About Grakan Tert

Grakan Tert

Grakan Tert, whose name means Literary Paper or Literary Newspaper, is the literary newspaper of Armenia, published in Yerevan by the Writers' Union of Armenia. Where most newspapers in this directory chase politics, Grakan Tert's territory is literature itself: new Armenian poetry and prose, literary criticism, essays, translations, the memory of classic writers and the debates of the living ones. It is one of the oldest continuously rooted periodicals in Armenian cultural life. When its online edition was presented in Yerevan in March 2013, its archive was described as covering more than eighty years of publication, with digitisation planned back to 1932 — a lineage reaching into the early Soviet Armenian literary world. Published in Armenian, with a small print circulation of about 1,000 copies at the time of its digital launch, it has never been a mass newspaper. Its importance is of a different kind: for generations of Armenian writers, appearing in Grakan Tert, being reviewed in Grakan Tert, or arguing in Grakan Tert was part of what it meant to belong to the country's literary profession.

A Newspaper of the Writers' Union

Grakan Tert is published by the Writers' Union of Armenia, the professional organisation of Armenian writers whose own history frames the newspaper's. The Union marked its seventieth anniversary in June 2004, and its publishing activity across the decades included literary magazines and newspapers among which Grakan Tert stood as the newspaper-format flagship, listed alongside journals such as Nork, Nor Dar and Literaturnaya Armenia. The United States Library of Congress country study of Armenia, surveying the press of the early post-Soviet years, identified it in exactly those terms for foreign readers: Grakan Tert, the Literary Paper, published by the Armenian Union of Writers. That institutional home gave the newspaper both stability and a defined mission. It did not need to chase a political patron in the manner of Armenia's party-aligned dailies, because its patron was the writers' own corporation; and its editorial agenda was set by the concerns of that corporation — the state of Armenian literature, the livelihood and standing of writers, the preservation of the language and canon, and the introduction of new names.

Roots in the 1930s

The newspaper's documented lineage reaches to the early 1930s. Reporting of its 2013 digital launch stated that the online archive would take in two-year-old materials at first and that it was planned to upload archives from 1932 to the website, and the presentation highlighted a gallery of unique photographs taken in different periods over eighty years. Those details date the paper's heritage to the period when Soviet Armenia was constructing its cultural institutions: the Writers' Union itself was a 1930s foundation, Armenian publishing was being reorganised on Soviet lines, and a literary newspaper served as the connective tissue of a small, state-supported literary world centred in Yerevan. This profile states the lineage carefully. The eighty-year archive was the claim made by the Union's own leadership at the 2013 launch and reported by the ARKA news agency; the completeness of the run across the Stalin years, the war and the late Soviet period is an archival question that the digitisation project itself was designed to answer, and no issue-by-issue history is asserted here beyond what that reporting establishes.

What a Literary Newspaper Publishes

Grakan Tert's contents follow the classic pattern of the writers'-union newspaper, adapted to Armenian material. Its pages carry new poems and short prose by established and emerging Armenian writers; critical reviews of new books; essays on literary history and on the anniversaries of classic authors; interviews with writers, translators and scholars; reports of Union congresses, prizes, book presentations and literary evenings; and obituaries and memorial pieces that, accumulated over decades, form a biographical record of Armenian letters. In recent years its editorial writing has ranged well beyond belles-lettres in the narrow sense. A scholarly study of editor Karine Khodikyan's editorial and publicistic writing in Grakan Tert between 2018 and 2024 catalogued her editorials under political and national themes — including emigration and genocide — alongside ecological, cultural and even epidemiological themes from the pandemic years. That range is typical of the Armenian literary newspaper tradition, in which the writer is expected to act as a public intellectual and the literary paper doubles as a forum on the nation's condition, not merely its verses.

The Digital Launch of 2013

The best-documented single moment in the newspaper's modern history is the launch of its online version, presented in Yerevan on Tuesday 26 March 2013 and reported by the ARKA news agency. The website, grakantert.am, was presented as the online version of the periodical published by the Union of Writers. Levon Ananyan, the president of the Union, said he was glad to note that the number of Grakan Tert readers was growing year over year and would rise further with the online version, and that the authority of the newspaper would climb. Two practical details from the launch define the paper's economics at that moment. First, the print circulation stood at about 1,000 copies, and Ananyan said the online version would not affect that circulation or its sales. Second, the delay model was print-first: articles and information published in the periodical would appear on the website a week later. The site's developer, Naira Vardanyan, explained that beyond the newspaper's own materials, grakantert.am would carry constantly updated news of literary events, works of the classics and books of contemporary Armenian writers, with the long-term ambition that the site would become an electronic literature portal — and with the historic archive, back to 1932, to be uploaded over time.

Editors and Literary Stewardship

A writers'-union newspaper is edited by writers, and Grakan Tert's modern editorship is documented in that pattern. Karine Khodikyan — prose writer, playwright, publicist and translator — has served as the newspaper's chief editor in the period since 2018, a role attested both by the academic study devoted to her Grakan Tert editorials of 2018–2024 and by cultural reporting into 2025, which identifies her as writer, playwright and editor of Grakan Tert. Her predecessor-era leadership at the Union level included Levon Ananyan, the Union president who fronted the 2013 digital launch and led the organisation from 2001. Beyond named individuals, the editorship is collective in a way commercial newspapers are not: the Union's assemblies, its publishing house established in 2002, and its ecosystem of magazines and youth publications all feed the newspaper's pages, and its contributors are substantially the Armenian literary profession writing for itself and for the reading public beyond it. Researchers should note that a complete verified succession list of the paper's editors across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods is not available in the sources consulted, and none is fabricated here.

Scale, Audience and the Economics of Literary Print

Grakan Tert's print circulation of about 1,000 copies, recorded in 2013, places it at the small end even of Armenia's small newspaper market, where the entire country's newspaper circulation in the early 2000s was estimated at around 40,000 copies and major political dailies sold only a few thousand. But circulation is the wrong measure of a literary newspaper. Its audience is concentrated and influential: writers, critics, teachers of literature, university scholars, librarians and the committed reading public in Yerevan and the diaspora, for whom a notice in Grakan Tert could establish a young author's reputation or fix the interpretation of a new book. The 2013 launch reporting captured the resulting strategy precisely — protect the small, loyal print edition, use the website to widen reach without cannibalising print sales, and build the archive into a permanent national literary resource. The same logic explains the paper's survival through the post-Soviet decades that killed hundreds of Armenian titles: a union-backed cultural periodical with a defined professional readership has a sturdier, if modest, foundation than a general newspaper dependent on kiosk sales.

Grakan Tert and Armenian Literary Culture

The newspaper's deeper significance lies in continuity. Armenian literature in the twentieth century was repeatedly ruptured — by genocide, exile, Sovietisation, the purges, the collapse of the USSR and the emigration of the 1990s — and institutions that carried literary memory across those ruptures are correspondingly precious. A newspaper whose archive spans from 1932 through the independence generation to the present holds, in one run, Soviet Armenian poetry debates, the thaw-era rediscovery of suppressed writers, the literary response to the 1988 earthquake and the Karabakh movement, and the emergence of the post-1991 independence generation of Armenian writers, whose arrival scholars associate with new literary periodicals and magazines of the internet age. Grakan Tert also anchors the Armenian-language literary system against the pull of Russian and English: it insists, by existing, that Armenian remains a language in which new literature is first published, reviewed and argued over. Its coverage of book presentations, jubilees and writers' congresses, unglamorous beside political news, is the connective record of how a small nation's literature organised itself.

Assessment

Grakan Tert is not a newspaper of record for politics, and it should not be cited as one. It is something rarer in this directory: a professional literary newspaper with a documented lineage of more than ninety years, published by the Writers' Union of Armenia, edited in recent years by the writer Karine Khodikyan, printed in about a thousand copies and extended since March 2013 by an online edition intended to become a portal for Armenian literature and to preserve an archive reaching back to 1932. In a media market defined by patronage, polemic and collapse, its endurance on literary merit and institutional stewardship makes it one of the most distinctive titles in Armenian journalism — the paper in which Armenian literature has long talked to itself, and through which the rest of the world can listen in.