September 21, 2022

Power of Love of Armenian Mayrig

While Sewing Hope for Armenia’s story only starts in after the most recent Artsakh War of November 2020, a look at an ancient map of the Kingdom of Armenia, such as the one in the entrance hall of the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial in Yerevan will reveal the land lost by the Armenian people over the centuries. As one of the oldest cultures in the world, the Armenian people are proud and strong, defending their heritage. Few people have suffered as much as the Armenian People have – one can only imagine the lives lost and the suffering endured for each meter of land lost. Armenian suffering culminated in the Armenian Genocide that took place between 1890 and 1917. An estimated 1.2 million Armenian women, children, and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacres. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps. In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. The methods used by the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide would later inspire Nazi Germany for the Holocaust and are recognized by 32 countries and the United Nations as the first systematic eradication of an entire people.

Notwithstanding the human cost, the Armenian genocide also resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Subsequent wars, until today continue this systematic destruction of one of the world’s oldest civilizations and cultures.

Since its origins, the beating heart of the Armenian people, and guarantor of its eternal culture, is the mother, or Mayrig in Armenian. Very much like Armenia herself, the Armenian mother’s heart is worn out for having given so much love for so long.

This Armenian mother who for centuries has been crying those we see as soldiers, but in whom she sees only her son, her brother, her husband, or her father, is the very reason behind Sewing Hope for Armenia. Only by saving and preserving Mayrig, can only hope to save, in the same effort, the Armenian people and the Armenian culture.

Carefully selected for their precarious condition and vulnerability, 10 mothers were invited on the 8th of January 2021 to a newly set up centre on Yerevan’s Marshall Baghramyan Avenue. This centre, a Sisterhood of Sewers, was the initiative of a group of young Armenian women, too young to have sons of their own to send to war, but, who, in their hearts, were mothers to all the 6,000 soldiers who had sacrificed their lives in the recent 44-day Artsakh war.

In this centre, a sanctuary for the Mayrig, these mothers found in each other, allowing them to share in their sorrow and their loss. Like Alchemy, the tears, and emotions of these mothers, grew into love and passion, for each other, for their families and for a future. Through the colourful and vibrant patterns of the Armenian weave, their little fingers pulled the very thread of so many Mayrigs before them – creating, from the ashes of destruction, a collection of light and love.

In the collection that results, is all the knowledge of the past, centuries and centuries of tears and laughter, but also the love and passion and perseverance to build the future, a bright and strong future. As these little fingers sew, one by one, the grey of the ashes turns into the orange of apricots, the red of pomegranates, these fragrant fruits born out of a land made fertile by the blood of so many.