James Baquet

Armenia is a landlocked western Asian country, located in the South Caucasus region between Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan and the disputed Republic of Artsakh to the east, Iran to the south and Nakhchivan (an exclave of Azerbaijan) to the southwest. As these parenthetical comments indicate, the region is one in the process of transition.

What was once known as the Kingdom of Armenia, the country dates back to the ninth century B.C., when it was known as Urartu, which was mentioned in the Bible as “Ararat.” A century or so later, it was split between two empires, and reunified in the ninth century. It fell in 1045 and was occupied by the Turks. The people moved out to the coast of the Mediterranean and established “Cilician Armenia” in exile from the 11th to the 14th centuries.

From the 14th to the 19th centuries, the traditional homeland changed hands between the Ottoman and Iranian empires. Then, in the 19th century, the Russian Empire took the eastern portion, and the western portion suffered genocide at the hands of the Ottomans in the early 20th century, a horrific event still commemorated. This led to a diaspora that has resulted in more Armenians living outside the country than in it. Under Russian influence the country became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936, and it remained so until independence in 1991.

Armenian is the official language, and despite the crossroads nature of the area, 98.1 percent of the people are ethnic Armenians. The remainder are Yazidis (a strictly endogamous Kurdish group), Russians and others.

In 301, Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion. The Armenian Apostolic Church, the world’s oldest national church, is a form of Oriental Orthodoxy. It considers the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus to be its founders; nevertheless, because a saint named Gregory the Illuminator was the first head after it became the state church, it is sometimes called the Gregorian Church, a moniker which the Church itself eschews.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. taking spouses from inside the group

2. twelve key followers of Jesus

3. forced living away from home

4. remembered, observed

5. nickname

6. killing of a group of people

7. in parentheses (round brackets), thus, an aside or comment

8. rejects, avoids using

9. terrible, causing horror

10. joined together again