Long before “clown” became a synonym for children’s birthday parties, the word described a hardened professional performer — one whose stage, on occasion, was not a court hall or a village square but the front line of a battlefield. Armenian tradition remembers these figures as tsaghratsu (ծաղրածու), the comic actors of the medieval Armenian stage, and holds that the least talented among them were sent to stand before the enemy and provoke them …
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