4 p.m.
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Lecture Abstract
Daredevils of Sasun is an oral Armenian folktale put into writing by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The oral variants were recorded after the First World War in Soviet Armenia, mostly through interviews with Armenians who survived the Armenian Genocide and the imperial wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empires. These displaced people, many of whom lived along the southern shores of Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, recounted their versions of the epic. Shepherds, farmers, part-time shoemakers, carpet weavers, mostly illiterate men and some women shared their variant of the epic.
The geography of the epic covers regions around Lake Van: Taron, Mokk, and Sasoun. Yet it is not clear when the epic was first composed. However, the events it refers to can be anchored to a period between the eighth and the twelfth centuries, when the Armenian territories were under Arab domination.
The talk will be about the epic narrative about two noblewomen- one ideal the other the source of conflict. It will examine how the epic bends the ecclesiastical and legal boundaries and allows possibilities for children of these two women. I compare the reception of women and their marriages with ‘others’ with official historical accounts written by Łewond (eighth century) and Vardan Vardapet Arewelc‘i (thirteenth century). I propose that the fate of these noble women might have left an impact on the collective imagination of everyday Armenians who composed the epic. The second section of the talk will be an invitation to think about the lives of the people who recited the epic and our present issues as Armenians and as scholars of Armenian Studies.
Speaker’s Bio
Ani Honarchian is an Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Late Antiquity at Saint Louis University and a former research fellow at Princeton University. She is currently completing her first monograph, On the Threshold: Churches under Sasanian Iran. Her publications are on topics in Armenian and Iranian studies, as well as Syriac and Armenian historiographical and hagiographical texts. Her recent research focuses on the Armenian-Arab-Byzantine borderlands, with Daredevils of Sasun as an entry point into this complex world.
https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/283913-our-mothers-and-the-others-in-daredevils-of-sasun