Salmast Heritage Association held a private fundraising event on Feb. 9 at the Glen Arden Club, and gave a comprehensive status report from its inception in 2015 to 2017
GLENDALE—Salmast Heritage Association held a private fundraising event on February 9 at the Glen Arden Club, and gave a comprehensive status report from its inception in 2015 to 2017, covering its activities, accomplishments, and next steps. The main goal of the gathering was to clarify the funding required for two parallel projects: Supporting research for an academic publication on the history and culture of Salmast, and initiating an undergraduate course by the Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies at UCLA.
The informal event provided an effective opportunity to meet supporters, to report on SHA’s sponsorship of activities pertaining to the project, to introduce its main partners, UCLA and Politecnico di Milano, and to discuss related research and development ties to Cambridge University in the UK, Azad University in Iran, the State University in Armenia, and last but not least, its collaboration with Organizations for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, in Iran and Armenia. Event Chair Laura Atoian, opened the evening; Board Chair Sarkis Barkhoudarian introduced SHA Board and Committee members, and ceded the floor to the directors of the project, Drs. Brambilla and Cowe.
Principal Project Leader, Dr. Marco Brambilla, captivated the audience’s attention with an impactful Power Point Presentation on Salmast’s geography and architecture, showed a Google map where a multitude of churches and monuments were accurately pin-pointed, and shared photos of research expeditions he conducted in the 1970s, with colleagues from Politecnico di Milano, emphasizing the pressing need for resuming archeological and architectural research in the Salmast region, before humans and the elements, completely destroy crumbling historic sites. He reiterated his views by showing and contrasting photos of the same sites dating back to the 70s, and ones taken as recently as a decade ago. Dr. Brambilla then informed the audience that he is in the process of organizing a Salmast expedition in 2017, and discussed the importance of scientific research methods and options. He illustrated his views with photographs produced with a state of the art “preservationâ€
