The very fact that we can speak, and rightfully indeed, of an Iranian 'oikumene' is itself a sign that we are dealing with an inexhaustible crossroad of peoples, nations, religions, cultures, and civilisations meeting one another in a fascinating dialectics of contraposition and composition, of conflict and reconciliation, of confrontation and synthesis. As to the Armenian partner of this vast oikumene, owing to a large extent to the geopolitical position of their homeland, the Armenians who also are the actors of a millennia-long history, felt themselves almost constantly challenged to face a great diversity of peoples, cultures, and religions: Achaemenids and Hellens, Romans and Parthians, Sasanians and Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, Italians, Franks and other Europeans, Mongolians, Slavonians, both Ottomans and Turks, Safavids, and in modern times, Russians and Western Europeans, to mention only the main political formations around Armenia or in close political and cultural relationship with it. To those we must add minor political entities as, for instance, Georgia, and in recent times Azerbaijan Republic, and some prevalently ethnic or religious-confessional groups, such as the Caucasian Albanians or the Syriac. In most of those cases Armenians found themselves almost crushed between two superpowers of the moment, as it was the case with Parthians and Romans, Byzantines and Sasanians, Ottomans and Safavids, Ottomans and Russians. Such multifarious relationships with neighbouring peoples, states, and cultures, caused, of course, to Armenians numerous problems of very different nature, problems often extremely hard to resolve going as far as to touch the limits of survival. But survival itself has different aspects. Not every time when peoples survive, we see them in a full