• News
• Links
• Partners
• Site map

The characteristic features of the development of the Armenian culture.

The Armenian culture has a thousand-year history and played a special role in the life of the Armenian people. Along with the national religion it served to preserve the Armenian ethnic group, as well as to protect it from the neighboring more powerful ethnic communities for centuries. Gradually, the tradition of national culture has been formed, which allowed to crystallize the most characteristic features of this culture and pass it on to future generations.

The Armenian culture was a complex and flexible system which accurately reflected the significant problems of the era, responded to the requirements of time and environment. Due to its geographical position, Armenia was a connecting link between Europe and Asia (the East and the West). Therefore, it was constantly in crossroad of interaction between different peoples, however, it maintained its own identity and uniqueness.

The Armenian culture is a significant phenomenon from the standpoint of international culture, as the Armenian people made a worthy contribution to the common cultural treasury of the world by carefully preserving and enriching their own culture. As a rule, it was alien to our national image to imitate to even more magnificent and comprehensives culture. The most dominant idea was the tendency to preserve national cultural values and to leave this legacy to future generations.

Having a clear understanding of their own cultural contribution and taking into consideration the achievements of past generations, Armenian cultural figures have always faced dangerous situations, such as radical and comprehensive changes in the military-political, economic and cultural life of the region. In such circumstances, the Armenian national culture revealed an amazing ability to respond adequately to the phenomena of the environment. By adapting to changing external conditions in time, the Armenian culture has played an extremely important role in the issue of improving ethnic preservation mechanisms. The cultural innovation were adapted to the Armenian environment and found their rightful place beside the traditional cultural values. Therefore, Armenia cannot be compared, for example with eastern countries, such as China and Japan which preserved their cultural characteristics (particularly in the late Middle Ages) through separating from the rest of the world. Armenian national culture has never avoided borrowing material and spiritual values from even distant countries. Interactions dictated by the requirements of the internal cultural developments not only ensured the steady development of the Armenian culture, but also contributed to the renewal and flexibility of the Armenian culture. As the international experience shows, isolated cultural systems not only were knocked out of the total flow of human development, but were also unable to perceive the creative innovations from the outside world.

In the geopolitical and demographic conditions Armenian cultural centers back to medieval times have been scattered on a vast territory and developed their activities in different geographical, ethnic and even cultural environment.

In such circumstances, though the Armenian culture was inevitably subjected to foreign influences, and different directions of development were manifested in its framework, the regulating function of cultural traditions was able to ensure the integrity of the cultural system and its profound national seal. In modern times, when the two major parts of our people were forced to be separated from each other and Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian literary languages were formed, the development of the national culture took place taking into account the achievements of world culture, which also had a significant impact on the cultural development Western and Eastern Armenians.

Margaryan H.