Let us descend into our underground world

By Sempad Shahnazarian

couldn’t sleep all night, that night. Memories of my youth at Sourp Garabed Monastery profoundly tortured my heart, and I desired to be there again. I yearned to climb the Innagnian Mountains, to breathe the pure and enchanting air of the roses, to enjoy the intoxicating beauty of the panorama of the Moush Plain. I wanted to kiss the marble walls of the Temple which had been the Armenian cultural and religious center of Daro-Dourouperan for over seventeen hundred years.

That night, after a sixty year absence, I flew on the wings of my imagination to my dreamland. But...what a tragic scene! The monastery had been reduced to a catastrophic sight. The Holy Temple had been converted to a stable and the marble courtyard into a military training ground for the Turkish soldiers.

From the neighboring hills the religious monuments had been destroyed and a mist of tears spread all over the Holy ground.

I stopped nervously in the midst of that cataclysmic sight. I looked for the bottomless cavity where Gregory the Illuminator, seventeen centuries ago, had thrown the Pagan fathers and religious workers, after a long and terrific battle. Upon introducing Christianity to that territory our “Sourp Garabed Monastery” was built upon the ruins of a pagan temple.

After a long and agonizing search I found the hole.  I stopped, excitedly, and began to calculate the possibilities and finally decided to crawl in.

I didn’t need the help of a candle as the underground world had its own light. I began to walk around in that mysterious looking world.

What a surprise and joy when I saw Karekin - a classmate of mine, a Sassountzi, sitting on top of a rock, enjoying the beauty of the panorama. Diavolos! I cried. We used to call him Diavolos for his hedonistic way of thinking. He quickly looked around, amazed.  When he saw me, he jumped down and ran toward me. We began shedding tears of joy in our embrace and started to  mumble, “It’s been over sixty years since I have seen you,” I said, “I had left the monastery before the massacres and had heard that they had killed you too.”

“Yes, they killed me, but they couldn’t make me die.” He said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Strange...don’t you know I am living here in the underground world? You can’t imagine how mystifying this world is, that extends down below our Moush plain. The streams, bordered with beautiful greens, flow like radiant poems. Flowers smile at the sun with captivating fragrant kisses. Forests sing, peacefully, like enchanted concerts. Mountains tremble from their inner sensations. Vineyards always offer wine to amiable and thirsty poets. Waterfalls help printers in their creative works and girls, like sunrays, float in the sky in search of flying eagles. The philosophers swim in the torrential rivers, disappointed. The Christian and Pagan fathers, excitedly, surrender themselves to the juice of the winery, enjoying the embrace of Santaramed’s spirits.

If we accept a definition of God as Holy and of Satan as evil, God is defeated.

Disaster, massacre, natural upheavals and all social and political cataclysms prove that Divinity has lost His battle against Satan.

We simply laugh here when we hear discussions about Divine and Satanic definitions and actions.

Holy and Evil ideas are two sides of the same entity. They are coexistent and inseparable.

In chemistry they call them positive and negative forces. Yes, they have distorted the picture of Satan, by concentrating on the negative forces in him. If we look at it more closely, the picture will change.  Satan is a person, an individual, no purely negative conception or understanding. If he is a person, then unquestionably, he can feel, he can think and he can act. Therefore, he is a complex tissue of negative and positive forces, as we are.

Every decision, every movement and every action is the result of reciprocal and united effort. Without these united efforts there could be no compositions, no combinations, no compounds, no elements and therefore no tissues.

If Satan were a purely negative existence, he would never be able to think, to move, to act, and therefore not be able to hurt; and is reduced into a harmless, inorganic, lifeless and abstract conception.

But, Satan is not an abstract conception. He lives, he moves, he hurts and tries to remain a true and independent person. Therefore, is a being like we are. For that reason, I can’t see any difference between him and an organically normal person.

Satan doesn’t torture and kill feeble and defenseless people because he doesn’t get any enjoyment out of it.

He fights with personalities equal to him. He doesn’t act like the Turks who devour the helpless mothers with babies in their wombs.

They are simply degenerated devils.

That’s enough! I talked too much. I know, you are impatiently waiting to hear  what happened here during the massacre days...1915. 

I was sitting by the fountain on the hilltop, disguised as a Kurdish Lamong and was witnessing what was happening around me.

I was watching how the Turks were dragging the nine old Fathers out of their cubicles and carrying them out from behind the walls.  They killed them with knives and bayonets and then threw their mutilated bodies into a ditch.

A few days ago the governor of Moush had invited the head of the monastery, Vartan Vartabed, for a meeting. He then had him killed.

Stepan Vartabed, however, throwing the Bible away from his table, took his rifle and after killing some of the devils, ran away from the monastery into Sassoun to participate in the heroic battles...

The Turks, then began to plunder the Temple of its sacred and priceless articles...silver, crosses, diamond-covered Bibles...golden candlesticks...Holy vestments and many other articles. They burned the precious antique library.

Then, coming out of the monastery, they began bombarding the three cupolas and converted the Holy Temple into a stable and the beautiful courtyard into a drill ground for soldiers. Then, they killed me. 

Ever since then, I have been living here with the Pagans and the Daron-Dourouperan spirits.

The other day, in a very enthusiastic festivity organized by Daron-Dourouperan spirits, the crowd screamed. Our Ararat!... Our Ararat!...

The sky and the earth began shaking, terrified by this unusual spiritual upheaval.

Almost always, festivities are being organized to study all social and political problems and act accordingly.

I thought about you when the crowd screamed ...Shame! ...Shame!... to Stalin, for giving Ararat to the Turks...

When one of my friends, who was the main speaker of the day, representing this low and criminal act to the public, even the clouds were mortified by this diabolical action. They became darker and darker with their inner forces creating an violent explosive storm as the expression of their anger.

It was highly interesting to see the Armenian girls sitting on the clouds, exclaiming their love to Ararat!...

You can behold wonderful and mystic moments in this underground world.

Watch carefully and from the top of the Sassoun Mountains, you will hear a call to the heroes who gave their lives for the protection of the ideas of individuality and liberty.

Look here. Sempad, look at these fountains, see how they smile at each other, how they shake their brilliant breasts and dance. How they sprinkle each other and laugh. Each movement, each sparkle is a poem with words, lines and pictures. Everything that is immortal seems to come from these underground fountains.
 

Let us not forget that all valuable and priceless things are buried deep in our soil and we must persistently and intelligently excavate it in looking for them.”