The Mandela Effect / S01E04 /Who Surrendered Ani?

For a full ten centuries, Armenians have debated who surrendered the last Armenian kingdom in the Armenian Highlands and how it was surrendered — the Bagratid Kingdom of Ani. For a full 1,000 years, Armenians have argued over who was to blame for the fall of Ani, who was the traitor, and who was the patriot. The reason for this difficult discussion — or debate, if you will — is understandable: the subject is extremely sensitive, because Armenians are a nation that lost its statehood 1,000 years ago and struggled and survived for nearly ten centuries without statehood, that is, without an independent political system. That is why we Armenians have been trying for 1,000 years to understand how we lost the kingdom on the very territory of historical Armenia, and who was responsible for it.

Over the last hundred years, a widespread view has taken hold that the Bagratid Kingdom of Ani ceased to exist in 1045 because of a great national and political betrayal, and that the traitor was Catholicos Petros Getadarts. This widely распространված opinion, as they say, began spreading among broad popular circles as early as the beginning of the 20th century, but reached, so to speak, industrial scale during the Soviet years.

The fourth episode of “Mandela Effect” attempts to answer the question of why and how the last Armenian kingdom in the Armenian Highlands — namely, the Bagratid Kingdom of Ani — fell 1,000 years ago; what objective and subjective factors led to Ani’s fall; what is true and what is fiction; and, ultimately, whether the guilty parties have in fact been correctly identified.