The translator between Iran and Armenia

In 2004, a bus left Tehran and moved north, carrying its passengers through a landscape that was becoming less and less familiar. By the time it reached the border, the exhaustion inside had turned into silence. People leaned against the windows, half-asleep, waiting for the moment when the bus would stop and they could regain the freedom of their bodies. At one point, a sound began to drift into the bus, almost like the low hum of the engine. That was the Aras River, outlining with its blue the narrow line between two neighboring countries: Iran and Armenia. Among the passengers were Jorj Abrahamian, a 41-year-old Iranian-Armenian, and his son, Narek, 12, whom he had brought with him to Armenia in hopes of providing him with a better education and opportunities as a pianist. As the bus began to slow, Jorj pushed his seat back as much as possible and leaned into it, taking a deep breath that could have been mistaken for the same breath of relief most passengers felt, as their journey was nearing its end. But for his son, who knew they were not simply arriving but leaving something important behind, that calm came as a surprise. Jorj kept his gaze forward. He knew that most of the passengers on the bus were just visitors. “All these people will go back to Iran,” he said. “For us, there is no return. We are here to stay.” This is where the story begins for Vahe Abrahamian, 18, the younger son of Jorj Abrahamian, born four years after his father made the decision to repatriate to Armenia. It is the story of a man for whom repatriation did not mean choosing one side over another, but learning to live between them, like the Aras River. Jorj did not see it as a contradiction. “I like my status,” he said. “I carry two cultures, two states, two homelands. If Iran is my fatherland, Armenia is my motherland.” Yet this was not a spontaneous decision driven by dissatisfaction with life on one side or by a sudden pull of patriotism. It was the result of a long, gradual return and a reconnection with his roots that had begun years earlier, long before Armenia could be reached, or even found on a map as we know it today. Jorj Abrahamian’s first connection to Armenia did not begin with a place, but with a sound.  Every night at 11 p.m., his father would turn on the radio, trying to catch the right frequency. “I remember even that khsh-khsh sound of static,” Jorj recalled, “and then, finally, a beautiful female voice, clear and mesmerizing, saying, ‘Yerevan is speaking.’” The program was called “Crane,” or “Krunk,” a special broadcast for diaspora Armenians, transmitted from the Soviet Union, which Armenia was part of at the time. It aired late, at an hour not meant for children who had to wake early for school. Still, Jorj never missed it.  Listeners would call in with musical requests, opening for him a world of Armenian singers he had never seen, but came to know by heart, voices like Bella Darbinyan and Hovhannes Badalyan. During the day, he tried to hold onto that connection. There was a small store in the Armenian district where he went almost every day, first asking for vinyl records, later for cassettes brought from Soviet Armenia. “I knew there was little chance anything new would come,” he said. “Still, every day I went to the store and asked.” Through radio, he developed a lasting attachment to music, carrying those sounds into classrooms in the 1990s, when he was teaching Armenian in Iranian schools and later onto the long bus routes he would later guide between Armenia and Iran. All the tourists who visited Iran with Jorj, as well as guests who entered his home, heard him sing those songs. “The biggest loss of my generation,” Abrahamian said, “is that because of wars, changing world order and everything that came with them, our dreams remained in our hearts.” For years, the longing to sing stayed with him, until, in the summer of 2025, with the help of family and friends, he held his first concert at his home in Dvin, the small village where he had lived for the past 15 years. Though music and radio were his first touchpoints with Armenia, it was the Armenian language that eventually brought him to his motherland.  “I believe that there are people who can change our lives,” he said, tracing his love of language back to his schoolteacher in Tehran, Miss Varduhi. It was a different Iran then, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Armenian schools in the capital were still mixed-gender spaces. Though he would later witness their transition into a single-sex system in the upper grades. “Just the way now, for boys and girls in Iran, it would be unusual and even shocking to go to mixed-gender schools,” he said, “for me it was shocking to see the other transformation.” Before that shift, he attended one of Tehran’s Armenian schools, where Miss Varduhi became his first Armenian language teacher. “Her manners, the way she spoke, she was, for me, the most beautiful woman on earth,” he said. “Even though she was freckled, with a rather big nose, others may not have found her beautiful, but I fell in love with her.” Discipline, in her classroom, was replaced by attention. She never raised her voice or turned fear into a method of instruction. She was more than a teacher: she organized small gatherings after class, where students cooked together and turned ordinary afternoons into shared dinners. “She was the reason I was going to school and learning Armenian so passionately,” he said. In the mid-1980s, Jorj was in his early 20s, already certain of what he wanted to do: go to Yerevan and study Armenian at Yerevan State University. He walked into the Armenian consulate inside the Soviet Embassy in Tehran, not sure whether his request would be taken seriously.  Back then, there were no direct diplomatic relations between Iran and the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic or any way through which the Armenian diaspora could reconnect with its homeland. The Aras River was not simply a border but a closed line, marking separation far more than connection. And yet, the absence of access didn’t weaken Jorj’s determination.  He met with the consul and explained his reasons. To his surprise, the consul was ready to grant him the permission. But instead of the excitement or relief he had expected, the young man asked to delay it for two years, a request that contradicted everything Jorj had told him just moments before. “If you are going to go two years later, why are you asking for permission now?” the consul asked. “I need a motivation to survive.” That was Jorj’s answer. He was about to undergo his mandatory military service that coincided with the Iran-Iraq War, an eight-year conflict he doesn’t describe in events, but in intervals: 45 days at the front, 15 at home. What carried him through those two years was not certainty, but direction: the goal of reaching Armenia. When he returned in 1987, the consul was still there and there was no need to convince him. Yet the road to Soviet Armenia didn’t lead directly there. It turned west, into Turkey, into a country where even the ghost of an Armenian didn’t pass unnoticed.  “I was walking through Kars with a map in my hands, naively trying to find places I had only read about, looking for Yeghishe Charents’s house in its streets,” he said. Burdened by the weight of the Armenian Genocide, the secret police watched him closely, fearful of those who might return and claim what had once been theirs. And one night, in his hotel room, Jorj had a visitor. “He said to me as if it was already decided: ‘You’re from ASALA, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia.’ And then he beat me,” he recalled. The week he spent in Kars was the darkest of that winter. Even so, everything changed when he reached the train station. Six or seven people stood along the platform: Russians, a few tourists from Syria, and Jorj. No one spoke, as if the cold had frozen even time. Then a low, steady sound of wheels broke the silence. “When I heard the train,” he said, “I felt like someone was finally coming for me.” He fell to his knees, unable to get back up, even as the train drew closer. “Is there an Armenian here?” a voice called out from the train. Jorj tried to answer, but what came out was a cry. It was enough. The man stepped down and came straight toward him. He didn’t ask anything; he just reached Jorj and hugged him. “I was crying,” Jorj said. “He started crying too.” That train carried him to Gyumri, his first stop in Armenia. After completing the first two years of his bachelor’s degree in the Faculty of Philology, Jorj Abrahamian’s studies were interrupted. What was meant to be a gap year ended up lasting four years. He ran into legal complications. There was no visa regime at the time, and the only document he had was a paper from a consulate that, after Armenia’s independence in 1991, was no longer valid. “The separation was unbearable, as if someone had pulled me out of my roots and thrown me away.” Those two years in Armenia left a lasting imprint on him. He often speaks of the sincerity he found among Armenians, recalling his closest friend, whom he met at university. They attended classes together, ate together, and spent most of their time side by side. Eventually, he left the dormitory and moved into his friend’s home, where he lived with his mother. There, Jorj recalled, he stopped being a guest and became “her second son.” “I love this part of Armenia,” he said. “The way Armenians become happy when you eat their bread, drink their water or ask them something.” After his second return, Jorj was determined to stay in Armenia. But once again, life pulled him away, this time for family reasons. There he became absorbed in work, got married and had his first son, Narek, reasons more than enough to stay. Yet the idea of going back to Armenia never left him and he kept speaking of it as something unfinished.   “Armenia has always played a role in my life. One of the reasons my first wife and I parted was that she wasn’t willing to move here,” he said. “I’m grateful she agreed to let our son come with me. As a pianist, he had more chances here.” “What impresses me about Jorj is his humility and his courage to take risks,” said Narine Grigoryan, his second wife, with whom he has been together for 20 years. They met in the autumn of 2006, when they were both working in journalism. The first thing that stood out to her was his attitude toward women. She had grown up in a social environment shaped by what she described as a more rude, rigid and “rabiz” culture, where a man could stand by the tap and order his wife to bring him a glass of water. Once, before one of their first visits to her mother, she walked into the bathroom and saw him cleaning it. She was so shocked to see a man share household chores that when they reached her mother’s house, they called an ambulance for her. “It may sound funny, but it took me a long time to get used to it,” she said as the whole family gathered in the kitchen and prepared dinner together. Narine was baking bread. Jorj stood beside her, preparing velvety homemade hummus, tasting and adjusting as he went. At the stove, their son Vahe moved between pans, cooking halva in different variations, recipes he said he had learned from Iranian chef courses, filling the room with the flavors and colors of Armenian, Iranian and Eastern kitchens. Jorj Abrahamian and his wife, Narine Grigoryan, at their home in Dvin village, Armenia. (Photo: Heghine Aleksanyan) In the 2000s, when Jorj made his final return to Armenia, the country was an uncommon destination for newcomers or visitors, people were not accustomed to other cultures or open to difference and it was not easy to adapt. Although there was no stigma around marrying an Iranian-Armenian, what troubled Narine was that they were often called Persians. Even she was. Once, at a school where Jorj taught Farsi, the principal told parents that their children were being turned into Persians.  “Imagine how much those children lost. Jorj was more than a teacher. He was their friend, trying to open new opportunities for them, taking them to camps and tours,” Narine said. While Narine remains upset about this, Jorj has always been understanding about it. He knows there is a gap between the two cultures closest to his heart, neighbors yet largely unknown to each other. In a society where Iran is often reduced to a handful of images — the hijab, restrictions and Iranians who come during Nowruz to do what they cannot do at home — Jorj knew he could not begin with explanations. He would first have to show them the country. “We should get rid of fear. The reason I was able to adapt to local life so quickly is that I was not afraid of my neighbors,” he said. He began organizing trips to Iran and took small groups of Armenians and foreigners across the country, from Tehran and Isfahan to Yazd, moving through cities and places that rarely entered the conversation. “After each tour,” he said, “someone tells me how wrong they were about Iran, or that they feel they owe Iranians an apology.” “We should get rid of fear. The reason I was able to adapt to local life so quickly is that I was not afraid of my neighbors,” he said.   Especially striking to them was how Armenians were treated in Iran, with a level of respect many had not expected and shaped by the ways Armenians contributed to the country. Jorj would point to figures like Vigen Derderian, known as the “King of Iranian pop” and the “Sultan of Jazz,” as an embodiment of Armenian presence across fields ranging from music and film to medicine and architecture.  One of the stops Jorj never misses on his trips is the tomb of Hafez, on the northern edge of Shiraz. There, he would find himself drawn by the need to read from one of the most celebrated Persian poets and make his voice known to those around him.  It was an instinct more than a decision: he began translating one poem after another, without a clear sense of where it might lead. “There is a magical word in Persian,” Jorj said, “khatere-saz,” in Armenian, “hushastekhts,” a “memory-maker.” And there is “khatere-bazi,” meaning a play of memories. “I play with memories. I want people to experience so much and gather so many memories, that they can return to them,” he said. The blanket knitted by Jorj Abrahamian’s grandmother, which he brought with him to Armenia and always carries with him. (Photo by Heghine Aleksanyan.) As a result of this memory-making, people began sharing his translations more and more, until three publishing houses approached him to translate Hafez.  It turned out that Armenian readers were hungry for Iranian literature. An edition of Hafez’s poems was republished three times within a short period, an unusual number for a poetry book in a market where readers tend to favor prose. “I play with memories. I want people to experience so much and gather so many memories, that they can return to them,” he said. Soon, Rumi followed. Over the past three or four years, Iranian works have gained more and more presence in Armenian bookstores, while Jorj began receiving more and more requests: one more Iranian poet and one more book. Those who know Jorj might say it was only a matter of time before he would take on the task of translating Armenian poets into Farsi. And for those more familiar with Armenian literature, the choice would seem almost inevitable: it had to be Yeghishe Charents. Born in Kars, Charents had long carried traces of Iran, returning in language to places like Maku as if it were his birthplace. The book was published this year, almost symbolically, at a moment when Iran was once again drawn into war with the United States and Israel. Fearing what each morning might reveal, Jorj has only one wish: peace for Iran, so he can cross the Aras River once again and bring his translation of “Charents-Name” to Iran. The post The translator between Iran and Armenia appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.