Thursday 10 June 2010

Armenian News

Associated Press
Archaeologists kicking up their heels at finding what may be world's
oldest leather shoe
RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP Science Writer
June 9, 2010 | 2:12 p.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — About 5,500 years ago someone in the mountains of
Armenia put his best foot forward in what is now the oldest leather
shoe ever found.

It'll never be confused with a penny loafer or a track shoe, but the
well-preserved footwear was made of a single piece of leather, laced
up the front and back, researchers reported Wednesday in PLoS One, a
journal of the Public Library of Science.

Worn and shaped by the wearer's right foot, the shoe was found in a
cave along with other evidence of human occupation. The shoe had been
stuffed with grass, which dated to the same time as the leather of the
shoe — between 5,637 and 5,387 years ago.

"This is great luck," enthused archaeologist Ron Pinhasi of University
College Cork in Cork, Ireland, who led the research team.

"We normally only find broken pots, but we have very little
information about the day-to-day activity" of these ancient people.
"What did they eat? What did they do? What did they wear? This is a
chance to see this ... it gives us a real glimpse into society," he
said in a telephone interview.

Previously the oldest leather shoe discovered in Europe or Asia was on
the famous Otzi, the "Iceman" found frozen in the Alps a few years ago
and now preserved in Italy. Otzi has been dated to 5,375 and 5,128
years ago, a few hundred years more recent than the Armenian shoe.

Otzi's shoes were made of deer and bear leather held together by a
leather strap. The Armenian shoe appears to be made of cowhide,
Pinhasi said.

Older sandals have been found in a cave in Missouri, but those were
made of fiber rather than leather.

The shoe found in what is now Armenia was found in a pit, along with a
broken pot and some wild goat horns.

But Pinhasi doesn't think it was thrown away. There was discarded
material that had been tossed outside the cave, while this pit was
inside in the living area. And while the shoe had been worn, it wasn't
worn out.

It's not clear if the grass that filled the shoe was intended as a
lining or insulation, or to maintain the shape of the shoe when it was
stored, according to the researchers.

The Armenian shoe was small by current standards — European size 37 or
U.S. women's size 7 — but might have fit a man of that era, according
to Pinhasi.

He described the shoe as a single piece of leather cut to fit the
foot. The back of the shoe was closed by a lace passing through four
sets of eyelets. In the front, 15 pairs of eyelets were used to lace
from toe to top.

There was no reinforcement in the sole, just the one layer of soft
leather. "I don't know how long it would last in rocky terrain,"
Pinhasi said.

He noted that the shoe is similar to a type of footwear common in the
Aran Islands, west of Ireland, up until the 1950s. The Irish version,
known as "pampooties" reportedly didn't last long, he said.

"In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing
technique and style of this (Armenian) shoe and those found across
Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn
for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse
region," Pinhasi said.

While the Armenian shoe was soft when unearthed, the leather has begun
to harden now that it is exposed to air, Pinhasi said.

Oh, and unlike a lot of very old shoes, it didn't smell.

Pinhasi said the shoe is currently at the Institute of Archaeology in
Yerevan, but he hopes it will be sent to laboratories in either
Switzerland or Germany where it can be treated for preservation and
then returned to Armenia for display in a museum.

Pinhasi, meanwhile, is heading back to Armenia this week, hoping the
other shoe will drop.

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, the
Chitjian Foundation, the Gfoeller Foundation, the Steinmetz Family
Foundation, the Boochever Foundation and the Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology at UCLA.

The Armenian Observer
June 4, 2010 Friday 3:34 AM EST
Gentle Armenian Police on Duty
Jun. 4, 2010 (The Armenian Observer delivered by Newstex)


Gentle Armenian police officers bravely holding hands in anticipation
of an army of 20 opposition activists © PanArmenian photo via Banadzev


Following 6 days of blocking oppositions entry to Yerevans Liberty
square, the kind, gentle and caring Armenian police officers, have
finally allowed 1 (thats one!) oppositionist to hold a sitting protest
action in the square, which has been the site of all key political
gatherings in this country.

The brave Armenian police officers have recently acquired quite a fame
for being delicate and gentle. A 22-year-old girl, a
photographer-journalist of Å`Armenian Times opposition newspaper, has
been charged for assaulting police officers during one of the days
when police were preventing a group of oppositionists to enter the
square.

As one can clearly see from the video footage placed on the police
site, the girl strikes the hat off a police officers head. That seems
to have been interpreted by the police as an assault, which in the
initial formulation of the charge sounded as Å`exercising
non-life-threatening violence against the police officers. Thats
probably why the Ë`dangerous girl was pulled into a police van by a
group of 10 police officers the next day¦ the police did come
prepared! Somebody, list the names of the 10 police-heroes who dared
approach the criminal-girl.

Yes, we can rest assured, our Armenian police are protecting us
against evil young girls and a handful of fierce opposition activists.


RFE/RL Report
British Group To Widen Nagorno-Karabakh Demining
07.06.2010
Lusine Musayelian

A British humanitarian organization said on Monday that it has cleared
the bulk of Nagorno-Karabakh's war-affected territory of landmines and
unexploded ordnance and will soon start demining Armenian-controlled
areas outside the disputed region.


Representatives of the HALO Trust made the announcement as they marked
the 10th anniversary of its permanent presence in Karabakh at an
official ceremony attended by the Karabakh Armenian leadership.

Karabakh President Bako Sahakian praised the group's decade-long
demining efforts in his unrecognized republic that have been financed
by the U.S. government and non-governmental Western charities. `We
regard saved lives as the biggest result and value of the work done by
them,' he said in a speech at the ceremony held in Khachen, a village
in Karabakh's eastern Askeran district.

The HALO Trust says that ever since 2000 its has destroyed over 50,000
landmines, cluster munitions and other items of unexploded ordnance in
125 square kilometers of land. According to its regional director,
Andrew Moore, that means more than 80 percent of Karabakh territory
mined by Armenian and Azerbaijani forces during the 1991-1994 is now
considered safe.

Aknaghbyur, a village in southern Karabakh close to the now
Armenian-occupied Fizuli district in Azerbaijan proper, has been one
of the biggest beneficiaries of HALO's demining efforts. `Six hundred
hectares of our agricultural land have been cleared,' Artur Babayan,
the village mayor also attending the ceremony, told RFE/RL's Armenian
service. `We had suffered many casualties until then. Thank God, our
people are now able to safely cultivate the land.'

Karabakh has continued to regularly report civilian casualties even
after 2000. According to government data, 74 local residents have been
killed and 254 others wounded in landmine explosions over the past
decade.

`The most typical result of a mine explosion is limb amputation,' said
Vartan Tadevosian, director of the Stepanakert-based Rehabilitation
Center for landmine victims. The center's main objective is to make
the maimed victims `as independent as possible in their life,'
Tadevosian told RFE/RL.

Moore revealed that HALO, which operates in nine countries and has
nearly 8,000 mine-clearers, now plans to expand its operations into
some of the Azerbaijani districts around Karabakh that were fully or
partly occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces during the war. He said
that work will be financed by a fresh grant from the Julia Burke
Foundation, a California-based charity that has already supported
HALO's activities in Karabakh since 2007.

`We are extremely grateful for the support of the Julia Burke
Foundation and their funding our clearance in the green areas,' Moore
told RFE/RL.

`I hope very much that Azerbaijan will not try to influence other
potential donors willing to support demining efforts in
Nagorno-Karabakh,' said Caroline Cox, a pro-Armenian vice-speaker of
the British House of Lords who has frequently visited Karabakh since
the early 1990s. He argued that those efforts have a `humanitarian,
rather than political' character.

Azerbaijan has repeatedly condemned HALO for engaging in landmine
clearance in Karabakh without its permission. Its reaction to the
charity's continued operations there will likely remain the same.
Bishop's killing reignites fears for Christians
The Times (London)
June 4, 2010 Friday
Alexander Christie-Miller


A Roman Catholic Bishop has been stabbed to death in Turkey, allegedly
by his chauffeur. Luigi Padovese was attacked outside his home in
Iskenderun the day before he was due to leave for Cyprus to meet the
Pope.

Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz, the Governor of Hatay province, said that
the alleged killer had been the bishop's driver for four and a half
years. "We have learnt that the suspect had psychological problems and
was receiving treatment," he said.

Bishop Padovese, 63, had served as the head of the Catholic Church in
Anatolia since 2004.

The murder could reignite the debate over the safety of the Christian
minority, who account for less than 1 per cent of the 70 million
population.

After caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were published in newspapers
in 2006 a 16-year-old boy shot dead a Catholic priest in Trabzon. The
following year the editor of Turkey's Armenian Agos newspaper was
killed. Five people are also standing trial for the alleged killing of
five Christians at a Bible publishing house in 2007.

Emma Sinclair-Webb, from Human Rights Watch, said: "This may be an
ordinary crime. But there has been a history in this country of crimes
against these kinds of minority groups."
ArmeniaNow
Passions over Holy Cross: An Armenian church in Georgia faces identity issue
Arts and Culture | 09.06.10 | 15:01
“There should be an appeal of cooperation to the Georgian authorities
to restore the church with the assistance of local and Armenian
experts,” says Simonyan.
By Gayane Mkrtchyan
ArmeniaNow reporter


A dispute over the “faith” identity of an Armenian church in Georgia
has overshadowed the poor condition in which the nonfunctioning
medieval house of worship has been for years.

Conflicting reports about the fate of the Holy Cross Church in
Akhaltsikhe, an Armenian-populated province in present-day Georgia,
were made early this year, as some groups in Armenia claimed the
Armenian traces of the church were being erased under the guise of
planned renovation.

The non-functioning church’s status has been another point at issue
amid reports that it has been handed over to the Roman Catholic
Church.

“There should be an appeal of cooperation to the Georgian authorities
to restore the church with the assistance of local and Armenian
specialists and the issue of the church’s belonging should be left to
our spiritual fathers to decide. It can never be allowed that the
church becomes a faith center of Georgian Catholics. This will become
a basis for everything that is Armenian to be distorted or destroyed,”
says Hakob Simonyan, a candidate of historical sciences, who heads a
scientific research center on historical-cultural heritage affiliated
with the Armenian Ministry of Culture.

A group of Armenian experts was recently in Georgia over the matter.
Hakobyan says the visit was prompted by reports from Akhaltsikhe
Armenians in March about earth-moving activities within the Church’s
premises. The Armenian expedition, however, has confirmed that the
activity was for “excavation purposes” rather than constituted
demolition as claimed by some advocacy groups.

The expert says the excavation has in fact reaffirmed the Armenian
origins of the church, moreover its belonging to the Apostolic Church,
which has been questioned by historians in Georgia.

“Four cross stones, or khachkars, laid inside the eastern wall of the
altar were uncovered and three of them had Armenian inscriptions on
them. The khachkar that mentions the year 1366 is the most important
piece of evidence among them,” says the center’s director. “This
testifies to the fact that Armenians have lived in this territory from
[at least] the 14th century onward. And the far-fetched versions that
Armenians had not lived in the Akhaltsikhe region before the [1829-30]
exodus of ethnic Armenians from Karin [in modern-day Turkey] do not
correspond to the facts.”

The possibility of handing the church over to the Catholic community
in Georgia has been discussed lately.

Hakobyan says that the church could not have belonged to the Catholic
Church, which appeared in Akhaltsikhe no earlier than in the 17th
century. Meanwhile, he says, evidence shows that the church is
Armenian
Apostolic.

From 1830 the Armenian Catholic community of Akhaltsikhe divided into
two parts: the indigenous folks and those who had come from Grand
Hayk. Those who had come from the Karin province were
Armenian-speaking Armenians. And the “locals” gradually became
Georgian-speaking and assimilated with the Georgian community.

As a new community, the Armenian Catholics became owners of the
churches in the 17th century and the churches were later passed to the
Catholic community.

“And the Holy Cross, which was initially founded as an apostolic
church, is one of such churches,” says monuments expert Samvel
Karapetyan. The church in the upper district of Rabat has remained
non-functioning. Medieval khachkars were built around it; it also has
an old cemetery with tombstones, a majority of them bearing
inscriptions.

Karapetyan has long protested the destruction of monuments of Armenian
cultural heritage outside Armenia, including in Georgia. He contends
that the destruction of Armenian monuments in Tbilisi and
Armenian-populated provinces is part of a Georgian policy. The expert
cites the example of a large inscription on a 17th-century Armenian
church located in-between two Armenian-populated villages, Damnia and
Sion, in Georgia’s Marneluli province, which has disappeared.

Karapetyan’s work “Monuments of Armenian Culture and the State
Policies of Georgians” published in 1998 presents more than 100 pieces
of evidence and photographs showing how Armenian monuments have been
destroyed in Georgia. An English-language version of the book is
expected to be published this year. Karapetyan believes Armenia ought
to raise the issue of monuments destruction at an international court.

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