wayweird

Hey, anyone out there ever hear of Armenia?

Where the hell is it? Never mind – I’ll just Google it 

 .

Hey! There it is. Doesn’t look very big does it?

It once covered much more area. Check out the map below:

In fact back in the day most educated people didn’t even have to ask where it was or who the Armenians were.

The Armenians are an ancient people. The kingdom of Armenia was established in 600 B.C.  Although their country is presently only about the size of Rhode Island, the Armenian Empire once occupied most of which is now known as modern Turkey.

In 290 A.D. Armenia was the first and only Christian nation in the world - this was 40 years before Emperor Constantine acknowledged Christianity for the Roman Empire. By 600 A.D. it had become one of the Byzantine Empire’s most important provinces.

Ralph Peters in his book Looking For Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World comments that their art, commerce and architecture were such that the ruins they left shamed cultures that followed them.

In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks took Georgia and Armenia from Byzantine Empire. Thus began several hundred years of subjugation by the Moslems. By the sixteenth century, Armenia had been absorbed into the vast and mighty Ottoman Empire. At its peak, this Turkish empire included almost all of the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Southeast Europe.

Even after they had fallen from greatness and succumbed to the Moslem yoke, Armenians continued to be the most prosperous and best educated communities within the Ottoman Empire. Armenians were the professionals in society, the businessmen, lawyers, doctors and skilled craftsmen. They were more open to new scientific, political and social ideas from the West than the typical Turk.

Once the Ottoman Empire began to crumble at the dawn of the 20^th Century a great tragedy befell the people of Armenia…the Armenian Genocide, planned and executed by senior officers of the Turkish army, claimed 1.5 million Armenian lives.

Men were disarmed, rounded up, tortured and shot or hanged. Women and girls were kidnapped and raped. Toddlers were grouped together and bayoneted. The elderly were rousted out of their homes and died under the blazing sun during a long deportation march through the Syrian Desert.

The Turks tried to obliterate 2500 years of Armenian heritage. They destroyed Armenian churches, they sacked Armenian towns, they burnt Armenian literature, and they demolished ancient works of art. What they didn’t destroy they kept for themselves.

Even now the Turks deny the fact that the genocide ever happened.  Here are three books that say it did.

Henry Morgenthau, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a first hand account of the horrors he witnessed in a book aptly entitled Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story published in 1918. Click the link and read what he said.

Little seven year old Schnorhig Keshishian lived to tell how her entire family (grandparents, aunts, cousins, brother and sister) was evicted from its village and sent on a death march which only she and her mother survived.  Schnorhig’s daughter, Florence M. Soghoian, writes about it in Portrait of a Survivor.

If you want the big picture - who did what and when - then check out Peter Balakian’s Burning Tigris, The: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.  

Trackback URI | Comments RSS