3-August-99 Echmiadzen
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By now Anne and I were so used to pronouncing the kh sound (like the German ch in “ach”) that we were almost unable to cope with the name Echmiadzen, which is pronounced more like “itch me ...” Anyway, that was our destination this morning.
I had been up in the middle of the night with the runs. No stomach ache nor intestinal distress, but I lost a lot of fluid. I started on a prescription Harvard Health had given me and took a pepto-bismol. At breakfast my mouth was so dry I couldn't eat any bread. Cucumber and tomato were the only things that were comfortable to chew.
Tom met us at the hotel promptly at 10. We had arranged to have him drive us through a travel agent, Ashod Shaboyan, whose name I had got through the Cambridge-Yerevan sister city project. We weren't sure how or when we were going to pay for all the rooms he had arranged, or the driving, but we went to Ashod's office and got all that straightened out. Ashod also got someone else to ride along -- more or less the director of one of the museums at Echmiadzen.
Echmiadzen is the Vatican of Armenia, the seat of the head of the church. Armenia was the first country to convert en masse to Christianity (In 301 AD. That really doesn't get them many points in my book, but they're proud of it) and the main church in Echmiadzen is the oldest Christian church in the world. There are legends of a vision defining the site -- Jesus descending and striking the ground at that spot. I'm not the person to get to report on that. At any rate, before we got there we passed the Saint Hripsime church.
Church of Ste. Hripsime
Hripsime was a beautiful Christian woman who refused to marry the pagan king, and was martyred for her defiance. Shortly after that, with some coaching from a missionary who became another of the fathers of the Armenian church, the king repented of putting her to death and converted the country. There's another church a few blocks farther on, dedicated to another woman, a friend of Hripsime's, who suffered a similar martyrdom.
Church of Ste. Hripsime's Friend
There are beautiful gardens around those churches, and amazing stone work inside the domes.
The typical old Armenian church has thick stone walls, a floor plan that's a cross with all four arms the same length (about half or a quarter the length of the square in the middle), and a dome with a skylight and amazing stone carvings around the inside of the dome. No pews -- the congregation stands up. Our guide pointed out how the church of Ste. Hripsime was built to be earthquake resistant with zigzag walls for extra strength like corrugated cardboard. No, I don't mean the walls were like cardboard, I mean that in the way the corrugations make cardboard ten times as strong as the paper would be if it were flat, the zigzag walls make the church much stronger than normal two foot thick stone walls would be.
Back in 301AD the Armenian church must have made some accomodation with the existing pagan religion that holds to the present. There's still a tradition of animal sacrifice in the country, not on church property per se but adjacent to it. As we parked by the main church in Echmiadzen, basically the Saint Peter's of the Armenian church, someone was sacrificing a chicken on the edge of the parking lot. I didn't see it all, but Anne says she saw the live chicken and saw the person who slaughtered it paint a cross on the foreheads of two people who were waiting in a parked car.
There's not so much two-dimensional art in Armenian churches as in Russian Orthodox churches, which can have an entire wall covered with paintings. The Armenian churches we went in mostly had one long horizontal painting of the twelve apostles, Jesus, Mary, and John the Baptist in front of the alter, and one painting behind the alter. They make up for it in geometric and abstract stone carvings. There's an old tradition of stones with crosses carved on them, khatchkars. They're somewhere around two by four feet in size, rectangular, with a cross in the middle and intricate knots around the outside that looks as though they and the guys who did the Book of Kells were channeling each other. I don't know who came first, but Celtic knots have nothing on Armenian khatchkars. Like snowflakes, no two khatchkars are identical.
Between the main cathedral in Echmiadzen and the residence of the Catholicos (that's the title of the head of the church) is a big stone archway. When you walk through it your soul is purified. I'm not sure what that means, but of course I walked through it. Do you think the effect will last if I stay away from those XXX web sites?
The Catholicos who was in office for the last five years died about a month ago. His throne in the cathedral was draped in black ribbons. The graves of the former Catholicoses (-icosi?) were outside the cathedral. The last grave in the row had a pile of dirt and a wooden cross instead of the big stone memorial like the others. There's a forty day mourning period before the grave is leveled off and the stone put in place.
The grave in question
On the grounds of the cathedral were a couple of museums. Inside the cathedral proper were ancient religious relics, crosses or other items with a fragment of the bone of a saint or apostle in the middle, and, if you will, the head of the lance that peirced Jesus. I don't know about all those things. To me, it doesn't matter much what the real origin of the relics is, but it's very moving to see that people have cared about them enough to preserve them for so long. That's the real truth of the Bible to me, too. I don't know how much of what the Bible says is true, but it's certainly true that people have cared about it for two thousand years.
Another museum, the gift of a millionaire from America (and your million dollar donation will build a bigger museum in Armenia than in the US) had more mundane artifacts, such as tapestries, vestments (the Catholicos' vestments weigh up to 60 pounds and have lots of silver and gold woven and embroidered in), and batiks. Our guide said that the art of batik started in the Caucasus and reached a high state of development in Armenia and Georgia before people got more interested in tapestry. There were also all the gifts that the Catholicos had been given on various official visits around the world. He was fond of crystal so there was lots of that, but also two autographed soccer balls.
Tom droped us at our hotel and came back in about an hour to drive us to Lake Sevan. Lake Sevan is only about fifty miles or less from Yerevan. It's the second largest lake at that elevation in the world (I guess that means there's only one other that's both bigger and higher), 1900 meters above sea level. I figured that's 6175 feet. It's a lot cooler there than in Yerevan -- have I been complaining enough about how hot it was in Yerevan? Hot enough that it was hard to sleep. Once we were fifteen miles from Yerevan we were at a much higher elevation and it was lots cooler. Most of the ride was very pleasant. There was nice rolling semiarid countryside, with flocks of sheep every so often along the road.
Our hotel was a former Intourist resort right on the lake. It reminded me of nothing so much as one of the big resorts in the Catskills, with a big lobby, restaurant, bar, and long long dark corridors with guest rooms. We explored, looking for the indoor pool, and found a corridor with a broken toilet in it, hidden passages, and lots of places we weren't really intended to see before we found the pool -- small, and there was an extra charge for using it, so we decided to stick to the lake.
Our room was a suite with a sitting room with a couch and a bedroom with two twin beds pushed together. Anne told the dizhournieh that wouldn't do, but it was no problem -- the couch folded down into a bed, and the dizhournieh took the bedding from one bed and made up the couch for Anne. There were also two bathrooms in the suite. One of them had hot water, and the other had a toilet that flushed (we did get the other toilet to flush when I pushed the handle really hard -- but then it didn't stop flushing for five minutes).
We were pretty hungry. We had been getting along on two meals a day (and lots of bottles of sprite or fanta or juice) and I was feeling rehydrated. There wasn't much choice but the hotel dining room, with its Soviet past. Anne predicted, “The food is going to be so nasty,” but we went in. What a pleasant surprise! They started us off with a big plate of bread and lavash (that's a bread about half as thick as an opened pita bread, and tough enough that you can roll it around cheese and vegetables), tomatos, cucumbers, cheese, and mass quantities of scallions, dill, parsley, and purple basil. The only tomatos I've had as good as those were homegrown. Before we completely pigged out on vegetable rollups our food came, beef shashlik for me and grilled vegetables for Anne. Let me say this about that: the Armenians have been making shashlik and shish kebab and grilled vegetables for two or three thousand years and they have it figured out. Yumm.
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