The Krouzian Center and the Memory of a Nation
Dickran Kouymjian
Nov. 15, 1996. UC Berkeley

    The symbolic significance of the new Krikor and Zovinar Krouzian Study Center in the Bancroft Library should be evident to everyone present for today's inauguration. The Bancroft Library has been keeper of the memory of California and the western United States for a century. It has served as one of mankind's guardians, protecting a legacy to be used by generations to come. In the medieval world, and in Armenia until the Genocide of 1915, when historical time abruptly and violently stopped, that task was reserved for monasteries and the monks working in them. They were the writer-librarians, the guardians of thought and tradition, of their time. Armenia was particularly rich in monasteries inhabited by scribes, binders, and miniaturists, that is the laborers of the ancient book industry, producing one at a time and by hand, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. These leather bound books with parchment or paper pages were the repository of language and literature, philosophy and theology, history and art: in short, civilization. Thirty thousand Armenian manuscripts miraculously survived the destruction of fifteen centuries of invasion, pillage, and massacre. They are scattered in libraries and museums everywhere in the world. One of them is here in the Bancroft Library, a seventeenth century Gospelbook, a gift of Phoebe Hearst donated sometime after the First World War. How and from where the Hearst family got it is not known, but almost certainly the manuscript came on the western market after the genocide of 1915. In that sense it too is one of the survivors, as are some with us today and as were almost all of the parents and grandparents of the Armenians present in this room. The Bancroft Gospel is illuminated with elaborately decorated title pages of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and with four full-page portraits of each of the Evangelists. Only part of the scribal memorial has survived, and, thus, we are deprived of the exact date and place of copying, unusual for a manuscript, which by Armenian standards is quite late. But we do know the name of the scribe, Nikoghos or Nicholas, and there is good reason to believe he is the same Nicholas who worked during this period in the Crimea, one of the major centers of the Armenian diaspora from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The precision with which scribes recorded the details of the production of manuscripts is a hallmark of the Armenian tradition. Architects, stone cutters, sculptors, metalworkers, ceramicists, weavers, and especially scribes and miniaturists were careful to leave an inscription, in classical Armenian, on the objects they fashioned, whether artistic or utilitarian. This phenomenon has often been remarked upon, since craftsmen in the Middle Ages usually remained anonymous until the Renaissance. The Armenians used the dedicatory inscription from the very beginning of the invention of their alphabet in the early fifth century, and gradually turned it into a precise literary form, like the ode or the sonnet. The scribe's memorial would read something like this : "I, Nicholas, the unworthy and sinful scribe, copied this Gospelbook at the monastery of Sanahin in the year 770 of the Armenian era (that is 1321 A.D.) in bitter and evil times, when the nation of archers (that is the Mongols) held Armenia under tyrannical sway, and during the reign of the Armenian King Levon IV and the Catholicosate of Constantine III," after which the scribe would add any one of a number of formulas, from asking forgiveness for his many sins, to remembering all the members of his family. Often he would also offer an original account of just what was happening in the immediate surroundings during the months he was copying the manuscript. In our time the equivalent of the memorial is an inscription on a plaque naming the patron or artist, like the one which will be on the Krouzian Study Center. The scribal memorials of manuscripts, called by us colophons, are the repository of much of the thought and feeling of Armenians as they lived and created over the centuries. In Armenian, the word for colophon is hishadagaran, literally a repository of memorials, from the Armenian verb, hishel, to remember. Memory is remembering, and history is memory. Today we are here to honor, but also to remember the life of a man and a woman, Krikor Krouzian and Zovinar Krouzian Davidian, whose lives have been caught up in the history of our century and the saga of the Armenian people. We are asked to remember, and though we would like to be selective about remembrance, instinctively choosing the joyous and rejecting that which is painful, we, nevertheless, find memory rushing, uncontrolably toward dark and sorrowful corners of the past. There is a certain harmony in the dedication of the Krouzian Study Center in that building devoted to storing the collective record of human history on the campus of one of this country's finest universities. For a library and a university are places where human memory is most intensely and most naturally studied and examined. The world outlook of the Krouzians, and most Armenians, is still shaped, for good or for bad, by the past. Armenians are inheritors of a long and rich culture, over-crowded by change and movement and displacement. They are also burdened by the task of preserving that culture, guaranteeing it will be remembered, or perhaps more simply, not forgotten. Surely it is this consideration which compelled Armenians in the past to inscribe every object they fashioned and dedicate every manuscript that passed through their hands. Confronted with the possibility of annihilation, Armenians wanted to make sure they would not be forgotten, and if they survived, to make sure later generations would understand exactly how they suffered, yet survived. Afterall, is it not history, the sacred record of the nation, which has allowed Armenians to take courage, to move forward even in anguish? Is it not the knowing that once there was a rich, at times even glorious, Armenian past, that permitted them to believe in the possibility of a wondrous future? It is this memory, this collective remembering, that both haunts and strengthens any nation or people. The Krouzian Study Center will from this day on act as a focal point of memory for the Armenians of California. Already the Bancroft Library, of which the Krouzian Room is now an integral part, has an important Armenian collection, including the Hearst Gospel and the beautifully decorated and recently acquired fifteenth century manuscript page, which you will see shortly in the Krouzian room. The Library also has a rich series of archives on the history of California Armenians, including the materials patiently gathered by Anne Avakian, Nectar Davidian, Richard Hagopian, and Samuel Mahdesian, as well as a number of carefully recorded oral histories of early settlers including Sox Setrakian and Henry Saroyan. The presence of an Armenian Study Center in the Archival Library of the University of California can only act as a catalyst to study this rich and well catalogued collection. The Krouzian Center, by its very existence, will also encourage Armenians to take a dynamic interest in the Bancroft Library itself and to help it expand the Armenian collection. November 15, 1996 will in turn become an historical day, remembered and inscribed in history. The Krikor and Zovinar Krouzian Studies Center joins the William Saroyan Endowed Chair in Armenian Studies at U.C. Berkeley as the cornerstones of a solid and permanent foundation for the preservation and the study of the Armenian experience. Together they will assure the Memory of a Nation.