Turkish students shot film about Armenian family

PanARMENIAN.Net - *

Elect The Dead Symphony CD/DVD set featuring March 16, 2009 exhilarating and unique performance of Serj Tankian and New Zealand’s 70-piece Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra was presented in Yerevan on March 16, 2010. Aside from the orchestral performance of the tracks on the album, the Elect the Dead Symphony includes two bonus, never-before-heard songs, Gate 21 and The Charade, interviews with Tankian and members of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, as well as backstage footage.

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Virtuosic duduk player Jivan Gasparyan presented a CD recorded in Armenia on March 18. Elaborating on his future plans, he said he will perform in Moscow on April 7 and will also give a concert in Italy in late March and in the Netherlands in May. “I have one unrealized project. I want to establish a school for orphaned children where I will teach them to play duduk. I think I will do this in the near future,” he said.

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Young composer and pianist Alexander Iradyan presented his concert program in the House of Moscow in Yerevan. Other talented students from Soli trio, Duo Thesis duet and Dualite piano duet gave a concert on March 18.

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Tonino Guerra, an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter, was awarded a Medal of Honor of the Republic of Armenia. RA Minister of Culture Hasmik Poghosyan, who was in Italy to attend a meeting of the board of trustees of the Venice center on research of Armenian culture handed the medal to Mr. Guerra.

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Archaeologists say a temple being excavated in Urfa, southeastern Turkey is 12,000 years old and is likely the oldest temple ever uncovered.

The site was first identified in 1986 when a farmer tilling his field in Sanliurfa found a statuette in the soil. Since then, archaeologists have uncovered the foundation of the temple built in the Neolithic Age along with carvings of pigs, foxes, snakes, fawns and headless humans. Officials with the Harran University Archaeology Department have yet to identify the culture that built the temple or their belief system.

German teams were the first to excavate beginning in 1995, but the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry placed the site on its first-degree protection list in 2005, taking control of the research.

Prior to its discovery, the world's oldest known temple was in Malta, dating from 5,000 B.C.

Sanliurfa (often simply known as Urfa) is a city with 482,323 inhabitants (2009 estimate in south-eastern Turkey, and the capital of Sanliurfa Province. Urfa is situated on a plain under big open skies, about eighty kilometers east of the Euphrates River. The history of Urfa is recorded from the 4th century BC, but may date back to the 9,000 BC. In 1914 Urfa was estimated to have 75,000 inhabitants: 45,000 Kurds and Turks, 25,000 Armenians and 5,000 Syrian Christians.

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Turkish students have shot a documentary about the life of an Armenia family living in a church in Diyarbakir (historical Tigranakert). The Wall documentary was named the best at Akbank festival held from March 1 to 11 in Turkey.