On 3 March 2020, a symposium “The Christian historical-cultural heritage of the peoples of the Armenian Highlands and the adjacent territories”, organized by the Forum of Armenian Associations of Europe (FAAE), and dedicated to the protection of cultural monuments, was opened online.
We are publishing the speech of Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage Museum, at the opening of the symposium.
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The speech by Mikhail Piotrovsky at the opening of the symposium “Saving cultural monuments so that they should save us”
Christian culture is in danger. Both monuments and the very presence of Eastern Christians in the East are endangered. Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq are examples. If the Christian presence disappears in the East, its homeland, there will be no Christianity at all.
Therefore, I welcome this assembly and participate in it, although I consider it a great and fundamental failure that no representatives of the intelligentsia of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the North Caucasus participate in our meeting.
I also strongly dislike the confrontational term “falsification of history”, although this term is often used in Russia. History cannot be falsified, only documents can be falsified. History can be interpreted or distorted.
Words and wording are very important, since a constructive argument is necessary. Otherwise we will lose monuments. I remember well when on the days when fanatics destroyed the mausoleums of Timbuktu, a large meeting of UNESCO was held in St. Petersburg and strong words of condemnation against the destruction of cultural values were said. In response the next day people went out into the streets of Timbuktu and triumphantly destroyed several more mausoleums. This response should always be borne in mind, as well as the fact that it is the situation in Timbuktu that was an example of the first court verdict for the destruction of the cultural heritage.
Apart from condemnation, we primarily need to constantly and continuously record the state of cultural monuments, the smallest changes and all possible, even the smallest threats. I think this is one of the main tasks of this and future meetings.
During the Karabakh war I published the “Derbent Appeal” about the need to unite efforts to continuously monitor the life of all monuments in the Middle East and the Caucasus, including the South and North Caucasus (this is in the style of the modern world full of cameras and iPhones).
The appeal was pronounced in Derbent during the remarkable landmark UNESCO conference. It discussed one of the structures of the Derbent fortress, Naryn-Kala. What had long been thought to be a water reservoir turned out to be the foundation of one of the oldest Christian structures in the Caucasus. And this was enthusiastically perceived by the leadership and the people of the Muslim republic of Dagestan, one of the cultural heirs of Caucasian Albania. The discussion was not about whether it was a temple or not, but what type it was: a basilica or a martyrium. In my opinion, this is exactly what we need today. We suddenly find ourselves amid a medieval massacre in which monuments are also involved. I think that it is monuments and cultural history that will help us get out of these Middle Ages back into the 21st century.
The State Hermitage which I have the honor to head is a universal and encyclopedic museum which has recently renewed its unique Caucasian cultural section. It displays masterpieces of ancient, Christian and Muslim art. Urartian antiquities, including new gifts, ancient vessels from Bori, capitels from Garni, khachkars and Skevr Reliquary, tiles from Pir Hussein Mausoleum and ceramics from Oren Kala, Kubachi reliefs, silk clothes from the Relics Gully. Dagestan, Georgia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Ossetia. All of them are in dialogue with other Hermitage collections and with each other. They speak of the unity of the world culture in general, and remind us that diversity, ethnic and religious, is the great value and wealth of the Caucasus and the Middle East.
This diversity must not only be preserved. It is the diversity that must determine the political agenda. Culture is not beyond politics; it is above politics. Culture must be protected not out of compassion, but because it is our hope for salvation. Every day we must talk about the preservation of cultural monuments. Caring for them must become a virus, a pandemic, a new strain, a mutation in the aggressive human DNA. And this can be done by combining the humanistic traditions of our cultures with the most modern means of information transmission and evaluation.
I strongly hope that people for whom culture, their own and that of other people, is above feelings of hatred and revenge, even justified ones, will determine the life of our world and the fate of Christianity and its monuments, and, thus, its living memory.
Prof. Mikhail Piotrovsky
General Director of the State Hermitage Museum,
Dean of the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.
Full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Arts,
Foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia,
Foreign member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature of the Institute of France and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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The opening of the symposium was also attended by His Holiness Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, the Right Reverend and Right Honourable The Lord Carey of Clifton - former Archbishop of Canterbury (UK), members of the British House of Lords (UK)
