THAT SWEET LONG AGO KHARPERT

Photographs from Project SAVE, the Photograph Archives of the Armenian people

Narration by Paul Campanis

Vahe Haig translated a few pages of his vast Armenian history into English. His book is "Kharpert and Her Golden Plain." I like his subtitle. "A Book of the History, Culture, Industry and Ethnology of the Armenians Therein."

He says to the living, especially to the young, "freedom and security, they are yours. Do appreciate what you have. It is precious and has been paid, up front, for you, in the sacrifices of the ones who came before. The vast assemblage of Armenian peoples in history."

I paraphrase only a bit, to show the fervor Haig feels, as he tells the story of the people in his mind and soul. He says,

"Do not forget your Armenian heritage. Try to preserve language, faith and culture. It will be your contribution to humanity today and will help make a better world. In a deep way it will be a fulfillment of the dreams of your ancestors, who died for their faith and culture."

These photographs of Kharpert and its people come from the archives of Project SAVE. Kharpert was a large settlement in the historic Armenia of Eastern Turkey, devastated by the soldiers of the Ottoman empire.

Haig in his pages describes the customs, practices and family dynamics of the people. He further documents the fate of those who underwent the effects of the diaspora, the spread of the people, in the face of genocide. Thousands of survivors came to the United States, toWorcester, to Fresno, to points in between.

The fierce pride of the Armenians came out of their horrendous experiences. Their oppression, suffering, and ultimate success in the face of all obstacles is expressed today in print and in the photograph. The vitality of the Armenian diaspora borrows of this long history of suffering, and of the attempts to extinguish a race.

There is the past. There is the now. There is what is the present. Let us say the current moment is important to the Armenian people, as it is the arena for action. Where progress can occur for Armenians and for human kind.

Action can and does occur. Action in the present time is the only way to affirm the values and beliefs of these remarkable people. And it is they themselves, who are on the battlements , fighting the ravages of time , trouble and forgetfulness.

They write about their people, save their photographs, describe their troubles. That way the present complements and supplements the history and the past of the Armenian people.

It is quickly apparent to the non-Armenian like me, that the Armenian is lost in prayer, both for him or herself, and for the rest of us, poor souls too. That prayer will soon crystalize into action, words, poems, children. The Armenian people the world around are busy, is all.

They are busy knitting the fabric of a gold garment that will tie the ones gone past with the ones who will arrive here, soon enough, to carry the mantle of a most grand culture.

So the present is the cutting edge, so to say. Paruir Sevak, the great poet, says it in his words. I quote a few lines from his book,"Selected Poems," available at the Boston Public Library.

He argues that the world needs to change. He uses the image of cleaning, as the way to cosmetize a world that lacks something essential.

The World Needs Cleaning

The world could be cleaned

with the appearance

of the red-hatted bird,

praying like a cardinal

not for our souls

but for the cleaning of the world.

The poet, Sevak, tells us the truth, always. That we need to clean our act, all of us. In this sense he is not speaking, as Armenian alone, but as human. His imagery is apt and lovely. The past for him and his people , it seems to me,

is one of devastation, forced movement, fire, marches, death at cruel hands.

Sevak concentrates on the present , to improve, to upgrade , to build for the future of his people and their ways. The people can have the energy and the will, he implies in his other poems, to ride to the future on the back of the Armenian language and culture. All that is needed, is to do it. The vision and the energy are there, Sevak argues. Just do it.

One somehow knows they will. Once again the program for the future is in the lines of the poetry, if only we can listen, and learn from it.

The Armenian people endure. Of all their wonderful traits, the one stronger than the rest, is their ability at enduring. I refer to the gospel song I so love, which has in it the line, "will you be in that number when the saints go marchin' in?" Hmm? Armenians manage to stay in this number, part of the scene, wherever they locate, wherever they are forcibly located.

It is this power to survive that all the commentators and poets marvel at. Business as usual; they set up shop. A church, a way of love and life, and it just goes on, to the next chapter of the evergoing, everloving journey on this fair earth.

Sevak has a way about him. I guess all great people who do poetry do. He was lost in 1971, in a car crash. Some clouded circumstances to it. He knows what to say, and how to phrase it.

This is from the poem, "Nightfall."

Then every house

fires a salute to the universe

with a baby's cry, a mother's call

and the brays and neighs

of machines and animals.

A few choice lines about the power of not giving in, to much of anything awful, that happens in life. Relent. Life is to be endured and lived, as it lies.

Concentrate on the good, what is real and satisfying. The land, the family, the sounds of life. His poem says it all, in just a few words. Survive. Dare to. Live life and love it.

Then every house

fires a salute to the universe

with a baby's cry, a mother's call

and the brays and neighs

of machines and animals.

The Armenian person, in the bosom of the family, continues the life path, putting food on the table , so to say, and that life endures, in its patterned way, despite the pogroms, flames, killings. It is always the poet who is the optimist for whatever asserts the presence and continuity of his race. Sevak is a bright light, a lighthouse on a foggy landfall, a person one can only love and admire for the ability he has, to say what he does, in some few words, about the present and future of a people.

I shall return to this genius of words, Sevak , in a while, but now must speak of the nineties, of the turbulent decade we are experiencing. Today, and what it bodes for the living. How are the Armenians doing? What are they up to?

Are they still with us, chatting in an animated fashion, forming communities, going to their churches, fretting over their families and the byzantine politics?

You know, the usual ones of property rights, marriage prospects for the kids, business dilemmas, adequate wages and funds to keep the whole ship of the family on a steady course? Well, yes , of course, they are still among us, doing their crowded, excited and exciting lives, anywhere there are human beings, on the five continents.

The culture is held together by a shared vocabulary, the home language, Armenian, and by the faith of the people. Philip Marsden, in his new book, "The Crossing Place. A Journey Among the Armenians," refers to the land , the land of Historic Armenia, in Eastern Turkey now, as the anchor for a culture.

Symbolized by Mount Ararat, the land is what counts the most. It is no longer theirs to populate. Therin, lies the rub. They cannot go back to that sweet long ago.

To what is now Turkey. Repository as it is, for the bones of the ancestors, for the sites of grand churches, farms and fields, for homes and water, for life itself.

For fruit trees, for the grape, for bountiful harvests. Return is not possible. Not now at least.

Marsden, in his book, goes all over the earth to locate and interview and describe the Armenians, his adopted cousins, and to see how they are doing in their forced diaspora. Happily, as we might expect, they are doing fine. Armenians have that capacity. They are doing fine, considering......

The photographs I show you are from the treasury of Project SAVE. They are evidence of the diaspora, of the life and the times of people living outside their homeland. In their faces one glimses the outline of their lands. In their face is imprinted the stubborn pride the Armenian is famed for. Their pride of place is strong and their place is lost to them.

The Armenian remembers his and her lands, as if they were there yesterday. They are melancholy over its loss. They go on, wherever they are, but they are sad.

As in the poem of Sevak, one has to read between the lines of the daily Armenian's life, to apprehend the size and scale of the Armenian miracle. To understand what they have accomplished, these quiet giants among us, in this hard and forgetful world.

They are with us in 1995. They will be with us in 2015. Just another generation will pass. That is all, and the photographs of Project SAVE will shine up on the screen of our consciousness, will continue to teach us that the people have a will to be, to endure, to thrive and survive. The Armenian people are there in picture-form to say a thing to us.

To tell us Armenians and non-Armenians alike , that all is well. We can welcome the new millenium, 2000, with an Armenian greeting. Will you give a little blessing now, right now, as we speak of these blessed pictures, these accumulated pearls, these sparkling sapphires that remind the faithful of the fields of Kharpert?

The photographs are our only remaining assurance of the life lived, in three-dimensional form, alive and throbbing with the message of time. It is hard to say this, but these pictures and the memories of people who lived through the times, is all we have.

How precious this makes each and every photograph! That is what I am grappling to say, emotion-choked , as I am, at this moment. How profoundly precious these photographs have become with the passage of time, that cruel and pitiless measure of life.

Marsden travels the known world to talk with and take a meal with an Armenian he may meet. His book is enormously enjoyable. One wishes to meet him and get caught up on what he has been doing, since he wrote his travelogue among the people. One might say, "how's it going?" Then say to him with hope in one's eyes, "meet any Armenians lately?"

Then sit back and listen to story after story pop out of him, with him out of breath at the end. So exciting, the Armenians. Never a dull moment, as they say.

Anyway, we have Sevak to regale us, and also, Marsden, to tell about the present. The combination allows me to spend a few quiet moments, contemplating a remarkable people.

The photographs Ruth Thomasian has gathered , flesh out the passage ; what the people looked like then and and what they look like now. Ruth colors in the canvas of an Armenian history for me. We get to see what the people look like, what they looked like, when they were doing life back home, in the blessed homeland , that sweet place in their past. This achievement in saving and savoring the past, cannot be overestimated. You have a visual past or you don't. Most cultures don't. The thing is lost, amid the bustle of life, in this, our twentieth century. Not so with the Armenians.

They were photographers in their native lands. They did it for a living. For pleasure and for remembrance, but also for pay. They knew it was important. To document the daily life of common persons. Their ceremonies and events. The photographers of the 1850's and on, knew somehow, that the future journey was to be precarious, like the past, and they layed the course, Ruth Thomasian, now humbly treds. Save it or lose it. To lose it would be a shame, a crime, an insult to those ancestors who gave so much. In many cases, their very lives. 'Cause they were Armenians.

So one has to see the photographs as special. Thank goodness, the Armenian photographer existed, that he had the skill to take all those remarkable photographs. They are all there is . There is no other way to know how the people dressed, what their faces looked like, how their children looked, what their lands looked like, how they seemed to feel about themselves. Their photographs accompany us as we go to sleep. We dream on these photographs,

seeing the ancestors in their proud poses. The photographs are in our unconscious minds, playing tricks, reminding us of the glorious past and the responsibilities of the present. The photographs are a gift from those who came before us, needing to be preserved and revered for what they are, holy documents of a tortured past.

Marsden moves among the people. He learns Armenian and goes about looking for the people. He finds them and they accept him. Armenians are not prejudiced against the outsider. Not as long as he or she is not bent on their destruction. He is fed and bed down in countless poor peoples' homes, and in rich ones too. He has a grand time. He must have gotten tired a bit, but he is young and vigorous, thank god.

He is wildly in love, he is. It seems to him every useful thing mankind and womankind has invented or developed since time began, came from the febrile mind of an Armenian. Please forgive him; his zeal is excessive. Inaccuracy is the sad result of his assertions, but who cares when you are having fun.

It is well-known the Armenian people prospered in whatever field of endeavor they entered. Marsden is a zealot. He would have to be, to go to the killing fields of 1915, as he did, and tell us about it. His book speaks on the unspeakable at length. He may be forgiven for his excess praise of Armenians' achievements, since that time.

In dogged fashion he chases down the very last Armenian on the earth today , as he seeks to put together the tapestry of the culture, as it has developed in the latter part of the century.

The introduction is by Peter Sourian who argues the Armenians have yet to bury their dead. They are as ghosts, he claims, who upset the daily life and the sleeping lives of aware Armenians. The ghosts, he claims, "wander restlessly abroad. " I would ask the viewer to consider his imaginative ideas.

Let me try. I cannot resist a preliminary pass at his provocative statement. The past has yet to be dealt with by those alive, including those of us, non-Armenian. The living, the live ones, who have an interest, the mostly Armenian people who have a deep interest, are joined to the ones gone past, to attempt to put to rest the bones of the ancestors.

This can be done by telling of their exploits, by saving and seeing the photographs, by reclaiming the lands lost back there. It is to my Greek culture that I turn for answers, as we have the problem, too, of restless ancestors. The temples fell to ruin and our ancestors hover about, waiting for our living poets to rescue them through word, photo, play and quatrain. The restlessness of the ones gone, is ever in us, the living. It is in Sourian, thank goodness, and he knows to express it in Marsden's book.

Marsden says he sees a positive outlook on the faces of Armenians he views in photographs that are shown him as he travels around. He puts it, that the look on the peasant's face is that life is potentially good and he or she is about to give life his and her best shot.

He alludes to the buoyancy and hopefullness of the common man or woman. One looks and can see it, in the photos.

Lost places , lost people. So much of that in the Armenian experience. Yet the photographs make it seem less lost. They are a reminder, hard evidence, that this or that place really did exist , really does exist in our minds and souls today. It sits in our conscious minds. Our very own Kharpert.

This or that human trod God's earth, did what we do. Eat, sleep, talk, love. This human who looks at us from the photo-print has dreams for the future, as we do.

The photographs are all we have of visual reminder. Of a tragic past. We make the best of them. To remember our ancestors. We tenderly touch the photograph, massage it in our safe hand. We touch the photograph, talk to those in it, look in awe on the sacred persons in it. The ones gone by.

The Armenians pine for the lost place. The land,.the land itself. The land of Armenia that is lost. The photographs show the land as it was. Now they live where they can, over the world. They replicate life as it was, in the old land, in places like Kharpert.

In 1995 a Kharpetsi woman in Revere has tears in her eyes, as she tells of losing her family in the marches of 1915. The land, the holy land in their dreams. Kharpert, but also Van, Bitlis, Moush, Sebastia. If they can't go back in person, they are back there, in mind. The photographs are all there is now, to remind them of the past and their responsibilities.

Marsden speaks of the "look of the land." He quotes a writer named Bryce.

"Do you see that white thing yonder? High

up ? Do you know what that is?

No, replied the other sleepily..

That is Ararat."

If the Armenian lost what is valued the most, the land, the world can only be seen as a precarious , unpredictable place. The sense of what one accomplishes is all the more precious and valuable, precisely because some unauthorized force, an alien force, may swoop down and take it away. Marsden argues this point forcefully, and gives evidence in the words of the people he interviews.

The Armenian must live for the moment.

The townsman is always looking over the shoulder to see who's gaining. To take his child, his land, his vineyard,

his forge, his donkey, his books, his church, his field, his life, his soul, his song, his poem, his essence, his tree, his well.

Life is that dangerous.

History has made that much clear to the Armenian, that holy person, who sees all, and knows all lessons of time. He or she is alert to what is going on and trouble is always the companion of each day. You don't need me to tell you this, viewer. Hear the poet speak. Grigor Aghtamartsi, a sixteenth century, Armenian poet.

"I reap the harvest of the vine

My garden treats me with its wine

I drink in shade beneath the fence

Then hear, "your garden leave-go-hence."

It is no way to live. One can go mad with uncertainty, when the foe feels such hate. One lives in fear, in anticipation of certain loss of one's daily life, and the security the human needs to survive.

So what happens, I surmise, is that the most precious things of all, the language, the culture, the religion, get put into a safe pocket where no foe can touch them.

The culture is, after all, portable. It is in dreams and recipes one carries in the head. In the woman's mind, in the man's, it travels to Venice, to Roumania, to Worcester, to Sydney, and Johannesburg. Memory survives along with photographs, to keep the dream whole and expanded. The sense that the Armenians are a people, a race, a good people. A kind people, a peacable people. A smart people. Three millenia of continuous culture, addressed, updated, launched into a future, as 2000 gapes at us.

No-one said it would be easy, but the Armenian has a few advantages. St. Mesrop gave his humans the script in the fifth century. The idea would continue, if script would carry it on its holy wings. That happened. Villages burned. Humans perished, but the culture went forward, nonetheless.

This is how the writer, William Saroyan, put it.

"Go ahead and destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when any two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."

Any diaspora is cruel, uncaring. Difficult, challenging. Like a storm in the North Atlantic is dangerous. The new time we live in, makes culture shatter into little pieces. The commerce of the day, the fast pace , the overbearing tv and advertising. All of it threaten each and every one of our various diasporas. That is the new foe. The modern way, that is so readily adopted. It robs our children, who meet life with the sleepy gaze of the stupefied, consumer-gorilla. They do not know better than to fall for the modern messages and we are hopelessly inadequate to help them.

The neck of the culture, Armenian culture, cranes. The head speaks a poem of Sevak. The song erupts and then the memories trot out.

They pull out the family photographs and they go onto the magic carpet and Armenia comes back into focus once more. Oh, Ararat.

One lives in a diaspora at constant risk. The diaspora makes us tough, be it an Armenian diaspora, or some other one. Vladimir Nabokov puts it this way in a chapter heading in Marsden's book.

"In exile one lives by genius alone."

How true. Oh, how true of the solid, stolid, Armenian. The ones I see as the "serious people."

The photographs that visit our homes, via the half-inch video tape, are sacred. They must be seen for what they are. Special evidence that life lived in them was, and is something special.

To Armenian people, they are the only possible, visual representation of what went past them, in such a hurried and tragic fashion.

There is no way to see them in a neutral manner. One is overcome all the time. The views of children, the scenes of pastoral life. It is highly emotional. We need that kick, all of us, to recall what we, the living, must do to justify ourselves in the eyes of those in the pictures. Our responsibility is to remember and sing songs of praise. To see that communication among peoples improves, so the past horrors will not repeat again.

The land of the Armenian people is sown with the rich harvest; with people, their bodies, with ideas, philosophy, implements, customs, with photographs. This is some thousands of

years, of peace, war, conquest, more peace, war and trouble. Victory, stalemate, defeat, a decade of surcease from war and trouble, and then some more. Horror, eviction, poisoning.

On and on. It has gone on. Armenian history. Some few thousands of years. Boiling in a crucible; a magical, dynamic, driven people, the Armenians. The same who have spread to all the corners of the earth.

Garig Basmadjian is quoted in the introduction to the book I mentioned earlier, the poems of Paruir Sevak. "Selected Poems."

He says, "Everything conspired to kill literature in the Armenian diaspora, but despite the wholesale butchery of the intelligentsia and other discouraging conditions, the strange Armenian will to survive preserved the language and obliged poets to construct a spiritual Armenia that could never be destroyed, looted or massacred.

Miraculously, the orphaned, crippled poetry once again flourished."

The cultural fires, they yet burn. Sevak reminds us where the wind lives. In a poem called the "Buffoon." He asks, "where does the wind live?" And goes on to tell us in the poem. One line and then the next, go to tell us the wind lives...."in our wounds."

The poet suffers and we with him. He will spread his seed where it is wanted and where they don't want it. Sevak says in the poem, "The Toymaker,"

"I shall sell truth , sell it everywhere, wherever they wish and wherever they don't."

Sevak is ever up to the task. That is why he is one of the great, contemporary, Armenian poets. He witnesses. He testifies. He says it like this.

In the beautiful piece, " Midcentury Hymn."

"But if we ever kneel down

it's to minimize the world's pain

by reducing it to ashes

in the sun's crematorium.

But if we ever kneel down,

it's to embrace the naked knees of beauty,

to melt silently in the warm scent of the earth,

or be photographed in a child's eye."

CO-PRODUCERS:

Paul Campanis

Ruth Thomasian

Photographs from the Archives of Project SAVE have been provided by the following people:

Carnig Alexanderian

Lorraine Alexander

The Armenian Library and Museum of America

Astrik Aznavorian

Edna Bogosian

Serop Bogosian

Vahan and Mary Bogosian

Levon Der Hohannesian

Roxie Gagosian

Seesag Gavoorian

Rose Palulian Greenhalgh

Rouben Gregorian

Michael Halebian

Ardashes Hampar

Haroutune Hazarian

Artemis Herrian

Ann Hovanesian

Hannah Kalajian

Garabed Kazanjian

George Keverian

Nevart Kinosian

Alice Sivaslian Lord

Toros Markarian

Mary Melikian

Ann Najarian

Charlotte Nalbandian

Lucy Nargozian

Thelma Asadorian Norman

George Norsigian

Mary Siroonian Ogden

Areknaz Omartian

Harold Pogarian

Ann Shadbegian

Takouhi Shemligian

Bizer Simonian

Veron Tashjian

Ruth Woodis

Won't you share your photographs with Project SAVE? You, too, can become a photo donor. For more information, write or call

Ruth Thomasian

Project SAVE

46 Elton Avenue

Watertown, MA 02172-4116

617-923-4563

Continental Cable

Watertown, Massachusetts

CONTINENTAL CREDITS:

January 1996

Photograph Archives of the Armenian people