1.
Armenia
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Armenia, officially the Republic of Armenia, is a sovereign state in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia. The Republic of Armenia constitutes only one-tenth of historical Armenia, Armenia is a unitary, multi-party, democratic nation-state with an ancient cultural heritage. Urartu was established in 860 BC and by the 6th century BC it was replaced by the Satrapy of Armenia, in the 1st century BC the Kingdom of Armenia reached its height under Tigranes the Great. Armenia became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, in between the late 3rd century to early years of the 4th century, the state became the first Christian nation. The official date of adoption of Christianity is 301 AD. The ancient Armenian kingdom was split between the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires around the early 5th century, under the Bagratuni dynasty, the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia was restored in the 9th century. Declining due to the wars against the Byzantines, the fell in 1045. An Armenian principality and later a kingdom Cilician Armenia was located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea between the 11th and 14th centuries. By the 19th century, Eastern Armenia had been conquered by the Russian Empire, during World War I, Armenians living in their ancestral lands in the Ottoman Empire were systematically exterminated in the Armenian Genocide. By 1920, the state was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, in 1936, the Transcaucasian state was dissolved, transforming its constituent states, including the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, into full Union republics. The modern Republic of Armenia became independent in 1991 during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Armenia recognises the Armenian Apostolic Church, the worlds oldest national church, as the countrys primary religious establishment. The unique Armenian alphabet was invented by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 AD, Armenia is a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Council of Europe and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Armenia supports the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which was proclaimed in 1991, the native Armenian name for the country is Հայք. The name in the Middle Ages was extended to Հայաստան, by addition of the Persian suffix -stan, the further origin of the name is uncertain. It is also postulated that the name Hay comes from one of the two confederated, Hittite vassal states—the Ḫayaša-Azzi. The exonym Armenia is attested in the Old Persian Behistun Inscription as Armina, the ancient Greek terms Ἀρμενία and Ἀρμένιοι are first mentioned by Hecataeus of Miletus. Xenophon, a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and he relates that the people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. According to the histories of both Moses of Chorene and Michael Chamchian, Armenia derives from the name of Aram, a descendant of Hayk
2.
Yerevan
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Yerevan is the capital and largest city of Armenia as well as one of the worlds oldest continuously inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerevan is the administrative, cultural and it has been the capital since 1918, the thirteenth in the history of Armenia, and the seventh located in or around the Ararat plain. The history of Yerevan dates back to the 8th century BC, Erebuni was designed as a great administrative and religious centre, a fully royal capital. During the centuries long Iranian rule over Eastern Armenia that lasted from the early 16th century up to 1828, in 1828, it became part of Imperial Russia alongside the rest of Eastern Armenia which conquered it from Iran through the Russo-Persian War between 1826 and 1828. After World War I, Yerevan became the capital of the First Republic of Armenia as thousands of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire settled in the area, the city expanded rapidly during the 20th century as Armenia became part of the Soviet Union. As of 2011, the population of Yerevan was 1,060,138, according to the official estimate of 2016, the current population of the city is 1,073,700. Yerevan was named the 2012 World Book Capital by UNESCO, Yerevan is an associate member of Eurocities. One theory regarding the origin of Yerevans name is the city was named after the Armenian king, Yervand IV, the last leader of the Orontid Dynasty, and founder of the city of Yervandashat. However, it is likely that the name is derived from the Urartian military fortress of Erebuni. As elements of the Urartian language blended with that of the Armenian one, while looking in the direction of Yerevan, after the ark had landed on Mount Ararat and the flood waters had receded, Noah is believed to have exclaimed, Yerevats. In the late medieval and early periods, when Yerevan was under Turkic and later Persian rule. This name is widely used by Azerbaijanis. The city was known as Erivan under Russian rule during the 19th. The city was renamed back to Yerevan in 1936, up until the mid-1970s the citys name was spelled Erevan, more often than Yerevan, in English sources. The principal symbol of Yerevan is Mount Ararat, which is visible from any area in the capital, the seal of the city is a crowned lion on a pedestal with the inscription Yerevan. The lions head is turned backwards while it holds a scepter using the front leg. The symbol of eternity is on the breast of the lion with a picture of Ararat in the upper part, the emblem is a rectangular shield with a blue border. On 27 September 2004, Yerevan adopted an anthem, Erebuni-Yerevan, written by Paruyr Sevak and it was selected in a competition for a new anthem and new flag that would best represent the city
3.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
4.
Yerevan City Council
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The Yerevan City Council is the lawmaking body of the city of Yerevan. It has 65 members elected by Party-list proportional representation system, headed by the Yerevan Mayor, the Council serves as a check against the mayor in a mayor-council government model. The council monitors performance of city agencies and makes land use decisions as well as legislating on a variety of other issues. The City Council also has responsibility for approving the city budget. Yerevan City Council elections are being conducted four years with proportional lists of parties. The City Council has 65 members, the first person in the list of the party that has received more than 40% of seats is considered elected mayor. If the parties fail to gather so many votes, the mayor is being elected by City Council, the construction of the building was completed in November 2004 during the period of Mayor Yervand Zakharyan, with a cost of AMD3.1 billion. It was originally designed by architect Jim Torosyan, the construction was set at the beginning of the 1980s but stopped in 1991 due to financial difficulties. It remained unfinished until August 2003 when the process was continued and completed within 15 months. The city hall is a building with a total area of 13,500 m2. The main entrance is topped with the traditional Armenian symbol of endless circles representing the eternity and it has a 47-metre-high rectangular clock tower with the word ԵՐԵՎԱՆ carved in Armenian script, decorated with traditional ornaments. The tower is surrounded with walls at its top. The Yerevan History Museum is located in a building just to the west of the city hall
5.
Armenian language
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The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. Like Hellenic Greek, it has its own branch in the language tree. It is the language of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. It has historically been spoken throughout the Armenian Highlands and today is spoken in the Armenian diaspora. Armenian has its own script, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots. Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages and it is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within that family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups, Armenia was a monolingual country by the 2nd century BC at the latest. Its language has a literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian, and to an extent by Greek, Persian. There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, with which most contemporary dialects are mutually intelligible and he is also credited by some with the creation of the Caucasian Albanian alphabet. In The Anabasis, Xenophon describes many aspects of Armenian village life and he relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. W. M. However, unlike shared innovations, the retention of archaisms is not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development. Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities between the two meant that Iranian and Armenian were the same language. The distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann used the method to distinguish two layers of Iranian loans from the older Armenian vocabulary. Meillets hypothesis became popular in the wake of his Esquisse, eric P. Hamp supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis, anticipating even a time when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian. Nevertheless, as Fortson comments, by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, graeco--Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-third millennium BC
6.
Cafesjian Museum of Art
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Officially, Cafesjian Center for the Arts is an art museum in Yerevan, Armenia. Inspired by the vision of its founder, Gerard L. Cafesjian, over one million people have visited the Center annually since its opening. The museum is directed and run and the Cafesjian Museum Foundation, the Cafesjian Museum Foundation was established in April 2002 in Yerevan under the auspices of the Government of the Republic of Armenia and the Cafesjian Museum Foundation of America. The Armenian government provided the Foundation with the half-constructed Yerevan Cascade complex along with the surrounding area, the construction of the Cafesjian Museum was launched in April 2005 and was expected to be completed in April 2008. However, with a delay, the grand opening of the museum took place on 17 November 2009. The Cafesjian Museum Foundation invested over 35 million dollars to complete the reconstruction of the Cascade, the museum is situated within the cascade complex of Yerevan and along the adjacent pedestrian zone and gardens at the entrance to the cascade from the Tamanyan Street. The beginning of the construction of the dates back to 1971, designed by architects Jim Torosyan, Aslan Mkhitaryan. The first phase of the plan was completed in 1980, the cascade is a complex massive staircase on both sides with fountains in between, ascending up from the Tamanyan Street gardens and pedestrian zone. Having five levels, the number of the stairs is 572, however, only between 2002 and 2009 the complex was developed and the museum was opened through the Cafesjian Family Foundation. The New York Times described it as a mad work of architectural megalomania and architectural recovery, the museum consists of the 2 separate sections, the external Cafesjian Sculpture Garden, and the internal Cafesjian Art Galleries. The Cafesjian Sculpture Garden is the front gardens of the cascade where many sculptures are exhibited, sculptures are also exhibited in the garden terrace along the massive steps and fountains ascending up from the Tamanyan street gardens. With unobstructed walkways, long vistas, and formal garden areas, the galleries are home to a massive collection of glass artwork exhibited in several galleries and sections, including permanent shows or temporary exhibitions. Khanjyan Gallery is home to the large scale mural triptych History of Armenia by renowned Soviet, sasuntsi Davit Gallery includes basrelief by Artashes Hovsepyan depicting scenes from the Armenian epic fable David of Sasun. The majority of the collection are derived from the private collection of the founder Gerard L. Cafesjian. Other important glass artists in the collection include Dale Chihuly, Bohumil Elias, Pavel Hlava, Jaromír Rybák, Ivana Šrámková, Bertil Vallien, Lino Tagliapietra, Mark Peiser, and Hiroshi Yamano. The museum organizes regular programmed events throughout the year, Encounters with Art, is a program launched in October 2010 as a series of events for adults and it takes place on the first Thursday of each month. It takes place at the first Wednesday of each month at the Special Events Auditorium, the program was launched in July 2010. Traditional Folk Dances at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, it is performed by the Karin Dance Ensemble on the last Friday of each month between May and September
7.
Mount Ararat
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Mount Ararat is a snow-capped and dormant compound volcano in the eastern extremity of Turkey. It consists of two volcanic cones, Greater Ararat, the highest peak in Turkey and the Armenian plateau with an elevation of 5,137 m. The Ararat massif is about 40 km in diameter, scholars agree the biblical mountains of Ararat do not refer to specifically Mt. Ararat. Nevertheless, it has perceived as the traditional resting place of Noahs Ark since the 11th century. It is the national symbol of Armenia and has been considered a sacred mountain by Armenians. It is featured prominently in Armenian literature and art and is an icon for Armenian irredentism, along with Noahs Ark, it is depicted on the coat of arms of Armenia. The first efforts to reach Ararats summit were made in the Middle Ages, however, it was not until 1829 when Friedrich Parrot and Khachatur Abovian, accompanied with four others, made the first recorded ascent. Mount Ararat forms a near-quadripoint between Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran and its summit is located some 16 km west of both the Iranian border and the border of the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan, and 32 km south of the Armenian border. Following the 1826–28 Russo-Persian War and the Treaty of Turkmenchay, the Persian controlled territory was ceded to the Russian Empire, Little Ararat became the point where the Turkish, Persian, and Russian imperial frontiers converged. The current international boundaries were formed throughout the 20th century, the mountain came under Turkish control during the 1920 Turkish–Armenian War. It formally became part of Turkey according to the 1921 Treaty of Moscow, in the late 1920s, Turkey crossed the Iranian border and occupied the eastern flank of Lesser Ararat as part of its effort to quash the Kurdish Ararat rebellion. The Kurdish rebels were using the area as a haven against the state in their uprising, Iran eventually agreed to cede the area to Turkey in a territorial exchange. The Iran-Turkey boundary skirts east of Lesser Ararat, the peak of the Ararat massif. Ararat is the Hebrew spelling of Urartu, a kingdom existed in the Armenian plateau in the 9th-6th centuries BC. The mountain is known as Ararat in European languages, however, none of the native peoples have traditionally referred to the mountain by that name. The traditional Armenian name is Masis, which is transliterated as Massis. However, nowadays, the terms Masis and Ararat are both widely, often interchangeably, used in Armenian, the peaks are referred to in plural as Մասիսներ Masisner. Greater Ararat is known as simply Masis or Մեծ Մասիս, while Lesser Ararat is known as Sis or Փոքր Մասիս
8.
Fernando Botero
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Fernando Botero Angulo is a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor. Born in Medellín, his style, also known as Boterismo, depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume. Self-titled the most Colombian of Colombian artists early on, he came to prominence when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1958. Working most of the year in Paris, in the last three decades he has achieved recognition for his paintings, drawings and sculpture, with exhibitions across the world. His art is collected by major international museums, corporations. In 2012, he received the International Sculpture Centers Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, Fernando Botero was born the second of three sons to David Botero and Flora Angulo. David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, died of an attack when Fernando was four. His mother worked as a seamstress, an uncle took a major role in his life. Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches. He received his education in Antioquia Ateneo and, thanks to a scholarship. In 1944, Boteros uncle sent him to a school for matadors for two years, in 1948, Botero at age 16 had his first illustrations published in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano, one of the most important newspapers in Medellín. He used the money he was paid to attend school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia. Boteros work was first exhibited in 1948, in a show along with other artists from the region. From 1949 to 1950, Botero worked as a set designer and his first one-man show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival. In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, in Madrid, Botero studied at the Academia de San Fernando. In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had an exhibit at the Leo Matiz gallery. In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre and he lived in Florence, Italy from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters. In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris and he has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars
9.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
10.
Armenian Americans
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Armenian Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community in the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia, the first major wave of Armenian immigration to the US took place in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the US following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, between the 1960s and 1980s Armenians from Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Turkey migrated to America as a result of political instability in those countries. At around the same time immigration from the Soviet Union began and it accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The 2011 American Community Survey estimated that 483,366 Americans held full or partial Armenian ancestry, Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The city of Glendale in the Los Angeles metropolitan area is thought to be the center of Armenian American life. The Armenian American community is the most politically influential community of the Armenian diaspora, the Armenian General Benevolent Union is known for its financial support and promotion of Armenian culture and Armenian language schools. The first recorded Armenian to visit North America was Martin the Armenian, in 1653–54, two Armenians from Constantinople were invited to Virginia to raise silk worms. A few other Armenians are recorded as having come to the US in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the 1770s over 70 Armenians had settled in the colonies. Khachig Oskanian, a Constantinople American missionary school student, arrived in America in 1834 to pursue higher education and he later worked for the New York Herald Tribune and became the New York Press Club president. Many Armenians followed him and went to the US for education, during the Civil War three Armenian doctors—Simeon Minasian, Garabed Galstian, and Baronig Matevosian—worked at military hospitals in Philadelphia. The only Armenian known to have participated in hostilities was Khachadour Paul Garabedian, the number of Armenians rose from 20 in 1854 to around 70 by the 1870s. In the late 1870s, small Armenian communities existed in New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, by the late 1880s, their number reached 1,500. Many of them were young students of the American Evangelical Missions spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. About 40% came from the Province of Kharpert, before 1899, immigrants were not classified by ethnicity, but rather by country of birth, obscuring the ethnic origins of many Armenians. After 1869, however, Armenians from the regions of the Ottoman Empire were registered as Armenian in American records. The number of Armenians who migrated to the US from 1820 to 1898 is estimated to be around 4,000. Armenians began to arrive in the US in unprecedented numbers in the nineteenth century, most notably after the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–96
Yerevan, Armenia
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