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For 3,000 years Armenians survived conquerors, calamities, diaspora

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  • For 3,000 years Armenians survived conquerors, calamities, diaspora

    National Geographic magazine
    March 2004

    By Frank Viviano Photographs by Alexandra Avakian

    For 3,000 years Armenians survived conquerors, calamities, and diaspora.
    Defiance and a long memory continue to sustain them as they rebuild their
    Caucasus homeland.

    Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

    "You are looking at the great Armenian paradox," Jivan Tabibian said. We
    stood at the second-floor window of the Foreign Ministry building in
    Yerevan, watching clouds scuttle across Mount Ararat's ice-capped
    16,854-foot (5,137-meter) crown. Tabibian, a diplomat whose portfolio
    includes ambassadorships to four countries and two international
    organizations, was discussing a policy initiative when he abruptly fell
    silent, gazing at Ararat. It's impossible not to be distracted by Ararat in
    Yerevan. Despite its enormous mass, the great peak seems to float
    weightlessly over the city, engaged in permanent dialogue with Little
    Ararat, its 12,782-foot (3,896-meter) neighbor.

    The vast snowy brow of Ararat glowers, pronounces, with hallucinatory power.
    Its name is derived from that of a Bronze Age god, Ara, whose talismanic
    cult of death and rebirth mirrored the seasonal transitions of Ararat from
    lifeless winter to fertile spring. Little Ararat, by contrast, is an
    exercise in calm, rational idealism, a volcanic cone so perfectly shaped
    that it suggests not so much what a mountain is as what a mountain ought to
    be.

    You can't ponder the two Ararats for long without drifting into
    philosophical reflection, and the Armenians have been pondering them since
    the birth of civilization.

    The philosopher in Jivan Tabibian maintains that his people's identity is
    inextricably bound to the experience of loss, to the serial reorderings of
    the map that have often stranded their most hallowed landmarks in someone
    else's state. Like the Monastery of St. Gregory the Illuminator deep in the
    hills of Nagorno-Karabakh, Mount Ararat lies outside the contemporary
    Armenian Republic, beyond the closed frontiers of a hostile Turkey.

    "The paradox embodied in that mountain," Tabibian said, "has to do with our
    sense of place," the concept that is so essential to most national
    identities. "We are not place bound"-an impossibility, given Armenia's
    ceaseless traumas, metamorphoses, and peregrinations-"but we are intensely
    place conscious."

    Later I repeated Tabibian's enigmatic words to Vartan Oskanian, the Republic
    of Armenia's foreign minister. And he too offered a philosopher's reflection
    on Ararat. "Every morning we look at it," he said. "It's only 25 miles (40
    kilometers) from this building, and we feel we can almost touch it. But we
    can't go there. Ararat is our pride and our frustration. Our history. The
    unfulfilled dreams that drive us."

    Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

    Read this 1926 manuscript unearthed from our archive: "A Holy Spectacle" by
    Geographic legend Maynard Owen Williams.
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