Reflections On Armenian Culture, More Than A Century After Genocide

By Harriet Paintin & Hannah Kirmes-Daly

‘We always hear the voices from this place.’

“My parents came from western Armenia (modern-day Turkey). They lived there but they had to flee and come here. It’s our territory but the genocide happened and we were thrown out of our land. 1.5 million Armenians were killed, just because we are Christians. That’s why they wanted to destroy us.”

April 24 marks the anniversary of what is known by many, and denied by some, as the “first modern Holocaust.” Between 1915 and 1917, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were summarily executed by factions of the failing Ottoman Empire. Today, the diaspora is spread across the world, and lives, identities, and communities have been constructed in the aftermath of the genocide. Only a handful of survivors remain who can tell their stories of surviving the massacres and death marches, but the memories resonate in the minds of the Armenian population; songs, stories, and a strong sense of injustice have been fiercely preserved through the generations, maintaining culture and remembering grief.

In order to understand how the echoes of this tragedy linger on, we travelled to Armenia, hitchhiking from village to village seeking out spontaneous encounters with…