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Armenian Kars and Ani

Quick Overview

From early antiquity, the Armenian people developed a rich and distinctive culture on the great highland plateau extending from eastern Asia Minor to the Caucasus. On that crossroad, they interacted on many levels with civilizations of the Orient and Occident. Armenian Kars and Ani represents a departure from the preceding volumes in this series which have focused on the historic Western Armenian provinces, cities, and communities that were encompassed in the Ottoman Empire. In modern history, Kars and Ani were very much a part of Eastern or Russian Armenia, and, even after the Turkish border was pushed eastward again in the aftermath of World War I, the Russian and Caucasian influences in the region remained manifest in its urban planning and architecture and in its music, cuisine, and other forms of popular culture. Historically, Ani, lying along the right bank of the Akhurian (Arpachai) River in the great plain of Shirak, outshone Kars (Vanand) as the medieval Bagratuni/Bagratid kingdom’s last illustrious capital city, with its great walls and grand palaces and its fabled thousand and one churches. But Kars preceded Ani as the Bagratuni capital and, what was more, continued to exist as a regional administrative center long after the decline and ultimate abandonment of Ani. Hence, while the histories of the two neighboring Armenian cities are linked, they are also quite distinct. The UCLA conference series, “Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces,” is organized by the Holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History with the purpose of exploring and illuminating the historical, political, cultural, religious, social, and economic legacies of a people rooted for millennia on the Armenian highland. Armenian Kars and Ani is the tenth of the conference proceedings to be published. Scholars from various disciplines present the history and culture of the region across the centuries until its de-Armenianization between 1918 and 1921. Other volumes in this series include Armenian Van/Vaspurakan; Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush; Tsopk/Kharpert; Karin/Erzerum; Sebastia/Sivas and Lesser Armenia; Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa; Cilicia; Pontus—Trebizond-Black Sea Communities; and Constantinople.

author

Richard G. Hovannisian

Richard G. Hovannisian (1932-2023) was past holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. A native of California, he received his B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. in history from UCLA. A member of the UCLA faculty since the 1960s, he organized both the undergraduate and graduate programs in Armenian history and served as the Associate Director of UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies from 1978 to 1995. Professor Hovannisian is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received many honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and advancement of Armenian studies. He is a founder and six-time president of the Society for Armenian Studies and has published thirty books and numerous scholarly articles, including 5 volumes on the Armenian Genocide and 15 volumes by Mazda Publishers on historic Armenian cities and provinces.

List of Maps and Illustrations viii

Contributors xiii

Preface xix

CHAPTER 1: The Legacy of Kars and Ani
Richard G. Hovannisian 1

CHAPTER 2: The Historical Geography of Ani and Kars
Robert H. Hewsen 29

CHAPTER 3: The Emergence of the Bagratuni Kingdoms of Kars and Ani
Tim Greenwood 43

CHAPTER 4: Medieval Chroniclers of Ani: Hovhannes, Samvel, and Mkhitar
Robert W. Thomson 65

CHAPTER 5: Vardan Anetsi’s Poem on the Divine Chariot and the Four Living Creatures, Tenth-Eleventh Centuries
Theo Maarten van Lint 81

CHAPTER 6: The Architect Trdat: From the Great Church at Ani to the Great Church at Constantinople
Christina Maranci 101

CHAPTER 7: Encircled by Time:The Church of the Savior
Diane Favio 127

CHAPTER 8: Ani after Ani, Eleventh to Seventeenth Century
Claude Mutafian 155

CHAPTER 9: Trade, Administration, and Cities on the Plateau of Kars and Ani, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Century
Tom Sinclair 171

CHAPTER 10: Kars in the Russo-Turkish Wars of the Nineteenth Century
Christopher J. Walker 207

CHAPTER 11: The Kars Oblast’, 1878-1918
Ashot A. Melkonyan 223

CHAPTER 12: Kars in the Armenian Liberation Movement
Rubina Peroomian 245

CHAPTER 13: The Contest for Kars, 1914-1921
Richard G. Hovannisian 273

CHAPTER 14: Charents: Mourning the Loss of Kars
Vartan Matiossian 319

CHAPTER 15: G.I. Gurdjieff’s Spiritual Quest in Kars and Ani
David Stephen Calonne 349

CHAPTER 16: The Armenian Molokans of Karakala
Joyce Keosababian Bivin 367

CHAPTER 17: Kars-Ardahan and Soviet Armenian Irredentism, 1945-1946
Robert O. Krikorian 393

Index 411

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