A this blog wrote about in a previous post, apricots hold a particularly important place in Armenian life, both culturally and economically. Writing for the wonderful Mashallah News website, journalist Liana Aghajanian delves deeper into this story, producing a beautiful ode to the apricot. From Aghajanian's piece:
Indeed, there is not an apricot in the world that tastes like the ones found in Armenia. It is more than just a piece of fruit – the weight of a country and a diaspora’s national psyche, with equal parts tragedy and nostalgia, rests on its shoulders.
Scattered across the world by the horrors of a genocide at the turn of the 20th century, the Armenian Diaspora’s feet have always been on the move, planted elsewhere by accident and circumstance, but constantly pulled back by the heavy gravitational force of Armenia. As immigrants in faraway lands struggling with a collective, passed down trauma and relishing in the nostalgic notions of homeland – a place kept neatly framed in scenic oil paintings hung on walls from Beirut to Boston, there is an intense longing for home, a place to feel grounded and whole in again, a place where an apricot can be so delicious, that no other apricot found in any other corner of the world will do.
The feeling can only be described in words that have no direct English translation. One of them is the Portuguese “Saudade”, a deeply melancholic state for the absence of something or someone. The other is a Welsh word, “Hiraeth”, defined by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David as “homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed.”
Forever homesick, Armenians are always searching for that fulfillment of home, for what was lost to be found.
After leaving Armenia, I, too, was searching. My quest for the perfect apricot however, turned out to be fruitless.
The full story, which thankfully has a happy ending, can be found here.
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