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Matthew Patay's
Note of the Month
October 2007
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Map and flag images provided by Graphic Maps
This month's featured note
is from Armenia.
The denomination is 1,000 Dram and the Standard Catalog of World Paper Money
(SCWPM) Number is P-45.
The note is dated 1999.
(front)
The banknote is aqua and green on multicolored underprint.
Yeghishe Charents (13 March 1897-29
November 1937)), a
poet and political activist is at left.
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The following information
was obtained from:
Periodical of Armenian
Students
Yeghishe Charents
(1897-1937)
(For the full article, please refer to
the link above.)
By Grigor Hakobyan
Yeghishe Charents was born in 1897, March
13 in Kars, one of the former capitols of Armenia, currently located in
North-Eastern Turkey. Born into a family of tradesman, he became one of the
legendary figures of Armenian art and anti-Soviet activism. His works have
fostered generations of patriotic Armenians and have been translated and read by
peoples as diverse as the subjects on which he wrote. One of the leaders of the
literary elite of the Soviet Union, his poetic dynamism and musical modality set
him apart as one of the most inspired poets—not Armenian poet, but poet—of the
twentieth century.
The ever socially conscious writer, Charents covered topics such as civil war in
Russia and Armenia, world communism, famine, poverty, World War I, the Bolshevik
Revolution of Red October 1917 and everyday life. Langston Hughesesque in his
negotiation of social ills and the state of his people, Charents found that the
essence of these ideas lay within the history of his people and within
nationalism. Actually, considering that Charents and Hughes were relative
contemporaries of one another, Hughes could equally be called Charentsesque—in
either case, I’m sure neither would mind the epithet.
At first, inspired by Communist utopianism, he spurred his fellow countrymen to
fight for the victory of Communism and Leninism in Armenia and abroad. As he
later experienced the realities of the Soviet brand of communism he became a
famous anti-Soviet, gradually increasing the nationalistic tone in his works.
His political dissidence led to his arrest by the Armenian NKVD (same as KGB) on
the orders of Moscow during the Great Purge, and his further imprisonment and
ultimate death at the age of forty in the jail for political dissidents in
Yerevan.
At age fifteen, Charents enlisted as a volunteer in an Armenian self-defense
regiment fighting Turks in Van. His active participation in the national
struggle to defend his homeland, inspired Charents to write such major works as:
“Danteesque Legend” (Danteakan Araspel, 1916), “Three Songs to a Pale Girl”
(Erek erg tkhradaluk aghjkan, 1914), “Blue-Eyed Homeland” (Kaputachia Hyerenik,
1915), and “Rainbow” (Tsiatsan, 1917).
In 1916, Yeghishe Charents went to Moscow, to pursue literary studies at the
Shaniavskii Institute. Immediately following the October Revolution of 1917, he
put himself into the service of the Soviet Union, where he actively fought
within the Red Army against Armenian and Russian nationalists from 1918-1921.
During that time, Charents wrote other significant poetic pieces, including
“Soma” (1918), and “The Demented Crowds” (Ambokhnere Khelagarvats, 1919), which
became one of the most respected Soviet poems about the October Revolution.
Thereafter, in June of 1921, Yeghishe Charents married Arpenik Ter
Astvatsatrian, who passed away less than seven years after they were married.
The year after their marriage, Charents published, in two volumes, a collection
of his poems entitled, Collected Works (Ergeri Zhoghovatsu), which became widely
available throughout the Soviet Union.
Charents spent 1924 and 1925 as a Soviet diplomat, traveling throughout the
Armenian Diaspora, visiting Italy, France, Germany, Turkey and other countries,
urging Diasporan Armenian writers to return to Armenia, and continue their
literary work there.
After Charents returned to Armenia, in 1925, he and a group of other talented
Armenian writers including: Gegham Sarian, Gurgen Mahari, Vagharshak Norents,
Mkrtich Armen, and Aksel Bakunts founded a literary organization called the
Association of Armenian Proletarian Writers. Unfortunately, many of his
colleagues mentioned here were either deported to Siberia, or shot or both,
under Stalin’s regime.
During the years following 1925, Charents published his satirical novel, Land of
Nairi (Yerkir Nairi), which rapidly became a great success among the people.
Later on, Charents became the director of Armenia’s State Publishing House,
while he continued his literary career, and began to translate, into Armenian,
literary works by various writers like: Pushkin, Nekrasov, Esenin, Maiakovskii,
Goethe, Gor'kii, Remard Verhaeren, Walt Whitman and others. Charents also
published such famous novels as: Rubayat (1927), Epic Dawn (Epikakan Lussapats,
1930), and Book of the Road (Girk Chanaparhi, 1933). The last collection in this
list, also the last book he ever published, contains his reflections on
Armenia's past, the folk epic David of Sassun, verses on art, and cultural and
philosophical lyrics.
In one of his most famous poems, more infamous probably, called "The Message",
written in Book of the Road, Charents, supposedly praising the greatness of
Stalin, transmits a hidden message to the Armenian people by stringing together
the second letter of each line: "Oh! Armenian People, Your Salvation Lies Only
in Your Collective power" (Ov Hye Zhoghovourd, ko miak prkootyune ko havakakan
uzhi mej eh). The message, deemed “nationalistic” by the Soviet regime, was
banned and earned Charents heavy criticism and ridicule in the communist
Armenian press. Some of Charents’ loyal supporters, however, including famous
Armenian intellectuals such as the chief architect of Yerevan Aleksandr Tamanyan
and folk Artist Martiros Saryan spoke in defense of Charents’ work.
But shortly after the release of Book of the road Yegishe Charents was arrested
and later died on November 29, of 1937. While officially the circumstances of
Charent's death were not confirmed by the Armenian communist government of the
time, it was said that Charents was on a hunger strike, during which, he is said
to have banged his head against the walls until he killed himself.
After a famous speech by Anastas Mikoyan (Armenian official within Moscow's
government elite), on March 11, 1954, Egishe Charents was rehabilitated into the
cannon along with many other Armenian Soviet writers, who fell victim to
Stalin's reign of terror.
The legacy of Charents and his works now stand proudly and firmly within the
cannon of Armenian literature. And many of his words and thoughts have become
national slogans and emblems of Armenian unity, even to the extent that they
have been printed on official government documents in nationalistic support of
unity.
Source: The Reference Guide to Modern
Armenian Literature, by Gevorg Bardakjyan
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(back)
An old scene from the city of Yerevan is
at center right.
The following information
was obtained from:
Armeniapedia.com
The City of Yerevan
(For the full article, please refer to
the link above.)
History
Archaeological evidence indicates that a military fortress called Erebuni stood on Yerevan's site as far back as the 8th century BC. Since then the site has been strategically important as a crossroads for the caravan routes passing between Europe and India. It has been called Yerevan since at least the 7th century A.D., when it was the capital of Armenia under Persian rule.
Due to its strategic significance, Yerevan was constantly fought over and it passed back and forth between the dominion of Persia and the Ottomans for centuries. In 1827 it was taken by Russia and formally ceded by the Persians in 1828. After the 1917 Russian revolution it enjoyed three years as the capital of independent Armenia, and in 1920 became the capital of the newly formed Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, a territory of the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yerevan became the capital of the independent Republic of Armenia in 1991.
Armenia was for most of its history a rural society, with few cities of its own. The modern city of Yerevan was built on tragedy and dreams. Little more than a garrison town of mud-brick and gardens before its first brief experience as capital of an independent Armenia in 1918, the city burgeoned under Soviet rule. The flood of refugees from the 1915 holocaust and its aftermath fueled an uneasy but productive alliance between Armenian nationalism and Soviet hopes of spreading the Communist gospel through the Armenian Diaspora. Modern Yerevan was built, deliberately, to be the universal center and pole of attraction for the diaspora, with an educational and cultural infrastructure far out of proportion to the size or intrinsic wealth of Soviet Armenia.
In 1988, when the collapse of the Soviet Union became visible, Yerevan was a full-fledged, booming Soviet city of over 1 million people. A gracious street plan of parks, ring-roads, and tree-lined avenues had been laid out by the architect Alexander Tamanyan and his successors in the 1920s and 1930s for a population they dreamed might reach 200,000. That goal long surpassed, the process of expansion to reach the magic million-person threshold that qualified Yerevan for a metro and the other perquisites of a city of all-Union importance involved Armenia's successive First Secretaries in sordid expedients and half-finished, earthquake-vulnerable construction projects in sprawled, depressing suburbs.
The success of the 1988 independence movement dealt the city a series of major shocks, first with the forced emigration of a centuries-old Muslim (mostly Azerbaijani Turkish) population, and its replacement by newly impoverished refugees from Baku. The disastrous collapse of the Soviet economic system (Armenia made high-tech pieces of everything, but produced all of practically nothing) triggered the economic migration of hundreds of thousands of impoverished Armenians bound for the bright lights of Moscow or Glendale, California. A reliable census took place in 2001, counting just over 3 million heads in the country.
The city of Yerevan preserves little of its early history in a form of interest to casual visitors. Behind the anonymous Soviet facades, however, a rich and complex life took place and still does, in the bak (courtyard) or in private apartments far better furnished -- with books, musical instruments, art, and hospitality - than 70 years of official culture or a decade of grim poverty would suggest.
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The following information
was obtained from:
Infoplease.com
History of Armenia
(For the full article, please refer to
the link above.)
Geography
Armenia is located in the southern Caucasus and is the smallest of the former Soviet republics. It is bounded by Georgia on the north, Azerbaijan on the east, Iran on the south, and Turkey on the west. Contemporary Armenia is a fraction of the size of ancient Armenia. A land of rugged mountains and extinct volcanoes, its highest point is Mount Aragats, 13,435 ft (4,095 m).
History
One of the world's oldest civilizations, Armenia once included Mount Ararat, which biblical tradition identifies as the mountain that Noah's ark rested on after the flood. It was the first country in the world to officially embrace Christianity as its religion (c. A.D. 300).
In the 6th century B.C., Armenians settled in the kingdom of Urartu (the Assyrian name for Ararat), which was in decline. Under Tigrane the Great (fl. 95–55 B.C.) the Armenian empire reached its height and became one of the most powerful in Asia, stretching from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Throughout most of its long history, however, Armenia has been invaded by a succession of empires. Under constant threat of domination by foreign forces, Armenians became both cosmopolitan as well as fierce protectors of their culture and tradition.
Over the centuries Armenia was conquered by Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Mongols, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, and Russians. From the 16th century through World War I, major portions of Armenia were controlled by their most brutal invader, the Ottoman Turks, under whom the Armenians experienced discrimination, religious persecution, heavy taxation, and armed attacks. In response to Armenian nationalist stirrings, the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in 1894 and 1896. The most horrific massacre took place in April 1915 during World War I, when the Turks ordered the deportation of the Armenian population to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. According to the majority of historians, between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were murdered or died of starvation. The Armenian massacre is considered the first genocide in the 20th century. Turkey denies that a genocide took place and claims that a much smaller number died in a civil war.
After the Turkish defeat in World War I, the independent Republic of Armenia was established on May 28, 1918, but survived only until Nov. 29, 1920, when it was annexed by the Soviet army. On March 12, 1922, the Soviets joined Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan to form the Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic, which became part of the USSR. In 1936, after a reorganization, Armenia became a separate constituent republic of the USSR. Armenia declared its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union on Sept. 23, 1991.
In 1988, Armenia became involved in a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, to which both laid claim. The majority of the enclave were Armenian Christians who wanted to secede from Azerbaijan and either become part of Armenia or gain full independence. War broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region from 1992–1994, resulting in 30,000 casualties. Armenia effectively controls the region today, although no formal resolution exists.
An Armenian diaspora has existed throughout the nation's history, and Armenian emigration has been particularly heavy since independence from the Soviet Union. An estimated 60% of the total 8 million Armenians worldwide live outside the country, with 1 million each in the U.S. and Russia. Other significant Armenian communities are located in Georgia, France, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Argentina, and Canada.
Prime Minister Andranik Markarian died suddenly in March 2007. He was replaced by Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisyan.
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For more information about the Armenia visit:
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