SURPRISINGLY, many Armenians have blond hair and gray or blue eyes. I saw fair-haired children in the village. I saw a sweet little four-year-old girl called Ruzana who had pale blue eyes and golden hair. I saw faces with a classic, antique beauty, perfect ovals, with small straight noses and pale-blue almond-shaped eyes. I saw people with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and slightly slanting eyes; I saw people with elongated, sharp faces and huge, sharp, hooked noses; I saw people whose hair was so black as to be almost blue, with eyes like coals; I saw the thin lips of Jesuits and the thick protuberant lips of Africans.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a national type.
And it is hard to say which is the more surprising: this diversity or the stubborn persistence of the national type.
The diversity, I suppose, reflects thousands of years of raids and invasions, of people being taken captive, of commercial and cultural encounters. Here we can see all the other people with whom the Armenians came into contact: Assyrians and Babylonians; the ancient Greeks; Persians, Turks, and Slavs; the fearsome Mongols. The Armenians are an ancient nation, with thousands of years of culture and history. They have lived through many wars. They are a traveling nation, a nation that has borne the yoke of the invader for many centuries, a nation that has more than once struggled to win its freedom only to fall back again into slavery. Perhaps this is the reason for all the flattened Mongolian noses, the Assyrian jet-black hair, the pale-blue Greek eyes,[8] and coal-black Persian eyes.
Interestingly, all this diversity—fair and dark hair, pale-blue and black eyes, and so on—is particularly evident in the countryside, in villages whose way of life is inward-looking and patriarchal. Here, at least, it cannot be the reflection of any recent events. The mirror that shows us the face of contemporary Armenia has been polished in the depth of time.
The same can be said of Russian faces and—still more—of Jewish faces. There is certainly nothing uniform about Russian faces. There are Russians with gray or light-blue eyes, with snub noses and flaxen hair; there are Russians with hooked noses, so-called “Gypsies,” with southern, black eyes and pitch-black curls; and there are Russians with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and narrow Mongol eyes. And as for the Jews! Black-haired, hook-nosed, snub-nosed, swarthy, blue-eyed, fair-haired. . . . Faces that look Asian, African, Spanish, German, Slav. . . .
The longer a nation’s history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen—the greater the diversity of its faces. Throughout centuries and millennia victors have spent the night in the homes of those they have defeated. This diversity is the story of the crazed hearts of women who passed away long ago, of the wild passions of soldiers intoxicated by victory, of the miraculous tenderness of some foreign Romeo towards some Armenian Juliet.