-This year the RoA Prime Minister visited your office, an individual who is at least cognizant of the issues you have raised regarding the flawed renovation of monuments and the lack of attention paid to their overall plight, etc. Did your meeting have any positive results?  Did you come to any understanding of what needs to be done? Can you call him up when necessary and say that this needs to be done or that certain changes need to be made?

-I must confess that the Prime Minister’s visit on January 30 was a very much welcomed and encouraging sign for all of us. But many months have since passed.

The Prime Minister promised to finance our activities and especially the issue of where to house our operations. This issue of finding a suitable space for the organization is a pressing one indeed. We have been situated in our present location as of 2000. We took advantage of the generous gift made by the late Levon Hakhverdyan, Director of the Art Institute at the time, to take up residence in the Institute’s hall and two rooms. We will soon mark our tenth year here but the Institute is sorely in need of the space we now occupy. Right now, however, we have no other alternative. Recently, I was a guest on Shant T.V. and took advantage of the opportunity to present our plight to the public. I received many phone calls soon afterwards. The principal of a school called and offered us space in his school building. Of course, I wish to thank all those who made such similar generous offers of assistance. The fact remains that we have a very large archive of materials and if we were to relocate it would have to be to a permanent site. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to move the entire archive to some school room for just a few months. It would just take a month to sort everything out again and get the system and computers back up and running properly. We pointed this out to the PM when he visited. A reporter asked the PM whether the government would also take care of providing is with a new, permanent space. He replied that, “We will take care of all the organization’s problems.” Sadly, months have passed since those pledges were made. This year was the first since 2004 that we weren’t able to travel to western Armenia. It wasn’t merely due to a lack of funds that we couldn’t go, but because we faced big problems with maintain the archival library. I should note that Minister of Culture Hasmik Poghosyan visited us just two weeks after the PM on his directive. I laid out the situation we faced in detail and the minister seemed impressed with the work we were doing. By the end of March, I was forced to follow-up these visits with phone calls and letters since I hadn’t heard back from any government agencies. This inaction was puzzling since at the time the Prime Minister had made several T.V. appearances during which he praised the importance of the work our organization was carrying out. I even remember his exact words which were, “I am amazed and moved by the work conducted by these sons and daughter of our nation.” Important praise indeed coming from the PM. To my surprise, when I wrote to the PM, I received a response from his chief of staff the same day saying that they were working on the matter. Later that week, the same official phoned and told me that our letter had been passed on to the Ministry of Finance by the PM himself. Subsequently, I received a call from the Minister of Culture who told me that they had just received a notice from the Ministry of Finance stating that there were no more reserve funds available for projects not included in the budget. All I can say in response is that we knew that the economy would take an 18% dip this year. But we are talking about a mere trickle of funds to keep this organization on its feet. It is my firm belief that the problem, at least in our case, wasn’t economic. In other words, the crisis we face is one of national consciousness, not economic. I can’t come to terms with all this. How long can we expect to ensure our existence, given the national challenges we face and surrounded by super-nationalist states as we are, by our present passive and denationalized policies? This is what I don’t understand. Is it that our authorities cannot comprehend this basic issue? I asked one very pointed question to the Minister of Culture when she visited us – “Assume for a moment that I am your Turkish counterpart, the Minister of Culture, and I ask you what proofs do you have when you speak about western Armenia or that a genocide of Armenian culture took place. How can you talk of such things when we have renovated Aghtamar and plan to so the same with Ani?” What would be the response of Armenia’s Minister of Culture to all this? In other words, shouldn’t we have details of the present condition of each and every Armenian monument that still stands? Shouldn’t we have photographic proof to compare the present with what was captured on camera, even it is was one photo taken back at the beginning of the 20th century or the end of the 19th century? Shouldn’t we have all this information at our fingertips? The Minister replied that “Of course you are doing important work that is vital to our nation”. It seems we’ve never been at a loss for words to praise such work but taking concrete action is another matter.

To be continued P.S. For more information on the activities of Mr. Karapetyan and his team, go to: Research on Armenian Architecture.