As we have informed, Hamlet Petrosyan, the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) headman of the village of Basen, the region of Shirak, has gotten himself into trouble concerning the restoration of the church built in 1906. He went to the Russian Federation, collected money from the fellow villagers, guest workers, to restore the church and as soon as he came back to Armenia, he was informed at the airport that he was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. They explained to the village headman that he had destroyed the old church without permission.
During a conversation with us, Bishop Mikayel Ajapahyan, the leader of the Shirak diocese, said that he had been the leader of the Shirak diocese for 13 years and he didn’t remember any case, when the Monuments Preservation Department under the Supervision of the Ministry of Culture had restored any church or chapel or had constructed anything. “It is an absolutely useless
institution embezzling, spending money, it is a parasitic institution,” the Father described the Monuments Preservation Department in this manner. In response to a question of www.aravot.am whether such a thing had happened in his experience that a man building a church had been taken to the prosecutor’s office, the Father said, “This is the first time and I hope the last.”
Read the full complaint of the village headman and Bishop Mikayel Ajapahyan’s explanations on this matter in the upcoming issues of Aravot newspaper.
Nune AREVSHATYAN
