across the territory of armenia some of the world's most ancient churches hold clues to an age old architectural did the construction techniques used in armenia enable the construction of the great cathedrals of europe the existence of these ancient structures as the generations of our historians to ponder their meaning mean you became the st nation to adopt christianity as its official state religion fewer than three hundred years after the iron curtain fell most western scholars had problems getting to these ancient armenian monuments this is the story of one scholars crusade to keep many of i mean his most treasured monuments from being lost forgot funding for this program was provided by the armenian library and museum of america the bank boston charitable foundation i describe the the art in architecture is a kind of lost treasure sort of lost and forgotten until relatively recently by the west everyone became in thrall and i felt very happy because many of them said that you know the lecture is open their eyes to would different part of the world a part of the world they haven't known anything about and to different periods of history that were important for western civilization mongols an ottoman turks changed her borders considerably leaving present day i mean you with a small fraction of original territory it was very surprising to me because i had never run across any mention of on me in art in architecture in any of the textbooks on the history of art and i began to realize that i'm the basis of what the footnotes said that some more research in the field of armenian architecture might answer some of the most important unanswered and haunting questions in the history of medieval art for example one question is where did the medieval architects of western europe learn the building techniques that made it possible for them to build those towering  earlier at least in the th century and i thought you know this is amazing i've never read about any of this in any of the art history books i had read earlier and i thought why not pursue this field the specific monastery that i was studying for my dissertation was the monastery of g and i picked it because it has some very puzzling sculpture on the outside it's got animals like a lion and a bow fighting and it's got peacocks in the front and my job was trying to figure out what  began rebuilding it the st church was this main church and then in the one thousand two hundred and forty s prince prussia bought the monastery for his family and that's what's so interesting about these monasteries that they belong to princely families and they use them as their it ministry of center and cultural center and they would be schools built there and also manuscripts cliff that looked as though they were built from the ground up with all of this intricate decoration and yet it was just carved out of the cl round the surrounding cliffs you have these rectangular slabs of stone with a with a large cross carved in the front of it and various ornamentation carved as a frame for it and these were  armenian art creation they're not just grave stones but they were stones that commemorated something maybe the finishing of the monastery or in some cases the end of a battle and then along the cliffs you find these doorways and they were part of that early habitation of the monastery they were monks s part of what drew professor de manually into her expertise in armenian art was the thought that it might answer the most important questions in medieval art she also recalls childhood stories about armenian  history her godfather was also an authority on the architectural history of and around the turn of the century travelled across present day turkey documenting and sketching the ruins of an e the city that served as the capital of i mean you're in the middle ages of the ruined capital of armenia the city of ani and spent twenty years of his life sketching the medieval armenian churches and making thousands of them detail sketches of the architectural sculpture the water colors of the monuments and ani and when the republic of armenia was invaded by turkey and russia when he came to paris the museum of decorative arts of the move it's a exhibited his watercolors avani and that was great great praise for them and then in london the victorian albert museum  exhibit his paintings and the royal society of architects when he came to the united states he had those with him he didn't haven't much money at all and there was interest on the part of harvard to publish his sketches and his watercolors but there weren't enough funds to do this and by the time my godfather died when he was eighty years old over eighty years old his heart was broken because this published i as a child knew only that my godmother had done something very important for the history of armenian architecture but i didn't know the details so suddenly the intellectual interest coincided with this emotional bond and if i had started out to kind of fulfill my godfathers mission i couldn't have done it in a better way but i did it unknowingly from the other direction but i also think that some of the problems i had to face in the soviet union i was able to surmount because there was this emotional bond when i finished the course work i had to go to armenia to photograph the churches and study them research them do some field work i had taken something like sixty rolls of film with me i had two cameras for lenses and no experience and i didn't picture the black and white photographs were going to be developed in the polytechnic institute but the color you know this soviet union did not have the kodak color process i mean you didn't have it i had asked the american embassy in moscow we know what we could do about it and they said well if you were in moscow you would give it to was we would send the films by diplomatic pouch outside of the country to the united states because the soviets had a rule you could not export exposed film and so the fact i wasn't in moscow made me try another after new and that is that i used to hang around the house the hotels the in tourist hotels the two or three and yet have on an anybody who looked american and spoke english with an american accent i would go up to and say you know i'm not a spy i'm a graduate student from the united states i'm doing a dissertation on our history and you know i wondered if you would be willing to carry out just two or three rolls of film to the outside i've got them in prepaid mailers and you know invariably they were trusting and they would take my film and they'd get back to the united states mail it and the pictures would get back to my house where somebody looked at  subject was mainly studied by scholars behind the iron curtain the end of the cold war opened the armenian architectural record to scrutiny by more scholars worldwide there mind you only and continued her own research and build work inside armenia since because on the front of this church over the western doorway you've got portrayed of the madonna and child and beside there portrayed is john the baptist there of the very top sort of sit perched on the the cross but then when you look for is are down what you have is a lion on one side in the base of the cross and a bull on the other and the question is why in heaven's name do they have animals on the outside of these churches and then on the other side of the church you have the same thing and on the southern side as you move down from the double window you see the image of a wonderful eagle with a very fancy feathers carefully carved but he's holding a lamb in his claws and that's a kind of sculptural motif we find in churches all over armenia and it may be an image that refers to the the souls of the departed being carried into heaven by christ so this image of the evil in the lamb really does have to do with the armenian view of christianity their focus on salvation over here is some hidden bridge and what you find is at the very top of the steps on both sides to lions and just sprawl via looking very very relaxed but when you get close you see their claws are just holding on to those storms lamps and what they're doing is guarding their roadway that goes way up to santa han monastery and so you know lions in all cultures because it's so strong and powerful they were often considered guardian animal the most important part of the armenians identity was as a christian people so the portrayed of them holding the model richard between them is a lesson to them and anyone who looked at the church that supporting the church was the most important thing they could do when i was studying for my dissertation my purpose was to look at the images on a particular monastery and try to puzzle out what they meant a lot of of political history social history go explained just through the images of the churches i found that there were churches that had the same types of images on them not exactly and then they suddenly i learned that they were linked to one another because they were built by a nobleman by princes who had served to liberate armenia ad hoc but in nine seventy six the queen of armenia built the main church there and she again put the portraits of her two sons on but in the meantime one became king and so he has his fancy turban on and the other brother later became king of another territory but again they're holding a model of the church between them meetings and maybe members of the military forces of that particular family that on the monastery would assemble where monks copied manuscripts the monks used to sit and for hours and hours copy these manuscripts the bible the gospels and they complained in their postscripts that their necks were banned when their fingers could barely move because they were so cramped eats had a central opening in the eye in the ceiling so the light with stream down from the center where's the churches would have our windows on the east side of the church and sometimes around the dome area virgin and child you've got birds in the  and up above you've got a huge portrait of god tenderly holding the head of adam in his hand and that bird that's aiming right down to adam's mouth is breathing life into adam it's an image of the creation and to the left you see the crucifixion the see saw the showing the whole christian story the creation of a adam and then christ who has come to redeem the sins of mankind and lead the christians to salvation and then you have an image of christ with saints on either side of him and then on the right above them on either side there is a pair of birds and again in in the middle ages in the early christian art bird stood for the souls of those people who had died the idea being they would take flight towards the heavens and be sa and so the army is stick to those images of birds all the way through from the th century to the th century is if that's the focus of their christianity is the ultimate triumph over death worldwide destroyed by conquering armies and rebuilt time and again many of these monuments have endured for more than a millennium armenian building techniques predate by centuries those used later by gothic architect in the middle ages  early in the th century armenia adopted christianity and carved images on its church walls specific to this exciting new religion symbols of redemption and salvation unraveling the mysteries of the sculptures and searching for answers to the question of a possible link between armenian and gothic architecture had become professor to my new audience holy grail all in all it's just a very exciting subject and still a detective stor to an artist story and i'm impelled to keep on going in trying to put things together trying to get some possible answers to these questions about a possible connection between army and the w i think the most important evidence so far is that there were armenians in all the right times in all the right places in western europe so that you can conceive th brought the building techniques the ideas to westerners so it's a propelling subject that is to say the more you learn the more you want to learn and the more exciting what you learn nature time and human conflicts once obscured the armenian monuments that survived may now serve to remind humanity of much more than a once thriving ancient civilization their study continually reveals fascinating insights about the arjun's of western architecture and the significance of on minion art and architecture in the history of the christian religion major funding for this program was provided by the armenian library and museum of america the bank boston charitable foundation funding for the post production of lost treasures of christianity the ancient monuments of armenia was made possible by mohawk and paris has make