SOAS library’s Armenian collection remained, painstakingly collected and discretely preserved in a quiet corner where the only noise is the humming of a failing overhead light and the only company to be had is the layered coatings of each decade past’s dust.
I discovered this secret Armenian library during my undergrad at UCL but it wasn’t until I had returned to SOAS as a Masters student that I bothered to survey the dust laced shelves.
During one afternoon’s break from revision I took to rummaging through this forgotten collection of Armenian and Armenia related books. There I discovered great gems; translations and originals of the great Armenian historians Movses Khorenatsi and Sebeos, the complete novels of Raffi and Khachatur Abovian, collections of newspaper articles, forgotten prayers and hymns, papers from Armenian language symposiums, folk tales (that may be all that survives of a culture extinguished in 1915), complete collections of Armenian poetry from the early greats like Narekatsi to the more recent Yegishe Charents...
...and I kicked myself for having spent all my years ‘studying’ Armenia when I had merely hovered around the topics of Karabagh and Genocide or searching out entries for Armenian/Armenians in other peoples’ histories indexes.
It was all there...our entire Armenian literature...forgotten...left to rot, decaying away...and as I poured across the shelves blackening my palms with dirt and clogging my nose with the dry scent of dust I began to realise not just the pain, but the heart-wrenching, almost unbearable ashamedness, doubled by my faltering Armenian tongue, that is encapsulated in William Saroyan’s line, of which I quote an abbreviated extract;
“...this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead destroy Armenia. ...for when two [Armenians] meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new Armenia! ”
Here was that New Armenia written in the pages of these lost, forgotten tomes and volumes amounting to hundreds of books never even taken out, this New Armenia as forgotten as the old!
After spending so long amongst the dust I sneezed – but it made no sound, for there was not another soul close by. Nor an Armenian nearby to say “bless you! Now let’s read some books, listen to some music, and answer some prayers!”
A few hours exploration yielded up a real find, a lost poem by the late Catholicos Mgrditch Khrimian Hayrik entitled The Meeting of the Kings. It was been published in translation in 1915 and had entered the library around then.
I was the first person to check the poem out in 93 years! Its fragile yellow paper was disintegrating in my hands as I lovingly turned its pages. The library checkout clerk eyed me suspiciously; wholly uncertain as to whether this veritably fossilised manuscript was a relic to be put in a museum or something whose exhausted letters still had the life in them to be read.
Staring at these books, and please go and visit them, all those of you who have at the very least a fleetingly kind word to attach to Armenia for they are lonely and long only for your company, I stared at those books, ashamedly, and remembered the first words ever written in Armenian:
“To know wisdom and instruction; to discern the words of understanding...”
The Armenian writer Gevorg Emin writes that the above;
“...expresses our [Armenian] people’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not only of its own culture but also of all the best features in the cultures of other peoples and their desire to share their cultural treasures”
Perhaps with the new Armenian department this can become a reality. Emin refers to the Armenian alphabet as “courageous soldiers of the ‘book regiment’ ” and almost as an answer to Saroyan writes:
“Whenever [Armenians] were unable to triumph with the sword they triumphed with their letters, destroying their enemies, and passing down their hopes, faith and dreams to future generations.”
Writing about old Armenian manuscripts’ interaction with traumatic Armenian history Emin writes that some “were so petrified by the horror that they turned into stone and will never be able to reveal their secrets.” I don’t know what is a worse fate for Armenian books; to be turned to stone or to be forgotten, to rot away under layers of dust, doomed to be unread?
The new head of the Armenian Studies department is Dr. Igor Dorfman-Lazarev; Moscow and Sorbonne educated he looked every inch like an ancient Armenian with tight, thick, black curly hair like some Persian king maker or one of those Assyrians in the British Museum’s friezes somehow, magically brought to life. His face was dominated by an aquiline nose, the hallmark of the extinct Armenian nobleman, a Karabagh scion from which he is descended, and a thick black goatee every hair evocative of an Armenian clergyman and every other hair reminiscent of Serj Tankian.
It was as though Armenian history was personified in this articulate, youthful and genuinely excited historian. As though somehow the zeitgeist of Armenian history had assumed a respectable human form and his tellingly not aged or jaded approach to history and his audience was not only refreshing but wholly infectious.
I was suddenly happy for the dusty books rotting into memory in SOAS library – they would be read!
Dr. Lazarev went on to trace the four thousand year history of the Armenian plateau, that familiar ancient shape of Armenia centred around three lakes; Van, Urmia and Sevan, encompassing the headwaters of three rivers; Euphrates, Tigris and Arax, with a Caspian coast, and nearly a Black Sea one, the single constant central eye of which was the first Urartuan/Armenian city – Erebunni, the modern day locale of Armenia’s only remaining city; Yerevan.
We heard of how the medley of Proto-Armenians and Urartuans mixed and merged into a single Armenian nation united by language, church, history and alphabet. All the while through this tumultuous adventure, the path of Armenian history, ancient cities grow and die; Ani, Artashat, Arshagavan, whilst the familiar shape of Armenia continuously shrank into the modern borders; only briefly exporting itself into the unique shape and new locale of Cilicia, and even more briefly exploding into King-of-kings Tigran’s short-lived empire.
Throughout this arduous story we are treated to a litany of dead empires’ attempts to permanently quash Armenia and the familiar names reel off the tongue like birdsong; Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Achaemenids, Macedonians, Seleucids, Romans, Parthians, Sassanians, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Seljuks, Mongols, Saffavids, Ottomans, Russians and Soviets...
...and with these imperial armies came history’s ‘greats’ and tyrants; Semiramis, Xerxes, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Timur, Abdülhamid, Stalin and how many more bloody Caesars, Shahs, Caliphs, Khans, Pashas and Tsars all leading invading armies and rampaging hordes that launched themselves and broke against the mountains of the Armenian plateau like the crushing and crashing waves of the Biblical deluge of which Armenia was the first to submerge and the first to emerge...
Whilst Dr. Lazarev sculpts this history out in dulcet Russo-French accented tones, with the aid of gesticulation and PowerPoint I can’t help but remember my Grandfather’s authored maxim, too recently used before, but to quote again: “dariner ge antsir, Hayastan ge mina!”
There were of course the usual annoying Armenian know-alls present, eager to prove their erudition –of which Armenia has an unfortunate surplus, of which I am guiltily one of their number!
For these persons Armenian history is like a stellar constellation formed by tracing lines across a few bright stars of Armenian history; Tigran’s empire, conversion, the Genocide, Karabagh. By this single constellation myopic, amateur Armenian historians navigate through the vast oceanic expanse of Armenian historiography missing all the great and exotic lands and failing to discover a single new island.
They remain totally ignorant of the tastily obscure morsels of forgotten Armenian history that for them are stars invisible to the naked eye, but with the finery of telescopic vision reveal veritable galaxies of chapters in the history of the Armenians.
I hope that the department succeeds in revealing Armenian history to a wider audience and that we as an Armenian community extend a helping hand to the development and sustenance of this initiative.
Whilst I am warmed by the thought that all those books might be dusted off and read, my eyes are made sleepy by the familiar Armenian bedtime story whereby the Armenian alphabet is the length and breadth of Armenian history beginning with 'Ա' (‘A’) for Armenian Genocide and ending with the 'Ք' (‘K’) of Karabagh.
© Ara Iskanderian
