Պապիկ եւ թոռնիկPapik yev Tornik: Grandfather and Grandson

Mkrtich Khrimian, the Hayrik of the Armenian people, wrote Papik yev Tornikin exile in Jerusalem as a book for the Armenian peasant; by the time it was published in 1894 he had been elected Catholicos of All Armenians. The book is a primer in dialogue: an old grandfather teaches his grandson to plow, sow, water the fields, reap and thresh, fill the granary, keep sheep, plant trees, marry well, and die well. It ends with the grandfather's testament and death.

Under the farming lessons runs Khrimian's argument that the villager's labor and land are what the nation is built on. The prose is plain because he meant farmers to read it. The book belongs to two currents at once: the hoghagortsutyun campaign to modernize agrarian life and give it standing, and the Constantinople and Vaspurakan intellectual world that also produced Raffi's political fiction and, later, the realist and fedayi-adjacent writing out of Van and Mush. What gave it weight was Khrimian himself. He put his own moral standing behind writing addressed to peasants and treated it as national work rather than a lesser genre, in a literary culture that had mostly spoken to the educated diaspora and the clergy. It is one of the clearest signs of a national identity moving away from the church and toward land and labor, the ground rural self-defense organizing would stand on a few years later. Read it here in the original Western Armenian, in a new English translation with notes, or both side by side.