Paper short abstract:

Armenians have historically featured as a Christian "outpost". Therefore, religious identity has always played a strong role in Armenian culture, producing a very specific landscape, dominated by the tangible elements of religiousness and an impressive national iconography.

Paper long abstract:

Armenians have historically figured as a Christian "outpost" in a regional context dominated by Islam. Therefore, religious identity has always played a strong role in Armenian culture, which helped to keep it alive and has allowed for its survival in diasporic communities as well.

Armenian culture produced a very specific landscape, dominated by the tangible elements of religiousness (e.g., church architecture and khatchkars). The Monastery of Khor Virap (settled in the place where, according to the legend, Saint Gregory, the evangelist of Armenians, was imprisoned for fifteen years) is a key icon. It sits with the Ararat in the background: this image, obsessively portrayed and omnipresent in Armenian everyday life, represents at the same time the essence of Armenian Christianity, the cradle of Armenian civilization and the eradication from the "ancestral land" as a consequence of the Genocide. Moreover, an impressive national iconography (J. Gottmann, 1952), made up of material and immaterial elements, is linked to this cultural landscape, which creates an ambivalent interlacing of symbols, signs and values: from one side such a complex and specific "picture" represents an important tourist resource and a factor of attraction for a growing inbound flow; from the other side it symbolizes - and feeds, to a certain extent - a feeling of national identity that sometimes turns into open nationalism, not without consequences in terms of foreign policy (e.g., a tough position about Nagorno-Karabakh, an anti-Turkish ideological attitude, both hindering prospects of social and economic development).