Aristotle,
the famous Greek philosopher, allegedly used to walk while lecturing.
Since he was not a citizen of Athens, he could not own property. Like
another famous philosopher, Socrates, he and his colleagues used the
grounds of the Lykeion (Latin
Lyceum
), the name of a gymnasium dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (the term
lyceus
was applied to the type of statue that represented Apollo with his arm resting on his head).
This happened around 335 B.C. and the
Lyceum
actually
became an informal institution where Aristotle’s followers conducted
philosophical and scientific inquiries, rather than being a formal
school. Nevertheless, those followers were known as the
Peripatetic
school (the Greek word
περιπατητικός
[
peripatêtikos
] meant “given to walking about”), and Aristotle’s school came to be named
Peripatos
because of the
peripatoi
(“covered walkways”) of the Lyceum.
The word
lyceum
entered many languages, like English and Armenian, where sometimes the word
Լիկէոն
(
likeon
), used to translate Aristotle’s
Lyceum,
has been used to denote the
high
school section of a school. This happened, for instance, in the case of
a famous Mekhitarist school, the Mourad-Raphael school of Venice, which
existed from 1836 to the 1990s.
However,
the Armenian language found a way to give the concept of “lyceum” (or
“Academy,” as Aristotle’s teacher Plato called his own school) with a
word of its own. Following the idea of the peripatetic school, it used
the root
ճեմ
(
jemel
“walk”), derived from an Iranian source, from which derived
ճեմարան
(
jemaran
“walking place”). In the eleventh century, the word was also used to
call the schools founded by another important writer, Grigor Magistros,
in Ani, Sanahin, and Bjni. Later on, the school of the monastery of the
Holy Cross, in Crimea (fourteenth-seventeenth centuries) received the
name of
jemaran.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several important educational institutions took the name of
jemaran,
meaning
“academy” or “lyceum,” such as the Lazarian Academy of Moscow
(1814-1918), the Scutari Lyceum in Constantinople (from 1838), the
Gevorgian Lyceum in Etchmiadzin (1874-1917), the Academy of Marash
(1891-1915), the Cilician Lyceum of Aintab (1891-1915), and others. The
name was continued in Armenia when the Seminary (
հոգեւոր ճեմարան/hokevor jemaran
)
of Etchmiadzin was reopened in 1945. However, it was more consistently used in the Diaspora. For many decades, the name
Jemaran
became
synonymous with the school founded in Beirut (1930) by the Hamazkayin
Armenian Cultural and Education Society, first known as “Armenian
College,” then as “Nshan Palanjian College,” and currently as
“Melanchton and Haig Arslanian College” (the word
college
is used in the French and not the American sense of the word). Nevertheless, other
jemarans
had
existed before, such as the Mesrobian Academy in Sofia (1921), and
later, such as the Karen Jeppe College (1947) and the Cilician College
(1960), both in Aleppo, for instance.
On
a side note: for decades, the Armenian American community did not have a
daily school of its own, thinking that it was not important for its
survival. It used to think that it was more important to do fundraisers
to benefit “the”
Jemaran,
the
one in Beirut. This went on and on until the 1960s, when a new
generation arrived in this country, conscious of the importance of
Armenian daily schools to ensure not only the future of the Armenian
language in the United States, but also of the community. Then, the
fundraisers continued, but with a different goal.
