In Search of a Golden Age of Armenian-ness

Special for the Armenian Weekly

Every year my whole family unites to roll dolma and sarma for hours. When it comes to what we actually eat for dinner the traditional fare for the evening is take-out pizza. I have always found it funny that so much care is taken to recreate the traditional Armenian practice of rolling grape-leaves, while our actual meal is the traditional American quick and easy fix. As my cousins and I roll them they are carefully inspected to ensure reasonable sizing and a tight enough roll. When my uncles and aunts chop the onions and garlic they never flinch. This is a characteristic that is doubtless Armenian.

Armenian-ness can be built upon the powerful ancient history of Armenian civilization. (Photo of Ani Cathedral by Khatchig Mouradian)

I have tried swimming goggles, burning a candle while I chop. Though I know no method soothes the sear in my eyes when I chop, I know that there is only one way to chop an onion. Dad taught me to slice it in half first, so that it doesn’t slip, and then to slice thinly almost to the end but not quite so that it won’t fall apart. And then, rotate the onion ninety degrees and slice thinly again, this time letting it fall apart behind your knife. A perfectly diced onion appears before you. If, that is, you aren’t thwarted by tears. My eyes never fail to sear worse than they do when I open them underwater in the pool in summertime. My uncles and aunts could chop onion after onion without tears, without hardly blinking even. When I wondered how it was that they developed this ability, I wondered if it came from practice, or whether it came with developing a hardness to life in general as they aged. Or, perhaps it was some innate Armenian-ness. An innate Armenian-ness I did not have.

I saw Armenian-ness expressed in other ways besides that uncanny ability to disperse onions. In a magazine interview, Kim Kardashian credited her Armenian-ness for her storied derriere. At home, I saw the books from my grandfather’s collection and often heard Dad talk about how Armenians prized education and learning. Perhaps that quality contributed to my desire to learn more about the nature of this Armenian-ness.

With all of the manifestations of Armenian-ness out there, the question becomes what “Armenian” actually means. I was disappointed to find that the question cannot be answered with an etymology. Current attempts to trace the word itself back to an original people end in poor scholarship. Several different peoples inhabited the central plain to which Armenian origins are traced, resulting in no single discernable lineage. Tracing the word itself also proves problematic because a people may self-identify with one moniker while the world uses another. Any look to ancient Armenian history does make one thing clear though. The simple fact is that Armenians trace roots back really, really far. Hundreds of years further than Greece and Rome, and further even than the Persian empire.

While the past may not hold an etymology, delving into the impressively ancient Armenian history does yield useful insights into what it means to be “Armenian.” Here are a few basic ones. First, the mountainous fractured geography of the region kept the peoples now identified as proto-Armenians fractured into groups. This simple geographical determinism was not without consequences, and it informs an understanding of the factions that continue to hound Armenians today. Second, the area of ancient Armenia also suffered a large number of taxes exacted by the Persian imperial administration. These bureaucratic realities made for lots of bandits and rebels, early evidence and explanation of the toughness of the Armenian character (a contributing factor to my relatives’ superhuman onion tolerance?). Third, the geographical location of the Garden of Eden is Armenia, at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. With that unparalleled paradise within its borders, it is no wonder that Armenians are known for particular aesthetic talent. And fourth, the most ancient of Armenian houses, built in the sides of mountains, featured a ladle hung at the center of the dwelling. The place given food seems to have only increased in prominence since then. Now instead of a ladle, it is a vat of velvety pilaf.

Another particularly memorable episode from antiquity is Xenophon’s account of how he and his storied 10,000 drank beer through straws among the Armenians on their long march home. I leave this one up to your interpretation, and I’m still working on it myself.

Study of the ancient reveals much about the present. There is a tendency to look only one or two hundred years backwards when studying history. However, root causes of so-called modern issues are often in their purest form at the earliest origins of peoples. Nowadays much money and attention is paid modern history, especially in Armenia’s Middle Eastern region, in the name of understanding. And modern history plays a vital role in the attainment of such an understanding. However, a broader realization of how it is the most ancient of history that holds the deepest of understandings would also be beneficial.

Facts are more easily settled on when it comes to ancient history than modern national history. The Turkish government continues to deny the Genocide, a major event in its national narrative of Armenia. Without the ability to heal so wide a wound, the event looms larger in Armenian national consciousness. The young nation of Armenia faces the further challenge of doing a great deal of its nation-building outside its borders because of the large diasporas. Armenians were the favored builders of the Persian empire. And still, the talent for architecture and design persists in ways large and small. In elementary school Dad would sit me down with my poster-board for projects and guide me through measuring, lightly tracing and eventually cutting and pasting. The edges were clean and the pictures level.

Armenian-ness can be built upon the powerful ancient history of Armenian civilization. Indeed, the project of nation building is the project of answering the question of what it means to be Armenian. And antiquity legitimates and unifies nations with remarkable success. The discipline of archaeology itself is to a large extent a construct of the modern nation-state. A nation must exist to claim and celebrate certain elements of antiquity, whether material or otherwise, that are sanctioned as valuable. For example, Greece created its independent national identity after Ottoman occupation out of the sanctification of their past. This is seen in the large-scale reconstruction of their ruins, dissemination of idealistic “Golden Age” photographs of them worldwide, and successful propagation of a national narrative in which Greece identifies as the very foundation of civilization itself. Armenia has emerged from a situation of dominance under the Soviets as Greece emerged from under the Ottomans. And Armenia has an even longer history than Greece. Armenia could perhaps learn from how Greece and others have derived such national unity and strength from their ancient pasts. In the face of continued challenge to the modern Armenian national narrative, its incredibly ancient history is a promising further source of both understanding “Armenian-ness” and creating it.