When will the next meeting be?

When will the next meeting be?

June 10, the 10^th day of our summer camp, the club of the High School-gymnasium, a longed for meeting with Levon Abrahamnyan, a  specialist of culture studies and ethnographer. It was a very interesting lecture with different questions, answers and opinions. The meeting lasted more than one hour during which I was able to learn so many things about Armenian ethnography, symbols and about creating films with these symbols carrying the real plot in them.  I could never learn those things with text-books or during the lessons. One thing is to read or listen to your teacher, another thing is to listen to the man who was the creator of it. Who was Sayat-Nova, who was Sergey Parajanov and who was Levon Abrahamyan? In fact they are names that have been heard about by many people. Some people know these men, and some haven`t ever heard of them. The lecture was about how Sayat-Nova characterized the world, and how Parajanov reproduced it. He spoke about the pomegranate and said that it became in a way the symbol of Armenia after Parajanov`s film. In Armenian culture the pomegranate is associated with fertility. When I first saw the film “Pomegranate Colour” I didn’t understand anything. It was a film with no plot and full of pagan traditions.

The word “panjara” was used by Sayat-Nova with the meaning “window”, but Levon Abrahamyan told us that it is a window with checked bars so it is a cage like window. “My world is a window”, or “My world is a cage”. Which one is more authentic? This was the simplest example. Levon Abrahamyan also told us how he had blessed an old woman`s offering. When he was dressed up like a patriarch (he was playing a role in the film and he was wearing a real costume from the museum), an old woman came up to him and asked him to bless her offering. Levon Abrahmyan refused to do so and the woman began crying saying that the patriarch was refusing to bless her offering. And he had to bless. The time was really limited. We could endlessly listen to that man and learn many things from his speech and life.

The Armenian text was written by Syuzi Karapetyan

The translation into English was done by Lusine Sahakyan and Lilit Melkonyan