The fragments of history that have reached us point to the same qualities of the Armenian character that stand before our eyes today in all their sounds and colours.
The Armenian of Xenophon’s time and the Armenian of today are the same person; our character has not changed, our nature has not changed. And we are a beautiful people. We were beautiful in Xenophon’s time; we are beautiful today. History has tormented and robbed us, but still we have remained an optimistic people, a people striving towards great politics, towards the LIGHT.
Meruzhan Ter-Gulanyan and I were on the shore of Lake Saghamo. From a distance we saw a girl, perhaps six or seven, beside the wall of an old ruined building, dressed in her finest clothes, in a rainbow-coloured skirt, clapping and turning around herself. From the rhythms we understood that it was a foreign dance. Then she made all her graceful gestures, and the dance became Armenian. She was dancing for herself. Then we saw: no, she had a spectator, a little goat standing on a rock. A calf raised its head once, turned its ears towards the girl, and then… the child darted away. Her sister, two years older, in a peasant manner, guarding Armenian morality, had wagged a finger after her: you must not be so coquettish, people can see, it is shameful… The child ran away.
To me this is the symbol of beauty. The child had put on her finest clothes for no one; on her nonexistent stage she saw herself in a great hall, observing the rules of the dance, not evading them. That dance was her striving towards light, song, great civilisation, the great world; she herself was that striving. This is my people, my people’s independent, self-sufficient beauty, conduct that is the same in solitude and among others.
In the mountains of Lori we met a man born in the first year of the century; he was over eighty. The conversation concerned things far from me and books, certainly not Shakespeare. Suddenly the man stood up and left, reciting Tumanyan. He was there and not there, in the mountains by the sheep and at the same time in the world of poetry, having his own conversation with the universe. We have always been that, and it is imperishable, cannot be broken or crushed; we do not lose it for a moment. We are unique.
We live in the world of our imaginings: our death, life, day, love, infatuations, everything takes place in that world. That child at Saghamo was in the world of her imaginings; that old man in the Lori mountains was in his, in the world of poetry.
…I would wish all the inhabitants of the Armenian land a life in houses of their own with gardens, free, secure, in the procession of the world’s peoples, with the confidence of a sovereign person. For we have survived and exist not only because the enemy misjudged us, but also through our confidence in living in the world.
Nothing in our people’s fate has been the result of one individual’s error, so that we should turn in accusation towards that individual, towards yesterday or today, and curse. What happened was what was to happen. What comes will come as it will: we shall endure, we shall always want a homeland, we shall always have a homeland. And the enemy will give us a homeland, and the enemy will cherish the eternity of our homeland; otherwise we will become an explosive on his path, a bomb that cannot promise not to explode one day. And in the enemy’s expectations too we exist as the Armenian and as the song of the Armenian.