Prof. Kouymjian’s Spring Activities

(This article is a continuation of the March 2002 Hye Sharzhoom report on Professor Dickran Kouymjian’s sabbatical leave activities.)

Later in the month he traveled to southern Italy, where the University of Lecce organized an international conference entitled “San Gregorio armeno e il suo culto nell’italia meridionale” (Saint Gregory the Armenian and His Cult in Southern Italy). He presented a paper entitled “The Armenian Iconography of St. Gregory the Illuminator,” discussing in detail with the aid of some 60 slides the different ways Gregory was depicted in Armenian art and how we are to interpret the great variety of images. During his stay in the Apulia region he was able to visit other sites devoted to St. Gregory, including the church of St. Gregory in the city of Nardo, where he was allowed to photograph a hitherto unknown right hand relic of St. Gregory the Illuminator preserved in the treasury. According to him, there are now four right hand relics of the founder of the Armenian church, on which he is preparing a separate study. Professor Giusto Traina, one of Italy’s foremost young classical scholars and an authority on early Armenian history and texts, organized the conference. Dr. Kouymjian had invited Traina to participate in the international symposium on the father of Armenian history, Movses of Khoren, that he had organized in Paris ten years ago, the proceedings of which were published last year.

At the end of October, Prof. Kouymjian was invited to present a paper entitled “Art in Exile: Armenian Artists of the Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries,” in Leiden, The Netherlands, at an international symposium titled “Armenia Beyond Territory. The Evolution of the Individual Living in the Diaspora.” The one-day conference held on October 30th was part of the inauguration of three separate exhibits on Armenian art as part of Holland’s celebration of the 1700th anniversary of Armenian Christianity. The exhibitions were held in Leiden and in Utrecht and comprised ancient, medieval and modern Armenian art. Dr. Kouymjian in his paper discussed in detail the question “What is Armenian Art?” He asked the audience to reflect on the possible answers to the question and on the arbitrary nature of the term “Armenian Art.”

Currently, the Professor Kouymjian is deep into the correction of the proofs of the major publication on the history and analysis of Armenian writing from the invention of the Armenian alphabet in the fifth century to our time. The book, to be published by Aarhus University Press in Denmark, is entitled Album of Armenian Paleography and is the fruit of eleven years of research he carried out in libraries and archives throughout the world with Prof. Michael Stone, head of the Armenian Program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Dr. Henning, a classical Armenian scholar and for the past 15 years president of Denmark’s second largest university in Aarhus. The folio volume, scheduled to appear in the first half of 2002, will be more than 500 pages and contain over 200 full-page color plates and a very dense text and many comparative alphabet tables illustrating the various forms of Armenian manuscript writing.