The article deals with the notion of autostereotype or self-image and its significance in the Armenian historical and literary discourse. Armenian nation is usually depicted as a priori suffering, tortured and persecuted. The very idea of persecution is inseparably linked with the existence of God‘s punishment, because his Chosen People (Armenians) betrayed sacred Covenant (ukht), abandoned the faith of their ancestors, and for this reason lost forever their promised land and were sentenced to life in eternal exile. The exile represents in the Armenian context one of dominant „key“ themes. The notion of exile is closely linked with Armenian historical experience of aghet or catastroph (persecutions, deportations, massacres). Armenian self-image reflects the experience of long-term existence as a religious minority without own country or kings, surrounded by Others. It incorporates into itself a number of aspects borrowed from the heterostereotype, which is mostly negative and full of hostile feelings against the „middleman minority“ supposed to play a role of „fifth column“. Armenian selfimage thus oscillates between pride and humility, mirroring the role of martyrs.
The article deals with the notion of exile and its significance in the Armenian historical and literary discourse. The exile represents in the Armenian context one of the cornerstones of Armenian ethnicity construction and it could be said without exaggeration, that Armenian history (both medieval and modern) is pervaded by this dominant or more precisely "key" theme. The exile symbolizes primarily the concept of uprootedness (exile from the country as well as the alienation from the society), which is conceived in close connection with the search for identity itself. In other words, the exile can be considered as a kind of "rite de passage" - the position on the border or "threshold" between two cultures, languages and worlds.
Jerusalem is one of the most important sites associated with monotheistic religions in the world; for the Armenian Apostolic Church it is a holy city, surb kaghak, whose significance for the Armenian community is indisputable even today. Here is situated the hajoc tagh - as the Armenian Quarter with its center at the Monastery of St. James is called - and it is also the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Seat of St. James; the head of the Patriarchate. For centuries, Jerusalem and its pilgrimage sites were the destinations of ukht, Armenian holy pilgrimage. Pilgrims (mahtes) attempted to complete a precisely planned itinerary of holy sites (tnorinakank). The text by Shimon of Lvov, an Armenian pilgrim from the beginning of the 17th century (who was also a contemporary of Kryštof Harant of Polžice and Bezdružice) and the one by the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle provide a view insight the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem right during the period of its great transformation. Within the canon of period Armenian literature and the history of the Armenian community in Jerusalem, Šimon Polský’s travel memoir remains the key reference work.
In late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the Caucasus represented an important crossroads of civilizations, which brought together Judaism, Christianity, and even early Islam. The Christianity in the Caucasus has one of the oldest church structures in the world: the Armenian Apostolic Church (Hay Ar.ak’elakan Yekeghetsi) is often classified in the same category as the pre-Chalcedonian ancient Eastern oriental churches, and in the early Middle Ages the Georgian churches (sakartvelos martlmadidebeli ek‘lesia) developed into the current that later became known as Orthodoxy. Both the Armenian and the Georgian church traditions show a similar development during the 4th – 7th centuries CE, and they rely on the apostolic tradition as their fundamental argument for their own independence (autocephaly; i.e., having their “own head”). These “self-governing” churches have their own highest patriarch (later, the term catholicos was adopted for this function), and their autocephaly was later reaffirmed in the context of the 11th century and the Crusades. A textual analysis of the surviving primary sources from this period, in comparison with the numerous secondary sources, reveals not only common sources of inspiration, but also a multi-layered phenomenon of period religious polemics. In the local conception, Caucasian “holy cities” such as Mtskheta and Etchmiadzin were a “new Zion” that oscillated between the image of Jerusalem and Constantinople. The resulting picture indicates a very early construction of a religious identity which continued to manifest itself with practically unchanged features through the course of the Middle Ages, as well as into the early and later modern periods, as a cornerstone of future “national” identity.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.