Pastura

Hamshen is a highland district on the northern slopes of the Pontic Mountains, above the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea — today the Hemşin and Çamlıhemşin districts of Rize province in Turkey. According to the 8th-century historian Ghevond, around 790 Prince Shapuh Amatuni and his son Hamam, fleeing crushing Arab taxes, led some 12,000 people with their wives and children into Byzantine lands. Tradition says Hamam rebuilt the ruined town of Tambur and named it Hamamashen, “built by Hamam”, which in time became Hamshen.

It is a land of mist and rain: valleys sink in fog while the summer pastures, the yaylas, lie above the clouds. As early as 1307 the Armenian historian Hetum wrote of Hamshen as a land where fog and darkness hide everything. Hamshen weddings rang with the davul, the zurna and the kemenche, and the dancing went round in a circle.

Hamshen Armenians — Homshetsi, as they call themselves — kept their own dialect, Homshetsma. It belongs to the Western group of Armenian dialects, and UNESCO lists it as endangered. From the later 19th century into the 1920s, Christian Hamshen Armenians fleeing persecution and the 1915 genocide resettled on the Caucasian Black Sea coast and grew tobacco and maize there. Their descendants live in Sochi and Adler, in Abkhazia and across the Krasnodar region.

Pastura is a game many of us grew up with, passed on at the family table from the old to the young. The design of this page is a tribute to Hamshen and to the Western Armenian world it remains part of.