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Ethnical Variety of Armenia
offered by supplier M18454 (view this supplier profile)
Key Information:
Tour Duration: 4
- 15
day(s)
Group Size: 5
- 50
people
Destination(s):
Armenia
Specialty Categories:
Cultural Journey
Season: January - December
Airfare Included: No
Tour Customizable: No
Minimum Per Person Price: 350 Euro (EUR)
Maximum Per Person Price: 1150 Euro (EUR)
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Armenia is a small country, but it also has some ethnical variety. There are 65,657 representatives of different ethnical groups living in Armenia. The largest community is Kurds-Yezidis, which counts about 40,000 people. The second one is the Russian community, which is about 15,000 people. The third one is Assyrians (about 3,500 people) and the forth is Ukrainians (about 1600 people).
Yezidis is an ethnic religious group of Kurds. They practice syncretic religion, which combines elements of ancient Iranian (Manichean) believes, Judaism, Islam and Nestorianism. Yezidis speak kurmanji, the northern dialect of the Kurdish language. Yezidis call themselves Yezdi. According to the Kurdish language as well as many Mesopotamian cults, the word "Ezd", "Ezda" and "Ezata" imply "God".
Yezidism is the primary ancient faith of the Kurds. It appeared thousands of years ago and had complete domination in Kurdistan among all Kurdish people. When Christianity and Islam came, Yezidi religion lost its power, and at the end of the XIX cent. when Kurdistan was under other countries’ rule, the majority of Kurds was forcibly Islamized. From the time the Yezidism appeared, Kurds-Yezidis celebrate one of their main religious holidays - the day of creation of the World. The holiday is celebrated in the second half of December. Friday at the middle of December is the holly day. According to Yezidi mythology, the World was created in the first day of this holly week.
Russians. The Molokans movement appeared among Russian peasants during the reign of Ivan the Terrible in 1550. It was during this time that Semen Matvey Uklein together with Matvey Dalmatov read the Bible and found out that this book preached the faith different from that of their parents and priests. They began to evangelize his family, his master, and local village members. Molokans denied the Czar's divine right to rule and rejected the icons, Orthodox fasts, military service, the eating of unclean foods, and other practices, including water baptism. They also rejected the traditional beliefs (held by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians) in the Trinity, the veneration of religious icons, worship in cathedrals, the adherence toward saintly holidays, and the decisions of Synods and Ecumenical Councils. Immediately they were subjected to repressions. Beatings, torture, kidnapping, imprisonment, banishment, dismembering, killing, and other forms of cruel punishment were inflicted upon them. However, at the end of the 19th century, there were about 2,000,000 Molokans in Russia.
The name "Molokan" comes from Russian word “moloko” which means “milk”. Molokans were named so because they ignored the Orthodox Church rules prohibiting drinking milk and eating meat during the 200 fasting days. By the 1830s during successful Russian expansion in Transcaucasus, a new teaching appeared among the Molokans. It was based on the legend about “Ararat kingdom”, from where the true followers of the Christ like the Ark’s passengers would start the history of a new righteous humanity. The government used this chance to transform the dangerous heretics into appeasable and hardworking colonists assisting the Molokan migration. Molokan villages appeared throughout the Transcaucasus region, but their densest settlements are in Armenia, around the Sevan Lake and to the north-west from it.
During the 90s, the Russian population of Armenia reduced three times. However, less than half of Molokans left. They fled mainly from the Krasnoselsk region along the Armenian-Azerbaijan border, which became one of the seats of war. Presbyters of the Molokan community decided that God did not tell his people to leave Armenia. Nowadays, Fioletovo is the largest and ethnically pure Molokan village. It was called Nikitinskoe before, but in the early Soviet times, it was renamed after one of the Baku commissars Ivan Fioletov. Fioletovo has about 380 houses (only several are Armenian) and about 1, 5 thousand villagers.
Notes:
Airfare is not included in the tour price.
Also see tour packages in:
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Armenia
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, ext: 18454
