Armash fountain “restored”

Through the “Armenian Genealogy Հայկական Ծագումնաբանութիւն Haygagan Dzakumnapanutyun” Facebook group and Ancestry DNA, I have been lucky enough to connect with several families that have connections to the Armash Theological Seminary, which was an important spiritual center for Armenians before the Genocide, and where Vartan’s grandmother’s family was from.  We’re just starting to share stories over email and Google Drive, and I am so optimistic that other people are out there to help research and share the stories of Armash in English.

Reconnecting with them has reinvigorated my interest in researching the family history, so I went to Google Earth to see if any new photos of Armash (now called Akmese) had been put up in the last few years, since I last checked.

And to my dismay, I discovered that the beautiful old Armenian fountain in the middle of the town, in front of the mosque where Armash Seminary once stood, has recently been “renovated.”  Rather than preserving the structure as a historic building, they have completely plastered over the old stones, and (from what I can tell) erased any traces that it was once an Armenian structure.  It breaks my heart.

See these before and after photos:

 

In 2002, there were still Armenian symbols on stones around the fountain.

yazit-taslari-fot...-kiraz-9-32f38dd

From 2011:

Armash Fontaine, 2011
La mosquée, l’emplacement de l’église avec la fontaine, 2011
closeup of fountain in akmese armash

I knew they planned to do a restoration, but the rendering here didn’t look that “bad”:

plans for fountain restoration

And here’s what it looks like today:

restored fountain
fountain after restoration, mosque in back
mosque and restored fountain
armenian fountain after restoration

Armenian cross outline

When we were putting together the program book for our wedding, I looked online for a nice black and white outline of an Armenian cross. Couldn’t find one that I liked, so I sketched one up myself.
Here’s the file, in case anyone else wants to use it, go ahead!
Black and white Armenian cross outline

Lenten Listening

During Lent, I have been trying to replace my usual audiobooks and podcasts with things that feed my soul and focus me more on God.

Specifically, I’ve been listening to and loving the third season of “A Lenten Journey with Fr. Vazken“, which is focused on the Badarak (Divine Liturgy).  There are 40 episodes, one for every day of Lent.  Each episode walks you through a different section of the Badarak – what happens, why, the theology, and sometimes a little history.  It’s like a little daily Badarak study, and I’m really enjoying it.
Lenten Journey with Fr Vazken
A Lenten Journey with Fr. Vazken: http://lentenpodcast.blogspot.com/
“A 40 day journey of spiritual reflection and meditation presented daily via 40 podcasts by Fr. Vazken”

There are three “seasons” total – Lenten Journey, Healing Series, and the Badarak Series, as well as recordings for each day of Holy Week.

Honorable mentions, but not specifically Lent-related:
I also just came upon The Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America’s 2019 Lenten Program on Youtube, and will be watching as more are posted: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSFR0AjdFyCUlcAQe3Ad-hgc3TuKrMgS

Learning Western Armenian: Start with morphemes

Armenian is a somewhat agglutinative language. “Words may contnain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions.” Basicaly compound works.
It’s like this example in English… “Auto” is a prefix that means “self” (by itself, by one’s self). “Mobile” is something that moves. Automobile = something that moves by itself. In Armenian, “ինք” means “self” and “շարժ” means move or moving. ինքնաշարժ means car! There are many, many, many words like this in Western Armenian.
So if you learn a whole bunch of little one-syllable words in Armenian, you can start to put those pieces together and decipher longer words. It’s a very efficient way to start learning vocabulary.
To do just that, here is a list of 200 one-syllable Armenian words and their roots, created by our friend Fr. Ghevond Ajamian.
We took Der Ghevond’s list, and made an Anki flashcard deck. Anki is a flashcard review application that uses spaced memorization techniques, based on the neuroscience of learning, to teach you new vocabulary in the most efficient and effective way. You can download the flashcard deck, import it into your Anki account, and get started learning these morphemes!

Download Anki here, or use the web app.

Download the flashcard deck: 200 Monosyllabic Words in Armenian and their Roots, Anki flashcard deck.

The flashcards will look like this, once you’ve got them uploaded into Anki:

Once you’ve memorized a bunch of these morphemes, go back to Fr. Ghevond’s PDF and test yourself. He has put up a bunch of words made up of the 200 morphemes you’ve just learned. See if you can figure out what the words mean!
Notes about the list and flashcards:
1. Words that are in bold are words by themselves in Armenian.
Ex: 157. պարզ – clear, simple
2. Words that are in regular print are parts of words, but not words by themselves.
Ex: 39. երթ – go, travel (this is not a lone word)
3. Words in English that are in “quotes” are directly related to that word
Ex: 172. սպան – murder, “-cide”
4. Words that are bold and then regular are words in which the word changes when connected to another word/syllable.
Ex: 165. սէր/սիր – love
Additional resources and information:

Jirair’s karasoonk

My father-in-law’s karasoonk / karasounk (40th day memorial service) was on Sunday. Suffice to say, it was super sad.

I’m really not the best person to write about the meaning behind the service, so I’ll just share out these two pieces of information about how and why Armenians pray for those who have passed away.

“It is a venerable tradition in the Armenian Church for families to request special requiem prayers on the 40th day and on subsequent anniversaries of the death of their loved ones. If the requiem services takes place on a Sunday, following the Divine Liturgy, the priest mentions the names of the deceased during the prayers of the Divine Liturgy.

According to the teachings of the Armenian Church, those who have died enter into a period of rest while awaiting our Lord’s glorious second coming at the end of time. But while separated from the Christian community, the souls that are at rest continue to be counted among the faithful, who “rest in the shadow of the church.” We therefore pray for them, as we pray for all of our earthly cares. Essentially, our prayer for the dead is that they rest in peace, that the Lord forgive them all of their sins and find them worthy of eternal life in the Father’s kingdom when Christ comes again.

Praying for the dead is a proclamation of our faith in Christ’s second coming, and our hope in the resurrection of the dead. When the Armenian Church prays regularly for the dead, we are reminded that this life is transient, and we are filled with hope because we believe that death is too.”

—excerpted from The Divine Liturgy of the Armenian Church (Fr. Daniel Findikyan, editor)

And this article,

Why do we pray for the dead?

why do we pray for the dead, ilooys
https://www.ilooys.com/single-post/2017/01/07/Why-do-we-pray-for-the-dead-1?fbclid=IwAR2hfGcOP3o1go9gkGmEG1TGTxbhi3Hbeg5iL0OxeS27x9Rk0xnqbZMB9kw

Busy weekend, lots of cooking

Our Saturday was really busy, with lots of cooking ahead of Jirair’s karasoonk (40th day memorial service) on Sunday.

It was good to get more practice with these Armenian recipes, and there are definitely future posts in the works.

We made:
Five 9×13 trays of spinach boereg
Two batches of imrig helva (which turned out pretty well this time!)
Big pot of gatnabour
About 90 tahini cookies
A ton of choereg, with two different recipes
Vospov kheyma

We also picked parsley leaves off stems for a few hours, and cut bags and bags of pita bread.  Some pictures of the mess below.

 

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Western Armenian alphabet worksheets

(This is my most popular post. Hello! Welcome! I’m Kalyn, an ABC (“Armenian by choice”) wife and mother. I’ve put together and created a bunch of resources on learning Western Armenian, that I’m now sharing on this site. There are also church, parenting, genealogy, and recipe posts randomly throughout. Check out “About,” and “Blog Posts” for more.)

These Alphabet worksheets are something I put together when I was first learning the alphabet. They’re meant to go along with this series of lessons:

They’re not in alphabetical order, but instead in the order I recommend you learn the letters – they build off of each other, starting with shapes you already know.

Here’s the excel spreadsheet I used to create the worksheets. It contains a whole bunch of miscellaneous information about the letters in the Western Armenian alphabet, and some tips/tricks that helped me remember each particular letter. Those might not be the same tips and tricks that help you though, so if you know how to do a mail merge, you can edit fields in the spreadsheet, and create your own 🙂

alphabet worksheets, preview 4

If you prefer to study the letters in alphabetical order, you can use this version: Alphabet sheets, alphabetical

Learning Western Armenian with Anki flashcards

A few summers ago, I picked up the book “Fluent forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it” by Gabriel Wyner, and it changed everything I thought I knew about language-learning. Highly recommend.
One of the top things I learned from the book was about the neuroscience behind memorization, particularly as it applies to learning vocabulary. Spaced repetition, reviewing flashcards more or less often based on how well you know them, is the way to do it. And the application Fluent Forever recommends, which I’ve been using, is called Anki.
Anki is a web-based, desktop, and mobile application. You can upload flashcard decks, and Anki’s algorithm will show you flashcards at different rates, depending on how well you know the word.  If you know “կադ” means milk, it’ll only show you that flashcard periodically just so you don’t forget it.  If “հաց” (bread) keeps tripping you up, it’ll show you that word every day until you really really know it.
Vartan and I have built a number of flashcard decks for the Anki system to help learn Western Armenian, and we’ll be uploading them to this site and to Anki for anyone who wants to use them 🙂

The best way to learn the Western Armenian alphabet

 
It took me FOREVER to learn the Armenian alphabet. I kept wanting to learn things I could put into practice right away, and brute memorization of shapes and letters felt super intimidating. Having not grown up Armenian, I was starting from ZERO on the alphabet. Didn’t even know the alphabet song. I tried a lot of different strategies and flashcards before it finally “clicked”.
 
What finally helped was a series of lessons I discovered through St. Nersess’ e-learning module. 

The lessons are structured so that you’re not learning the alphabet in alphabetical order, but from most to least familiar. First, you learn the letters that look similar to letters in the English alphabet. Then you build from there with “lookalikes” and “soundalikes.” There are still a few oddball letters that you might just have to memorize, but this strategy dramatically reduces that number.
 
The other thing I really appreciated about the St. Nersess’ PowerPoints is that it gets right to the point of learning the alphabet – reading! I confess, I still don’t know all the names of all the letters, or the numbers they stand for if you’re using them numerically… I still don’t know the alphabet song. But, proudly, I can now muddle my way through paragraphs of text and read Western Armenian out loud.
 
If you ARE interested in learning more about the letters — how to pronounce them, words that start with that letter, how to write the cursive, etc… you are welcome to use these Alphabet worksheets that I created.  They’re in the same order as you learn the letters in the St. Nersess lessons, so you can use them as you go along.

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As of 3/18/2024 (and probably way earlier), this link and e-learning thing doesn’t appear to be public anymore. A while back, with permission, I started a series of posts to accompany the St. Nersess Powerpoint lessons, referenced below. I am now updating them to include the original Powerpoints as well. Please see: