The Temple at Garni

Dare I interrupt the temple being
still, the Ionic columns a squadron
at attention ? Should I leave it, seeing
that the temple is its own eschaton,

and has been resurrected to wait
for something new ? I might have preferred
the steps to the sky, where hope beyond fate
has hatched, and final rupture had occurred

to match the breathless gorge. This memento
of live colonnade and vanished courts,
fufils a poem by Siamanto,
when this land was jigsawed with corpses.

Armenia is where the dead get up,
pray for each another, uninterrupted.

Oxford - 25 August 2019

The Temple at Garni is an impressive classical temple in Armenia. It stood absolutely intact until a powerful earthquake struck in 1679, the epicentre of which might have lain right underneath. Tiridates I might have erected it in 77 CE or else it was erected and dedicated to Trajan when Armenia was a Roman province briefly. It might have been spared Christian iconoclasm by use as a royal mausoleum. Tradition associates it with Tiridates. Alexander Sahinian restored it in 1969 by using the componets scattered about from 1679.

Atom Yarjanian (1878 - 1915) was the poet Siamanto. He was born in the banks of the Euphrates, studied at the Sorbonne, and worked as a journalist at Boston, Massachusetts,. After returning to Istanbul in 1913, he was caught up in the Armenian Genocide and killed. I adapt a line above from his powerful poem, “Prayer”.