German President highlights cultural ties in Komitas museum in Yerevan

President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier has visited the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan.

During a cultural reception organized at the museum, the German president delivered a speech, highlighting the close ties with Armenia.

President Steinmeier recited Theodor Storm’s April, and said, “If a Federal President is reading a spring poem in the Armenian capital, it could mean two things, spring has indeed come, and perhaps we are in the Komitas Museum, where German poetry has its solid place.”

He said the poem is just one of the many poems by Storm and Goethe that Komitas turned into music during his studies in Berlin.

“No one symbolized this Biblical country as he did, a country between Asia and Europe, a country bearing millennia-old eastern, and at the same time Christian culture, whose history is full of suffering, persecution and exile,” he said.

The German president said Komitas’ connection with Berlin made him the forerunner of the German-Armenian ties in culture, religion and science. “Thus, we couldn’t have chosen a better place to duly value our cultural relations,” he said.

The President said that the Goethe Center, which will be transformed into the Goethe Institute, will become yet another place in Yerevan where cultural relations between the two countries will develop.

The opening of the institute is planned to take place this year.