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Published: September 11th 2023
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So today we went to the Armenian Genocide Monument and Museum In Yerevan.
It remembers a series of massacres an deportations of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Turks particularly in the period from 1890 - 1919. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide.
Pistachio croissant for breakfast. It was decorated with green glazed stripes and filled with green pistachio custard.
We had waited for good while for a No 46 on Mashtots Street, but this Rough Guide recommended transport to the museum seemed unlikely to materialise. Numbers and services change. We walk a bit and taxi driver who was on hand agreed 2000 AMD (about £4 like a ride for two on the No 1 at home, if you’re twirly for the old gadgies’ pass). So, in minutes we were across the canyon and up the hill to the Genocide Museum and Monument. It was built in 1965 in grey stone with an obelisk and a structure enclosing a flame with views to the city and Ararat. There a numerous trees donated by governments and individuals from around the world to remember the dead and acknowledge the genocide.
The exhibition is really well designed and the story told well executed in a sequence of display boards, video and occasional artefacts. It’s free and it was not too busy to take one’s time and digest the info.
Please feel free skip the next summary of the history if it’s not your interest, it’s not really a blog as such, more my account of what has become important for me to grapple with while we stay here. But here goes........
For centuries the great mountain plateau of Eastern Anatolia, present-day eastern Turkey, was inhabited by both Christian Armenians and Muslim Kurds. Then Armenian political independence was largely brought to an end by a wave of invasions and migrations by Turkic-speaking peoples beginning in the 11th century, and in the 15th and 16th centuries the region was secured by the Ottoman Turks and integrated into the vast Ottoman Empire.
But Armenians still retained a strong sense of their on identity, however, embodied in the Armenian language and the Armenian Church. And, their autonomy was fostered by the Ottomans using their millet system allowing them to administrate their own community.
By
the End of the 19th century, there were about 2.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, mostly concentrated in the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia. A significant number of Armenians also lived beyond the eastern border of the Ottoman Empire, in territory held by Russia. This is the land where we are now staying and know as Armenia. Armenians were never a majority in E Anatolia though they were mostly geographically grouped in pockets. And their success as traders, craftspeople and academics was often seen as a threat. As a result, they often received harsh treatment from the dominant Kurdish nomads. The Armenians had to pay a higher rate of tax. Local courts and judges often favoured Muslims, Armenians had little recourse when they were the victims of violence or when their land, livestock, or property was taken from them.
In many ways the Ottomans depended upon the Armenians, for example, the chief architects of the Ottoman court were of the Armenian Balian family. But overall polarisation of feelings was increasingly coming to a head.
Towards the end of the 19C young Arminian activists started to campaign for an independent Armenian state. When, in 1894, the Armenians
in the Sasun region refused to pay an oppressive tax, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands of Armenians in the region. Another series of mass killings began in the fall of 1895, and then in series of other massacres up to 1909.
A new movement called The Young Turks and smaller group within it: the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power in the run up to WW1. Armenians welcomed the restoration of the Ottoman constitution that was being introduced by this regime, and also the promise of elections led Armenians and other non-Turks within the empire, and started to cooperate with the new political order. But soon the bubble burst with constitutional promises broken and antipathy toward Christians increased when the Ottoman Empire suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Balkan War (1912–13), resulting in the loss of nearly all its remaining territory in Europe.
Young Turk leaders blamed the defeat on the treachery of Balkan Christians. Furthermore, the conflict sent hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees streaming eastward into Anatolia, intensifying conflict between Muslims and Christian peasants over land.
Fearful Armenians capitalized on the Ottoman defeat to press for reforms, appealing to
the European powers to force the Young Turks to accept a degree of autonomy in the Armenian provinces. In 1914 the European powers imposed a major reform on the Ottomans that required supervision by inspectors in the east. The Young Turks took that arrangement as further proof of the Armenians’ collusion with Europe to undermine the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire.
As World War I began in the summer of 1914, the Young Turks joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austro-Hungary) against the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia). The Armenians were subsequently being massacred wholesale, many emigrated to USA or Europe, women were moved to Aleppo or elsewhere in enforced marches with no food or shelter where most died of exhaustion and starvation. Children left behind were left to die or sent to orphanages then brought up as Muslims.
Thanks to Encyclopaedia Britannica for large parts of this.
And I’ve only scratched the surface. Some countries have still failed to recognise the well documented events as genocide.
The visit to the museum was very moving. It makes one thankful to be living on an island like UK. Geography
plays a big pert in landlocked territories.
In this time when many democracies have moved to the right, tolerance and celebration of difference must not be allowed slip through our fingers. Beware the bullies and spreaders of rumour creating division.
We commandeered a further taxi on the way back and Marion’s skill with Russian landed a fee of 1500 AMD this time. We alighted at the Square of the Republic and found a place to slt in shade with a sandwich and beer. A further myriad of fountains here gave the sense of a water garden in Cordoba or Grenada: the sound and cooling nature of water relaxes the sandwich muncher.
For an hour we sketched in the lower part of the garden.
Afterwards we continued south to a further garden celebrating the 2800th birthday of Yerevan. Guess what...... it contains 2800 fountains and is in a strip leading to a further square. These were the most impressive of all like the dancing fountains of Alnwick Gardens. Best of all is a arched tunnel created with a succession of fountains set in the paving.
But they can stop at any time. It’s a gamble to run through because mid tunnel, if it switches off there’s a fair old weight of water to drop on you......
We walk back to the hôtel to find a rock stage erected in the our square next to the spider. The sound check is very loud as we settle in upstairs in our room ....... there is an interesting hand drum kit is being played and a folk flute of some sort.
Later, as we leave to find an evening meal, a DJ is chasing grooves. We hope we might catch the live band later (but not be kept awake all night). We head to where I bought a phone card earlier today, near Mashtots Street. We see a couple of Armenian food restaurants there, one has a function in full swing the other has no front of house person in evidence to greet us......
By chance we fall upon ‘Komanche’ restaurant around the corner. There’s live Armenian music inside with good food. I eat barbecued fish, Gregorian Khachapuri is Marion’s choice ..... it’s like a boat hull made with pizza dough
filled with cheese and egg, rich but lovely.
The band are great: hammer dulcimer, 2 x duduks, an upright fiddle, two keyboards and an Armenian dohl drummer. There’s plenty of traditional music but also bossa novas with both a male and female vocalist. We have fallen on our feet.
The duduk is a short pipe with a large double reed that sounds very low and sonorous when played lyrically with a drone. There are lots of mixed time signatures and tempo changing and the dhol, a simple two headed cylinder played by hand like a frame drum, drives the music.
Back home at the Moscow Cinema it’s 10.45pm and the band are packing up. We’re relieved that we won’t have to stay up all night but sad to have missed their live music.
Good night!
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