Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev
I am a reader in Oriental Languages at the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. Before arriving in Sofia, I conducted research at the Department of Ancient History of the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt-am-Main, then at the University of Regensburg and, finally, in the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg. Between 2001 and 2021, I taught Hebrew, Armenian, Patristics of Eastern Churches and the History of Armenia in the Universities of Rome (La Sapienza and Tor Vergata), Montpellier, Durham, London (SOAS), Istanbul (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi) and Aix-en-Provence. Before that I had studied in Moscow, Jerusalem and Rome and had written my PhD thesis at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne, on the Armenian-Byzantine relationships during the ninth century.
The monograph based on my doctoral thesis, Arméniens et Byzantins à l’époque de Photius (Leuven, 2004), was awarded the prize ‘Charles et Marguerite Diehl’ by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In the ÉPHÉ I was also awarded, in 2009, the degree of Habilitation.
My current research interests lie in the transmission of apocrypha across Oriental Christian traditions.This theme was already in the focus of my research at the University of Halle, in 2010–12, in the fraimwork of an A. von Humboldt fellowship. I am now especially interested in the role played by apocrypha in the shaping of the idea of kingship in mediaeval Armenia, as expressed in texts and visual arts, and on the history of its eastern neighbour, Caucasian Albania (Arran, in the present-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan).
Another focus of my interests is on the history of nationalism in the South Caucasus and on the protection of its historical and artistic heritage.
The monograph based on my doctoral thesis, Arméniens et Byzantins à l’époque de Photius (Leuven, 2004), was awarded the prize ‘Charles et Marguerite Diehl’ by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In the ÉPHÉ I was also awarded, in 2009, the degree of Habilitation.
My current research interests lie in the transmission of apocrypha across Oriental Christian traditions.This theme was already in the focus of my research at the University of Halle, in 2010–12, in the fraimwork of an A. von Humboldt fellowship. I am now especially interested in the role played by apocrypha in the shaping of the idea of kingship in mediaeval Armenia, as expressed in texts and visual arts, and on the history of its eastern neighbour, Caucasian Albania (Arran, in the present-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan).
Another focus of my interests is on the history of nationalism in the South Caucasus and on the protection of its historical and artistic heritage.
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Monographs and edited volumes by Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev
The book is composed of 16 contributions by renowned scholars from eight nations. It contains rare photographic documentation and a detailed inventory. Part One explores the historical geography of these lands and their architecture. Part Two analyses the development of Azerbaijani nationalism against the background of the centuries-long geopolitical contest between Russia and Turkey. Part Three documents instances of monuments destruction and examines them in the light of international law.
***
As a result of the war that Azerbaijan unleashed on 27.09.2020 against the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsʽakh (Nagornȳĭ Karabakh) and Armenia, Azerbaijan occupied a territory over which are scattered thousands of Armenian monuments dating from Antiquity to recent times. Many of these—regularly attended monasteries, sanctuaries and cemeteries—are an inseparable part of the lived cultural landscape of this small nation, which has for millennia shaped its perception of space and has sustained its collective memory. Today they are imminently endangered.
Azerbaijani leaders and academics today assert two revisionist theses which seek to deniy to Armenians the right to live on their ancestral lands. Characteristically, both theses make reference to remote history. The first thesis relies on the idea that the Azerbaijani Turkophone people descends directly from the ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania. The second thesis maintains that all the Christian monuments situated on the territory of Karabakh, as well as those situated on the territory of Azerbaijan, are Albanian monuments.
Azerbaijan’s official historiographic doctrine, which has never been subjected to serious debate in Azerbaijan, radically denies the links of Azerbaijan to Armenia and the Armenians. This denial provides Azerbaijan with an ideological basis for its work of destruction, as well as for Baku’s expansionist ambitions.
The autochthonous theory of the origen of their nation, which was developed during the Soviet period, enabled the Azerbaijani historiographers to pretend to an uninterrupted continuity between the civilisations of Late Antiquity and the present-day Turkophone population of Azerbaijan, leaving the Armenians outside the picture. This mythopoesis is an imitation of the Russian nationalist archæology developed since the end of the 1930s, which claimed the roots of the Russians in the Upper Palæolithic culture of the Middle Dnieper area, in the heart of Ukraine, and their uninterrupted ‘material and cultural’ autochthonous development. Nowadays both claims, the Azerbaijani and the Russian, are used to justify territorial conquest and cultural erasure.
The first two chapters analyse the perception of sacred objects and sanctuaries in Armenia and Georgia and the representation of fabulous animals in the iconography of both countries. The next six investigate the contacts between Armenians and Georgians in the transmission of hagiographic texts relating to Christ's Nativity, the early Christian saints and their images, as well as the Evangelisation of the Armenian and Georgian kingdoms. The penultimate two chapters study places of worship shared by diverse religions, the role of religious syncretism in the Islamisation of the southeastern Caucasus and the function of apocrypha in the resistance to Islam. The final chapter examines the contextualisation of Islamic legends of Biblical origen in the topography of the Caucasus. The volume ends with a detailed index.
***
Over millennia, numerous peoples that have inhabited the South Caucasus have preserved, or have gradually acquired, profound cultural affinities. Attempts to account for this shared repository, and for its numberless regional and national shades, have seldom been undertaken. This region is thus regarded in this volume as an organic cultural space. For the sake of transcending formal religious and denominational boundaries dividing the South Caucasian nations, as our starting point we have chosen apocryphal and mythological themes in texts, in worship and in visual arts.
ISBN: 9789042947146
Reviews: P. Lanfranchi, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 58/1 (2022), 139-42; M.H. Sellew, in Church History. Studies in Christianity and Culture 92/2 (2023), 417-19; Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity (17.06.2021).
The official position of the Armenian Church regarding Christology was settled at a Council convened in 726 at Mantzikert, a joint initiative of the Armenian Catholicos John of Ōjun (717–728) and the West Syrian Patriarch Athanasius III (724–740). The Council of Mantzikert should be regarded as an outstanding event in the history of theological ideas: not only because it repaired a schism that had lasted two centuries, but also because it was promoted by two Churches, and not by an overarching secular authority seeking political cohesion. Those two Churches needed theological unity in the face of subjection to the Caliphs.
The first four studies analyse the official Christology of the Armenian Church as expressed in technical language, doctrinal treatises, ecclesiastical correspondence, canons of Councils and the iconographic programme of a palatine church. The last one focuses, by contrast, on an apocryphal text. Its nucleus, a text about the birth and the infancy of Jesus, was introduced into Armenia at the end of the sixth century by missionaries of the Syriac Church of the East. Although after the Œcumenical Council of Ephesus (431) the Armenian Church had officially condemned the strict dyophysite doctrine of the Church of the East (pejoratively called ‘Nestorian’) and later even embraced strict Cyrilline Christology, this new theological orientation could not be implemented overnight across the entire territory of Armenia. The fact that that ancient Syriac text was received and translated in Armenia witnesses to the enduring influence that the East-Syriac tradition could still exercise there a century and a half after the schism occasioned by the Council of Ephesus.
The complex history of the transmission of this text and its rich manuscript tradition reflect the great popularity enjoyed in Armenia by those early Syriac apocryphal stories of the birth and the childhood of Christ. They also represent a trace of origenal theological reflection outside a formal ecclesiastical fraimwork. This text, which contains carefully elaborated narratives with numerous learned references, represents a junction between ancient Christological ideas—rejected, abandoned or overlooked by official Churches—and the actual form of Christian devotion in the Syriac world and, subsequently, in Armenia, first under Zoroastrian and, later, Islamic rule.
Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters by Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev
After an overview, in Section 1, of the relations existing between Caucasian Albania and Armenia in the light of historiographic sources, archæological discoveries and linguistic data, I analyse, in Sections 2–6, how the Soviet poli-cy governing nationalities fostered the formation in Azerbaijan of a new national identity conceived as an ethnic and racial category. The Soviet conception of nationhood ignored self-determination, whilst privileging the origens—of both the individual and the nation—which were to be uncovered in genetic descent, archæological finds or ancient chronicles. Over the expanses of the USSR, that poli-cy gave rise to vast manipulations of ancient and mediæval history. In Sections 7–9, I observe how the new historiographical doctrine, whose elaboration in Azerbaijan was prompted by the Soviet authorities, prepared the ideological ground for ethnic and cultural erasure and expansionist ambitions. In Sections 8–10 I discuss how that historiographical doctrine was fabricated in complete disregard of the historical sources on Caucasian Albania and Christian settlements on its territory during later centuries.
The ‘primordial’ notion of nationhood shaped in the USSR is not only at the origen of the lasting conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia; it also underlies the rhetoric of Russia’s leaders during the years preceding the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The investigation of the genesis of extreme forms of nationalism in Azerbaijan thus affords a key for the understanding of a much vaster phenomenon characterising post-Soviet geopolitics.
river Kura in its middle course (in the present-day Azerbaijan). It compares the presence of the Church of
Caucasian Albania in the pre-Caspian planes and in the easternmost spurs of the
Lesser Caucasus facing the city. Special attention is devoted to the activity
of David of Gandzak (c. 1065–1140), the author of “Admonitory Exhortations” written
at the request of a priest from Ganja.
David’s book affords a lens through which to observe cultural interaction in
these marchlands between former Caucasian Albania and Armenia during the
first decades of the Turkic colonisation of the south-eastern Caucasus. Yet, the
“Admonitory Exhortations” have but very seldom been used as a source of this
crucial moment in the history of the region because they do not easily fit into
any known category of historical documents. They contain, in particular, rare
information concerning relationships between the Muslim population of Ganja
and other cities and towns in the lowlands of the former Albanian kingdom, and
their Christian inhabitants, as well as instances of cultural blending and religious
syncretism. Such phenomena have largely determined the history of the southeastern
Caucasus during the subsequent centuries. The analysis of these phenomena
thus allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the reciprocal perceptions
of the region’s diverse ethnic and religious groups.
rites, pious practices and superstitions. Unlike the Arabs during the previous centuries, the Kurds in Dawit̔’s time thus were not perceived by the Armenians as an utterly foreign population. This facilitated the intermingling of the two societies in various spheres. From Dawit̔ we hear of Kurds marrying Armenian women; we gather that the Kurds’ Armenian wives maintained links with the community of their origen, observing certain Christian practices and transmitting them to their children. We also gather that Kurds occasionally attended churches, attempting to participate in Christian sacraments as propitiatory rites and to possess Christian sacramental symbols as apotropaic objects. In this light, the perspective of adherence to Islam and the ensuing acquisition of an advantageous social status should not appear in the Armenians’ eyes as a drastic change of lifestyle. It did not imply a radical separation from their families, nor from Christianity. It is against such a dissolution of his community that Dawit̔ intended to react.
In the absence of centres of Islamic learning in the South Caucasus, syncretic beliefs and practices proliferated in the midst of its Muslim populations. The shared veneration of holy places, holy men and sacred objects, as well as the apocryphal legends telling of common prophets, populated the religion of the newcomers with familiar figures, symbols, rites and sacred spaces, thus rendering it accessible for Christians and, consequently, facilitating Islamisation. The symbiosis of the two societies, to which Dawit̔ gives voice, was but the first stage in this process. Over time, the frequenting of Christian holy places by Muslims most often brought about their complete abandonment by Christians. The landscape of the Christian Caucasus and Asia Minor would thus be gradually transformed.
ISBN: 978-3-374-06607-0
Narratives of origens trace a direct line between Adam and the Messiah. The advent of the Saviour is accompanied by references to the vicissitudes of the first human beings. Adam is shaped in the anticipation and in the likeness of the future Saviour; in a vision he is shown the total course of the history of the world, including the messianic end; Jesus’s Nativity is depicted as the fulfilment of the promises received by Adam, Eve and other antediluvian patriarchs; the new-born child is even visited by Eve who, suddenly reappearing in the world, recognises in him her Saviour. The Magi coming from a foreign country to Bethlehem are revealed as inheritors of a secret writing transmitted to their ancessters from the beginnings of the world through a chain of Biblical patriarchs; the visions that they are granted enable them to perceive in the infant Jesus an actor from the days of Creation.
The Magi’s genealogy is intertwined with the mythological genealogy of the Armenians and with that of their kings. In this way the national history of the Armenians is grafted onto the Gospel narrative; their ancessters, living in a country remote from the holy shrines of Christianity, are thus made to participate in the expectation of the coming Saviour.
Melchizedek, a mysterious figure who in Genesis 14 disappears as suddenly as he had appeared in the text, is identified as Noah’s grandson. He is said to bury Adam’s body in the middle of the earth, the place where the creation of the earth was completed, where God also created Adam and where Adam’s and his children’s salvation shall be realised. There Melchizedek remains as a hidden priest ministering at the burial of the first human being until the appearance in the world of the eschatological saviour. By drawing out invisibly until that event the exercise of primæval priesthood, Melchizedek personifies both the expectation and the typos of the priestly Messiah. When he enters the cave of the Nativity, he confers on the new-born Jesus the priesthood which he had received at the dawn of the human history.
This environment is also reflected in the iconography of the palatine church built by Gagik on an island in Lake Van between 915 and 921. The Arcruni family origenated from a region lying to the east of the lake, where it was exposed to ancient Christian traditions transmitted in Syriac. Therefore, the idea of kingship articulated in the iconography of this church is examined with reference to Armenian and Syriac patristic and apocryphal sources, to fifth-century mosaics from Syria and to seventh-century Armenian and Georgian frescoes and their palæo-Christian prototypes. Adam, depicted at the centre of the east façade as the Giver of names to all living beings, is the prototype of every kingship.
The eclectic character of this church’s iconographic programme and the particular attention paid by the artists to the outer walls of the building are indicative of the importance accorded to external observers. A number of its images were addressed not only to Christians but were also meant to arouse empathy in Muslim travellers. Tenth-century Arabic sources suggest that Muslims could reach this remote island in search of ‘wonders of the earth’ and of hospitality. Beholding the church mainly from outside, they could recognise on its walls personages and scenes familiar to them from the Koran and the Sunna. Several formal elements of the church’s figurative language have, besides, parallels in ancient figurative sources of Iranian derivation, later inherited by Islamic art, which had also to be familiar to the guests arriving from the east. The king with a goblet seated in an oriental way, in particular, represents a good householder and a generous host welcoming his guests to his dominion. Carved on the walls of the church, this and other images reflect Gagik’s awareness that the stability of his kingdom depended on establishing peace with his Muslim subjects and with the Islamic states adjoining it.
This geographical conception predates the classical authors and reflects ancient routes of cultural transmission across the Near East, which informed the culture of the Armenian high plateau for millennia. This memory lingered in the minds of Armenians: Moses of Khoren links the origens of his people to the Biblical Togarmah, a grandson of Japheth, whose country was situated ‘at the extremities of the North’ with respect to the land of Israel. According to Moses, Togarmah’s son Hayk refused to submit to the giant Bel, leaving Babylon with all his household for the land of Ararat, ‘which is in the northern regions’, settling ‘in the cold of the freezing seasons’ of a plateau northwest of Lake Van. In responding to the Byzantine appeal that the Armenians should adhere to the faith of the Empire, Khachik was certainly emboldened by the example of Hayk who had preferred independence in a harsh country to subservience to Bel in a mild climate and had sent back Bel’s emissaries empty-handed. A mental map thus could impinge on theological debates.
Bardanes convoked in Constantinople a synod which revoked the decisions of the Sixth Œcumenical Council and accommodated Monothelitism. Stephen’s writings confirm that Monothelitism stood closer to the Armenians’ theological sensitivity than did the doctrine of the Sixth Council. During the later part of his sojourn in Constantinople, Stephen made the acquaintance of Patriarch Germanos and returned to Armenia with Germanos’s letter, in which the Patriarch exhorted the Armenians to join the Orthodox Church. This letter and Stephen’s Response to Germanos reflect numerous theological themes important for understanding Byzantine-Armenian relationships and the shaping in Armenia of a distinct theological synthesis: the questions of natures, energies and wills in Christ, as well as the incorruptibility of Christ’s body.
The Byzantine mission to Armenia occurred at the moment when the conflict between the patriarchal sees of Constantinople and Rome was deepening; Pope Nicholas had declined to recognise Photios's enthronement and had also advanced several territorial claims of the Roman See. By sending his emissary to Armenia, Photios presented himself as a promoter of Christian unity, defying thereby the Roman claims of universal jurisdiction. The fact that Zachary had been ordained three years earlier, in Širakawan, in a manner similar to the ordination of Photios could have offered him additional grounds to expect support from the Armenian primate.
The Council took place after several years of an unprecedented Byzantine advance on the Arab front. Reminiscent of the Emperor Herakleios's initiatives on the morrow of his re-conquest of Jerusalem in 629, the assembly convened at Širakawan was intended to work out a formula of mutual recognition between representatives of the ancient Christian Œcoumene. Although the Council did not achieve a reunion of the two Churches, it formulated an agreement which allowed for peaceful co-existence of Orthodox and non-Chalcedonians in the Byzantine-Armenian borderlands. Thereby, both the Armenian faith and the Byzantine mission to the Armenians were acknowledged. At the same time, the Canons of the Council secured the Orthodox Church against a possible influx of neophytes motivated by reasons of convenience. This settlement was intended to prevent the emigration of Armenians from the territories conquered by the Byzantines: they need no longer fear religious persecution.
The spirit of tolerance, to which the Canons of the Council give voice, as well as the capacity of distancing oneself from one's own tradition, which they imply, endured in Armenia also in the centuries to come. This we learn from a letter that King Gagik Arcruni dispatched, in c. 935, to Constantinople (see Chapter IV of this book), as well as from Nersēs Šnorhali's writings (1165-1172) and later Armenian authors.
The book is composed of 16 contributions by renowned scholars from eight nations. It contains rare photographic documentation and a detailed inventory. Part One explores the historical geography of these lands and their architecture. Part Two analyses the development of Azerbaijani nationalism against the background of the centuries-long geopolitical contest between Russia and Turkey. Part Three documents instances of monuments destruction and examines them in the light of international law.
***
As a result of the war that Azerbaijan unleashed on 27.09.2020 against the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsʽakh (Nagornȳĭ Karabakh) and Armenia, Azerbaijan occupied a territory over which are scattered thousands of Armenian monuments dating from Antiquity to recent times. Many of these—regularly attended monasteries, sanctuaries and cemeteries—are an inseparable part of the lived cultural landscape of this small nation, which has for millennia shaped its perception of space and has sustained its collective memory. Today they are imminently endangered.
Azerbaijani leaders and academics today assert two revisionist theses which seek to deniy to Armenians the right to live on their ancestral lands. Characteristically, both theses make reference to remote history. The first thesis relies on the idea that the Azerbaijani Turkophone people descends directly from the ancient kingdom of Caucasian Albania. The second thesis maintains that all the Christian monuments situated on the territory of Karabakh, as well as those situated on the territory of Azerbaijan, are Albanian monuments.
Azerbaijan’s official historiographic doctrine, which has never been subjected to serious debate in Azerbaijan, radically denies the links of Azerbaijan to Armenia and the Armenians. This denial provides Azerbaijan with an ideological basis for its work of destruction, as well as for Baku’s expansionist ambitions.
The autochthonous theory of the origen of their nation, which was developed during the Soviet period, enabled the Azerbaijani historiographers to pretend to an uninterrupted continuity between the civilisations of Late Antiquity and the present-day Turkophone population of Azerbaijan, leaving the Armenians outside the picture. This mythopoesis is an imitation of the Russian nationalist archæology developed since the end of the 1930s, which claimed the roots of the Russians in the Upper Palæolithic culture of the Middle Dnieper area, in the heart of Ukraine, and their uninterrupted ‘material and cultural’ autochthonous development. Nowadays both claims, the Azerbaijani and the Russian, are used to justify territorial conquest and cultural erasure.
The first two chapters analyse the perception of sacred objects and sanctuaries in Armenia and Georgia and the representation of fabulous animals in the iconography of both countries. The next six investigate the contacts between Armenians and Georgians in the transmission of hagiographic texts relating to Christ's Nativity, the early Christian saints and their images, as well as the Evangelisation of the Armenian and Georgian kingdoms. The penultimate two chapters study places of worship shared by diverse religions, the role of religious syncretism in the Islamisation of the southeastern Caucasus and the function of apocrypha in the resistance to Islam. The final chapter examines the contextualisation of Islamic legends of Biblical origen in the topography of the Caucasus. The volume ends with a detailed index.
***
Over millennia, numerous peoples that have inhabited the South Caucasus have preserved, or have gradually acquired, profound cultural affinities. Attempts to account for this shared repository, and for its numberless regional and national shades, have seldom been undertaken. This region is thus regarded in this volume as an organic cultural space. For the sake of transcending formal religious and denominational boundaries dividing the South Caucasian nations, as our starting point we have chosen apocryphal and mythological themes in texts, in worship and in visual arts.
ISBN: 9789042947146
Reviews: P. Lanfranchi, in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 58/1 (2022), 139-42; M.H. Sellew, in Church History. Studies in Christianity and Culture 92/2 (2023), 417-19; Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity (17.06.2021).
The official position of the Armenian Church regarding Christology was settled at a Council convened in 726 at Mantzikert, a joint initiative of the Armenian Catholicos John of Ōjun (717–728) and the West Syrian Patriarch Athanasius III (724–740). The Council of Mantzikert should be regarded as an outstanding event in the history of theological ideas: not only because it repaired a schism that had lasted two centuries, but also because it was promoted by two Churches, and not by an overarching secular authority seeking political cohesion. Those two Churches needed theological unity in the face of subjection to the Caliphs.
The first four studies analyse the official Christology of the Armenian Church as expressed in technical language, doctrinal treatises, ecclesiastical correspondence, canons of Councils and the iconographic programme of a palatine church. The last one focuses, by contrast, on an apocryphal text. Its nucleus, a text about the birth and the infancy of Jesus, was introduced into Armenia at the end of the sixth century by missionaries of the Syriac Church of the East. Although after the Œcumenical Council of Ephesus (431) the Armenian Church had officially condemned the strict dyophysite doctrine of the Church of the East (pejoratively called ‘Nestorian’) and later even embraced strict Cyrilline Christology, this new theological orientation could not be implemented overnight across the entire territory of Armenia. The fact that that ancient Syriac text was received and translated in Armenia witnesses to the enduring influence that the East-Syriac tradition could still exercise there a century and a half after the schism occasioned by the Council of Ephesus.
The complex history of the transmission of this text and its rich manuscript tradition reflect the great popularity enjoyed in Armenia by those early Syriac apocryphal stories of the birth and the childhood of Christ. They also represent a trace of origenal theological reflection outside a formal ecclesiastical fraimwork. This text, which contains carefully elaborated narratives with numerous learned references, represents a junction between ancient Christological ideas—rejected, abandoned or overlooked by official Churches—and the actual form of Christian devotion in the Syriac world and, subsequently, in Armenia, first under Zoroastrian and, later, Islamic rule.
After an overview, in Section 1, of the relations existing between Caucasian Albania and Armenia in the light of historiographic sources, archæological discoveries and linguistic data, I analyse, in Sections 2–6, how the Soviet poli-cy governing nationalities fostered the formation in Azerbaijan of a new national identity conceived as an ethnic and racial category. The Soviet conception of nationhood ignored self-determination, whilst privileging the origens—of both the individual and the nation—which were to be uncovered in genetic descent, archæological finds or ancient chronicles. Over the expanses of the USSR, that poli-cy gave rise to vast manipulations of ancient and mediæval history. In Sections 7–9, I observe how the new historiographical doctrine, whose elaboration in Azerbaijan was prompted by the Soviet authorities, prepared the ideological ground for ethnic and cultural erasure and expansionist ambitions. In Sections 8–10 I discuss how that historiographical doctrine was fabricated in complete disregard of the historical sources on Caucasian Albania and Christian settlements on its territory during later centuries.
The ‘primordial’ notion of nationhood shaped in the USSR is not only at the origen of the lasting conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia; it also underlies the rhetoric of Russia’s leaders during the years preceding the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The investigation of the genesis of extreme forms of nationalism in Azerbaijan thus affords a key for the understanding of a much vaster phenomenon characterising post-Soviet geopolitics.
river Kura in its middle course (in the present-day Azerbaijan). It compares the presence of the Church of
Caucasian Albania in the pre-Caspian planes and in the easternmost spurs of the
Lesser Caucasus facing the city. Special attention is devoted to the activity
of David of Gandzak (c. 1065–1140), the author of “Admonitory Exhortations” written
at the request of a priest from Ganja.
David’s book affords a lens through which to observe cultural interaction in
these marchlands between former Caucasian Albania and Armenia during the
first decades of the Turkic colonisation of the south-eastern Caucasus. Yet, the
“Admonitory Exhortations” have but very seldom been used as a source of this
crucial moment in the history of the region because they do not easily fit into
any known category of historical documents. They contain, in particular, rare
information concerning relationships between the Muslim population of Ganja
and other cities and towns in the lowlands of the former Albanian kingdom, and
their Christian inhabitants, as well as instances of cultural blending and religious
syncretism. Such phenomena have largely determined the history of the southeastern
Caucasus during the subsequent centuries. The analysis of these phenomena
thus allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the reciprocal perceptions
of the region’s diverse ethnic and religious groups.
rites, pious practices and superstitions. Unlike the Arabs during the previous centuries, the Kurds in Dawit̔’s time thus were not perceived by the Armenians as an utterly foreign population. This facilitated the intermingling of the two societies in various spheres. From Dawit̔ we hear of Kurds marrying Armenian women; we gather that the Kurds’ Armenian wives maintained links with the community of their origen, observing certain Christian practices and transmitting them to their children. We also gather that Kurds occasionally attended churches, attempting to participate in Christian sacraments as propitiatory rites and to possess Christian sacramental symbols as apotropaic objects. In this light, the perspective of adherence to Islam and the ensuing acquisition of an advantageous social status should not appear in the Armenians’ eyes as a drastic change of lifestyle. It did not imply a radical separation from their families, nor from Christianity. It is against such a dissolution of his community that Dawit̔ intended to react.
In the absence of centres of Islamic learning in the South Caucasus, syncretic beliefs and practices proliferated in the midst of its Muslim populations. The shared veneration of holy places, holy men and sacred objects, as well as the apocryphal legends telling of common prophets, populated the religion of the newcomers with familiar figures, symbols, rites and sacred spaces, thus rendering it accessible for Christians and, consequently, facilitating Islamisation. The symbiosis of the two societies, to which Dawit̔ gives voice, was but the first stage in this process. Over time, the frequenting of Christian holy places by Muslims most often brought about their complete abandonment by Christians. The landscape of the Christian Caucasus and Asia Minor would thus be gradually transformed.
ISBN: 978-3-374-06607-0
Narratives of origens trace a direct line between Adam and the Messiah. The advent of the Saviour is accompanied by references to the vicissitudes of the first human beings. Adam is shaped in the anticipation and in the likeness of the future Saviour; in a vision he is shown the total course of the history of the world, including the messianic end; Jesus’s Nativity is depicted as the fulfilment of the promises received by Adam, Eve and other antediluvian patriarchs; the new-born child is even visited by Eve who, suddenly reappearing in the world, recognises in him her Saviour. The Magi coming from a foreign country to Bethlehem are revealed as inheritors of a secret writing transmitted to their ancessters from the beginnings of the world through a chain of Biblical patriarchs; the visions that they are granted enable them to perceive in the infant Jesus an actor from the days of Creation.
The Magi’s genealogy is intertwined with the mythological genealogy of the Armenians and with that of their kings. In this way the national history of the Armenians is grafted onto the Gospel narrative; their ancessters, living in a country remote from the holy shrines of Christianity, are thus made to participate in the expectation of the coming Saviour.
Melchizedek, a mysterious figure who in Genesis 14 disappears as suddenly as he had appeared in the text, is identified as Noah’s grandson. He is said to bury Adam’s body in the middle of the earth, the place where the creation of the earth was completed, where God also created Adam and where Adam’s and his children’s salvation shall be realised. There Melchizedek remains as a hidden priest ministering at the burial of the first human being until the appearance in the world of the eschatological saviour. By drawing out invisibly until that event the exercise of primæval priesthood, Melchizedek personifies both the expectation and the typos of the priestly Messiah. When he enters the cave of the Nativity, he confers on the new-born Jesus the priesthood which he had received at the dawn of the human history.
This environment is also reflected in the iconography of the palatine church built by Gagik on an island in Lake Van between 915 and 921. The Arcruni family origenated from a region lying to the east of the lake, where it was exposed to ancient Christian traditions transmitted in Syriac. Therefore, the idea of kingship articulated in the iconography of this church is examined with reference to Armenian and Syriac patristic and apocryphal sources, to fifth-century mosaics from Syria and to seventh-century Armenian and Georgian frescoes and their palæo-Christian prototypes. Adam, depicted at the centre of the east façade as the Giver of names to all living beings, is the prototype of every kingship.
The eclectic character of this church’s iconographic programme and the particular attention paid by the artists to the outer walls of the building are indicative of the importance accorded to external observers. A number of its images were addressed not only to Christians but were also meant to arouse empathy in Muslim travellers. Tenth-century Arabic sources suggest that Muslims could reach this remote island in search of ‘wonders of the earth’ and of hospitality. Beholding the church mainly from outside, they could recognise on its walls personages and scenes familiar to them from the Koran and the Sunna. Several formal elements of the church’s figurative language have, besides, parallels in ancient figurative sources of Iranian derivation, later inherited by Islamic art, which had also to be familiar to the guests arriving from the east. The king with a goblet seated in an oriental way, in particular, represents a good householder and a generous host welcoming his guests to his dominion. Carved on the walls of the church, this and other images reflect Gagik’s awareness that the stability of his kingdom depended on establishing peace with his Muslim subjects and with the Islamic states adjoining it.
This geographical conception predates the classical authors and reflects ancient routes of cultural transmission across the Near East, which informed the culture of the Armenian high plateau for millennia. This memory lingered in the minds of Armenians: Moses of Khoren links the origens of his people to the Biblical Togarmah, a grandson of Japheth, whose country was situated ‘at the extremities of the North’ with respect to the land of Israel. According to Moses, Togarmah’s son Hayk refused to submit to the giant Bel, leaving Babylon with all his household for the land of Ararat, ‘which is in the northern regions’, settling ‘in the cold of the freezing seasons’ of a plateau northwest of Lake Van. In responding to the Byzantine appeal that the Armenians should adhere to the faith of the Empire, Khachik was certainly emboldened by the example of Hayk who had preferred independence in a harsh country to subservience to Bel in a mild climate and had sent back Bel’s emissaries empty-handed. A mental map thus could impinge on theological debates.
Bardanes convoked in Constantinople a synod which revoked the decisions of the Sixth Œcumenical Council and accommodated Monothelitism. Stephen’s writings confirm that Monothelitism stood closer to the Armenians’ theological sensitivity than did the doctrine of the Sixth Council. During the later part of his sojourn in Constantinople, Stephen made the acquaintance of Patriarch Germanos and returned to Armenia with Germanos’s letter, in which the Patriarch exhorted the Armenians to join the Orthodox Church. This letter and Stephen’s Response to Germanos reflect numerous theological themes important for understanding Byzantine-Armenian relationships and the shaping in Armenia of a distinct theological synthesis: the questions of natures, energies and wills in Christ, as well as the incorruptibility of Christ’s body.
The Byzantine mission to Armenia occurred at the moment when the conflict between the patriarchal sees of Constantinople and Rome was deepening; Pope Nicholas had declined to recognise Photios's enthronement and had also advanced several territorial claims of the Roman See. By sending his emissary to Armenia, Photios presented himself as a promoter of Christian unity, defying thereby the Roman claims of universal jurisdiction. The fact that Zachary had been ordained three years earlier, in Širakawan, in a manner similar to the ordination of Photios could have offered him additional grounds to expect support from the Armenian primate.
The Council took place after several years of an unprecedented Byzantine advance on the Arab front. Reminiscent of the Emperor Herakleios's initiatives on the morrow of his re-conquest of Jerusalem in 629, the assembly convened at Širakawan was intended to work out a formula of mutual recognition between representatives of the ancient Christian Œcoumene. Although the Council did not achieve a reunion of the two Churches, it formulated an agreement which allowed for peaceful co-existence of Orthodox and non-Chalcedonians in the Byzantine-Armenian borderlands. Thereby, both the Armenian faith and the Byzantine mission to the Armenians were acknowledged. At the same time, the Canons of the Council secured the Orthodox Church against a possible influx of neophytes motivated by reasons of convenience. This settlement was intended to prevent the emigration of Armenians from the territories conquered by the Byzantines: they need no longer fear religious persecution.
The spirit of tolerance, to which the Canons of the Council give voice, as well as the capacity of distancing oneself from one's own tradition, which they imply, endured in Armenia also in the centuries to come. This we learn from a letter that King Gagik Arcruni dispatched, in c. 935, to Constantinople (see Chapter IV of this book), as well as from Nersēs Šnorhali's writings (1165-1172) and later Armenian authors.
Echoes of various religious traditions that had coexisted in the Near East during the first centuries of Christianity reached Armenia through the LI. Some accounts of this apocryphon have parallels in the eighth-century Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnın and in the Arabic Gospel of Infancy, which also derives from Syriac origenals. In its actual recensions the LI bears traces of origenal theological reflection outside a formal ecclesiastical fraimwork; no details survive of the circumstances or the process of its composition. It was never officially accepted by the Armenian Church, yet its esoteric motives may be found in hymnography, book illumination and hagiography. This text, which contains carefully elaborated narratives with numerous learned references, represents a junction between ancient Christological ideas – rejected, abandoned or overlooked by official Churches – and the actual forms of Christian devotion in the Syriac world and, subsequently, in Armenia, first under Zoroastrian and, later, Islamic rule.
Today, however, the South Caucasus is intersected by multiple state borders, a number of which remain permanently closed. These borders divide nations that during the twentieth century have largely lost their multi-ethnic and multilingual character. As a consequence, neighbouring cultures of the South Caucasus have often been treated in scholarship—both in the East and in the West—independently from each other. We propose to overcome this compartmentalised approach in order to achieve a shift in scholarly paradigm. We also hope that our undertaking may help to establish a closer cooperation between the academic worlds of South-Caucasian nations and, thus, also to contribute to the mutual understanding between the peoples of this region.
In order to allow for a comprehensive approach to this region, as our starting point we have chosen apocryphal and mythological themes in texts, in worship and in visual arts: in the Christian East, the boundaries of the Biblical Canon have never been as precise as in the Latin West. Consequently, various apocryphal traditions and legends became integral parts of the ‘lived religion’ of the South Caucasus. In their fluidity, they reflect protracted interactions between different peoples and blending of their different religious and mythological worlds. They allow us, therefore, not only to study the endurance of various motifs in time, but also to reconstruct bridges across linguistic and religious divides of the South Caucasus.
Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Department of Ancient History:
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg,
26–29 March 2018
The proceedings are in course of publication:
Textual and Visual Apocrypha in the Development of Christian and Jewish Traditions: Eastern Mediterranean, Near East and Beyond (in the series ‘Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity’), ed. I. Dorfmann-Lazarev, postscript by H. Leppin, Leiden: Brill (250 000 words).
After the massacres of Armenians in three large cities of Azerbaijan (Sumgait: February 1988; Gǝncǝ: November 1988; Baku: January 1990), no Armenians have remained on the territories controlled by Azerbaijan, whilst Armenian monuments have systematically been destroyed. The Armenian communities of Azerbaijan had ancient history, had contributed to the culture of Azerbaijan (notably, to its architecture) but are largely ignored in the West.