In Conegliano Italy on December 9, 2007, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian received the Civilitas 2007 award from the Dama Castellana organization.

The award, established in 1992 by the Dama Castellana organization, the town of Conegliano, the Province of Treviso, the Region of Veneto, and the European Community, is intended for those individuals who personify human values, tolerance, solidarity and whose work adds quality to the life of the community and humanity.

Previous winners include Pope John Paul II (2004) and Rita Levi Montalcini (2003), a Nobel Prize laureate and daughter of Primo Levi.

The official ceremony bestowing the award on Minister Oskanian took place on Sunday, December 9. In the town hall, in the presence of local and regional leaders, businessmen and dignitaries, as well as members of Italy’s Armenian community, the announcement of the award was made. This was followed by a procession towards the Academy Theater, with participants dressed in traditional garb carrying the medieval traditional banners of the region. At the Theater, Minister Oskanian was awarded the prize for his work in promoting dialogue to achieve peace and stability in the region and in the world. The Minister’s acceptance speech appears below.

 

H. E. Mr. Vartan Oskanian
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Conegliano, Italy
December 9, 2007

I am honored to receive this award and feel privileged to be in the distinguished company of today’s winners and the recipients of former years.

I thought long about the significance of the Dama Castellana conceiving of such an award, and thus creating the opportunity for an annual message about the importance of dialogue and peace. This respected organization takes very seriously its local heritage, and understands the need to recall and evoke the past in order to assure a well-grounded and meaningful life in the present.

So, it is because of the wisdom of the ages, that in a region synonymous with viniculture, you are focusing on peace-making.  Wine is life, wine makes life, and depends necessarily on a life of peace and stability. Making wine, sharing wine, enjoying wine all assume time, all require a confidence in the future, all oblige patience and faith in tomorrow. The world of wine takes peace for granted.

The original European dream, the glue that held together post-war Europe, was for peace and prosperity. Today, you in Italy and throughout Europe can take that peace for granted.

We in Armenia cannot.

We have lived under subjugation, have seen ethnic cleansing and genocide even before the terms existed, and have lived as a minority without rights. We saw military aggression in response to peaceful calls for dialogue and tolerance.

As a small people, serving as the perennial buffer between empires, on the most trampled path on earth, Armenians have become living witnesses of the benefit of dialogue between and within cultures. We have been engaged in that international exchange for ages. Our  Diaspora, living as it does across borders, is both the means and the beneficiary of international exchange. Today, we in Armenia are among its greatest promoters, especially in our neighborhood.

21st century Armenia belongs to a world where warring neighbors have found that they can accept new borders based on realities on the ground and move on. Europe’s nation-states have found that they can transcend borders, without diminishing or ignoring cultural spaces, without expecting historical identities to vanish. Armenia has the example of some of the West’s oldest democracies, oldest developed economies, some of the most stable states, coming together several decades ago, voluntarily suspending some aspects of their sovereign political and economic rights in order to build structures which would enhance and consolidate their political and economic advantages, and diminishing the threat of war.

Armenia has always said that we have already benefited from the process that you have undergone. We share history, values and civilization, we also share the goals of an integrated, interdependent, interrelated European political and economic community.
For me personally, seeing the community that exists here, in Conegliano, the political, social community that embraces visitors with a passion, that is proud of its accomplishments in 50 years, that is ready to serve as example and partner, this community offers hope and inspires passion. From winemaking to tourism, there is much that we can learn from you.

Armenia is known as the motherland of grapes and winemaking. Armenia’s viticultural history goes back at least to Biblical times, when Noah established the first vineyard in the Ararat Valley after the Flood. Excavations in this area have lent strong support to the theory that some of the very earliest systematic wine-growing did indeed arise here.

This is one of many connections between Veneto and Armenia. Last year we concluded a two-month long Days of Italy in Armenia. This year, our ambassador in Rome is promoting several events that highlight the centuries old connections between us. And there are many.

Let me use this opportunity to say thank you for the especially large and meaningful assistance Italians provided to Armenians in the devastating earthquake that destroyed much exactly 19 years ago yesterday. This was not the cause but the manifestation of a special relationship that goes back much farther. It was in Italy in 1512, that Hakob Meghapart produced the first book ever published in Armenian.  Venetians signed their first interstate trade agreement with Armenians, half a millennium ago. The renowned Briton, Lord Byron, referred to the Venetian island of San Lazaro as a fortress of Armenian independence, since the Armenian monks of the Order of Mekhitar had found refuge there in the early 1700s.  There you have it all – cultural, economic, political – our ties are deep and broad.

Today, you point to the Mekhitarist congregation as an example of the wealth of Venetian culture and heritage. Armenians point to the Mekhitarist Congregation as Armenia’s representatives from the ages when there was no Armenian state. 

From them, and from you, we have much to learn. I will take away with me today the warmth of your friendship, the generosity of your hospitality, the wisdom of your age. And all of this offered with ease.

It is sprezzatura.  I wish for a long and deep dialogue so that Armenians can discover this Italian art of effortless creation that results in the  ‘studied carelessness’ of Italian food and Italian wine. I wish to replicate the accessibility, the immediacy, the intimacy with the old even as the elegant new is continuously created. I wish to appreciate the individual’s resolve to enjoy the pleasures of life and the society’s understanding that such enjoyment can only be had in a world of dialogue and peace.

I appreciate your trust in my own commitment to these values. The Dama Castellana has put additional responsibility on me and on all of us in Armenia to work harder for tolerance, solidarity and peace in our region and in the world.