Before PM Nikol Pashinyan signed the now infamous deal with Azerbaijan and Russia to end the Artsakh War, Azeri forces were making a push for territories which they deemed to be theirs from the northern parts of Karabakh to the southern tip of Armenia. The last remaining route open to enter Armenia after the Lachin corridor was cut by Azeri forces was through Karvachar. On the 15th of November, the Karvachar region was set to be ceded to Azerbaijan (now postponed to November 25), forcing Armenia to at some point create a new route to keep Stepanakert connected with Armenia. In Khachen, only elderly men and women remained, refusing to leave their homes while the men were at the front fighting for their land. In the region of Syunik, Azeri forces had been targeting Armenian villages with heavy artillery strikes, even using infiltration groups to enter some of these border villages like Davit Bek. Though the territorial integrity of Armenia remains intact, Azeris will be allowed to travel through Armenia to the enclave of Nakhichevan, which is another defeat for the Armenian republic. This new corridor will create a constant Turkish link between Turkey and Azeri territory.

The northern route through Karvachar

The southern Armenian border

Author information

Jonathan Alpeyrie

Born in Paris in 1979, Jonathan Alpeyrie moved to the United States in 1993. He graduated from the Lycée Français de New York in 1998 and went on to study medieval history at the University of Chicago, from which he graduated in 2003. Alpeyrie started his career shooting for local Chicago newspapers. He shot his first photo essay in 2001 while traveling the South Caucasus. After graduating, he went to the Congo to work on various essays, which were noticed and picked up by Getty Images, and signed a contributor contract in early 2004. In 2009, Jonathan became a photographer for Polaris images and SIPA press as well. Alpeyrie has worked as a freelancer for various publications and websites, such as the Sunday Times, Le Figaro magazine, ELLE, American Photo, Glamour, Aftenposten, Le Monde, BBC, and today he is a photographer for Polaris Images, with whom he signed in February 2010. Alpeyrie's career spans over a decade and has brought him to over 25 countries, covered 13 conflict zones assignments in the Middle East and North Africa, the South Caucasus, Europe, North America and Central Asia. A future photography book about WWII is in the works. Alpeyrie published a book with Simon and Schuster in October 2017. Alpeyrie has been published in Paris Match, Aftenposten, Times (Europe), Newsweek, Wine Spectator, Boston Globe, Glamour, BBC, VSD, Le Monde, Newsweek, Popular Photography, Vanity Fair, La Stampa, CNN, and Bild Zeit, ELLE magazine, Der Speigel, Le Figaro, Marie Claire, The Guardian, Bild and The Atlantic.

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WATERTOWN, Mass. — The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Archives constitute an invaluable repository of modern Armenian history from the late-19th century to our days. Thousands of reports, letters, telegrams, brochures, diaries, memoirs, photographs and artifacts make up the core of the collection, shedding light on the history of the ARF since its inception in 1890 and, more broadly, the history of the Armenian people in its homeland and in communities around the globe. 

After the opening of a reading room, the Archives have hosted a number of researchers in recent years, including Dr. Khatchig Mouradian. The Armenian Weekly asked Dr. Mouradian to curate a collection of photographs for our readers. We present them below, with brief captions. It is worth noting that the ARF Archives are in the process of scanning and cataloguing the entire photography collection, making them more accessible.

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WATERTOWN, Mass.—The collection of rare photographs from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Archives in the Armenian Weekly’s January 23 issue generated much interest and discussion. The photo essay was reprinted in several newspapers and online publications, both in the original English and in Armenian. In this week’s issue, we feature another set of photographs, this time focusing on Armenian cultural, religious and political institutions from around the globe.

The photographs are curated by Dr. Khatchig Mouradian, who has conducted research in the archives on several occasions over the past few years. He has shared yet another representative sample of the photography collection in the ARF Archives for this issue of the Weekly.

The ARF Archives constitute an invaluable repository of modern Armenian history from the late-19th century to our days. Thousands of reports, letters, telegrams, brochures, diaries, memoirs, photographs and artifacts constitute the core of the collection, shedding light on the history of the ARF since its inception in 1890 and, more broadly, the history of the Armenian people in its homeland and in communities around the globe. 

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On August 14, 2019, I swore an oath to become a citizen of the Republic of Armenia. It was a decision that felt so natural to me, but many of my friends and family wondered why. I’ve always felt compelled to give a knee-jerk reaction by replying “why not?”, but I knew that their remarks were not just some accidental occurrence and that they were genuinely curious. Indeed, other than having some visa-free access to some obscure countries, there seemed to be little tangible benefits for my citizenship. But deep down, it was much more than that. I never felt I should bother explaining why I did what I did. Until now.

My family was among the last Armenians to leave their historic homeland of Sepastia (today’s Sivas) and settle in Istanbul in the 1960s. Prior to that, they had lived on those lands for more than a thousand years. Theories as to when the Armenians settled in Sepastia tend to vary, but there is a consensus among historians that the bulk of them settled there under a pact with the Byzantine Emperor and Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni of Vaspurakan as an exchange of territories to prevent further Turkish incursions into the Byzantine Empire’s frontier. With that, in the winter of 1021, Senekerim-Hovhannes surrendered his kingdom to the Byzantines which effectively ended nearly a thousand years of Artsruni rule. As the Byzantine army moved into Vaspurakan, approximately 14,000 Armenians of Vaspurakan packed up their belongings and settled in Sepastia where Senekerim-Hovhannes was granted autonomous rule. Perhaps some of my ancestors were among those who settled from Vaspurakan to Sepastia at that time. Since then, my family probably never lived in Armenia proper. Nonetheless, it should go without saying that to say you’re Armenian is to say you’re from Armenia. It is acknowledging that at some point in time in your family’s history you once lived in Armenia proper. To many that should be obvious, but for other Armenians, their identity is based on theoretical grounds given how long ago it was that they moved out of Armenia. Regardless of it all, my family, just like many Armenian families, has kept their identity alive for thousands of years and are now able to tell their story. And in any case, some theories concerning where and why Armenians settled in and around Armenia are more concrete than others. We can all agree, however, that Armenians once lived on those lands with some degree of land and property ownership and in many cases autonomously, for better or for worse.

Fast forward to today: there are almost no Western Armenians left in their historical homeland. Most Armenians were forcefully deported, assimilated or massacred and are now living in foreign lands with various different passports in their possession. Armenians have been forced to adopt new customs, beliefs and identities and begin the process of starting and building new lives. Nevertheless, we adopted William Saroyan’s model of building a “New Armenia” and did whatever we could to salvage our identity as a people. This was the modus operandi for decades and almost felt like it was here to stay.

But things suddenly changed in 1991 and the unthinkable happened: Armenia became an independent country. The whole idea of building a “New Armenia” in the Diaspora became obsolete. We now had an Armenia we could all build, invigorate and develop. This opportunity would have probably been inconceivable for those who never got to see this moment.

My family’s history differed from most genocide survivors in that they were among the rare few who managed to remain and continue living in their ancestral lands, but this time under the new Turkish republican rule. My grandfather, who was born and raised in Sepastia, would tell me stories about how his father, who lived under an increasingly hostile Turkish nationalist environment, would always revel in the idea of living in a free and independent Armenia. These mindsets were part of a dying breed that still felt a connection with Armenia. My great-grandfather was part of a bygone generation that openly discussed the prospects of an independent Armenia. But these dreams slowly disintegrated for many of these Armenians after the genocide, and most ended up moving to Bolis, ultimately integrating into the Bolsahye way of life. This lifestyle consisted of adopting an outlook on Armenian identity that was so different from the long-lost days of the national awakening of those Armenians living in their ancestral lands. They lost that connection forever and had to orient themselves to the new reality of living outside of their homeland.

It was no surprise that the main counter reaction to my citizenship journey came from the representatives of this part of my life. Many Bolsahyes looked confused when I told them I wanted to become a citizen. They felt and continue to feel that I am an Armenian at a cultural level and that Bolis has never been part of the Diaspora. I never understood why many Bolsahyes, including the late Hrant Dink, tend to disassociate themselves from Armenia, even not considering themselves members of the Diaspora, something I’ve always respectfully disagreed with. Bolis was never part of Armenia and to say that you’re not part of the Diaspora is to imply that you live on historically Armenian lands when in reality you were violently torn away from them. Indeed, the separation of Bolis and Armenia is not something new for that community. The Bolis Armenians, even before the genocide, always viewed themselves as outsiders and thereby disconnected from Armenia. While there were massacres happening in Armenia, many were ridiculed for writing poems about love and romance. In the aftermath of the Adana massacre in 1909, Rupen Sevag penned a scathing letter addressed to his Bolsahye peers, writing how alarmed he was at only being able to find details of the massacre in the European press, while the Armenian press in Bolis had only passing mentions of it, focusing more on romantic poetry and betrothal announcements. It goes without saying that this lifestyle comes from a life of privilege. They had the ability to distance themselves from Armenia, and that’s why they found it convenient to do so.

This is not meant to be a criticism of Armenians in Bolis. Indeed, many Diasporan Armenians throughout the world, despite all of their nationalist and patriotic rhetoric, are also disconnected to a certain extent from Armenia. For example, the materialistic obsessions of many Armenians in places like Los Angeles or Paris can be characteristically similar to the distractions the Bolsahyes indulged in back then. However, the Bolsahyes of today have succumbed to a unique narrative that was force fed to them by the Turkish government. Another reason why they may not want to identify themselves with Armenia is because the Turks made it impossible for them to make that association happen to begin with because of the genocide and acts of political, social, economic as well as many other forms of oppression that continued in the aftermath of 1915. Indeed, this partially explains why the Bolis community resorted to a communitarian form of living, working for the community by maintaining churches, hospitals, and schools above anything else. As such, they had to ultimately redefine their identity in a way that would appease Turks – that is, not taking Armenia into account at all, acting like it doesn’t exist, and considering themselves just citizens of Turkey. Implicit in the attempt at eradicating Armenian identity is the idea of the Armenian as “other” – lesser, sub-human – subject rather than citizen. The utter absence of human and civil rights within this scheme is as undeniable as the genocide. Yet, the Turkish government continues to unapologetically deny it, along with human rights abuses that continue to be committed against Armenians in a full-fledged assault that culminated this past year. The way in which such militaristic, political and psychological warfare is wielded against the colonized to destabilize any attempts at unity and resistance has been hauntingly effective across certain areas of the Armenian community. Second class citizenship cannot be achieved without the subjects’ acceptance of their own perceived inferiority along with the perceived superiority of the oppressor. The colonizers want to make you believe this and succeed in doing so when a fracture occurs between subjects who cease to identify their connection through their cultural identity and shared subjugation.

Frantz Fanon called this the colonization of the mind. It’s a theory that explains the subjugated mentality that many colonized people internalized without being conscious of it. That is to say that even after the many minorities become formally free from subjugation and dehumanization of some colonial power, they still carry with them the attitude of a colonial subject wherever they go. It explains why many newly-independent countries or communities still prefer emulating the former colonizer’s culture, beliefs and values. Fanon argued that the way forward would be to decolonize the mind and return to one’s liberated self. This can apply to all Armenians. As much as Armenians want to believe that we are free, independent and liberated, it’s not hard to see why we can still have a colonized mindset wherein we capitulate to the desires of those colonizers who want us to physically, mentally, and spiritually disassociate ourselves from Armenia. Every single moment that we distance ourselves from Armenia helps those who want to eradicate us to inch closer to achieving that sinister plan.

Indeed, there’s a steep hill to climb when it comes to this self-realization because Armenians have been dealt heavy blows throughout their history. On top of it all, much of their verifiable past has been lost in the dustbins of history. Family records, assets, places of worship, schools and other institutions have all been burned. Human beings can often harbor memories that they’ve never had or have long-lost and forgotten. However, the real loss would be giving up this history and doing nothing to retrieve it. This can be likened to a newly-discovered archeological site filled with a treasure trove of artifacts waiting to be dug up. Some of these treasures are out in the open and easily identifiable, while others need time, patience, and a tremendous effort to locate, unearth, and ultimately appreciate. It’s up to us as human beings to make that first step to this self-realization so that we can fully comprehend our past, present, and future as sentient beings on this planet. 

When I became a citizen, I felt like I had retrieved something that was lost or taken away from me. I broke that chain of the colonizer and felt one step closer in fulfilling all that was lost in my family’s history. I became a citizen not only to fulfill my own desires, but the wishes of all those in my family who could not have ever had that opportunity. Indeed, this can be applicable for almost every Armenian. After all, the loss of Western Armenia was a loss for us all. The loss of our land also coincided with the loss of our identities as human beings. Hence, my decision to become a citizen wasn’t a nationalistic or patriotic one, but a personal one. It was something that I felt human beings must recover after centuries of deprivation and assimilation, and this was my way of resisting all those variables that wanted to make that recovery impossible.

After all, what is a passport but a booklet of bonded paper flanked by plastic? Its value is determined by those agencies that approve of it. And as we are constantly consumed with the idea of what others have to say about it, we often lose sight of what that little booklet may mean for us, and the values we instill into it ourselves are far more valuable to me than what any passport controller has to say about it. We put into that booklet the values we’ve attained throughout our lives. Among these values is that quest for identity and a sense of belonging. Sure, a passport is used to indicate where we are going, but it is also used to show where we come from. And, sometimes where we come from does not begin from the day of our birth, but a story that has traversed the depths of time for millennia.

To me, becoming a citizen of Armenia was a no-brainer. I am sure any Armenian who wants to be a citizen has their own unique story of becoming one themselves. Because in reality, we are all Hayastancis. To say we are anything but is to willfully succumb to the colonization of the mind. To create such a wedge between Armenians and refer only to those living under the Republic of Armenia as Hayastancis is to play into the hands of the colonizer. Therefore, to recognize this and adjust accordingly is the first step to self-realization and ultimate liberation. What astonishes me is how much we are allowing ourselves to dissociate with Armenia given our colonizers’ obvious delight. This trend only works in their favor as we further move towards the depths of an uncertain future.

It is no coincidence that I write this article in the winter of 2021, because this winter marks the 1,000th year anniversary of when Hovhannes-Senekerim, due to the invading Turkish threat, surrendered his kingdom to the Byzantines and had tens of thousands of Armenians move from Armenia proper to Sepastia. As mentioned earlier, my family may very well have been among those who fled their homeland. Yet this story hasn’t changed and is eerily familiar. The issues Armenians faced exactly one thousand years ago are hauntingly similar to the issues Armenia faces today. Armenia still has to deal with the familiar existential threat of Turkish invasions and the prospect of losing our sovereignty. However, the one thing that can be changed is our response to this intimidation. Do we pack up and leave like the Vaspurakan Armenians did a thousand years ago? Or do we remain, resist and rekindle our connection with our homeland in order to further strengthen it? The choice is ours.

As Armenia continues to face the new but ever so familiar reality of coping with the aftermath of a war that can credibly be considered a genocidal attempt against its sovereignty, it is now more important than ever to consider the prospect of engaging with Armenia at this level. This is key to the progress of a nation, but also the progress of an individual. As we engage with ourselves as Armenians, we are simultaneously rekindling our connection to our common humanity. Armenians throughout the world have come a long way to make that happen. It is imperative for them to seize the moment and make the most of it because, at the end of the day, true liberation and independence comes from the mind above anything else.

Author information

Garen Kazanc

Born in Paris to Armenians from Turkey, Garen Kazanc moved to Los Angeles at a young age, where he attended and graduated from the Armenian Mesrobian School in 2006. He received a B.S. degree in sociology from Cal State Los Angeles. He has been an active member of Hamazkayin and the Armenian Poetry Project and has contributed articles to various Armenian newspapers and media outlets.

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Y-DNA Testing

The advent of commercially available DNA testing has opened up opportunities, previously unimagined, for Armenians to learn more about their family histories. Unfortunately, most people are drawn to DNA testing with the promise of identifying their ethnicity make-up. The advertising campaigns of these companies promote this service and feed these hopes. People fixate on the varied ethnicity estimates of each company and how they differ from their perception and self-identity. It is outside the scope of this article to discuss the caution that should be employed when viewing such results. Regardless, if this is the driving force for more Armenians to DNA test, all the better. I have often supplied in presentations and articles the explanations for why DNA testing is so important in the process of repairing the ruptures in our family histories caused by the Genocide. In this article, I offer analysis of another infrequently used DNA test.

Y-DNA testing is available to only men. Unlike autosomal DNA testing (e.g., ancestry.com, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, etc.) which supplies information on all ancestors within a certain time period, Y-DNA testing only supplies information on direct paternal ancestry (e.g., father, paternal grandfather, great-great grandfather, and so on).

This test is only offered by FamilyTreeDNA. It is rarely ordered because of its limited use for genealogical purposes and higher cost. There is a comparable mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA) for direct maternal ancestry which both men and women can take, but it is even more limited in usefulness for genealogical research.

The objective is to determine the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) with those who share your DNA. An autosomal DNA match, depending on the amount of shared DNA, will most likely share a MRCA within five to six generations, though occasionally small segments will be passed down over longer periods. For example, those sharing greater than 50 centimorgans (cm) of DNA will, with high probability, be fourth cousins or closer in relationship. 

However, in the case of a Y-DNA match, the MRCA for even an exact match may be centuries ago. The mtDNA mutates even more slowly and, thus, even less can be discerned from matches. In addition, whereas the MRCA for an autosomal test can be anywhere across your family tree, the MRCA for a Y-DNA or mtDNA match can only be one person in each generation (e.g., only one of your eight great-grandparents, one of your 16 great-great-grandparents, etc.). 

There are different levels of Y-DNA testing that can be purchased. The more markers compared, the more costly the test, and the more refined the timeline of MRCA. Currently, you are limited to a 37 (Y-DNA37) or 111 (Y-DNA111) marker test, though those testing previously had more options. A match of genetic distance of zero on the Y-DNA111 will have MRCA within four generations 90-percent of the time and within two generations 50-percent of the time. For genetic distance of one, the MRCA will be within six generations 90-percent of the time and within three generations 50-percent of the time. 

The following table is a more detailed explanation for the Y-DNA67 test.

Here is the comparable table for the Y-DNA111 test.

In western cultures where surnames have a longer tradition than in Armenian families, one could use a Y-DNA test to confirm the relationship of those sharing a surname. However, in the Armenian context, surnames were mostly a 19th century development and were rarely maintained across generations. As families grew and divided into separate households, most often they would take on the name of their patriarch. Thus, Armenian Y-DNA matches will most likely not share the same surname. Yet, there are some fascinating oral histories available that detail the surname progression of particular families, and it is here that opportunities exist for study.

Pazmashen

Pazmashen was an entirely Armenian village approximately nine miles west of the Kharpert fortress. Throughout the 19th century, the village grew and prospered. At its height, almost 2,000 Armenians lived in Pazmashen. After the Hamidian massacres and increased immigration, there were 1,500 Armenians in 320 households on the eve of the Genocide. In 1930, two separate histories were written of the village, one by Abdal Boghosian and the other by Vartan Khosrovian. These books, especially Boghosian’s Comprehensive History of Pazmashen, supply a rich history of the founding clans of Pazmashen and the surnames generated from each of these clans. Many descendants from the village congregated in Whitinsville. There is a story that back in the day, the trolly operator would call “Last stop Pazmashen,” upon arrival in Whitinsville, much to the pleasure of the Armenians onboard.

I became interested in Pazmashen particularly in 2016. That year, while in Watertown, I visited my father’s first cousin Michael Demirjian—a direct paternal descendant of my great-grandfather Misak Demirjian. I visited him with the hopes that he would take a DNA test, and he agreed. Sadly, he has since passed away, and I am even more glad I took the opportunity that day to take his sample.

We knew so little of my great-grandfather. He was a blacksmith in Diyarbakir. In 1914, he was conscripted into the Ottoman army and never heard from again. My grandmother, her brother and mother survived the march to Aleppo and eventually made their way here. Previously, I held out very little hope of ever learning more about his background. But then I received Michael’s test results. He had a Y-DNA67 match with genetic distance of zero. His match, Ken Hampian, had paternal roots in Pazmashen.

I then became consumed with trying to determine which of the Pazmashen clans my great-grandfather had been a member of. During that process, I also came to study the oral history tradition of family relationships as contained in the Pazmashen books. Since then, I arranged for the DNA tests of over a dozen men with paternal roots in Pazmashen. The results are fascinating. 

The founding families were stated to be Tatoyents/Tatoian, Korkoyents/Korkoian, Narozents/Narozian, Dervishents/Dervishian, Mnchigants/Mnchigian, Bedoyents/Bedoian, Shahbazents/Shahbazian, Eoksiuzents/Eoksiuzian and Panoyents/Panoian. From each of these would spring 10 more surnames and, thus, over 80 more in total. In one account, Pazmashen was founded in the 12th century by these clans. In the other account, following the brutal reign of Tamurlane in the 15th century, four Kendoian brothers purchased the village. Early Ottoman records indicate a growth in Pazmashen throughout the 16th century to the same approximate size over the next 150 years.

So far, of those tested, 12 match each other with a genetic distance of 0-6 using the Y-DNA67 results. At the core of these results are Michael Demirjian and Ken Hampian. They are at zero genetic distance for Y-DNA67 and one genetic distance for Y-DNA111. This most likely means that Ken and Michael descend from the same man who would have been Misak’s grandfather or great-grandfather. This is further supported given Ken and my father also were autosomal DNA matches. Interestingly, before the Y-DNA results, I had noticed a good number of autosomal matches between me and my father and those with roots in Pazmashen, particularly those from the Dervishian clan. 

The Pazmashen histories speak of the significant trade of villagers with various cities, including Diyarbakir. It seems likely that sometime in the mid-1800s my ancestors made the move from Pazmashen to Diyarbakir, most likely for economic reasons. The question of which clan he belonged to is still unanswered. Ken’s family took on the patronymic surname of Hampartsoumian while my family took on the occupational surname of Demirjian. While our closest matches are with those of the Dervishian and Shahbazian clans, the results also indicate that these clans originate from the same common male ancestor.

What we can say at this point is that these founding families would grow to encompass well over 100 households in the village during the 1800s. The Korkoians, Dervishians, Panoians, Bedoians, Shahbazians and Narozians all descend as well from a common male ancestor who most likely lived in the 1600s. Thus far, the Tatoian clan is the only one that did not match the others. I have also yet to discover a descendant of the Mnchigian or Eoksiuzian clans. However, the more people test, the clearer things will become. So I would be very interested in others who descended continuously through their male ancestors from Pazmashen. 

Author information

George Aghjayan

George Aghjayan is the Director of the Armenian Historical Archives and the chair of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Central Committee of the Eastern United States. Aghjayan graduated with honors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Mathematics. He achieved Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries in 1996. After a career in both insurance and structured finance, Aghjayan retired in 2014 to concentrate on Armenian related research and projects. His primary area of focus is the demographics and geography of western Armenia as well as a keen interest in the hidden Armenians living there today. Other topics he has written and lectured on include Armenian genealogy and genocide denial. He is a board member of the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), a frequent contributor to the Armenian Weekly and Houshamadyan.org, and the creator and curator westernarmenia.weebly.com, a website dedicated to the preservation of Armenian culture in Western Armenia.

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Editor’s note: March 15, 2021 marked the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin. The Armenian Weekly asked Dr. Khatchig Mouradian to curate a selection of newspaper clippings from around the globe. We feature those clippings here, alongside a brief introduction by Dr. Mouradian. 

“High Mogul of Turkey Assassinated!” “Dramatic Confession, An Armenian’s Revenge, Waited Ten Years for his Chance,” “Why Talaat was Killed,” “Armenians Here Defend Student,” “Slayer of Former Grand Vizier of Turks Acquitted.” These are some of the headlines in newspapers from America to Australia in the aftermath of Talaat Pasha’s assassination 100 years ago.

In the absence of a Nuremberg trial equivalent for the Armenian massacres, the survivor generation took justice into its own hands. Trials had been held in Allied-occupied Istanbul sentencing perpetrators to death in absentia, but most leaders from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) were beyond reach, having fled the country (many to Germany), while those imprisoned by the British in Malta were released as part of a prisoner exchange deal.  

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) decided in its 9th Congress held in Yerevan in 1919 to assassinate the perpetrators. By 1922, the ARF had gunned down—in Berlin, Rome and Tiflis—Ottoman Turkish leaders implicated in the genocide: Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, Ottoman Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha, Minister of Navy Cemal Pasha, CUP founding member Bahaeddine Shakir and Trebizond governor Cemal Azmi. The project, dubbed “Operation Nemesis,” made headlines around the world and helped influence Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and paved the way to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 

Reading about Talaat Pasha’s murder in the newspapers of the day, Lemkin felt that Soghomon Tehlirian, the Operation Nemesis assassin, “upheld the moral order of mankind.” He wrote:

But can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? Will not passion sway such form of justice and make travesty of it? At that moment, my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.¹ 

Lemkin’s search for answers culminated in the coinage of the term “genocide” in 1943 and his lifelong struggle to pass a law against it.

¹ Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 20.

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Editor’s Note: The following special report by Weekly correspondent Linda Berberian is based on an exclusive four hour, one-on-one interview with Maral Najarian. Due to Najarian’s traumatic experiences and the sensitive subject matter, Berberian and Najarian took breaks during questioning. The interview was conducted a week after Najarian’s release in the Armenian language and was translated by Berberian.  

Maral Najarian spent her 49th birthday on November 18 alone in a dark, dreary Baku prison. Perhaps the only permanent trace left of her was the number she marked on the wall with a broken zipper hook from her jacket, symbolizing the last of the 120 agonizing days held captive by the government of Azerbaijan. Najarian, a former civilian war hostage, is now safe and back in Beirut, Lebanon. But her kidnapping and imprisonment continue to haunt her. With no television, radio or books, not even a pencil or a piece of paper to distract her from an unimaginable reality, the future looked grim for the Lebanese-Armenian who had repatriated to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) just two weeks before Azerbaijan launched a full-scale war on Armenians.  

The ink had barely dried on the Russian-brokered trilateral ceasefire agreement in the early afternoon hours of November 10, 2020 when Najarian and her fiancé Viken Euljekjian—an Artsakh War volunteer— began traveling toward his temporary lodging in Shushi by car from Yerevan. They were just two blocks from the hotel when they faced a roadblock and were met with Azeri forces.

“When we saw they had set up positions on the road along with their flag, I turned to Viken and said there are Azeris here. What are they doing here? What is happening?” Najarian recalled, believing that it was safe to travel to the Fortress City amid conflicting reports from social media and government officials about its capture. “He replied to me, ‘don’t be afraid,’ and I exhaled a bit.” 

She said they had no choice but to move forward since the road was far too narrow to turn around. So they pulled up in front of the post and parked the car. 

According to Najarian’s account, two Azerbaijani officers surrounded the car. The soldier on the passenger’s side spoke in Russian, but then switched to Turkish when he realized Najarian didn’t understand him. He asked where she was coming from and where they were going. Najarian, who speaks fluent Turkish, responded they were coming from Yerevan and on their way to a Shushi hotel to collect their belongings. 

“He said to me, ‘Don’t you know Shusha is ours? It’s not Shushi anymore,’ and I told him if we did, we wouldn’t have come,” she explained. 

The soldier instructed Najarian to unlock her cell phone, making sure her passcode was visible to him. Meanwhile, Euljekjian was undergoing a similar line of questioning. Both of their phones were confiscated as well as their Lebanese and Armenian passports as they are both dual citizens as of 2017.

“They took my purse. Then they took the car keys and after they took everything, they asked us to get out of the car. They searched us to see if we had anything on us, like a gun,” said Najarian. “I was already shaking and crying because I realized the matter was very serious because I’ve never been in a situation where I was threatened with a rifle before, not even in Lebanon.” 

The couple was told to sit down on the side of the road, as one soldier stood guard while another scrolled through Najarian’s phone. One soldier asked if they were hungry, thirsty or cold. She said she was too distraught to accept any of these offers. 

Najarian said she overheard the four soldiers calling for backup; perhaps because she spoke Turkish with them they must have thought she was a spy. She also noticed the soldiers going through Euljekjian’s phone, which contained photos of him holding a rifle during the war. Najarian noted neither of them was carrying any weapon to be regarded as enemy combatants even if Euljekjian had volunteered to fight in the Artsakh War. According to her, he stayed and fought for only about four or five days, then spent time at a Shushi hotel for one week before returning to Yerevan.  

“From what I understood, they were saying they captured two people and they needed to go. At that time, I didn’t understand if that meant to go to Armenia or to go with them,” said Najarian.  

After two hours on the side of the road in the bitter cold, another group of soldiers arrived. Within moments, eight soldiers surrounded Euljekjian and tied his hands behind his back. They began to kick him as Euljekjian, fearing for his life, yelled that he was forced to fight in the war. 

“They [Azerbaijani soldiers] beat him all over his entire body and repeatedly told him that he used a gun against them and needed to be punished. I remember there was blood all over Viken’s face. He and I were both yelling out that he didn’t want to go and fight and I was trying to push the soldiers off of him, but they shoved me aside so that I wouldn’t get beaten too,” recalled Najarian, unable to hold back tears as she described this painful account. 

She said the soldiers then covered Euljekjian’s head with a hood. With hands tied, both were forced into a 4×4 jeep and headed to a military prison camp about 30 minutes away. From there, she said they were transferred into another jeep filled with gas tanks. The windows, Najarian recalls, were closed. 

“I started screaming to Viken they are going to burn us alive,” Najarian described. “I was screaming, but Viken was partly unconscious and unable to hear me.”

She said she felt dizzy as they were both having difficulty breathing while trapped in the car with gasoline fumes. About 30 minutes later, four soldiers entered the overcrowded jeep; Euljekjian was then forced to sit on the backseat floor. That’s when they cracked open the windows for fresh air. 

“Viken was begging me to remove the hood off his face, but I couldn’t help him because my hands were still tied. He was really suffering because he still couldn’t breathe. After some time, the soldiers began to take off the hood and then put it back on. They did this until we reached the prison where we stayed overnight,” she said.

On the morning of November 18 following a week-long series of interrogations and then being allowed some time with Euljekjian, they were both hauled off in a prison van with three other male Armenian POWs, including an elderly man who was deaf and blind. She said at some point during the five to six-hour journey, she asked one of the soldiers where they were headed and why it was taking so long. Najarian said she was shocked to hear they were headed to Baku and had no idea that they were previously in Azerbaijan. She said up until that moment she thought they were in an unfamiliar area of Artsakh that had been recently captured by Azerbaijan after the war. 

After spending one night in a temporary holding cell, she was told by the guards that she would be taken to the Red Cross. An overjoyed Najarian quickly put on her jacket and shoes thinking she would be going home and this nightmare would be but a brief misunderstanding. 

After a 15-minute ride, Najarian, Euljekjian and the same elderly Armenian POW stopped in front of a building with iron bars on the windows. Euljekjian was blindfolded with his hands tied in front of him but managed to move the blindfold enough to catch a glimpse of the ominous site. 

“Viken and I both told each other this doesn’t look like the Red Cross, and moments after this conversation they took him away. That was the last time I saw him,” she said. All she knows of his fate is based on information from an Azerbaijani official who told her that he has multiple charges against him and will be in prison for “a long time.” The last time Najarian saw her fiancé she said his face was bruised where he was beaten and his wrists had open wounds.

“I hope I see him again, but I don’t think I will because they really made me lose hope that much, but I hope God will help him and all the POWs,” she said.

Evidence based on firsthand information of Azerbaijan’s maltreatment of detained Armenian soldiers and civilians has been recently documented and released in several reports by Human Rights Watch (HRW). “HRW was quite open in raising the responsibility of Azerbaijan for war crimes,” noted Siranush Sahakyan, an international human rights attorney who is part of a team that has filed 250 cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to apply interim measures for captives under the control of Azerbaijani authorities and protect them from harm. In her comments to the Weekly, Sahakyan said the initiation of these proceedings has been backed by the Armenian Legal Center for Justice and Human Rights. 

But Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has refuted these investigative reports and asserted that all Armenian POWs have been returned in accordance with the November 10 ceasefire agreement. Sahakyan says the government of Azerbaijan is once again trying to mislead the international community, masking the crimes of its own political leadership and making political bargains at the expense of humanitarian issues.

To date, only 65 captives from the 2020 Artsakh War have been repatriated. According to Sahakyan, around 75 captives have been officially acknowledged by Azerbaijan. The remaining captives are unaccounted for more than four months after the cessation of hostilities. 

Najarian, for her part, said that Azeri authorities never explained any charges or allegations against her or why she was being kept prisoner, other than her association with Euljekjian. 

“I didn’t know what was happening to me or where I was until I was taken to a prison cell with one wall that had the prison’s rules and visiting days written in large letters. That’s when I became very stressed and realized that I’m in prison,” Najarian said. 

Gobustan prison, about 40 kilometers (23 miles) west of Baku, is where Najarian believes she was held for eight days until November 26; the high security facility, known for incarcerating Azerbaijani political prisoners and activists, is now widely reported to be where 250 or more Armenian prisoners of war are held captive. She described the cells as small and claustrophobic with bunk beds and double doors; the outer door had iron bars while the inner door was solid with a metal flap usually opened only to serve meals. During her interview with the Weekly, she repeatedly referred to her prison cell as “the L-shaped,” where she recalled walking eight steps forward, eight steps back.

In her first prison cell, there was a razor by the wash area. She wasn’t sure, however, if it was left by previous inmates or if it was intentionally put there. Later that day, prison guards blindfolded her again and introduced her to another cell, which also had a razor. She would remain in that cell for four days; she was given two blankets since the heater was not working. Then they moved her again to another cell with a razor placed on the bed; she was convinced that the availability of these razors was intentional. 

At this point, the mental and physical toll of confinement was mounting for Najarian as she endured a number of intense rounds of questioning from prison authorities. During one of many interrogations in a designated room in the prison, she recalls speaking with two Azeri authorities, one of whom spoke Armenian and would serve as translator. These were stressful situations for Najarian, who passed the time by pacing back and forth in her cell afterwards for hours. Desperate and hopeless after eight days, she recalled reaching for the razor but ultimately stopped short to envision her two children. 

“I could hear them saying to me, ‘Mom, don’t do it, don’t do it’ and right then I threw the razor into the underground toilet hole and poured water over it,” vowing to see her children again. “I thought of committing suicide because I was convinced I was going to stay there, and they were never going to release me,” Najarian recalled.

Dr. Artin Terhakopian, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in PTSD and war trauma, said from what he knows about Najarian’s case, he believes she was subjected to unnecessary prolonged trauma due to the Azerbaijan government’s decision to delay her release from captivity. Dr. Terhakopian has never treated Najarian, but he does have extensive experience in working with patients with fresh trauma, including from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

He explained that predictors of PTSD or severe depression are if a person has been subjected to a lack of any type of predictability or security, such as not knowing what may happen in the next hour or tomorrow or when control over when they want to sleep, eat or drink is taken away from them. He also added that many Armenian war veterans and civilians who are suffering from insecurities, traumas or effects from the recent Artsakh War may not want to seek help because of the stigma attached. 

“It’s a lot easier, God forbid you have a severed leg, to seek help for that. When you are able to possess all your limbs and appear intact physically and can’t focus or you are having nightmares or can’t sleep, it’s a very difficult thing to talk about or admit,” said Dr. Terhakopian.

There were at least two separate incidents during her four months in custody when Najarian thought she would be killed. On November 27—15 days into her captivity and the day after her final interrogation with Azeri authorities—she was escorted into a prison van while handcuffed and blindfolded. Terrified, she began to cry and yell that she was a civilian and had done nothing wrong, but the prison guards mercilessly snapped back, ordering her to stay quiet. After about a 15 to 30-minute ride, Najarian—still handcuffed and blindfolded—was removed from the vehicle by Azerbaijani guards, walked to a wall, and shoved her forehead against it.

“I kept thinking that since yesterday was the interrogation, today I’m going to be punished. I said to myself they are going to kill me,” she told the Weekly of the incident. “I was praying, shaking and crying while waiting for a bullet to go through my chest.”

When they took the blindfold off, Najarian realized she had been transferred to another prison. While there, she was given new clothes and allowed to shower once a week. She also underwent a full medical evaluation, including a PCR test for COVID-19. She described the prison as much more regulated. Her cell was located on the second or third floor and had a wooden door with a metal flap, which was used to determine whether or not she was sleeping during off hours. When the guards caught her sleeping, they banged on the cell door to wake her. One guard in particular had a habit of waking her up one hour before the other prisoners. “Sometimes they were good to me, but then they would go back to treating me badly again,” recalled Najarian. “There were days when some of the guards would bring me shawarma or potatoes or ask me if I wanted salt with my food, while others shoved food in my face.”  

During her captivity, Najarian was never allowed out of her cell, except to receive medical attention. She suffered hypertension and was prescribed medication to treat the onset of her symptoms, as well as antidepressants to calm her nerves. Najarian said she never had any type of serious health issues prior to her imprisonment. The doctor also prescribed medication for dizziness and allowed her to sleep, but when she woke up to use the bathroom, she noticed that her hands had turned blue. At that moment, she said everything went black before she fainted. The prison doctor then adjusted her medications. 

For the first three days, Najarian said she wasn’t allowed to sleep until around 10:30 pm and began to experience back pain due to a herniated disk. The guards noticed that she started laying on the floor, and not long after that the prison warden instructed the guards to allow her to rest on the bed when needed. She also said the food tasted better; her diet consisted of grains, macaroni, chickpeas, as well as fruit and juice three days a week. Her cell had a working heater. Linens were changed once a week. She was also given necessary toiletries. The prison guards also wore face masks at all times as part of COVID-19 safety measures. 

Najarian said the guards assured her that they respect women and that because she was never a soldier or fought with a knife or a gun, no harm would come to her. That’s not what happened to 58-year-old Alvard Tovmasyan of Artsakh, an intellectually disabled Armenian woman from the Karin Tak village who was brutally tortured, dismembered and eventually murdered in her own backyard after Azerbaijan forces captured the village on October 29, 2020 during the war. 

On December 13—the death anniversary of Najarian’s father—she suffered a panic attack and later fainted. She was evaluated by the prison doctors who gave her medication to calm her nerves. When she returned to her cell, she saw they had conducted a full cell inspection and removed everything including her shoes and extra clothes. Najarian suspected they might have thought she was abusing drugs.  

Months later on February 12, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was finally granted access to visit Najarian in prison. ICRC representatives interviewed Najarian to gather further background on her case; Najarian said they seemed surprised to learn she was unarmed upon her detainment.

“According to its mandate, ICRC visits conflict-related detainees, monitors their treatment and conditions of detention and helps to ensure that these individuals are able to maintain contact with families,” said ICRC Yerevan’s communications manager Zara Amatuni in a statement to the Armenian Weekly.

“They told me I can write a letter. My hands were shaking, and I was crying at the same time,” Najarian said. Her letter was addressed to her two children; she assured them she was safe and being treated well. 

During the week of March 4, Azerbaijan withdrew from negotiations to free Najarian with no official explanation. On March 8—International Women’s Day—Najarian was summoned to see a high-ranking official who offered his congratulations on her future release and then gifted her a bouquet of red and white flowers. She remained skeptical of this news.  

She told the guards that she wanted to be home to receive flowers from her children on Mother’s Day and asked that the flowers be removed from her cell. She had missed many important milestones and holidays with her family, including her son’s birthday on March 9. She was inconsolable and exhausted from the emotional rollercoaster and constant manipulation. She was prescribed even more medication to relax. “There was a psychiatric ward on one of the floors above mine, and I could hear them screaming all the time. I would tell myself that I’m almost at that point of heading up there myself. Either they [Azerbaijan] are going to win by me dying, or I’m going to win by surviving,” she said. 

In the early morning hours of March 10, the prison guards opened the metal flap and instructed Najarian to gather her belongings. “I jumped out of my bed and quickly gathered everything. At 6 am, they opened the door—the door that would never open for me. I couldn’t believe that I was really leaving. Before I left the cell, I turned around and I prayed to God that whoever comes after me in this prison cell, let them get out even sooner than I did,” she tearfully told the Weekly. 

Najarian was transported to the Heydar Aliyev International Airport where she met with an ICRC representative and an Azerbaijani soldier/escort. The ICRC representative accompanied her all the way to the airport’s security checkpoint and gave her a plane ticket to Istanbul. She traveled with her Lebanese passport wearing the clothes she had on the day she was kidnapped along with a jacket and a sweater given to her by Azeri authorities in case she got cold on the plane. They did not return her phone, her watch or her glasses, but they did make sure she left the prison with their gifted bouquet of red and white flowers. 

During her 11-hour layover in Istanbul, Najarian passed the time aimlessly walking around the terminal. She says she was disoriented, but eventually made conversation with other travelers. She landed in Beirut at 9:30 pm local time. 

“I never imagined I would reach my family and that happiness I was feeling that God gifted this to me. When I got off the plane, I looked around and thought no one had come because I didn’t recognize anyone and just as I was about to start crying, my son and daughter came up from behind and hugged me, and I realized that I had gotten my wish,” a smiling Najarian said. 

Since her release, there have been questions surrounding why Najarian decided to journey back to retrieve her belongings from a fresh warzone when there were so many conflicting reports about the status of Shushi and the safety of surrounding towns. Najarian, who fled Artsakh for Yerevan 10 days into the war, claims she was under the impression that it was safe for her to return to Berdzor to retrieve her belongings (furniture, kitchen essentials, clothes). She had made contact with Euljekjian, who after serving in the war for about five days, had returned to a hotel in Shushi and joined Najarian in Yerevan a week later. 

“Every day we were checking our Facebook pages and the news on what was happening with the war but there was always wrong information coming out; news from Lebanon was different from the news in Armenia and this went on until November 10. On that day, we saw on Facebook that Shushi had been taken but we still didn’t know if it was true or not,” she explained. Najarian criticized the Armenian government for being indirectly responsible for her harrowing ordeal due to the misinformation surrounding the capture of Shushi. 

A frustrated Najarian said she and Euljekjian had not reached Shushi until around 4 pm and that there was enough time for the Armenian side to set up blockades at least on the border of Berdzor, which remained Armenian territory. She believes this would have prevented Armenians from heading to areas of Artsakh that had fallen under Azerbaijan occupation after the war ended. She also said that she noticed Russian peacekeepers from afar who were deployed but had yet to set up checkpoints on the only road leading to Shushi. 

“Everyone makes mistakes, but it doesn’t mean you have to pay for it for the rest of your life,” she said while recalling her and Euljekjian’s decision to go back to Shushi. 

She credited the ICRC and the Lebanese Red Cross for facilitating her ultimate release and also named Lebanese Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbe and President of the Federal Council of the Russian Federation Valentina Matvienko, as well as all the foreign ambassadors for their efforts along with Armenian Revolutionary Federation Central Committee of Lebanon members Hagop Pakradounian and Raffy Demirdjian.  

After her release, Najarian identified an Armenian POW in a viral video filmed by Azerbaijani soldiers as the elderly man from her time in the Baku prison. Sahakyan confirmed he was eventually repatriated to Armenia sometime in February but died shortly after. 

For now, Najarian, who captured the attention of the international community, is planning on restarting her career as a hairdresser in Lebanon. While incredibly grateful for all the support she received during her captivity, she said she would have rather been known for her positive contributions to society. “As for me, I want my life to change for the better. I went through hell and back, but right now I want to move forward.”

Author information

Linda Berberian

Linda Berberian is an independent journalist as well as a full-time corporate communications and staffing director. Although Berberian has spent the majority of her career in corporate healthcare, her true passion has always been journalism. She started her career reporting for the Suburbanite New Jersey newspaper and was published in local magazines. In addition to the Armenian Weekly, Linda has been published in the Armenian Reporter. As an active member of the Armenian community, Linda is most recently recognized for her coverage of the Artsakh War, human rights activism and Armenian related causes. Berberian holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications/Journalism from Fairleigh Dickinson University in NJ, where she served as news director/anchor for its television and radio stations and a reporter for the its campus newspaper. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

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The post Maral Najarian’s Harrowing Tale of Captivity in Azerbaijan appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.

Starting in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was undergoing an economic transition and European powers were meddling in the empire’s economic system. This factor gave rise to the Christian middle class at the expense of the traditional Muslim middle class. To counter this situation, Sultan Abdul Hamid II and later the Young Turks centralized the system, reorganized the Turkish middle class and paved the way for the extermination of Greeks and Armenians and the resettlement of Caucasian and Balkan Muslims on confiscated properties of these communities in Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands.

Two factors contributed to the rise of the Armenian middle class in the Ottoman Empire: first, the beginning of the Tanzimat Reforms era (1839-1876) which encouraged non-Muslims to open to European trade; second, the abolition of the Janissaries (Sultan’s elite slave soldiers) which benefited Armenian moneylenders.

With the start of the Tanzimat (Reform) period, the social dynamics of the Ottoman society changed as Muslims, despite being the numerous majority, feared they may lose power to non-Muslims who were becoming economically powerful. Moreover, Muslims viewed this new order replacing the old strict religious order as a pretext used by European powers to interfere in the empire’s domestic affairs and empower the Christians at their expense. As a result attacks on Christians intensified. However, Muslim merchants became more suspicious after the Young Turks took power (1908) and they saw an uncertain future in electoral politics as they believed that the parliamentary system would undermine Muslim supremacy. As a result, many middle-class Muslims gathered around religious people such as Ulema (Sunni religious scholars)  and struck back in 1909 demanding the implementation of Sharia law throughout the empire and the prevention of secular measures from taking root in the Ottoman legal system.

Another factor was the abolition of the Janissaries. Heather Sharkey argues that the elimination of the Janissaries benefited Armenian bankers and moneylenders as they stepped in to replace Jewish bankers in service of the Ottoman state. Armenian workers benefitted, too. When Sultan Mahmud II crushed the Janissaries in 1826, he struck at the same time the Muslim artisans and guild members and expelled thousands of Muslim laborers from Constantinople to the Armenian Highlands. The Sultan then had Armenians brought in to replace them, engaging in a population swap that bred resentments between working-class Turks and Kurds, on the one hand, and Armenians, on the other. The abolition of the Janissaries weakened the position of the Ulamas and shifted the power in the Ottoman state. As such, non-Muslim elites increasingly mounted an economic challenge to Muslim interests and the social safety net that protected guilds. The urban poor ultimately ceased to exist with the destruction of Janissaries and policy of centralization.

The Muslim middle-class wanted to fight back and bring back the “old order” which was in its interest. Thus, the clash between the two orders took the form of ethno-religious struggle and further radicalized the Ottoman Muslims. 

The Destruction of the “Old Order” and the Clash of Interests Along Ethno-Religious Lines

The trade agreements signed with European powers after 1838 and the capitalist integration of the Ottoman Empire put Ottoman Muslims at a disadvantage as Muslim traders were kept out of doing business in Europe due to their religious identity. Muslim rural, mercantile and artisan classes were marginalized as Ottoman Christians and Jews imported cheap European goods. As such the Muslim society in the Ottoman Empire was destabilized as tens of thousands lost their traditional jobs and positions in social mobility. Muslims were either unemployed or employed at the lowest rank with the lowest salaries. The Europeans take part of the blame as they engineered this social-economic structuring by starting projects in the empire and hiring cheap Muslim labor controlled by highly paid non-Muslim managers, thus further increasing the religious social-economic gap in the empire.

The initial stage of the class conflict was the hinterland, where economic actors and the politically connected elite clashed over land and commercial agriculture during the early 1800s due to the state’s efforts to centralize the empire. In Anatolia, the centralization efforts of the Ottoman state consolidated the conflict between the peasantry (mostly Armenian), the Muslim landlords (mostly Kurds), and non-Muslim merchants (mostly Greeks and Armenians).

The replacement of the decentralized old feudal order with centralized statist regulations antagonized the nomadic Kurdish tribal leaders who profited from land income. As a result, they shifted their “business” by imposing additional taxes on Armenian peasants. Kurds forced Armenians to pay tax in return for either “defending” them or not attacking them. Armenian peasants were forced to provide food and shelter to pastoralist Kurds. Since the Ottoman state demanded tax too, Armenian peasants were paying twice. After 1890, when Sultan Abdul Hamid II created the Hamidiye regiment, the situation worsened as more Kurds wrested more tax from Armenians with impunity.
The situation was becoming unbearable for Armenian peasants of eastern Anatolia (also known as the Armenian Highlands) who complained bitterly about the Kurdish tribal chiefs who took their lands illegally and demanded unpaid labor and arbitrary taxes while Kurdish tribes raided and plundered. The Kurdish actions were seen as the revenge of the 1858 Land Reform Law, under which more Armenians in eastern Anatolia started buying back their lost lands and additional holdings often from Turks and Kurds who had fallen into debt. As many Armenians became debt-holders and moneylenders, many Muslims who couldn’t afford to pay back their debts lost their property. In 1871, the British consul in the Black Sea port of Trebizond reported that Anatolia was running into debt, meaning falling into the hands of Armenian debt holders. According to the report the Muslim peasantry in Anatolia was being squeezed by a compound of interest rates of between 24 and 60-percent charged by Armenian moneylenders, and as a result, in many cases they lost the ownership of their land to Armenians.

All these factors pushed Muslims of the empire to question the reforms and direct their revulsion towards the Christian subjects who were seen as “European instruments to control the empire.” The fact that they were Christians (Greeks and Armenians) or Jewish meant that the question of class became intertwined with religion and ethnicity. Muslims started holding Ottoman Christians accountable for the collapse of the old order and blamed them for these new regulations for undoing Muslim privileges. From an economic perspective, Muslim interests opposed the intrusion of European capital and the rise of non-Muslim classes.

It was not a coincidence that during this era Ottoman Muslim ruling elite began to emphasize the Muslim identity of the state; this was a direct reaction to the growing Christian bourgeoisie. There were popular calls for a return to a more stringent application of the Islamic law (Sharia) that was in favor of Muslim merchants and artisans. Thus a religious conflict with social and economic origins was forming on the horizon. Ottoman authorities were aware that there was a Muslim working-class frustration at economic inequality expressed in cultural and religious terms as the economically privileged communities had a “Western” cultural outlook. This argument was used by the conservative and reactionary forces to block any reform imposed by the central authorities.

As such, the authorities concerned with the growing economic influence of non-Muslim bourgeois had to favor the emergence of a strong Muslim middle class, aiming to “liberate” the empire from the non-Muslim elements who were accumulating money with the “aim” to come to power through the “reformation.” After 1909, the Young Turks shifted from their official amendatory policy and continued the policy of Abdul Hamid II of searching for political allies among the Muslim middle class while engaging in economic boycotts targeting mainly the Greek merchants to challenge their hegemonic presence in cosmopolitan cities such as Smyrna (Izmir) and Constantinople. After the Balkan wars, they accused the Greeks of disloyalty and decided to disrupt non-Muslim commercial interests, encouraging the rise of Muslim merchants in port cities.

However, silencing the Armenian middle class, which was being highly politicized, was not easy. Unlike the Greek middle class who was concentrated mainly in Constantinople, Smyrna and Trabzon, Armenian bourgeois was scattered all around the empire from the Capital to Cilicia, from Syria to the eastern frontiers of the empire. Moreover, missionaries played a crucial role in shaping the Armenian-educated middle class by introducing them to new ideas, innovations, and effective health care systems, something the Ottoman Muslims lacked.

The Missionaries and the Social Roots of Resentment Toward Armenians

The social history of the Ottoman Empire was transformed as a result of Christian missionary activities. Private and organized missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire date back to as early as the 16th century and intensified in the 18th century with the empire’s openness to Europe. These missionaries established schools, printing presses, hospitals, and other institutions which helped to form a well-educated Christian (mainly Armenian) middle class in the empire. The missionaries implemented programs that had a visible impact on Christians, who were becoming visibly healthier, not to mention wealthier and better educated than some of the Muslims. For these reasons, their activities were always looked at with suspicion by the authorities and Muslim religious figures.

In the Armenian Highlands, Armenians’ exposure to missionary schools placed them ahead of Muslims in male and female literacy, while their knowledge of hygiene and access to medical care enabled their children to evade illness at much higher rates than Kurds. According to the Russian consul, before WWI about half of the Kurdish babies in the villages used to die at birth because of lack of medical assistance, while another 30-percent of Kurdish infants used to die before the age of three from endemic diseases such as smallpox, scarlet fever, typhoid or bites of snakes and insects. Armenians, by contrast, were surviving childhood illnesses. An awareness of these discrepancies in well-being may have contributed to anti-Armenian resentment.

Moreover, Armenians were being exposed to new political ideas about liberty, socialism and freedom that concerned authorities. To counter this phenomenon, Sultan Abdul Hamid II made it a priority to establish public schools in the Anatolian provinces. He envisioned creating a Muslim middle class to replace the well-educated Christians and to provide the Ottoman state with an ethnoreligious reliable social base. By the time he was overthrown in 1909 by the Young Turks—a secular nationalist middle-class movement whose members ironically owed their social rise and education to the overthrown Sultan—the Sultan’s goal of fostering the Muslim professional middle class had become a success. Moreover, Abdul Hamid II, motivated by his Pan-Islamist ideology, favored the widespread Nakshbendi network of Sufi order, which built religious unity and had strong mobilization potential, a pro-state approach, and an anti-Christian stand, among the Muslims, especially the Kurds. With public support, Nakshbendis opened schools in tribal areas, encouraged the Muslim children to attend mosques and an educated Muslim generation loyal to the state.

By educating the Muslims in bordering areas, the state’s main aim was to secure the loyalty of the Muslims. It is interesting that starting in 1889, the Ottoman state opened tribal schools in sensitive provinces on the border, intending to buy the loyalty from the upcoming generation elites by turning them into middle-ranking bureaucrats. To secure the loyalty of border tribes and encourage tribal leaders to send their children to these schools, Abdul Hamid II bestowed imperial medals and sent robes of honor to tribal chiefs to secure their loyalty to the empire.

When Abdul Hamid II was overthrown in 1908, the Muslim middle class was already organized: a secular nationalist Turkish middle class composed of military officers and bureaucrats and a religious-oriented middle class in the bordering areas of the empire. These two classes added with the Muslim refugees from the Balkans later formed the backbone of the modern Turkish middle class established on the ashes of Armenian bourgeois and its capital. 

The Class War, the Road to the Genocide and the Emergence of Modern Turkish Bourgeoisie

The 1908 Young Turk revolution was a bourgeois revolution against a reactionary state. Despite the fact that this divided the Turkish middle class between the “secular nationalist” camp (often backed by the military) and conservatives (often backed by religious scholars), their enmity towards the non-Muslim middle class and determination to destroy it were unifying factors that played a crucial role during the Genocide.

For the conservative Muslims, this new era of post-1908 constitutional order threatened their traditional relationship with the Armenians. Technology also played a role since Armenians introduced innovations to agriculture such as steam plows, steam thrashers and reaping machines. All these advancements worsened the livelihood of Muslim farmers. The Muslim peasantry, fearing its economic future and often suspicious of the 1908 revolution, tried to support a counter-revolutionary movement in 1909 by attacking Armenians and accusing them of supporting the 1908 revolution. One of the major massacres took place in Adana, the economic center of Cilicia. Back then, on April 25, 1909, the New York Times published an article titled “Armenian Wealth Caused Massacres,” arguing that some 60,000 Muslim farmers who came to depend on seasonal work near Adana, were among the agitators of the massacre. Although the Young Turk government suppressed the counter-revolutionary movement, it intentionally failed to intervene and watched the burning of the center of the Armenian middle class in Cilicia.

The destruction of Adana was the final alarm to the Armenian middle class. However, what Armenians failed to foresee was the threat of the influx of Muslim refugees to their territory. Already in 1859, the Ottoman state established a “General Administrative Commission for Migrants” in order to resettle the Muslim refugees in the empire through a planned centralized policy. Caucasian and later Balkan refugees (after the 1912-1913 Balkan wars) became the participants in Ottoman efforts to establish greater control over the most difficult political territory in the empire. These refugees (200,000 from North Caucasus and around 400,000 from the Balkans) showed complete loyalty to the Ottoman state and were resettled in Christian regions, often guided by hatred towards Christians, which played a major role in massacres of the Ottoman Christians and looting of their properties in the 1890s. According to Turkish nationalist intellectual Halide Edip, “the vast number of Balkan Turks, refugees who poured into Constantinople and Anatolia with their lurid and sinister tales of martyrdom and suffering at the hands of Balkan Christians…aroused a curious sympathy for everything that was Turkish in those days.”

What many historians, who had addressed the issue of Balkan refugees, had failed to mention is that in the Balkans, the situation was completely different from Anatolia, where the land ownership was held mostly by Muslims, who controlled large estates cultivated by Christian peasants. The Muslim landowners suddenly realized they were overthrown by their Christian peasants; hence, as they resettled in Anatolia they viewed Christian Armenian peasants as a threat and felt that they ought to take vengeance for their suffering in the Balkans. The Muslim refugees from the Balkans who flooded to Anatolia brought with them ethnoreligious tensions and rekindled old ones. It is worth mentioning that the Balkan peasants provided a strong base for Slavic nationalism. Thus, Armenian peasants were seen as a continuation or extension of “evil Christians” and “rebellious peasants.”

According to Halil Karaveli, after the Balkan wars, Turks had a fear of “physical extinction.” Many CUP leaders were also of Balkan origin, among them, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Displaced from their towns of origin, they concluded that there was no future left for them in a multi-ethnic Ottoman state and that they must create a homogenous Turkish entity. The CUP government was alarmed that with the advancement of the Russian troops, Armenians would rise up and carve the economically significant fertile land of eastern Anatolia and annex it to the Russian Empire. The CUP engaged in what it saw as a struggle for Turkish ethnic survival and made preparations to carve out a safe haven by destroying the non-Turkish Christian element of the empire. Interestingly, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels saw this scenario coming, as they had predicted that as Ottomans would not be able to hold in the Balkans they were bound to end up in Asia Minor and Armenia as their last stronghold.

Thus, for the CUP government as Muslim refugees poured into Anatolia, the concept of removing particular communities to ensure a more desirable ethnic profile took on another justification: the property of the deported could be redistributed to incoming deprived Muslim refugee communities, one of the initial rationales behind the first deportations of the Armenians beginning in 1915. On January 6, 1916, Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire, decreed: “The movable property left by the Armenians should be conserved for long-term preservation, and for the sake of an increase of Muslim businesses in our country, companies need to be established strictly made up of Muslims.” Following the decree, private Armenian schools became Ottoman Turkish schools, and school supplies were distributed to the Turkish Muslim population. Abraham Harutiunian, a priest living in Zeitun, notes in his memoirs that the school in Zeitun was confiscated by the government and that “the Armenians no longer had any right to education, and the campus was now filled with hundreds of Turkish children.”

The confiscations that completed the Genocide provided the “dowry” for the capitalist foundation of the new state of Turkey. With the end of the World War, the Christian bourgeoisie was no longer in command of the Ottoman economy. Eighty percent of the factories in 1913, which had been owned by non-Muslims, were now confiscated and given to Muslims (mainly influential Turkish families). The Young Turks were determined to carry on the project of creating a Muslim Turkish middle class that Abdul Hamid had begun earlier. In the mind of Young Turks, capitalism and the creation of a capitalist class were intertwined with the fate of the newly formed homogenous state. Thus their party, which was based on the idea of the survival of the Turkish state, was dependent on a “national capitalism.” They succeeded in launching a program of social and political engineering to create a bourgeois that could survive even after the dissolution of their party. Thus, the emerging strong Turkish bourgeoisie class was ensuring the continuity of the nationalist ideology of the Young Turks. Between 1913 and 1914 Young Turks called on Muslims to boycott Armenian and Greek stores, and by the start of the war, they offered the opportunity to evict the Christian bourgeoisie and redistribute its wealth to a Muslim Turkish bourgeoisie. It was a successful class war. It was this class war that cleared the way for the emergence of modern Turkey; a state with a “national economy” controlled by “national bourgeoisie.”

Conclusion

There is no question that the capitalist economy of the new state of Turkey was founded on the plunder of the Ottoman Armenians. The Turkish case stands as a perfect illustration of Karl Marx’s words that “capital is born covered in blood and dirt.” The savings of the Ottoman Christians, as well as their trading companies, craft shops, agricultural properties and industries, were expropriated by the state and handed over to trustworthy Muslim middle-class individuals who were going to form the bulk of the Turkish bourgeoisie in the Republican era.

The value of the lost Armenian property counts in the billions. There are clear examples illustrating this fact; for example, Turkey is the world’s leading producer of hazelnuts, controlling 75 percent of global production. Before the Genocide, hazelnut production was largely an Armenian business, and according to Ottoman statistics, more than half of the 100 or so hazelnut producers in the empire were Armenians. The same was for the cotton industry: Turkey today is the seventh global cotton producer in the world. Before the Genocide, Cilicia was the center of the cotton industry in the empire.

The Republicans fought hard to retake Cilicia from the French, knowing its economic significance for the future of the Republic. In 1923, when Mustafa Kemal visited Adana he gave a speech saying, “Armenians don’t have the least right to this fertile land. This land belongs to the Turks and is going to remain eternity. These lands are the profound and fundamental essence of Turkey.”

On June 11, 1986, the laws concerning “abandoned” properties during the Armenian Genocide were abrogated, which ended 73 years of effectiveness. Throughout the Republican period, these regulations continued to provide a legal basis for the confiscated Armenian properties that were not yet redistributed to the Turks. Though the laws were abolished in 1986, the Turkish “General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre” issued an order on June 29, 2001 which effectively transferred all the leftover “abandoned” properties to the government. The order also forbade the disclosure of any information regarding the title or the documentation of the properties. As a result, the Armenian and Greek owners or their heirs could not make claims to the property since it was now securely sanctioned under Turkish law and had become property of the Turkish Republic.

References:

Bedross Der Matossian, “The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire”, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey, 2011, pp. 1-23. 

Cem Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East; Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and Islam, London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. 

Halil Karaveli, Why Turkey is Authoritarian, From Ataturk to Erdogan, London: Pluto Press, 2018.

Heather J. Sharkey, A History of Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Middle East, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Heather J. Sharkey, “American Missionaries in Ottoman Lands: Foundational Encounters”, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2010, pp. 1-16. 

Kevork K. Baghdjian, The Confiscation of Armenian properties by the Turkish Government Said to be Abandoned, Antelias: Printing House of the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, 2010.

Laura Robsen, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, California: University of California Press, 2017.

Prof. Ugur Ungor on Property Confiscation during Armenian Genocide (April 30, 2012), YouTube, published on May 12, 2012

Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress Or Order? New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004. 

Ugur Ungor and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property, UK; Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 

Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven; American Missionaries and the Failed Conversation of the Middle East, USA: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Author information

Yeghia Tashjian

Yeghia Tashjian is a regional analyst and researcher. He has graduated from the American University of Beirut in Public Policy and International Affairs. He pursued his BA at Haigazian University in Political Science in 2013. He founded the New Eastern Politics forum/blog in 2010. He was a Research Assistant at the Armenian Diaspora Research Center at Haigazian University. Currently, he is the Regional Officer of Women in War, a gender-based think tank. He has participated in international conferences in Frankfurt, Vienna, Uppsala, New Delhi, and Yerevan, and presented various topics from minority rights to regional security issues. His thesis topic was on China’s geopolitical and energy security interests in Iran and the Persian Gulf. He is a contributor to the various local and regional newspapers and presenter of the “Turkey Today” program in Radio Voice of Van.

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While it has become widely accepted in recent years that the World War I destruction of the Armenians influenced Raphael Lemkin’s work, the efforts of Armenians in support of Lemkin’s campaign to secure the adoption of the Genocide Convention and its ratification by parliaments around the world have received little attention. In this article, part of a larger project, I explore the role of the Hairenik newspapers in this effort, focusing on three of Lemkin’s close collaborators: editors James G. Mandalian and Reuben Darbinian and correspondent Levon Keshishian.¹

From Nemesis to ‘Genocide’

In the absence of a Nuremberg trial equivalent for the Armenian massacres, the survivor generation also took justice into its own hands. Trials were held in Allied-occupied Istanbul sentencing perpetrators to death in absentia, but most Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) leaders were beyond reach, having fled the country (many to Germany), while those the British had imprisoned in Malta were released as part of a prisoner exchange deal. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) decided in 1919 to assassinate the perpetrators. By 1922, the ARF had gunned down Ottoman Turkish leaders implicated in the genocide in Berlin, Rome and Tiflis: Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, Ottoman Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha; Minister of Navy Cemal Pasha; CUP founding member Bahaeddine Shakir; and Trebizond governor Cemal Azmi. The project, dubbed “Operation Nemesis,” made headlines around the world², influencing a Polish-Jewish university student named Raphael Lemkin to pursue the task of establishing an international law against attempted annihilation of ethnic groups.

Reading about Talaat Pasha’s murder in newspapers in 1921, Lemkin felt that Soghomon Tehlirian, the Operation Nemesis assassin, “upheld the moral order of mankind”:

But can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? Will not passion sway such form of justice and make travesty of it? At that moment, my worries about the murder of the innocent became more meaningful to me. I didn’t know all the answers but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.³

Lemkin’s search for answers culminated in the coinage of the term “genocide” in 1943 and his lifelong struggle to pass a law against it. Two months after the third count of the Nuremberg Indictment stated that defendants had “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide,” the Armenian-language daily newspaper Haratch in Paris published an editorial providing the readers with background on the term “génocide,” using information from the French newspaper Le Monde. “A new word was used in the Nuremberg trials, which means Tseghasbanutyun,” founding editor of Haratch, Shavarsh Missakian, wrote. He then referred to Lemkin’s efforts toward punishment and prevention and lamented:

We read these lines, we follow the Nuremberg trials, and our mind instinctively wanders to a faraway world, where “war crimes” took place thirty years ago … Where were the jurists and judges back then? Had they not discovered the word, or was the blood-thirsty monster so powerful or unreachable that they could not punish him?⁴

After the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention in December 1948, the Hairenik Weekly in Boston published an editorial that argued, “To have any meaning at all, the decision to outlaw genocide must go deeper. It must also offer remedy to the wronged parties. To outlaw genocide, but to sanction the basic aims and results of the action is only a half measure.”⁵ 

Levon Keshishian

Although this was the dominant sentiment in the Armenian press from the Middle East to North America, Armenians around the world strove to secure the adoption of the Convention at the UN, and then its ratification by parliaments around the world. Lemkin recounted how:

“[T]he Armenians of the entire world were specifically interested in the Genocide Convention. They filled the galleries of the drafting committee at the third General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris when the Genocide Convention was discussed. An Armenian, Levon Keshishian, the well-known UN correspondent for Arab newspapers, helped considerably through his writings in obtaining the ratifications of many Near Eastern and North African countries.⁶

Keshishian and Lemkin first met after the UN adopted the Genocide Convention.⁷ Here’s how Keshishian describes the encounter:

Lemkin is a law professor, divides his time between Boston, New York and Washington. My meeting with him was short, but it was most interesting. He wanted to see the Arab News Agency. He asked, are you the same Levon Keshishian of “Hairenik Weekly.” I replied yes. He then confesses that the “Weekly” has been one of the outstanding newspapers supporting the Convention of Genocide and paid full credit to editor Mr. James G. Mandalian. Then coming to the point, he said, “You are an Armenian.” After a long pause he said: “You will therefore understand how important this Convention is.”⁸

Keshishian filed dozens of reports in Middle Eastern in North American publications when parliaments ratified the convention, when Lemkin delivered lectures and made public statements, and even when he privately advocated for the Convention. He also connected Lemkin to political figures in the Middle East and beyond and then reported on Lemkin’s communication with them. Keshishian reported, for example, about how “Prof. Rafael Lemkin, father of ‘genocide’ has written to Lebanese deputy Dicran Tosbath (Armenian) asking him to work for the ratification of the Convention of Genocide by the Lebanese Parliament.”⁹

Hairenik editors Mandalian and Darbinian 

Reuben Darbinian and James G. Mandalian, the editors of the Hairenik Daily and Hairenik Weekly respectively, had an even longer history of collaboration with Lemkin.¹⁰ Their correspondence with the Father of the Genocide Convention dates back to the late 40s and offers insight into how Lemkin mobilized thought leaders in communities affected by genocide to advocate for the ratification of the Convention by the US Congress and parliaments around the world. 

In a telegram to Darbinian in June 1950, Lemkin noted that the Hairenik editor’s “previous help on genocide [was] of greatest importance.” He then requested that Darbinian “kindly arrange that Armenian survivors of genocide… write letters to Senators on Foreign Relations Committee urging immediate ratification [of] Genocide Convention.”¹¹

Darbinian responded, “We received your telegram… We have taken steps to fulfill request…. Will request genocide survivors to send letters to Foreign Relations Senators and will editorialize issue.”¹²

A week later, Mandalian wrote a letter to Lemkin in which he said:

In compliance with your request, our Armenian language newspaper the Hairenik Daily published an editorial call, inviting our readers to write letters to the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging them to do their upmost [sic] for the ratification of the Genocide Convention. The Enclosed letter which I sent to Senator Lodge was translated and published in our Armenian Daily as a sample, to give the readers an idea of how they should write. I am happy that Senator Lodge was very prompt in his reply to me, the copy of which you will find enclosed.¹³

On 12 November 1953, the Hairenik Weekly published yet another editorial arguing for US Congressional ratification. “In the face of known facts it is difficult to understand the precise motive which underlies this hesitation [to ratify the Convention].”

The editorial went as far as to say that the US has never committed any genocidal act:

It cannot be contended that the United States suffers from a guilty conscience. The United States has never been guilty of a genocidal act. On the contrary her entire history is a record of abhorrence of all which is inhuman, brutal, and barbaric. And yet, this very country which initiated the genocide convention, which is supposed to lead the nations of the world in the fight against the forces of tyranny, is the very one which has to be coaxed and urged to subscribe to a civilized measure.¹⁴

The United States would not be “coaxed” in Lemkin’s lifetime. 

A few months before he died, Lemkin penned an article for the Hairenik Weekly, in which he said, “The sufferings of the Armenian men, women, and children thrown into the Euphrates River or massacred on the way to Der-el-Zor have prepared the way for the adoption for the Genocide Convention by the United Nations and have morally compelled Turkey to ratify it.”

He added, “One million Armenians died, but a law against the murder of peoples was written with the ink of their blood and the spirit of their sufferings.”¹⁵

Lemkin continued working with Armenian leaders to secure the United States’ ratification of the convention until his death in August 1959. US ratification only came in 1988. But with the 50th anniversary of the 1915 nearing, Lemkin had equipped Armenians, primarily in the diaspora, with a powerful weapon to push for justice. 

The Armenians, who had helped Lemkin attain the ratification of the Convention by legislatures around the globe, now engaged in yet another struggle: a decades-long battle for the acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide.

_________________

¹ This article is partly based on a lecture delivered at NAASR in 2011. For a biography of Raphael Lemkin and his campaign for the Genocide Convention see, for example, John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). For Lemkin and the Armenian genocide, see Steven L. Jacobs, “Raphael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide,” in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003), 125–135; Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Peter Balakian, “Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27:1 (Spring 2013), 57-89.
² I recently curated a selection of newspaper clippings about Talat’s assassination for the Armenian Weekly.
³ Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2013), 20.
⁴ “Editorial,” Haratch newspaper, 9 December 1945, 1
⁵ “Editorial: Exit Genocide,” The Hairenik Weekly, 30 December 1948, p. 2.
⁶ “A Weekly Exclusive: Dr. Lemkin, Father of Genocide Convention, Reviews Work Relating to Turkish Massacres,” The Hairenik Weekly, 1 January 1959, 4 (continued from page 1).
⁷ The two had several other meetings in the 1950s. See, for example, “Leaders of ANCHA Visit UN Official,” The Hairenik Weekly, 12 November 1953, 2.
⁸ “Honduras is 35th Nation to ratify Genocide, but Life of Convention is Menaced,” The Hairenik Weekly, 13 March 1952, p. 3 (article continued from page 1). For more reporting by Keshishian on the Genocide Convention see, for example, Keshishian’s column “This and That from New York,” The Hairenik Weekly, June 5, 1952 and 20 August 1953, p. 3;
⁹ “This and That from New York,” The Hairenik Weekly, 28 August 1953, p. 2. Lebanon ratified the convention a few months later. The Weekly reported the news on its front page. “Lebanon is 43rd Nation to OK ‘Genocide,” The Hairenik Weekly, June 5, 1952 and 7 January 1954, p. 1.
¹⁰ Darbinian served as the editor of Hairenik Daily for more than four decades. Mandalian was the first editor of the Hairenik Weekly, as well as a founder and first editor of the Armenian Review.
¹¹ Telegram from Lemkin to Reuben Darbinian, then the editor of the Hairenik newspaper, dated 14 June 1950. Haigazn Khazarian Archive, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Mardigian Library.
¹² Telegram from Darbinian to Lemkin, dated 14 June 1950. Center for Jewish History, Raphael Lemkin Collection, Box 2, Folder 3.
¹³ Letter from James G. Mandalian to Lemkin, dated 21 June, 1950. Center for Jewish History, Raphael Lemkin Collection, Box 2, Folder 3.
¹⁴ “Editorial: The Genocide Convention,” The Hairenik Weekly, 12 November 1953, 2.
¹⁵ “A Weekly Exclusive: Dr. Lemkin, Father of Genocide Convention, Reviews Work Relating to Turkish Massacres,” The Hairenik Weekly, 1 January 1959, 1. 

Author information

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918. In 2021, Dr. Mouradian was appointed the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division (Near East Section) at the Library of Congress. He has published articles on concentration camps, unarmed resistance, the aftermath of mass violence, midwifery in the Middle East, and approaches to teaching history. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review. Dr. Mouradian has taught courses on imperialism, mass violence, urban space and conflict in the Middle East, the aftermaths of war and mass violence, and human rights at Worcester State University, Clark University, Stockton University, Rutgers University and California State University – Fresno.

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For years, every time I was in the fourth floor conference room in the Hairenik building in Watertown, Massachusetts, I would stare at a huge map on the back wall. The 5’ x 8’ map was hand-drawn by Mardiros Kheranian in 1922. Those of us fortunate to have seen this map could not help but be drawn to it and be transported to the many Armenian villages it identified. Kheranian’s map is even more of a cultural and artistic treasure in a world where the Turkish government has attempted to wipe the names of these villages from modern maps.

Kheranian was born in the region of Van and lived most of his life in Aykestan, a neighborhood just outside the city walls of Van. He was a cartographer and teacher at the famed Armenian monastery of Varakavank. He participated in the defense of Van in 1915 and, after the fall of Van in 1918, he fled south and took refuge in Syria, where he continued to create maps of Armenia. Others in his family fled to Yerevan, to France and to the US. 

We do not know the exact number of maps he produced during those years, but several others are accounted for. These include a 37 x 56 inch map of the defense of Van city which is displayed at the National Museum in Yerevan and reproduced in “The Armenian Highland: Western Armenia and the First Armenian Republic of 1918,” a book written 97 years later by his great-nephew Matthew Karanian. At least three other maps of Van are accounted for and in private hands in California, according to Karanian’s research.

Kheranian’s other maps of historic Armenia that are known to have survived the Genocide are held by the Armenian Apostolic Church in Echmiadzin, the Detroit Azadamart Gomideh of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the ARF Museum in Yerevan and members of Kheranian’s family. Each of these maps is large format. The version held by Kheranian’s descendants was created in 1928 and measures 42 x 66 inches. The Hairenik map is the oldest and largest of those known to exist.

Over the years, I had taken many images of the map with my camera, none of which were satisfactory. The condition of the map, its large size and the glare from the protective glass covering it made it difficult to photograph. At some point in its history, the map had sustained water damage. In addition, the cloth map had been stretched and stapled to a piece of plywood, which wasn’t ideal from a preservation perspective. 

At the beginning of last year, I contacted Levon Avdoyan, the now-retired Armenian specialist at the Library of Congress to seek his advice on conserving the map. He suggested I reach out to the Harvard Map Library.

Through the Harvard Map Library, I was put in contact with Louise Baptiste of Paper Conservator. On the eve of the pandemic, we were able to meet at the Hairenik and discuss restoring the map. The objective was to restore the damaged portions, clean the map of all harmful chemicals accumulated over the years and make a high-resolution archival quality scan of the map. Louise recognized the importance of the map and enthusiastically took on the project.  

When the day came to take the map out of the frame and roll it up for transport, I was nervous. Louise delicately removed the staples and placed the map between the necessary sheets and specifically designed roll to ensure its safe-keeping. For the first time in a long time, the map left the Hairenik building.

Over the past year, Louise painstakingly restored the map to its original grandeur. Along the way, she shared images and videos of the work being done on the map. The process was complex. She made special screens to allow for vacuuming the map without causing damage. In addition, she had to find the right mix of chemicals to clean the map without removing the original ink. A year later, the map, now restored, was brought to the Harvard Map Library for scanning.

Robert Zinck, a photographer for the Digital Imaging and Photography Services department of Widener Library at Harvard University, used a 100 megapixel camera (one of the highest resolution cameras on the market today) to take eight separate images of the map. The map’s size required this many images in order to maintain the desired resolution. There are then two ways to join these images to recreate the map in its entirety. The preferred way is to “stitch” them together so that the resulting full image is seamless to the viewer, without any misalignment, distortion or tone/color difference between sections. If this was not possible, then the images would have to be tiled. Stitching is most easily done with material (such as paper) that can remain flat and stable. With linen there is the possibility of the fabric stretching or misaligning between scans. We were very fortunate that with our map, stitching proved possible and the results are phenomenal!

The map has now been returned to the Hairenik, awaiting the new frame that will protect and preserve it. The entire project was made possible by grants from the Armenian Cultural Association of America (ACAA) and the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The digitized map will be made freely available through Houshamadyan: A project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. 

DOWNLOAD the four page, special insert appearing in the June 5, 2021 issue of the Armenian Weekly.

Author information

George Aghjayan

George Aghjayan is the Director of the Armenian Historical Archives and the chair of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Central Committee of the Eastern United States. Aghjayan graduated with honors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Mathematics. He achieved Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries in 1996. After a career in both insurance and structured finance, Aghjayan retired in 2014 to concentrate on Armenian related research and projects. His primary area of focus is the demographics and geography of western Armenia as well as a keen interest in the hidden Armenians living there today. Other topics he has written and lectured on include Armenian genealogy and genocide denial. He is a board member of the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), a frequent contributor to the Armenian Weekly and Houshamadyan.org, and the creator and curator westernarmenia.weebly.com, a website dedicated to the preservation of Armenian culture in Western Armenia.

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The letter pictured here (and transcribed below) is part of the collection of the Northbridge Historical Society. It was presented to Gregory Jundanian by the Whitinsville Social Library and Society volunteer Carole Brouwer upon hearing about the Armenians of Whitinsville Project, a project supported by the Soorp Asdvadzadzin Armenian Apostolic Church of Whitinsville and Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives. At the turn of the century, Whitin Machine Works was the largest textile machinery factory of its kind in the world and attracted many Armenians for work in the foundry. As such, Whitinsville was one of the earliest Armenian communities in the United States.

“The Armenian people who came to work in the Whitin Machine Works  (a.k.a. “The Shop”) had a unique history and were an integral part of the labor pool,” according to information on the Northbridge Historical Society website. In fact in the early 1900s, some Armenian immigrants were welcomed and offered housing and employment at the company by its representatives with the assistance of an interpreter in Providence, RI. 

“This letter is an incredible testament to life in Marash and to the conditions which Armenians were subjected to at that time,” said Jundanian. It’s a thank you note from missionary Clara Hamlin Lee to Arthur F. Whitin, a member of the founding family of Whitinsville, where many Armenians lived while working at the Whitin Machine Works. Lee was born in Constantinople in 1853 and died of pneumonia in Marash in 1902 according to her personnel card for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. She was the daughter of Rev. Dr. Cyrus Hamlin who founded Robert College which at that time was an important institute of higher education for Armenian Protestants in Turkey.

Community volunteer for the Armenians of Whitinsville project and Mount Holyoke College alumna Lisa Misakian offered information from the book Mount Holyoke Courageous (1994, 2000). The book was written by another Mount Holyoke alumna, Bess Pazeian Vickery, whose father came to Worcester from Van in 1895. “In fact, Bess writes in the book that she was born in 1915 on the day that Van was being destroyed,” noted Misakian, who explained that Mount Holyoke Courageous tells the stories of young Christian women missionaries who went to the Ottoman Empire to spread the Gospel, to teach and who witnessed the Armenian Genocide.

According to the Mount Holyoke Courageous book, said Misakian, “Clara Hamlin Lee’s letters from Marash to her father in Istanbul are considered primary eyewitness accounts and confirmation of the accounts detailed in Amb. Morgenthau’s reports on the planned actions of the Ottoman leaders against the Armenians.” The letter presented to Jundanian is another important example of Lee’s eyewitness accounts and may provide supplemental detail to the letters she wrote to her father. “For this reason, I believe this newly uncovered letter may have historical significance beyond our Armenians of Whitinsville Project,” explained Misakian.

The Armenians of Whitinsville Project is based on the tradition of the memory books that many wrote of their native villages in historic Armenia. “The project intends to explore, document and celebrate this community from earlier times to present. As a snapshot of the diaspora, It hopes to capture something intrinsic about our identity and our history.” explained Jundanian. 

Letter from Clara H. Lee to Arthur F. Whitin (Transcribed by Carol Brouwer)

Constantinople, June 29th 1896

Dear Mr. Whitin,

Some three months ago I received word from Mr. Peet our treasurer of $200.00 contributed by you for the sufferers in Marash. My father also wrote me about your gift about the same time. I am filled with shame that I did not write to you without delay to thank for the contribution and to tell you how it was spent. I can only ask you to pardon me for my tardiness which was not intentional. The press of work all through this sad winter and spring has been such as I had never before known in my life. 

Children and household affairs have been neglected in a way which would have been very wrong but for these peculiar circumstances, and letters which ought to have been written have been deferred like this one, from week to week, and even month to month. I have at last run away from Marash for the summer’s rest and am now with my little Carrie at Kennedy Lodge, Henrietta’s beautiful house at Hissar. We shall doubtless have another hard winter next year, and I hope to go back to the work with new energies after this refreshing change and rest.

I devoted the whole of your $200 to clothing the poor wretched refugees who poured down from Zeitoon to Marash as soon as Zeitoon was open. There were already about 9000 people in Marash who were dependent on relief funds, and when these 1000 refugees poured in, we did not know what to do with them. For about four weeks 450 of them were crowded into a large building that had been erected for public exercises of an Armenian school. The floor was of stone, all the windows were broken, and it was midwinter.

The refugees were, with very few exceptions, destitute of bedding, and they had worn the miserable rags on their backs without change or washing for four months. They were swarming with vermin and I had never before beheld such misery. As the convoys of refugees came in under guard(!) from Zeitoon on several successive days the Moslems of Marash turned out to meet them, and showered them with stones and beat them with sticks as they passed through the streets, their guards making no objection, but rather enjoying the fun. Some were killed thus in the streets. Most of the Zeitoon refugees were men though there were a few women and children. Thousands of these must have perished from want and cold in Zeitoon. We went to work immediately to relieve these poor people, and the Marashlis, needy and suffering as they themselves were, came forward nobly to help. Some contributed boards to cover the stone pavement, some brought soap, rice, dishes etc. and the windows were all covered with paper.

Mrs. Macallum worked the bedding department, and turned out “yorgans” or comfortables as fast as possible, while I employed 70 women at making clothes, and it was thus that I used your money. It not only helped to cloth the refugees, but gave employment to 70 poor widows. You would be touched if you could see how grateful these widows are for work. Though we did our very best, some weeks had passed before the refugees were supplied with the needed bedding and clothing. I used to feel sad indeed as I went to bed those winter nights when the bitter north wind was raging around us, and thought of the refugees stretched out on the stone floor – which had been wholly covered with boards – without any warm covering.

Typhus fever and dysentery were soon raging among them, and we were obliged to open a hospital for them. The diseases proved so contagious that out of 43 who worked in the hospital, including, doctors, nurses, servants, all but one became ill, and ten of them died. 

All the time that we were caring for these refugees, we were also distributing aid to 9000 Marashlis, and also to thousands more in the surrounding villages. This was a large family to clothe, was it not? And as I had the charge of the clothing department, I have had enough to do all these months. In March the first boxes of clothing came from Constantinople, and were a great help. It is a subject for thankfulness that all the boxes sent in from Constantinople and other places have reached us safely.  Not one has been lost.

The refugees have at length nearly all returned in fear and trembling to their ruined villages. The Red Cross people are giving valuable aid in the line of implements, dishes and seed. If the government would only protect these villages there would be hope that in the course of time they would be able to take care of themselves, though they will certainly need aid for a while. But the prospects are very gloomy, for acts of violence and cruelty are still very frequent and no Moslems are punished for such deeds.

And in Marash itself, while there is now no new special fear or excitement, business is utterly crushed.  Strong able-bodied men sit listlessly at home because there is no work to be had, and the widows and orphans lead a hopeless cheerless existence from day to day. Our relief funds are given out, at the rate of 5 cents a head every week! Food is cheap in Marash, but this only enough to buy dry bread, nothing else. The outlook for the next winter is dark indeed. If even these funds fail, hundreds will die of starvation before our eyes. I look forward to the winter with unspeakable dread, and feel a selfish longing sometimes to run off somewhere, where I could not know of the terrible misery that we cannot relieve.

Perhaps it is unkind of me to trouble you with this picture of suffering, but when I get started on it, I don’t always know when to stop. I know you pray for these sufferers, and though our faith is sorely tried, we must believe that God reigns, and that sometime there will be a change. Till then we hope to hold on and do what we can.

With all good wishes

Yours sincerely,

Clara H. Lee

The Armenians of Whitinsville Project

Soorp Asdvadzadzin Church of Whitinsville and Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives are partnering to preserve photographs, recipes, stories and anything identifying the character of the Whitinsville Armenian community that people would like to share. We are interested in the community as defined by the people who currently live in Whitinsville or those who have lived and worked in the past across all time periods. The purpose of this living memorial is to celebrate today’s community, preserve our past for generations to follow and have some fun in the process.

Our ancestors came to this country with little, but they did have their hopes and dreams, something embodied in all of us today. We are who we are because of their struggles and courage. We’d like to honor them starting with the photographs, recipes and stories that we each may have. The information will be housed on a website dedicated to the Whitinsville Armenian community.

Sometimes people had photographs with them when they came to this country, but if not, they valued having a photograph made here as evidence of their ability to survive and build a new community. The paradox is that many times when people die, their photographs are discarded because their descendants don’t know the people in the photograph or understand the significance or context of what they are holding. Our idea is to go through photographs together, scan the more important ones and record the stories.

Our goal is to bring people together over these treasures. If there are original photographs that people might like to preserve and make publicly accessible, Project SAVE Archives will add the original photographs to their archive for researchers and the public.

If your family passed through Whitinsville 100 years ago or lives there still today, and you are interested in participating either as a volunteer or by contributing photographs, recipes, stories, music or video, please email armeniansofwhitinsville@gmail.com. 

Author information

Pauline Getzoyan

Editor

Pauline Getzoyan is editor of the Armenian Weekly and an active member of the Rhode Island Armenian community. A longtime member of the Providence ARF and ARS, she currently serves as chairperson of the local ARS Ani chapter. She also is a former member of the ARS Central Executive Board. A long-time advocate for genocide education through her work with the ANC of RI, Pauline is co-chair of the RI branch of The Genocide Education Project. In addition, she has been an adjunct instructor of developmental reading and writing in the English department at the Community College of Rhode Island since 2005.

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Located on the eastern banks of the Beirut River, Bourj Hammoud is one of Lebanon’s most dynamic cities with its multifaceted residential, industrial and commercial dimensions, which connect the capital Beirut to the Mount Lebanon governorate. 

Above and beyond the 2.5 square kilometers of gridiron plans, architectural features overseeing the Mediterranean and infrastructural facilities of a city, Bourj Hammoud is the manifestation of the collective memory of a people uprooted from its ancestral homeland. It is a yearning for home, away from home. It is a place of memory. The product of refugees. A city in exile. 

While the land on which the city stands existed for centuries as small and disbursed settlements, swamps, marshlands and as agricultural fields, the city of Bourj Hammoud, as we know it today, was founded in the early 1930s by survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

The Armenian refugees who fled the Ottoman massacres initially found refuge in tent settlements in the adjacent areas of Karantina and Mar Mikhael in the 1920s. However, after consistently facing pressure from the landowners to evacuate the area and multiple cases of arson, Armenian organizations sought the purchasing of land in Bourj Hammoud and planned the construction of a new home for these people. What was supposed to be a ‘temporary exile’ was soon to be a lasting one with hopes of reconstituting lives they left behind. 

Father Boghos Ariss, a visionary Catholic priest, played an instrumental role in planning and overseeing the founding of a city which would become the religious, cultural, social, educational and political center for the post-genocide Armenian communities of Lebanon. 

The etymology of Bourj Hammoud is debated. The literal meaning is “The Tower of Hammoud.” It is believed that Hammoud designates Mr. Hammoud Arlsan who, a few centuries ago, lived in a two-story stone structure which enabled him to oversee the agricultural lands and monitor the work of the peasants. For the peasants, who often lived in shacks, that structure was considered a tower. The area soon became known as the land of Bourj Hammoud. It is believed that the structure persists to this day and is in the premises of the Mar Doumit non-Armenian church. 

Bourj Hammoud became an independent municipality in 1952 with Father Ariss as its first mayor. The city was divided into quarters. Quarters were organized by and named after the ancestral villages of Western Armenia (modern-day Turkey) where these communities came from. The quarters of “Nor Adana,” “Nor Marash,” “Nor Sis,” “Nor Giligia” are some manifestations of that, with the word ‘nor’ meaning ‘new.’ In other instances, cities of modern-day Armenia are chosen to name segments such as the residential quarter of ‘Arakadz,’ the ‘Yerevan’ flyover bridge and the major commercial street of ‘Arax.’ In many ways, Bourj Hammoud is the reconstruction of the diasporic version of the Armenian nation.

The community organized and founded the institutions and structures it deemed necessary to advance and prosper as a people. All three denominations – Apostolic, Catholic and Evangelical – established their churches and schools. The traditional political parties delved into work and mobilized masses. They established newspapers, radio stations, scouts and athletic movements. The cultural scene was transformed with the creation of cultural organizations, theaters, cinemas and record stores.

Bourj Hammoud became a city of craftsmanship with shoppers from around the country targeting it to get their hands on the products of skilled shoemakers, talented goldsmiths, meticulous tailors and the like. 

While everything in Bourj Hammoud shouts Armenian—from the signage to the spice shops and the overwhelming display of tricolor flags of red, blue and orange—it is worth noting that despite popular belief, Armenians are not the only inhabitants of Bourj Hammoud. It is also home to a large number of non-Armenian Christian and Shiite communities, Kurds, Syrian refugees and a significant community of migrant workers, enriching its social fabric. With a heterogeneous population of 150,000, Bourj Hammoud is a true example of inter-faith and inter-racial coexistence. 

Bourj Hammoud is indeed a one-of-a-kind city. It is the result of imagining and re-imagining of ‘Armenianness’ at the intersection of nostalgia and the start of a new home on no-longer foreign lands. It is a case so niche and particular to the Ottoman Armenians who survived the pre-planned systematic annihilation of their people, but also so significant and international for all forcefully displaced people and refugees. This is why, in mid-2019, I established my walking tours of the city to introduce strangers, visitors and locals to my people’s history of genocide, survival and revival. Bourj Hammoud is a story worth telling.

This is a photo tour of Bourj Hammoud. Let’s take a look at some of my favorite spots.

Arax Street

Arax Street is one of Bourj Hammoud’s main shopping spots where you can find just about anything. Literally, anything. Known for always being busy, the street is named after the one-thousand kilometer long river that passes via Turkey, Armenia and Iran. 

Embroidery 

The Armenian Artisanat is a social enterprise founded by the Armenian Relief Cross of Lebanon (ARCL) in 1977. It is completely run by women and aims to preserve the traditional art of Armenian embroidery. The ARCL periodically conducts embroidery workshops to teach different stitches, motifs and techniques for all those who are interested. Every embroidery piece bought comes with a leaflet that explains its Western Armenian origins. The profit generated by the Artisanat is used by the ARCL to pay the women for their work and re-invest the rest in the different humanitarian projects that the ARCL is engaged in.

Marash Street 

Marash Street is known to be one of the oldest streets of Bourj Hammoud. It is a narrow street, less fancy than Arax, and a favorite of the locals. It is known for its spice shops, but the reality is that anything could be found there. Shop signs are also often in Armenian. 

Spice Shops 

Fifty shades of chili! The spice shops on Marash Street are known for their dried fruits and vegetables, herbs and chili. Lots and lots of chili. These spice shops, the most famous of which are Café Garo, Tenbelian’s Spices & Co. as well as Nerses Halabi, also sell sweets. Their specialty grape molasses stuffed with walnuts is highly demanded.

Music 

In the sixties and seventies, Bourj Hammoud also became the birthplace of a new-post genocide Armenian music genre, known as ‘estradayin.’ The likes of Adiss Harmandian started singing pop music in the Armenian language, a first of its kind. This ‘hybrid’ music was influenced by international and European jazz and pop, but sung in Western Armenian. They were also defined by what they were not; they did not have Ottoman/Turkish or Soviet influences. Record stores in Bourj Hammoud popped up growingly to cater for the increased demand for Armenian music. Levon Katerjian, Manuel Menengichian and George Tutunjian were also popular performers of the time. For many, a guilty pleasure was Paul Baghdadlian, who initially sang in Turkish-inspired music and eventually became one of the most popular love song singers. The city’s Armenian radio station Vana Tsayn (Voice of Van), which is operated by the ARF to this day, played an instrumental role in preserving the Armenian language through music and being cautious and intentional about its on-air playlist for Armenian households.

Khachkar

The khachkar (cross stone) being a defining feature of Armenian monumental art, makes an appearance in different spots throughout Bourj Hammoud. One of the most famous and apparent ones is the memorial monument erected by the municipality for the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in 2015 on one of Bourj Hammoud’s main streets. The khachkar is carved in Armenian tuff (or doof) stone. 

Forty Martyrs Church 

As the Armenians from Marash were organizing themselves in the Nor Marash district of Bourj Hammoud, they felt the imminent need to construct a church. Oral testimonies narrate that Der Hagop, the priest of Marash, led a crowdfunding campaign. He laid down his cassock on the floor and asked his fellow Marashtsis to donate what they could to realize the erection of their place of worship. Some donated money, others their jewelry. Those who were not able to donate anything, offered their free labor. 

In that time, a group of Nor Marashtsi men who were working in the construction of a palace for the Bsat family in Ras Beirut noticed that the molds for the pillars resembled those of their church in Ottoman Marash. They were given permission to take the molds with them after work. The second time they requested to borrow them, their employer, the owner of the palace, was intrigued to know what they were working on. He accompanied them to Nor Marash. Mr. Bsat, a Sunni Muslim, was overwhelmed with the scene of a community collectively building a church, including children who were transporting sand with their school bags. He donated the metal windows and large metal doors of the church as a token of appreciation for the hardworking people. 

The church was built in stages and completed in 1931, becoming the first Armenian church in Bourj Hammoud. A school gradually was added adjacent to the church. They named the church (and the school) ‘Karasnits Mangants’ (Forty Martyrs) as per the name of their church in Ottoman Marash. Der Hagop, who was born in Marash, was laid to rest in Nor Marash next to the church. 

Graffiti 

Graffiti in Bourj Hammoud is very political. “Turkey Guilty of Genocide,” “Stop Aliyev,” “Eastern Turkey is Western Armenia” are just some of the many inscriptions you can find spray-painted on walls throughout the city. Graffiti in Armenian is also quite common. Graffiti is not a new phenomenon for Bourj Hammoud. Decades ago when Turkish was commonly spoken in the neighborhood and as the community was reconfiguring its Armenian identity with an emphasis on language, graffiti bearing the common slogan: “Turkeren khosogheen, hayeren badaskhaneh” (“To those who speak Turkish, answer in Armenian”) was hard to miss. 

Apollo 

Statues often depict heroes, military commanders, political leaders or religious figures. But not this one. Meet Apollo. Apollo’s real name is Sarkis Doudakian. At a seasoned age, until his last day alive, Apollo distributed the daily Armenian newspaper Aztag to its loyal readers. In 2017, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Aztag’s establishment, a statue of Apollo was erected in front of Center Arin to immortalize the memory of a humble, hardworking and patriotic man. The statue was masterfully executed by renowned sculptor Vartan Avessian.

Food 

Bourj Hammoud has a vibrant culinary scene that offers anything from affordable street food like soujoukh, shawarma or falafel sandwiches to fine dining of traditional Armenian cuisine with dishes like mante, fishneh kebab, soubereg, among others, adapted from Ottoman Armenian kitchens. Restaurant Varouj, a small family business, was one of the first to commercialize Armenian food in Lebanon. Anyone from infamous warlords to your average Joe could be seen indulging in the unique food experience. For those who don’t know, there’s an ongoing battle over basterma between ‘Mano’ and ‘Bedo.’ Ghazar Bakery’s lahmajuns are to die for. Badguer—known as the Pink House of Bourj Hammoud—offers a second-to-none cultural and culinary experience for its guests. With its ever-changing exhibition floor, dining hall and rooftop terrace, it has become a much celebrated touristic destination for the city. Resto-Foul offers a twist with influences from Aleppo Armenian taste buds. Kebab Apo is a landmark station specializing in different kebabs like the ourfa and the khashkhash – arguably one of the best in the country. 

Exhibition center 

The Hamazkayin “Lucy Tutunjian” Art Gallery opened in 2009 to serve as a platform for artists and art lovers alike. Centered in the middle of Bourj Hammoud, it aims to present art to all of Lebanon and beyond. For more than a decade, the gallery has exhibited the works of local and international artists – both Armenian and non-Armenian. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, weavings and creations from other art forms have all been housed in the gallery. 

The Shikhani Building 

The Shikhani Building is one of the oldest surviving structures in Bourj Hammoud. The Shikhanis were a well-off Christian family that owned a considerable amount of land in Bourj Hammoud. They, along with other families like the Kahwajis, sold much of their land to the Armenians for the construction of their new city. The building was first registered in the municipality records in 1935, but popular knowledge and oral testimonies claim it to be much older. The building was made of sand and sea stones from the nearby shore rather than concrete. When another floor was added, concrete was used to enhance the firmness of the structure. The building has previously served as a police station and now a residential unit. The building along with the adjacent areas have been purchased by an investor. The fate of the building is unclear.

Beirut Blast

While Bourj Hammoud was founded from the ashes of sorrow, it also witnessed its fair share of misfortunes. A year ago, the Beirut blast of August 4th had a devastating impact on the city, which was already suffering from the dire economic and financial situation of Lebanon. Scenes from the explosion in Bourj Hammoud and the resulting destruction haunt the entire country. A year later, Bourj Hammoud is alive and full of life, but struggling. The future does not seem so optimistic. But, struggle is the bread and butter of every Armenian.

Author information

Hrag Avedanian

Hrag Avedanian holds a master’s degree in International Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Lebanese American University in Beirut. He is an alumnus of the MEPI Student Leaders Program from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. His academic interests include identity, Turkish politics and forced migration. He works in the field of development focusing on refugees and education. Avedanian has previously written about Armenian and Turkish issues in various media outlets.

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Born on September 23, 1925, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Haig Sarafian was the only child of Puzant Sarafian and Elizabeth Kistorian, two Armenian refugees who had no other choice than to leave their beloved land. Puzant settled in the United States in 1916, and Elizabeth set foot on American soil in 1921. After witnessing the horrors of the Armenian Genocide, the birth of their son was a chance to live a normal and peaceful life.  

Haig grew up in West Philadelphia and was a cheerful kid, until his father walked out the front door and abandoned his family. This traumatic event changed everything. Without a father figure, Haig started making wrong choices and getting into trouble. His actions got him sent to the Kis-Lyn School for Boys in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. It was a reform school aimed to rehabilitate juveniles who committed nonviolent offenses, such as shoplifting. Almost all the boys came from broken homes; some were psychologically destroyed after being abused by their parents. Discipline was severe at Kis-Lyn, and life was really tough for certain boys. The ones who behaved and worked hard were allowed visitors once a month. Haig was not one of those teenagers. He hated this reform school, so in October 1940, he took his chance and escaped. His little adventure didn’t last long. Quickly located by the State Police, Haig was immediately sent back to Kis-Lyn.

In January 1943, the world was at war, and Haig was now 17 years old. So he decided to join the US Marine Corps. Like every young man sent to the Pacific Theater, Haig knew that his chances of returning to Philadelphia were slim, but he knew that fighting for freedom was the right choice.

Haig first saw combat in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) where he showed remarkable bravery. He was then stationed on Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) where he lost one of his dog tags. Haig loved his brothers in arms, and he admired the camaraderie among Marines. He was willing to die for them, and they were willing to die for him. As a proud member of Company C, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine, he took part in the deadly Battle of Peleliu (Palau) and literally marched into hell. Despite his young age, this Armenian American teenager fought heroically, but on September 19, 1944, four days before his 19th birthday, Haig was killed by enemy fire. Intense efforts were made to locate his remains, but they were never found.

Thousands of miles away, his mother was devastated and never recovered from losing her only child. A few years after the war, she married a man named Cary Kegham Chakarian and moved to Massachusetts. Elizabeth passed away on February 25, 1989, in Worcester. Haig is now memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. He also has a memorial marker at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts.

In 2012, 67 years after the end of the war, Mr. Mesion Bosoboe, an inhabitant of Guadalcanal, was walking near Tetere, when he found, by chance, the dog tag that Haig lost. When he discovered the heartbreaking story of this 18-year-old Marine who fought and died for a better world, he felt such a strong connection with him that he later decided to name his newborn baby “Haig.”

Seventy-seven years after the death of PFC Haig Sarafian and so many other Armenian American heroes, we have a choice to make. We can forget the past, look straight ahead, and let time, slowly and meticulously, erase the last traces of their footprints. Or we can build a bridge between the past and the future, to properly educate younger generations, preserve this invaluable heritage, and make sure that all the Armenian American heroes who died for freedom are remembered. The choice is ours. Now is the chance.

Author information

John Dekhane

John Dekhane grew up in Paris before moving to the South of France. He works for a sport organization in Monaco. Since he was a child, he has always been interested in World War II with particular emphasis on American soldiers. In order to honor them, over the past years, he has located and purchased WWII U.S. artifacts in Europe and donated these items to more than a hundred museums in the United States.

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It has already been more than a year since the 44-day war was unleashed by Azerbaijan against the Republics of Artsakh and Armenia. A war that ceased on November 9 on the basis of a trilateral statement signed between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia created a new reality in the South Caucasus: more than two-thirds of the territory of the Republic of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh) are now under Azeri occupation. Thousands of Armenians have been displaced. Russian peacekeepers are deployed in the remaining parts of Artsakh. However, even those forces seem to be inadequate to prevent the continuing abuses and human rights violations towards the Armenians of Artsakh. 

Despite this and against all odds, life still flourishes in Artsakh, and individuals committed to starting anew are getting married. Moreover, it was this war that placed most of them in proximity. 

The stories below tell about the omnipotent feeling of love that makes us live and create during and especially after the war.  

Narine and Sergey

Narine Arzumanyan is a cardiologist from the Martuni region of Artsakh. She is currently living in Yerevan. Sergey Aramyan is a urologist from Yerevan; his roots are from Artsakh as well.

Narine: I went to Artsakh on the second day of the war together with my father, coursemate and her husband. I settled in Martuni and worked at the hospital all the time. On another day, a heavily wounded soldier was brought there by a young man, who was to become my future husband. It was later revealed that we have studied together at the same course for six years and then worked at the same hospital, but had never met each other before. Afterwards Sergey’s friend told me that when they accompanied a wounded soldier to the hospital, Sergey stated that they would be back again. His friend was surprised and wondered why, whereas Sergey told him that he fell in love. The road from Sergey’s place to the hospital was dangerous; however he managed to visit me every day by bringing some sweets for me and asking how I was feeling. I even managed to introduce Sergey to my hometown Martuni. We both started to transport wounded soldiers from Artsakh to Yerevan, and it was the road that united and connected us more. I was amazed how flexible and calm I became with Sergey notwithstanding my general strong and difficult character. We were getting closer day by day, and at the end, we realized that we had to continue our life journey together. Although we got married just 10 months after the day of our first meeting, those were months each worth 100 years for both of us. Currently, we continue postgraduate training in Moscow together, each of us with our specialization. We are planning to have as many children as possible and do everything to help our country withstand all difficulties.  

Marine and Shant

Shant Charshafjian is from Glendale, California. Marine Karapetyan is a linguist from Sardarapat, Armenia. 

Shant: I was in Yerevan when war broke out in Artsakh. Just the day before, I met my future wife. On September 26, I was in the Tavush region of Armenia to participate in Gutan fest, where I met Marine. She was wearing a tee-shirt with an image of Garegin Njdeh (a prominent Armenian statesman and military strategist)—one of my favorite national heroes. She grasped my attention immediately, and we started to talk and discovered that we have so many things in common. On the next day of the war, I decided to confess my love to Marine as I did not know what would happen to us. So, we started to date and in the middle of October, we got engaged and went to Aghavno—a border village connecting Artsakh with Armenia. During the war, there were still people and especially children staying there at their homes, so we decided to provide them with medical and humanitarian aid. As Marine is a linguist, she started to work with the children of Aghavno. Even under the heavy shelling, she stayed calm trying to assist everyone as she could. The war ended. We went through many difficulties and challenges, and this summer we decided to get married. We moved to the Martuni region of Artsakh and are helping to develop agriculture in this area. Recently, we had a baby girl, and of course, we are planning to continue to live and work in Artsakh.  

Ani and Meruzhan

Ani Poghosyan is a psychologist living in Yerevan. Meruzhan Sargsyan comes from Musaler in the Armavir region of Armenia. 

Ani: I was voluntarily working as a psychologist with the children from Artsakh during the war. For that purpose, my friends were always tagging my profile on Facebook to help people find me and get the needed help. This is how I met my future boyfriend, who contacted me and asked for help. As I was working only with teenagers, initially I refused him, but when I was told about his problems caused by war I decided to help. We were working online for a month and I was telling Meruzhan what to do to overcome all the psychological problems he had. After a month, he asked me to go out with him and assured that I became a very close person to him. Our feelings were mutual, as I was experiencing the same. It took two months to improve Meruzhan’s speech, and it is our love that helped him to recover so quickly. 

After the war, something has definitely changed and that is common for 95-percent of Armenians living in Armenia. It is the feeling that you have to live here and now, and you do not have to postpone something to another day.  

Meruzhan and I see our future in bright colors. I am planning to open my own center where I can help teenagers by offering them psychological aid, and Meruzhan is helping me. We are going to get engaged very soon. After that, we will marry and have children. Most importantly, Meruzhan and I are going to raise our children with love towards their motherland. We wish them to become really good individuals who know their role and mission for their homeland and have goals and objectives to reach.

Elina and Martun

Elina Balasanyan is a student from Berdashen village in the Martuni region of Artsakh. Martun Abrahamyan is from Artik city of Armenia. 

Elina: When the war started I was going to work at around 7:30. On my way, I immediately understood that something was happening, as there were some objects in the sky, but I could never imagine that it might be a war. I like hiking, and usually after work I used to go to Shushi to find peace in nature. That day was not an exception, and I packed everything I needed – warm clothes, water and other stuff. My sisters were in Stepanakert, but my parents and my little brother were in the village. I managed to go to my village and help my parents and other people to flee to Stepanakert where they found shelter at the Holy Mother of God Cathedral. (The famous photo from the recent Artsakh War where a young lady is reading a book for children in the bunker was taken there.) I was taking care of elderly people and children who were in the bunker at that time. But when my mother got sick, I had to leave for Yerevan where I started to help displaced individuals and met my future husband who was also helping others. It was love at first sight from his side, whereas the only thing on my mind was the future of Artsakh and my family. After a few days, Martun approached me and told me that everything is very serious, and we have to behave like mature people. This is how our love story began. After the ceasefire, on 13 November, we both returned to Stepanakert and got engaged in the same cathedral where I was seeking shelter during the war. 

The war made us think about eternal things. We were happy that we did not lose each other but found each other instead. We should appreciate each minute given to us. Martun and I became parents in September. It is a blessing to find love and build a family in this mess. We are planning to move back to Artsakh as soon as possible and continue to live there.

Author information

Irina Safaryan

Irina Safaryan is a political scientist, social and political activist and a translator. She lives in Stepanakert.

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The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Archives located in Watertown, Massachusetts contain a trove of photographic treasures. The process of cataloging the thousands of images is an often time-consuming, yet fascinating, research process. 

Last month, while reviewing the catalog, we happened upon a photograph where the handwritten last name was not entirely clear. The photograph was of a dapper young man with the imprint of a fingerprint left sometime over the years. We discovered the subject of the photograph was named Sdepan, and his last name began with “Al.” Entering this scant information into the Hairenik Digital Archives yielded a single result, Sdepan Alyanakian. From the September 9, 1917 issue of the Hairenik Daily, we learn that Alyanakian had drowned in New York. 

Born in 1892 or 1893 in the village of Nirze in the Gesaria region, Alyanakian arrived in the US at the age of 18 or 19 in 1911 aboard the SS Martha Washington. In 1918, A Brief History of the Nirze Village of Gesaria was written by Senekerim Khederian and, just this year, an English translation by Gerard Libaridian was published by the Gomidas Institute. Alyanakian is mentioned a number of times in the book along with a short biography.

Alyanakian had worked in New York as a tailor. After joining the ARF, he enlisted in the first Caucasus volunteer movement in 1915. There is a record of Alyanakian first joining the 8th Company of the New York Guard on April 21, 1915. He left for the Caucasus soon thereafter in August. He would return to the US by 1917. I cannot be sure because of some conflicting information, but I may have found the ship manifest for his return aboard the SS Kristianiafjord on August 20, 1916. His World War I draft registration in the summer of 1917 stated he had served one year in the Russian army as an infantry private.

Alyanakian would again volunteer for the second Caucasus movement. Yet in August of 1917, he would drown at Holland Rockaway Beach on Long Island. Apparently, he had gotten cramps while swimming, and others nearby did not realize his distress until it was too late. His funeral took place on August 21, 1917 at St. Illuminator’s Church in New York City. He is buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, though I could not find an image of the gravesite online.

Neither the book nor the Hairenik article contain a photograph, thus the one in the ARF archives is probably the only photograph of Alyanakian in existence. The Alyanakian family of Nirze seems to have been small. Khederian writes of four individuals in a household headed by Garabed Alyanakian. When Sdepan arrived in the US, he stated that he had no relatives remaining in Turkey and, again, he was single and without dependents on his World War I draft registration. His funeral record lists his parents as Mgrdich and Sultan Alyanakian. It is unclear if he has any surviving relatives today, but regardless, we should not forget men like Sdepan Alyanakian. “There was no one who had known him who did not mourn this young man’s death,” wrote Khederian. “Unger Stepan was modest and quiet, but by personality he was unswerving. He had a deep sense of the responsibility he was bearing as an Armenian.”

As we find new and interesting items in the ARF archives, we hope to share them in the pages of the Armenian Weekly.

Author information

George Aghjayan

George Aghjayan is the Director of the Armenian Historical Archives and the chair of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Central Committee of the Eastern United States. Aghjayan graduated with honors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Mathematics. He achieved Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries in 1996. After a career in both insurance and structured finance, Aghjayan retired in 2014 to concentrate on Armenian related research and projects. His primary area of focus is the demographics and geography of western Armenia as well as a keen interest in the hidden Armenians living there today. Other topics he has written and lectured on include Armenian genealogy and genocide denial. He is a board member of the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), a frequent contributor to the Armenian Weekly and Houshamadyan.org, and the creator and curator westernarmenia.weebly.com, a website dedicated to the preservation of Armenian culture in Western Armenia.

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Abstract

Researching Armenian genealogy presents unique challenges, in large part due to the scarcity of records in the Armenian homeland and the scattering of families who survived the Armenian Genocide. Many Armenians immigrated to North America in the latter part of the 1800s and in the early 1900s. Fortunately, for those of Armenian descent living in the US and Canada, a tremendous amount of information can be found in primary source records of these countries to help them to learn about their Armenian families. The Armenian Immigration Project explores nine different types of American primary sources related to Armenian immigrants during this time period, using an evidence-based methodology to abstract over 170,000 entries from these records and present them in a searchable, free, online database.

Background

My paternal grandfather Dikran Arslanian was born around 1883 in the village of Sergevil, located in the kaza (county) of Keghi, sanjak of Erzurum (Garin), vilayet of Erzurum, in Turkey in the Ottoman Empire. He immigrated to the US through New York (Ellis Island) in 1906. Many of the men in his family also left Turkey in the years prior to the 1915 Genocide to find work in the US, Canada and western Europe in the hopes of bettering their family’s prospects and perhaps bringing their wives and children to join them. Of the 40 or so members of our extended Arslanian family remaining in Turkey in 1915, only two boys were known to have survived the Genocide. They were rescued from refugee camps in the Middle East after the end of World War I.

Dikran remained in the US, married a woman of French-Canadian descent and settled on the Pacific coast (Washington and Oregon). He finally arrived in Fresno, California in the early 1930s. My father was one of seven children born to this couple between 1918 and 1934 – first-generation Americans of Armenian and French ancestry.

As a teenager in the early 1970s, I became interested in learning more about my father’s Armenian family. My Armenian grandfather Dikran died in 1965, and my father knew very little about the Armenian side of his family (as he had been estranged from his father for many years). Dad referred me to one of his much older Armenian first cousins—Kevork, or “Uncle George” as we called him. He was born around 1895 and came to America in 1912. I met Uncle George at some family gatherings and later wrote to him with questions about our Arslanian family. George responded immediately, and we corresponded for several years. Not only did he share a lot about our Armenian family, but he gave me the addresses of several other older close relatives, including the two boys in our family who had survived the Genocide (who were then in their 60s and 70s). I put together similar questionnaires and mailed them to the other contacts, who promptly responded. Some of them also sent old photographs. One even provided a hand-drawn sketch of their home in Sergevil. (They all lived together in an extended household after my great-grandfather Sarkis Arslanian and his brother Garabed, the family patriarchs, were killed in the massacres of 1895-1896.)

The information I obtained from my correspondence with my older relatives in the 1970s enabled me to piece together our family story, but left a number of questions unanswered. In these days before the internet, widespread availability of primary source records and DNA technology, I figured that was as far as I was going to get in understanding the history of my Armenian family. At least I was able to meet some of my extended Arslanian family living in the US, England and France.

Primary Sources

Over the next several decades, I started researching primary sources to augment the information I had already learned about my Armenian family. Primary sources are official documents created near the time of the event for governmental, religious or commercial purposes, as well as unofficial material (such as correspondence or missing persons ads) created by someone with first-hand knowledge of certain facts. My research started with the general availability of the 1910 federal census, which was released to the public (via microfilm) in 1982, after a legal waiting period of 72 years. My Armenian grandfather and several of his family and fellow villagers first appeared in that census.

In addition to censuses, primary sources include vital records (births, marriages and deaths), military records (World War I and World War II draft registrations), ship manifests, citizenship records (naturalization and passport applications) and newspapers (especially missing persons ads). In those days, some of the records were available from the US and state and local governments in the form of microfilm, microfiche and paper files. Other records could be found in county courthouses and archives. During my business and personal travel in the 1980s and 1990s, I often set aside a day or two for genealogical research in courthouses, archives and cemeteries or for meeting and interviewing relatives.

The commercial availability of the internet in the 1990s was a game-changer for genealogists. Not only did forums emerge that allowed researchers to collaborate, but all kinds of different primary records started to become available online. For my Armenian research, the most important of these were the collections of ship manifests, starting with the Ellis Island website around the year 2000. I was able to take my Armenian research notes from the early 1970s and locate many of the individuals on the original ship manifests. Not only did these records reveal the relatives or acquaintances they were joining in America, but they listed (for arrivals in 1907 and later) the names and relationships of the ones they were leaving in the ‘old country.’ Many of the names of family and friends were previously unknown to me, leading to more research possibilities (new information on my Armenian family, at last!)

I became interested in learning more about other Armenian immigrants to America who originated in my grandfather’s home kaza of Keghi and eventually compiled a spreadsheet of over 2,500 immigrants from Keghi who entered America through Ellis Island. (Some were related to my Arslanian family, but I eventually learned that Keghi was quite a large kaza, consisting of over 50 Armenian villages clustered around the principal town of the kaza, called Keghi Kasaba.) To learn more about these Keghi immigrants to America, I tried to see if I could find them in the US and Canada federal census records and military draft registrations (and created spreadsheets for those).

At some point, I realized the significance of this approach for anyone researching their Armenian family who immigrated to America. I decided to expand my research beyond Keghi to include anyone of Armenian ancestry, regardless of their place of origin. More records became available online – ship manifests for ports other than Ellis Island, censuses for later years, citizenship records, vital records, newspapers, etc. (I created many more spreadsheets.)

Linkage of Primary Sources

It soon became apparent to me that there was tremendous value to be gained by looking at a number of different primary sources when researching individuals and family groups. You get a much more complete picture of a person’s history by combining information in a holistic fashion from different primary sources and timeframes, much more than you find in just a single record:

• date and place of birth (including town/village)
• interrelationships of individuals (relatives, neighbors from villages/towns in the “Old Country” and in America)
• dates and places of marriage(s) and death
• where they lived and how they got from one place to another
• occupation(s)
• how they lived and what they did
• photographs 

In the 1970s, I learned that by sending the same questionnaire to different older family members, their answers didn’t always agree. Dates were problematic. (Didn’t people know their own birthdays or that of their relatives?) Sometimes the chronology of events and names of people were inconsistent. The same thing, I realized, applied when looking at primary source records. They often don’t agree. Dates are off. Place names and personal names are spelled dozens of different ways. This is the nature of research with primary sources. Rarely will all of the information in a particular record be entirely correct. Often, it will conflict with a family’s oral traditions (memories being flawed, as well). Research of any kind is messy. You can’t take anything verbatim. It is important to look at the entirety of a person’s “paper trail” of primary records to look for corroboration and discrepancies and make a judgment as to which information is likely to be correct, which is incorrect and what information you may never know.

Why are primary records not entirely accurate? Here are some of the possible explanations.

• Informant didn’t know
• Error in transcribing between work document and official document (or copying of official document)
• Lack of understanding between clerk and informant due to language difference
• Change of place names, borders; no clarity regarding level of place to use in the administrative hierarchy (e.g., village/town, kaza, sanjak, vilayet)
• Delay in time between event and recording of information
• Deliberate falsification (informant or clerk)

In general, information in a primary source is usually quite accurate with respect to things happening at the time of the record, assuming that the informant was knowledgeable. For example, a death certificate is usually correct for things like the decedent’s name, address, occupation, date and place of death, cause of death, and place of burial (or removal). That same death certificate may not be accurate for things like the decedent’s date and place of birth and names of the parents, since those things may not have been known first-hand to the informant, especially if the decedent was elderly.

Another good reason for gathering information from as many primary sources as possible for an individual is to uncover that “gem.” Many times I have gathered information for a person across many different types of primary sources, and one (and only one) of those sources contained a piece of information that allowed me to break through a “brick wall” and solve a puzzle that had perplexed family researchers for years. Perhaps there was an aunt living in the household in the 1930 census whose identity finally enabled me to identify that person’s parents. Or maybe the village of the person’s birth is only shown in the World War II draft registration (all other records for that individual giving just the name of the kaza, sanjak, vilayet or country).

After gathering information on Armenian immigrants to North America (US and Canada) from many different types of primary sources, tens of thousands of rows in multiple spreadsheets, I was challenged with how best to present this information to a global audience. At first, I just created pdf files of the spreadsheets and published them on a web server. This was not satisfactory for a number of reasons. The amount of information couldn’t easily fit on a single sheet (even in landscape mode). Each different sort order required its own spreadsheet, and it was almost impossible to link together all of the information for an individual across all of the different primary source records.

Around 2015, I solved many of these problems by organizing information from these different primary sources into tables within a database, and then publishing that database along with easy-to-use search tools to quickly view the information (over 170,000 entries) in a variety of different ways, even a consolidated view for an individual (linking all of that person’s records together).

Evidence-based Methodology

Many of the purported genealogies published in books and online are nothing more than a repetition of someone else’s mistakes due to shoddy or inadequate research. Early on, I tried to carefully document primary sources to support each relationship or event (birth, marriage or death) in my own family genealogies. Even if the primary sources are conflicting, as they often are, someone years later could at least examine each of the cited sources to draw their own conclusions.

In my research of Armenian immigrants to America (the Armenian Immigration Project), I have not attempted to document genealogies of any of the families other than my own. Rather, I am more interested in providing them with original evidence and clues that they can use to construct their own family trees or gain a better understanding of their own family histories. My role is more like an archaeologist digging up bones and artifacts, and then displaying, categorizing, cataloguing and indexing my finds. My objective is to allow others to find new information about the subjects of their research. 

By gathering as much evidence from primary source material for an individual (and their close connections), researchers will be able to determine which facts are independently corroborated and which ones conflict, and then use their informed judgment to develop a narrative of their family history. Many of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We need to learn to accept that some level of uncertainty is unavoidable. 

Oftentimes, information from primary sources will be in direct conflict with an oral family tradition that has been repeated (and probably embellished) for decades. Admittedly, it is sometimes hard to let go of these oral traditions. But that is usually the case with historical research.

Structure of Armenian Immigration Project Website

The project web site consists of two pages: Home and Project Reports and Queries.

The Home page is a description of the project – its background and each of the nine primary sources. For each primary source, a link is provided to allow you to download the entire database table in .csv format. You may import this file into your own spreadsheet program or database to create your own reports or do your own analysis. The character set is utf-8, and the column separator is a semicolon.

The Project Reports & Queries page is the workhorse of the project, allowing you to search through the more than 170,000 entries contained within the database tables. A report is a summary of data in a table (e.g., top joining street addresses on ship manifests). A query allows you to use various search criteria to find individual entries (abstracts) of the primary sources. Within the abstracts, you will often find links to other abstracts relating to the same individual or to someone in that person’s network (a relative, friend, or associate). This linkage of the abstracts is the key analytical benefit of the project.

In most cases, the abstracts do not provide a linkage to the actual image of the primary source record. There are several reasons why I chose not to do this. These include the time it would take to clip a discrete image and point to it, the fact that some types of records (like ship manifests and marriage registers) don’t lend themselves to just clipping the entry of interest without getting the whole large page with headings, the issue with links to the sources themselves (on sites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org) becoming outdated and invalid, as well as possible issues with intellectual property rights. For the Ads table, I present images of missing persons ads. For some of the records in the Deaths table, I include an obituary or news item relating to the person’s death. Published content, like American newspapers, are in the public domain after 75 years. Also, Fair Use guidelines allow their selective use for this type of scholarly research.

Project Reports & Queries Page

The Project Reports & Queries page allows you to search through any of the nine database tables corresponding to primary sources, as well as a combined search (across all tables at once). 

At the top is a sampling of five individual photographs. These photographs are part of a collection of over 4,000 photographs of Armenian immigrants whose entries are in the project. When you refresh the webpage, five more randomly chosen photographs will appear. If you click on a photograph, it will take you to that person’s entry. Presenting these faces is a way to help the data (names, dates and places) come alive. 

Each section on this page (delineated by headers with a yellow background) corresponds to one of the primary sources in the database. For example, you can run a query or report for the Deaths table, which includes abstracts of death registers and certificates. There are currently 3,883 entries in the table. To run the query or report, click the hot link. There are several different ways to search each table.

Let’s turn to the concept of roles. Each type of primary source record may mention one or more individuals. For example, in the death records, you will find the deceased person, his/her spouse and the parents of the deceased.

Next, how do we deal with all of the different spelling variations of personal names? For most last names, we will often find dozens of different spellings in the primary sources. Here is a sampling of those found for the last name Կրճիկեան. The transliteration of a name to the Latin alphabet is different for Western Armenian versus Eastern Armenian. It can also differ depending on where the record was written (by a French-speaking clerk preparing a ship manifest for a voyage from Le Havre or a military draft registrar in Fresno writing down a phonetic approximation of the name using American English conventions). When abstracting the names from the primary sources (those written in the Latin alphabet), I transcribed them exactly as written, so you can search across all of the different spelling variations.

To make it easier to find a last name across all of the different spelling variations, names that are phonetically similar have been grouped together under a label called the Last Name (Std.). The variations of the name Կրճիկեան can be found under the Last Name (Std.) of Grjigian. The labels are usually the Western Armenian transliteration in a style you will typically find in the US. This is not to say that this is the correct spelling of the transliterated name, as different families (or branches of the same family) may have their own spelling preferences. Sometimes, different last names may be grouped together if their spelling variations are hard to distinguish from one another or if they are based on the same root (e.g., Hagopian and Yacoubian). If a last name has commonly been anglicized to its American English equivalent (e.g., Arslanian to Lion or Lyons), you will find it grouped with the original Armenian name.

On each of the Query pages, you will find a button for a utility that maps any last name in the database to its standardized last name.

Place names are another challenge. In the Ottoman Empire, many towns and villages had different Armenian names than Turkish names, such as Garin/Erzurum, Dikranagerd/Diyarbekir, Kharpert/Harput, or Paghesh/Bitlis. Even the Turkish names were spelled differently in western European and American publications of that time (e.g., Erzurum vs. Erzeroum). After the formation of the Republic of Turkey following the end of World War I, many of the names were changed further (e.g., Smyrna to Izmir, Constantinople to Istanbul and Harput to Elazig). Of course, any place name could be found spelled dozens of different ways that are rough phonetic approximations on primary sources in American records. The same applies to names of places in the former Russian Empire (Alexandropol to Leninakan to Gyumri), now the Republic of Armenia. 

For place names, the Armenian Immigration Project uses the names in place at the start of World War I (in 1914), using the style most commonly found on American maps and in English-language publications. When referring to places in Turkey, the administrative hierarchy of place names in use at that time is used. For example, my paternal grandfather’s village of birth is referred to as Keghi (Sergevil), Erzurum, Turkey, using the kaza (Keghi), followed by the town/village name in parentheses, then the vilayet (province), then the country. For places that were then in the Russian Empire (now the Republic of Armenia), the towns and villages in the okrug of Kars are grouped together, as are those in the uyezd of Alexandropol. (Kars was recaptured by the Turks and incorporated back into Turkey in 1921.)

Example of Consolidated View with Linkages

One of my key objectives for this project is to show a consolidated view of information from primary source records for individual immigrants to America. This can be illustrated with the view for my paternal grandfather Dikran “Dick” Arslanian: 

The consolidated view is built around the immigrant’s ship manifest (or border crossing entry, in the event that the person arrived in the US by land through Canada or Mexico). Dikran arrived in America through New York (Ellis Island) on November 24, 1906 aboard the ship La Provence, which departed the port of Le Havre, France on November 17, 1906 (a voyage of seven days). He had traveled from his home village in Turkey to the Black Sea port of Batum (then in Russia), which was listed as his Last Residence. From there, he eventually reached France to begin the final leg of his journey to the US. Dikran, like many Armenian immigrants to America, traveled with others from his home village. To see others on his voyage, click the little ship icon. (This will bring up an additional view of voyages for that year, positioned with that particular voyage at the top of the screen. Give it about 10 seconds or so to refresh the screen for heavy immigration years like 1913 and 1921.) 

The immigrant’s place of birth first appeared in the ship manifests of late 1906. As seen in Dikran’s entry, it was erroneously listed as Batum. (This is typical with many of the 1906 ship manifests, conflating the places of birth and last residence; records of 1907 and later are generally more accurate in this respect.)

Many immigrants to America, particularly men, traveled back and forth multiple times. Dikran did not. Were this the case, you would see one or more Other Immigrant IDs listed, with hot links that enable you to view abstracts of those ship manifests, as well.

If an individual’s direct male descendant had a Y-chromosome DNA test performed (typically through the Armenian DNA Project at FamilyTreeDNA), his results and a contact name would be listed here. This can be used, in Dikran’s case, to determine if other Arslanians are of the same family as him. (Most are not, unless they were from the same village in Keghi.) To be of the same family, their y-DNA results would need to be virtually identical. This field could also display the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) results for female immigrants. Here are the current haplogroup results for the Armenian Immigration Project database. This is a relatively new feature, which I hope will be used broadly by descendants of Armenian immigrants in America to find other members of their families.

Starting with ship manifests (to the US) in 1907, a column appeared for “The name and complete address of nearest relative or friend in country whence alien came.” In my database, I refer to this as the Leaving role (with Name, Relationship, Immigrant ID and Location). This field often contains the name of a spouse or parent in the Old Country who may or may not have come to America. (In Dikran’s case, this field is blank, since he traveled in 1906.)

Starting in about the year 1900, ship manifest entries showed the name, relationship, and street address of the person in America (“relative or friend”) they were joining (i.e., the Joining role in my database). In Dikran’s case, he was joining his older brother Marouke Arslanian in Madison, Illinois (near Granite City). By clicking on the hot link for Marouke’s Joining Immigrant ID, you can view all the information I have found for Marouke (whose photo appears above the Joining section of this page).

In the Comments field, there’s more additional information found for the immigrant on the ship manifest entry, such as if they were deported or had distinguishing physical characteristics (deformities, scars, tattoos, blue eyes, etc.).

The most important feature of this consolidated view are linkages to other entries appearing in my database for that same individual from the different types of primary sources records, which appear in the bottom section of this page. To the left of each entry, you will find a small icon depicting a magnifying glass. Clicking this icon will bring you to a view of an abstract for that record, which may itself contain linkages to other entries. For example, you will find entries for Dikran in the 1910, 1920 and 1930 census, the World War I draft registration, a naturalization application from 1920, his 1912 and 1918 marriages (the latter one to my grandmother) and his 1965 death certificate from Modesto, California.

Note that his birth date is inconsistent from entry to entry, which is typical for Armenian immigrants to America. Also, there are a number of different spellings for his first and last names.

Every few months, I refresh the online version of the Armenian Immigration Project database with new entries. This consolidated view will automatically incorporate additional entries for the immigrant with each refresh. 

Conclusion

Doing an exhaustive search for your relatives in primary documentary sources takes a lot of time and patience, but it can be very rewarding and gratifying. You may find a personal signature or even a photograph that you’ve never seen before (in naturalization applications starting in 1930 and passport applications starting in 1915). Ship manifests may reveal new names and connections, as well as show how your relatives got to America. The decennial censuses of the US and Canada often show extended family groupings soon after they arrived. Be prepared for surprises, as family anecdotes are almost never completely accurate. Keep an open mind and have fun.

Author information

Mark Arslan

Mark Arslan is a 2nd-generation American whose paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1906 from the kaza of Keghi, vilayet of Erzurum, Turkey. He started researching his own Armenian roots in 1971, established the Armenian DNA Project in 2005 and expanded his research of Armenian genealogy to include the entire North American diaspora (for the period prior to 1930) with the Armenian Immigration Project database. Mark is a regular contributor to the Armenian Genealogy group on Facebook and frequently travels across America to lecture on his research into Armenian immigration. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in forestry from Oregon State University. Mark is retired from a 35-year career in systems engineering, technical support and sales with IBM. He is married with three adult children and three grandchildren and resides in Cary, North Carolina. Besides genealogy, he enjoys hiking, reading, gardening and travel.

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Would there be war in a woman’s world? How would men react to our decision to start a war? Would we have so many wars if women ran the world?

War is not a female story. The stories of wars are mainly about men’s heroism and losses. Stories and songs are dedicated to them. The courage, devotion and emotions of women are mostly overshadowed. Women, however, suffer terribly painful consequences of war: losing their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers – losing everything. Women also suffer, to some extent, from social insecurity, lack of access to education, sexual harassment, reproductive health issues and rights violations. 

On the morning of September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a large-scale war on the internationally unrecognized territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), targeting almost all civilian settlements and densely populated cities, including schools, kindergartens and hospitals. These were targeted by artillery and air strikes by Azerbaijan throughout the war – for almost the entire 44 days.

According to the Artsakh ombudsman’s report, 72 civilians, including 12 women, were killed. Seven of these women (including an underaged girl) were killed by long-range missile strikes, including rocket-propelled grenades, bombings and subversive gunfire. Five women were held in Azeri captivity and subjected to physical violence and torture. Three other women were killed on the battlefield. 

I spoke with eight women, aged 27 to 90, who served as volunteers or direct participants in the war. All of these interview subjects were asked the same question: what were the most haunting things you witnessed?

Angela Frangyan, 34  

Angela Frangyan is a documentary filmmaker who lives and works in Yerevan. On the first day of the war, she went to Karabakh to make a film about the war before its end. After the war, she filmed footage of the families of captured soldiers and civilians, many of whom are still struggling to get their relatives back from captivity in Azerbaijan. 

“Sometimes when I am looking through my archival footage, I feel that there is nothing that I have seen in reality… Sometimes I worry a lot that what I felt and what I saw I haven’t been able to film…

I remember in the hospital one brother had to inform his father that the other brother who was with him in the battle has died…

I saw parents who were watching the videos of the POW that has been tortured, thinking that they can find their lost sons… I was really listening to him, when he was looking at the video and talking with other parents…

I remember the voices of the animals in the villages that were getting evacuated, and mostly I remember the silent faces of the mothers in the shelters…silently praying.”

Helen Hakobyan, 44 

Helen Hakobyan works as an economist and chief specialist in Martuni. When the war broke out, Hakobyan joined her husband (a physician) as a volunteer nurse to help him throughout the war. The city of Martuni is the most heavily devastated city in the war. 

“The hardest moment was seeing scorched and dismembered bodies of soldiers; the smell of death that surrounded them is the same smell that I can smell even when I am asleep. When my brother fell into an ambush, I did not share my feelings with anyone. When he finally escaped, I knelt on the ground and gathered my strength. 

You find strength and you don’t have a right to cry, because everybody looks at you. You don’t share the pain that’s deep in your soul with your husband, because you don’t want to weaken him by your weakness.

 The first horror I witnessed was when the second horrible bombing occurred on the first of October in Martuni, resulting in many casualties. It seemed to me that the soldier who was in front of me was alive, but they took him to the morgue. His body was dismembered; he looked at me one last time and then passed away. It is impossible to forget those eyes…”

Hasmik Arushanyan, 63

Hasmik Arushanyan is a history teacher who stayed in the shelter during the war with her friends and relatives. With their hearts pounding, they waited impatiently for word from the battlefield about their sons and brothers.

“When a phosphorus bomb was thrown in Isaac akhbyur, near Shushi, the forest caught on fire, and you could hear the pain and suffering of the animals: the bears roaring in agony and the wolves howling in torment. That moment was so hard for me. A day later we learned that my son’s combat vehicle was hit by a Bayraktar. For three days we had no news, but then finally he called.”

Isabel Dangourian, 40

Isabel Dangourian is a Syrian-Armenian refugee who has been living with her family in Stepanakert for eight years. During the war, she and her husband opened their Samra restaurant to all visitors. Dangourian would test positive for coronavirus, but she refused to go to Yerevan until her husband forced her to leave.

“The most touching thing was seeing a mother, under intense bombing, bid farewell to her own young son while whispering in his ear asking him to stay strong and wait for her return in Yerevan. And to be honest, it’s difficult to choose the most haunting or touching experience because [you] not only go through indescribable situations during war but also the consequences that come after it. Just when you thought there wouldn’t be anything else more extreme than you had witnessed, there comes another situation. For instance, lately, the stories that we have heard about people we know well were quite unbearable, and what’s worse is that there’s not much you can do about it other than accept it.”

Lara Sargsyan, 36

Lara Sargsyan is a member of the military from the city of Chartar. She served in Artsakh’s Defense Army for 12 years. During the war, she took part in the most crucial stages of war.

“The war is a disaster itself; within seconds everything changes inside you. What you considered important before, becomes meaningless from the first shot. In the most tense moments, you do not feel anything under the shells and missiles. You wait impatiently for the end of this nightmare. If you survive, you will continue what you have to do.

I have witnessed an elderly friend observing the demise of his junior comrade-in-arms by a missile explosion from a distance, but he does not want to believe it until the end; he keeps hoping to find him alive. Approaching under the shelling and finding the dead, he is not confused or scared, but on the contrary, he continues the fight more persistently. 

The most difficult moment during the war in my case was me hearing on the radio that the next attack would be on my brother’s positions, and I understood that these would be hard battles. I don’t even want my enemy to have that feeling. I could not do anything to help and I was just praying to God. I’m still haunted.

I prayed that at least the severely wounded would be saved, and if it is not possible, then that they would not suffer when dying.”

Lika Zakaryan, 27 

Lika Zakaryan is a journalist from Stepanakert. Throughout the war, she filed reports from the most heavily targeted areas in the region. She considers herself a child of war and kept a diary, sharing her feelings as an eyewitness.

“The war made us experience a lot, but I will never forget one thing. Once, we visited one of the basement shelters in Stepanakert and met many people. It was the basement with a handful of children still in Stepanakert, children who were still in Artsakh. 

A woman, Elmira, was making tanav – a national Armenian soup. She served us all. We drank the hot tanav we missed and we talked. She told the stories of all the people living in the basement, who have children, brothers, friends and relatives on the frontline. At the very end of the basement, a man was sitting in front of the TV, his head hanging down, but still focused on the TV. 

And a little farther, a woman was sitting. ‘Her son has been living in Russia for seven years,’ said Elmira. ‘Who told you to come back?’ ‘Is he back?’ I asked. ‘Yes. The next day of the war he was already in Stepanakert. His parents had not seen him for seven years. He entered the house, kissed his mother and father and said that he was going to war. That was the way he went’ ․․․ ‘Is there no news?’ ‘No.’ And the father and mother, who lived in the distant shadow of their son, are sitting everyday waiting for the news. At the same time, they read all the names on TV, fearing that his name may be on that list․․․ At that very moment they heard… They heard the name of their son, which came out from the TV… Not to see your child for seven years, send him for a better life and get his name in the list of dead… I will never forget their cries…”

Nune Arakelyan, 50

Nune Arakelyan is a lecturer of Russian language and literature at Artsakh State University. She could not leave her only son and other relatives on the battlefield and leave Artsakh, so she remained in the shelter during the war, taking care of the elderly who were forcibly displaced from their villages.

“Old people were brought to our basement from the villages in which the fighting was going on. I will not forget this old woman whose son had been martyred in the last war; her grandchildren were participating in this war, and she was so brave. She did not lose her heart; instead she consoled and encouraged everyone.

When I was working as a volunteer in a hotel, I saw an elderly lady there. She was a professor at the university. She said that she came to Artsakh to help, to be useful. But the most touching thing was when my son called from the front. I screamed in hysteria that I will go to him myself and bring him home for at least one day. And he replied that if I dare do it his fellow soldiers would lose respect for him, and he would lose respect for himself and for me.”

Kima Gabrielyan, 90 

Kima Gabrielyan is a violinist who moved from Yerevan to live in Shushi (now under Azerbaijani control).

She worked at the Stepanakert Music School as a violin teacher. After leaving her home and her son’s grave under enemy control, she now lives in a Stepanakert nursing home. Hundreds of forcibly displaced families live here. Even at this age, she continues to play the violin to teach displaced children.

“I was shocked by the loss of an entire generation, that so many young people were killed. All of them were 18 to 20 years old.

A whole generation is gone. What will we do? We waited 20 to 25 years, raised these children and lost a whole generation. I cried a lot. Although I am 90 years old, I could see perfectly, but this pain blinded me… I’m not a politician to answer the question of whether the land or the victims. Maybe they should have thought. I am not saying to give everything to the Turks; I am not saying this. We have dignity, we are Armenians and we must defend our land, but if such a choice was made, we must think. Where is our future when young people who are to create this future are killed? What are we going to do now? I don’t know…

And now I am disturbed by the thought that I left my son’s grave in Shushi. On the last day when Shushi was handed over, I was kneeling at my son’s grave in Shushi when our soldiers hugged me and took me away from it, put me in a car and drove away. And now my only wish is to go and get a handful of soil from my son’s grave.”

These women still live in Artsakh. Their lives, however, have transformed from one wartime period to another, where uncertainty steals their dreams. Surviving three wars and always expecting another one, the only thing they want is peace. At the same time, most of them are ready to take a gun and defend their motherland. They realize that they are to bear the burden of defeat, encourage their husbands, sons and the ones they love with their wisdom and charisma. These women had the courage to give birth and bring new lives into this world under the terrifying sounds of explosions. They are the powerful key in educating generations, who will live and reanimate the land.

Author information

Siranuysh Sargsyan

Siranush Sargsyan is a historian and political scientist. She's earned her degrees from Artsakh State University and the Public Administration Academy of the Republic of Armenia. Her master thesis focused on the issues surrounding the development of the party system in Nagorno-Karabakh. She's taught history in a village in Martuni and has served as the chief specialist of the Republic of Artsakh National Assembly in the Standing Committee on Science, Education, Culture, Youth and Sports. Siranush takes great interest in conflict resolution, gender equality and education.

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Targeted for genocide and dispossession, reduced to exiles and deportees and fighting for survival and freedom, Armenians were facing the nation’s darkest moments from 1915 to 1919. Yet New Year and Christmas came, as it always did, occasioning memories of brighter days, even offering glimmers of hope. On the roads of deportation, in concentration camps and in the trenches, families and friends embraced, prayers were said and, if possible, Mass was celebrated. 

This article takes us on a journey to Christmas in the time of genocide. Mining survivor memoirs and accounts, I offer snippets of often fleeting moments of celebration, hope and resilience as the New Year tolled and Armenian Christmas beckoned. 

Today, the holiday season is a reminder of the losses left in the wake of the 44-day war on Artsakh—arguably the darkest period of Armenian history since World War I. It is in times such as this, that one can channel the resilience and resistance of one’s ancestors. 

We stand on the shoulders of generations that repelled the deepest darkness with resistance and celebration. If they could do it, so can we.

1916: Celebrating Christmas in Marsovan and concentration camps 

In January 1916, the Dildilian and Der Haroutiounian families prepared to secretly celebrate Armenian Christmas at the latter’s house, on the outskirts of Marsovan (modern day Merzifon, Turkey). This was their first Christmas since they had evaded deportation by converting to Islam. The occasion was immortalized in a rare photograph that is part of the collection of the Dildilians, famed photographers of everyday life in the Ottoman Empire. In his book, Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home, scholar Armen T. Marsoobian identifies and reconstructs the trajectories of the family members depicted in the photograph.¹ 

Around the same time, more than 800 miles south of Marsovan, pharmacist Hagop Arsenian of Ovacık was among the survivors who greeted the New Year on the banks of the Euphrates River in the Syrian desert.² Within days of arriving at the Meskeneh concentration camp, he fell severely ill, lost his mother (he buried her “among all the other refugees there” on December 22), bandits robbed him of his clothes and the gold coins that same evening, and yet another re-deportation loomed. In his memoir Towards Golgotha³, he recounts:

December 30, 1915. The gendarmes became active again and without any consideration for the sick and dying, they began dismantling the tents. I did not have the energy to sit, much less to walk, since I was still in a period of convalescence after my disease and in dire need of rest. But to whom was I to plead my case?

He had to comply “and joined the caravan towards unknown destinations.”

As the last day of 1915 dawned, Arsenian was once again on the deportation roads, after having camped overnight near an Arab village. “I was feeling extremely weak, the weather was exceptionally cold, and I was afraid of having a relapse.” Still, he managed to survive and the convoy reached the Dipsi transit camp by the end of the day. He writes:

January 1, 1916. On the first day of this new year, as customary, we woke up at dawn and witnessed the beautiful sunrise and welcomed the new year. With Father Arsen and Hapet Effendi Ghazarian and his brothers, Zakar Agha and other villagers, we gathered in our tent, in that deserted corner of Syria, to celebrate the new year after surviving one of the darkest chapters of the Armenian deportation. On this occasion, we exchanged good wishes and hoped that the New Year would be a good one.

It was a beautiful day, Arsenian recalled. So much so that “we took it to be a good omen and a sign for better days.” The next day, Arsenian’s aunt died. Still ailing, Arsenian “wrapped myself well and, leaning on a cane, accompanied Father Arsen, who undertook the funeral rites in a low profile ceremony. Thus we surrendered another member of our family to the treacherous desert sand…. We were haunted by a nightmare that very soon each one of us would be sharing the same fate.”

The re-deportation continued. On Armenian Christmas Eve (January 5), Arsenian arrived in the Abuharar camp “exhausted” and “in a defeated state.” He remembers:

The following day was Christmas Day. The blessed believers wanted to attend Mass on the occasion of Holy Christmas, with the hope of receiving some spiritual consolation. In that huge refugee camp… we chose a spot to celebrate mass and requested a clergyman from Akshehir to conduct the service. Of our fellow compatriots from the Ovajik Church were Mihran Papazian, Vagharshag and others who assisted in the Mass, thus filling us with a sense of joy, hope and continuity. On that day there was no Sevkiyet [deportation].

1917: Celebrating the New Year in Belemedik in Hiding

Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian welcomed New Year in 1917 in Belemedik, a village near Adana. He was in hiding with the Armenian intellectual Teotig (Teotoros Labdjindjian), both working for the German railway company. “Like me, most of these Armenian refugees were registered in the company’s official ledgers under false names… nevertheless the police found informers to reveal the identity of some of them,” he wrote after the Great War. In his memoirs, which he began writing in the immediate aftermath of the war and completed years later, he contrasted New Year’s celebrations in Belemedik among the Germans, the prisoners of war and the Armenians who were in hiding: 

The Germans in Belemedik celebrated New Year’s 1917 with great pomp: there was plenty of food and drink, including beer and wine and even champagne—hundreds of glasses of champagne were emptied in toasts to the ultimate victory of Germany. We Armenians, however, passed the festive days within the confines of our huts, mourning and feeling like orphans. The hundreds of Russian, French, and Italian prisoners of war in Belemedik also spent the New Year in a melancholy frame of mind. But we Armenians felt not just melancholy but grief; the prisoners of war had the hope of seeing their loved ones again, but our beloved relatives had been martyred and had gone to eternity leaving us inconsolable.

We who were left alive felt like pitiful wrecks, somehow still dragging our useless selves on; we envied those who had died … who, having paid their debt, were now resting forever. Meanwhile we remembered happy New Year celebrations of the past, with tables laden with fruit and anushabour; surrounded by our loved ones, we had heartily wished one another Happy New Year and Merry Christmas. Would we ever see the old, happy days again?⁴

The answer to this question was somewhat positive for some members of the Der Haroutiounian and Dildilian families, for Hagop Arsenian, and for Balakian himself. They survived and, scattered around the globe, helped rebuild their communities. With their writings and photographs, they also kept alive the memory of the people who did not survive to see another Christmas, and the places that remained inaccessible behind the borders of the Turkish Republic.

1919: First New Year after Ottoman Turkish Defeat 

Karnig Panian was dragged into an orphanage in Antoura (modern-day Lebanon), where the administrators followed a policy of systematic Turkification. In this notorious institution conceived by Cemal Pasha, who reigned supreme over Ottoman Syria, Armenian children were forced to speak Turkish only, were circumcised, given Muslim names and subjected to religious and political indoctrination. Panian’s memoir and multiple other accounts that corroborate it paint a grim picture of abuse and terror that lasted throughout the war. With the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Syria late in the fall of 1918, the orphanage administrators packed and fled, and the children who had survived were now free. “We once again felt like a part of humanity, a part of the Armenian nation,” writes Panian in his memoir. The orphans were thrilled when, a few months later, Santa Claus came. Panian narrates:

On New Year’s Eve, the staff organized a celebration. There were delicacies, songs, a beautiful dance performed by one of the teachers, and even a visit from Santa Claus. He gave us all stockings full of confections, raisins, walnuts, almonds, and dried fruit. There was no limit to the orphans’ joy. We remembered how back home, on New Year’s Day, we would go from home to home, gathering gifts. Those old, happy days seemed to be coming back.⁵

Here it is again: the same references to “old, happy days.” As if in response to Grigoris Balakian’s question, Panian, a child survivor, looked to the future with optimism and hope. Hope that would make rebuilding the nation—largely on the shoulders of orphans and widows—possible. 

Panian, whose Armenian identity was targeted for erasure, became a celebrated educator at the Armenian Lyceum (Djemaran) in Beirut. His daughter Houry Boyamian is the principal of St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown, MA. And when on December 20, I saw the images of the school’s Christmas celebration and Santa’s visit on Ms. Boyamian’s Facebook page, I imagined her father, as a child survivor, celebrating with Santa more than a century ago, and then embarking on the next difficult task: rebuilding the nation.

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¹ Armen T. Marsoobian, Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home: The Dildilian Photography Collection (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 220-246.
² For a detailed exploration of the concentration camps in the region, see Khatchig Mouradian, The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021).
³ Hagop Arsenian, Towards Golgotha: The Memoirs of Hagop Arsenian, a Genocide Survivor, trans. Arda Arsenian Ekmekji (Beirut: Haigazian University Press, 2011), 109-118.
⁴ Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, trans. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag (New York: Knopf, 2001), 324-325.
⁵ Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, trans. Simon Beugekian (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 149-151.

Author information

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian

Khatchig Mouradian is the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress and a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies, New York University. Mouradian is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918, published in 2021. The book has received the Syrian Studies Association “Honourable Mention 2021.” In 2020, Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review.

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In May 2014, I was traveling from Van to Kars with my wife and a group of close friends. Not long after passing the northeast-most corner of Lake Van, I was looking up at the countryside when a structure along the mountain ridge caught my eye, and I had our driver stop. There was no access for our vehicle, and the structure was too far in the distance to walk, but I grabbed my most powerful camera lens and took some photographs of what was obviously a church.

With a bit of research, I was able to determine that the church was known as Sourp Sdepanos, located in the region of Pergri or Berkri, which is now known as Muradiye. The church was dedicated to the son of the priest, Der Housgan. 

The Research on Armenian Architecture collection by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute details an interesting legend surrounding the church. It is said that the wife of Der Housgan was kidnapped by Tatar soldiers and sold to a Christian woman in Tabriz. This woman agreed to release Der Housgan’s wife if a son was born to the couple and committed to the priesthood. “The son that was born, whom they named Sdepanos, did indeed display saintly ways and powers, and a great passion for helping the poor.” Der Sdepanos is considered to have died at the end of the 13th century, and the church was built in his honor.

It is believed that the original church was destroyed by the 17th century. The current church was built sometime during the same century through the efforts of Pilibos I, Catholicos of Aghtamar. 

Various Turkish media outlets recently reported on a new road being constructed by the Muradiye municipality to improve access to the Sourp Sdepanos church. The primary objective is to encourage tourism. It is claimed that the Museum in Van has initiated research on the church and that Mehmet Top, a faculty member at Van Yüzüncü Yıl Üniversitesi, has been investigating the church over a number of years. While acknowledging the role “man” has played in the destruction of the church, equal attribution is given to natural conditions. 

Anyone who has traveled over a period of time in the region of Van, and elsewhere in Turkey, can well imagine the role looters and treasure seekers have played in the years since the Genocide, prior to which the Armenians constituted at least two-thirds of the population in the region of Pergri. 

Just as significant are the ruins of an even older Armenian monastery of Arkelan on the cliffs above Sourp Sdepanos. The monastic complex included the church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin and dates to a much earlier period, most probably prior to the 11th century. The monastery was famous as a scriptorium, producing important manuscripts into the 17th century. We can see that the monastery is largely in ruins from satellite imagery, yet there still are remnants. J. M. Thierry, in his volume on the Armenian monuments of Vasbouragan, details the Armenian inscriptions at both sites and includes numerous photographs.

It remains to be seen if the increased accessibility to the church ruins will decrease or increase the likelihood of further vandalism. As we see even today, the security of both Armenians and our cultural heritage cannot be taken for granted.

Author information

George Aghjayan

George Aghjayan is the Director of the Armenian Historical Archives and the chair of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Central Committee of the Eastern United States. Aghjayan graduated with honors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Actuarial Mathematics. He achieved Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries in 1996. After a career in both insurance and structured finance, Aghjayan retired in 2014 to concentrate on Armenian related research and projects. His primary area of focus is the demographics and geography of western Armenia as well as a keen interest in the hidden Armenians living there today. Other topics he has written and lectured on include Armenian genealogy and genocide denial. He is a board member of the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), a frequent contributor to the Armenian Weekly and Houshamadyan.org, and the creator and curator westernarmenia.weebly.com, a website dedicated to the preservation of Armenian culture in Western Armenia.

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Armenian Women Artists (AWA) is an educational and historically oriented Instagram page that aims to bring awareness and recognition to Armenian women artists, both in Armenia and the diaspora. I created the account in 2018, prompted by an academic interest of mine in Armenian art history and a personal desire to learn more about the artistic and social contributions of Armenian women. 

Formally trained as an archivist and researcher, I am both personally and professionally dedicated to the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage, and Instagram has served as an appropriate platform to present these often-underrepresented figures from our collective history. What began as a modest attempt to brush up on my own lack of knowledge and awareness of Armenian women artists has transformed into a shared space for recollection, remembrance and a sense of belonging where others can connect with mutual narratives.  

The catalyst for the project was the great Soviet artist Mariam Aslamazyan (1907-2006). Inspired by both her paintings and the international respect and acknowledgment she received from her work as a cultural diplomat, I soon discovered a whole world of Armenian women who made a significant impact not just in Armenian society, but in the broader culture society that they were a part of, be it Russian, Ottoman, Persian, Soviet or American. 

Unsurprisingly, given the geographical range of the Armenian diaspora, both leading up to and following the Armenian Genocide, the women that I feature come from all over the world, often the first among their peers to pave the way for a variety of creative pursuits and social developments. From Iraq’s first concert pianist and first female composer Beatrice Ohanessian (1927-2008), to Iran’s first woman to perform on stage and direct a play Varto Terian (1896-1974), to France’s first French female oceanographer Anita Conti (1899-1997), Armenian women were perceived as intellectual and moral leaders among Armenian and non-Armenian audiences alike.

In addition to geographical range, it’s important for me to show a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, individuals who were able to overcome struggles and challenges in life, be it economic, political or social. I also wanted to push back against certain strands of contemporary feminism, which, from my perspective, can tend to oversimplify the role of gender in society. I strive to share stories where we find women taking responsibility for their lives and, most importantly, where men and women support one another in an egalitarian way towards the betterment of society and culture. 

For example, Syrian-born painter, Armine Galentz (1920-2007), who was the only woman artist in Aleppo during her time, always had the support of her husband Haroutiun Galentz (1910-1967) both in Beirut where they met and in Yerevan, where they repatriated in 1946. Despite initially facing harsh criticism from the Artists’ Union of Armenia and after years of financial hardship, they were eventually embraced by the Union. Galentz was featured in several shows, including the first exhibition of works by Armenian repatriates, where she was the only female participant. She held her first solo exhibition in Yerevan in 1962.

Although at times controversial, I also try to showcase so-called “hidden” Armenian artists from Turkey, who kept their Armenian identity hidden to survive and thrive in Turkish culture and society. Renowned Turkish folk singer Zehra Bilir (1913-2007) was born Eliza Ölçüyan but lived her life as a Turk, choosing not to publicly embrace her Armenian roots. By collecting and sharing these stories, my aim is to challenge our understanding of the parameters of Armenian identity by showcasing a diverse array of Armenian women, artistic practices and their experiences. 

To this end, there is a quote I like very much by one of my favorite minority French-Canadian women writers, Gabrielle Roy: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” This sums up so succinctly what I believe is both the progressive and critical function of the arts; at the highest level, art is not just a kind of individual expression, but also a kind of intellectual diplomacy. I don’t mean we always have to agree, but we should at least know how to engage with and understand each other. I think art is at its most successful, impressive and universal when its artistic ambitions are high, and its social pretensions modest, as outlined by Roy. Cultural and intellectual exchanges allow us to understand what makes each other distinct.

Moving forward, I’d like to continue to engage in this spirit and interact with artists and curators on a more intimate level. I’m open to publishing a book or organizing public exhibitions, workshops and lectures with an eye towards developing an online database where researchers, artists and educators can access this knowledge. Ideally, this engagement will help facilitate dialogues and interactions. 

Today, perhaps more than ever, Armenians all over the world are feeling a sense of cynicism and hopelessness when it comes to the preservation of our cultural identities. However, despite the constant tragedies and threats we face, we sometimes need reminders of how far we’ve come and the potential we have within ourselves to persevere and succeed, as our ancestors have done before us. The contributions made by Armenians, both men and women, are endless, and I feel proud to be part of a community where the role of art and cultural heritage is seen as essential in shaping our society. I couldn’t be more grateful for the support and positive feedback I’ve received, and I’ve been lucky to encounter many thoughtful, creative and engaged individuals through the account.

Painter Vava Khatchadourian was born on February 12, 1895, in Trebizond, Ottoman Empire (present-day Trabzon, Turkey) and spent most of her childhood in Batumi. Prior to pursuing an artistic career, Khatchadourian lived in Vienna and Paris, where she modeled for the famous French painter Henri Matisse and others. 

In 1920, she married famed painter and muralist Sarkis Khatchadourian in Tiflis. After extensive travels around the world, including several years living in India and Iran, Vava and Sarkis settled in New York to begin a new life in 1941. She started painting in 1945. Her works can be found at the National Gallery of Armenia and private collections. She died of cancer in 1984 in Manhattan, New York. 

Elbis Ferahian was born in 1907 into a cultural family in Tehran, Iran. After completing her primary education in Iran, she moved to Vienna with her family. Due to the outbreak of World War I, the Ferahian family settled in Tbilisi, where Ferahian completed her secondary education. She later settled in Soviet Armenia where she worked at a kindergarten. 

After years of teaching in Yerevan and Tbilisi, Ferahian returned to Iran in the early 1930s. She taught at the Iran Bethel School for Girls and shortly after established her own kindergarten. In 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi, then Prime Minister of Iran, ordered the closure of Armenian schools in Iran, at the request of Turkish president Kemal Atatürk. Ferahian’s kindergarten was thus subject to the decree. 

In 1941, Armenian schools were allowed to reopen after the overthrow of Reza Shah, and Ferahian was invited to establish an independent Armenian kindergarten by the board of trustees of the Davidian School, which opened in 1942. The kindergarten, called “Koushesh” (Armenian for kindergarten) operated under her direct supervision for 35 years. It continues to be one of the most important educational centers for Armenians in Iran. 

In addition to her educational activities, Ferahian also composed children’s songs and hymns, which are still performed by and taught to children today. Ferahian died in 1994 in Tehran and was laid to rest at the Nor Burastan Cemetery, the Armenian cemetery.

Salma Kouyoumjian was born on December 26, 1907 in Ruse, Bulgaria. Her family originated from Western Armenia and was forced to flee the Ottoman Empire in 1907 as the policies of Abdul Hamid II’s government against the Armenians intensified. She earned a bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the École du Louvre in Paris.

Following her studies, Kouyoumjian served as one of the three secretaries of the Société des Études Iraniennes et de l’Art Persan for four years. During this time, she met and married Mohsen Moghadam, an Iranian painter and archaeologist and one of the founders of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. 

Kouyoumjian studied Iranian archaeology of the Sassanid period and archaeology of India and China. She and her husband were both hired by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and served as technical inspectors of the Antiquities Authority during the French excavations in Susa, Khuzestan Province, Iran. 

Following her retirement from the Ministry of Culture on June 20, 1964, Kouyoumjian worked in The Parliamentary Library of Iran. She passed away in 1990, four years after her husband. She is buried in the Armenian cemetery in Tehran. Their home in Tehran was transformed into the Moghadam Museum and was bequeathed to the University of Tehran in their memory. 

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The late French actress, writer and photographer Hermine Karagheuz was born on December 2, 1938 in the southwestern suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris, France, into a family of exiled Armenian orphans with little means. 

She made her theatrical debut in Liliane Atlan’s adaptation of “Monsieur Fugue” by Roland Monod in 1967. Through a series of encounters and small roles on stage, she met the notable French actor and director Roger Blin (with whom she later shared her life) and performed in several of his creations. Critics noticed Karagheuz in 1973 after she appeared on stage in Patrice Chéreau’s mythical play adapted from Pierre de Marivaux’s now legendary “La Dispute” at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. She would go on to perform in some 30 productions from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. 

In addition to theatre, she also made a few furtive film appearances, first in Francois Billetdoux’s “The Wednesday Play: Pitchi Poi” in 1967, and later in smaller roles for Jacques Baratier, Joseph Losey and Jeanne Moreau. But it was in front of Jacques Rivette’s camera that the actress truly revealed herself, embracing the surrealist roles of the French New Wave director. 

A multifaceted and multi-talented artist with an unforgettable screen presence, Karagheuz reflected her vision of the world in her own creations. Sadly, she passed away this past April 30 in Paris at the age of 82.

Lucy Ashjian was born in 1907 in Indianapolis to Armenian refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire. She grew up watching the rise of fascism throughout Europe and reading about the Armenian Genocide of 1915. 

After moving to New York City in the 1930s, Ashjian and her husband, journalist Charles Preston, joined the Communist Party, a common affiliation of intellectuals and progressives in that period. In 1937, Ashjian, who developed a serious interest in photography, graduated from the Clarence White’s School of Photography. 

That same year Ashjian joined the legendary New York Photo League, a progressive collective of amateur and professional photographers who saw documentary photography as a vital element of the movement for radical social change. The League, which included greats such as Lewis Hine, Paul Strand and Berenice Abbott, had its origins in the Workers International Relief, a communist organization based in Berlin which formed in 1921. 

Ashjian was an active and respected member of the League, serving two terms as vice president and participating in several of the League’s best-known projects, including “Harlem Document,” which documented the historical African-American neighborhood of Harlem. However, despite having played a prominent role in the world of New York photography, Ashjian is yet to fully be recognized for her talent and remains a relatively unknown figure. 

Sadly, her promising career was cut short after moving back to Indianapolis in 1943 after her husband abandoned her and their young child. After her passing in 1993, only 150 prints and a box of negatives were left as evidence of her contribution to the history of photography. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Met Museum, the Center for Creative Photography and the Museum of the City of New York.

Anna Davidovna Abamelik-Lazareva (Lazarian) was a Russian-Armenian translator, lady-in-waiting, socialite and public figure. She was born on April 15, 1814 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire into the Abamelik family, a noble family of Armenian origin in the Kingdom of Georgia, and then in the Russian Empire.

From an early age, Abamelik-Lazareva was passionate about literature and the study of foreign languages. She received an excellent education and was fluent in English, French, Armenian, Georgian, German and Greek. She devoted her life to literary translations and translated poems by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, amongst others, from Russian into English and French. She also translated works by prominent European poets, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Lord Byron, into Russian. In addition to her translation work, she was also in charge of several educational and musical institutions in St. Petersburg. 

She was married to the governor of Kazan, Irakli Baratinsky, the brother of Russian poet Yevgeny Baratinsky. Having had no children, Abamelik-Lazareva dedicated the last few years of life to charity, collecting donations during the Crimean War to help support wounded soldiers. She died in St. Petersburg on November 25, 1889.

Born in 1926 into an established Armenian family, Madam Anahit spent most of her life in and around the district of Beyoğlu, once the lively cosmopolitan center of the old city. At the age of 16, while attending the Esayan Armenian School, she joined the school choir where her passion for music developed. She was first introduced to the accordion on Heybeliada, one of the Princes Islands near Istanbul, where she spent her summers as a young girl. Shortly after, she started taking lessons and continued to play until the end of her life. A staple of Çiçek Pasajı, Madam Anahit would play for guests dining at the various historic cafes, tavernas and restaurants. 

As the years passed, however, the demographics of Beyoğlu changed and Madam Anahit’s presence was no longer welcome. The respect and admiration that she had garnered from the locals had vanished. In addition, in the 1980s, the city of Istanbul seized and destroyed the apartment she had inherited, forcing her to live elsewhere. Despite these challenges, she remained determined to fight for her survival as a musician. 

An avid animal lover and rights advocate, she was also the vice-president of the Animal-Lovers Economic and Agricultural Party, which aims to stop the poisoning and shooting of dogs and cats both in Istanbul and other cities. She once stated, “People who can’t treat animals properly can’t treat people properly.” 

Although she did not receive the recognition she deserved, Madam Anahit is remembered as an indispensable part of Beyoğlu’s cultural heritage. She passed away in Istanbul on August 29, 2003 and was laid to rest in the Armenian cemetery in Şişli.

Zabelle Boyajian was born on March 27, 1873 in Diyarbakir, Ottoman Empire, the daughter of Baron Thomas Boyajian, British Vice-Consul in Diyarbakir and Harput, and Catherine Rogers, a descendant of the English poet Samuel Rogers. She received her education in Armenian and English, while also learning Turkish, French and Italian. 

In 1895, her father fell victim to the Hamidian massacres (1894-1896). Following this tragic life-changing event, Boyajian moved to London with her brother and mother. She enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Arts where she started writing and illustrating her own books. She held her first solo exhibition in 1910 in London and went on to publish and translate several books which highlighted the enduring spirit of Armenia and its cultural heritage. An active member of the Armenian community, Boyajian was a significant driving force behind cultural life and fundraising during WWI.

Boyajian is probably most remembered for the illustrated anthology “Armenian Legends and Poems.” Introduced by Viscount James Bryce, the anthology includes a collection of translations of Armenian literature from the Middle Ages interspersed with poetry from the 19th century. In addition to translating and publishing Armenian poems, Boyajian was also a Shakespeare enthusiast and participated in one of the many commemorative festivals that took place on the 300th anniversary of his death on April 23, 1916. She recited her personal ode to the Bard titled, “Armenia’s Love to Shakespeare” and wrote essays on Shakespeare as well as comparative works on English and Armenian literature. She died on January 26, 1957 in London, England.

Lilit Karapetyan was born on January 28, 1963, in Yerevan, Armenian SSR, into a family where music was highly valued. She studied at the Anton Chekhov School No. 55 in Yerevan, and at the same time, she graduated from the guitar class of Zhanna Sheldzhyan at the Tigran Chukhajian Music School. In 1980, she started studying the oud at the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan.

In 1981, while still a student, Karapetyan became one of the founding members of the Sharakan Ancient Music Ensemble (later named Tagharan Ancient Music Ensemble) where she played the oud, lute and guitar. She toured with the ensemble in concerts around Armenia and musical centers of the former Soviet Union, in addition to Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. 

As a performer, she made many adaptations and transcriptions of medieval and modern Armenian and European composers for the oud and guitar. In 1986, she participated in the first international competition of folk instruments in Baku where she won second prize. 

Due to illness, Karapetyan gave up her performing activities in 2003 and dedicated her time to teaching the oud and classical guitar until the end of her short but fruitful life. She died on October 22, 2006 in Yerevan, Armenia at the age of 43.

Artist and ceramic painter Marie Balian was born on January 25, 1925, in Marseille, France. Her family hailed from the small town of Kütahya, Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), which is known for its historical Armenian ceramic industry. 

She lived in Lyon with her mother Manoushag and her sister Haigouhi. Demonstrating an early interest in fine art, Balian studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where she received several first prizes. However, due to financial difficulties, she was unable to finish her degree. 

In 1954, she met and fell in love with Setrag Balian, whom she married a year later in Bethlehem, Palestine. In 1955, the Balians moved to Amman, Jordan where they had three children: Sylva, Neshan and Ohan. From 1964 until 2015, Balian was an indispensable part of her family’s ceramic studio in East Jerusalem, where she served as the master painter. In 2017, after two years of deteriorating health, she quietly passed away in the same studio where she worked for the past 50 years. 

Today, the Balian family business is managed by Neshan Balian Jr., the son of Marie and Setrag Balian, and his three children, Kegham, Nanor and Setrag. The famous studio continues to produce unique hand-painted and custom ceramic tiles and pottery items. It remains one of the oldest businesses in existence in Jerusalem.

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Cassandra Tavukciyan

Cassandra Tavukciyan is an archivist and researcher. She holds a Master of Arts in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She has held positions at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, the New York Public Library, the Ryerson Image Centre and the Sara Corning Centre for Genocide Studies and is currently serving as Specialist, Digital Collections Management at the Canadian Museum of History. In her spare time, she manages an educational and historically oriented Instagram page (@armenian_women_artists), where she brings awareness and recognition to Armenian women artists, both in Armenia and in diaspora communities.

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