Armenians in Hungary, Moldova

Istevan Garaguly plays the organ at St. Mary's Armenian Church in Budapest. He is a 26-year-old lawyer, whose Armenian ancestors came to Hungary hundreds of years ago. Dr. Moldovan Kristof, 78, is a retired road construction engineer whose dream in life is to see the completion of the Armenian Center in Budapest. Two Hungarian Armenians, each with a different view on what their Armenian roots mean and what it takes to keep the Armenian flame alive in a changing society.

If strength is defined only by numbers, then the small Armenian community of Hungary would rank near the bottom of the Diaspora But that is not the case, thanks to a group of Armenians with a mission and a singular objective to strengthen the foundations of a community of 12,000 and its battle against total assimilation. As individuals and collectively, they are busy spreading the seeds of national pride through the revival of the Armenian language, culture, literature and heritage.

“Make the strangers welcome in this land, let them keep their language and customs, for weak and fragile is the realm which is based on a single language or on a single set of customs.” These are the opening words of a letter written in 1036 by King Istvan, Hungary's founding father and first Christian monarch, which now form the cornerstone of ethnic tolerance and democracy in post-communist Hungary. They were not written with any specific ethnic group in mind, but hundreds of years later, they have become an integral part of the Hungarian way of life.

Mayor Nikolai Simeonovich Seferiants is proud of his Armenian heritage, and good reason. His city was built in 1792 by Russian Empress Catherine II for the Armenians who had settled in Moldova early in the 14th century. A Royal decree named the city Grigoriopol after the patron saint of the Armenian nation, Gregory the Illuminator, or Krikor Lousavoritch, and ordered the local authorities to "help the Armenians set up homes, develop crafts and open factories."

Moldova is not new on the map of the Armenian Diaspora, but despite its deep roots, the small Armenian community was dormant and near extinction until the breakup of the Soviet Union and the birth of an independent Moldova in 1991. "I came here in 1957 as an officer of the Soviet Army, and in all the years I lived here, I had no contacts with other Armenians. I had no Armenian friends," says Ashot Hovhannes Assatourovitch, an 80 year-old retired army officer.

In a diplomatic career that sent me through all Europe, none equaled Budapest for the intrigue of its history, the mystery of its politics, the faded but still visible loveliness of its facade, but above all, the charm and the genius of its people. While the previous articles embrace the Budapest of today, my experience is of thirty years ago, the late 1960's, when Hungary was one of a number of client states of the Soviet Union—in other words, at the height of the Cold War.

Armenians have been part of the Hungarian landscape from well before the birth of the first Hungarian Kingdom nearly 1000 years ago, and despite the often devastating effects of assimilation, their survival instinct has kept their Armenian identity alive. Traces of the early Armenian presence are evident in every juncture of Hungarian history, often contained in his­torical documents describing many of Hungary's wars against invading armies.