Milwaukee Armenian Community member David Luhrssen was the guest speaker at UCLA’s “I Am Armenian” program. A film series marking the centennial of the Genocide, “I Am Armenian” features Armenian films and discussion between guests and host Carla Garapedian.
In Christian tradition, the Four Evangelists are often symbolically represented by four living creatures as described in the Book of Ezekiel (1:5–14) and the Book of Revelation (4:6–8): a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. These symbols capture the essence of the message and the character of the Gospel each Evangelist conveys.
In the Armenian Church, we celebrate the Feast Day of the Four Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Through their divine inspiration and human experiences, these extraordinary men crafted the Gospels, Աւետարան/Avedaran in Armenian.
I read this story about a traveler who found himself sitting next to a man on a train. The man looked burdened, weighed down by something heavy—something no one should carry alone. After sitting in silence for a while, the man finally opened up. He had just been released from prison and, in that moment of vulnerability, also admitted that his imprisonment had brought shame on his family and that they had neither visited him nor written much.
He tried to convince himself that maybe they were just too poor to make the trip or too uneducated to write. And before his release, he wrote one last letter to his family suggesting that if his family had forgiven him, they should put up a white ribbon in the big apple tree near the tracks as a signal. If they didn’t want him back, they were to do nothing; he would understand, stay on the train, and head West.
The popular long poems and folkloric short stories by Hovhannes Tumanian [Toumanian] turned him into a beloved author of Armenian literature for the past hundred years.
He was born on February 19, 1869, in the village of Dsegh [Tsegh] (province of Lori). His father, Der Tadeos, was the village priest and an offspring of a branch from the princely house of the Mamikonian. The future poet first attended the parochial school of the village (1877-1879) and then a school in Jalaloghli (nowadays Stepanavan) from 1879-1883. It was there he wrote his first poem at the age of 12.
