Your Namak for Friday, July 15
Pashinyan and Erdogan hold first ever telephone conversation, National Security Service proposes tightening Armenian citizenship requirements, and Armenia to establish foreign intelligence agency.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Pashinyan and Erdogan Hold First Ever Telephone Conversation
On July 11, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held their first ever telephone conversation, emphasizing the importance of the ongoing bilateral normalization process. The two countries have lacked diplomatic relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Armenia’s independence in 1991. According to a statement released by Pashinyan’s office, both leaders said they hoped the agreement reached during the July 1 meeting of their special envoys would be implemented soon. It included the right for third-country citizens to cross the Armenia-Turkey land border.
National Security Service Proposes Tightening Armenian Citizenship Requirements
The National Security Service (NSS) has proposed a draft bill to require all ethnic Armenian applicants for Armenian citizenship to legally reside in the country for at least 60 days during the two years preceding their application. The NSS singled out Armenian applicants from the Middle East, stating that many have never visited Armenia prior to applying for citizenship, and in some cases “are not informed about Armenian culture, history, and socio-political and socio-economic processes in the Republic of Armenia.”
According to the Passport and Visa Department of the Police, 10,000 Armenians from the diaspora holding foreign citizenships applied for Armenian citizenship in the first half of 2022 –– three times higher than during the same period in 2021. More than 30,000 people from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have moved to Armenia since the beginning of the war in Ukraine on February 24, increasing demand for asylum and residency administrative services.
Armenian Government to Establish Foreign Intelligence Agency
During a hearing before the National Assembly on July 12, Armenian Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan announced that the Armenian government plans to establish a foreign intelligence agency. The new division would be part of large-scale structural reforms in the fields of defense and national security.
Diana Danielyan: Meet a French-Armenian graphic designer making Armenia pop
“When I was a child, I just said ‘barev’ to everyone I met in the streets. My nickname was ‘barevik.’ Everything starts with a barev, you greet someone and start a conversation.”
Diana Danielyan is always dressed in black, but don’t let that fool you. She has a bubbly personality and puts all the colors in her work. The 28-year-old artist and graphic designer was born in Budapest, Hungary, to an Armenian mother and a French father.
She lived in the northern Armenian town of Ijevan, where her mother is from, for the first four years of her life, and then grew up in Paris. After graduating from high school, she pursued her passion for drawing and the arts at the Ateliers de Sèvres.
Six years ago, Diana moved to Yerevan and founded “Barev Lifestyle,” a brand of postcards and posters featuring her pop art designs. The images play on familiar Armenian scenes, with a high-impact visual twist. She lists Martiros Saryan, Andy Warhol and Christian Lacroix as her main inspirations.
“I decided to work with monuments and street photography elements because I was tired of the use of Ararat and pomegranates or apricots as Armenian symbols,” Diana says. “We can use them but they need to be modernized. I also want to show that there are many colors in Armenia despite our painful history.”
Diana sells her work online and in stores throughout Armenia. “The name of my brand is ‘Barev’ because when I was a child I just said ‘barev’ to everyone I met in the streets. My nickname was ‘barevik.’ Everything starts with a barev,” she says.
Her brand draws on the idea of art as a conversation starter about Armenia and Armenian culture. “You greet someone and start a conversation, and it can lead to many different things,” Diana says.
The decision to move to Armenia was not an easy one for Diana, but she felt a calling to land she knew from childhood. “My link to Armenia and Armenian culture has always been my grandmother. I spent all my summers with her in Ijevan, Gandzakar, surrounded by nature, animals,” she says. “I always felt like I belonged there and nowhere else, so I just moved to Armenia and share my time between Yerevan and there.”
Until today the young artist shares a lot in common with her grandmother Svetlana, who attentively follows Diana’s work and takes care of her cats. Diana also inherited Svetlana's love of carpets and traditional Armenian crafts.
Diana’s next goal is to create silk fabrics customized with her prints, and to expand sales of her products abroad to familiarize more people with the many colors of Armenia.
To watch: Motherland, a short documentary by Emily Mkrtichian. The film follows women from Nagorno-Karabakh who work as deminers, breaking stereotypes and facing danger to clean their land.
To read: Armenian Wine Traditions Rediscovered, an article about the rebirth of Armenian wine-making, a tradition dating back thousands of years.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
Questions? Story ideas? An urge to say barev/parev? You can send us a secure email at namaknews@protonmail.com.