Raffi Kortoshian, Deputy Director of the Research on Armenian Architecture Foundation (RAA), presented the 15th issue of the RAA Foundation’s “Vardzk” magazine and his “Archbishop Artak: Collection of the Armenian National-Ethnographic Museum of Tehran after Manukyan” illustrated booklet. He noted that a number of interesting articles were published in the next issue of “Vardzk,” the first of which is dedicated to Armen Hakhnazaryan’s 80th birthday.
“Armen Hakhnazaryan is the founding director of our foundation and the first Armenian to visit Western Armenia since the 1960s who started a systematic study of destroyed Armenian monuments. After doing that for many years, he also founded the RAA Foundation,” said Raffi Kortoshian. As for the second article, it is dedicated to Samvel Karapetyan, director and chairman of the AWF Foundation Yerevan office and monument expert. There are some interesting facts in this article. The author of the third article is Raffi Kortoshian.
“It is no secret that our culture has been plundered, destroyed, and razed in Western Armenia for 100 years, and even the remaining fragments are being plundered today both by looters and state bodies. There will be not one article on this topic, but a series of articles.
For more than 15 years, when we interact with different people who are engaged in looting and other similar activities, they send us various photos, which contain items, inscriptions, tombstones found as a result of vandalism. These are the relics we present in our magazine. There are even inscriptions on royal rings and stamps stolen from schools, photos of which have reached us. Those schools were destroyed after the genocide,” added the deputy director of the RAA Foundation. He gave an example, noting that in the new issue of “Vardzk,” the seal of a school found in one of the villages of Yerznka was printed that listed 1913 as the date of foundation, and the date of the foundation of the school was not known before.
Gohar Hakobyan
