Welcome

A brief bio

I was born in the shtetl known as the Armenian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, in the heart of a labyrinth of quaint, serpentine streets and alleys, where one of the most dynamic people of the Middle East, the Armenians, make their home. I was the second son in a family that would number eight, a new generation of descendants of a precious and proud heritage. Claiming descent from the conquering armies of Tigranes II, King of Kings, Armenians have been living in Jerusalem for over 2,000 years. Pagan idol-worshippers, they had left their home in the land where Noah’s Ark had come to rest, seeking the distant glory their emperor had promised them. The invading Armenian army pitched its tents along the skirts of the Judean Hills through which the River Jordan meanders on its merry way to the Dead Sea. Some of the adventurers who tasted of the hypnotic waters of the river, fell under its spell, and decided to settle in the region. Three centuries later, in the year 301 of the Christian Era, their original homeland, Armenia, abandoned paganism following the miraculous cure of their ailing king Tiridates, and adopted the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as its state religion, the first nation in the history of the world to do so. The new converts smashed the lifeless statues of their gods and goddesses, Anahit, Vahakn and their cohorts, and took up the wooden cross as their crutch. This seminal milestone in their history was to unleash a borderless tsunami of pilgrims, wending their way to the Holy City by sea and by land, on foot or on the back of camels and donkeys, in long caravans that sometimes trailed 700 beasts of burden, in rickety vessels, braving unforgiving desert sandstorms or running the gauntlet of roaming bandits, and pouncing pirates, in their relentless quest for spiritual rejuvenation. The Armenians who made their home in Jerusalem’s Old City, the “kaghakatsi” (from the word for city, “kaghak”), formed the vanguard of an uninterrupted influx that gathered pace during the 1915 Armenian genocide when thousands of refugees sought sanctuary within the walls of St James, earning for themselves the designation of “vanketsi,” (convent dwellers), and bringing the total number of the city’s Armenian inhabitants to over 15,000 at their peak. But in 1948 at the height of the first Arab-Jewish war a large number of the “vanketsi” sought repatriation to their homeland which had been absorbed into the Soviet Union as an autonomous republic: over the years, emigration and natural attrition extracted their relentless toll, winnowing the ranks of Armenians and cutting a swath through their presence in the Holy Land. For the ones who opted for greener pastures in the West, predominantly the US, Canada and Australia, Jerusalem remains the home where the heart lies. The ones who remained, stayed and prospered, in the process making Jerusalem what many unabashedly proclaim, the center of the world. They kept on building: houses churches, monasteries. (One of my great- grandparents, Hovsep (Joseph), was a prolific artisan. The houses he built, with their distinctive three-foot-wide earthen walls, still stand). Alongside the craftsmen, tradesmen, artisans and the dreamers, they contributed reams of administrators, civil servants, educators, diplomats and artists, some of whom attained universal acclaim. Their descendants gave the city its first printing press and photographic studio. My father was a merchant and owned a shop within walking distance of Jaffa Gate, one of the seven girdling the Old City, abutting its 500-year-old wall. He sold wool which he imported from England, and which earned him the enviable sobriquet, “the king of wool.” He saved enough to purchase a stately home in one of the city's modern suburbs, only to lose everything when the harbingers of a local war started brandishing their swords. He bundled the family into a truck and sought refuge, with other asylum seekers, in the Old City monastery of St James. The prevalent belief among the band of refugees sheltering there was that the hostilities would not last long, and that they would be home before the end of the year. But the aftermath of the internecine blood-letting among the Semitic cousins of Arabs and Jews, turned their expectations into a nightmare of truncation, with the city split in half and its population disenfranchised. We had to abandon our home, our dreams and our hopes and find refuge in a dilapidated hovel in the bowels of the monastery. The bombs continued to rain down, striking right and left as the wind blew, picking up the unwary and tossing them into the rubbish bin of oblivion. I survived this and other wars as I would survive other cataclysms, battered and scarred but undaunted. Like the Flying Dutchman doomed never to make port, I have sailed across the oceans, forever waiting to hear the siren call of Jerusalem.