Vardavar

The third Sunday of July every year is Vardavar, the Armenian festival where all except the elderly throw water at each other. HETQ Online has a photostory called 'A Pagan Vardavar'. There are some wonderful pictures of the festival held at the pre-Christian Garni temple.

One of Armenia 's most popular traditions is the water festival of Vardavar. Although now adopted into the Christian calendar, Vardavar has its roots in pagan times and every year, a group gathers at the pagan temple of Garni to pay homage to the goddess Astghik and hand out roses. After the ceremony during the traditional feasting near water, many of the participants admit that the main reason they still practice the "old religion" is to point out that Armenia has a history dating to long before 301 AD when the nation was the first in the world to adopt Christianity as its official state religion.

The Anahit Visit Armenia site (by Onnik Krikorian) has a description of the festival, and points out Vardavar coincides with harvest time, and says that there used to be "a tradition in which the first apples of the year where eaten on the day of Vardavar itself, and ceremonies created around the event. In Shatakh, on the evening before Vardavar, young men stacked hay before burning the piles to usher in the sunrise. Apples baked within the haystacks, while young girls danced around the pyres. In mountainous regions, tightrope walkers performed at fairs and feasts where horse riding and water games were common."

Groong has a poem by Yerevan artist Shushan Avagyan:

What started with rose petals
sprinkled in abundance
onto joyful crowds
of Armenian ancestry, centuries ago,
in celebration of a saint -

now, on a hot July afternoon,
spread across the turbulent streets of Yerevan,
metamorphosing into a wild pagan ritual
of water, turned into
a mystical ingredient,
purified and hidden in tin carafes -
waiting in the hands of stealthy adolescents
for random
startled passers by.

An article on the Usanogh website says that Vardavar was originally associated with "the Goddess Astghik, the Goddess of Water, Beauty, Love and Fertility". Armenians offered her roses on this festival from which came the name Vardevar (vart is the Armenian for rose).

Posted by Matt on July 19, 2004 | TrackBack | Email to a friend