It has been observed: a thousand years ago, when our capital cities were destroyed, when our country’s nobility was beheaded, sovereignty took refuge in the Armenian peasant’s home. That is, the Armenian’s, the Armenian peasant’s home, from the mountains of Lori to Sasun and the Taurus, became the cradle of our ancient glories and future hope. That home sang epics of its kings and heroes, those who had existed and those who had not, and awaited the birth of the son who would come and fill our silent Armenian world with cries of joy and victory, who would resemble the heroes and kings of our unforgotten times, but still more would embody our people’s ideal of hero and king.
Through the little valley of the Armenian land, our long ages have led many princes, victorious or chained. Many, many of them have deserved glory and a crown. Yet none can turn his passage through the people’s feeling into a procession of delight and joy, love and tenderness, hope and confidence, as can our ideal of king and hero, our unreal, our epic figure, our David of Sasun. For centuries upon centuries, until today and tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow, no one can draw from our young and old the sorrow and regret, the tear and smile reserved only for David, the man of Sasun, the unreal, the heroic, our whole people’s ideal.
General Andranik, Andranik Ozanian, is as legendary, heroic and epic to us as David is real. The arena of the whole people’s love turns the march of these two real and epic heroes into a crowned procession, clothes its Andranik in its ideal of the human being and the soldier. And its Andranik, the people’s Andranik, takes the image of the ideal human being upon himself exactly as David of Sasun puts on the arms and armour of Mher of Sasun.
As the long-awaited son of our Armenian home, Andranik clothed himself, his people clothed him, in the arms and armour of their epic. And Andranik’s verified reality did nothing to impair his legendary stature. The certainty of the years of his death and birth, his battles, failures and birthplace, his human vulnerability, do not prevent us from seeing him again as one who came from the epic and returned to song, epic and legend. For our heroic epic and Andranik himself are born of the same time, and it is unknown which revived the other. Did the heroic struggle of Zeytun, Aghbyur Serob, Mother Sose, Gevorg Chavush, Andranik himself, bring forth our epic? On the life-giving breath of those pashas of mine in peasant leather shoes, did our epic emerge from our rural Armenian home? Or did the epic awaken them and raise them to princely stature in our Armenian world?
They were travellers on one and the same road, Andranik and the epic. Complementing one another, teaching one another, learning from one another, correcting, affirming and strengthening one another, they were to come, and their road was endless. In their Armenian distances they had multitudes waiting: those multitudes are us. They had multitudes of multitudes: those are our descendants’ descendants. And the road of those eternal travellers will end when no multitudes wait in their distances any longer.
And so glory to us who call them, who await them, who guarantee their immortality and endlessness; and glory to them, glory to Andranik himself, who did not leave the Armenian past of his sons and their sons without memory, without a past. He brings grandeur to our image, honesty and nobility to our temper, an eagle’s soaring to our conduct as warriors. A thousand glories to him.
20 February 2000.