The last three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have witnessed corruption infiltrate nearly every corner of Armenia’s educational system. In 2015, a study from Open Society Foundation revealed a widespread tolerance for the unethical purchase of academic papers in universities. In Jan. 2018, a scandal emerged after a Palestinian website revealed students were receiving dentistry diplomas from Armenian universities without even having ever entered the country. And of 200 fake university diplomas, police reported that 56 of them came from Armenia.

In short, the nation’s institutions of higher learning have seen better days.

So it’s no wonder that the major engine of the recent Velvet Revolution has been students—for no one has felt the effects of Armenia’s failed governance more viscerally than they. Fed up with increasing fees, overt corruption, and shameless politicization of the very institutions that should be sanctuaries for objectivity, students have thus far taken a strong and effective stand.

But while many are optimistic that Nikol Pashinyan’s leadership will bring with it many positive reforms, the issues that have affected Armenia’s universities since independence are deeply rooted. The government alone cannot effect change.

To this end, on May 11, students from more than 13 universities gathered at a hall in Yerevan State University (YSU) to discuss some of these challenges and possible solutions. The event was coordinated by YSU Restart initiative, a student movement launched earlier this year.

One of their first organized gatherings in February consisted of a “toilet paper collecting charity event,” in which students drew attention to the university’s numerous problems, and the lack of basic hygiene items there, in particular. The initiative has since spread to other campuses. Its goal is to create alternative bodies at universities which will represent interests of the students.

The May 11 meeting—the first since Nikol Pashinyan became prime minister—offered a safe space for students to candidly voice their concerns and propose solutions. There were over 100 students present. Just one faculty member attended, Arayik Harutyunyan, a professor of Oriental Studies at YSU. Harutunyan is also a member of the Civil Contract political party led by now-Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. In a curious twist, students were pleased to discover that his appointment to the role of Education Minister  was announced during the course of the meeting.

“Our primary issue is to depoliticize our university,” explained two students from Yerevan State Medical University in an interview after the gathering. They highlighted the pressure to join the [Republican] party has always been prominent—a fact which has been central to the demobilization of student unions. By pressuring students to join the Republican Party—an institution which is responsible for the corruption in schools in the first place—Armenia’s ruling elites have cultivated a student body that is unable to effectively organize, for it is both complicit with and subject to the same corruption it might organize against.

Ruling party politics also infiltrates education at an organizational level. The Youth Foundation of Armenia, for example, receives 130 million AMD annually to distribute scholarships to students. It should be independent, but there is little transparency about where the money actually goes, and during elections, it became a source of propaganda and was known for promoting Republican candidates among students.

In addition to creating a less politicized environment, students also targeted more specific concerns. One student referenced an instance in which YSU students asked the university to make its facilities more accessible to students with disabilities. The request was rejected by administrators, who stated that the school “could not afford to make changes for 30 students.”

Maria Hareyan, a student at YSU, explained that while each semester, her department’s tuition increases by about $100, the quality has either stayed the same or declined. Currently her yearly tuition is around $1,200 (USD), and while to many from the West that may not sound like a lot, for reference, the average monthly salary in Armenia hovers around $400.

“Either they should decrease the amount, or raise the quality,” Hareyan said. “We are already in our second year, and yet we are still studying materials that we had from high school. Basically, we are reviewing what we have already learned.”

But the event wasn’t just a platform for problems—students brainstormed solutions, as well. One idea included the implementation of an independent audit of the Youth Foundation. Another called for the adoption of laws that would keep student unions immune to political interference in the future, while another suggestion was made to implement online ratings of professors, to hold them accountable for quality. Students also emphasized the need for other student groups to start their own Restart initiatives at their universities to act in a more decentralized and autonomous manner.

The most prominent discussion point of the day, however, centered around the controversial law introduced in 2017, which abolished the temporary exemptions from compulsory military service for men above 18 who were in university. In this scenario, anyone pursuing their bachelor’s degree has to postpone academic pursuits until after their military service. The law was highly unpopular amongst students, who staged a number of protests in opposition, which have had little success. During the Restart meeting, students revisited the law, hoping the new administration might provide more flexibility.

“Before this revolution I know many students, including me, had one purpose,” highlighted Maria Hareyan of YSU, “to finish studies here and go abroad to continue studying there and get some quality education. But now it is a crucial moment to give solution to our problems and since students are now actively engaged in bringing changes in this sphere, I would like all of us to have our investment and create our brighter future ourselves.”

Author information

Sofia Manukyan

Sofia Manukyan is a staff writer at the Armenian Weekly. Her specialization is in the field of human rights impacted by the private sector. She is particularly interested in how private interests impact the environment and socio-economics. She holds a degree in human rights from the University of Essex. In Armenia she is mostly engaged with promoting environmental protection and labor rights.

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From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

An analysis of the Congress reveals striking parallels between the attitudes of Western Armenians regarding the “repugnant Russianism” of the First Republic and its inhabitants—and the attitudes of many Western Armenians in the Armenian Diaspora regarding today’s Armenia, a century later.

For the survivors of genocide, who subsequently fell victim to hunger and disease, the newly independent republic of 1918 seemed neither haven nor home. To make the lessons from that nuanced chapter in Armenian history relevant to our world today—to best move forward—we must first look back.

***

Despite the perception of relative liberty in the south Caucasus after the February Revolution in Russia overthrew the Tsar in 1917, the 300,000 Western Armenian refugees who were fleeing genocide could not escape persecution.

From Bayazid, in Russian-held Western Armenia, came complaints that former Romanov officials continued to oppress and disarm the populace while Kurdish violence against Armenians ran rampant.¹ Two years earlier, prior to the Russian occupation of portions of Western Armenia, General Yudenich had informed Count Vorontsov-Dashkov of his intent to prevent the Armenian refugees now in the Caucasus from reclaiming their lands in the Alashkert Plain and Bayazid valley, expressing his desire to instead populate the border area with Russians and Cossaks.²

The First Congress of Western Armenians was convened in Yerevan in May 1917, and initiated the creation of an executive body to secure the physical existence of the Western Armenians, revive their disrupted economy, rebuild their homeland, and provide a progressive education for their youth. By the end of 1917, 25 primary schools were in operation in the Van area alone to serve the native population that had streamed homeward. Nearly 150,000 natives of Van, Bitlis, Erzerum, and Trebizond vilayets had repatriated.³

After the October Revolution of 1917, Russian forces withdrew from the Caucasus. Taking advantage of the subsequent vacuum, the Turkish armies of General Vehib Pasha succeeded in occupying Erznga (Erzincan), Papert (Bayburt), Garin (Erzerum), Sarikamish, Kars, and Alexandropol (Gyumri) starting in Jan. 1918. The Turkish advance was finally halted at the battle of Sardarabad, deep into Armenian territory, on May 26, 1918. Consequently, the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Batumi awarded the Turks nearly 20 percent of the territory of Armenian Republic. Thus unable to harvest crops from the fertile Ararat valley, more than 200,000 among the population of the Armenian Republic perished from hunger and disease in the following months.⁴

***

Yerevan was merely a provincial town a century ago, yet it formed the nucleus of the infant Armenian republic that emerged after nearly six centuries of foreign rule. Western Armenians would have preferred for that state to re-emerge in the heart of the Armenian Highlands, in Asia Minor. Instead they found themselves refugees in a peripheral province that bore the marks of all things Russian.⁵ Some half a million Western Armenians impatiently awaited the opportunity to return to their homes; to them, the government and capital of liberated Armenia should have been in Garin, Van, or even a major city in Cilicia, but certainly not, as General Antranig put it, “in the capital of an Armenia carved out by the hand of the Turk.” ⁶

The political and intellectual leaders of Western Armenians shared such popular misgivings, but they also recognized the potential consequences of lasting internal division.

The Armenian Republic’s government initiated the Second Congress of Western Armenians, which met in Yerevan Feb. 6-13, 1919, to discuss the political goals of the Western Armenians and issues associated with their repatriation. A nine-person elected Executive Body was instructed to implement the decisions of the Congress and to function until the creation of a combined government of United Armenia.⁷

The Western Armenian leaders placed their aspirations in the hands of the Armenian National Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, led by Boghos Nubar Pasha, an influential politician and the former chairperson of the Armenian National Assembly of the Ottoman Empire. Although ARF members and sympathizers formed the majority of the Second Congress, they regarded Boghos Nubar as the person best qualified to advance Armenian interests at the Peace Conference.¹⁰

The Congress’s Executive Body communicated its demands to Paris: Armenia’s right to statehood, the liberation of Western Armenia in order to constitute a United Armenia, and punishment for the architects of the systematic massacre of the Armenians.

A new National Delegation was named in April and included the famed ARF revolutionary Karekin Pastermadjian (Armen Garo), respected in both Western and Eastern Armenian circles, with the hope that his history of collaboration with Boghos Nubar would create a more unified front during negotiations.¹¹

***

Nearly a century later, we again have an independent Republic—despite the Turkish crescent and the Russian sickle. Yet, the unfortunate reality remains that Armenians are dispersed across the globe, and more of us reside outside of our homeland than within it.

Recently, however, many Western Armenians have sought refuge in Armenia to escape war in the Middle East, and some others from the Diaspora have also “repatriated” and are playing a role in the country’s revitalization. The issues prevalent a century ago continue to be discussed among this new generation of Diasporans returning to Armenia.

No Armenian is immune to foreign influence, whether in Armenia or in the diaspora. To overcome the obstacles of dialect, custom, tribalism, and mistrust, both the government and its citizens must collaborate to foster an environment of inclusivity, encourage and provide incentive for repatriation, and denounce all types of discrimination.

And perhaps such measures might include following the example of the First Republic by having active Western Armenian participation in all strata of government to bridge our artificial divisions.

Notes

1. Hovannisian, R.G., Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918; University of California Press, 1967, pp 77-78
2. Ibid., 57-58
3. Ibid., 78-79
4. Ibid., 210-211
5. Hovannisian, R.G., The Republic of Armenia, Vol. I; University of California press, 1971, pp 450
6. Vratzian, S., Hayastani Hanrapetutiun [Republic of Armenia] 2^nd ed.; 1958, pp 256
7. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, pp 454
8. Tarbassian, H.A., Erzurum (Garin): Its Armenian History and Traditions; Garin Compatriotic Union of the United States, 1975, pp 222
9. Kitur (Gidour), A. Patmutiun S. D. Hnchakian Kusaktsutian, 1887-1963 [History of the S. D. Hnchakian Party, 1887-1962] Vol 1; Beirut, 1962, pp 480
10. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, pp 453
11. Ibid., 458-459
12. Vratzian, Hanrapetutiun, pp 264

Author information

Jano Boghossian

Jano Boghossian is a resident podiatric surgeon in Los Angeles, Calif. He studied Physiological Sciences and Armenian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his interests lie at the intersection of sports, medicine, history, and language. His roots are in Yozgat, Garin, Bayazid, and Aintab.

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From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

Zaruhi Bahri is one of the many women who need to be written back into Armenian history. Despite her decades-long activism and prolific writing, she is all but invisible in current scholarship. If one of the reasons for her absence in historiography is her sex (Armenian historiography largely remains blind to women’s experiences), the other is the long silence on the history of Armenians who stayed in Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the Genocide, the years that Bahri was most active in the Constantinopolitan Armenian community.

After moving to France in the late 1920s, Bahri wrote six historical novels, all of them featuring female protagonists. One novel is specifically about the life of an Armenian woman during and after the Genocide, but the remaining works revolve around Armenian life either in pre-Genocide Constantinople or post-Genocide France.[1]

All but one of the works devoted to the history of literature in the Diaspora ignore her existence.[2]

Accordingly, in this special issue dedicated to the centennial of the First Republic of Armenia, I give the floor to Zaruhi Bahri to tell us how she, from her corner in Istanbul, observed and interpreted the fate of her kin in Transcaucasia from 1918 to 1921. The selections come from her memoir, Gyankis Vebe (The Novel of My Life), which was posthumously published by her family in Beirut in 1995. A more extensive translation will appear in Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology (edited by Melissa Bilal and Lerna Ekmekcioglu, forthcoming in 2020). Published and unpublished works of hers, as well as interviews with her descendants, will appear in Feminism in Armenian’s website in digitized form.

Zaruhi Bahri: A Short Biography

Zaruhi Shahbaz Bahri was born in Constantinople on May 31, 1880. She began her work in the public space after the 1909 Adana massacres. She taught orphaned girls sewing and needlework. During the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, she worked in charitable organizations that provided the families of Ottoman Armenian soldiers with food and clothing. She was one of the women who established the Armenian Red Cross of Constantinople in 1913

Zaruhi lost a brother and sister to the Armenian Genocide. Her sister was deported from Amasya (a city in north-central Turkey, in the Black Sea Region) with her family, after which they all disappeared. Her brother, Parsegh Shahbaz, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Hay Heghapokhagan Tashnagtsutiun), was among the intellectuals arrested by the Ottoman government on the night of April 24, 1915, and later killed.

The Bahri family spent the war years in the Ottoman capital. After the Mudros Armistice of Oct. 1918, the Armenian residents of the city were most active in relief work for survivors who came to the capital from Mesopotamia and other parts of the Middle East. Very soon after the signing of the armistice, Bahri became director of the Shishli branch of the Armenian Red Cross of Constantinople and a member of the Armenian Women’s Association (AWA). She also began contributing essays to the women’s journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman). At the Armenian Patriarch’s request, she worked as the Armenian representative and director of the Neutral House (Chezok Doun, Bitarafhane) where orphans and young women of contested identities were brought in order to determine whether they were Turkish or Armenian. When the Turkish Kemalist forces entered Istanbul and forced the Allied evacuation, Zaruhi Bahri had to flee the city with her family, for she was viewed as an anti-Turkish figure because of her work at the Neutral House (accused of “Armenianizing Turkish children”). The family first escaped to Bucharest and, later, in 1928-1929, moved to Paris.

Together with her husband Hagop Bahri, a prominent lawyer, she had four children and four grandchildren. She died in Paris on May 13, 1958, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 1987, in accordance with her wishes, her children took her ashes to Armenia to bury them on the grounds of Etchmiadzin Cathedral, the Mother Church of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

***

Translations from Gyankis Vebe

Part I

Zaruhi Bahri and her family, along with many other Armenian intellectuals who were not deported from Istanbul, spent some parts of the war years on Kınalı Ada, one of the Prince Islands near Istanbul, which used to be known as “Hay Gghzi” (Armenian Island), for it was heavily populated by Armenians. In this section of her memoir, Bahri narrates hearing the news of the establishment of the Republic of Armenia in 1918.

21. The Independent Republic of Armenia (p. 156-158, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz)

And so, this historical moment and our generation were destined to witness the establishment of our long dreamt-for country (hayrenik). From its very first day, we were aware of the problems that our small, newly formed state would face. But the sheer fact that even our greatest and perhaps only enemy, the Turks, recognized it—albeit under pressure—assured us that we could overcome all obstacles as long as we continued our stubborn work. And, indeed, the Turkish newspapers delivered us the good news. True, that small country wouldn’t satisfy our greatest wishes, but we trusted in the benevolence of our great Allied friends to satisfy the rest. We were not interested in the specific political and military conditions under which that republic was given to us.

I confess that we were enveloped by a childish, intuitive, and reckless happiness, and we openheartedly surrendered ourselves to the enchantment of that joyous gift. Poor Hrant Asadour was the only one who couldn’t ardently savor that long-awaited, long-desired joyous news. The mental illness that had already taken hold, and which in the end would overcome him, filled him with a fear that rendered all of our encouraging words and factual arguments utterly futile. He would retire to his bedroom and withdraw behind closed windows and doors not to hear or take part in the ardent enthusiasm of the young people outside, which inundated the rocky paths of the Armenian island.

The enthusiasm in our house knew no limits. The blood of our lost loved ones and of the hundreds of thousands of martyrs was finally emerging victorious from this unequal battle.

A celebration was to be organized in the village hotel.

The Arakelian sisters were going to play, my Noyemi was going to recite Chobanian’s “To Armenia,” and Mannig Berberian was going to sing “Armenia, Heavenly Land” wrapped in a tricolor flag. I don’t know how we knew that the Armenian flag was the red, blue, and orange tricolor. We were still at war and it was very difficult to find colored fabric. We succeeded in finding dye and we sacrificed a bed sheet to prepare a large, beautiful flag for our bright new fatherland (hayrenik).

The celebration took place with indescribable enthusiasm. At everyone’s request, Shahan Berberian took the floor and fervently praised our fatherland (hayrenik).

As I write these lines in one of the distant suburbs of Paris in the autumn of 1952, I recall with great pleasure that one evening not too long ago I had the pleasure of hearing “Armenia, Heavenly Land” sung again, this time by a young Armenian from Marseilles, which brought a flood of different emotions back to my mind’s eye. That song was quite dear to my precious mother, who would softly hum it to me when I was a child, when the tyranny of Sultan Hamid had yet to end. My adolescent children sang it until the dawn of the Ottoman Constitution [1908]—until 1914 arrived seeking to destroy my ancient nation in a reign of terror. So it was sung for the emancipation of Armenia, in those perhaps deceptive days, on a rocky island in the Sea of Marmara, expressing the fervor of a patriotic group.

And now it is sung in my émigré’s apartment in Boulogne, it is sung by a youth born and raised on foreign soil. I’ve heard that precious hymn from the lips of four generations, praising glory to our fatherland. “Will a fifth generation that grows up abroad continue to sing it?” I asked sadly.

“Yes, madam, you can rest assured,” said the precious youngster, and added, “our generation won’t be lost because now we have a homeland, an actual country toward which we fix our eyes and hearts each time we recite the words Armenia, heavenly land.” And as if to complete the meaning of his words, he began to enthusiastically sing, “Blossom Free, My Homeland.” My eyes welling with tears, I kissed that dear ambassador of the new, foreign-born generation.

Part II

In this section, Zaruhi Bahri narrates developments that led to the Sovietization of Armenia.

26. “The Fatherland is in Danger” (p. 179-182, translated by Maral Aktokmakyan)

During that summer of 1920, the news of the realities in Armenia gradually began to grow unclear. The statements of the national assembly slowly ceased to be reassuring. Stormy winds were blowing, casting down our enthusiasm. In a speech to an overflowing audience in the Petit Champ theater, A. Khadisian brought the reality before us: In Armenia, there was no food, no clothing, no medicine, no guns… and no money. We were looking in vain for a powerful state that would protect this small, suffering republic whose people, desiring emancipation, were unmercifully slaughtered and crucified, while those who survived had given their best to the benefit of those powerful countries.

At the start of autumn, Turkey began to become a threatening force under Mustafa Kemal’s resurgent forces and, as always throughout their history, the Armenians became the first victims in those horrific days. The surprising irony is that in the occupied capital of the very same Turkey, our newspapers still enjoyed the freedom to write about Kazim Karabekir’s assault [against Armenia] and the dangers threatening our fatherland.

It was then that I thought that it is every Armenian’s duty to send at least some financial support to the threatened fatherland. The easiest and most practical way was to donate a military tax to the state in place of our children who did not serve as soldiers in the army. I sent an article entitled “The Fatherland Is in Danger” to [ARF publication] Azadamard (Battle for Freedom) or its successor, the newspaper Jagadamard[3] (Battle). Along with it, I sent 50 golden coins each for my two children, Krikor and Jirayr, in lieu of their military service. My Krikor was studying in Paris, and my Jirayr, my poor, precious Jirayr, barely 15 years old, desperately wanted to volunteer in the Armenian army… But how? Armenia, surrounded by enemies, wasn’t even able to breathe…

A black curtain was being drawn on our two years of enthusiasm, emotion, and hope… The fatherland wasn’t in danger: It was on its deathbed…

***

That black curtain would be pulled back on a supposedly gloomy morning in November with Armenia’s lustrous Sovietization. The brotherly army coming down from the North told Kazim Karabekir’s hordes, “Hold off there!” It was Stalin’s immortal voice that ordered from Tiflis that “Armenia must be helped.”

The tears of sorrow were replaced with tears of joy. Those who had hesitated to believe in the past now had difficulty in accepting the reality.

For instance, during those days I received a visit from Dr. Torkomian, a great friend of my husband and our family. I had noticed that he held me in high esteem since the time that a very short article of mine titled “But I Have Still Been Waiting for You,” which I wrote to the memory of my brother, appeared in Jagadamard.

Dr. Torkomian visited to talk to me about a particular matter. Perhaps he wished to clear his conscience by getting my assent. He noted that on the same morning he had received a check of ten thousand francs from Mrs. Aharonian in Paris, to be delivered to the army of Armenia, and he added sadly that he was obliged to send back the money right away as we did not have an army any longer and the “Reds” occupied Armenia a day or two ago. I protested severely. For us, for our family, Armenia, whether red, blue, or yellow, was ours and so was its army. And he made a mistake in having sent back the money because that money could have been used to satisfy a need. It is true that a short while after this we would be thrilled to hear that the Soviet government from Moscow provided a large amount of material aid to our small Sovietized republic, while the Allied governments had denied Free Armenia any pounds sterling or dollars. This, despite Fridtjof Nansen’s request with tearful eyes before the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva, where he said, among other things, “You will save a people, an entire nation for the yearly cost allocated toward just a single battleship of the great nation that is England.”[4] And the Assembly remained deaf to the supplicant call of that great philanthropist.

Moscow became an unconditional provider for Armenians. And the Armenian people, supported financially and protected against the external enemy, raised up their country with energetic hard work and creative mind to amazing heights in 30 years, to most people’s surprise. It is painful, and even more than painful, that some of us still insist on going against the course of history.

***

Thereafter we had gradually been receiving news of Kemalist troops’ victories over various lands in Asia Minor. How pleasant it was to think that the direction of Kazim Karabekir’s soldiers had been directed westward, where this time they unfortunately faced the Greeks who had landed there after the Armistice of Mudros. The Allies were still in Istanbul, where one would see twice a week the parade of Scottish soldiers with picturesque uniforms, feathered caps, and rustic band. The bandmaster on the front would swing his astonishing decorative instrument and give beats for his musicians to play. To safeguard against any maritime or ground attack, Mustafa Kemal had made Ankara the capital city, that Turkish city in the center of Asia Minor, where even its Armenian population was Turkophone.

I don’t wish to talk about politics, thinking that, without evidence, my views might be subjective and might not correspond to the truth.

We were trying to continue to do our work. The Armenian Patriarchate, National Caretaker Service (Azkayin Khnamadarutiun), Armenian Red Cross, Neutral House (Chezok Doun), each one of them did their part conscientiously and faithfully.

Part III

In this section Zaruhi Bahri narrates the ARF’s rebellion against the Bolsheviks in Armenia that began on Feb. 18, 1921 and was suppressed on April 2, 1921. Coming from an ARF family, Bahri is critical of the uprising and supports the Bolsheviks because she sees the Soviets as the only force that will protect Armenia from Turkish attacks.

27. Armenian Women’s Association (p. 192-193, p.194-197, translated by Maral Aktokmakyan)

[…]

In the summer of 1921, the reality of Soviet Armenia was becoming increasingly more reassuring. Government representatives were coming to Istanbul to report on that reality and forge connections with most of the Armenian communities abroad and inspire faltering minds with strength and faith.

I am happy and proud that as much as our home, the Shahbaz-Bahri family, had been among those that sacrificed much to the cause of Armenianness—had lost its members and had been ground down—it also knew equally well how to appreciate and deeply experience the joy of the liberated fatherland, no matter that it constituted only a fragment of the (territorial) rights that we had been claiming. Our home was one of the first to receive the leaders of Soviet Armenia.

[…]

In the fall of 1921, I left with Jirair for Paris via Italy, by boat up to Naples, at which time I met and talked with B. Boissière, the French scientist I wrote about in the section on the Neutral Home (Chezok Doun), then to Rome, Venice/San Lazarro, Turin, and through the Alps on to Paris.

Having read Ruskin’s works and D’Annunzio’s Le Feu, I set off, ready to meet the aesthetical wonders awaiting me in Italy. Communing with the Old World and the works of Renaissance masters, my soul was enlivened with boundless satisfaction. On the other hand, I pitied our people, the Armenian nation, which had its own multifaceted riches, but whose similar aesthetic works had been the target of barbaric Asiatic invasions and destroyed. But I remained hopeful, only because I truly believed in the eternal soul of my race, like a rising phoenix. I believed that under the watchful supervision of Moscow, and without internal dissent, the fatherland and its people would find their path upward, toward luminous horizons.

Before having any rest after that unforgettable journey, a great national-political disappointment was in store for us. That was the February Uprising. I know that there were people, many people, who wanted and still want to give a share of responsibility to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) for the Turkish policy of the extermination of Armenians in the 1915-18 period. They claim that ARF should have been more cautious, and could have taken a prudent step to, if not forestall, at least to mitigate the ferocity of the horrible crime. I do not think they should have the right to criticize men who consciously absolved themselves of their misdeeds by sacrificing their lives. Making mistakes is a human trait. Insisting on mistakes is a crime.

Mr. Saghatelian, a member of the Duma of Tsarist Russia, would tell my husband years ago in Istanbul: “Our mistake was to believe that we could deceive imperial Turkey and defeat her by relying on Europe. We did not realize that politics never entails humanitarianism, we never thought that every leader is obligated to look after the interest of his own country and people. We failed to see that Turkey was founded on a 500-600-year tradition of military discipline, that its leaders had a mentality of ruling, whereas our revolutionaries are the children of a nation that has degenerated (aylaserads) under centuries-long enslavement. Thereby, though committed, they are unable to compete with their adversary.”

Based on this, and judging from the ARF leaders I had known in the past and as well as the conduct of my brother Parsegh, I did not want to believe that Armenians, those committed ones who are dubbed as patriots in Armenia, after enduring all the disappointment that our two Delegations (to the Paris Peace Conference), Patriarch Zaven (Der Yeghiayan), Fridtjof Nansen and our friends suffered as they defended our case in the conferences and the League of Nations Assembly,[5] would betray recently established Soviet Armenia, which was going to survive thanks to the new regime that shook the world.

In Paris I had, at times, the opportunity to see Avedis Aharonian, whom I had met in Istanbul. During those meetings, I shared with him my views [about the political situation]. He would not oppose what I was saying. But I have the deep belief that his illness, which caused occasional brain congestion, was the main reason why, during a banquet, in response to a question, he felt obliged to make a statement in favor of the anti-Armenia policy of his political party. I was so convinced by his patriotism, I thought he must return to Soviet Armenia at the first occasion and continue his activism and literary career there (just as Avedik Isahagian would do in the following years). I tried to make his life a little easier. I introduced him to my cousin, Vahan Khorasanjian, inviting them and Mrs. Aharonian to a tea party in Neuilly, Dr. Karakoch’s residence. That first encounter was followed by a dinner that Khorasanjian hosted in Hotel d’Iena. After that, Khorasanajian became friends with him in the broadest sense of the word, and remained friends during Aharonian’s long period of illness.

Based in particular on what I had told him, Khorasanjian respected Aharonian as a poet, a man of letters, a great patriot, the president of the first government, and future ally of the newly established Soviet administration. As proof of his great sympathy for Soviet Armenia, he [Khorasanjian] donated a large and most valuable Aivazovsky seascape to the museum in Yerevan.

The February Uprising ended, with the result being18,000 casualties from among this unfortunate people who had already been bled to death. Fortunately, though, the uprising ended with the victory of the Soviet regime. Who among us could imagine, without fearful uneasiness, about a possible scenario where the ARF laid claim to the conditions on the ground? Turkish hordes were on the border, ready to smash, destroy, ruin everything, to the very last…

As I write these lines, my entire being shivers from the horrors of new perils. I am terrified by the Americans’ assistance to improve the Turkish army and economy.[6] Trained under the supervision of American officers and armed with the latest weapons, Turkish soldiers are a great threat to the other side of the Arax river.

But why not take heart by the sole remaining hope, with our poetess Silva Kaputikyan’s hope that “henceforth the road to Yerevan goes through Russia”?

Notes

[1] Her genocide novel is Parantsem: Jampanerun Yergaynkin (Paris: Der Hagopian, 1946). Others: Dakre: Vospori Aperun Vra 1875–1877 (Paris: Der Hagopian, 1941); Dayyan Kevork Bey gam Badriarkarani Poghotsin Pnagichnere: Vospori Aperun Vra 1895-1898 (Paris: Le Solei, 1952); Muygerun Dag (Beirut: Madensashar “Ayk,” 1956); Louisette ou Osmose (serialized in Aysor: 1952); Ambrob (serialized in Azad Khosk, Paris: 1940). Bahri also edited and wrote the introduction of the book that her son Gerard Bahri wrote, Vahan Maleziani Gyankn u Kordse: Hushamadyan Ir Utsunamyagin Artiv (1871-1951) (Paris: Le Solei, 1951).

[2] Bahri does not appear in the Soviet Armenian Encyclopedia or in the Armenian Abridged Encyclopedia. Notwithstanding a couple of factual mistakes, Krikor Beledian discusses Bahri’s works in his Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France (California State University, Fresno, DATE, edited by Barlow Der Mugrdechian, translated by Christopher Atamian), p. 393-395. Beledian does not see talent in Bahri’s works, finishing her section with “The author, simply stated, doesn’t seem to possess the talent to achieve her ambitions.” (p. 395). Beledian does not shy away from noting, however, that other critics during the time of Bahri’s novels’ publication found her work “the cornerstone of the new Armenian novel, the best example of the genre,” as stated by Yenovk Armen in Loossaghpiur, March 1953, no 7, p. 180, as quoted in Beledian fn 23 on page 395.

[3] Zaruhi Bahri’s note: I don’t have a copy, as it was destroyed like all my other papers, in Istanbul. It must of course be in the [newspaper’s] archives (author’s note).

[4] Lerna Ekmekciglu (L.E.) Note: Zaruhi Bahri uses the word “zrahavor” (in Turkish, zırhlı) which means “armored.” While in time it came to mean “soldier,” during the time of Bahri’s writing it usually referred to ships with extensive armor. I thank my friend Ulys for alerting me to this nuance as well as his careful reading of and comments on this whole text.

[5] Here Bahri says “azkayin zhoghov,” meaning “national assembly,” but she must have meant “azkerou zhoghov,” meaning “assembly of nations”—i.e., League of Nations Assembly.

[6] Bahri refers to the Marshall Plan here.

Author information

Lerna Ekmekcioglu

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at MIT where she is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program. She graduated from Getronagan Armenian High School in Istanbul and majored in Sociology at Bogazici University. She received her PhD at New York University’s joint program of History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies in 2010. She held a one year Manoogian post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Armenian Studies Program. Together with Melissa Bilal, Ekmekcioglu is the co-editor of the 2006 book in Turkish titled A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862–1933). Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in 2016. Currently she is collaborating with Melissa Bilal for a book and digital humanities project titled “Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive,” which focuses on the life and works of 12 pioneering women intellectuals from 1860s to 1960s.

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The post A View from the Bosphorus: Zaruhi Bahri’s Take on the First Republic of Armenia and Its Sovietization appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.

From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

The First Republic lasted only 32 months. Its legacy, however, went far beyond its short-lived existence. After it collapsed in Dec. 1920, generations were born and raised, both in Soviet Armenia and in the Diaspora, with the hope that one day Armenian statehood would be resurrected. The Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR), however, did not provide fertile ground for preserving the legacy of the First Republic. Heavy-handed Soviet censorship and propaganda portrayed the First Republic and its founders as reactionary, nationalist, and adventurist. As early as in the 1930s, in the official discourse of the USSR, the First Republic was presented as distant and insignificant history. The Soviet version of the history of the First Republic and its turning points were distorted beyond recognition. Until the late 1980s, even the date of collapse of the First Republic was noted as Nov. 29, 1920, instead of Dec. 2, when the leaders of the First Republic ceded power to the Bolsheviks.

Yet, despite the official narratives and efforts to ridicule the founders of “the Dashnak republic,” the history of the First Republic faded little on the popular level. In the 1960s and 1970s, the generation that had endured the calamities of the Genocide and had lived in the First Republic, was still alive. Many of them recalled the 1914-1923 period with great pain and sorrow, but also with great pride, recalling the great victories at Sardarabad, Gharakilisa, and Bash-Abaran.

Until the late 1950s, the Soviet leadership in Moscow was ultrasensitive toward any manifestation of local nationalism. However, the Khrushchev-era thaw resulted in changes to the flow of social and ideological transformation in the USSR, including in Soviet Armenia. Leaders of Soviet Armenia undertook various initiatives that aimed to present the history of 1914-1923 under a new light.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, dissident groups and underground movements were formed in Soviet Armenia. The Armenian Youth Union and the National Unity Party, the only underground opposition party in the territory of the USSR, were the ones most widely known. Their strident criticism of Moscow and of past injustices, their territorial claims from Turkey, along with their demand that Karabagh and Nakhichevan be reunited with Soviet Armenia, reopened wounds that the Communist party leadership had hoped was a distant memory.

Many party functionaries and ideologues in Moscow scoffed at those groups and their demands, arguing that only a very few embraced those “manifestations of petty nationalism” in Armenia. Little did they know that their utter confidence would prove problematic. The seeds of Soviet disintegration and ideological polarization were planted in the 1960s, and Armenian dissidents’ roles in that process were anything but secondary. Those “manifestations” were also behind the April 1965 events in Armenia, when mass rallies occurred in Yerevan on the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Some 100,000 Armenians participated in the massive demonstration on April 24, 1965, demanding that April 24 be designated a day of commemoration of the victims of the Armenian Genocide.

Moscow and the Soviet propaganda machine were quick to criticize the unprecedented demonstration by labeling it “secessionist and anti-state nationalism.” Despite Moscow’s reaction, it was an undeniable reality that such ideas were embraced by the masses, in part because fertile ground existed for nurturing such views. People took to the streets because they sensed the change in the air of the Soviet Union.

The unparalleled rally in Yerevan led to changes in the political, cultural, and social landscape of Soviet Armenia. The government had to take note of the growing concerns and rising voices of the people and the intellectual class, and convey that information to Moscow. That’s not to say, however, that the leadership of Soviet Armenia during that decade—Yakov Zarobyan and Anton Kochinyan, and later Karen Demirchyan—nurtured anti-nationalist tendencies. Despite being part of the Communist system, they had all been raised in families that kept the stories of the 1910s alive. The books and memories published by their family members and friends demonstrate that they held a deep belief in the rebuilding of the Armenian homeland. In various settings, they shared their visions of a prosperous Armenia that would develop against all odds. With carefully calibrated language and arguments, they appealed to the leadership in Moscow to consider the sentiments and concerns of the Armenian people. Despite their undisguised unease, the Communist leaders in Moscow were quick to realize that resorting to violence against the population and silencing dissent en-masse could prove problematic. As a result, a new model of coexistence between Moscow and Soviet Republics was shaped in the 1960s, and all the Soviet republics began to benefit from it.

However, the political protests, rallies, and subsequent revisions came at a price. Smaller-scale persecutions and arrests were part of the reality of the era. Between 1963 and 1988, 34 political trials were held in Armenia, resulting in the sentencing of 105 political prisoners. The events of 1965 and subsequent developments had provided inspiration to many in Armenia, and new popular heroes arose who went on to inspire young people.

Yet another important factor the rise of the Armenian dissident movement and the popular discussion of historical events was the repatriation of tens of thousands of Armenians to Soviet Armenia in the late 1940s. Those newcomers had brought with them new ideas and visions that enriched popular discussion and ideological debates.

The Soviet Armenian leadership was itself inspired by the emergence of patriotic literary works that delved into both the heroic past and the sufferings of the Armenian nation, including the revolutionary period preceding the Genocide. It was during this decade that Khachik Dashtents, Hovhannes Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, Sero Khanzadyan, Silva Kaputikyan, and many others became household names. Their books and poetry were widely read, distributed, and discussed. Their literary works helped produce a new identity, inculcating hope, determination, and perseverance. They became anchors during a period of nationwide, including leadership-level, soul-searching. Moreover, in 1969, the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Hovhannes Tumanyan and Komitas were celebrated in Armenia and contributed to the that reawakening.

Two famous sports victories also contributed to the rise of patriotic sentiment in Soviet Armenia. In 1963, Tigran Petrosyan became world chess champion by defeating Mikhail Botvinnik. In 1966, Petrosyan successfully defended the title for another three-year term. His victory became a cause of joy and celebration in Armenia, newborns were named after him, and he popularized chess in Armenia. The other important event occurred in 1973, when the “Ararat” football (soccer) team of Yerevan became the USSR Champion in the Soviet Union’s Premier League, winning the trophy in Armenia’s newly built Hrazdan stadium.

In the 1960s, there was great interest in questions related to Armenian identity and history. The Civil Registration Agency in charge of registering children’s names began to demonstrate reluctance toward accepting non-Armenian names, encouraging the use of Armenian names instead. Couples started to get married in the church—a quite uncommon occurrence in the preceding decades. The first studies about the Armenian Genocide emerged, containing archival documentation; these were the pioneers of Genocide studies in Armenia. Another manifestation of rising interest in Armenian history, culture, and identity was the number of visitors to museums: In 1960, there had been only 96,000 visits, whereas by 1970 the number of visits had increased to 525,000.

Reluctantly, Soviet authorities also yielded to the power of symbolism, particularly in public spaces. As early as 1959, the construction of the Matenadaran, the repository of Armenian manuscripts, had been completed. The same year, the monument of Sasuntsi Davit, the legendary hero of the Armenian national epic, was erected in Yerevan, in front of the railway station. In 1962, the massive statue of Stalin was removed from Victory Park in Yerevan, and five years later it was replaced with the equally massive “Mother Armenia,” visible from all corners of Yerevan. After two years of construction, the Genocide memorial was inaugurated in Tsitsernakaberd in 1967. In 1968, after a series of discussions with Moscow, Kochinyan convinced Soviet leaders of the necessity of celebrating the 2750^th anniversary of Urartian Erebuni—modern-day Yerevan. The same year, the construction of the Sardarabad memorial began, marking yet another turning point in the decade. After 1.5 years of construction, the Hrazdan football stadium was also completed. Soon, the erection of a monument commemorating the Battle of Avarayr was authorized; the statue of Vardan Mamikonyan, the Armenian general from that fifth-century battle, depicted on his horse and with sword in hand, gives the impression that he is rallying his people and charging at the enemy. Unveiled in 1975, it has become a powerful manifestation of struggle and hope.

The main conclusion that can be drawn from this discussion is that the link between the independent First Republic and the republic of Soviet Armenia remains underexplored. Yet, clearly, despite the dominance of Soviet historiography, the history of the First Republic has left a lasting impact on the people of Soviet Armenia. For many, it has been—and remains—a source of historical pride and inspiration.

Author information

Vahram Ter-Matevosyan

Vahram Ter-Matevosyan is Assistant Professor at the American University of Armenia and he is also the Head of the Turkish Studies Department at the Institute for Oriental Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He received his PhD from the University of Bergen (Norway), Master’s degree from Lund University (Sweden), Candidate of historical sciences degree from the Institute of Oriental Studies and Yerevan State University (Armenia). He was Visiting Professor at Duke University, N.C. (2016), Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Calif. (2009-2010) and Visiting Doctoral Student at the University of Washington, Seattle, Wash. (2005). He authored an award-winning monograph Islam in the Social and Political Life of Turkey, 1970-2001 in 2008 and co-authored History of Turkish Republic in 2014. His research articles have been published in several publications including Europe-Asia Studies, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Insight Turkey, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Turkish Review, Diaspora Studies, and others.

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From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

“Hidden venereal diseases[1] have begun to spread also among us, as they were spread in Russia and Europe. Syphilis[2] has already spoiled the pure Armenian family and threatened to destroy the Armenian home. Immigrant life, conscription, labor in big cities are to be blamed. Continually, Baku is ruining Armenian youth and dispersing them into small towns and villages inhabited by Armenians. Armenian young laborers infected with dangerous diseases are returning from Baku, Tbilisi, and Russia to the homeland and bringing with them this illness and contaminating the Armenian family,” doctor Vahan Artsruni[3] writes in the introduction of his book Vat Tsav (Bad Pain), published in 1900.[4] That book is one of the first published in Armenian that raises the question of venereal disease and the problems it caused among Eastern (Russian) Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century.

Having received his medical education in France, Artsruni was well aware of the harmful consequences of venereal diseases, which had already caused significant damage to Europe. He was also aware of the poor sanitary and health conditions of Armenians in the Caucasus. The first clinic in Eastern Armenia had opened in Artashat only in 1887, and another had been established in Yerevan in 1890. The first hospital in Yerevan had opened its doors in 1882 and had just 12 beds.[5]

In the early 20th century, the term “venereal disease” was known among Armenians as frankakht (French disease) or vat tsav (bad pain) and referred mainly to syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, which were the most prevalent diseases of this kind. The three forms of venereal diseases identified in the early 20th century were known to produce superficial or visual symptoms on the exterior of the body, such as rash, warts, lesions, mucous, bumps, and various other forms of presentation. In fact, the symptoms of syphilis, its mode of transmission, and its effects on the body have been understood for hundreds of years.[6] At the end of the 19th century, Armenians, as other peoples in the region, were suffering from several well-known infectious diseases. In those conditions, when malaria, typhus, and cholera were also rampant, the question of venereal diseases was assigned secondary importance. Another reason was the shame and social stigma associated with these types of diseases among Armenians. Because of shame, ignorance, and a lack of education among the population at large, syphilis was neither prevented nor treated, and within a short period it became widespread and manifest.

As Artsruni points out in his book, the main population infected by venereal diseases consisted of Armenian migrant workers who were leaving their villages and going to large cities in search of work and money. In due course, those men’s tastes changed, they became accustomed to city life, and they adopted the habits of urban lifestyles, including abusing alcohol and visiting prostitutes. As a consequence, they were returning home infected with diseases. In conditions of poverty, many villagers had only one outfit and ate from a communal pot, and often slept in the same bed, all of which contributed to the rapid spread of disease. Another reason for venereal infections was ignorance about disease itself. There was no limiting of contact with the infected. On the contrary, workers coming back from the big cities married village girls; as a consequence, not only their wives but also the children born of those marriages suffered from disease. There were not enough doctors, and the absence of female doctors made the situation even worse. Venereal diseases cast substantial shame on a family, and especially female members. These women, with the help of their mothers-in-law, would try to find treatment for themselves and their children. Their best option was a village healer who would try to heal them using traditional methods. Those methods were not useful, however, and in most cases they cost patients their life.

But the situation was little better in cities. Women were afraid to seek out a doctor, afraid that their illness would be revealed, thus ruining “the good names of their husbands and families.”

“What is more preferable?” asked doctor Artsruni of his readers, “to cold-heartedly witness how people lose their health and keep silent, or to break the wall of false bashfulness and loudly pronounce the word ‘syphilis,’ which people have made synonymous with the word ‘disgrace’ against themselves.”[7]

How could the damage brought by venereal diseases be prevented, controlled, and cured? Ideas about public hygiene and attitudes about morality found their way into Armenian society through the publications of Armenian physicians. With his publications, Artsruni tried to support Armenian women and girls who were victims of a patriarchal society and of social stigmatization. In 1901, he published another book, this time about marriage. In it, he terms any man who would ignore his venereal disease and marry an innocent girl a “monster.” [8] He notes that these men are guilty in front of not only their wives but also an entire generation that they have poisoned. He titled the eighth chapter of the book “Syphilis,” in which he tried to explain the disease and treatments for it.

Artsruni’s professional life was significantly influenced by French dermatologist Jean Alfred Fourier[9], who specialized in the study of venereal diseases. “How to stop syphilis? How to treat it? Of course, with the help of doctors, and never old quack cures of the village,” Artsruni wrote.[10] Concerning treatment, physicians at the time were divided into two camps. One argued for treatment using mercury, the other for non-mercury therapies. Artsruni was more inclined toward mercury treatment, but he warned patients that a full and absolute cure would not come immediately: It may take a year or sometimes three years, and they had to have patience. Writing about the inheritability of syphilis and its destructive effects, Artsruni notes that everyone who has syphilis should visit a doctor and get married only with the doctor’s permission. “Undoubtedly, the time will come when it will be necessary to produce health certificates from doctors to get married”: That is required for honesty; for the health of the family and offspring; the survival of the nation; and, it should be added, because people are selfish even in marriage, and so it is a necessity for their own happiness, he argues.[11]

Not finding allies among men, who were continuing marriages without proper treatment for syphilis, Artsruni tried to find allies among women and girls to save them from danger. In 1903 he published another book, dedicated to his niece, Haykanush Tigranian.[12] In it, Artsruni notes that “the Armenian girl should constitute a pillar of the family, but her education is wrong and full of false influences.”[13] He criticized the traditional way of girls’ education and their treatment as unimportant, secondary members of the family, which undermines the strength of the Armenian nation. “She should publish good books, establish children’s journals, spread positive education among the nation. She is also a part of our nation, isn’t she? Society has expectations from her. She should act—act in all spheres,”[14] Artsruni writes. Referring to marriage, he points out, “An Armenian girl is given to a husband; she does not choose him.”[15] He calls on girls to resist such brutality and marry only with love. He also warns girls to pay attention to their future husbands’ health condition before agreeing to the marriage.

Elsewhere, his contemporary, Dr. Budughian, writes that “to be safe from syphilis, merely awareness is needed. If the child were to receive education within the family similar to that at school, it would give hope that syphilis will gradually diminish. Otherwise, degeneration is inevitable.”[16]

Despite the efforts of Armenian doctors, the disease continued to spread. It was necessary to take more practical steps. The situation in Europe was no better. According to Fournier, who was the first professor to obtain a chair in both dermatology and the study of syphilis in France, there should be three paths of action: (1) to put into effect administrative measures and policies affecting the public and having as their goal to stop the spread of syphilis; (2) to attack syphilis by treating the disease; and (3) to fight syphilis by educating the younger generation of physicians on all aspects of the disease. In addition to that three-pronged policy of treatment and education, Fournier added another measure: marriage. “Nothing more noble, nor more exalted than to pursue the extinction of syphilis by the early unions, the marriages at the age of 25 between a husband and a wife, equally chaste, equally dignified, one to the other as the flower of the orange blossom.”[17]

At the time, France was trying to control the situation by monitoring the health of prostitutes, which was neither fair nor effective. Police checked prostitutes and regularly demanded health certificates, although they never asked the same of men who frequented brothels. But even that unequal and unfair method could not work in the case of the Armenians. They did not have any authority to establish control over brothels in the large cities of the regions. Their only hope was the Catholicos of All Armenians, in Etchmiadzin, who was at that time Mkrtich Khrimian (Khrimyan Hayrik). A group of Armenian doctors, among them Artsruni, introduced the problem to Archbishop Sedrakian, who was a confidante of Khrimian. The Catholicos understood the seriousness and urgency of the question and immediately took action. In 1904 he issued the Edict on Marriage, according to which every man should provide a certificate from a doctor about his health to a priest before the wedding ceremony in church.[18] According to other Armenian sources on the issue, for some time the “Marriage Certificate” worked efficiently, and the population supported the decision of the Catholicos. The problem came back again, however, and the number of those infected increased during World War I and the Armenian Genocide.

In 1917, a Dr. Makarian raised the question of prevention of venereal diseases: “Not only the individual but also society, the government, must fight against such infection. But to succeed in this fight, it is necessary to eliminate the attitude society has in general about venereal diseases. We need to cast aside prejudice, start talking and writing about syphilis freely, tell the people the nature of it, and teach them how to combat it successfully. It is essential that venereal diseases and especially syphilis come out from their covered, hidden state, and we begin to fight against it as freely as we fight other infectious diseases. This is the only guarantee for a successful outcome.”[19] But, unfortunately, the call of doctors regarding the urgency of the problem would not be heard. Armenians and the entire region were suffering from war and other well-known dramatic events. There was no time for fighting venereal disease.

Armenian doctors revisited this issue only during the First Armenian Republic. At the beginning of its establishment, the young republic established the Ministry of Relief, which was supposed to deal with the health issues of the republic. Through the efforts of the ministry, the Armenian Physicians’ Congress was organized in 1920. Its primary purpose was to combat malaria, but during its various sessions other health issues of the Republic were discussed, including venereal diseases. This ministry was abolished in Jan. 1921 by a parliamentary decision.[20]

Artsruni was more enthusiastic and motivated in his mission and work because of the long-awaited independence of Armenians. Now he had an opportunity to act freely for the benefit of his nation. In Feb. 1920, with the help of his friends, he began publishing the first health journal in Armenia. The first article of the inaugural issue of Aroghjapahik (Healthcare) was dedicated to the prevention and treatment of venereal diseases. “The government takes measures,” writes Artsruni in it, “but they are not enough if there is no public support. The government urges us not to keep infectious patients at home, but to take them to hospital and ‘isolate’ them so that they cannot infect others. But what use is that if the people continue to hide their infection?”[21] The journal aimed not only to educate the people but also to dispel thousands of superstitions, to warn them not to trust village remedies. Especially in light of the genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the future and the existence of the Armenian nation and its young independent republic were dependent on a healthy society. At least, that was Artsruni’s conviction: “We need a healthy generation in body and in soul, which can only be born to healthy parents,”[22] he wrote.

Artsruni used the journal platform to raise the question of a “Marriage Contract” once more. He reminded his readers about the famous Catholicosal Edict of 1904 and pointed out that it was not working anymore. He also considered it “incomplete,” because a health certificate was not required of women, it was required of men only, which made it entirely insufficient. “Khrimian’s great work should be implemented through legislative means. Let the parliament of Armenia develop this law as soon as possible, and the homeland will be grateful for it,”[23] he wrote.

It is not known whether the Armenian parliament managed to discuss the question, and a relevant law was not adopted during the short-lived First Armenian Republic. One thing is certain, however: Soviet Armenia was fighting venereal diseases for several decades after its establishment.

Notes

[1] The term “venereal disease” refers to a group of illnesses that enter the body through either sexual transmission or blood transfusion. The word “venereal” itself refers to activities involving sexual desire or sexual intercourse in general. For more see: Wills, Mildred F., “Our Attitudes toward Venereal Disease Nursing,” The American Journal of Nursing 52(4), 1952, p. 477.

[2] Syphilis is one of the oldest known venereal diseases and can manifest itself in various ways throughout the body, and is capable of changing into different, more complex forms over time.

[3] Vahan Artsruni (1857-1947) was a well-known Armenian doctor who graduated from the school of medicine at the University of Paris and was a member of Caucasus Doctors Union. He edited and published medical journal “Aroghjapah tert” [Healthcare newspaper] in Tbilisi (1903-1905) and “Aroghjapahik” [Health-care] in Yerevan (1920).

[4] Artsruni V. Vat Tsav [Bad Pain]. I. Syphilis (translation), II. Chancre Mouth, III. Chlamydia, Tbilisi, Publication Mn. Martiroseants, 1900.

[5] Armenia in 1870-1917, in The History of Armenia, Vol. VI, published by the Academy of Science of ASSR, Yerevan, 1981, p. 959.

[6] Cooper, Alfred, Syphilis, Second edition (Philadelphia: P. Blankiston, Son & Co., 1895), pp. 1-2.

[7] Artsruni V. Vat Tsav, p. 10.

[8] Artsruni V., Amusnutiun: Aroghjapahakan Etude [Marriage. Healthcare Étude], Tbilisi, 1901, p. 96.

[9] Jean Alfred Fournier (1832-1914) was a professor of dermatology at the University of Paris and director of the internationally renowned venereal hospital at the Hospital of St. Louis. He wrote extensively on the clinical and social aspects of this subject. Fournier emphasized the importance of congenital syphilitic disease and wrote on its social aspects (Syphilis et Marriage, 1890).

[10] Artsruni V., Amusnutiun, p. 130.

[11] Artsruni V., Amusnutiun, p. 132-133.

[12] Artsruni V., Aghjik (Aroghjapahakan ev Baroyagitakan Etude) [Girl (Health and Ethics Étude)], Vol. I, (Georgian Literature Company; Tbilisi, 1903).

[13] Ibid., p. 4.

[14] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

[15] Ibid., p. 66.

[16] Budughian A., Aroghjapahakan Nver Norati Kanants [A Health Offering to Young Women], (Printing house Stepaniants, Alexandropol, 1901), p. 72.

[17] Tilles G., Grossman R., Wallach D., “Marriage: A 19^th Century French Method for the Prevention of Syphilis: Reflections on the Control of AIDS,” International Journal of Dermatology, Oct. 1993, 32 (10) p. 767.

[18] Aroghjapahik journal [Healthcare], (publisher: Aghbyur-Taraz, Tbilisi, 1910) No. 76, pp. 5-6.

[19] “Aroghj kyank,” Joghovrdakan Aroghjapahik Amsatert [“Healthy life.” Popular Health Monthly], (publisher: N. Yerevantsian, No.1, Baku, Jan. 1917), pp. 26-30.

[20] Khatisian Al., The Founding and Development of The Republic of Armenia, (Hamazgayin: Beirut,1968), p. 146. Vratsian S., Republic of Armenia, II edition, (Printing house Mush: Beirut, 1958), p. 364.

[21] Aroghjapahik [Healthcare], No. 1, (Yerevan: Feb. 1920), p. 3.

[22] Aroghjapahik, No. 1, p. 4.

[23] Ibid., No.2, p. 23.

Author information

Anna Aleksanyan

Anna Aleksanyan holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in History. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her dissertation explores gendered aspects of the Armenian Genocide in the experiences of its female victims. Before starting her PhD, Anna worked at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute as a scientific researcher for seven years. She has published widely both in academic journals and in non-academic publications in Armenian, Russian, French, Turkish, and English.

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The post Marriage Contract: Armenians against Venereal Diseases at the Beginning of the 20th Century appeared first on The Armenian Weekly.

From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

If you had told Aram Manoukian on March 6, 1908, that within a decade he would successfully lead the defense of Van against the Ottoman military, save tens of thousands of Armenians from imminent murder, become the temporary governor of Van after the withdrawal of the Turkish forces, and then emerge as the founder of the First Armenian Republic as Tsarist Russia faltered, he probably would have had a good laugh. After all, that day seemed to usher in the end of Aram’s life as a free man—if not his life altogether—as Turkish policemen and soldiers dragged him out of a 30-foot-deep well where he was hiding with fellow revolutionaries, and escorted the lot of them to the military commander’s residence, where they were interrogated, photographed, and sent to solitary confinement.

The story of what got Aram (née Sargis Hovhannisian) into that predicament, what got him out of it, and what turned him into the founder of Armenian statehood after an interregnum of more than five centuries is a combination of luck, resilience, mistakes, experience, and unwavering will that shaped him into a leader who ruled the borderlands between two empires and established a home for his nation.

Chroniclers have projected the Aram they knew backwards, fashioning an image of a born leader, yet what makes Aram’s journey from “inexperienced revolutionary” to statesman remarkable is the process through which he became a leader.

Early Life

The youngest of five children, Sargis Hovhannisian, often referred to as Sergei, was born March 19, 1879 in Shushi. Sergei was a student in his hometown when the Armenian Revolutionary Federation was established in Tiflis (Tbilisi), and he joined the ranks of the party within a few years. He was expelled from his Armenian school for revolutionary activity in 1901, completed his secondary education in Yerevan at the age of 24, and then moved to Baku, where he served the party apparatus. He helped fight Tsarist Russia’s anti-Armenian policies and organized labor protests and gatherings for the workers in the city’s burgeoning oil industry.

Sergei’s brief tenure in Baku helped hone his organizational and oratorical skills, preparing him for the “revolutionary crucible” of Kars, but it was also formative ideologically. Writing about the discussions during the Fourth ARF World Congress in Vienna (1907), ARF leader Simon Vratsian summed up Aram’s ideological allegiances: “He was a staunch Socialist with us, the ‘lefties.’… But he would be willing to abandon socialism, and us, if necessary. He was an Armenian in the mold of [members of the ARF’s founding generation] Rostom [Stepan Zorian] and Dr. [Hakob] Zavrian [Zavriev]. Socialist? Yes. But first and foremost an Armenian.”

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, or Dashnaktsutiun) in Kars was not your average operation, and Aram dove in head first (in the fall of 1903) after a short stop in Gandzak. “The revolutionary crucible of the Kars Province was a place where the Dashnak novices came out either forged and molded or, unable to withstand its extreme ideological and Spartan lifestyle, they renounced the revolutionary path,” wrote chronicler Ruben Ter Minasian. Here, Sergei distinguished himself as an effective communicator and propagandist and served in the network that organized the passage of armed revolutionary groups to the Ottoman Empire. Eager to support the Armenians waging an asymmetric battle against the Ottoman military in Sassoun, the ARF in the Russian Empire sent group after group of Armenian revolutionaries, but most were killed crossing the border, long before reaching Sassoun. Sergei itched to cross the border and join the Armenians there. “Sassoun’s untimely eruption, the failed attempts of countless arms-smuggling groups and their annihilation on the border, and the martyrdom of my close friends had rendered me hopeless. I was tormented by the thought that everyone went and got massacred, and I, as if through my cunning, stayed behind,” he wrote later. By the time Sergei managed to cross the border, Sassoun had fallen to Ottoman armies. He had to settle for Van.

From the Furnace into the Inferno

An incident in Sergei’s journey to Van, prior to crossing the Iranian border, stands out as a testament to what he himself referred to as “revolutionary inexperience.” Staying in the house of an Armenian family in a village while he awaited a Turkish guide to help him and his comrades cross the Araxes River to Iran, Sergei decided to disassemble the dynamite capsules he was carrying with him to render them safer for travel on horseback. He laid out the explosives on the table and started emptying the capsules, engaging the host family, a couple and their child, in the process. Suddenly, a capsule in Sergei’s hands caught fire, and the flame engulfed everything on the table. “I automatically threw myself under the table. The schoolteacher and his wife, less experienced, remained standing and were exposed to the blow of the horrible explosion. The schoolteacher lost a few fingers and his face was burned. The poor wife, and especially the child, received greater injuries,” he confessed.

“I sort of knew just a little bit about explosives, more in the theoretical sense than in the practical, as I had only once or twice been present at tests, conducted by others at that,” he acknowledged. The incident, recounted by Sergei himself in a forthright manner, points to the reality that he was still a work in progress as he left the revolutionary crucible of Kars and journeyed to Van. He was yet to become a “born leader.”

The harsh winter conditions impeded Sergei’s journey, imposing on him a four-month stint (October 1904-January 1905) at the St. Thaddeus Monastery in Northern Iran near the Ottoman border. He wrote to Koms (Vahram Papazian), the leader of the ARF in Van, from the monastery, explaining his circumstances: “I am forced to stay here until spring; the roads are buried in snow.” This, the oldest surviving letter we have from Sergei, is signed “Aram.” This is also the earliest instance the nom de guerre appears (henceforth, I shall refer to him as Aram). He went on to report, “In the spring, I am hoping that at the earliest opportunity we can send large amounts of dough and apples.” It is not that Aram was into the production of apple pie. In Dashnak-speak, dough was understood to be gunpowder, and apples were bombs.

Curiously, Aram touted his expertise in “dough and apples operations” in this letter, written only a few weeks after the explosion that maimed three people. It is possible that he was simply playing up his knowledge of explosives. Yet a more plausible explanation is that his “revolutionary inexperience” right before crossing the border to the inferno of Yerkir alarmed him, and he decided to use his stay at St. Thaddeus Monastery to educate himself on explosives (one of his three companions was an expert) and peruse the encyclopedias and books at the monastery to deepen his knowledge on everything he deemed relevant to his mission. The letters Aram sent to Van from the monastery support this hypothesis. In one, he writes to Koms at length about the advantages of breeding carrier pigeons, and how he himself has started doing so after reading about them in an encyclopedia. “There is dedicated literature on the subject. If you want, I can send you at least what’s in the encyclopedic dictionary, which can serve as a reliable guide,” he wrote. It is unclear what happened to Aram’s proposal, but two months later, in early February, Aram finally arrived in Van after a tumultuous journey, and Koms welcomed him warmly: “The first time I met him, I already felt that the newcomer was a serious, mature, and capable asset of a person,” Koms wrote in his memoir, extolling Aram’s experience in Baku, Kars, and the borderlands between Russia and Iran.

That region in the aughts of the 20^th century was bustling with revolutionary activity, and Aram quickly asserted himself, despite initial resistance from the local party members, who typically viewed the revolutionaries arriving from the Caucasus with suspicion. Within months, Aram became a pillar of the ARF’s Van operation, extending the organization’s reach and forging alliances. Contemporaries praise Aram’s efforts to find common ground and cooperate with other Armenian groups, like the Hnchakians and, in particular, the Armenakans, as well as “neutral” Armenian circles. “Aram was adept at making a good impression, generating affinity, and gradually bringing others into the fold,” observed Koms.

Circumstances on the ground contributed to Aram’s ascent: Koms left Van soon after Aram’s arrival, leaving a void that Aram readily filled. However, Aram was first and foremost engaged in the process of procuring weapons from Russia and arranging their transport to Van, in fulfillment of the ARF’s plan to arm the Armenian peasantry in the region and prepare them for self-defense against local aggression and extirpation. This was his main role in the region until he left for the Fourth ARF World Congress, held in Vienna in early 1907.

Betrayal

Aram’s letters were full of instructions about effective and safe modes of transportation of bomb-making materials. In a letter dated March 11, 1905 addressed to Malkhas (Artashes Hovsepian), he explained his tactics to discourage betrayal and ensure the safer transport of goods. For example, sellers and transporters were not paid for the service rendered until the next time they rendered service. Always owed pay, sometimes significant amounts, these local Kurds and Turks had a vested interest in keeping their mouths shut, lest they lose their money if the authorities arrested their contacts.

But the greatest betrayal, one of the costliest in Armenian revolutionary history, was not committed by Kurds or Turks, but by an Armenian revolutionary. Davo was in a relationship with Satenig, the sister of Ales, a fellow revolutionary. When Satenig became pregnant, Ales threatened to kill Davo unless the ARF resolved the issue. Davo refused to marry Satenig and accused Aram of impregnating her. The party made it clear that Davo must either marry Satenig or suffer the consequences of his act. The confrontation led Davo to engage in the unthinkable: He went to the Ottoman authorities and exposed the locations of numerous ARF weapons caches, in return for protection.

The betrayal brought the powder keg of Van to the brink of explosion. A flurry of actions followed: The ARF moved weapons caches to new locations; the Ottoman authorities cracked down on the revolutionaries in the region and placed Van under siege; Dajad Terlemezian, an ARF member in his late teens, assassinated Davo following party orders; 19 revolutionaries, including Aram and Dajad, went into hiding in a well. This brings us to March 6, 1908.

From Freedom to Independence

Had it not been for the Young Turk coup (known as the Young Turk Revolution) of July 1908, Aram would have likely been hanged and remembered today primarily as a revolutionary who smuggled hundreds of kilograms of explosives and thousands of weapons from the Russian Empire into the Ottoman Empire to defend the Armenian peasantry against Turkish and Kurdish oppression. But the coup ushered in a brief period of freedom, and the ARF leaders, allies of the Young Turks in the revolution, were released from prison.

Thirty-year-old Aram was a free man—and, finally, a “born leader.” During the next decade, he would successfully lead the defense of Van against the Ottoman military, save tens of thousands of Armenians from imminent murder, become the temporary governor of Van after the withdrawal of the Turkish forces, and then emerge as the founder of the First Armenian Republic as Tsarist Russia faltered. He died of typhus in Yerevan on January 29, 1919. His funeral in Yerevan was one of the most widely attended the Armenian nation had ever witnessed. In his eulogy, ARF leader and statesman Nikol Aghbalian told the nation: “When the night falls, withdraw into the back chambers of your souls, speak to your conscience, and ask: Have you worked for the Armenian people as Aram has? Have you been as self-sacrificing? Have you dedicated your entire life to the Armenian people as Aram has?”

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Note: This article is an excerpt from a much longer manuscript titled “Becoming Aram: The Life and Legacy of a Revolutionary Statesman,” currently under review for publication. This project was partially funded by a travel and research grant from the Knights of Vartan Fund for Armenian Studies (FAS), administered by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR). Aram’s letters referenced in this article are housed in the ARF Archives in Boston.

Author information

Khatchig Mouradian

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is the Nikit and Eleanora Ordjanian Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Previously, he served as the Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor at CSU Fresno (Fall 2016 Semester). In 2015-2016, Mouradian was a visiting assistant professor at the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University, where he also served as the program coordinator of the Armenian Genocide Program at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR). Since 2014, Mouradian has taught courses on imperialism, mass violence, human rights, concentration camps, urban space and conflict in the Middle East, and collective memory in the History and Sociology departments at Rutgers and at Worcester State University. Mouradian holds a PhD in History from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Mouradian was the editor of the Armenian Weekly from 2007-2014.

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From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

The establishment of the First Armenian Republic took place at one of the most crucial periods of the Armenian nation’s history. Having just suffered genocide, and in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, the Armenian people and its leaders were forced to confront a massive new challenge—in the form Ottoman-Turkish Army advancing toward Yerevan.

The crucial battles at Sardarabad, Bash-Abaran, and Gharakilisa in May 1918 stopped the advance of the Ottoman forces and pushed them back, thus creating a safe haven for both the survivors of the Genocide and for the Russian Armenians in Yerevan and surrounding territories. Both populations were in desperate straits after the fall of czarist regime in Russia and the subsequent political and military chaos in the Caucasus. Heroic Armenian resistance and Turkish defeat resulted in the opportunity for Armenian leaders to proclaim an independent Armenian Republic after similar proclamations by the Georgians and Azerbaijani Turks.

After the defeat and withdrawal of the Ottoman Army from the Caucasus, a relatively calm period ensued, helping to foster state-building and the strengthening of the Armenian Army. Despite all odds and numerous hardships, the leadership of newly created republic, along with Armenian communities worldwide, celebrated the establishment of Armenian statehood.

As one might imagine, creating a festive atmosphere in a newly independent state overwhelmed with refugees and a population on its last legs was extremely difficult. And though Armenia and the Diaspora celebrated the first two anniversaries of the independent Republic, after its Sovietization the people of Armenia no longer could, for decades thereafter.

Some unique memorabilia of the First Republic period, as well as photographs showing the parades and other celebrations that took place in Armenia, have survived. One of those interesting photos was taken on May 28, 1920, when Armenia was proclaimed “United and Independent.” The procession on the central Astafian (now Abovyan) Street in Yerevan, the capital of the hunger- and war-stricken republic, featured two floats and rows of Armenian soldiers on one side of the street and rows of orphans on the other. Among the flags representing the diplomatic and military missions in Armenia, the US flag is visible. The woman standing in the front car is dressed in black, symbolizing the past and suffering of Armenia, while another, younger woman dressed in white stands on the other car, symbolizing the future and national rebirth of Armenia, with two children at her side. The children, holding hands, are dressed as Turkish and Russian Armenians. Posters surround “New Armenia” bearing the names of the cities and regions of Armenia, such as Van, Mush, Ani, and Tigranakert.

Another fascinating photograph depicts a triumphal arch in Yerevan, on Astafian Street, crowned with the coat of arms of the new republic, and HH-Hayastani Hanrapetutiun (RA – Republic of Armenia) and Ketseh Miatsial yev Ankakh Hayastanuh (Long Live United and Independent Armenia) written on either side. Armenian army detachments would have paraded through that arch.

A photograph preserved at the Mekhitarist Monastery in Vienna depicts Mekhitarist clergymen with a young lady holding an Armenian tricolor. The flag used during the same celebration is displayed in the congregation’s museum.

Rare memorabilia—posters, anniversary programs, fundraising receipts, and other rare glimpses into the First Republic—continue to be preserved in museums and private collections, giving us an important understanding of the mood and sacrifices our people in those crucial years.

The postcards and various ephemera of the time bore images of Mother Armenia as a seated, mourning woman amid the ruins of Armenia. Today, she has become a young heroine calling for struggle and the revival of a nation.

Author information

Hayk Demoyan

Dr. Hayk Demoyan is the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI) and a U.S. Fulbright visiting scholar at the Davis center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University, where he researches identity transformation processes in the South Caucasus. Demoyan is also the head of the scientific council of the AGMI and the chief editor of the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies. He is a graduate of Yerevan State University (1998) and received his degree of Doctor of historical sciences from the Armenian National Academy of Sciences in 2012. From 2011 to 2015, Demoyan was the Secretary of the State Commission on the coordination of the events dedicated to the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. He is the author of 12 books and more than 40 academic articles. In 2018, he published Armenian Legacy in America: 400-Year Heritage, a volume dedicated to the arrival of the first Armenian in Virginia back in 1618.

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From the Armenian Weekly 2018 Magazine Dedicated to the Centennial of the First Republic of Armenia

This special magazine issue of the Hairenik newspapers is dedicated to the 100^th anniversary of the First Armenian Republic (1918-1920). Other contributors to this issue will supply fascinating details, commentary, and context regarding the legacy of the Republic. Here, I wish only to broadly comment on some of the circumstances under which the government of the Republic functioned, as indicated by documents in the archives located in the Hairenik building.

Independent Armenia was declared during one of the most desperate times in Armenian history, via a simple statement issued in Tiflis (Tbilisi) by a representative body: “The Armenian National Council declares itself the supreme and sole administration of the Armenian provinces.”

Having been left to its own devices by both Georgia and Azerbaijan, and with the complete annihilation of Armenians barely forestalled by the victories of Armenian military and volunteer forces against the Turkish army at the battles of Sardarabad, Bash-Abaran, and Gharakilisa, Armenia was compelled to accede to the harsh provisions of the Treaty of Batum with Turkey.

The birth of the First Republic was marked by an immense refugee crisis stemming from the Armenian Genocide, with the remnants of the massacred populations of Turkish (Western) Armenia having found refuge in Russian (Eastern) Armenia.

The government of the First Republic, though preoccupied with ameliorating the harsh conditions confronting the population, was not consumed solely with humanitarian concerns. Many early documents in the archives also contain survivor testimony and criminal complaints against the perpetrators of the Genocide. Of course, that process was not merely a documentation of past crimes but also of the ongoing victimization of the Armenian people.

The Republic faced insurmountable financial challenges, as well. Money was needed both to feed the population and to acquire weaponry to protect it. Accordingly, there are numerous reports on Armenia’s resources (military, mineral, water, agriculture, etc.), as well as the demographic composition and socioeconomic condition of the population.

The hopes, aspirations, and desperation related to the negotiations at the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference are palpable in the correspondence, meeting minutes, and the diaries of key actors. The government of the First Republic played a role in the issues and aspirations of Western Armenians, viewing those concerns as integral to the survival of the Republic itself.

Moreover, references to the ongoing disputes regarding Nakhichevan, Zangezur, and Artsakh (Karabagh), as well as threats confronting their indigenous Armenian populations, can also be found in these documents.

Viewing those documents in their totality, one clearly understands how the leading figures and statesmen of the Republic considered themselves a government for all Armenians.

One cannot but hold immeasurable respect for those who formed a functioning government under unimaginably difficult conditions in 1918. Though facing significant challenges today, the current independent Armenian Republic (1991) has, in comparison, significant advantages unavailable during the dark days of the First Republic.

Still, appropriately recognizing, honoring, and emulating the legacy of the First Republic would afford today’s Armenia an invaluable opportunity to further consolidate its own independence, placing it on a more democratic and secure footing.

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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It has been over three weeks since we are living in a different Armenia. Now, in just a few days, the interim government will present its program of short term policies. Many are hopeful about the potential for positive change, but others are more cautious. How much change will actually be possible?

It’s helpful to remember that from the start, the leaders of Armenia’s peaceful revolution were consistent in outlining several very concrete main goals. The first, to elect their leader, Nikol Pashinyan, as interim prime minister has been achieved. Also achieved: their goal of forming and appointing a temporary government. Still in the works are the implementation of legislative changes to the electoral code and changing laws on political parties to ensure fair and free snap elections (predicted to be organized this autumn). Additionally, they have stated intentions to clear state bodies of special interests and work to eliminate corruption in the country. (To this end, a new body was recently established, called the “State Oversight Service of Armenia” run by Davit Sanasaryan.)

But while these broader goals are enough to keep the newly formed apparatus fully busy, citizens are already following up expectations for problems in more specific, regional interests to be addressed.

Hopeful Expectations

Geographer and environmental activist Levon Galstyan hopes for changes in the country’s environmental policy. “All previous governments of Armenia viewed environmental issues as a last priority in their political agenda,” he says, “They didn’t realize that ecological security is equal to national security in Armenia. I hope the new government approaches environmental issues with this in mind and based on it creates environmental policy for the state.” But though for Galstyan hopes for environmental change, he does not expect it immediately. He realizes the new government is temporary and has a specific agenda (i.e. fixing the electoral process), on which it must focus in order for future change to be possible.

Gohar Stepanyan is a cultural anthropologist who also believes that establishing a rule of law should be the government’s first priority, but a close second for her is education. Stepanyan says she hopes to see the “recovery of the educational sphere, in short and long term programs. Both local and international experts, researchers in different fields should be involved in teaching. As a representative of science, I would also highlight the need for new approaches to developing science. There are many initiatives from the scientific community, but the state also has to be receptive towards them.”

Journalist Arman Gharibyan is hopeful about the government’s stated ambitions to curb corruption in the country, but he hopes that this will come with much more visible steps than taken in previous attempts. “I imagine this to be done in no other way than holding high ranking officials accountable, maybe already former officials, who committed crimes and appropriated state money.” He adds that this is also important to ensure that in the future new members of the government and other officials will keep in mind that they will not be immune from liability.

Cautious Skepticism

Anna Kamay, a local curator, believes the time frame is too short to expect too much from this government. “We now see that a process has started similar to Georgia’s, as the prime minister’s team works toward eliminating corruption. Yet there is no certainty if it will be possible to fully eliminate it, also taking account Georgia’s case where at higher levels corruption still remains. The only expectation [I have] from the new temporary government is the organization of just elections as Nikol has promised us.”

As for her field of work—arts—Kamay adds that she will continue pursuing her art projects hoping for a support from the respective ministry. “The newly appointed minister of Culture has little background in this sphere, but [it might actually be a good thing], in the sense that she might be objective,” which Kamay says would be a change from her predecessors.

Anna Nikoghosyan is a feminist scholar and activist, whose skepticism revolves around the appointments that have been made to Pashinyan’s cabinet. “There were appointments that made me optimistic, like for example, the minister of education and minister of justice,” she says, “but others suggest that… class, social, economic, environmental, and feminist issues will continue to stay on the fringes, so we are going to be the ones trying to push for changes in these areas.”

Based on this cabinet, Nikoghosyan says she expects the least change in terms of feminist reforms. “The fight that we went through showed that patriarchal approaches have not declined at all, as it was mostly men speaking from the platform, even though women did a lot of work as well, or the posts that were appointed in the government, ministries, only two women appointed to decision making posts. And for me, this is a real problem, as in terms of gender balance, there is no real change,” she continues cautiously, “The temporary government should go after goals that are possible to realize in short terms which are eliminating corruption and ensuring free, just and transparent elections.”

Another point of criticism has targeted the experience and particularly the age of many of Nikol’s appointees, who have been younger than in previous administrations. But according to Babken DerGrigorian, a diasporan himself who was recently appointed Deputy Minister of Diaspora, younger faces mean fresher perspectives.

“I’ve been at the job for a few days already and I am seeing that this team has a lot to offer. First of all, a new vision for Armenia, for the government. Secondly, I think we have a morally different approach to governance, a lot of things that were acceptable for the old system, for us they are completely unacceptable, such as inefficient management. We may be inexperienced, but we know what is efficient and what’s not. After all, this is a team of activists and organizers. These are very goal oriented people. We measure our actions based on the end goal that we are trying to reach.”

But at the end of the day, says DerGrigorian, though there are many hopes for broader reforms, the top priority remains the organization of fair elections. Without that first important step, Pashinyan’s team believes, nothing else will be possible.

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It is not likely to, in 20 days, completely shake up an old system, which was the last twenty years in the making. But for the future, it will be important to bear in mind that key to Armenia’s success will be the individual contributions made by each and every one of us. Government should not have a monopoly over the process of state-building. Only through the cooperation of people and politicians can we achieve the country we always thought we deserved.

Author information

Sofia Manukyan

Sofia Manukyan is a staff writer at the Armenian Weekly. Her specialization is in the field of human rights impacted by the private sector. She is particularly interested in how private interests impact the environment and socio-economics. She holds a degree in human rights from the University of Essex. In Armenia she is mostly engaged with promoting environmental protection and labor rights.

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Stand outside of any supermarket in Yerevan for an afternoon and Armenia’s plastic problem comes into focus. In a larger, wealthier nation, it’s easy to lose sight of the waste stream, or how our plastics end up in landfills and waterways. In Armenia, plastic pollutants are impossible to ignore. Trash is everywhere, and it has nowhere to go.

The current administration hopes to change this. In July, the Minister of Nature Protection Erik Grigoryan announced a broad policy decision to ban single use plastics: first, implemented in a single community, then scaled upward. Deputy Minister Irina Ghaplanyan outlined this announcement further, clarifying specific goals and certain obstacles on the road to a cleaner Armenia.

Toprak Trouble: New policy tries to sort out Armenia’s plastic problem

Out of all of the issues of environmental protection sitting on Ghaplanyan’s desk, plastic is the most visible.

“For a landlocked country, we have a serious problem of solid waste pollution of our rivers and Lake Sevan,” said Ghaplanyan. “This [ban] is something that has to happen one way or another.”

Ghaplanyan defined single-use plastics as plastic bags, plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and plastic cutlery. Developing sustainable and controlled alternatives to food packaging presents another challenge, one that the Ministry will tackle in a later phase.

According to Ghaplanyan, the administration has already begun its partnership with Talin, a town of 3,800 in the Aragotsotn province which is already home to the largest solar power plant in Armenia. The official plastic ban in the community is set to kick off this fall. The Ministry picked Talin to pilot the ban because its demographics and infrastructure fit neatly within their vision. The town is not too small, but not too big either. Talin also lacks organized irrigation, and faces endemic poverty and out-migration. Most importantly, the town has displayed the “readiness of community leaders to take on this challenging project,” Ghaplanyan said.

The Ministry will invite its international partners to Talin, where they can freely implement existing and planned “green” projects. The hope is that by streamlining, each project will ensure the sustainability of another.

“Talin will serve as a mental exercise to inspire a shift in national behavior,” Ghaplanyan said.

“We want it to be a small success story, but a home-born success story, so that we may point to that community and say, ‘It worked here, so there’s no reason it won’t work in yours.’”

In parallel with the Talin project, the Ministry is currently drafting legislative plans to contain the largest source of plastic angst: bags and bottles. A transitional plastic bag tax will be the next move, slated for January 1, 2019.

This is a tax, not a fee; the revenue will not be absorbed by stores, but will be collected by tax agencies and reallocated to environmental protection. If properly adopted and regulated, Ghaplanyan says the Ministry will have a better idea of when to move into the next phase: the national ban.

Plastic bags are a nuisance on the Armenian landscape, said Alen Amirkhanian, former advisor to the Ministry of Nature Protection and current director of the American University of Armenia’s Acopian Center for the Environment. Bags are carried away by the wind and the country’s waterways, and cling to plants, trees, and bushes, creating a visual impact of chaos. Ghaplanyan similarly identified plastic bags as a the logical place to begin this nebulous effort.

“We believe that we need to join the ranks of countries that have already banned plastic bags as soon as possible, because with that, comes expert and financial assistance that we are desperate to receive,” Ghaplanyan explained. “[Armenia has] a lot of environmental issues, and we do not have the capacity to find sustainable solutions to all of them.”

For perspective, Amirkhanian pointed to the fact that on a global scale, the per capita plastic and consumer waste generated in Armenia is relatively low. He places the number in between 800 grams and 1 kilogram, while the average global citizen creates at least 1.2 kilograms a day, per a 2012 study by the World Bank. (In the U.S., the average consumer generates nearly 2 kilograms, making its residents the most wasteful in the world.)

Perhaps the problem in Armenia is that waste is not properly managed, Amirkhanian suggested. If so, Armenia is far from alone on this issue, which plagues municipal governments everywhere. As reported by Armenian Weekly, Armenia lacks a single sanitary landfill to meet the needs of Armenia’s rural or urban regions. Current plans to build one in southeast Yerevan have drawn ire for lacking a resource recovery component, a requirement by EU standards. The municipal government said it cannot afford to include a recycling component unless it pays for itself, despite the project’s 24 million euro budget. Several private and foreign-owned companies currently offer recycling services, yet collection rates are extremely low. In the meantime, residents resort to “unofficial” dumping and burning of trash throughout the region.

Of course, the fastest way to manage waste, especially in cities, is to decrease economic activity and reduce consumption; but to anyone accustomed to the grotesque convenience of the resource-intensive, consumer-based economic lifestyle, this is not an attractive option.

It is also worth noting that plastic bags carry a particular ‘baggage’ in post-Soviet countries. To transport groceries and other goods, citizens of the USSR carried a netted, cloth grocery bag on their person at all times (which came to be jokingly referred to in Russian as avoiska, the “what if” bags, as you never knew when you would need them). As a result, reusability came to be associated with many of the hardships and scarcity of Soviet life, in which resources were not always readily available. In contrast, in the nineties after the USSR collapsed, certain stores began offering plastic bags as a courtesy to consumers. They were welcomed into society for their convenience, perceived luxury, and abundance.

Supermarkets in Armenia today resemble their Western counterparts more closely than their Soviet-era ones; but unfortunately, so do the country’s problems with trash. Unlike the varieties of shampoo that now line the shelves of Armenian supermarkets, solutions to Armenia’s trash woes won’t fit in a plastic bag.

While this seems like a bleak point of departure, attitudes towards plastics everywhere are changing. Charged by the disturbing images of plastic waste contaminating oceans and landscapes, countries from Kenya to China are adopting policies to reduce single-use plastics and embrace more sustainable alternatives. The Republic of Georgia, which shares one of Armenia’s open borders, only embraced resource recovery within the last 3 years, and reportedly banned plastic bags in 2017. Like Armenia, Georgia has multiple plastic bag suppliers within the country.

Given the raison d’etre of Armenia’s current administration, and the ideology of personal responsibility that they champion, there is truly no better time for Armenia to take action on single use plastics. Ghaplanyan recalled how after mass gatherings, a critical space during the Velvet Revolution, young people would return the next morning to pick up leftover trash.

“A green Armenia, leading the region, and even the rest of the world would be a sense of pride for younger generations to feel more connected to the country,” Ghaplanyan said. “Certainly, I’m taking a step further and saying that the environment should be a uniting platform for the Armenian transnation.”

However, for a ban to take hold, a mass awareness campaign must first reach the average consumer. Ghaplanyan said the Ministry is developing its approach to educating the public on the issue, of which the pilot ban in Talin is a central part. The Ministry also plans to use their television airtime to release a series of PSA’s.

“People are intelligent consumers,” Amirkhanian said. “They may not be aware, but they are critical thinkers.”

Asking Armenians: It’s Not Personal, It’s Plastic

To find out what regular people thought of the ban, my friend Ani and I went around the city to ask them. Our first stop was the Nor Zovq supermarket on Saryan Street. Nor Zovq was one of several supermarkets to begin charging customers for plastic bags in 2016, instead of covering the cost through products.

You would think that the extra fee might discourage shoppers from accepting bags, but given the steady flow of plastic bag-laden shoppers, it appears 10 dram (2 cents) is a negligible amount. Most customers hardly notice it.

We encountered Ambat Bayaltan exiting the store holding a bag that contained a single bottle of Coca-Cola. He said he knew plastic bags don’t break down, but before abstaining from them entirely, wished to know more about alternatives: “If they’re free, then of course. But if they’re not, then it depends on how much they cost.”

Anna Sahakyan recently visited New York, and was impressed by their recycling program. “You know, I would be more for it if there was a recycling program for plastic bottles and bags than a ban,” she said, “Just like it’s done outside of Armenia, there should be a day where plastic bottles and everything else could be recycled.”

While these conversations were happening, a store employee spoke up to say that reusable bags would never work. “They’re not convenient,” he chimed, “They’re not convenient.”

Outside of the supermarket, we chatted with Ruzanna Ghukasyan, whose small fruit stand relies heavily on plastic. “If I can’t use plastic, then I can’t sell my fruit. If they give me paper that looks nice, that doesn’t smell and that holds up, that would be better. But if not, what else can I do?”

She explained that each morning, a plastic distributor comes to her stand to sell her hundreds of bags. Sometimes, they even try to sell her fewer bags for the same price. Ghukasyan trusts “Nikol” to make this problem right, and used an endearing Armenian idiom to convey her affection to the new Prime Minister (an expression too colorful, unfortunately, to be published here).

Harut Ptukyan is the shopkeeper of a small convenience store, which sells mostly soft drinks, gum, and cigarettes. Plastic bags are affordable for him and his customers, he argued. The ban might work in a European city, “but would not work for our country.”

“There are lots of things that are bad for the environment,” he said, “like cars driven with gas.” As for the trees outside of Yerevan laden with plastic bags? “That’s the trash collector’s fault,” he replied.

Even in a country as small as Armenia, the connection between a bag used once and caught on a tree for half a millenia can feel pointless, and distant. But hope remains that Armenians will be able to see past this dissonance, and look towards a future in which we use precious resources to meet real needs, instead of our immediate desires.

Back at Nor Zovq, Garen Ananian walked out of the supermarket with a plastic bag. The ban is correct, he said, of course it’s correct. But what will it change?

“Has anything changed after the revolution?” my colleague responded.

Garen thought about it for a second. “That’s another conversation.”

Street interviews by Ani Yavrenc

Author information

Elize Manoukian

Elize Manoukian is a Californian fugitive currently hiding out somewhere in Yerevan. She enjoys baking fruit tarts, trouble makers, and ruthless criticisms of everything existing.

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Although I have spent the last 45 years in the United States, I consider myself more of a citizen of the world.

For thirty years, I was a journalist. I learned to explore and explain everything around me, ranging from political developments to everyday matters. But in 2015, after 30 years at the Voice of America, I decided it was time to retire.

VOA is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the government agency that oversees all non-military, U.S. international broadcasting. It is funded by the U.S. Congress.

My years at VOA were some of the most interesting and productive of my life. I witnessed many changes in the world and in broadcasting. I didn’t just watch history unfold; I told it as it was unfolding. And as a result, I played a part in changing it.

When I joined the Armenian Service in June of 1980, Armenia was still part of the Soviet Union. People in the office were still using manual typewriters to report the news.

Broadcasts in Armenian had started nearly three decades earlier in 1951. Up until that point, all broadcasting was done in Russian and Ukrainian, the languages of the two major political entities. At that time, Moscow interpreted our broadcasting as an openly hostile act, reflecting a foreign policy aimed at the eventual dismemberment of the Soviet Union.

And they weren’t entirely wrong. According to Edward Alexander, the first Armenian Service Chief, the use of these languages “was a direct channel to peoples of Soviet Union for information about the United States, to counteract the [USSR’s] distorted propaganda.”

The first Armenian-language broadcasts consisted of a one-hour radio program. The first 10 minutes covered international news, followed by short four to five minute backgrounders and analytical features about current events, Armenia and other neighboring countries. The last half hour usually consisted of features about life in America, reports on Armenian community events and interviews with Armenian-Americans.  The daily one-hour daily radio show always ended with a five-minute news summary.

Shortly after, electric typewriters were introduced, followed by computers with custom made Armenian font. VOA had just started using tapes for recording (before that they were recording on huge plastic disks.)

My first 10 years at the Armenian Service were extremely interesting. I polished skills in writing radio pieces, conducting interviews, and hosting live radio programs. I also occasionally traveled around the country to cover events in the Armenian community and historic American celebrations, such as the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in New York in 1986.

During President Reagan’s administration, public diplomacy became more important, and the Soviet bloc language services began to receive more resources to enrich programming. A 15-minute, live breakfast show was added to the existing one-hour live evening radio show. At the time, Soviet government officials in Armenia were jamming all radio programs (Beginning in 1948, as part of efforts to censor information and political news from outside the iron curtain, the USSR made frequent use of radio jamming from VOA and other western radio programs, including BBC.)

Years later, in 1993, after the independence of Armenia was established, I visited Armenia and I met one such person—whose job during the Soviet years was to jam the very programs I had toiled to air.

Nevertheless, local audiences managed to follow our programs, and VOA’s popularity grew tremendously throughout the eighties. The programs were broadcast on several short and medium wave frequencies, and listeners switched from one to another to avoid the jamming. As the host of the one-hour radio show, I had to repeat the list of radio frequencies in our broadcasts, at least twice, at the beginning and ending of the show.

I especially enjoyed writing special radio features about life in America, American music, and new developments in science and medicine. Another memorable trip was to Nashville, Tennessee, the music capital of the country. A group of our music programmers met with songwriters and famous American musicians and performers and reported about the music industry, which, at that time, was considered America’s biggest export industry.

In 1985, the Politburo of the USSR Communist Party Central Committee elected Mikhail Gorbachev as its new General Secretary. This event initiated the internal transformation of the Soviet Union and at the end of the eighties, under Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and “perestroika” movements, Armenia began to move away from Moscow (though Moscow’s suppression of the Armenian democratic movement continued in less obvious ways, avoiding any action that would trigger mass revolt in Armenia). During this period, the VOA Armenian Service was crucial in providing information to the country.

In 1987, one of the leaders of the democratic movement, Paruir Hairikyan, was stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled to Ethiopia following his accusations that the Soviet leadership had instigated the Sumgait Pogroms of the Armenian population in Azerbaijan. From Ethiopia, Mr. Hairikyan contacted the VOA Armenian Service, and we ran an interview with him, where he described how the Russian KGB had secretly arrested him after he met with officials from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. I had the privilege of interviewing him.

After this, the independence movement finally gained wider support, and Armenia finally declared its independence in 1991. I covered the young republic’s first democratic presidential elections, interviewing all the candidates.

One of the most heartbreaking moments of my career was the devastating Spitak earthquake in December of 1988, killing almost 20,000 people.  The natural disaster cut off all communication between Armenia and outside, but the Voice of America’s shortwave broadcasting was still sending reports oversees from the U.S. During this time, it was the only way people in Armenia could learn about their own situation and, in particular, about outside efforts to help them.

At one point following the earthquake, a priest from an Armenian church in Washington contacted me at VOA to ask if I could interview him about a plane shipment of relief equipment that was being sent to Armenia, donated by the Diaspora. The broadcast would be the only medium through which he could communicate with people on the ground in Armenia. He hoped that the Armenian Catholicos, the supreme leader of the church, might get the message and distribute the resources to people in need.

We did the interview, during which he announced the exact date and time when the plane was scheduled to land in Armenia. Indeed, the Catholicos of Armenia, who was a loyal VOA program follower, came to the airport to receive the aid, which otherwise would have fallen into the hands of corrupt officials, in which case it is likely the materials would never have made it into the hands of the people, who desperately needed the help.

From 1988 to 1992, we put a great emphasis on radio programming to help Armenia on the road to peace and democracy; we produced a radio series on democracy, democratic institutions, women’s issues, and developments in science, medicine, business, and the environment. Then, in 1992, my husband was transferred to Saudi Arabia for work. I took a five-year hiatus from my role at VOA to accompany him with our two small children, though I periodically sent in freelance articles from the Middle East. In 1998, I returned to the U.S. and also, to VOA’s Armenian Service, but this time, as Service Chief.

We continued building on past accomplishments and innovating, but in 2004, we faced a major challenge. Due to budget cuts, VOA announced that the Bulgarian, Estonian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Slovenian language services would end their regularly scheduled programs.  Although the Armenian language radio program was not eliminated, it suffered  severe cuts and was directed to use the remaining resources to maximize its impact in post-Soviet Armenia, the target region.

Several Armenia TV executives, who had visited VOA Armenian Service during a U.S. State Department-hosted tour to learn about free press practices in the U.S., were eager to partner with VOA. Out of these, VOA chose Armenia TV, the second major TV station in Armenia after the state sponsored Public TV. Armenia TV was more Western-oriented than other television outlets in the country at that time, likely in no small part because it was financially supported by a U.S. Armenian businessman and philanthropist, Gerard Cafesjian. They used cutting edge technology to broadcast programs that reached not only the whole country, but also Diaspora communities around the world, including the Middle East and the U.S. In May of 2004, VOA Marketing offered and signed its first affiliate contract with Armenia TV Company.

For the last 11 years, the Armenian Service has continued to produce two VOA Armenian programs: Armenian Daily Report, which airs, Monday-Friday, consisting of 10-minute news and a feature program; and Armenia TV Magazine, a 20-minute standalone program that includes feature stories and interviews about Armenian Diaspora life and other Armenia related events in the Washington, D.C area. These programs are fed to Armenia TV every day for broadcasting within their network.In addition, the Armenian Service has web and mobile sites, and is available on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

With very limited resources, the Service is able to maintain high quality TV programming for the target area. According to a Gallup survey, the Armenian Service accounts for most of Armenia’s U.S. international media audience, with a total weekly audience reach of 33.7 percent.

During my television coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, I met with an Armenian presidential candidate at an election party convention in Boston. Stephan Demirchian was part of a visiting group made of presidential candidates from former Soviet republics.  The visit was sponsored by a U.S. NGO to exemplify political freedom in presidential elections. Mr. Demirchian was most impressed with how the opposition party candidate campaigned freely in the US, and how the voters were allowed to cheer for their candidate and criticize the government in power. During our conversation, he seemed sad, and at one point, he told me it would take many years to establish this kind of freedom in Armenia.

It seems those many years have passed—and that day has come. I am proud of Armenia’s citizens for standing up to corruption and achieving a peaceful revolution. I am proud of Armenia’s press for unwaveringly reporting news about the historic demonstrations to the Diaspora and the rest of the world. Much has changed since I began reporting on Armenia’s current affairs nearly three decades ago; much, it seems, for the better.

Note from the Editors: Araxie Vann, née Kazandjian, began her career in journalism in the seventies at the Hairenik and Armenian Weekly offices, back when they were located in Copley Square (not Watertown, as they are today). She worked for the Hairenik newspaper, the Armenian-language counterpart to the Weekly, as a translator, where she translated texts from Eastern Armenian and English into Western Armenian, before embarking on her VOA career at the State Department. For full disclosure, nearly fifty years later, her daughter is an editor at the English-language counterpart to that very newspaper. It speaks to the generational role that these newspapers have played in the Armenian community, that the Armenian and Hairenik Weekly newspapers continue to offer stepping stones into the world of journalism to current and future generations of Diasporans. 

Author information

Araxie Vann

Araxie Vann was born in Yerevan in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1973, settling in Lynn, Mass. She received a B.A. in Russian Language and Economics from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Norwich University. Her original goal was to teach Russian. However, in 1980 she moved to Washington DC to work at the Voice of America’s Armenian Service as an international radio broadcaster, covering international news in the Armenian language, where she eventually became Service Chief. After retiring, she hopes to return to her original goal of teaching the languages of her native country, Armenian and Russian. She feels that the knowledge of foreign languages resolves many problems and breaks down the barriers between countries. In particular, she wants to teach the Russian language, because she feels that superpower countries like the US and Russia have a lot more in common than they realize, and that knowledge of Russian will lead to better understanding and build mutually beneficial conditions for world peace.

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In a classroom decorated with ancient and modern maps and photos of students in front of statues and monuments, restless high school juniors dressed in navy and plaid uniforms are seated at their desks trying to follow along with their teacher’s lesson of the day. Hanging overhead is a tricolor flag—red, blue and orange. This is a daily Armenian language class at AGBU Manoukian High School in Pasadena, California.

“What is the first thing Armenians build when they migrate to a new place?” Ms. Lora Kuyumjian, a 40-year Armenian teacher, proudly asked her class.

“Schools and churches,” the students responded, almost mechanically.

Armenian school students living in the Diaspora say this piece of knowledge is passed onto them from day one. The concept of cultural preservation is deeply ingrained in these young Armenian Americans by their families and by the schools.

In large part as a result of the Armenian Genocide, Armenians are spread out in almost every corner of the world. There are more Armenians living outside of Armenia, than in the country itself. The result: Armenian schools have been established in many communities inhabited by Diaspora Armenians.

Armine Movsisyan, director of curriculum and instruction at the Los Angeles Unified School District, explained that the attempt to wipe out someone’s identity makes it all the more important for that person, or that group of people, to maintain who they are. That is part of why cultural identity and ethnic background, she said, are really important to Armenians – because it was challenged.

“As a culture who faced the reality of genocide – getting rid of all members of this ethnic group – I think that not just surviving, but thriving is such an essential part of our story,” said Movsisyan, who was previously the principal at AGBU Manoukian.

As a people historically persecuted for their religion and ethnicity, who were victim to genocide and who are now one of the few communities that have a large diaspora – a homeland that they live outside of – Armenians outside of Armenia cling to their identity, Movsisyan explained.

There are over 171,000 native Armenian speakers living in Los Angeles County, making it one of the largest Armenian communities living outside of Armenia. Consequently, there are 14 Armenian day schools throughout Southern California with over 4,300 students.

In such a richly diverse country like the United States, ethnically homogenous schools might seem odd for those outside the community. However, the general goal of these Armenian schools is not to promote an atmosphere of xenophobia – far from it.

“The Armenian heritage is so endangered. Armenians are so few to begin with,” said Deeown Shaverdian, an Armenian school alumnus and current supervision advisor at Chamlian Armenian School in Glendale. “With the melting pot that is the United States, more and more here are forgetting the language, the culture. I have a fear that we will cease to exist.”

Students, parents, alumni and faculty say the main appeals of Armenian schools are the safe environment, the preservation of culture, language and Armenian identity and the fear of assimilation as a post-genocidal diasporan group.

Juniors at AGBU Manoukian expressed that it can be difficult to grow up in what can feel like a cultural echo chamber, surrounded by people who are, in some respects, the same. Yet, every single student in the room, including the disinterested slackers and the rebellious class clowns in the back, said they too would send their own children to Armenian school.

Vana Yepremian, an eighth-grader at Chamlian, said she would send her future children to Armenian school because she believes it’s important that future generations stay Armenian, know the culture and speak the language.

“It’s a good chance to have as a young Armenian person to learn more about your own culture, who you are and what your past is,” she said. “It’s important to know what has happened before I was born.”

The Pull

Families send their children to Armenian schools for several reasons. The primary reason is the preservation of Armenian identity.

“They can learn to appreciate their heritage, culture and language,” said Aline Yepremian, who has three daughters in Armenian school.

Yepremian explains she wants her children to have that opportunity because she didn’t. Growing up in Canada, there weren’t any local, daily Armenian schools for her and her siblings.

Ana Sirabionian, an alumnus of Pilibos Armenian School in Hollywood and a teacher specialist at Chamlian, explained that preserving facets of Armenian-ness and passing them on to future generations who live in the Diaspora can be difficult.

“When people are forced to live outside of their country, they can easily just eventually disappear, forget their language, forget their culture. To us, as Armenians, it’s really important that that doesn’t happen,” Sirabionian said.

The fear of losing the Armenian identity stems, for many diasporans, from the Armenian Genocide, Movsisyan explained. The Ottoman Empire’s attempt to annihilate the Armenian race has left a trans-generational trauma in generations of Armenians.  

“When someone tries to take something away from you, your identity, generations are affected by that psychology,” said Movsisyan.

Talar Kakilian, who transferred from a public school to Sahag Mesrob Armenian Christian School in Pasadena in the seventh grade, explained that Armenian schools gave her a clear sense of who she was, who she wanted to be and where she wanted to go.

“Once I got to Armenian school and I started learning about our history in a deeper way, reading our literature, reciting poetry and performing music that was composed by Armenian composers, it really solidified that identity that my parents had worked so hard to foster in me,” she said. “It gave me a clear view of who I was as a person and how that ethnic identity has allowed me to become who I am today.”

Armenian schools can offer a safe environment for students to feel comfortable and to grow in.

Tenny Kizirian, an alumnus of Chamlian Armenian School, now sends her two sons there.

“I wanted them to have the social environment that I had,” she said. “The friendships and bonds you create there are truly lifelong.”

Kizirian explained that as a parent, she feels a sense of assurance knowing who her children’s friends and their families are.

Sirabionian echoed the sentiment, saying, “We knew each other’s families and grew up together. It’s really like family.”

Lack of Diversity:

Armenian school administrators are conscious of their lack of diversity, Sirabionian said.

“Some people might feel like it’s xenophobic: Armenians just want to be with other Armenians; they have their own schools,” said Sirabionian. “But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about keeping a culture alive that’s otherwise dying.”

Alique Cherchian, who attended Ari Guiragos Minassian School in Santa Ana, entered public school in seventh grade. She said that once she left the sheltered Armenian school environment, or the “bubble”, she had a grounded sense of her identity and her roots.

“As long as you live outside of the homeland, the time you have to be in such a grounded environment like this is very limited,” she said.

Although Cherchian said she would definitely send her children to Armenian school, she would also like for them to experience public school, as she did.

“I want them to learn to educate their peers and others on history that is unfortunately not taught enough in the public school system, if taught at all,” she said. “I would want them to experience that empowerment, but at the same time learn that there are so many other students who come from very different backgrounds. Understanding that Armenian politics and history is not the center of the world is something I want my kids to learn and understand.”

The ‘sheltered’ Armenian school environment can be like a safe zone where students’ ideas about the world and ‘others’ go unchallenged.

“In an increasingly globalized society, that would be an issue. You’re going to be exposed to different types of people and mentalities all the time,” Shaverdian said.  “Knowing how to connect with them and communicate with them is vitally important.”

Many alumni and parents expressed the desire for students to have a more diverse experience. However, for many families, the cultural preservation aspect of the Armenian schools outweighs the lack of diversity.

“For me, when you weigh what is more important, as a family we’ve decided the Armenian aspect is,” said Yepremian. She adds, however, that she does wish her daughters were exposed to diversity earlier.

Armenian school students share common ground when it comes to language and culture. But experts say it’s much more than that.

“We are unified linguistically,” Myrna Douzjian, professor of Armenian language and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “Our cultural experiences that inform our ideas about our identity might be very different.”

Douzjian, who attended Pilibos, explained there are many different types of Armenians at these schools. Many of these families come from Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, Iraq and elsewhere. Some students are born in the U.S. and have immigrant parents or grandparents, or are, themselves, immigrants. There are also students with mixed families, children of mixed marriages and so on, she described.

“Talking about differences enriches one’s sense of self and education,” Douzjian added.

“The strong connection to Armenian identity can spark an interest in learning about other cultures,” said Alik Yepremian, an alumna of Armenian schools who is now a sophomore at Loyola Marymount University.

“It’s kind of hard to relate to others because I’ve ever only known Armenians,” she said. “But I’ve realized the people I’ve become friends with (in college) are also really connected to their culture and their background. That’s where it becomes easier because we have that strong connection to who we are.”

Having only known Armenians for most of their young life and having a sense of family in a tight-knit community, can make it difficult to form relationships with others.

“I felt so confident with friends I already had, that I didn’t feel the need to look for other friends in college,” Sirabionian said. “But now, I’m more interested in people of different backgrounds and upbringings because I didn’t get to experience much difference growing up.”

That being said, there is more to a person than their Armenian-ness, she added.

It’s not for everyone

Not everyone can afford to send their children to an Armenian private school.

Teni Bazikyan, a recent graduate from University of California, Berkeley, came to the United States from Iran when she was 13. While living in Iran, she attended Armenian private school until sixth grade. When she and her family moved to Glendale, California, she no longer had that option due to financial restraints.

“It was expensive for us. We just got here, my parents were looking for jobs, we were trying to settle,” Bazikyan said.

Still, living in Glendale, a city with a large Armenian population, most of her friends in public school were Armenian. This was a subconscious decision, she said, because she related to Armenians more easily. As for those outside her Armenian circle of friends (the odars as Armenians say), Bazikyan made a surprising discovery.

“By explaining ourselves and our identities to non-Armenians, we became more Armenian because they were constantly questioning things we never questioned about ourselves,” she said. “They sort of made me more Armenian.”

Vanuhi Vartanian, who was born in Armenia and moved to Glendale when she was 4 years old, said she noticed most of her friends who attended Armenian schools are not first-generation. Their parents have lived in the U.S. for some time and are better established and can afford to pay private school tuition, she said, as opposed to those who are new to America like her own family.

“If my parents could at the time, they would have enrolled me in Armenian school,” Vartanian said. “I think many parents who come from Armenia would love to do that but they can’t afford it when they first move here.”

Vartanian, who attended public schools throughout her life and recently graduated from UC Berkeley, believes that, in a way, it was a disadvantage for her.

“Whenever I started taking Armenian classes at UC Berkeley, the students who had attended Armenian private schools read a lot faster, wrote a lot more accurately, were well-versed and could get through a conversation without saying ‘um’ and they knew all these big vocabulary words, something that I didn’t get to practice too often at home,” Vartanian explained.

However, she did attend Saturday school and free after-school Armenian classes at her public elementary school.

Armenian is the second most spoken primary language for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) students who are also English speakers. As a result, some public schools have begun to offer classes in Armenian. The LAUSD and the Glendale Unified School District have launched dual-immersion programs, where students learn and speak Armenian in some of their classes.

With public schools beginning to offer Armenian language classes, families who cannot afford an Armenian school education for their children can still have the option to learn Armenian in school, Vartanian said.

Last Bell

For the 11th graders in the Armenian class at AGBU Manoukian, being surrounded by Armenians doesn’t mean they’re all one and the same.

Michael Pratt, head of school at AGBU Manoukian, who is not Armenian, agrees.

“I can see us having a great ethnically, racially, politically tight-wrapped heterogeneous student body where everybody’s difference was the most valuable thing,” he said. “Not everybody’s sameness.”

Sareen Habeshian attended Chamlian Armenian School and AGBU Vatche and Tamar Manoukian High School.

Author information

Sareen Habeshian

Sareen Habeshian is a reporter and trained multimedia storyteller based out of Los Angeles. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and USC. Habeshian is currently working at the USC Institute of Armenian Studies.

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When the American-made motion picture Ravished Armenia was released in 1919, it became the first film to tell the story of the World War I Armenian Genocide through the eyes of a survivor, Aurora Mardiganian. Directed by Oscar Apfel and produced by early film pioneer Colonel William Selig, the eight-reel silent film was commissioned by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR). The ACASR was established in the United States in 1915 in order to provide aid to victims of the Genocide. ACASR spokesperson Oliver Harriman, explained that the purpose of the movie was to acquaint viewers with ‘ravished Armenia’ and ‘to visualize conditions so that there will be no misunderstanding in the mind of any one about the terrible things which have transpired.’ The ‘screen was selected as the medium,’ she added, ‘because it reached the millions, where the printed word reaches the thousands.’

Ravished Armenia became a huge success with screenings throughout the United States, Europe, South America and as far away as Australia. To illustrate its ability to generate publicity and money for Armenian relief, ticket prices for its packed 12-day New York screenings were $10 each (about $150 in today’s terms) with the theatre’s seating capacity at approximately 1000 people. When the film premiered in Sydney on January 10, 1920, it drew such a strong crowd that ‘many hundreds’ had to be turned away.

While only one reel has survived, a book titled The Auction of Souls: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, first published in 1918, supplies the screenplay. It opens in an Anatolian village on Easter Monday 1915 with the large Mardiganian family preparing for the forced deportation. On the road, Aurora is continuously molested; she ultimately apostatised in order to save her mother, but to no avail. At a certain point during the exodus, 16 girls in the caravan are ‘crucified’ on crude crosses—the most sensational scene in the film. Aurora is finally rescued and taken to Russia, where she embarks on a Norwegian ship for the United States. According to film historian Leshu Torchin, it was the first motion picture ever made explicitly as a work of advocacy for humanitarian relief.

Since the discovery of one of the film’s reels in 1994, a plethora of articles and books have been published analyzing the movie’s importance to American film and humanitarian history—most notably the 1997 revised edition of Ravished Armenia edited by prominent American film historian Anthony Slide. However, it may come as a surprise to many, that Ravished Armenia was not the first film to be made in America which told the story of Armenian suffering. There was another.

As many historians know, the World War I era genocide of Armenians was not the first case of systematic large-scale massacres of Armenians. Between 1894-1896, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The scholar Daniel Goldhagen has observed that ‘the massive eliminationist assault against the Armenians from 1894 to 1896 would rightly be called the Armenian Genocide – had an even more massive mass murder … not followed twenty years later.’

One of the worst massacres occurred in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). A group of armed Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople on August 26, 1896 and threatened to blow it up unless their political demands were met. They gave in after holding the bank for thirteen hours; all they obtained was free passage out of the country. As they left, Ottomans loyal to the government, armed by the Sultan, went on a rampage and slaughtered thousands of Armenians on the streets of the capital, under the noses of the foreign ambassadors. In the two days of slaughter, an estimated 5000 to 6000 Armenians were killed. The event was widely publicized in the American and European press, sparking outrage among civic, political and religious leaders throughout the world.

In July 1901, the Edison Manufacturing Company (EMC) released a silent black and white 35mm film about the atrocities entitled Massacre at Constantinople. The EMC was founded in 1894 by Thomas Edison—regarded by many as America’s greatest inventor. Some of his inventions include the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the long-lasting light bulb. Raised in America’s midwest, he built his first production company in West Orange, New Jersey in 1892. His second facility was built at 41 East 21st Street in Manhattan entertainment district in 1901. Some of the EMC’s most notable productions included The Great Train Robbery (1903), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1910), the first Frankenstein film in 1910 and the first ever serial made in 1912 titled What Happened to Mary.

While no script, photos or reels of EMC’s film Massacre at Constantinople are known to have survived, the EMC’s film catalogue for that year provides the following description: “… showing a number of ferocious Turks tearing down the doors of an Armenian residence. They drag forth the occupants, consisting of men, women, and little children, butcher them with long knives, and then, after looting the house of all its valuables, they set it [sic] fire to it.” The duration of the motion picture is unknown but according to IMDb, the length of the reel’s film measured 19.8 meters. It can be argued that Massacre at Constantinople was America’s first film on the mass killing (what we call genocide today) of Armenians to mainstream audiences.

Today, we know much more about Ravished Armenia than its predecessor film Massacre at Constantinople. It is my hope that this article will help spark some interest in the 1901 film, so that further light can be shed upon its content and impact on film history.

Author information

Vicken Babkenian

Vicken Babkenian is an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is the co-author (with Professor Peter Stanley) of Armenia, Australia and the Great War (NewSouth Publishing 2016) - shortlisted for 2 major Australian history awards.

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When I was 19 and living in Ireland, a young man named Declan asked me out on a date. “Feel free to say no,” he wrote via text, clearly anticipating rejection. “I won’t be offended.”

He was sweet, but not my type, so I said “no.” But this time, the “no” was an especially difficult one, because Declan was confined to a wheelchair. Although his limited mobility had played no role in my decision, it opened my eyes to the complex, often unspoken emotional toll of disability. No matter what reason I or any other girl gave him, Declan might never be able to shake the feeling that his disability and his desirability were incompatible.

Among the myriad of challenges associated with special needs, one often remains unaddressed: the inevitable awakening to the world of romance and the struggle of unrequited love. For children with disabilities, especially of a physical nature, the maturation process is fraught with self-doubt and heartache. With adolescence come both a surge of confusing hormones and the simultaneous comprehension that dating, marriage and the creation of a family may be impossible dreams.

It’s been some time since Declan asked me out, but the memory recently resurfaced. I currently volunteer at Emili Aregak, a support center for youth with a range of disabilities in Gyumri, Armenia. Here, the problem of unrequited love is common and complicated by several factors. Disability still carries great stigma in Armenia. Because of this, youth often face rejection in mainstream society, making romantic rejection that much harder to accept. In addition, romantic feelings and struggles can be rather taboo topics in the home, although early marriage and childbearing are both familial expectations and cultural norms. According to a recent study conducted by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) organization on trends among Armenian youth, about 94-percent of respondents saw their future selves married with a family.

To understand a bit more about the emotional trials of youth with disabilities, I sat down with some of the staff at Emili Aregak. Hasmik, the PR Coordinator, told me that the beneficiaries often fall in love— especially with the Center’s volunteers. “It’s normal,” she explained. “It’s human.”

Venera, who works directly with the youth, went more in depth recounting the stories of two young men – Andranik and Artin.

Venera has known Andranik since he was nine. The young man, now 15, has cerebral palsy, a sharp mind and a habit of falling deeply in love. In fact, his mother tells him he falls in love too much. To this, Andranik retorts that it’s not his fault. He simply opens his eyes, and there are always beautiful women around him.

Five years ago, Andranik fell for one of the volunteers—a married woman with two children. Later, it was the girlfriend of Aram, a volunteer. During Aram’s army service, Andranik counted the days until the young soldier would return from Artsakh and reunite with his beau. The young couple would be together again, and the teenager would be alone with his dreams.  

“Andranik becomes stressed when he is in love,” Venera told me. “He wonders: Why don’t girls love me? Is it because I am in a wheelchair? He asks me: Is Aram a good boy, and I’m not?”

Although it’s unlikely that Andranik will ever marry, Venera is a firm believer in the power of hope, mixed with a dash of grounding realism. “It’s very important that the kids don’t stop dreaming,” she said. “At the same time, Andranik needs to realize that girls also have the freedom to say yes or no to him.”

Currently, Andranik has set his sights on the Indian actress Tina Dutta; unlike the other girls he’s fallen for, she can’t break his heart. In fact, she’s someone so unattainable and distant as to be little more than a muse; still, he’s collecting money in a jar for a trip to India.

The problem may be even more acute for those with high-functioning autism, who are adept of body and mind, but lacking in the social skills so integral to successful romantic relationships. My own nephew, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, is only nine. Along with becoming a programmer (like his dad), his goal is to be a husband and father. At this point, he’s not cognizant of the roadblocks to that goal—roadblocks that Artin, another young man at the Emili Aregak Center, is beginning to see.

At 17, Artin appears to be a typical teenager and wants desperately to be one. He has a part-time job, loves cars and girls, and speaks three languages. But like my nephew, he struggles with Asperger’s Syndrome, and like Andranik, he frequently falls for the female volunteers.  

Artin can’t understand why they don’t reciprocate his feelings. One time, he looked a volunteer straight in the eye, banging his fist on the table, and asked her: “Can you tell me why you don’t love me?”

The young man frequently vents his frustration to Venera; she’s one of the only confidants he has. For six to seven months, the two would talk about his romantic woes nearly every day. “I earn money, I can take care of a family,” he would protest. “What is the problem?”

“We need to have answers for their questions,” Venera told me. “Frequently, families are afraid to discuss these topics. For example, Artin’s parents gave him permission to have a girlfriend, but they never explained to him how.”

“At home, he cannot show his emotions,” she continued. “It’s ‘closed’ in Armenia. Normally, boys don’t talk about things like this with their parents.”

One of the young men quoted in the FES study echoed this sentiment. Commenting that teenage relationships are hardly condoned in his regional town, even among the abled, he noted: “…At school age, you fall in love, and start to date… They think badly of it… Society doesn’t accept it.”

While there is still cultural stigma against discussion of romance and emotions in many parts of Armenia, especially among older and more rural populations, the same demographic groups tend to exhibit an entrenched prejudice against the disabled.

This latter stigma may be the more complicated to overcome as well as the biggest difficulty in relationship-forming. Extended family are often considered in the spouse selection process; in fact, 80-percent of Armenian youth believe family consent to be important. But things become complicated when relatives view disabilities or other perceived undesirable traits as shameful family blights.

In an interview with Human Rights Watch, one young woman discussed her decision to send her four-year-old with cerebral palsy to an orphanage because of the impact he might have on her relatives.

“The issue for us was not entirely about finances. We have to think about the bigger family,” she explained. “My brother is still young. We are thinking about any potential bride for him. No one will want to see an unhealthy child at [our family’s] home.”

Even if Artin or Andranik were able to secure love, would their partners’ families condone their relationships? Maybe. Maybe not.

Although repeated rejection takes its toll, Venera tells me she always works to keep hope alive in the youth. Love, or the possibility of it, can be a strong motivating factor.

Andranik, for example, often resents his condition, struggling with bitterness and despondency. When he fails to exert himself during therapy and refuses to recognize the abilities he does have, Venera exhorts him to think with perspective. “When you sit bent over in your wheelchair, staring at your legs, will girls look at you?”

Love is an incentive. “When we stop dreaming,” Venera believes, “we stop living.”

Editor’s Note: The identities of the young people in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

Author information

Sarah Stites

Currently based in Gyumri, Sarah Stites is a wordsmith and traveler exploring her Armenian roots. With a background in marketing and journalism, she especially enjoys promoting and writing about the work of organizations connected to faith and human rights. She is passionate about literature, puns and couchsurfing, and immensely appreciates Armenian fruit and nature.

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In 1929, two Armenian immigrants set up a modest dairy facility in Andover, Massachusetts. Their production was centered on a food item often consumed in the old world: a sourish, white substance derived from milk. Popular amongst fellow recent immigrants and refugees from the Ottoman Empire fleeing ethnic persecution, who yearned for the food of their ancestral homeland, this product was delivered daily in a wagon emblazoned with the Armenian word madzoon. These Armenian immigrants were Sarkis and Rose Colombosian, and their product was what we now refer to in the United States as yogurt.

It’s hard to believe, given the bountiful selection of yogurts in the dairy aisle of a modern American supermarket, but until the 1940s, this food staple was completely unfamiliar to the average American. Colombo Yogurt, as it came to be called, was one of the first companies to popularize what is today nearly a $9 billion industry in America. But as the Armenian word for yogurt—madzoon—fell to the wayside, the mass yogurt industry (with the help of major corporations like Yoplait and Dannon) continued to recede further and further from the homegrown features that once defined it. Today’s mainstream yogurts bear little resemblance to those consumed by peoples of the far east who brought the dish here to begin with.

***

For the last 48 years, Erivan Dairy, a small, family-owned and operated producer of yogurt in Pennsylvania, has been the single manufacturer of traditional Armenian madzoon in the United States. I had unwittingly stumbled upon their yogurt in a supermarket in Brooklyn in 2016. Like surely many other Armenians, I was lured to their brand by its not-so-subtle reference to the capital of my ancestral homeland; but I was secured as a lifelong customer for its taste, which exactly resembles the madzoon I consumed daily living in Armenia several years ago, and for which I had never found an American substitute. My curiosity led me eventually to visit their modest facilities in a small town about 15 miles north of Philadelphia on a searingly hot day last April.

I was greeted by owner Paul Fereshetian and a smattering of staff (which, truth be told, felt more like an intimate family reunion than a gathering of employees) that consisted of Paul’s wife, Yvonne; their daughter, Cerise; and daughter-in-law, Joyce—each patriotically clad in a burgundy tee shirt (Erivan’s signature color) donning a bubble-letter logo, hand-drawn by Paul’s mother in the seventies, in the right-hand corner.

Amidst the cheerful banter and warm smiles, it was hard to imagine these people were responsible for one of the most subversive yogurts in the American food industry. For reference, where the American version of this Caucasian dish is thick, madzoon is watery. Where yogurt is creamy, madzoon is tart. Where yogurt is consistent, madzoon is clumpy. For decades, American consumers have been conditioned to identify these qualities as ‘wrong.’ One could say that in an industrial food system, in which value-added trumps actual human values, this is a yogurt that marches to the beat of its own drum.

Paul sees it a bit differently. “Our yogurt is really healthy for you,” he told me as we stood together in Erivan’s production area, the magical place where milk becomes a healthier version of itself. Modern man’s pursuit of health is, in fact, Erivan Dairy’s very raison d’etre. Their business started in the kitchen of Seran Fereshetian, Paul’s mother. Yogurt-making had always been in their family—not for profit, but for subsistence, but that changed when the health food movement hit America (and, apparently, the Fereshetian household) in the sixties and seventies. Paul recalled that, as a child in the seventies, his mother’s obsession with all-natural foods had some social repercussions. “It was very embarrassing… I used to hide my lunch and reach into my brown bag and pull out food just big enough that I could hide it in my hand and eat it. This isn’t just farm fresh stuff. We’re talking things like, whole grains. Your sandwich bread dissolves in your hands because there’s nothing in there to hold it together. All my friends are having wonder bread and I’m eating this bread that’s just falling apart.”

A lot of local stores began sprouting to meet the demand for healthy alternatives to mass produced foods. Seran would routinely send Paul’s father, Harry Fereshetian, on trips to the local health food store to pick up ingredients. “He was talking to the owner of one store, Walter Wade of North Penn Health Food in Lansdale, who is really the person we owe the most to,” Paul explained to reporter Jim Quinn of the Philadelphia Inquirer back in 1985. “There was some acidophilus yogurt in the refrigerator, and my father said, ‘You know, my wife makes that kind of yogurt at home.’ We’re Armenians, and Armenians love yogurt. Walter Wade said, ‘If she can make it, l’ll buy it from you—the only company making it around here is going out of business.’”

And so it went. Paul’s mother hand wrote the labels to their containers herself and Harry delivered them by hand to the store. “My mother had this little set up in her kitchen,” he recalled, “And I knew that there was work to do. I thought it was interesting. I was just trying to figure out life at ten years-old. But little by little, over the next few years, I started realizing that this was really cool, and that this was probably what I was going to be doing with my life.” In 1977, Paul attended Temple University, majoring in business, with the specific idea that he would take over Erivan Dairy’s operations. “My mother was an entrepreneur, she was not a business woman. So I learned how to make it a business.”

When yogurt was first discovered by early people millennia ago, it was surely a happy mistake. (What is more intuitive, after all, than conserving a resource that spoils by developing a fondness for its spoiled version?) Yogurt is at its heart a relatively simple science, which boils down to a careful process of heating and cooling. But this process has been refined from its early days, in ways which are central to Erivan Yogurt’s story. Before his family fled the Genocide, Seran’s father and Paul’s grandfather, Garabed Hachikian, a chemist hailing from Istanbul, taught at the famous Sorbonne University in Paris. “He didn’t just pass down a recipe,” Paul explained. “He taught [my mother] some really significant advantages, techniques, to help start culture from scratch. Not just to grab somebody else’s madzoon and make some new yogurt or go to a culture lab. He taught her some things that helped her to get this business started back in 1970.”

Equipped with a deeper understanding of the chemistry, Seran decided early on to make yogurt using cultures that would eventually take hold in the American health industry. This is why “The Erivan Story,” the script on their yogurt’s white and magenta plastic container, tells not of their company’s genesis, but rather, of the natural processes which give their madzoon its healthy appeal. It is made using a beneficial bacteria called acidophilus, which appears naturally in healthy human bodies. It’s a probiotic that works with your natural chemistry, whose health effects range from improving cholesterol to aiding digestion. “And that’s what made us different,” Paul explains, “because nobody else is doing that. That article”—referencing Jim Quinn’s feature—“was 25 years ago. And still nobody is doing that.”

***

In 1977, lacking the capital to compete in the mass market, Colombo Yogurt was sold to the French conglomerate Bon Grain. In 1993, it was sold again to the major American food corporation General Mills, best known for marketing brand name cereals like Cheerios and Lucky Charms. In 2010, after 81 years on the market, General Mills announced it was halting production of Colombo Yogurt altogether. But by that time, Rose and Sarkis Colombosian’s legendary madzoon had already been translated, many times over, into the language of America’s industrial food system. Erivan, on the other hand, has managed to do what few have in the modern era: stay pretty much exactly the same. They are still 100-percent family-owned and revered by a fiercely loyal customer base, who is responsible for bringing their product from the shelves of the niche health food stores that Seran Fereshetian so adored, and into Whole Foods, Erivan’s largest distributor by far. All this, Paul explained, has resulted nearly entirely from word-of-mouth requests. Yet as with any small business, the future is still uncertain.

Any yogurt-maker worth their salt will tell you yogurt’s most defining ingredient—its foundation, if you will—is in its starter, or as it is called in Armenian, magart. Like sourdough bread, each new batch requires a carefully balanced blend of bacteria, which converts the lactose in milk to lactic acid in a process pre-determining many important elements, like tang, texture and consistency. But unlike sourdough starter, which can be recreated from scratch using flour and water, yogurt is more elusive. As a result, many starters are proprietary—including Erivan’s, a prized family secret. Impossible to make from scratch, yogurt’s magart functions by passing down meaningful elements from one scrappy generation of yogurts to the next.

Like their yogurt itself, Paul and Yvonne, second-generation Armenians who are both descendants of a long line of madzoon-makers, both hope the business will stay in the gene pool. People of faith, they have been blessed with five children. Of these, their second-oldest, Cerise, shows great promise. As her father answered questions about the science and history of her family’s particular strain of madzoon, Cerise listened excitedly, at one point jumping in to explain how the science of Erivan inspired her lifelong interest in chemistry. (A wayward school science experiment revealed that—luckily for Erivan’s customers—garlic-flavored yogurt would not become a reality.) Though her professional journey saw her exploring other fields, later in life, she was drawn once more to the tantalizing simplicity of her family’s madzoon. “Just the idea of starting from milk and creating a product that somebody would really like is really interesting to me,” she explained.

Up until now, Erivan has been in the business of serving a no-nonsense family recipe, “simply good since 1970.” As for what the future holds, Paul said, “Well, it’s been just yogurt,” pausing only to add, “but my daughter’s got great ideas.”

Author information

Karine Vann

Editor

Karine Vann is the editor of the Armenian Weekly. She is a musician who transitioned into journalism while living in the Caucasus for several years. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian.com, The New Food Economy, and a number of other publications. Her critical writings focus primarily on the politics of culture, media analyses, and the environment. She spends her spare time in front of a keyboard, at a farm, or making a fuss about zero waste. If you have comments, questions, pitches, or leads, she can be reached at karine@armenianweekly.com.

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In an unimpressive building located just behind a semi-abandoned Soviet-era theme park, programmers are building a decentralized internet for Armenia. Led by Vahagn Poghosyan, a prolific Armenian startup founder, and Enno Wein, a German expat who has worked in the tech industry for several decades, Leviathan seeks no profit. The scrappy startup is driven purely by a desire to reclaim cyberspace for individuals.

When the world wide web was first conceived, its developers envisioned a network directly connecting personal computers to each other. This nebulous system would embody democratic values and guarantee universal access to knowledge, bridging communities around the globe.

The internet of the nineties mostly adhered to this egalitarian outline. Then, as more people began to access and expand the web, middlemen entered the picture. Corporations like Google introduced search engines to direct what information users access. Others, like Amazon, set up server farms to control how data is routed and stored. Social media commodified user experience and information. All this added up to an increasingly monitored, authoritarian and manipulative internet that obstructs rather than encourages direct communication.

Even though corporate interests have stymied a system meant to bolster democracy, startups like Leviathan prove that industry outsiders are evolving alongside tech giants to revitalize the internet’s spirit of freedom.

By changing the way information is managed and stored online, Leviathan’s founders believe they can shift power dynamics, not only online but in the real world. According to Wein, a decentralized internet would enable equal societies and small-scale local economies to flourish. “At the end of the day, if we want to have a future at all, we need to recognize that we should work together instead of against one another,” he says, “decentralization is key to that.”

A basic understanding of the internet will help explain Leviathan’s software. Put very simply, the web is a network of computers that talk to each other. Think of this network as having three tiers. Though the internet feels abstract, its bottom-most layer is physical; endless wires stretch through cities, over plains and valleys and under oceans. A computer accessing the web connects to this wired grid, either directly or via a wireless network.

The internet’s second tier is a protocol layer — essentially instructional computer language — that tells machines plugged into the web how to communicate. The third tier comes into play because the information being sent back and forth needs to be saved and organized. This layer is comprised of servers, giant computers that store data, and browsers, internet navigators. The web’s top-most tier also includes applications like social media.

Leviathan is rethinking the internet’s second and third tiers. On the one hand, its data storage system distributes information across thousands of personal computers, forming a decentralized cloud where user data can only be accessed by participants with special cryptokeys. On the other hand, Leviathan’s browser allows direct peer-to-peer communication and keeps companies like Google from pushing paying clients’ websites onto users.

As of now, Leviathan’s technology has no launch date partly because Poghosyan and Wein refuse to engage any marketing campaign that clashes with their grassroots philosophy. Instead, they hope people will learn about Leviathan spontaneously and sign up out of a desire for a freer web.

Leviathan is not the only startup working on a decentralized digital platform; U.S.-based Blockstack is one prominent competitor. However, the venture is unique in that it has no profit-model or funding rounds. “Because it’s open source technology there is no way to make money from it,” explains Poghosyan. “This is important because we are trying to build horizontal networking rather than top-down control.”

For the past five years, Leviathan has been funded by its parent company Instigate Design, a tech consulting firm launched by Poghosyan and Wein in 2005. The founders keep investing significant resources into Leviathan, seemingly purely on the basis of tech idealism. The project is optimistic, considering the challenges. Manpower is one. A team of five can hardly cope with the scope of a new internet. Another issue is critical mass. A decentralized web where data is stored among a host of personal computers needs myriad users to function. “It’s difficult to get many people to adopt and buy into something like that,” admits Wein. Leviathan will struggle to draw users away from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.

That said, Leviathan has one unique advantage: its location. Armenia is a prime candidate for a decentralized internet because cybersecurity is a major national concern. Since 1988, the country has been locked in a conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan. With few allies and resources to its advantage, a homogeneous and nervous population of less than three million might be convinced to adopt a decentralized system. Reformation is more than plausible in Armenia. Just last year, heads turned around the world when peaceful protests ousted a corrupt government that had been in control for decades.

It seems unlikely that Leviathan, a stealth project developing in a warring post-Soviet country, could stand up to global corporate interests and giants like Google and Amazon. Then again, tech is known for unexpected successes and Armenia for its dissident climate. In this industry and place, there’s no telling how the tide may turn.

Author information

Lilit Markosian

Based in New York City, Lilit is a writer who likes to explore art, design, technology, and the post-Soviet Eastern Bloc. Currently, she is a writer at The New School and pursuing her degree in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University.

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Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan was one of the most courageous, principled and forward-looking church leaders in the contemporary history of the Armenian Church. His youth, charisma, strong pastoral and administrative leadership were assets that the community in Turkey needed at the time of his election as Patriarch. However, his decade-long illness made it impossible to fulfil the hopes of a new era in the life of the Armenian community in Turkey.

Physically a towering figure, even as he resembled a Biblical character, his thinking was fully in step with the times—creative and purposeful. Above all, as a priest and hierarch, he was a deeply spiritual person and tried to live what he preached. He became an inspiring role model for multitudes of young people for whom he dedicated serious time and energy with the love of an elder brother.

For Patriarch Mesrob, Christian faith and Armenian culture and language were inseparably intertwined—like body and soul. Unlike many high ranking clergy, his sermons were almost entirely focused on the Gospel and its relevant messages to Armenians today. His Eastern message to the Armenian people on the occasion of the Jubilee of Christianity in Armenia in 2001 was indicative: “Although you have not personally seen the miraculous resurrection of the Savior, re-confess and strengthen your faith in the witness of the first Illuminators, St. Thaddeus and St. Bartholomew and the other apostles. Anchor unshakably your spiritual life in the preaching, character and exemplary life of our Patron Saint, Gregory the Illuminator and the multitudes of other Christ-loving holy fathers.”

In August 1999, when a devastating earthquake hit Turkey’s Marmara region killing almost 20,000 people and injuring more than 27,000 people, Patriarch Mesrob was one of the first leaders behind the immediate organization of relief work to help the hundreds of thousands that were left homeless. Within hours after the earthquake, he mobilized the Armenian community and sent rescue teams to the affected areas to help the victims. Aid distribution continued for months. This enormous effort was organized despite far-right Nationalist Action Party Health Minister Osman Durmus’ notorious decision to reject rescuers and aid from Armenia, Greece and Romania. In a touching move, Mutafyan adopted three Armenian orphans whose parents were killed in the earthquake—one of them a 12 year-old girl whose left leg was amputated. He assured them that they will be taken care of until they graduate from university.

Two of the eminent patriarchs that Mutafyan admired for their indelible leadership and prolific scholarship were Hovhaness IXth Golod (1715-1741) and the formidable Malachia Ormanyan (1896-1908). But most influential in his life was the saintly Patriarch Shnork Kalustian (1963-1990), his spiritual father and a constant inspiration for the ideal religious life.

Mutafyan’s appreciation and taste for aesthetic details brought a certain degree of sophistication to the Patriarchal office and regalia, yet he remained faithful to church tradition and the rich history of the Patriarchate, which was established in 1461.

The assassination of Hrant Dink in January 2007 had a shocking effect on Mutafyan, as he, too, started to receive more frequent death threats. In June of that year, he went to Ankara to meet with the Chief of the General Staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, the top military man in Turkey. This was a rather unusual visit for a religious leader but indicative of the tortuous relationship of the church and the community with the Turkish state. When asked why Mutafyan wished to meet with the military head rather than the Prime Minister, he said there were allegations that Dink was assassinated by the security forces. Therefore, he wanted to ask the army chief “the necessary question.” That is, “What would you advise the Armenians? What should we do?”

In that fateful year, he was involved in a serious car accident from which he did not fully recover. Along with the anxieties caused by death threats, his health gradually deteriorated for mysterious reasons. In the summer of 2008, the Holy Saviour Armenian Hospital in Istanbul (Ս. Փրկիչ Ազգային Հիվանդանոց) officially announced that the Patriarch had been afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. Eight years later, in October 2016, the Clergy Council of the Patriarchate officially retired him through a canonical procedure, but the Turkish government did not recognize it and insisted that Mutafyan would remain the Patriarch as long as he was alive. For over a decade until his death on March 8, 2019, he remained in vegetative state in the hospital, away from public view and unable to carry out his patriarchal duties. He is survived by his mother Diramayr Mari Mutafyan and his sisters.

Archbishop Mesrob Mutafyan was elected 84th Patriarch of “Istanbul and All of Turkey” on October 14, 1998 at the young age of 42, after months of state interference in the election process. The election took place only after the governor of Istanbul sent the required approval of the government, which permitted the Armenian community in Turkey to proceed. The 79 lay and 10 clergy delegates of the General Assembly of the Armenian Church Community officially represented 15,811 church members from Istanbul, Kayseri, Diyarbakir, Iskenderun, Kirikhan and Vakifkoy.

While historically known as the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople—and still referred to as such in Armenian (Պատրիարքութիւն Հայոց Կոստանդնուպոլսոյ)—the reference to the ancient capital of Byzantium is a taboo and considered a politically charged term. Indeed, a few months before his election, a Turkish television accused Archbishop Mesrob of committing “a crime” by placing a wreath at the funeral of his predecessor with the Armenian inscription: “Patriarchate of Constantinople.” Likewise, the Greek Patriarch, who is recognized as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople by the Orthodox world, is referred to in Turkey and by officialdom as the “Patriarch of Fener,” after the neighborhood where the patriarchal headquarters are located. It must be noted that both Patriarchates do not have legal status, which means they cannot engage in legal transactions. Ninety-six years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish state continues to refuse to recognize them as legal personalities.

At the time of his election, the Turkish state had implicitly made its displeasure with Archbishop Mesrob Mutafyan’s candidacy known. In addition to his audacious public pronouncements as the Chancellor of the Patriarchate, during previous Patriarchal elections in 1990 and 1998, the charismatic bishop had led the campaign for a “people’s choice,” rather than supporting the candidate favored by the Turkish government. The mobilization during these elections became the catalyst for the community to become active again and engage with the government and politics. Mutafyan mobilized a group of young and progressive Armenians and engaged them in community affairs. Among them was Hrant Dink, who became a spokesperson of the Patriarchate in the early 1990s and from where the idea for Agos germinated. The hunger to speak out and the desire to address the “existential” problems surrounding the Armenian Church and community institutions in general, sparked the creation of the bilingual weekly newspaper in April 1996.

Patriarch Mesrob was invariably criticized by the media in Armenia and the Diaspora for statements he had made or policies he had adopted. Fierce criticism were levelled at him from Istanbul to Etchmiadzin and to various circles in the Diaspora, especially when he was publicly critical of the Catholicos or when he championed the cause of the Melkonian School in Cyprus, or when he spoke, for domestic reasons in Turkey, against the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by foreign parliaments. One Armenian party newspaper preposterously warned that Mutafyan is exporting “his eccentricities to other communities with unchecked imperial ambitions.”

Most notably, in June 1998, Mutafyan made headlines for commenting on the French National Assembly’s affirmation of the Armenian Genocide. “The Armenian community in Turkey finds itself between two fires,” he said. “The state of Armenia, the Armenian Diaspora and the Turkish government, all three have different views and opinions… when these three shoot at each other, we are right in the middle,” he said with frustration.

Leading an extremely vulnerable community required understanding, diplomacy, patience and judgment. Surely, Mutafyan did not satisfy everyone—from Armenia, Diaspora and Turkey—but he had said from the outset of his tenure that his responsibility is to place the interests of his flock and community above all other considerations.

In the early 2000s, Patriarch Mesrob and Hrant Dink had bitter disagreements, especially over the critical issue of as to who should represent the Armenian community before the government. The dispute over policy and procedure played out many times in the media. Nevertheless, their essential problems and issues vis-à-vis the Turkish state and society were the same: state-instituted discrimination of minorities and erosion of their rights. In his eulogy at Dink’s funeral, Patriarch Mesrob lamented the “enmity against the Armenians” created in society and said efforts to eliminate such characterizations should “begin with our school textbooks and our schools to change the attitude, mentality and practices that are behind the perception of Armenians as enemies, so that our government and people accept us not as foreigners and potential enemies but as citizens of the Republic of Turkey, who have lived for thousands of years on this soil.”

Long before Dink’s entrance into public life, in the late 1980s there were steady public campaigns through the media and the courts against a number of clergymen—the religious leadership of the community—among them Bishop Mesrob, when he was the outspoken young Chancellor of the Patriarchate. He was falsely accused of supporting, predictably, “terrorist acts against Turks” in sensationalist newspaper headlines. Among a host of preposterous court cases brought against him in the same period, one is notable. In 1987 Mutafyan appeared in a Turkish Criminal Court in Istanbul to face charges for violating the country’s statutes on the preservation of historical buildings. A state prosecutor had charged him of being guilty of covering the leaking roof of a balcony of the Armenian Patriarchate with rubber-based tiles (“eternite”). The prosecutor asked the court to sentence Mutafyan to a two to five year prison term for the offense. A confidential report, revealed during Hrant Dink’s trial, showed that Mutafyan was under surveillance by the police and intelligence services “for his Armenian nationalist inclinations”—as labeled by the state agencies.

Upon his election as Patriarch, Mutafyan was able to develop a modus vivendi with the state, even as he demanded respect for the rights of the church and community with tact and discretion. During a visit to Ankara in 2001, he assured the Chairman of the Grand National Assembly that “the interests of the Turkish Armenians are in line with the interests of the State and the place where the problems of the Community are ought to be discussed is the [Parliament].”

Among the critical challenges Patriarch Mesrob faced at his election was the lack of adequately trained and sufficient number of priests to staff Istanbul’s 33 Armenian churches. Over the years he successfully recruited a cadre of young candidates, trained and ordained them to the priesthood. Many of them continue to serve the Patriarchate today.

Minas Mutafyan, his baptismal name, was born in Istanbul in 1956. Upon completing his elementary education at the local Essayan Armenian School, he attended a British secondary school in Istanbul and later the American High School in Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated with a sociology and philosophy degree from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. In May 1979, he was ordained a priest by his spiritual mentor Patriarch Shnork Kalustian. Mutafyan continued his graduate studies in Old Testament and archaeology at the Hebrew University and the American Biblical Institute in Jerusalem. In September 1986, he was consecrated a bishop by Catholicos Vazken I in Etchmiadzin. During his post-graduate studies, he served the pastoral and spiritual needs of the community though various churches in Istanbul and the Princes’ Islands and held high level positions within the Patriarchate.

Being Patriarch of Turkey is not an envious position. The Armenian community, the religious and lay leadership in Turkey have to constantly juggle their ethnic and state loyalties. “Every Armenian in Turkey grows up with three elements in his personality: being a Turkish citizen, then his heritage as an Armenian, and then his faith as a Christian in a country which is overwhelmingly-99 percent-Muslim,” Mutafyan had once explained in an interview.

The elections of church and charity trusts are major “political” issues for the Turkish government. It is one of the controlling mechanisms of the state by which it manages the affairs of the minorities and ensures loyalty. Since 2013, the government has not allowed minorities to hold new elections. Previously, even participation in elections outside Turkey were not allowed. For instance, in 1995, Ankara forbade lay delegates from Istanbul to participate in elections for a new Catholicos in Armenia. A year earlier, the government had ordered the Patriarchate to disband its council of lay advisors.

In the coming months it remains to be seen as to how the Turkish government will handle the election of Mutafyan’s successor. Predictably, the election process will face the customary state-imposed restrictions and administrative hurdles, which will be exacerbated by the personality clashes and ambitions of the high ranking clergy at the Patriarchate. Turkish law mandates Mutafyan’s successor to be a Turkish citizen or at least born in Turkey, preferably one who has completed the mandatory Turkish military service, which limits the list of eligible candidates to only a few. None have the calibre and gravitas of Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan. Enormous challenges are ahead of the church and community in Turkey.

For a wider context and discussion of the Armenian community in Turkey, see Hratch Tchilingirian’s “The Other Citizens.”

Author information

Hratch Tchilingirian

Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian is an intellectual entrepreneur and an activist sociologist. In recent years he has drawn attention to the plight of minorities and Christian communities in the Middle East, especially in academic and policy-making circles. As a public intellectual, his research, thinking and projects aim to make heritage identity, culture and language a living experience, especially in diasporic life. Following his PhD at the London School of Economics, he was director of research on Eurasia and lecturer at Cambridge University’s business school (2003-2012). Since 2012, he is an Associate of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at University of Oxford. He has lectured internationally and is the author of numerous studies and publications (www.hratch.info). Dr. Tchilingirian has held executive positions in academic institutions and charitable organizations and has served communities in various capacities and leadership positions in the United States and the United Kingdom. He remains deeply engaged in community life and takes active part in civic and professional projects.

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While Yerevanstis were focused on the Spendiaryan National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet and, especially cafes located nearby, I tried to dive deeper into this question and imagine what was historically located here in this controversial area.

In 1926, a decision was made to build a national home in Yerevan (which is the current Opera House), corresponding to Yerevan’s size and needs. Alexander Tamanyan was chosen to be the architect of the city. The selection of the place was done according to the plan of Yerevan. The landslides of the Northern Avenue seemed to be out of the busy parts of Yerevan. It was even difficult to imagine that this area would become part of the city’s public center.

Sayat-Nova – a street which is a little bit far from the gardens, was once called Church Street, since some of the oldest and most famous churches in the city were located here. We already know about the chapel of Gethsemane, but the Katoghike Holy Mother of God church was also located here, at the intersection of Abovyan and Sayat-Nova streets. This is the oldest church in Yerevan. This little thirteenth century church seems to be an example of historical justice. The point is that the church had transformed its dimensions in the 17th century and became a large basilica church. During the Soviet era, it had to be demolished so that another building could be built in its place. The large hall was demolished, and only the chapel remained—a 13th century dome-like cathedral.

I think you all may know that the other street passing through here, Abovyan, was once called Astafian. However, few know its original name – Fortress -because it stretches to the Fortress of Yerevan. The fortress originally started from the current municipality of Yerevan and stretched to the Zangvi Gorge where the Noy Factory is now located. Let me also note that Abovyan was the first street to have been drawn. In 1856, during the construction of the city of Yerevan, this street became the center, where the houses of elite representatives were built, combined with classical, Russian and European architectural solutions.

For example, this building-masterpiece located at Abovyan 3 belonged to well-known surgeon, Hovhannes Hovhannisyan. The second floor functioned as a surgical station.

This period of time was crucial for the transformation and construction of the city of Yerevan. This was when when the city with eastern style transformed into a beautiful scene with Russian, Western, classic and Armenian architecture. Despite the fact that the buildings in this district have not been preserved in Yerevan and officially we have no cultural old city, we still need to work toward presenting them correctly.

Author information

Vardan Hovhannisyan

Vardan was born in Yerevan and graduated from the ASUE. He is currently living in Yerevan and writing about his favorite hobby - traveling.

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After the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern vowed never to mention the name of the terrorist responsible for those horrific actions. “Speak the names of those who were lost, rather than the name of the man who took them,” she told her parliamentary colleagues. “He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.” Hearing this, I was reminded of the Bible verse, Proverbs 10:7—“The remembrance of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot.”

April 24 commemorates the start of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We know the names of the government and local leaders who orchestrated the deadly deportations and massacres because it is important for our understanding of the attitudes, motives and actions that lead to the genocide. There were also thousands of members of the Special Organization, the gendarmerie, vigilante groups and others who carried out the wicked deeds. Most of their names are not known. Like Prime Minister Ardern said, we don’t need to know them. They have rotted away, as is just. Instead, we remember the victims of the genocide and the survivors.

In the last few years there has been a growing movement to include the righteous in the remembrance of tragedies. The term ‘righteous’ became part of our parlance following the Holocaust when Jews began to identify non-Jews who aided Jews during the terror of the Nazi regime as righteous people.

As I was researching for my book, Grit and Grace in a World Gone Mad: Humanitarianism in Talas, Turkey 1908-1923, I came across many examples of righteous people who helped Ottoman Armenians during this period of terror. The righteous were of different ethnicities and nationalities, but they all had one thing in common: a deep-seated streak of humanity.

In some cases, as with North American missionaries stationed in Turkey, there was a sense of friendship and compassion mixed with religious duty. For humanitarian aid workers, who were not allowed in the country until the Ottoman government fell, it was part of their innate and professional desire to rehabilitate and reconstruct communities in need. Some of the righteous were friends and neighbors of Armenians. There were even government officials and military personnel who believed that the Ottoman government’s policies were illegal, immoral and vile. All of these people took whatever actions within their power in order to help.

As research into this period of history continues, the list of righteous people grows. Some of their names are familiar, such as American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who was one of the first international leaders to sound the alarm on the world stage; Norwegian nurse Bodil Biørn and German military lieutenant Armin Wegner, who took photographs as evidence of the terror and its aftermath; and Danish missionary Marie Jacobsen, who worked tirelessly to alleviate pain and suffering.

Others are not so well-known, and some will remain anonymous forever; it’s important to honor them and their acts of kindness as well. I discovered the following instrumental people back when I was working on my book.

While we don’t necessarily know their names, we do know of the righteous of groups like the Trebizond Area Turks and the Greeks. In the summer of 1915 almost 6,000 Armenians had been deported from Trebizond (Trabzon) though 500 or so escaped into the woods, caves and dens of the nearby mountains. In the spring of 1916 when the Allies temporarily occupied the area, a missionary recorded that “God had sent modern ‘Obadiahs,’ in the shape of some kind-hearted Turks, and some Greek men, but mostly Greek women, who, during the storms of the winter, had secretly come to the city to get help and then to bake and carry bread to the hiding places in the woods, week by week for all these ten months.”

There were also Turks and Greeks who aided Armenians in the small village of Tavlusun, three miles northeast of Talas where several hundred of them lived all together. They were mainly farmers and animal breeders, though a few were artisan plasterers. When the gendarmes came to begin deportations, the entire village banded together as one. The Turks and Greeks declared that if the Armenians went, they would go, too. In the end, no one left the village except the gendarmes.

As shown in the instances above, these stories also remind us that there were Turks, both groups and individuals, who were committed to saving Armenians from the atrocities of their government. In 1916 when Armenians were being rounded up for deportation in the Talas region, an Armenian nurse, some of her children and two little grandchildren were hidden in the house of a Turk in a nearby village. He had been her patient in the Talas hospital, suffering from a serious scalp wound. He had never forgotten the kindness and caring of the nurse, and was now in the position of demonstrating his regard for her. When he judged it safe to travel, he secretly escorted them all to Talas to the home of the woman’s other daughter.

In July 1915 the Ottoman government, aware that some Turks had been helping their Armenian friends, decreed that from now on “if any Muslim protect a Christian, first his house shall be burned, then the Christian killed before his eyes, and then his family and then himself.” This still left one safe way to help, and that was to convince Armenians to convert to Islam. The druggist in Talas, an Armenian, was a popular man, and listened for months to the pleading of his Turkish friends to convert to save his life. Over and over again he refused, but in the end it was a combination of an order from a powerful administrator and begging from his family members that convinced him to convert. He regretted the decision but was grateful for the well-meaning intentions of his friends.

There were also righteous people in positions of power who worked to save Armenians. When news of the deportations reached a Bedouin sheikh near Aleppo, he immediately went to the home of his Armenian friend in Aintab (Gaziantep) to see how he could help. He discovered the man and his wife had been killed, and their children were alone and desperate. He took all five of them—three boys and two girls—home with him to be part of his family. When the local kaimakam (governor) tried to kidnap the girls, the sheikh and his brother fought him off. For the rest of his life, the sheikh carried the scars of four bullet holes to mark his heroic actions. After the war, in conjunction with the order in Turkey for all Armenian women and children to be released, Emir Feisal ordered the same for Arab households. At first, no one wanted them to go. The children refused to leave the sheikh because they loved him, and he and his family loved them in return. Eventually, though reluctantly, he persuaded them to accept the order, but insisted on accompanying them to Aleppo to ensure they would be safe and well-cared for. As he and the children tearfully drove away, the whole village “ran beside the car shouting farewells and weeping.”

There was more than one government official who risked the security of his personal and occupational livelihood to save Armenians. The governor of Basra and three other officials in Miintefak, Midyat, and Bafra were murdered for their opposition to the deportation policies of the Ottoman government; about twenty other local officials were fired for refusing to comply.

Just before several gendarmes were to deport eight Armenian employees of the Talas Boys’ Boarding School to the desert, their route was mysteriously changed by a government official. Rather than travel along the northeastern route through Sivas, where so many Armenian men had been ambushed and murdered by Special Organization forces, they were to travel south through Eregli (Erekli), where the dangers were less. The German Consul later reported that the former teachers all arrived at their destination intact.

In addition to those heroic figures whose names remain anonymous, there are many other righteous people whose names were recorded in history and should be remembered. Below are some of the stories of these people, ranging from government officials to ordinary, compassionate individuals, that can also be found in Grit and Grace in a World Gone Mad: Humanitarianism in Talas, Turkey 1908-1923.

When almost fifty Armenians in Zeitoon (Süleymanlı) were accused of being part of a pro-Russian armed revolt and were arrested by the local kaimakam, Jelal, the governor of Aleppo, investigated the incident, which was within his jurisdiction. He determined there was no revolt and released those who were not charged. To punish him for his efforts, the Ottoman government removed Zeitoon from his authority. He saw the government’s attitude and policies against Armenians as “a misfortune for his fatherland,” and he begged German Consul Walter Rossler to persuade the German ambassador to “counteract this trend.” His suggestion of erecting protective shelters for the deportees was rejected, and he was removed from his position and transferred to Konya because of his views.

Halil Rami Bey, a Kurd, was the new governor of Malatia in 1919. James Barton, Chairman of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, noted that one of Halil Rami’s “first proclamations after his arrival was to the effect that all Armenians should come personally to him if they had a grievance that was not receiving adequate attention” and that he was committed to the restoration of the country.

During the deportations, the Turkish mayor of Cesarea, Rifat Bey, appealed to the governor for his friend and treasurer of the municipality, Garabed Kasakian, to be allowed to remain at his job. Permission was granted. Rifat Bey had made the appeal for Kasakian’s extended family, which included siblings, nieces and nephews.

Huseyin Nesimi, kaimakam of Lice, contributed by delayinged deportations and arranging fake marriages for Armenian women in an effort to protect them. He was called to account by the governor of Diarbekir, and on the way to see him was murdered on his way to see him by a brigand. Sabit Es Suveydi, the 25-year-old deputy kaimakam of Beshiri, was also killed after he refused to participate in the Diarbekir deportations.

Omer Efendi, a Turkish trader in Keskin, a village near Talas, received a smuggled message from his friend and fellow trader, Tateos Minassian. Minassian washad been rounded up while on business in Angora (Ankara), and was taken as was now part of a deportation convoy headed for the desert. He needed help. Omer managed to extract Minassian and hide him in his house. He also found a hiding place in the village for Minassian’s wife and children. At tremendous risk to himself, he hid the family for three years until the war was over.

International missionaries, educators and caretakers make up a large number of the unsung saviors of Armenians during the genocide. Now is a good time to hear their stories and be grateful for their sacrifices and for all the lives they saved.

Karen Marie Petersen, a member of the Danish Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere (Women Missionary Workers), had been living in Mezreh and Harput (Elâzığ) since 1909. She bore witness to the deportations and the aftermath of the massacres, and recorded the testimonies of survivors. As the director of the Emaus orphanage, she cared for as many children as possible, including “rescue women” after the war. Eventually, she adopted an Armenian orphan, and named her Hope. Along with a handful of other women who had stayed at their posts throughout the “dreadful time,” she was exhausted by 1919. When she heard relief workers were on their way, she wrote, “Would it be possible for me to buy from your supplies stuff for dresses and underclothing for the children? They are almost in a worse condition than the children outside. I have been so ashamed to have them going around in rags! . . . Please come soon!”

American teacher Ethel Putney was in the first group of international aid workers who established a refugee camp in Port Said, Egypt in 1915. Within months, she was joined by Mary Kinney, former missionary from Adabazar (Adapazarı), who set up and supervised workshops for Armenian women. Lilian Cole Sewny also joined them to contribute her considerable nursing skills. Before the war, Cole Sewny worked in the Talas hospital; she later moved to Sivas where she met and married Levon Sewny, the mission’s Armenian doctor. He died in 1914 of typhus, but she stayed and did all she could to help.

Charlotte Willard, American principal of the Girls’ Boarding School, and YWCA secretary (field worker) Frances Gage sprang into action when gendarmes entered the mission’s compound in Marsovan (Merzifon) and removed sixty-three Armenian women and girls for deportation. They asked to accompany the deportees and appealed to the local authorities and were denied both times. It took three days before they were given written permission to travel. Meanwhile, they gathered all the money they could find, swift horses, a couple of wagons, an interpreter and a faithful Circassian servant. It took two days before they caught up with the convoy, and only two-thirds of the girls were left. Twenty-one girls had been separated from the group and sent on another route. Willard and Gage negotiated for days with the Turkish guards, using persuasion, argument “and the judicious application of large sums of money” to finally return to Marsovan with the remaining forty-two Armenians.

American missionary Susan Wealthy Orvis was a member of the Talas team, who answered the call to establish a refugee centre in Alexandropol (Gyumri) in 1917. She traveled more than 7,000 miles with seven other relief workers in the middle of the Russian revolution to do so. Her companions were Rev. Ernest Partridge, Rev. Theodore Elmer, Rev. Walter James, Carl and Ruth Compton, and Henry H. and Irma White. Orvis organized a milk program to feed 300 babies in the area and turned a decrepit old barracks into a functioning hospital, before being forced to flee a day ahead of the advancing Ottoman and German armies. She was one of the first to return to Talas after the war and, with her Talas colleagues, saved 3,000 Armenian and Greek orphans when Christians were expelled from Turkey in December 1922.

Some of the names of the righteous are known while some remain anonymous. Collectively, their actions stand to remind us that in the midst of great wickedness, there is still goodness in the world. When times are dark, it is especially important to remember and honor that.

Sweet is the Memory of the Righteous

Our days will soon depart, and death will close
The changes of each life, our joys our woes;
The graceless tyrant then no more can harm!
‘Tis actions pious will the good embalm.
Torn from its stem and withered on the ground,
The flower amidst its fragrance oft is found;
So sweet will be the memory of his name—
Who saved his neighbour from the burning flame;
Rescued in furious storms from whelming waves,
Or snatched the poisonous cup mid yawning graves;
Who when deep guilt was pointing to despair,
Its victim urged death’s horrors all to date;
Exhibited a Saviour’s lovely face—
By faith, on earth, in heaven a resting place.
Who led to life, to bliss; to Christ the way;
Sweet, sweet will be to him eternal day.
A gentler passage leads him to the tomb,
His sacred memory wafts the sweet perfume.

– J.H.

Published in New Zealander, Volume 7, Issue 549, 19 July 1851 (courtesy of the National Library of New Zealand)

Author information

Wendy Elliott

Wendy Elliott has an MEd and a special interest in history. She is the author of “Grit and Grace in a World Gone Mad: Humanitarianism in Talas, Turkey 1908-1923” and the young adult novel, "The Dark Triumph of Daniel Sarkisyan." Visit https://wendyelliott.ca for more information about her books or to follow her blog.

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On April 24, 2019, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had Armenians on his mind. He railed and cajoled, and spared no form of communication—a speech, a letter and a barrage of tweets—to stay afloat on a day that threatened to drown his country’s legacy in shame. His speech and tweets were primarily directed at his countrymen; his letter at Turkey’s Armenian community; and a statement by his Foreign Ministry at the international community and the “radical” diaspora.

“The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters, who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period. The doors of our archives are wide open to all seeking the truth,” tweeted Erdogan. This was but one of his many tweets referring to the “events of 1915.”

The others were self-congratulatory in essence, praising his country’s archival troves. “Archives are the memory of a nation and a state. Nations without memories cannot know where they come from, where they are today and where they are headed to. A strong tradition of archive is also a testimony to a strong state history,” read another tweet. “One of the issues about which we proudly proclaim the truth to the whole World thanks to our archives is the Armenian issue…” read part of another. Some of these tweets were quoted from a speech he delivered that very same day at “The Symposium on Our Archives’ Development, Vision and Contributions to Historical Research.”

That very same day, the Turkish President’s official website posted a letter Erdogan sent to the General Vicar of the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey, Aram Ateşyan. The letter was rife with justifications, equivocations, temporal distancing of the crime and a warning.

“This year as well, I remember with respect the Ottoman Armenians who lost their lives under harsh conditions of the First World War and offer my sincere condolences to their grandchildren,” wrote Erdogan. He referred to a “massive humanitarian crises” which he implied was an ordinary occurrence “as had been the case during any other empire’s disintegration period.” He briefly praised the “great contributions” of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He spoke of the “free” and “equal” Armenian citizens of his country today who play “important roles” in society “as they did in the past.” He referred to the “shared grief and joy” of “these two peoples”—presumably Turks and Armenians—and their “common objective…to heal the wounds of the past.”

“We will continue to stand with you for the alleviation of your sufferings and the resolution of your problems. I especially would like to underline that the peace, security and happiness of the Armenian community in our country are of very special importance to us. We will stand against those who allow even a single Armenian citizen of ours to be alienated or excluded… I believe that the way to building a shared future is to be one and united. In this regard, I kindly request you to avoid helping those who seek to create hatred, grudge and hostility by distorting our common history. With these thoughts in my mind, I remember with respect, once again, the Ottoman Armenians whom we lost during the First World War,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued the following statement in response to US President Donald Trump’s “Medz Yeghern” message:

We reject US President Donald Trump’s statement dated 24 April 2019 with regard to the events of 1915. This statement, based on the subjective narrative fictionalized by Armenians, is of no worth. Distortion of history for domestic political considerations can never be accepted. We remind pains of more than 500 thousand Muslims slaughtered by Armenian rebels in the same period and invite President Trump to be fair. Turkey is still behind its proposal to establish a Joint Historical Commission to shed light on all aspects of the events that took place 104 years ago. Radical Armenians, who want to ensure their responsibilities in the events of 1915 are overlooked, do not show the courage to respond positively to this proposal. On this occasion, we commemorate with respect Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all other Ottoman communities who lost their lives during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

These messages can be summed up in a couple of sentences: The Genocide is an Armenian fabrication. The deportations were not; but they were the most reasonable of actions and were well deserved. Armenian gangs are the true culprits. Suffering was expected as the empire collapsed. Armenian citizens of Turkey ought to be grateful and supportive of the state. We’re proud of our archives and would love to lock up Armenian historians in our archival mazes until they see things our way.

One would presume that no one was surprised reading the threats and justifications above. Outraged? Perhaps. Shocked? No. Most descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors expect this line of rhetoric from official Ankara. And most have been outspoken in their rejection of the official “condolences” and the equivocating language of Erdogan’s administration.

The question that interests me here however is what would be the “right” message by Ankara? What would constitute a sincere state apology?

***

The Apology

It is April 24, 2020. President Erdogan stands on the steps of the Haydarpasha Train Station in Istanbul, where around 250 Armenian intellectuals, politicians, community leaders and writers, who had been detained on April 24, 1915, were boarded on trains and sent to Ankara and later killed. The day marks the beginning of a genocide campaign that targeted the Armenian, Assyrian and Pontian Greek population of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Erdogan draws a deep breath and begins to speak. The event is broadcast live by major national and international television stations.

***

[1] I stand before you today to extend the long-overdue apology that my government owes to the survivors and descendants of survivors of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocide. The Turkish state killed up to 1,500,000 Armenians, 300,000 Assyrians and 500,000 Pontic Greeks between 1915 and 1923. The Christian population of this country stood at roughly 20 percent before the genocide. Today, that number is less than 0.2 percent. [1] I apologize for this systemic and government-sponsored campaign that targeted your communities, exterminated your leadership, killed your men, raped, abducted, and enslaved your women and children and sent the surviving members of your communities on death marches that many did not survive.

[2] I recognize the aim and consequences of that campaign, which uprooted you from your ancestral lands, systematically robbed you of your properties, lands, churches, schools, businesses and homes. This campaign of dispossession was not confined to the years 1915-1923, but it continued, peaking again in the 1950s and 1970s. I apologize to the Greek community for the Istanbul pogrom of September 6 and 7, 1955, when the government incited and condoned the violence against the Greek community in Istanbul, the looting and burning of your businesses, the beatings and the killing of up to 30 members of your community.

[3] I recognize the ways in which the perpetrators and this government and state enriched themselves through these plunders and continue to profit to this day. I recognize the continued destruction of your churches and cemeteries by treasure hunters who search for gold[2].

[4] I recognize, for instance, that until very recently—2014 to be exact—the presidential palace—the Cankaya Mansion—where I conducted much of my work, was in truth the confiscated home of Ohannes Kasabian, an Armenian jeweler and businessman. Today, my government has converted Kasabian’s home into the prime ministerial offices. I apologize for this continued injustice.

[5] I recognize that in the century following the start of this campaign of extermination and Turkification, the state has diligently engaged in a campaign of denial and intimidation, robbing you of your dignity. Denial has followed you to different shores where, as descendants of survivors, you sought to reconstitute your communities and remember all those who were victimized. While you pursued your quest for justice, this government and the governments before it denied, justified or minimized your suffering.

[6] I recognize that even today, those of you who have somehow managed to remain in this country—you who we have called “remnants of the sword”—continue to live in fear, facing intimidation, harassment, and discrimination. I recognize that the actions of this state have forced you to hide your identities and relinquish your names and religion; some of you have mothers or grandmothers who survived the genocide by being abducted or taken in by Turkish and Kurdish families and their stories have been suppressed in this atmosphere created by successive Turkish governments. In all these cases, the state remained meticulous in identifying you in official records. Until today, successive governments maintained “race codes.” The Turkish government mistrusted you, and its treatment of you showed that.

[7] I recognize that even today the state continues to harbor an atmosphere of fear. My government denied you your basic need for security. Some of you felt that most strongly in 2007, when the outspoken Armenian editor Hrant Dink was gunned down in front of his offices. My government intimidated him. We harassed him. We dragged him to the courts for speaking the truth. And we eventually killed him. The one to pull the trigger was an ultra-nationalist youth, but he is the product of this state’s rhetoric and treatment of you. We refused to offer his family justice. We hid the truth of his murder, of our complicity in that heinous crime.

[8] I recognize that by naming streets and public spaces after the masterminds of the genocide—Talaat, Enver and Jemal—the state continues to praise and condone this crime against humanity.

[9] I recognize that Turkish history textbooks advance the dominant narrative of genocide denial. I recognize that the Turkish government continues to teach its children this language of denial, vilifying you and painting you as enemies of the state. I recognize the state’s widespread and systemic effort to erase your presence from history through purposely destroying your churches, omitting references to your history and presence on these lands, as well as the renaming of villages, cities and towns.

[10] This government and governments before it did all this in a concerted effort at denial and Turkification, to create a homogenous Turkey—a Turkey for Turks only. I recognize these policies were rooted in racism, prejudice, xenophobia, greed and hatred.

[11] I recognize that my government’s justifications have only paved the way to new injustices against you and other groups in this country.

[12] I recognize these facts and take full responsibility for them.

[13] I apologize for these crimes, unequivocally and sincerely.

[14] This apology is this government’s initial step on a new path marked by a truthful reckoning with its past and present. This is the moment leaders of this country break the language of denial, and attempt to pave a new path forward. This is the first blow to the edifice of hatred and xenophobia—a new Turkey will only be able to rise on foundations of truth, justice, equality and self-reflection.

[15] Congruent to this apology, my government has consulted with victim organizations and individuals, representatives of various Armenian, Assyrian and Pontic Greek communities and experts in the field of transitional justice to draft bills and take important steps to counter the injustices of the past. Among these efforts are the return of confiscated properties and lands where possible; reparations to the descendants of victims; the rewriting of textbooks where denial and justification occur; support—whether moral or in resources—to the community organizations still functioning in this country; the construction of public memorials in cities and towns across this country; the renaming of streets and public spaces named after the masterminds of the genocide; and a comprehensive investigation into recent crimes, including the murder of Hrant Dink. In addition, we will make our archives fully available to researchers and set in place funds to support the research conducted by individuals and organizations in the field of genocide studies.

[16] Today, this government is lifting the illegal and unilateral economic blockade against Armenia that has been in place since 1993. We are in communication with Yerevan to draft a plan of normalizing diplomatic relations without preconditions.

[17] Finally, I proclaim this day—April 24—National Remembrance Day of the Armenian Genocide.

[18] I proclaim May 19 the National Remembrance Day of the Pontian Greek Genocide.

[19] I proclaim August 7 the National Memorial Day of the Assyrian Genocide.

[20] I hope that together we can continue to envision a new path forward.

Thank you.

***

Erdogan’s letter is clear and to the point.

[1] The opening paragraph lays out a clear acknowledgement of the wrongs and takes responsibility for them. It acknowledges the magnitude of loss in terms of numbers. Erdogan recognizes the concept of intent—that the orders of genocide came from the top echelons of government—which is a clear break from the justifications given in the past. The line of denial that has been pushed forward thus far has in essence argued: We didn’t do it; and if we did do it, we were justified by the realities of World War I. In recent years, Erdogan and former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have issued “condolence” messages to Armenians. Erdogan focused[3] on “our shared pain,” equating the losses from genocide with Turkish losses during World War I. Similarly, Davutoglu argued[4] that Turks and Armenians “share… a ‘common pain’ inherited from our grandparents.” Both statements were rejected by large segments of Armenian communities, and gave rise to a flood of editorials, op-eds and statements denouncing them.

[2] The second paragraph further recognizes the extent of the crime: the uprooting of peoples from their ancestral homes and the dispossession that accompanied it.

[3] The third paragraph recognizes that the genocide not only benefited the perpetrators of the time, but also how it continues to profit the descendants of the perpetrators and the state. For instance, the US Incirlik Air Base, the Diyarbakir Airport and many other major landmarks are located on confiscated Armenian properties. It has been argued that today’s economy and the creation of a new wealthy class in Turkey is rooted in this campaign of dispossession.[5]

[4] Paragraph 4 serves to give a closer example of the dispossession and state profiteering.

[5] Paragraph 5 addresses a different dimension of the injury—that of denial. Erdogan acknowledges the magnitude of this denial campaign and the injury it has caused, and takes responsibility for it.

[6] Paragraph 6 recognizes the suffering of the survivors and descendants of survivors who remained in the country. It recognizes the plight of the remaining communities, the Islamized and hidden descendants of survivors. It also acknowledges their continued oppression, and the state’s continued role in it. The last sentence of the paragraph refers to the identity codes in place in Turkey, where the ethnicity of individuals are codified on their identity cards and official documents. The codes have been in place since 1923, and identify individuals with Armenian, Jewish, and Greek background.[6]

[7] Paragraph 7 recognizes the state’s role in failing to protect minorities. The murder of Hrant Dink became a turning point in recent Turkish history, where the degree of hatred was seen in plain sight. Dink’s funeral brought out around 200,000 mourners, who were appalled by the deed. Justice still evades the Dink family. The legal process has been criticized for failing to reveal the extent to which authorities and police officers were complicit in his murder, despite a European Court of Human Rights verdict[7]. Here, Erdogan acknowledges the role of society and the atmosphere created by the state as complicit elements in his murder.

[8] Paragraph 8 recognizes how the naming of streets and public spaces after the masterminds of the genocide continues to cause injury, and furthermore condones the crime.

[9] Paragraph 9 recognizes the ways in which denial and the erasure of non-Turkic identities continues to this day, particularly in textbooks, the renaming of places, and references to history. It recognizes the complicit role of the education system in perpetuating injustices.[8]

[10] Paragraph 10 recognizes the root causes of the crime: racism, prejudice, xenophobia, greed, and hatred.

[11] In paragraph 11, Erdogan recognizes how failure to reconcile with past injustices make new injustices possible. Here, it is implied that he is referring to the state’s treatment of “othered” groups, including the Kurds.

[12] In paragraph 12, Erdogan reiterates his recognition of “these facts” and his willingness to take responsibility for them. By reiterating it, he leaves no room for vagueness.

[13] In paragraph 13, Erdogan reiterates his apology—clearly and unambiguously.

[14] In paragraph 14, Erdogan reveals that the apology is but a first step of atonement and a marked break from the language of denial. He also qualifies it as a first step towards a new vision of an inclusive state.

[15] Paragraph 15 describes some of the further measures that will be taken by the state, in consultation with victim groups and organizations. This shows the commitment of his office to taking meaningful steps towards restitution, reparations, and societal rehabilitation.

[16] In paragraph 16, Erdogan reveals a change in foreign policy, where the illegal blockade against Armenia is lifted without preconditions, and further talks between official Yerevan and Ankara are in the works. In 2009, the normalization attempt between the two countries—referred to as “The Zurich Protocols”—largely failed because of public outcry in Armenian communities worldwide against preconditions present in the deal, including a clause that rendered the issue of genocide recognition into a historic debate to be discussed by a historical commission made up of “experts” from the two countries.

[17-19] In paragraphs 17, 18, and 19, Erdogan assigns days of mourning of the Armenian, Pontian Greek, and Assyrian genocides. The dates are those set by their respective communities as days of remembrance.

[20] In his concluding sentence, Erdogan expresses his hope that “together” a new future will be possible. The sentence denotes a willingness to work together in ensuring that past injustices are not repeated in the future.

Erdogan’s apology is unambiguous and to the point—from the opening sentence to the end of his message. Erdogan largely avoids using the passive voice, but instead relies on an active voice and active verbs. He does not use temporal distancing, but on the contrary, recognizes the continued injustices affecting the survivors and descendants of survivors—from denial to the continuation of oppressive policies and rhetoric. He enumerates the injustices, and their different dimensions. He provides no justifications and no qualifiers. By using the first-person singular pronoun “I,” Erdogan takes personal responsibility for the wrongs. Erdogan, whose apology as well as the acts to follow it, would be drafted together with victim groups and organizations, is familiar with his audience. Furthermore, naming some of the root causes of the crimes—racism, prejudice, xenophobia, greed and hatred—suggests that Erdogan has drawn some lessons from this accounting.

Finally, it is important to realize that the apology will surely fall short of the expectations of some individuals and organizations, since not everyone has the same idea of what justice should look like. Groups are not homogeneous and include a multitude of voices and needs. It is important for Erdogan to come to terms with this and refrain from acting in an antagonistic way towards those who reject these efforts.

***

And three apples fell from heaven…

Author’s note: In drafting this apology letter, this author drew advice and inspiration from Stewart David Ikeda’s “The Art of Apology: Grading the Ex-Presidents on their Internment Lessons” (2000). (Ikeda’s article is available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120702114615/http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/history_heritage/ikeda_internment_apology.asp). Finally, the author is grateful to Prof. Rajini Srikanth of UMASS Boston, whose course on literature and conflict examined a range of topics including issues relating to state apologies and helped shape this article.

[1] Current percentage based on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “The World Factbook,” available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2122.html#tu .

[2] It is a popular belief in Turkey that Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks buried their gold beneath their churches during the genocide. Many articles have discussed such destruction. During my many travels in the Eastern provinces of Turkey, I did not encounter a single church whose grounds and interior were not pockmarked by deep, wide holes.

[3] You can find Erdogan’s message here: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/turkish-prime-minister-mr_-recep-tayyip-erdogan-published-a-message-on-the-events-of-1915.en.mfa

[4] You can find Davutoglu’s full message here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/02/turks-armenians-erdogan-condolences-1915-armenian-massacre

[5] See for instance: Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel’s Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011; and Varak Ketsemanian’s “The Confiscation of Armenian Properties: An Interview with Ümit Kurt”, The Armenian Weekly, September 23, 2013 (Available here: http://bit.ly/2pptMmH ).

[6] See “Minorities in Turkey tagged by ‘race codes,’ official document reveals,” in Hurriyet Daily News, August 1, 2013 (Available here: http://bit.ly/2pt6JnY ).

[7] See “Turkey Unanimously Convicted in Hrant Dink Case,” Bianet, Sept. 15, 2010. Available here: http://bianet.org/english/minorities/124789-turkey-unanimously-convicted-in-hrant-dink-case

[8] See for instance “Akcam: Textbooks and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey: Heading Towards 2015” by Taner Akcam, in The Armenian Weekly, Dec. 4, 2014 (available here: http://armenianweekly.com/2014/12/04/textbooks/) ; and “A Century after Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial only Deepens,” by Tim Arango in The New York Times, April 16, 2015 (Available here: http://nyti.ms/2oOUnZu).

Author information

Nanore Barsoumian

Nanore Barsoumian was the editor of the Armenian Weekly from 2014 to 2016. She served as assistant editor of the Armenian Weekly from 2010 to 2014. Her writings focus on human rights, politics, poverty, and environmental and gender issues. She has reported from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabagh, Javakhk and Turkey. She earned her B.A. degree in Political Science and English and her M.A. in Conflict Resolution from the University of Massachusetts (Boston).

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