«Արևելքը շատ ավելի մոտ է մեզ, քան թվում է» - Իրինա ԳԱՅՈՒԿ

Irina Gayuk's article is devoted to the history of her scholarly path — from work at the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion to the creation of the fundamental "Encyclopedia of Armenian Culture in Ukraine" — and reveals the key problems in studying Armenian cultural heritage on Ukrainian lands.

Introduction and Methodology
The author describes how a chance assignment to the topic of the history of the Armenian Church at the Lviv Museum grew into a long-term research program. The starting point was an exhibition on the history of the AAC in Ukraine (1998), organized jointly with Bishop Natan, followed by dissertation research and subsequent work on a catalogue of museum holdings.

The Dissertation and the Rethinking of Church History
The central thesis of the work is a critique of the traditional scheme of church history, according to which a single Christianity supposedly gradually split into separate Churches. The author argues that a unified church organization never existed, and that the designation of Armenians as "Monophysites" was the result of a politically motivated position taken by the state Roman-Byzantine Church. Drawing on an analysis of the Edict of Theodosius the Great of 380 and the works of A. Kartashov and A. Spassky, Gayuk shows that the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils were often dictated not by theological but by political interests of the empire.

From Catalogue to Encyclopedia
A significant part of the article is devoted to methodology and the difficulties of field work:

surveying the holdings of 44 museums in 25 cities of Ukraine;
the difficulty of identifying Armenian exhibits due to the Ukrainization, Polonization, and Russification of surnames (Bernatovych, Aivazovsky, Mitulsky, etc.);
the systematic underestimation and "invisibility" of Armenian objects in museum inventories, caused by staff members' unfamiliarity with the history of the Armenian diaspora.

The author cites illustrative cases — the discovery of a portrait of Bishop Y. Krzysztofowicz, royal charters granted to the Zolochiv community in 1703 and 1727, and an inscription from the icon of "St. Gregory the Illuminator" that had officially been listed as lost, having been mistakenly divided between museums during the Soviet period.

The Problem of Diaspora Identity
Particular attention is paid to a conceptual problem: the tendency to perceive the heritage of the Armenian diaspora as "foreign" — Russian, Polish, Ukrainian — rather than Armenian. The author aligns herself with F. Ganzhorn's position on the inadmissibility of denying ethnic criteria in the cultural heritage of the diaspora, calling such an approach a form of ethnocide. It is precisely this problem that formed the basis of the first section of the encyclopedia, devoted to the ethnic identification of Armenians outside historical Armenia.

Conclusion
The key conclusion of the article is that Armenian cultural heritage in Ukraine constitutes an extensive but systematically underestimated and poorly studied stratum, requiring purposeful scholarly reconstruction. The work on the encyclopedia demonstrates that the full identification and attribution of such monuments is possible only through a deep knowledge of the history of Armenian communities, and that this subject turns out to be far closer to and more deeply rooted in Ukraine's cultural space than is commonly assumed.