“The contemporaries of their ancient ancestors were the Hittites, Phoenicians, Phrygians, Lydians, Chaldeans, and Medians. All those nations have long disappeared, but the Armenians still exist.
Traveling around Armenia, I was increasingly understanding that my trip essentially was a study of a centuries-old drama and of a sequence of disasters and rebirth, which reminds of the Biblical legend about Noah’s Ark that came to rest on Mount Ararat.
Armenians have never perceived history as a complex of distant events lost in the current of changes. They possess continuous millennia-old cultural memory. The originality of that nation survived the heyday and collapse of every single empire starting from Babylon to the USSR.”
Frank Viviano
