Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

Posts from the ‘Asia’ category

Vienna: Armenian Mekhitarist Community (since 1810)

From outside, the buildings don’t look particularly special. But they tell a tale of extraordinary migration: beginning in Armenia and ending here in Vienna’s 7th district, by way of present-day Turkey, Greece, and Italy.

At the corner of Neustiftgasse and Mechitaristengasse is a set of buildings for the Armenian Mekhitarist Congregation.

If I’m in the city for a month, my curiosity demands to learn more. Through e-mail and by phone, I inquire with the monastery’s contact person about a visit, and I’m instructed to join a group of Americans for a guided tour.

Armenian Mekhitarists

The Mekhitarists are an order of Benedictine monks of the Armenian Catholic Church founded by Mekhitar Petrosean from Sebaste (now Sivas). Since 1810, the Mekhitarists established (a second) headquarters in Vienna, whose modern presence includes monastery, church, museum, and a library containing the world’s third largest collection of Armenian manuscripts.

Understanding the sustaining power of the printed word to a fragile culture, Mekhitar and the order’s monks created a complete dictionary of the Armenian language. The first volume of the “Dictionary of Classical Armenian Language” (ԲԱՌԳԻՐՔ ՀԱՅԿԱԶԵԱՆ ԼԵԶՈՒԻ) was published after his death in 1749, and the second volume appeared in 1769. In 1837, the New Dictionary of Classical Armenian Language was published, whose contents have now been digitized.

With my love of books since childhood, I’m regularly on the look for (sources of) old manuscripts, which is obvious in the images below.

By tour’s end, I have a few quiet minutes for a couple of questions.

Q1. How many Armenians are there in Austria?
A1. With a total population of almost 9 million, Austria is home to about 8000 Armenians, of which about 5000 live in Vienna.

Q2. Who was Deodat/Diodato?
A2. Diodato was an Armenian merchant whose birth name was Owanes Astouatzatur. He is credited with opening Vienna’s first licensed coffee house in 1685. Today, that location happens to be occupied by another café with a memorial plaque inside.

Mekhitarist Timeline

•   1701: Mekhitar of Sebaste (1676–1749) establishes congregation in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
•   1706: Move to Greece’s Methon; new monastery established.
•   1717: Move to San Lazzaro, one of Venice’s islands.
•   1773: 2nd group breaks away from Venice, establishing monastery in Trieste in the Habsburg empire.
•   1775: Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa’s “Privilege” guarantees Armenian colony with permanent status.
•   1805: Napoleon seizes Trieste as French territory; Trieste’s Mekhitarists flee to Vienna.
•   1810: Habsburg Emperor Franz I grants Triestine Mekhitarists permission to settle in Vienna.
•   1811: Mekhitarists establish presence in Vienna’s St. Ulrich.
•   1811–1873, 1889–1898: Book printing press by the Mekhitarists in Vienna.
•   1837: after 1835 fire, new construction designed by Josef Kornhäusel begins in Neubau.
•   1874: Site expansion includes new church, also by Kornhäusel.
•   2000: The Venice and Vienna chapters reunite into single Mekhitarist order.

( Click here for images and more )

Seattle Lake View: Bruce & Brandon Lee

Honouring the surname

In the mid- to late-1970s, our parents took us to single-screen movie theatres with names like Olympia, Golden Harvest, and Shaw for cinema night to watch movies made in Hong Kong. There were dramas; some high on the melodrama and low on character. Some were historic-period pieces, and there were kung-fu movies for which Dad passed his love to me.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a kung-fu action sequence on a big screen. I was mesmerized the first time I laid eyes on a memorable fight scene set in Rome’s Colosseum, that epic scene observed by little stone dragons between “Little Dragon” himself, Bruce Lee, and Chuck Norris’ character in the 1972 film “The Way of the Dragon“. As a kid, I was proud to have had the same surname as this Bruce fellow, and memories of seeing his on-screen characters prevailing in fights have stuck over time (e.g., “Boards don’t hit back.”)

Tragically, Bruce and his son, Brandon, died too young. I’m certain when I was a teen that I asked where Bruce Lee was buried; my parents didn’t know and in pre-internet days, it was more of a challenge to find those answers. But the mystery has long been solved: Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, lay side by side in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Despite multiple visits to the city in years past, this particular return trip to Seattle has been decades in the making for a chance to honour a part of my childhood and a part of my heritage. When I find the Lees, my arrival means another answer has been quietly realized. On a crisp bright autumn morning under blue skies, I feel my father’s spirit with me; he never had the chance to come to this cemetery. My lips move without voice, a prayer I utter into the ether, pushing for hope to reach him. Because I know now that this, is also for my Dad.

(Click here for images and more )

Fraser River, Port Mann Bridge, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

World Rivers Day: 50+ rivers from around the world

Above: Fraser River, east from Port Mann Bridge, between Coquitlam and Surrey, BC (HL).

The fourth Sunday in September is World Rivers Day. The University of Oxford’s Dictionaries defines ‘river‘ as:

“a large natural stream of water flowing in a channel to the sea, a lake, or another river.”

A river has always been water supply and demand: daily use and consumption; farming and agriculture; and where the waste goes, often back into the same supply. A river has always been about transport: trade and delivery of goods; shuttling people between places; and with people travelling, the exchange of language and culture. Throughout history, the establishment of towns and cities and the subsequent development of rivers have been about a mix of urban and rural elements, and about the relationship and interactions between people and their waterways.

( Click here for images and more )

Vietnam’s Mekong: Life and Traffic in the River Delta

Under direct sunlight, the deep ochre hues in the Mekong are initially unsettling: is the entire river made of chocolate milk? Vibrant reds and blues await around the bend, amid the nutrient-rich fine rock-powder silt floating down from the continental interior.

The Mekong river stretches over 4200 kilometres from its source in the Tibetan plateau in southwestern China1 through Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the river’s mouth at the South China Sea. The Mekong is one of Asia’s longest rivers, and is one of the world’s most productive rivers with number and volume of fish. There are over 1000 species of fish known in the Mekong, and despite the critical importance of the inland fishery industry, dangers are posed by overfishing threatening overall supply, disruption of natural flood cycles, and by the inhibition of spawning and migration from present dams and future dam construction. Based on the silt flowing from the Tibetan plateau, the Mekong Delta is also a critical fertile growing region supplying food and economic wealth throughout the region. International challenges remain about proper usage of the Mekong River.

We reach Mỹ Tho city (tp. Mỹ Tho), a two-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). People have gathered at the docks, ready to join one of many river tours. Some boats are ferrying residents from the mainland to islands in the middle of the Tiền river (sông Tiền), the northern branch of the Mekong.

We hop from one wooden boat to the next, alternating between water and land, slipping in between and hiding among mangrove trees. The midday sun beats down, and the heat and humidity are unescapable. As we dart around the islands near Mỹ Tho, my eyes swing from one boat to the next: floating fish-farms, ferries shuttling people, dredging ships carrying mounds of silt towards the South China Sea, men carrying their hauls on fishing boats carrying their hauls, women running errands on skiffs.

Only four short decades have passed since the end of “The American War”: bullets flew, chemical bombs fell, landscape blighted, blood spilled, families destroyed. The smiles and hard looks are a big part of an indelible visual memory, a part of this nation’s recovery and of her people’s endurance.

I’ve had a few hours only to gloss over the machinery of daily river life, but like countless other experiences in the year-long worldwide journey, this afternoon is representative of another introduction, another “appetizer”. Because there’s always more, here and elsewhere, up- and downstream. It’s easy to forget we’re only 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the South China Sea.

1 See the location here or the map here

( Click here for images and more )