Armenian Reporter - 11/10/2007
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November 10, 2007 -- From the community section
Armenian monuments stand tall in Harvard photo exhibit
by Yvette K. Harpootian
BOSTON -- Consider the beautiful khatchkars: they started out standing
proud and tall. Majestic, detailed, ornate. They began to lean,
looking weaker, until finally they were cracked, buried and demolished
-- leaving the heart of Armenia's culture, its religion, its very
people, broken.
This is what the photo exhibit, Armenian Monuments of the
Nakhichevan Region, by Argam Ayvazian and Steven Sim, reveals to its
visitors. Panel after panel fill the Concourse Gallery corridors at
Harvard with pictures of patterned pottery, rock drawings, tombstones,
churches, and of course, khatchkars, or cross-stones.
The exhibit opened last week, and will run through November 19.
Argam Ayvazian, a researcher on the Armenian cultural heritage of
Nakhichevan, is author of more than 20 monographs, including The
Historical Monuments of Nakhichevan (1990). Ayvazian currently serves
as deputy director of the Agency on Protection of Historical and
Cultural Environment at the Armenian Ministry of Culture. He was born
in the village of Arinj in Nakhichevan and has devoted his adult life
to documenting and analyzing the historical monuments of the region.
Steven Sim, the Glasgow-based architect and art historian, has
researched Armenian architecture since 1989, and is the creator of the
"Virtual Ani" website, (www.virtualani.org). His visit to Nakhichavan
was published in the 2006 book, Destruction of Jugha and the Entire
Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhichevan. He was one of the last
Westerners to see the hundreds of Jugha khatchkars destroyed by the
Azeri military in 2005.
As I walked around the concourse looking at the panels, I couldn't
help but notice the stonework outside: the bricks securing the
apartment complex next door, the square stone floor covering the
outdoor sunken garden area -- both examples of simple useful
stonework; both safe and secure, but without life and meaning. And the
masterpieces in the photos, which were painstakingly and passionately
crafted by our Armenian forefathers, have been demolished, swept up
and taken away. This is depicted in the exhibit's series of "before
and after" photographs, documenting the demolition of Armenian
churches and khatchkars in the Jugha cemetery.
* Setting the record straight
The Nakhichevan region, located in what is today Azerbaijan -- part of
the ancient Armenian historic lands and with an uninterrupted Armenian
presence -- is the site of thousands of endangered and destroyed
Armenian monuments. As far back as 1648, there were reports of 10,000
fully decorated cross stones. By the beginning of the 20th century,
there were only 6,000 khatchkars counted, some standing and others
falling.
The destruction continued after 1922, with many of the khatchkars
simply disappearing. In 1998, eyewitnesses on the Iranian border
observed tombstones being excavated by a crane and loaded on railroad
wagons, to be transported away and used as building material for
foundations of new houses. This account is an astonishing testimony to
the secret removal of Nakhichevan's Armenian patrimony in an attempt
to eradicate the evidence of ancient Armenian habitation of the
region.
The Armenian Government has played an active role in the effort to
raise awareness of this issue and to save what monuments are left.
Armenia's Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian wrote in a letter to
UNESCO: "These khatchkars ... are unique tombstones in that they are
simultaneously sculpture, archive and marker. Their removal is in line
with Azerbaijan's mission to expunge the historical record and remove
all documentation of Armenian presence on those lands."
The subject also came up during the late October meeting between
Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II and UN Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon in New York. (See the story elsewhere in this paper.)
On November 1, in conjunction with the exhibit, the National
Association on Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) hosted a panel
discussion on the Armenian Monuments of Nakhichevan, chaired by Dr.
James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard;
Argam Ayvazian; Steven Sim; and Anahit Ter-Stepanian, exhibit curator
and architectural historian at Sacred Heart University.
Ter-Stepanian organized this exhibit, and received support from Dr.
Russell, and funding from COPRIM, an architectural company in Canada.
She said: "This exhibit is very important because it brings awareness
to the American community about the devastating state of the Armenian
cultural heritage in Nakhichevan."
She noted that the attempts by Azeri officials to deny the
historical Armenian presence in the region are exemplified by
Hajifahraddin Safarli, the director of the Nakhichevan Department of
History, Ethnography and Archeology Institute and National Academy of
Science of Azerbaijan (NASA), who said: "There have never been
monuments belonging to Armenians in the territory of Nakhichevan."
Against such revisionism, Armenian Monuments of the Nakhichevan
Region, by Argam Ayvazian and Steven Sim, is a fascinating effort to
set the record straight -- and hopefully to contribute to the
preservation of these Armenian artistic treasures before they are all
destroyed.
The exhibit is on display from November 2 through November 19, at
the Harvard University Center for Government and International Studies
Concourse Gallery, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge Mass. Related
lectures are scheduled for Glendale, Calif., and New York City (see
the sidebar box). For information on the exhibit at Harvard
University, call the Davis Center at (617) 495-4037. The exhibition
website is www.nakhichevanmonuments.org.
November 10, 2007 -- From the front section
Azerbaijan fails to disrupt Armenian cultural heritage exhibit
Azerbaijan's embassy in the U.S. tried to thwart an exhibit on the
destruction of the Armenian cultural monuments in Azerbaijan that
opened this week at Harvard University (see story in the Community
Section of this newspaper). The destruction was condemned by the
European Parliament and decried by U.S. officials last year.
In a November 1 letter, distributed at a pre-exhibit panel
discussion and made available to the Reporter, the Azerbaijani embassy
said: "Azerbaijan denounces continuing hysterical ungrounded
allegations by part of the Armenian Diaspora of stone-crosses'
destruction in a Julfa (Nakhchivan) cemetery" (sic). It further
claimed that the cemetery razed at the end of 2005 was not Armenian,
and is "under state protection."
The letter went on to allege the destruction of "Azerbaijan's unique
cultural heritage amounting almost $7 billion" in Armenia and
Karabakh. The embassy did not explain how it arrived at that estimate.
The Armenian and Karabakh governments have in recent years spent
public funds to catalogue and preserve Muslim monuments now in
Armenian territory, even as the destruction of Armenian monuments has
continued in Azerbaijan.
Despite the Azerbaijani embassy's efforts, the exhibit will be on
display at Harvard's Davis Center through November 19.
