The biggest one was in l915, but massacres had been going on since the l890s and continued until 1922. Turkey took most of the country, including Ararat, and Ani, the city which the Bogratid kings built when they ruled Armenia in the ninth century,  and what’s left is a rocky, barren  enclave that’s smaller than Belgium (29,000 squares miles).”

           When I told Arlen that I was descended from the Bagratids, he suggested that I  announce, preferably drunk  on cognac, when I stepped off the plane in Yerevan, “I have come to reclaim what is rightfully mine,” which Egoyan also thought would be a “shining entry.” Egoyan said there was “tons of subculture in Yerevan-- amazing jazz and contemporary experimental art—so much to do,  and I hope you’ll be able to access it while you’re there.” And he gave me the names and numbers of  a dozen  interesting people. 
 

THE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF ARMENIA IN A NUTSHELL
 

 Armenia sits just below the narrow neck of land between the Black and the Caspian seas, where Asia Minor rammed and continues to ram into Europe, heaving up the Caucasus Mountains. It is a region of major tectonic and not uncoincidentally political instability, pleated with half a dozen lower, east-west-trending mountain chains, known collectively as the Lesser Caucasus whose strata  violently deformed and tilted and contorted by uplift. Besides Armenia’s earthquake, there was just recently one in Iran, immediately to the south. Both claimed about twenty-five thousand lives. Special methods and styles of building to withstand earthquakes have evolved over the centuries. The hills around Yerevan are plastered with close-packed, low-slung   dwellings partially dug into their sides, that look like mushroom colonies.  Four extinct, snow-covered volcanos rise spectacularly out of the three-thousand-foot Armenian plateau, which is mostly a treeless desert steppe, Tibetan in its starkness. Ararat is the highest (5156 meters); the others are Sipan, Aragatz, and Nemrut. 

       While its latitude is that of Madrid and Philadelphia, because of its elevation, the  climate of Armenia is like that of Montreal.  Spring and fall are the times to visit. The summer is too hot, the winter is bitter cold, as travelers have been complaining since Xenophon in the fifth century B.C..

      Because it sits at the entrance of the Caucasus land bridge, a major migratory and invasion corridor from the Middle East to Europe, Armenia has been a funnel of human activity,  the scene of a lot of  cultural exchange and carnage, and repeated foreign invasions over the centuries. It was on the silk route, so it has received a good deal of oriental input, as well as Hellenic, Persian, and Roman.  The first hominids from Africa, Homo ergaster, a transitional species, between H. habilis and H. erectus,  passed through 1.7 years ago; some their remains were recently found in a cave just over the Georgia border, to the north. 

       Few countries or people have a longer history than the Armenia and the Armenians. They seem to be descended from the Phrygians. By 900 B.C. the Armenian proto-state, known as Urartu, had become one of the most powerful  in the Middle East and had become a serious rival to the Assyrians (this is from Fitzroy Maclean’s To Caucasus). But in 590 B.C. the Urartians were overthrown by the Medes. In 521 Armenia became a satrapy of the Persian emperor Darius (Persia is now Iran), and when Alexander overthrew the Persians in 331 B.C., the Armenians abruptly found themselves under Macedonian suzereignty, and a period of Greco-Oriental influence began that lasted until 90 B.C., when a great Armenian king, Dikran or Triganes, established an independent Armenian empire that spread from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and from Mesopotamia to the Pontic Alps (one of the chains of the lesser Caucasus). This was Armenia’s zenith, in terms of its surface area. Subsequent rulers played the Romans and the Persians off against each other with varying degrees of success until 260 A.D., when Armenia again became part of Persia. But in 286 the Romans restored King Trdat or Tiridates III to the throne of his ancestors. With the conversion of Trdat in the year 303 by his cousin, St. Gregory the Illuminator (whom he had previously kept confined for fourteen years in a well full of reptiles), Armenia became the bulwak of Christianity in Asia. The following century a holy man named Mesrop invented a special Armenian alphabet, which exists to this day, giving the culture an immediate impenetrability,  and the gospels and many other scriptures were translated by monks in university-like monasteries that had sprung up by the hundreds on the plateau. (Again like Tibet.)

        But toward the end of the fifth century the Persians conquered Armenia again, and the Armenian Christians endured savage persecution at the hands of Persian fire-worshipers. Then in the seventh century came the conquest by the Arabs and the rapid spread of Islam through the Middle East, and what was left of Armenia’s territories were fought over by the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople and the Mohammedan Khalifs of Bagdad. 

      In the ninth century Armenia briefly regained a measure of independence and some of its former glory. For the next century and a half the country was ruled by my ancestors, the Bagratuni, who were originally Jews, and had been deported from Judea to Armenia to Judea by Dikran the Great, and had gradually intermarried with the local noble families and converting to Christianity,  achieved prominence. (This is from the Jewish Encyclopedia.) The founders of the Bogratid dynasty, Shabat and Bagrat, were princes of princes. By the ninth century the Bagratuni had risen  to king of kings status, and they built a splendid city called Ani, and over a thousand monasteries on the plateau. The last Bagratid king, Gagik II, was captured in 1049 by the Byzantine emperor, and in l065 Ani was sacked and destroyed by the Seljuk Turks. But one branch of the Bagratuni had by become the rulers of Georgia and of two other small kingdoms to the north, Kakhetia and Imeretia, and they liberated Armenia from the Turks late in the twelfth century. Other lines of Bagratuni  produced two Byzantine emperors, Konstantin Porphyrogenitus and Comnenus, and connect to the Byzantine-Greek house of Paliologus. They are a major Eurasian trunk-line. (My great uncle Avinoff, the butterfly collector, who left us with a detailed family tree,  was once heard muttering the word Porphyrogenitus on the streets of Pittsburgh, where he lived and was the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History from the late twenties until his death in l948.) 

        In 1236  the Mongols swept through, and Armenia was again subjugated. For the next seven centuries, the Armenians were stateless, an oppressed minority in Turkey, then, with the conquest of the Caucasus  by Tsar Nicholas I in the l840s, a far southern outlier  of the Russian empire.  Prince Nicholas Gagarine’s sumptuous two-volume 1846 Le Caucasse Pittoresque has 80 lithographs of the newly conquered territory : deep gorges and high mountain villages with minarets and sultans puffing hookahs on patios.

         Another branch of Bogratuni, the Bogrations, became a prominent family in the Russian nobility, and it is from them that I am descended, through a family called Jmakin, whose daughter married into the Panayev family, one of whose daughters married into the Lukianovitches, of eastern Ukraine, one of whose daughters married my great-grandfather, Nicholas Avinoff. There is a general-prince in War and Peace called Bogration, who was fatally wounded at the Battle of  Borodino, and in the l970s, when I was doing the research for Russian Blood,  I met in New York City a tall, slender, long-faced, silver-haired,  soft-spoken, melancholy aristocrat named Teymuraz Bogration, who was my remote cousin. In nineteenth-century St. Petersburg some  Bogration women dressed in mourning, with black dresses and veils,  on Good Friday, because that was the day  their ancestor in the House of David had been crucified. 

      During the First World War, as tsarism was crumbling, the imperial army pulled out of Armenia, leaving it defenseless, and the Turks moved in and committed the first major genocide of the twentieth century, about which there is a new book, Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris (the Tigris rises in the mountains of Armenia), that was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for several weeks. Balakian draws a grim parallel with America’s inaction and obstruction of the League of Nations during this holocaust and its thwarting of the international effort to stop the Rwandan genocide of l994. Fourteen years after the slaughter of close to a million Armenians by the Turks, Hitler argued to his staff, who were voicing reservations about the liquidation of the Jews,  “Who remembers the Armenians ?”  The Armenians who survived and their descendants do, and so do social scientists like Concordia University’s Frank Chalk, who have spend their careers trying to understand this most horrible act that humans are collectively capable of. 
 

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