Armenia

The Republic of Armenia is a young, independent political entity, yet the geographical area and Armenian culture and heritage are quite old. Thus, this entry presents an overview of the culture of play in the historical Armenian lands, the traditions that were developed during the Ottoman era, the altered meanings of play during the Soviet Armenia, and the revival of older traditions in modern Armenia based on ethnographic studies conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dikran Chituni was among the first to research children's play during the first decade of the 20th century. His study, titled “The World of Play in the East or the National Games,” was published in 1906 as an article and became a book in 1919 with the title The World of Play in the East. Inspired by a French book, 200 Jeux d'Enfants by Harquevaux and Pelletier, Chituni unearths and describes 256 Armenian children's games with their variants and gives detailed information on the nature of the playground, the number of players, and their [Page 39]approximate ages. His detailed descriptions add an ethnographic dimension to the study.

Emphasizing the antiquity of the games, Chituni argues that play is a primary quality of human beings from childhood to old age—as Huizinga's Homo Ludens. Mottos such as “the child grows up by playing,” “play is both living and self-development for the child,” or mens sana in corpore sana are repeated in Chituni's book. Play was defined as an activity giving meaning to idle time, and such habits as the use of a rosary were analyzed for their playlike functions. Admitting that closely living communities have similar traditions of play, Chituni argues that play still carries the “cultural marks of a people” and conveys their “moral conceptions.” Therefore, the compilation of children's games was like an archaeological excavation, the findings of which should be professionally conserved.

Decimation and deportation of the Armenians of Anatolia in 1915, their diasporic existence all around the world, the sudden and austere changes in the lives of Caucasian Armenians under the Soviet rule, and modernization in general interrupted the investigations on play. New interest only appeared in the 1950s, when Vard H. Bdoyan undertook a survey in the whole “historic Armenia” in 1951 and classified the games under 11 categories: babies' games, delineating the relations between adults and infants; games developing creativity and manual skills in 5- and 6-year-olds; sportive games for the preservation of the “memory of Armenian traditions”; movement games, sports; games situated between play and dance; dramatic games projecting the “image of society”; games for cultural education; games played with animals (bull fights, various races); games commemorating myths; competitive games, played during feasts; and games commemorating struggles against invaders.

Normative, repetitive, and restrictive characteristics of the classification were related to the ideological pressures of the Soviet regime on ethnographic studies. The inventory was compiled 1952–57, and the geographical dimensions of the study included Ararat plain, Lori, Zangezur Mountains, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and eastern Anatolia. Bdoyan's masterpiece, Armenian Folk Games, compiled a list of 200 games and remains a reference source.

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