Dear compatriots and friends,

It is a pleasure to introduce you to the Heritage and Progress foundation, established in 2020, the work of which is devoted to the development and support of Russian-Armenian humanitarian initiatives.

Establishing our foundation, firstly we aimed to broaden and fortify humanitarian links between the people of Russia and Armenia, bonded by friendship, historical roots, and cultural values through the ages. The Christian principles of humanity, love, and peace, run deeply through both our cultures.
The activities of the foundation are directed at the following: supporting humanitarian avenues that will bring our two countries closer together; creating broad, multifaceted cooperation in the fields of culture & art, science & education, and also youth politics; and strengthening state-level ties of fellowship based on heritage and patriotic values.

The board of trustees includes prominent representatives of Russian science & education, famous art & culture figures, and esteemed scientists, musicians, doctors, and businesspeople. Among them: well-known Soviet and Russian historian and Eastern scholar, director of the Hermitage Museum, and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Mikhail B. Piotrovsky; Soviet and Russian opera singer and teacher Lyubov Kazarnovskaya; Soviet and Russian historian, Director of the Institute of Asian and African countries at MSU, professor Igor I. Abylgaziev; Primate of the Armenian Diocese of the Russia and New Nakhichevan Armenian Apolostic Church, Yezras Nersisyan; Soviet and Russian film director and screenwriter Oleg Massarygin.

We believe that based on the millennia-spanning cultural heritage of our nations, we will be able to achieve progress in the humanitarian mission to strengthen engagement, and see the various endeavours of the people of our countries thrive.

Founder of the Heritage & Progress Foundation
Armais A. Kamalov

Dear friends!

It is an honor and pride for me to represent the Heritage and Progress Foundation, and I would like to share this joy with you.

In the very center of Moscow, near the Nikitsky Gate, hidden from the bustle of the big city, there is a monument near the Church of the Ascension of the Lord. Carved from white stone, leaning to the cross, two women bowed in an inseparable embrace. The inscription on the monument: "Blessed in the centuries is the friendship of the peoples of Russia and Armenia." The same monument rises in the very center of Yerevan. As a symbol. Like the single DNA of the two nations kept in hearts, engraved on the tablets of history. From time immemorial it sounds in the temple of Ani with the melodious painting of the Russian craftsman Flora, appears in the letters of the Armenian alphabet on the sarcophagus of Yaroslav the Wise, sounds with Armenian paints within the walls of the Novodevichy Church, it will be silent in the silence of Matenadaran, where thousands of the richest monastic manuscripts saved by Russia are kept returned to Armenia.

They say that there is a historical, actual and spiritual Motherland, and our young Foundation sees its task in reunification, in this trinity, in the creation of a single cultural space, in its preservation, rethinking and development.

Heritage is like a common genome, like a double helix of DNA memory with loops of history, like new turns of a spiral. Endless in its non-ringing. She crumbles in the wrinkles of war veterans, curls up in the world's weary calloused hands, circles, laughs in the brown-blue iris of childhood. Repeating the bends of the mountain serpentine, it leads to the velvet peaks of the Byurakan ridges, where high above the ground in a mountain observatory spoke to the stars, comprehended the cosmogony of distant galaxies, the brilliant philosopher and astrologer, academician Ambartsumyan, and today, years later, a planet that was discovered and named in his name by Russian astrophysicists. At the height of the war, the freedom-loving "Gayane", born in evacuation, sounded for the front and rear, and today a Russian liner with the name "Khachaturian" carved into the sky, like great music, is soaring into the sky. The painter of the Main Naval Staff of the Russian Empire, Aivazovsky, is still museum-friendly in his native Feodosia. Drunk in the workshops of Serov and Korovin, from Krasnoyarsk to Taganrog, Saryan's riot of colors dazzles. One of the best in Armenia, the Yerevan University of Languages and Social Sciences, bears the name of the great Bryusov, who revealed to the world the national image of Armenia. DNA stretches, curls. … Sergei Gorodetsky, who worked in an orphanage for Armenian orphans, dedicated the "Angel of Armenia" to his friend Hovhannes Tumanyan. Akhmatov's translations of Charents, an anthology of Armenian poetry edited by Maxim Gorky ...

Once the great Anush (as the genius Anna Akhmatova called Mandelstam, who is in love with Armenia), translated from Armenian the poems of the poetess Markarian:

Homeland and son are sweeter than life
What can young men do without a homeland?
Homeland is dead without sons
How prophetic precisely, this very spiral of memory is screwed in, piercing time, from heart to heart, from the past to the present day.

And picked up, continues: "The teeth of vision crumble and break off when you look at the Armenian churches." This is Osip Mandelstam Yeghishe Charents. But, in my opinion, it is he for us.
That is why today, united by the Christian mission of restoration and help, healing and creation, still very young, just taking its first steps, our Foundation begins its journey. Bright Angel on his way!
So that the foliage of apricot trees and Russian birches rustled on the alleys of friendship, so that under their closed branches over the common textbooks the heads of students of the same universities would bow, so that the daring young thought of the two peoples would argue on scientific platforms and symposia, create in the network of computer spaces and in the silence of libraries, so that common tables were laid - memories of the past, so that the square-blue-eyed childhood would have a peaceful future, and so that the ancient prayer of two peoples, united in faith and inseparable in fate, soared and flew over the temple that had risen from the ruins in a new round of an eternal spiral ...