My great-grandfather, Hovhannes Aharonyan, was born in Ynkuznak in the Mush province (now in modern day Turkey, historically part of Western Armenia) and served as a scribe at St. Karapet Monastery. He was trusted with the monastery’s books and treasures and when the darkness of 1915, the year of the Armenian Genocide, arrived, he pried open cracks in the domes and hid what he could from the violence at the gates. He risked everything to preserve its memory. That story sits inside me like an heirloom – proud, painful, and impossible to forget.
I imagine him at night, the monastery cold as an abandoned prayer, with a single candle, his fingers finding a seam in the stone dome. He wrapped manuscripts in oilcloth, slid icons into hollows, and trusted that memory was worth the risk. He did not lead from a pulpit. He led by defiant grace, refusing to trade truth for safety. That quiet, solitary defiance is the kind of leadership we in contemporary Armenia have begun to miss.
Leadership is not a title; it is a habit of the soul. It is the priest who walks into a hospital ward and sits with the frightened, the teacher who corrects a favored official in public; the citizen who names injustice and endures the consequences. When we Armenian citizens say that our country needs leaders, we do not mean better politicians or managers; we mean men and women anchored in conscience, willing to accept cost for the sake of principle.
For centuries, the Armenian Apostolic Church did more than raise a voice in worship; it also taught our alphabet, saved our books, and read our history aloud when no government would. It anchored sorrow and turned it into memory. Its moral language shaped how communities bore suffering and how families passed down courage. That was leadership rooted in vocation, not convenience.
Today that language is fraying. Rituals remain, stone churches still speak beauty. But too often, leadership has become preservation of position, privilege, and quiet arrangements that protect insiders. The recent episode in which a clergyman, once recognized by the Church and now disqualified, threatens to expose damaging secrets is not merely a scandal. It is a mirror. Why does moral outrage arrive only after the roof caves in on the individual who speaks? Why wait until one’s status is threatened before raising a voice?
Too often, leaders live by the old saying: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” That maxim explains silence, but it does not excuse it. Survival rules calcify into moral habits. When the hand that feeds you blesses you as well, you learn silence, and you measure conscience by consequence. You speak only when silence becomes personal. That is not leadership. It is arithmetic—an accounting of risk, not a declaration of faith. Of course, some remain silent not only out of self-interest but also because of systemic pressures, fear of retaliation, or entrenched patronage networks. Yet these factors, while real, cannot fully absolve the moral responsibility to act.
Free will is more than private choice. In a republic, it is the courage to act publicly when action is costly and right. When clergy members or officials remain silent until their own interests are imperiled, they reveal timidity, not bravery. They show a society where moral action is conditional, where principle bends to personal benefit.
This pattern spreads. Young people watch which acts are rewarded and which are punished. They learn that a raised voice is a gamble dependent on patronage—they learn to prioritize safety over truth. The pipeline of principled leaders shrinks. A generation grows skilled at survival and unskilled at sacrifice. Institutions may stand, but the soul of public life drains away. The causes are complex, historical, institutional, and political, but complexity does not remove the ethical demand for courage.
If the vocation of a clergyman is to carry and teach the word of God, what are we to do with those who wear the title but avoid the burden? A steward who keeps a ledger and ignores the hungry is not a steward. A shepherd who hides when wolves come is not a shepherd. A leader who waits for personal injury before speaking against wrongdoing shows calculation, not conscience. That failure fractures the moral tissue of a nation.
Senator John McCain’s life offers a counter-model: habit, not spectacle. His leadership sprang from small, costly choices of truth over comfort, duty over applause. Character is not a line in a speech; it is the accumulation of ordinary refusals to compromise. We cannot demand instant heroics, but we can ask whether the quiet choices were made long before the crisis arrived.
This is no uniquely Armenian ailment. Across the region and across traditions, when protection substitutes for conscience, patronage becomes the currency of silence. The remedy is simple and hard, choose principle when the stakes are small, so that when stakes rise you are already true.
My great-grandfather Hovhannes tucked manuscripts into a wall because he believed those pages would mean something to people he would never meet. That is the scale leadership demands—not what benefits you now, but what will matter for the memory of a people. Courage costs careers, comforts, friendships. Memory teaches the value of that cost.
We—Armenia—are a small nation with a long memory. That memory can pin us to old grievances or light the next act of courage. If patronage dictates when conscience speaks, we will only trade one set of harms for another. Ask every public person: when you first saw something wrong, what did you do?
Some will answer with silence. Others will answer with solitary defiance. The difference is leadership. The difference determines whether we pass on memory as a relic or as a guide. Hovhannes chose a hollow and a candlelight; he chose risk for the sake of truth. Those small, stubborn acts are the ledger by which I measure leaders now. If clergymen, officials, teachers, and young citizens value that ledger above their safety, memory will have done its work.
Listen to the silence and hear what it says: leadership has been outsourced to protection; free will has been rationed; principle has a price. Let the next voice to rise be not the one whose back is against the wall, but the one who raised its hand when the wall was only a hairline crack.
When we learn to speak before the wall appears, we will have remembered what leadership means.