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Ancient Armenian water celebration comes to Watertown

July 9, 2018 By administrator

WATERTOWN — When celebrating Vartavar, there is no such thing as a no-splash zone.

Everyone gets wet.

That’s the point of this ancient and joyous Armenian custom: to get drenched and, in turn, drench as many people as possible.

On Sunday morning, families, kids, and clergy filed out of the cross-shaped sanctuary at St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown and changed out of their Sunday best to wage a water fight of epic proportions and make their hometown live up to its name. In a nearby parking lot there were rows of buckets, hoses, and water blasters, three kiddie pools, and 2,000 water balloons.

“It’s a festival of life,” said Natasha Aljalian, the pastor’s wife. “The symbol of water has always been something that’s important to Armenians. It’s always been a sign of fertility, of life, of celebration.”

The ancient festival of Vartavar, or the Festival of Roses, eventually became celebrated on the feast of the transfiguration of Christ. It’s still remembered for the pagan feast it replaced, which marked the harvest and the bathing of the goddess Asdghig.

The celebration used to be gentler, said church deacon Herman Purutyan. People used to sprinkle each other with a bit of rose water. The modern-day festivities in Armenia, however, are no-holds-barred — a nationwide water fight. Fire trucks hose people down in the street. Water is thrown out of windows onto unsuspecting passersby — and into open car windows if drivers aren’t careful.

In Watertown Sunday, Arpi Tavil-Shatelyan of Somerville came armed with only a water bottle.

“It gives me memories of being in the Republic Square in Yerevan [the capital of Armenia] and just getting drenched,” Tavil-Shatelyan, 27, said. “Running around with my cousins where my grandparents live in their village and just maliciously coming up to my aunts and drenching them head to toe. There are only good memories associated with Vartavar.”

Samuel Chakmakjian, 23, of Arlington, wondered why it took so long for one of the local Armenian churches to embrace a Vartavar celebration. Watertown has one of the largest populations of Armenians in the nation.

“For me, it’s wonderful to have this kind of cultural expression in the open in Watertown,” Chakmakjian said. “We’ve been here for quite a while, and we’re sometimes a little bit too cautious about how we express our own traditions in public.”

Church leadership at St. James would like to see this mini-Vartavar grow into an annual tradition that acknowledges the fun and remembers the feast day.

By early afternoon, even adults and neighbors jumped into the fray, grabbing hoses, water blasters, and water balloons before chasing anyone that looked dry. Kids squealed as they rode the water slide and tried to avoid streams of cold water. Elders sat in the shade out of the range of hoses, smiling at the antics, while an ice cream truck gave out free Popsicles.

With a mischievous smile, Thatcher Simmons, 8, of Belmont, filled up the biggest bucket he could find.

“I need to fill her up,” Simmons said. “So I can soak everyone.”

Water gun in hand, Kevork Atinizian, 18, waited out his brother, Antranig, 15, who was hiding inside the church trying not to get wet. On this day, being dry was not an option. It was a day to remember the joy of living, of surprising others, and the innocence of childhood pranks.

“I grew up going to an Armenian camp, and we did this every summer,” said Alexis Demirjian, 40, of Belmont, moments before her 10-year-old daughter Meline, poured water on her and her 2-year-old son, Aram.

“My husband asked me, ‘Why did you wear a bathing suit,’ ” she said laughing. “Because I knew this was going to happen.”

The Rev. Arakel Aljalian remembers coming home after sundown last year on the day before Vartavar. He’d just finished performing a baptism. His kids were hidden behind the fence, waiting with water guns and water balloons.

On Sunday, the pastor didn’t even remove his vestments as he began soaking congregants. He’d told his wife to make sure to save him a hose.

“We figured it was summer, it was hot, and it’s something we all usually do in our own homes,” said Natasha Aljalian. “No Armenian is surprised if they’re hit with water today, and nobody will get upset because it’s just really about celebrating life and being happy.”

Filed Under: Articles, Events Tagged With: vartavar, Watertown

USA: First Armenian genealogy conference draws hundreds to Watertown (video)

May 14, 2016 By administrator

armenian_geneology_conference.thumbThe first Armenian Genealogy Conference was held at the Armenian Cultural and Educational Center (ACEC), in Watertown, Mass on the weekend of April 9-10.

More than 300 people attended the two-day conference, the Armenian Weekly reports.

Some came from as far as Vancouver, Canada, while two participants flew in from Great Britain.
The program began Saturday with a welcome by the three conference organizers, Tracy Rivest Keeney, Mark Arslan, and George Aghjayan.

Keeney, creator of the Armenian Genealogy Facebook page, led the first presentation, covering the sources most commonly available to genealogists in the United States. She used real cases in highlighting the valuable information that can be gleaned from the sources. Her talk supplied an important foundation, especially for those just beginning their family tree research.

The next presenter, Arslan, provided background on his family research and its evolution to become the Armenian Immigration Project. Initially devoted to immigrants from Keghi, the website has become an extensive database for all immigrants to the United States. Arslan gave examples of the ways to search the databases as well as to link individuals to various records. He also explained how others can help in transcribing records.

Vahe Tachjian, director of Houshamadyan, spoke of the project’s aim to “reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life.” He gave examples of memory items that supply important context, particularly for genealogists. He also explained how people can help expand the project.

Then, both Houshamadyan and Project Save—the Armenian photograph archives and one of the sponsoring organizations of the conference—welcomed attendees to their booths, where participants shared their photographs, family trees, and other memory items, and learned about these two important Armenian institutions.

Following lunch, Luc Baronian, professor of linguistics at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, spoke of the importance of the books, periodicals, and other information contained in the records of Armenian compatriotic unions. Using the examples of Gurin, Ourfa, Albustan, and Gesaria, Baronian detailed early census records, hand-drawn maps, post-genocide lists of villagers around the world, and survivor memoirs to highlight the richness of material available to genealogists.

The final speakers for the day were Janet Achoukian Andreopoulos and Stephen Kurkjian.
Andreopoulos supplied a brief explanation of the different DNA tests available and the companies that offer them. Kurkjian and Andreopoulos then told the story of how a DNA test helped one woman identify her Armenian father. Andreopoulos walked the audience step-by-step through the process and methods she used to unearth the previously unknown father.

The final two hours on Saturday were devoted to networking and actual research. More than 12 volunteers from nearby Family History Centers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped attendees with their own family research. In addition, based on the village origins of conference participants, photographs of the attendees were taken with others from the same region—the villages fell into 12 regions, and participants were divided into groups accordingly. DNA kits from Family Tree DNA were also made available at a discount.

The day-long program was video-taped by Roger Hagopian, well-known local filmmaker (“Destination Watertown: The Armenians of Hood Rubber” and “Memories of Marash”). The videos (14 parts) are available through the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) YouTube channel:
On Sunday, cosponsors Project Save, the NAASR, and the Armenian Museum of America (AMA) opened their doors to conference participants. Attendees learned more about the missions of the organizations, their extensive collections and resources, and the way they can be used by genealogists. Hamazkayin Boston and the Tekeyan Cultural Association also sponsored the conference. Given the tremendous success of the program, future conferences are currently being planned for other locations.

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Armenian, Conference, draws, genealogy, Hundreds, Watertown

A True Salt of the Earth, A Tribute to Watertown’s Mayram Gulbahar Gigiyan Cinar

October 11, 2015 By administrator

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Mayram Gulbahar Gigiyan Cinar

By Ludér Tavit Sahagian
Special to the TAB

Posted Oct. 9, 2015 at 8:35 AM
Updated at 10:41 AM   WATERTOWN

The year is 1915. The world is engulfed in warfare. In the cradle of civilization, an unprecedented genocide against the first Christian nation is festering. And Arusyak Hajinian, my maternal great-grandmother, is caught in the middle of it:

They smash open the house door and take her husband to purportedly serve in the army. Amid the pandemonium, she runs and hides a small portion of the family’s gold in the wall of the garden’s chicken coop. Arusyak (though pregnant), her young child, and other inhabitants of this small Western Armenian town, lying inside Ottoman Turkey, are seized and sent marching south towards the scorching heat of the Syrian desert. With little food and water, she can no longer breastfeed her child. He dies in her arms, and she has the heartbreaking task of burying him.

During the death march through treacherous terrain, a sadistic Turkish military officer bayonets her abdomen, killing her unborn child. She loses consciousness. When she finally awakens, she finds herself in his home, stitched up and recuperating. He then chains her in his basement when she refuses to be his latest wife. Weeks later, with the chains improperly placed, she breaks free, escaping through a small window secured with metal wire.

Arusyak makes her way back to her original village on foot, but nevertheless ends up in abject poverty, working, as she later puts it, as “a slave for Turks on my own land.” Her husband never returns. Neither do her brothers-in-law and raped sister-in-law. With most of her family gone and a living sister having fled to Abkhazia to safety, she is introduced to another genocide survivor, Garabed Ayvazian, whom she soon marries and begins to build her family anew. Eventually she returns to her first home and recovers the gold she had hidden in the chicken coop years ago.

Arusyak becomes a devoted mother to her five children, by day faithfully tending the farms and fields of her home village. Though the oppressive Turkish Empire morphs into an equally oppressive republic (using essentially the identical crescent and star flag), she remains a tireless purveyor of goodwill to all ethnicities for the rest of her life, including, for example, the renowned blind Turkish minstrel and poet Asik Veysel. She perseveres to the age of 110, physically disabled the last ten years due to multiple strokes, weeping beside her sole daughter each and every night in prayer for the unspeakable losses and horrors she and her nation had endured decades earlier. This remarkable woman, “Partridge” as she was fondly called, departs at last in peace.

Arusyak’s unbelievable tale of survival and tenacity in the wake of man’s worst cruelty to man was recounted to me over and over by Mayram Gulbahar Gigiyan Cinar, her sole daughter and my maternal grandmother, whom the world physically lost one year ago and whose equally inspirational story I have the honor of presenting now.

Growing up in Armenia

Mayram Gulbahar (“Mary Spring-Rose” in Armenian and Turkish) first opened her eyes in the heart of Western Armenia at a time when the rivers were no longer as crimson and no independent Armenian state yet existed. Born on January 9, 1924 in the town of Gamirk (Gemerek), southwest of Sivas, in newly independent Turkey, she was the second youngest child in her family.

Growing up, she had no school to attend and was prevented from speaking her native Armenian tongue due to the dangerous community environment. She spent most of her childhood assisting her mother with family chores and frolicking with her siblings and other youngsters outdoors. Her father, Garabed or “Hayrig” (Armenian for “Father”) as she had called him, was an industrious blacksmith who died prematurely when Mayram was ten-years-old.

To preserve her Armenian identity and preclude the possibility of marriage to a covetous Muslim villager, a small indigo cross was tattooed above the backside of her right wrist at the insistence of her grandmother immediately following her father’s death. A year later, at the mere age of eleven, Mayram was married to fifteen-year-old Avedis Gigiyan from the adjacent all-Armenian village of Gigi, which was founded by and named after his forefathers several generations earlier as a safe haven for dozens of families that fled the Ottoman Turkish culture of emasculation, harassment, and occasional massacre targeting Armenians and other minority groups.

Relocating to Gigi with her relatives, Mayram went on to slowly build her own family. She gave birth to eight children over the span of twenty-four years: three daughters, three sons, and two infants who died from fever.

From dawn until well after dusk, the entire village toiled in the fertile hilly fields, tended the farm animals, prepared fresh bread and meals, sewed and washed wool blankets and rugs, and tidied up their homes made of adobe-like baked bricks. Gigi had a small Christian chapel (today a mosque), a walled cemetery, and a sizeable orchard of oak and poplar trees. The city fountain delivered the daily supply of water. News arrived via word and radio. Every celebration or tragedy was an all-village and multi-day affair. Darting swallows and soaring eagles entertained them from above throughout the day, and the kaleidoscope of stars enchanted them during clear nights.

Life in Gigi was not always idyllic. Electricity was unavailable at the time. The small state-funded school was soon closed. Winters were generally harsh. The men would take turns carefully balancing relations with occasionally belligerent Muslim villagers. The young men were required to serve in the army, putting extra strain on mothers and siblings to make ends meet. In the 1930s, their Armenian surnames were all replaced with codified Turkish renditions designed especially for Christian citizens as part of then President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s forced assimilation and tracking campaign. Gigiyan was renamed Cinar. And with tensions again rising in the early 1960s between Turkish nationalistic groups as well as Alevi and Kurdish inhabitants, thereby exposing the village to direct threats, the people of Gigi, including Mayram, Avedis, their six children, and her mother, were forced one by one to flee to the relatively safer metropolis of Constantinople (Istanbul) to live among its historic Armenian community.

Gigi thus became a ghost town and has remained so since. But its people – both in the Old Country and in the New World – have never forgotten Gigi.

Moving to Watertown

The Gigiyans’ peaceful pastoral village setting was thus instantly replaced by a bustling urban one. From 1964 on, Avedis worked as a clerk at a local hotel for a few years before establishing his own grocery near Taksim Square.

Mayram helped him run the store, walked their younger children to and from local Armenian schools, attended weekly mass at a nearby Armenian church, and celebrated the marriages and baptisms of their younger children and grandchildren. In 1974, she began round-the-clock care of her now disabled mother Arusyak.

Political tension as well as anti-Armenian hostility and attacks in Turkey continued unabated. Starting in the late 1970s, in pursuit of a freer and more secure life, Mayram and Avedis witnessed the slow emigration of their younger children, grandchildren, and other families from Gigi and elsewhere to the United States, specifically to the major Armenian diasporan center of Watertown, Massachusetts.

Following the passing of Mayram’s mother Arusyak in 1986 and the sale of the family grocery, she and Avedis emigrated and joined the rest of their flock and friends in Watertown, first residing in a cozy apartment on Putnam Street before moving to a larger home on Dartmouth Street in 1996.

1988 is when I and other U.S.-born cousins first met the ever-smiling, petite Grandmother Mayram with gemstone eyes and a reserved angelic presence whom we called “Yaya” (Greek for “Grandma”). She would always be occupied with cleaning up the house, cooking scrumptious meals, slicing and peeling fruits for us to enjoy, getting us ready for Armenian Saturday school, and attending every church service and family festivity with grandfather.

Yaya was always there for everyone and made those around her feel utterly loved and important. The way she would zero in on you during one-on-one conversations at her kitchen table was exceptional.

And her dexterity was evident in the many hobbies she pursued. She dedicated many hours to crocheting elaborate white floral laces wearing her thick glasses, continuing her agrarian routines from Gigi in her home garden, stacking pots of dolma from handpicked grape leaves, and filling bags of manti dumplings made from spiced meat and thinly rolled-out dough pieces. She was a master at preparing and gifting fresh yogurt, dried mint leaves, tomato sauce, rose and apricot jam, and trays upon trays of assorted sweet breads and traditional filled pastries, such as baklava, burek, choreg, and kete, during Easter and Christmas holidays. Easter afternoon is when dozens of relatives and friends from Gigi would light up her home, arriving with small gifts in their hands in deference to their senior elders, and be treated in turn with large dishes of homemade sweets.

Yaya also enjoyed walking along the banks of the Charles River, picnicking on Gloucester’s rocky beaches, swimming on Cape Cod, and apple-picking in Merrimack Valley with all of us.

She always appreciated the freedoms and opportunities provided to her and her kin in the United States, despite successive White House administrations’ unwillingness to formally recognize and address the still-ongoing Genocide. After all, it was in her newly adopted country that she and grandfather began to receive first-rate medical services to ameliorate their various ailments, attended their first Armenian Genocide commemorations and marches, and saw their grandchildren attain academic degrees, purchase their first homes, and contribute in their capacities to the well-being of their local communities and the nascent Republic of Armenia (1991) – little of which would have been possible had they remained in Turkey.

Yaya’s magic extended well after her debilitating stroke in mid-February 2013 that completely paralyzed one side of her body, but fortunately kept her mind intact. For nineteen months she bravely fought on, experiencing several memory triggers that would occasionally lift her spirits and bring her family to laughter. She passed away in Dennis Port, Cape Cod on September 14, 2014 under the care of my devoted parents and was laid to eternal rest in Watertown’s Ridgelawn Cemetery five days later, following a moving funeral service at Saint James Armenian Apostolic Church. She is survived by her husband of nearly eighty years, Avedis, three daughters, three sons, three daughters-in-law, three sons-in-law, seventeen grandchildren, twenty-four great-grandchildren, one great-great-grandchild, and seventeen nieces and nephews.

Remembering the Armenian Genocide

2015 marks the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the systematic genocide of two-thirds of the global Armenian population, the worldwide dispersion of the surviving one-third, and the continued occupation by Turkey of the bulk of this ancient civilization’s indigenous homeland.

For 100 years, most of the international community has been outraged at the ongoing persecution and killing of so many minority members in Turkey just for being themselves. For 100 years, progressive and righteous governments, groups, and individuals have been denouncing Turkish plunder, confiscation, conversion, and destruction of most vestiges of Armenians’ millennia-old presence across Western Armenia – de jure part of the Republic of Armenia under President Woodrow Wilson’s binding Arbitral Award of 1920.

For the men, women, and children of this longest running and most complete genocide in modern human history, it has also been 100 years of assembling shattered pieces, building ever tight-knit families and communities, passing rich traditions to newer generations, and awakening assimilated, converted, or hidden persons. It has also been 100 years of advocating their collective rights and giving back to the individuals, societies, and nations near and far that granted them all a new chance at life.

Mayram Gulbahar, my maternal grandmother, was among the first offspring of survivors of the Armenian Genocide who applied great strength and courage to help raise a devastated nation up on its feet and create countless success stories out of its people. She had no formal education, professional titles, or particular wealth, but possessed the most incredible of souls. And like her mother, grandmother, and progenitors prior to the beginning of the Genocide – whose names are all missing on my genealogy tree and whose fates were similar to their contemporaries, she was a living testament to the earth, water, air, and fire of Western Armenia and beyond wherever she was.

There is no finer way to celebrate her existence than to continue imparting our unique cultural heritage to future generations, supporting global genocide prevention and restorative justice initiatives, and kindling the best in those around us to help make this world a richer and kinder place for all. Nothing surpasses bringing family and friends together at each special occasion to memorialize all those who endured the impossible to make everything possible for us. ■

The author, a resident of Needham, Massachusetts, specializes in international relations and diplomacy.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Mayram Gulbahar, tribute, Watertown

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