Diamond "jubilee" - 75th flag!

Pari irigun! I tried to post this morning when I could have said "pari luys" but Blogger was having none of it. I still am unable to post some graphics I wanted for this post but will move ahead without them.

Today (or possibly last night) we had a visitor from Armenia. This is one of the nations for which I have a 3'x5' flag in my physical flag collection, rooted in my having grown up in Fresno with lots of close Armenian friends.

Yes odarmen em paits kichme hayeren khosil g'rnam. (I am a non-Armenian but I can speak a little bit of Armenian.) I am afraid that although I have clicked to set up an Armenian keyboard function the Armenian letters are not showing up in my applications. Grrrrr.

This is a scan of an old photo I took of a statue of David of Sassoon, an Armenian folk hero, by Varaz Samuelian. Samuelian was born in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and came to Fresno in 1957. The statue stands next to the Courthouse in Fresno, California, where I was born and grew up. It is a very dynamic statue, fascinating from every imaginable angle. If only I could find the photos when I shot almost a roll of film trying to capture from all those angles!

Moses Khorenatsi with Prince Sahak Bagratouni

I grew up on Armenian food and cook it myself from time to time. A classmate taught me to recite the Armenian alphabet when we were in junior high school (John Sadoian, if you're out there, this is a shout out to you!) Many years later I took some night school classes through Pasadena City College in beginning Armenian. Most of the Armenian I still remember is in the category of pleasantries: greetings and farewells and a few other phrases. When in doubt, I can always fall back on "chem kider" = "I don't know." (I use не знаию a lot in Russian.)

Armenia was the first nation to convert to Christianity, something of which Armenians today are still fiercely proud. This is a photo of a carved stone cross or Khachkar; they are a common motif in Armenia.

Wikipedia includes the following paragraph:

With onslaught of World War I, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire engaged during the Caucasus and Persian Campaigns, the new government began to look on the Armenians with distrust and suspicion. This was due to the fact that the Russian army contained a contingent of Armenian volunteers. On April 24, 1915, Armenian intellectuals were arrested by Ottoman authorities and, with the Tehcir Law (29 May 1915), eventually a large proportion of Armenians living in Anatolia perished in what has become known as the Armenian Genocide. There was local Armenian resistance in the region, developed against the activities of the Ottoman Empire. The events of 1915 to 1917 are regarded by Armenians and the vast majority of Western historians to have been state-sponsored mass killings, or genocide. However as Turkey is an ally of the west and holds a strategic position near to the Middle East, both the United States and United Kingdom governments continue to maintain that there is a lack of unequivocal evidence to categorise the events as genocide. Turkish authorities maintain that the deaths were the result of a civil war coupled with disease and famine, with casualties incurred by both sides. Most estimates for the number of Armenians killed range from 650,000 to 1.5 million. Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have been campaigning for official recognition of the events as genocide for over 30 years. These events are traditionally commemorated yearly on April 24, the Armenian Martyr Day, or the Day of the Armenian Genocide.

I have known survivors of the genocide and their children and grandchildren. I have sometimes flown my Armenian flag on April 24.

You can catch a visual tour of Armenia with lots of churches here (4 minutes; starts slow then picks up):


A more modern visual tour is here (7:21 minutes) with the mellow music of a duduk (flute made of apricot wood). It repeats images but the music is so lovely I include it.


Here is a tour with a song "Hayasdan" (Hayastan is Armenian for Armenia, so this is very patriotic). It ends with a shot of the most famous feature of the country: Mt. Ararat.


Flora, fauna, and landscape are featured more in this one:


As a final note: Armenian has no grammatical gender; you don't have to memorize whether "table" "water" "truth" are masculine, feminine, or neuter as in so many other Indo-European languages. There is only one third-person pronoun (functioning for English "he," "she," and "it"). Cool, huh?

So, welcome Hay visitor. Menak parov!
--the BB