Good evening everyone I am Professor
Barlow Der Mugrdechian of the Armenian
Studies program at Fresno State.
I would like to welcome you all to our
first presentation
in the fall 2020 lecture series of the
Armenian Studies Program.
tonight's lecture is co-sponsored by the
Armenian Studies Program and is
supported by the Leons Peters
Foundation.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Program
will not be holding any face-to-face
presentations for the fall semester at
Fresno State.
So all of our events will be on zoom and
through the webinars.
Today we're going to take a look at
a brief
slideshow to look at some of the
upcoming events in the Armenian Studies
Program
and then when we come back I will be
introducing our guest
speaker.
 
 
We have a lot of really exciting
events coming up at the armenian studies
program and
you can always follow us on our facebook
page or at our
website at fresnostate.edu
forward slash armenian studies to see
all of our upcoming
events. It's my great pleasure today to
introduce our special guest
Dr Christina Maranci. She is the Arthur
Dadian and Ara Oztemel professor of
armenian art and
architecture at Tufts University and she
is also the chair of the Department of
art history at Tufts University. She
graduated from Princeton University with
a dissertation on Medieval Armenian
Architecture
in historiography Joseph Stryzgowski and
his legacy."
She is also the author of two recent
books the art of armenia a critical art
history of ancient and medieval armenia
and also vigilant powers three churches
of early medieval armenia
she's also published numerous essays
articles on armenian art and
architecture
tonight i'm looking forward to her
presentation because it's on the ani
cathedral it's sculpture and its
inscriptions revisited
and ani cathedral is in the imagination
of not only the armenians but the world
one of the most uh interesting
historical monuments and tonight
uh dr moranci will be giving her new
views
on some of the latest research that she
has been conducting at
the cathedral of ani so it's my great
pleasure to introduce
dr christina moranci dr morancy
thank you so much farlow it's it's an
honor
to to be invited to give a lecture for
the armenian studies program at fresno
state
it's a wonderful program and um
and you know with all the luminaries
there i'm i'm just i'm very
very honored so um thank you to you
um and to to everyone there uh it's
it's a little bit later here it's 10 p.m
so um just fyi
cats coming through as i give this
lecture because they're used to me being
tucked in bed by now but in any event
um let's get started um i'm going to
share my screen with y'all
so let's get rid of that okay does this
look good
does this look uh does this show the
powerpoint can you see it
barlow is that good yes it looks real
good
all right and you can hear me okay yes
all right excellent
so yeah i'm talking about um oops
hold on one second
oh here we go yeah i'm talking about ani
cathedral
um this is a work in progress um
i have a whole lot more to learn and to
read so just take that into account as i
present some of these new ideas
um and uh and
yeah just um be be aware that this is
rather um in the middle
of a project rather than um at the end
of anything i'm in the first stages of
working on a book
um that will include any cathedral and
you might think how foolish of me to
want to talk about such a very famous
monument
um so many excellent scholars have
talked about ani cathedral before
um but i i found um
with the frescoes that that i discovered
a year ago
and my ongoing work that even the most
famous the most celebrated monuments
um can we can still learn new things
about them
and indeed sometimes it's the most
famous monuments
that we kind of don't look at so
carefully
because they're so famous and we figure
so it's already been done
so i'm just i guess you know to the
students out there who are listening i
would say
don't be afraid to to um to
to study those those important monuments
and and be curious because you never
know what you're going to find
um so yeah any cathedral if you google
it you find it's got like four and a
half million
hits um it is up there with uh i would
say
the top five um um monuments of uh
of armenia um that in terms of fame
um so i want to talk about
ani cathedral in in a forthcoming book
project
um and i want to talk about it as part
of
an architectural movement or
tradition um that arises
in the late 10th early 11th centuries
in the northern kingdom of the bagratids
in armenia
so i see any cathedral in terms of its
architecture and its construction its
style
the way its the plan the design related
to a number of other monuments both
in ani and outside of ani but in the
region
so i'm i'm sort of placing ani here
um with a lot of photos and plans of
other churches also built
in the late 10th early 11th centuries to
give you a sense of what i'm trying to
do that is i don't
i'm i'm i'm interested in uh
taking a few monuments
and doing very close contextual work
on them so if if you know my previous
book vigilant powers
i tried to do that for the seventh
century to look at
three churches in in um
sort of with a deep dive into who made
them
why they were made why they look the way
they do
um what their inscriptions tell us what
the architecture tells us what the
landscape
tells us so very close study of a few
monuments in order to sort of build
a sense of this architectural moment
so that's what i'm going to try to do
also for um
for the late 10th early 11th centuries
um
in the bhagavatam kingdom and so any
cathedral i see that as
as a kind of as a part of that as a kind
of chapter
of um of that study uh so to that
end i'm looking at a number of themes
another
number of subjects related to
architecture
um and i've just put some of those up
there on the screen for you i'm
interested in history writing i'm
interested in liturgy
um society and social roles
neighbors like byzantium the ambassads
um i'm interested in technology i'm
interested in how
the bagratids perceived their own past
i'm interested in the bhagavatas as
architectural patrons
i'm interested in poetry um like grigor
magistrates and and and his relation to
to this moment in time i'm interested in
attitudes towards images and towards
material things so
all these things um make me are
they're they're part of um going to be
part of my study
uh so it's not just about architecture
for me it's about um inscriptions
about written texts about sculpture wall
painting and archaeology so i
and and that's frankly anytime you study
an armenian church
you're you're studying a bit that's
something that's more than just
walls piers and vaults it's it's um
often engraved
with messages on the wall or it's
sculpted or it's painted so
um built into studying armenian churches
as this kind of
interdisciplinary endeavor
um at the same time anybody who's
visited any cathedral
will look at this building and think
this is a very
carefully designed building and i'm just
showing you
a detail of the base of one of the dome
piers and you can see
this could have been a monolith it would
have it would have you know a big
a big rectangular support it would have
served the same function but instead you
have this incredibly carefully
faceted geometric form
that is holding up the dome so there's
tremendous
interest attention to design in
the period that i'm that i'm um that i
want to understand better
so so just to back up a little bit we're
looking at ani
we're looking at the bhagavatam kingdom
here's a little animation of where ani
is
um in the late 10th uh early 11th
centuries
we're looking at the cathedral which is
in the capital city of ani
and it's located right where the circle
is um
it was built interestingly uh
after um the city was became the capital
of the bhagavatam so from ninth in 961
ani became the capital of the bhagavatam
kingdom
uh it was built after that and around
the time
uh of the the major city walls
which you see here um so in the late
10th century
so it's part of a program um of
building that really speaks to the
expansion of
ani um in the latter 10th century
ani is centrally located in the city
um and from the various gates of the
city
you see it sort of nicely centered on
the right you see
ani as seen from the main gate sometimes
called the lion gate
and on the left you see it um
as you are standing in the you know
what's called the checkerboard gate
which is all the way
um on the the left the
um of the of the city i'm getting yeah
the western
no the eastern let me go back for a
minute yeah
all the way over here so that would be
the eastern
part of the walls um so
it's it's it plays a sort of prominent
role within the topography of the city
and
it also is as you can see a large
imposing building
it would have been even more so when it
had its dome intact and i'll show you a
drawing
of what that might have looked like in a
second but this is a large building
uh 34.29 meters uh by toromanian's
uh original measurements so
slightly larger than the than the church
of moren from the seventh century which
may have formed a kind of
model for any and and you can notice
that
you know even though anika theatrical is
three centuries later three and a half
centuries later it uses
the basic the same format that is a
domed basilica
um with corner chambers at the eastern
and terminating in a semi-circular apps
in the case of any cathedral
though um and again this speaks to
design you can see how carefully
it that the space is constructed to
emphasize
regular geometric forms so those
supports
form almost like diamond shapes faceted
diamond shapes
uh the apps it doesn't project from the
eastern end but actually
is inscribed within the um
the rectangle of the structure so again
very carefully
designed and thought out um
just a view of the outside one of the
things that makes ani cathedral
and associated buildings uh so striking
and unique and elegant is that exterior
arcade
that uh wraps around them and i often
talk to my students about
about that the development of this this
this kind of
elegant series of arches supported on
attached columns that
creates a kind of webbing and or a
visual rhythm
around um the exterior facades and
unites this
structure um here's another view
of that of that arcade so that's
a very interesting feature of this new
baggage at architecture
like so much of ani it's been written on
written about
in really insightful ways by uh other
scholars so
you know i i am i'm excited to be
reading the wonderful scholarship
of of many people about this monument
um and part of what what comes up in the
scholarship is the
the the kind of emergence of these
arcaded walls these blind arcades
here's just a detail i took on when the
sun was hitting the monument to show you
how polished the stones are
so they're not just it's not just
carefully cut
or joined stones or designs
you know spaces but but they're polished
to a high sheen
so that when the sun bounces off them
you get this this wonderful kind of glow
um here's that view that i wanted to
show you of any cathedral with
potentially what it's um what its drum
and dome look
like so it would have again been even
more prominent within the landscape
um and this
unfortunately is what um the roof and
the drum look like now
uh you can see that there that the roof
tiles have largely
um disintegrated collapsed fallen off
leaving in its place the soft cover of
the vegetation that's now growing from
the roof indicating moisture
um this photo was taken on a
top at a time when we actually a group i
was with
had a crane and we some brave people
went up
onto the roof and stood there i decided
to
take a pass on that um but i let others
do it and here you can see
someone very brave standing on the roof
of the basilica and you can also see
here some of maybe the remains
of the the stone shingles um that once
covered this uh building
and then here's my friend armin
khazarian who has written about
the arcades um of any and associated
buildings
and um i caught him on the crane
looking very pleased with himself okay
more uh
more to come so any cathedral here are
two interior shots
uh it may be review for
for those of you who are listening just
but but i will discuss it anyway that
these interior spaces the interior
spaces of ani cathedral
are um soaring spaces
spaces that um are defined by vertical
lines created by the profiling of peers
they are um they're made
elegant by the pointed arches that
are that rest on those piers
again the overall effect is of an
integrated building
kind of like a skeleton of a building um
not unlike what you see of course in
romanesque and gothic architecture
and of course that comparison uh was
made
already in the 19th century if not
earlier
the comparison between ani cathedral and
um
gothic and romanesque and and however we
want to
answer that question or or tease out
that relationship
the the essential aesthetic which is
about linearity
is about verticality and is about the
kind of uniting of parts of the church
from top to bottom
i think is is comparable and here's just
a view
of any cathedral on the left and ren
on the right where you can see how at
any cathedral
the interior space this is the same view
really of looking into the apps the
interior space is
is much taller it is more united
as a kind of vertical rising from the
floor
um and this is even true with the choice
of using pendants rather than squinches
as you see at merin so where is it moran
you get a series a sequence of
kind of hooded dark spaces at any
cathedral you have this
um you look into the apps and you get
this sense of
height and reaching towards uh the
excuse me towards this guy um i won't
i'm gonna just rush through my frescoes
a little bit because
you've probably you can find those in
other lectures online
but i i think i'll just show a tiny bit
so you have a sense of
what i have already done on any
cathedral so you're looking into the
apps
and um that's where i used software
to uh in a sense uncover
um images in the in the uh in the app so
here you see the apps without with just
an
untouched photo and then if you use
various kinds of software image
manipulation or image modification
software you can start
finding details like this wonderful ox
an angel part of a throne
so that that for me was a kind of
revelation when i realized how much
could be
done with any cathedral just by
taking the photos i had already had you
know i had taken from
many trips and kind of dropping them
into
my adobe software and playing
with um various levels of
um of light and dark various tonalities
various ranges of colors and brightness
um and what i found is that the armenian
frescos were very
um very sort of receptive
to being brought out through by that
means so there's much more work to be
done there
but that's just a kind of a little bit
about what i have already done
um but again with that too as with what
i'm going to talk about today there's
much more to be done
and then also i found the i i found this
inscription
on the right side of the the um the apps
the southern side of the apps
which was exciting um okay so
moving on i want to talk about
the foundation the the inscriptions at
any cathedral and particularly the
foundation
inscription at any cathedral but before
we do that
i just wanted to sort of emphasize
what's important about inscriptions
um and in particular inscriptions on
medieval armenian churches
so first and foremost they are import
important because they record
historical data they they tell us dates
they tell us the names of patrons or
rulers
they record donations whether it's the
donation of a building or it's a
donation made after the construction of
the building
but they also uh reveal
all kinds of other things uh they reveal
political ambitions when they're read
against
historical chronicles we can learn about
the historical personae
that were um that were involved
in in the church we can we can learn
about the motivations for the patrons we
can learn about relations between
different
individuals mentioned in an inscription
um we can learn about theology and
liturgy through the inscriptions and the
kinds of
um texts the kinds of uh
language that they use and and they are
also linguistic and literary phenomena
so they're very interesting
um as for for what they reveal about the
armenian literary tradition
at the same time along with all this
stuff to do with words they're also
inherently visual and material
so they have to be understood as um
as as a kind of um visual
marker as as
to be under they need to be understood
as words that
are that are would have been read maybe
not read maybe just looked at
maybe ignored but they would have been
um understood as
part of the building they might have
been understood in relation to nearby
sculpture for example
so um they they're
complex inscriptions are complex and
they can be approached from many
different disciplinary vantage points
um i'm an art historian and so i'm i'm
very interested
in in how they shape the experience of
the monument
um and uh i'm interested in what they
reveal
about donation practices
so um there are a lot of inscriptions on
any cathedral
and i just wanted to mention some of the
main ones
um here's and i've kind of highlighted
them for you in this way
there are two inscriptions that date
from the byzantine
occupation of ani um and these
are uh very interesting inscriptions
that have been studied
um for many years now from the 11th
century
they are recording tax levies for any
traders in the case of
this one close to the door another one
relates the restoration of walls
by an aharon magistros as well as a
donation of water
and tax levies
on the south side are more inscriptions
and there are two from the 13th century
one at the very far
right tigran who
don't restore stairs and donates um
store and stipends manuscript etc
in exchange for a yearly badarak and
then another
donation as well from the 13th century
but i have my red circley thing here
on the foundation inscription and that's
what i want to focus on
um right now so this is the foundation
inscription
um and a photo on the left and kind of
where it is
on the right um let's look at it a
little bit
first of all uh the the sort of the
classic place to
to look and study look at this and study
it is in the
divine divan high v macro tian and so
you see
the inscription here as it appears on
the wall
and then you see next to it the the
transcription
um i have
also tried to make a working english
translation of this
transcription of this inscription um
which you see here
and i have tried in this case
to sort of keep with the um the line
breaks
of the the original um
so what this foundation inscription is
is
a record of donation and
we're gonna spend a little time on on
this
because it's kind of i think a crucial
text
for us to understand the monument um
oops
okay so um the first thing we need to
understand is that this
is a donation by katranide who was
a bagrated queen uh queen of the
armenians
um and the wife of geek sean shop
so she's the crucial thing that this
inscription tells us is that she
builds this church and
so that's that's number one that's the
first thing we learn
um and in the second part of the
inscription
we go from first person i kachanide
to i lord sarkis so
it changes about halfway through and now
we hear from the catholicos
of the bhagavatis lord sarkis who has
ordered his clerics to um
after the passing of the queen to
celebrate um
40 masses for her until the coming of
christ so this is a crucial thing in
this donation inscription it's
given by katrani day who names herself
and she says we've erected this
house of god and then we learn that
you know in in exchange essentially for
that
she has asked for um these masses to be
said
in um for in to essentially to intercede
for her
um and then we also have there's another
character in this foundation inscription
and that is the scribe himself so this
we learn at the very end that this
memorial was written by the hands of
bene and we can even see this right here
on the inscription the very last line
so it's not unheard of for a scribe in
an inscription to name himself and we
can see this at
ani even where we have the names of
of scribes uh but for such a an
important church
uh and in a foundation inscription this
is really i think striking
so keep that in mind second interesting
thing um is the dates that are
present here and uh if you take
even a little bit of a look at this you
can see that there are many different
kinds of dates
there's the armenian era it's the year
450
there's a roman era 219
and then down below there are more eras
there's um
the year from creation or from adam
that's given
and then another date from the
incarnation of god or from the time of
christ
um and then another date from the
conversion of christ
so there are so many dates by which this
uh foundation is sort of situating the
construction
of the church and that's very
interesting and
it speaks to as much as as far as i've
got with it it speaks to a tradition you
also see in history writing of the time
and in someone like stephanos taro nazi
or asohic
who also is very interested in careful
calculations of time
um okay so
uh there's something else really
interesting about this foundation
inscription
um that is uh that appears
at the end of the first line and you see
it
here so this is a series of three
letters or three symbols
um in armenian it's sometimes called
gutsakir or pogba here like
joined up letters or symbols um
and this these these symbols come
right after the first two dates and so
one of the questions scholars have
have asked is what the heck is does this
say
and there's been a really interesting
kind of tradition of literature on this
subject so i want to take you through
this a little bit so what first of all
what are we talking about
so as i mentioned these are what we saw
here are not
not individual armenian letters but
letters that are symbols that seem to
combine many different letters
and this is a tradition in armenian
script we see it in manuscripts
and we can also see it in lapidary or
stone inscriptions and i'm showing you
some nice ones
on the left of tadeos and gara beds and
here's another i've got our bed but you
can see how the letters
combined it combine into a single glyph
so we can take do amen we can do
something like this with the
um with the magic of powerpoint we can
make
uh not very nice but a reasonable
good suckier by um by combining
all the all the letters of the word amen
um so basically the thing that scholars
have tried to do
since the time of brose who was a
scholar in the 1860s
at pavani um they've tried to figure out
well what
what combinate what are we reading here
what does this say
so um prosai came up with
an idea um that it said the first
part said chochani um
the second uh symbol
was ami
or year and then the third was a number
or 92. um
for the life of me i don't see how
uh i see ami but
and i i see how grad and pen could be
derived
from the symbol but i don't see um how
shirt chaney can be got from that so
that just for me
i felt like if this is a game of
armenian scrabble
that you know like that i just did not
get that
so uh moving on alishan
um had uh
trouble with the first and last symbols
but thought the middle one
said perhaps i mean so again of the year
or in the year
uh that was the that was his assumption
as well
and that makes sense uh i think that
that's that
and that's something that's that is
generally there's consensus around that
um now basma john in the 1930s had a
very different idea he thought the first
were the first symbol was
and he thought the second symbol was
amin and if you put that together
it's ben yamin
and then for the last one he thought it
was correct which is quite clever right
so it's saying
ben yamin writes this so he was saying
that
this is another sign of the scribe ben
who now calls himself who puts puts his
name as ben yaminier
um and that this is just this is
described
signing his name again um
and while it actually um
might work not so badly with the
with the glyphs like if you combine the
the letters
it sort of looks okay it doesn't really
make sense from
the point of view of um the convention
of inscriptions to have a scribe
name himself twice uh in that way so
um the basmation's idea um
yeah basmatis idea was taken up once um
modified a little bit by manucharyan but
nobody else
since then has really um accepted this
position that it's
basically another um another signature
of the scribe
now instead um uh a kenyan went in
another direction
he thought that the first glyph
was a number and he thought he agreed
that the second glyph was amin
so anot another one another year and
then he thought the third one
the third glyph i don't know how this
works i don't even i won't even pretend
to
but he thought it it it indicated the
haggads or the hagarites so
in the third in so i in the 390th year
of the agarites that's
that's what he assumed that this said
um the problem and that would be by the
way
um the islamic date the from uh
of the hijri of the hijra year so when
muhammad went to medina which is usually
dated from 622 so if you add 622 to 390
you get 1012 which is
roughly around when the cathedral
was built so so a kenyan
is saying basically this is um an
islamic date
that's what this um this
these three glyphs say and this was
um i think very smart
because he the position of these three
glyphs is right
after the era of the romans
so that that first line then if we
accept that it's
an uh a hedra date it would be the
armenian
era then it would be the roman era and
then it would be
this islamic year um abrahamian in the
1970s and we're coming to the end by the
way so don't worry about
um had the idea that again it was amin
but he thought that that last
word was gipper and
he so he thought it said basically in
the 402nd year of the
gepper ad1024
now gepper which isn't a word i found
attested
in armenian elsewhere but please help me
out there if you know of it
um it is uh could be arabic kafir
meaning infidel rejecter denier so
abrahamian thought this was again
the islamic era but he
interpreted that last glyph as
gepper and this has been accepted by the
only other
scholar i could find to write about
these three cliffs and that is vardanyan
in 2000
um he had a different view of the
the first the first glyph which um
he thought said 393 and
uh and so he thought this was the
393rd year of the gepper so ad1015
this is all really complicated it is
kind of like armenian scrabble
but what's happening is here is that
scholars are um are kind of
increasingly accepting that this
is an islamic era date it may be right
it may not be right
i'm i i think the jury's still out but
it would be very
interesting if this were um a hijri date
um and it would lead to only more
questions so why do you have
this date uh that's included after the
armenian era and after the roman era and
why is it written in glyphs this good
sagir or pagankir
versus regular script why not write it
out
is it is it trying to conceal
the islamic era date and if so why
is it a negative thing like a sign of
contempt or fear or hostility or
something else um what does it say about
political and cultural relations between
the bhagavatam and islamic communities
in their midst
and what does it say about the role of
the monument
these are these are open questions but
it's
interesting to compare from
almost the same time uh another
inscription uh and this is at pot
monastery
it's um a the sculpture of
sambat the bhagavatam king sambhat and
it is this is a inscription that is
essentially in the the turban here this
was discovered by derta von diane in
1979
um and it is believe it or not this is
an inscription
um and i'm just showing you a detail
here
and it was worked out by derek
avondian to read um
uh
so essentially king
shansha king of ani
um so that if we if we
take these two monuments together any
cathedral
and huff pod both bagranted foundations
um maybe we're looking at um similar
attitudes
towards the islamic world
as expressed through epigraphy
but that's already taking a few leaps
and i would like to do much more work
uh to to understand um both the glyphs
and the contemporary situation before i
before i make that leap but nonetheless
what's
so interesting and by the way this is
where that
inscription is so you can't see it from
the ground
um at hotpot but what's interesting here
is that you have so many dates
at any cathedral so you have the
armenian era you have the heir of the
romans you have
the islamic hebrew day you have the uh
the creation era
you have the year of the incarnation of
christ the christianization of armenian
not to mention the reigns of gagi
and sarki's so so in so many ways this
monument
tells us the time and if that weren't
enough it also
had a sundial originally it's no longer
there but
you can see from old uh old drawings
like the one on the left and from notes
like that of sarkisian
that there was once upon a time right
next to the foundation inscription
a large sundial so this monument is
is is a kind of meditation on time in in
so many different ways
um i am and i'm running out of time but
i want to say a few more things before
i continue if that's okay barlow are we
good with me going moving on a little
bit
yes definitely okay great um so the
other
uh thing the last thing i'll say about
the inscription that's interesting
is the the way the building
is described it is a house of god
and it is a new and living spiritual
offspring and an everlasting monument
again
everlasting monument reminding us of the
place of this monument in time
but the other interesting thing is this
new and living
spiritual offspring um
you have
so this language of the new and living
is really interesting and it comes up in
hebrews 10
20 um where uh
and this is uh the the letter of paul to
the hebrews where
where christ is described as um
as a a new and living way
that is the incarnation of christ is a
new and living way and it's contrasting
the blood sacrifice of the pagans with
uh this new sacrifice of christ so i
think there's some very
interesting um theological language
scriptural language that's being used
that's being evoked in the foundation
inscription and
not a great surprise given that it um
the the role of the catholic
sarkis in in the foundation
so um i i have like zero time but i'm
really excited about one last thing i
want to show you so
with barlow's indulgence um i want to to
get to it and
and that is um to return to the
issue of design so you're looking here
at the south facade and you're looking
at that beautiful pier that we talked
about before
uh the entire building
is uh filled with and covered in
decoration and i'm showing you here a
detail of
the window a window on the south facade
with the molding um the crowning molding
and you can see the colonnets and if you
look carefully
all of it is carefully carved
with different kinds of patterns and i'm
showing you some more details here
you could spend hours you know looking
and identifying uh different patterns
but luckily torostoramanian has largely
done that for us
um and i'm showing you here pages from
from his his notebook that show uh
the variety of kinds of
designs that there are and um
this alone is is fascinating and you can
see here the
the kind of the geometric designs and
the grid forms
that um adorn the the cathedral
a detail of one of the niches and
another detail um
so i was looking at this you know i it's
been locked down so i haven't been able
to go
to any cathedral uh at all so i thought
this summer i would sit down
and just look at all my photographs on
every single
one of any cathedral and go stone by
stone
and i was really interested um in what i
found
right below the eagle so this is an
eagle
on the south facade um and you can see
there's one of those beautiful cubic
capitals here but i want you to
notice this little little carving down
here
i'm going to show you in put my
purple square around it and maybe show
you here
here's me having traced what i saw
um basically what you see are a series
of interlocking circles
they don't actually extend beyond this
one stone so
i wasn't sure how to in my draw feature
to cut it off at the stone
but it does so you have a series of
interlocking circles
um and though that's located right up
here
right below that eagle and um
a scale bar this is rough because i have
not
been able to measure it i haven't uh you
know even been able to take a
great photo but it's about 20
centimeters long each circle is about
five centimeters um so
what the heck is going on here what is
this
is it random graffiti by a passerby i
sincerely doubt it given the great
height
of this of this carving
and also the fact that it is only on a
single stone
as i said it doesn't it doesn't extend
those lines don't extend
to make the next circle on the next
stone so
i don't think it was it was done in any
kind of random way and i also don't
think it was done
after the church was constructed i think
those carvings
were made on the stone before it was set
into place
on the church so in perhaps in the
building yard
so perhaps a fun doodle by a mason but
you'd have to define what's fun and
what's a doodle for the
late 10th early 11th century um
it for sure looks like it's practice or
some kind of
preparatory work with a compass and you
could even see the compass
uh the compass points um and
so it could be that what we're looking
at here
is a rare and precious thing for
medieval art and architecture and that
is preparatory work
the actual prep work that happens before
you you do your carving
and in that respect it's interesting
that interlocking circles are the
basic design unit of the cathedral
sculpture
um and we can see it here again looking
at toromanians
designs and then we can see it here so
right here you have those
those circles and right here you have
almost the same
motif of these overlapping circles
um so i want to stop with that and just
i will just point to the fact that there
is
there's my own little drawing again but
i want to point to the fact that this
takes us
to a lot of scholarship on
uh medieval graffito and the role
of of carving on walls for the um
for for the purposes of um preparing a
building or designing a building
so it's exciting that we find this
uh and here's here are just some other
examples we find this
um on any cathedral so
um so just to to wrap up
i think i'll say that um i want to thank
barlow again for giving me a chance to
share this work in progress i think
what's important
to take away from all this is that even
with a monument as famous as une
cathedral
we still have so much to to kind of
ponder and puzzle out
and and still to discover so um
maybe when we can all dust off our
passports
uh there's more work to be done at the
site
so i think with that i will i will
conclude my presentation
thank you so much dr morantzy christina
for that
presentation very interesting work i
mean there's so much to be done
and uh you still have i mean it's like
almost a lifetime of work
looking forward to it right in terms of
all the things that you're going to be
working on
um for our uh for our uh attendees
if you would like to ask a question or a
comment
please use the question and answer forum
so there should be a question and answer
a forum for you place that you can
ask some questions and while that is
starting
i have a question regarding the
inscriptions because it seemed that
after the initial construction was
completed that
uh inscriptions were added at different
periods it was
is that something that's commonly done
that different
people or owners maybe of the church or
different patrons would add
yes that it it is common and and
what it reveals uh i mean i think as
architectural historians we usually
focus only on the foundation
inscriptions but there's
but from a historical perspective it's
so interesting to look at the life of
the building over time so
for example one thing i'm going to do
with this book project is go back to
moren even though we're in a 7th century
and therefore
before this my sort of purview to look
at how
um in the 10th and 11th centuries it it
remained in use and was you know
remained a subject of sponsorship
um by uh by people by the community by
the bagratives actually
so that's good
still waiting uh for some questions
there's some questions that will come up
in just a moment
and the second question i want to ask
you was um
in the from the last time that you
visited ani we understand that ani is in
a sort of threatened state right
in terms of his physical state do you
have anything to add on that
as far as anything you've been hearing
from friends or
or people that have been able to visit
as to its status
um i i don't have much to add except i
know work
on work to stabilize the monument is
is ongoing and um there has also been
archaeology at the site at at the
cathedral west of the cathedral
but um as far as what the latest is i
don't know
my my knowledge is is probably where
yours is right now so
yeah we have a couple of uh questions so
some questions
uh first question is um when you were
discussing the apps and you were talking
about it
being white yes and that it was so faded
that you had to use the
software to find the icons was it a case
uh was it a case that
it had simply faded or was it
whitewashed because armenia was under
arab rule or something yeah
that's kind of the question great
questions and i
i only wish i knew for sure and i think
what you would have to do and i'm not a
conservationist that's
that's a serious science that that
people do and what you would want to do
is go to um go there and you would want
to
actually find out what the heck the uh
is on the wall so are we talking about
whitewash
um my guess is that what that's what it
is that the the apps was whitewashed and
it was probably white wall it could have
been whitewashed as early
as the seljuk period so when ani was
under seljec
um control so that would be the 11th
century it could have been at another
time we don't
know um so that's an
area that will demand uh probably a team
of experts
including conservationists to to figure
out what exactly is going on there
okay but it's a great question another
question it's a uh where was the sundial
located are the
uh at the missing section of masonry at
the base of the arcade above the steps
uh was that worthy yeah i wish i knew
for sure
um and the so that and i've looked at
the
the stones to figure out like is it just
is there a missing stone
and i can't for the life of me figure it
out what sarkisian says we're just going
on
you know what we what we can know
sarkisian says
you know it's it's close to the if i'm
remembering correctly it's very close to
the foundation inscription
um and i think he says i i
to be honest i forget exactly what he
said but it's close to the foundation
inscription and that makes sense so it
would be obviously on the south side of
the building
um maybe a little bit above the
foundation description but now
um you know it's shown in that old
drawing i showed it's
it's shown sort of to the right but i
don't think we can take that
as a kind of that's how it looked on the
wall so
um but uh yeah i i wish
i knew where it was because you look at
the
that part of the wall now and you know
you do there are missing stones towards
the bottom and i think that's
that's what um the person was referring
to but
um that wouldn't make sense for a
sundial to me because it wouldn't really
get
like like good light way at the bottom
so there was a
question about the comparison that you
made to the medieval markings at the
mosque of divry
yeah you have some comments on that what
are your comments on the kids yeah
so oh are you okay um yeah so there's
there was a
really interesting article by um a woman
named omur bakurer
on uh it was in a journal called mcconus
and it's called the story of three
graffiti and it was about actually it
was about two
um graffiti that were at dibrary
um that were took the form of
interlocking circles and
another graffito at any
at a in a dwelling um that was
excavated and i've been trying to dig up
she's using um archaeological reports
that i haven't been able to access yet
but um what what she was doing is making
a claim that these were architectural
drawings that they were used that these
um that the
graffiti were used as a means to
to essentially plan out these buildings
dvd
um and uh maybe something at any but
um but she didn't know the the graffito
that i was talking about
um today and um so but it it suggests
a broader context for
um for this practice and it also
puts um it it it
puts the practice back to the late 10th
early 11th century which is interesting
so
um and i think just one last thing i'll
say is it speaks to
the importance of um of design of
two-dimensional design
to medieval armenian architecture um
and and that's um that's something we
could also see
and i showed you briefly mukharnis
drawing um
as well that was made um in an armenian
monastery so
i think our graffito from ani cathedral
belongs to a kind of robust
um architectural practice in the region
great and uh there's a question that
says uh is the stone we see on the
exterior
only a facade or does it also appear on
the interior
or were there two quote unquote walls of
stone within fill
yeah the core and then the two the two
revetments on either side
okay uh interesting question here if
you're thinking of a bogratuni version
along the model of the book
vigilant powers what two monuments would
you read in conjunction with the
cathedral of ani and why that's a good
one
um i've been debating this and i have a
long wish list
um but i know that it has to include
hutzconc
which is um which was a um
a monastery and now it's just a single
church basically or look
that was single standing church in the
de gore region not too far from ani
and then i'm thinking of mar machen as
well um
because they belong to this interesting
moment um
and they are of a sort of comparable
architectural aesthetic but
at the same time i don't want to leave
out other monuments like
the church of gagi get ani or surprise
at
i'm i'm still really struggling with
that it's this there's it's a
it's an embarrassment of riches really
to try to narrow it down
but ultimately i'll try to try to pick
three
that um give the sense of the breadth
of uh of the tradition and its diversity
so stay stay tuned
uh there's a question about the
interlocking circles that you were
mentioning um did you find the evidence
of such
uh circles in other medieval armenian
architecture or medieval architecture
and
uh were there other ones or was it just
that only one that you saw at ani the
one
the one that you mentioned that's a
great question i've never looked before
i was shocked to find it i mean at first
i thought what
what as usual what the heck is this and
then
um and then i started to realize oh this
could be interesting and
and talk to people and but i've never
you know would like so much
of um when you find something you
it was complete it was complete luck and
um but i i knew that i wanted
to look very carefully at at every every
stone
on the building and that's that's how it
emerged but before so i think i'll be
keeping my eye out now
but um but i haven't seen any anything
like that
there are such interlocking circles and
this is in
bakura's article that you see on walls
in england as well i mean it's
interesting how it's a sort of medieval
phenomenon
um and uh and so she has a kind of very
sort of i don't know global approach to
the subject
um but uh but yeah i
i i had not seen anything like this
elsewhere and i don't think that many of
us who work on armenian architecture
knew about these interlocking circles
at this ani dwelling house so that was
news to me
um i mean maybe people did i certainly
didn't so
question about uh ani as far as it being
available
open to the is it open to the public is
the question and then how long ago did
you visit when was the last time you
visited
yeah um i i whether it is open to the
public right now
i mean not right now but like um you
know in these
in this pandemic moment i'm not sure um
but uh my la and
but it is in general i mean in in normal
times
yeah it's it's accessible right it
wasn't yeah
yeah it was for a while not accessible
but then actually i visited there about
five years ago and
one wasn't too many tourists weren't too
many tourists one guy kind of taking
taking money at the front and that was
about it yeah
yeah the ticket booth right um yeah my
last trip was 2016.
so i was probably there around the same
time that you were okay uh a follow-up
on the sundial uh
question the person that asked about the
sundial had mentioned that
uh it was uh perhaps at the base of the
arcade and the reason
that that was asked because that's where
it's located at horomos and
ah very good point comparing comparing
uh
the other monuments nice with that i
appreciate that
great um
so another person says that those
circular patterns seem like patterns
perhaps found in the irish
uh uh or british manuscript illumination
is their relation
wow i don't know i mean i think there's
this that's that's beyond my expertise
but i think there's um
you know there's there's a similar
interest maybe it's a pan medieval thing
in in in in design in in
geometric ornament and design um that
could you could possibly
explain the similarities that way but
um yeah i'm i'm not sure i think
i mean then again circles are
fascinating things
um so maybe that's also kind of a
universal i'm not sure
so lots of uh lots of compliments
thanking you and
um i think we can stop here because i
don't see really any other new questions
but
we want to thank you christina for
presenting this very
interesting uh presentation as far as
your insights
into uh the work that needs to be done
we'll definitely be looking forward
uh to your work and for those of you
that would like to review the lecture
again
uh it will be on uh the armenian studies
program fresno state youtube channel
uh you'll be able to look at it and and
review it
as well so thank you once again for uh
joining us everyone
thank you again dr maranji and our next
lecture will be on friday
september the 18th with uh dr johannes
kilichda
we'll be talking about the conscription
of armenians into
the ottoman army after the revolution of
1908 and he's our
kazan visiting professor at fresno state
so thank you again and good night
everyone and we'll see you soon thank
you
thank you
