Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage

A woman wearing traditional Armenian dress bends down to tend to an outdoor stove while preparing a meal.

Collaboration and Community: Working Together for the Future of Armenian Festivals

Festivals allow for pauses in our fast-paced routines to celebrate human creativity.

Bowls of citrus fruits including lemons, limes, and oranges, are arranged on a striped, bright green table cloth. Behind the bowls are jars filled with various superfoods including Goji berries.

La Cultura Cura: How Latinos Are Reclaiming Their Ancestral Diets

Whole Foods certainly didn't invent chia seeds.

American Sign Language alphabet

Hearing the Voices of Deaf Culture at the 1981 Folklife Festival

The landmark event introduced many hearing visitors to the stories, poems, sign play, jokes and traditions of the deaf community

Visitors pick out crochet toys to purchase at the My Handmade Armenia Festival.

Reviving Tradition With the My Handmade Armenia Festival

The My Handmade Armenia festival aims to not only help artisans but to create new opportunities for tourists too—from purchasing extraordinary items to taking home a tangible and traditional piece of Armenian cultural heritage.

(Photo courtesy of Sandra Chandler)

A Folkways Challenge Reveals a Love for Sacred Harp Singing in Georgia

Douglasville, Georgia, the home of Alexander High School, represents the divide where urban meets rural.

Preparing klulik from Sasoun at Noosh. (Photo by Areg Vardanyan, My Armenia Program)

Eat Like an Armenian with These Tips from a Local Guide

Did you know that Armenian culture is heavily gastro-centric? Any occasion, be it happy or sad, has associations with food.

Carolyn Smith collecting beargrass in Klamath National Forest, 2015. For beargrass to be supple enough for weavers to use in their baskets, it needs to be burned annually. Ideally, it is burned in an intentionally set cultural fire, where only the tops are burned, leaving the roots intact. Prescribed fires in the Klamath National Forest are few and far between, so weavers “follow the smoke” and gather, when they can, after wildfires sweep through the landscape. (Photo courtesy of Carolyn Smith)

How Indigenous Ecological Knowledge Offers Solutions to California’s Wildfires

“We need to reintegrate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and cultural and prescribed burning into our landscape,” Carolyn Smith says.

(Photo by Authenticated News/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Are You a Friend of Dorothy? Folk Speech of the LGBTQ Community

During the years before greater openness and understanding, members of the LGBTQ community sometimes resorted to coded speech or behavior as a safeguard. Other community members could understand these codes, but not outsiders.

Artyom Ghazaryan in his studio in Yeghegnadzor. (Photo by Narek Harutyunyan, My Armenia Program)

The Spirit Across Regions: Armenia from the Local Perspective

Yerevan Magazine spoke with several beneficiaries of the My Armenia Program who offer exciting tourism experiences in different regions of Armenia.

Stunning views inside the Arpa Protected Landscape. (Photo by My Armenia Program)

Adventuring the Armenian Way

Armenia is a museum under an open sky with hundreds of opportunities to actively explore outside.

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