Armenia turned 21 in 2012. By American standards, turning 21 is a milestone that signifies adulthood. It is at 21 that we shed our adolescence and take stock of our future.

As we prepare to put yet another year behind us and welcome the dawn of a New Year and rejoice in the Glorious Nativity and Theophany of our Lord Jesus Christ, we reflect on that first Christmas and the timeless and inspirational messages it brings of love, hope, faithfulness, and family

We often don’t realize that as humans, we don’t always inherit the best of worlds. Born without choice, we are thrown into consciousness; into a reality we had no part in shaping. As we travel through life, our surroundings, the people in our lives and the societies in which we live all etch their imprint into our very being, shaping our lives and the people we are to become.

Asbarez sat down with Alex Sardar, the organization’s outgoing country director for more than eight years to find out what he and his team have learned in Armenia, and why we should consider those lessons compelling.

Upon graduating from college this last year, I decided to spend my first 3 months out of school, living in Armenia. My experience in June began with meeting as many new faces as I could, and taking lots of photos in a number of remote locations around the country.

Armenia’s premier business advisory services provider, Ameria Group, is expanding its offices in Los Angeles after one year of operations in the United States of America.

Am I lucky or what? Last year while I was doing a research online for a column about the “Water Feast,” an old Armenian tradition of dousing each other with water, I found pictures taken in Yerevan showing kids throwing buckets of water. I wished that one day I could be there in person, watching those kids in action and taking my own pictures.

After two dismal years, Armenian theater in Los Angeles managed an uptick in both the quantity and quality of productions that graced area stages in 2012.

The Hellenistic city of Tigranakert is located in the internationally unrecognized republic of Nagorno Karabakh (old Armenian name of which is Artsakh), which has proclaimed its independence at the beginning of the 90s of the last century after the Armenian-Azerbaijani war.

Aurora Mardiganian was a wonderful person and a family friend. She was a closer friend of my aunt Serarpi. Aunt Serarpi was like a second mother to me, and I would often pass through my aunt’s apartment on my way into the street, I would stop to see my aunt to say hello.

In September, surgeons Dr. Hratch Karamanoukian and Dr. Raffy Karamanoukian began a one-week joint surgical humanitarian mission at the Central Republican Hospital in Stepanakert, Nagorno Karabakh Republic.

The Christmas tree in our capital city’s Republic Square is lit, holiday decorations are up, traffic is congested, people are buying presents, mothers are frantically preparing traditional dishes for their holiday table and children are looking forward to presents and their winter break from school.

I love to walk. I can walk for hours and hours in New York City, my current home. My great-grandmother Lucine loved to walk. In the mid- to late-1950′s, she would walk for miles and miles through Aleppo and into the outskirts with my toddler father on her shoulders.

Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, portrayed one small Armenian community’s efforts to resist deportation and massacre during the genocide.