Search - Forty Martyrs :: Armenian Chanting from Aleppo

In one of Aleppo's oldest quarters sits a church, once a hub and a harbor. The head priest there, The Very Reverend Yeznig Zegchanian, agreed to chant, but he was going to do it now and he was only going to do it once. Jason Hamacher, a drummer from DC who had stumbled into a serious fascination with Syria's endangered spiritual traditions, sprinted back to his hotel to grab his equipment. The result, recorded in the resonant Forty Martyrs Armenian Orthodox Church, captures a time, place, and language poised to blink out of existence. The city is embroiled in Syria's heartrending civil war. The church's congregants, descendants of several waves of Armenian refugees, have been scattered to the four winds. The language of the chants, West Armenian, once spoken in what is now Turkey, seems destined to die out in a generation. To honor this embattled community and the city that sheltered it, Lost Origin Sounds Series is releasing Forty Martyrs: Armenian Chants from Aleppo at the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, the tragic and bloody Ottoman campaign that drove many Armenians to the centuries-old community in Aleppo. The storied Syrian city may seem like an unlikely place to encounter a large contingent of Christians from the Caucasus Mountains. Yet cosmopolitan and tolerant Aleppo was on the Silk Road, as well as a way station on the important pilgrimage route to Jerusalem. It has been home to Armenians since at least the 15th century, when Forty Martyrs was built. A veteran of the DC punk/hardcore scene and a fan of exploratory music from far-flung places, Hamacher had wound up in Syria thanks to a misunderstanding (he heard Syrian not Serbian chant on a fateful phone call). It blossomed into a profound connection and interest in the country's unique and diverse religious communities, t/lhe Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions that had chants and songs rarely recorded and never released to a wide audience. Though he pursued leads carefully, he also happened upon rarities, simply by opening doors and introducing himself. When Hamacher returned in 2010, mere months before returning to Syria became impossible, he went back to the church and flagged down Zegchanian. With a portable rig and his translator, Jacob Warkez, who was half Armenian. As the priest sang a selection of chants from the liturgical year, Warkez jotted down notes, half in Armenian, half in English. (They are incorporated into the release's artwork.) The chants span more than a millennium; the earliest dates to the 5th-century ("Great and Wondrous Mystery") and are sung in Western Armenian, one of the two standardized forms of the language, with its own pronunciation. Once spoken in Eastern Turkey, Aleppo remained one of the few strongholds of the dialect, until now. Now, Aleppo's Armenian community is threatened or scattered. Hamacher, for example, has yet to track down Zegchanian. Yet he was able to track down a great deal about the chants themselves. He discovered that the Library of Congress has its own Armenian-speaking archivist, thanks in part to the Library's extensive holding of Armenian materials from Thomas Jefferson's personal collection, currently Dr. Levon Avdoyan. Avdoyan pointed Hamacher to colleagues and scholars who helped paint a more complete picture of the ancient, beleaguered Armenian piece of Aleppo's cultural history. CD Packaging: 2 Piece box: 24 page booklet with metallic print, 15th century manuscript scans, Armenian and English translated lyrics, Original Poem by 1915 Genocide survivor, hand drawn map, & CD slip jacket.