Blog Archives
An Odar’s Pilgrimage to Historic Armenia
I’d heard about historic Armenia for years. I learned about it from the stories of friends whose grandparents were born there. I saw it in the paintings of Saryan. I sang about it in songs like “Giligia” and “Akh Vaspurakan.” I peered into it from the buffer zone on the Armenian side of the border […]
Akhtamar: A Photographic Journey
The Armenian Weekly features below a series of photographs from the Sourp Khatch (Holy Cross) Church on Akhtamar Island in Van, taken by the Weekly Editor during a recent trip to the area. Click here for more articles and photographs from the Editor’s trips to historic Armenia.
A Turk, a Kurd, and an Armenian Walk into a Church
We park the car near Lake Van and start our long hike towards the side of a hill where the ruins of a medieval Armenian monastery await us. It is a long hike over uneven surfaces thoroughly sprinkled with dry manure. We had met the culprits earlier, near the lake—a large herd of sheep that […]
Looters or Landlords?
Since Fatih Sultan Mohammed occupied Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman rulers have been destroying and desecrating churches, castles, architectural monuments of Hittites, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and other nationalities who had been the indigenous people of Asia Minor, occupied and ruled through blood and sword. Now, all of a sudden, the destroyers of all these cultures […]
A Flower or an Oak Tree? A Response to Nanore Barsoumian
For the past few weeks, we have been reading the unbelievably emotional and informative revelations of Nanore Barsoumian, Weekly assistant editor, and Khatchig Mouradian, Weekly editor, in their travels in eastern Turkey, where they searched for traces of a three-thousand-year-old Armenian presence in the region that suddenly disappeared in 1915. In one of the articles, […]
Where Do We Go from Here? Notes from a ‘Tourist’ in Diyarbakir
The Turkish version of the following article appeared in the July 20, 2012 issue of Ozgur Haber, a daily newspaper published in Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd. I sit in my room, in Diyarbakir’s old Deliller Kervansaray. I draw the curtains shut, and lay down on my belly. I am content in my temporary seclusion, hidden from the bustling […]
Home at Last: An AYFer Visits Historic Armenia
When I was asked to accompany my father on a trip to Turkey, I was struck with conflicting feelings: Should I visit a place that was responsible for the massacres of my family, as well as many other Armenian families? Should I spend money in a place that took money and valuables from the people […]
Keghi Interrupted: Treasuring Moments in Manure
I took each step with caution, placing one foot in front of the other with the precision of a tightrope dancer. I carefully traced the edge of the crumbling wall, where the earth was dry. Just a few inches to my right was the stew of mud, manure, and urine that carpeted the interior […]
Virtuous Victims? Imagining Armenians in the West
During the winter of 1902-03, small groups of Armenian refugees began arriving in Sweden, survivors of the 1890’s Abdülhamid massacres,1 and according to newspaper reports some even made it all the way to Norway.2 But it was claimed by an alleged authoritative source that such groups were not, or not necessarily, actual Armenians at all. In […]
Scribbles in a Hand
“From the day we opened our eyes, a church stood here. They kept tearing down its walls and taking away the stones until almost nothing remained,” an old woman tells me, as she walks past the ruins of the Armenian church in Keserig (Kesrik). We are in historic Armenia visiting the ruins of churches and […]
Ghosts and a Sole Survivor: A visit to a former Armenian district in Turkey
Reminding of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, abundant vegetation hangs like emerald bracelets in the stretching districts of Kayseri (Caesarea) in central Anatolia (modern Turkey). In such a district, Talas, lives the sole Armenian resident of Kayseri, 55-year-old Sargis Tekian. “Three generations of our family have lived in this house. I have never concealed my […]
Malatya: Post-Armenian life in modern Turkey’s once Armenian city
Armenian brothers Arman and Murad, who live in Turkey’s southeastern city of Malatya, open the doors of the 250-year-old Armenian Holy Trinity (Tashhoron) Church in the city’s Cavusoglu district and invite in the group of visiting Armenian and Turkish journalists. The church that once saw liturgies and was filled with the fragrance of incense now […]
Revisiting the Turkification of Confiscated Armenian Assets
If one person murders another, then takes over that murdered person’s property and possessions, he would be living off the proceeds of his crime. Once authorities discover his crime, he would be found guilty—by any court, anywhere—and then sentenced, punished, and forced to return the unlawfully obtained property and possessions. But if a people murders […]
Western Armenian Is Nearing Extinction
“We must know the white man language to survive in this world. But we must know our language to survive forever.” (Darryl Babe Wilson, a Native American). The recent well-justified alarm that western Armenian is among the world’s thousands of endangered languages (that is, predicted to die in the next 100 years), important though it […]
