Categories: CulturePeople

Armenians, People Able to Maintain Respect for the Book – Rasul Gamzatov

“Armenians are a people who know how to preserve and pass on from generation to generation the holy respect for the handwritten book for centuries, and sometimes with blood.

Usually, everyone protects their land. We protect every inch of our land, the house in which we grew up, and sacredly keep the memory of our ancestors. But not all nations have carried a handwritten book through history.

And this is a huge indicator of culture and strong evidence of high love for one’s origins… I visited the grave of Mashtots in Oshakan. 1500 years ago, the glorious Armenian warrior Mesrop Mashtots came up with the idea that writing is a powerful weapon, and he thus created the Armenian alphabet…

I thought bitterly about Dagestan, which has existed for thousands of years without books and writing… We have had everything for books – passionate love, brave heroes, tragedies, harsh nature – but their product, a book, hasn’t come into existence…

I have seen the tremendous respect of a whole nation for its books. I have seen many museums in my lifetime! But only three places in the world collected the most valuable of all the values of mankind – handwritten books. I am talking about the depositaries of Iran, the Vatican, and Armenia.”

Rasul Gamzatov

Vigen Avetisyan

Recent Posts

Abandoned by an Ally: The French Armenian Legion in Cilicia and the Road to the Smyrna Catastrophe

How a promise made to genocide survivors was traded away for peace with Ankara —…

4 days ago

The Vilgort Cup: A Silver Masterpiece of Cilician Armenia (c. 1150–1159 A.D.)

A Fragment That Traveled Across Continents The gilt-silver medallion shown above — two richly dressed…

6 days ago

Hannibal and Artaxias the Great: The Carthaginian General Who Helped Build the “Armenian Carthage”

Few episodes in ancient Armenian history capture the imagination quite like the tradition that Hannibal…

2 weeks ago

The Priestess of the Kingdom of Van: A 9th-Century BC Bronze Figurine in the British Museum

Five angles of one small bronze figure — and what emerges is not an abstract…

3 weeks ago

The Winged Sun and the Armenian Tiara: Royal Symbolism of the Orontid (Yervanduni) Kingdom of Commagene, 163 BC – 72 AD

Introduction Among the successor states that emerged from the fragmentation of the Achaemenid-derived Orontid (Armenian:…

3 weeks ago

A Bronze Age Vessel from Gardman: Solar Symbolism, the Sun-Cross, and the Sacred Landscape of Ancient Armenia

Article based on the explanations and interpretive observations of Angela Terian, with additional archaeological and…

3 weeks ago