For more than a decade, I taught an area studies course at the Foreign Service Institute that focused on Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. My students were US diplomats, military staff, and government workers headed to assignments in the Caucasus. Several classes focused on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, and Armenia.
They came by the hundreds, even thousands — ethnic Armenian women who had survived the World-War-I-era massacres in Turkey and were brought by ship to the United States to meet the equally anxious Armenian men, complete strangers, who would become their partners for life.
In 2005, I took a picture of 100-year-old Yerevan resident Remella Amlikian, a native of the Turkish village of Vakif who had survived the Ottoman Empire’s 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians. She could hardly see, could hear nothing, and could not move.
Five years ago, 53-year-old freelance columnist Miran Pirgiç, a resident of the eastern Turkish region of Tunceli, decided to disclose a tightly held secret — his Armenian ethnicity. Increasingly, scores of ethnic Armenians whose ancestors survived the 1915 massacre and were raised as Turks, Kurds or Alevis are choosing to do the same.
For Armenians, the towns of Muş and Sason in southeastern Turkey, not far to the west of Lake Van, hold particular historical significance. But today, 100 years after the massacre of 1915, few ethnic Armenians still remain there