Fifteen Questions: Christina Maranci on Medieval Armenian Churches, Crumbling Grandeur, and the Best Kardashian
Professor Christina Maranci is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies and teaches the “Power and Beauty of Being In-Between: The Story of Armenia” Gen Ed course. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: So to begin, how did you decide to work on Armenian art history?
CM: I grew up as an Armenian in an Armenian family, but that wasn’t any kind of real incentive to study it formally.
I loved art. I still do. I love it. Like so many art historians, you start just loving doing it. Then I began really through medieval — I love medieval art. Through that, I found myself going towards the East, through Byzantium, into Armenia.
FM: You often lecture on buildings and art objects that cannot be experienced in person by students. What approaches do you take to teaching students about these objects?
CM: I think the one clear way is through video, using some sort of software that can help them experience it, and that’s great. Although I think the other piece of it is the way you describe — I talk about smells and sounds.
I talk a lot about a city called Ani, and there is no real way to get students there except to go there, which I did do. I took students, graduate students, there this past summer. But I think communicating through your own voice and emotion — that can transport students.
FM: Describe your favorite building of all time, Armenian, medieval, or otherwise.
CM: That’s a really difficult question, and I could answer it simply, like, ‘Oh yeah, an Armenian building!’ But I actually love house architecture. I love crumbling grandeur, as I like to call it. I love Scottish castles, I love fixer uppers.
I would say my favorite are dilapidated, but formerly grand buildings that have so much potential and so many memories. Kind of like here — you can see here, this used to be a porch, right? And you can kind of see the old industrial function of it. And I love that.
FM: Many of the architectures you work on are falling apart, fast. How do you work in and write on what might seem like such a tight timeline?
CM: It’s really, in some ways, depressing. And to know that, just as I might be lecturing on a building, it might be falling down. Because that’s the case with buildings that are on the eastern edge of Turkey, that are Armenian buildings, that are often not stabilized, that are also in a seismic zone.
Working in the heritage field you kind of have to accept that there is going to be, inevitably, some collapse and failure of the buildings. But what I love is teaching this so that students know and students are aware. Because that is a way to share that urgency with a larger group.
The effort — the projects, the communities you create when you go to these places and do the work — those are important.
FM: The destruction and erasure of Armenian culture is a tragic reality, both in the present day and in the historical past. How does this factor into what and how you choose to conduct research?
CM: It means that there always is an element of me calling attention to the fragility and the often the damaged or destroyed condition of monuments. I’m writing right now on a city that rose to importance around the year 1000, Ani.
In the First World War, during the Armenian Genocide, a lot of the artifacts that were recovered from it were lost. So every time I do my work, I’m thinking about, ‘Well, all I have is this, but there was once all this.’
So it’s an awareness that’s always with me. Sometimes I choose to write about it more than others, depending on what my goals are, and sometimes I simply want to write. I want to focus on the 980s or the year 1000, but it’s always there. It’s always in my head.
FM: What can medieval Armenian architecture tell us about Armenian religious practice?
CM: Oh, everything. Because in a lot of cases, some of our best, most immediate evidence is the buildings themselves. I had a wonderful professor many years ago who taught me to think about architecture.
He talked to us about how these are envelopes for movement, envelopes for liturgy, for ceremony. And when you start thinking of buildings as envelopes for things, then it starts getting you to think about why the space is shaped this way or that way.
For Armenia, you can tell the story of religion, of spirituality and of ceremony, of ritual through changes in building forms.
They’re not just stones and walls. They were understood by their worshipers — and still are — as something very different.
FM: Tell us about one aspect of medieval Armenian architecture that has always confused you.
CM: To be totally blunt, since I’m not an architect and I’m not a mason, something I want to know more about is: How do you actually build? What is it like? I’ve seen people on building sites repairing and restoring Armenian monuments, and people train the traditional way.
The masonry is very particular. It’s not solid blocks of stone architecture, but it’s facing stones, and in the middle is a mortar fill. So I would one day love to actually do it. You set up these facing stones, and there’s this peanut butter jelly in the middle of two pieces of bread.
What is that like? How hard is it? How heavy is it, what does it smell like? All those things, because sometimes architecture can seem really abstract. Unlike with paintings, you have to sort of imagine yourself in these spaces if you’re being taught it.
FM: In one of your written reflections on your work, you described Mren, an Armenian Church dated to circa 636, “as not inanimate. On the contrary, it was overcrowded with lives.” What responsibility do you and all art historians owe the unnamed individuals who conceived of, built, and occupied spaces we can now only study?
CM: For me, working in my field, I realized early on that I couldn’t study these buildings simply as works of art.
I realized I have to be more than just an art historian sitting in a library doing my work, that I needed to take care of buildings. They are not just buildings.
They embody generations and generations and generations of the people who worshiped in them, who built them, who preached from the altar. And that’s not just a pie in the sky thought, it’s made very real because traditionally, Armenian church buildings like Mren, they’re inscribed. They’re written on all over and they say things like, “remember me, Shushan” or Susan, and “my prayers and my sons” and this and that.
We have voices and lives and families that have helped to create and shape these churches, just as much as the initial architects. So that’s very meaningful, and it’s even more meaningful then when the building is in danger, neglect, vandalism, ultimately collapse — you’re losing all those voices.
FM: What does a typical day of field work look like for you?
CM: A typical day of field work is happening in eastern Turkey, or what we can also call historical Armenia. Get up early in the morning, put on your hiking boots, and you have a good breakfast. I have to bring my own coffee because I need coffee in the morning, and often when I’m on the road, I only get tea or Nescafé, which doesn’t count as coffee, to be honest.
I guess I should say there are two kinds of field work. One kind is me doing my work on buildings: examining them, reading inscriptions, taking picture after picture after picture after picture, making drawings sometimes — although I’m not good at that. The other part is me working with a group where we’re actually doing work on the buildings together with the World Monuments Fund.
We just finished this building — restoring it, at Ani — and so the question was, how do we want tourists to encounter it? Which of the signs works? So those are two different examples of field work, but the typical day is me putting on my hiking gear, going out and doing the work, and then coming back to the hotel and having a Turkish beer.
FM: I noticed that photography and drawing play a key role in your art history. Whether taking photographs of Armenian church exteriors or re-illustrating the interior artworks you’re consistently engaging in artistic processes of your own. How does this inform your research and writing?
CM: It’s complicated, because every time you’re taking a picture — or I also do things with Photoshop where I try to bring out evidence of wall paintings — you’re also making your own decisions. You’re interpreting. So part of it is I need to always take care that I’m trying to be as faithful as I can to what’s there. But of course, there are layers and layers of thought processes that inform and inflect what you’re doing.
The most exciting thing is when I’m able to use software to bring out some of the original. Even inscriptions that were there that hadn’t been read before, that’s incredibly meaningful.
It’s like a voice calling from the past. It’s really exciting.
FM: What can the history and art history of Armenia tell us about today?
CM: Here’s this place that is off the radar for most people and so, it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to not care, for it not to matter. But what I try to teach in the Gen Ed course, is that that’s exactly why we should study it. I try to demonstrate that — even though we can live our lives without ever knowing about Armenia, and it won’t matter — knowing that it’s amazing that this place, that is pretty much off the radar, has so much rich culture. So many landscapes and manuscripts and traditions that are rich and sophisticated and historically connected.
Why is it we don’t study it? Why is it that some cultures are studied and others aren’t? And I try to say to the students: Look, if this is the case for Armenia, which happens to be my specialty, what other cultures out there are we just not paying attention to?
And so I think that’s ultimately why Armenia is powerful. I think it teaches us a lesson about being curious, about allowing there to be horizons you just know nothing about. Even as an adult, even as a grown-up, even as a professor, there are whole worlds. It’s easy to be complacent about what you know. But Armenia really taught me how upside down it is — how upside down the world is in terms of what we study, what we don’t study.
FM: Your Gen Ed course has gained a lot of popularity with students who study many different disciplines. Why do you think Armenian history is so appealing to such a wide range of students?
CM: Well, it’s great and fabulous, and I love it. I do think it matters, I love it, and I think that it is contagious when you really love something. But I think also because it’s beautiful, it’s powerful, it is so connected.
You can learn about everything through the lens of Armenia, from classical antiquity to East Asia. You can learn about connections with Ethiopia. You can learn about connections with Western Europe and the Crusaders. You can learn about connections with South Asia through the Indian Ocean. You can learn about connections with Islamic art.
It’s also very beautiful. It can be funny, it can be sad. I think the material itself is very powerful. And I see students, I see their faces, and I think sometimes they see themselves in this wonderful body of work.
I think the fact that it’s also fragile makes it powerful to study. It makes it compelling. Because — and this is true with any culture — but you never know when it’s gonna disappear. You never know when you’re not gonna have it anymore.
FM: Besides your academic audiences, who do you hope your work reaches?
CM: I hope it reaches the governments of many countries. I hope it reaches the ministries of culture of many countries. I hope it reaches the Armenian community.
I tend to talk in my work, very particularly, to a hyper-focused academic group. But at the same time, I do hope that it can be useful for policy making.
It’s crucial to have a very good source of work — of the highest, best quality scholarship — because that’s how memories are formed. We see this right now with the erasure of Armenian sites. It’s not just the erasure of Armenian sites, it’s the rewriting of history. The only way, productively, to counter that is by having very good research that does its job.
FM: If you were to study anything else, what would you choose?
CM: I wish I could do science and math. I wish I were good at math. I love math. It’s so beautiful. I love astronomy, I would love to be able to study planets. I think that would be amazing. I just — I love the whole world. I love it aesthetically, it’s so beautiful.
FM: Who is your favorite Kardashian?
CM: Oh, it has to be Kim. There’s no question. I mean, she’s the one who started it all. So, yeah, it’s definitely Kim. Now, if Kim would be so kind as to reach out to me, we could talk more about that. I had promised my Gen Ed course that she was going to be coming to give a talk, and she never did. But, the offer stands!
— Associate Magazine Editor Rose C. Giroux can be reached at rose.giroux@thecrimson.com.