The author of the History of the Tartars, Het’um the Historian, was the nephew of King Het’um I and Smbat Sparapet (commander-in-chief) of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, both of whom were knowledgeable informants by virtue of having made the multi-year journey to the Far East (Smbat in 1247-51, and Het’um in in 1254-55). Smbat described some of his observations...
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Grigor Artsruni wrote in Raffi’s obituary that “the descriptive part of [Raffi’s] novels, about the lives of the people [and] the way in which they lived, are realistic to the highest degree.”
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To help any adults who may be interested in learning Western Armenian from scratch as a beginner, or who may simply want to develop their language skills further, we have compiled a list of the best language learning resources for Western Armenian that we have come across so far.
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Michael Bonner is an independent scholar specializing in Iranian history. His new book, The Last Empire of Iran, is a narrative history of the Sasanian dynasty from its founding in the 3rd century to the Arab conquests in the 7th century.
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George Mardikian, who named his celebrated San Francisco restaurant "Omar Khayyam's," acts on a charade from the best-known lines of that Persian poet's Rubaiyat.
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The History of the Rubenian Dynasty by Vahram Rabuni is a remarkable work of medieval Armenian literature. It was commissioned by King Leo (Levon) III (1270-1289), who requested from Vahram a continuation of Vipasanutyun, which was composed in the first half of the 11th century by Nerses Shnorhali (“the Gracious”) in verse. Little is known about Vahram except that he served in the royal court of King...
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As we have described previously, Franz Werfel’s 1933 classic, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, helped to raise awareness for the plight of the Armenians on Musa Dagh who had managed to resist the deportation orders of the Ottoman Government and escaped the genocide in 1915. Despite the novel’s importance, the line between fact and fiction was often blurred in its portrayal...
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In 1930, well-known novelist and playwright Franz Werfel made a fateful trip to the Near East. It was there that he first encountered Armenian orphans, many of whom were crippled or maimed, working in a carpet factory in Damascus. Haunted by the images of these children, Werfel went on to further investigate the deportations and massacres of the Ottoman Armenians...
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Learning an endangered branch of any language is no easy task, but for a monolingual English speaker who is not of the language’s heritage culture, it holds unique challenges.
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Armeno-Turkish When I was a child, my father told me that his grandfather (an Armenian from the Ottoman Empire) spoke only in Turkish and wrote only in Armenian, meaning he wrote Turkish in Armenian script. It turns out that this was pretty common in the Ottoman Empire, and not only among Armenians. The Greeks had a word for Greco-Turkish – karamanlidika...
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Raffi’s readers experienced reading the novella in serialized form when it was first published in 1878. In the 19th century, readers consumed books in the same way that we watch television today. Instead of “tuning in” each week for the next episode of the latest addictive TV drama, readers would turn to the next issue of their favourite literary periodical. Even...
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