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Vartan Matiossian

Vartan Matiossian

Born in Montevideo (Uruguay) and long-time resident of Buenos Aires (Argentina), Dr. Vartan Matiossian is a historian, literary scholar, translator and educator living in New Jersey. He has published six books on Armenian history and literature (five in Armenian and one in Spanish), and scores of articles in Armenian, Spanish, and English. He is currently the executive director of the Armenian National Education Committee in New York and book review editor of Armenian Review.

15 Comments

  1. Vartan Matiossian has presented an in-depth, informative and very interesting study of the evolution of the word Yeghern.

    Few years ago there was a German made documentary titled Aghed. I naturally understood what the word meant and implied but it sounded alien to me to ascribe to the 1915 Armenian Experience. Therein lies the subtle but profound influence of culture on the use of a word even among the users of the ‘same” language, let alone in attempting to translate.

    The pre-1965 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide was much more different than what it has evolved to since then. It was more of a lamenting, grieving indoors with the Avedis Aharanian’s famed quote plastered on the wall. Yeghern was the word used then and not tseghaspanoutiun- genocide – as much. My formative years were shaped there.

    In the end, I believe, its not word that constricts its evolution it’s the users who may expand on its use. Yeghern may have had different meanings at one time. However, as far as I am concerned the post 1915 use of the capitalized word Yeghern strictly defined the 1915 Armenian experience that altered our millennia old history forever.
    It is time for us to coin our Word, much like the word holocaust has now come to define the WWII Jewish experience. Incidentally Winston Churchill has used the word holocaust to characterize the Armenian experience. But that is now history.

    The use of the word genocide is being trivialized. I say this neither out of disrespect nor out of being insensitive to the massive killings that have been going on but because of the liberal use of the word genocide especially within the context of its political ramification and also to distinguish what happened to us in 1915. Ours is tragically unique. I quoted Raffi Hovanissian. The interested reader may read the comment I made to Vartan’s preceding article regarding the word Yeghern.

    Yeghern is very much established in our, at least in Western Armenian usage, to mean the 1915 happening. It is time that we adopt and capitalize our own unique Word, it may be the Latinized use of the word Yeghern or the use of the capitalized Calamity. My choice is for the latter, The Calamity.

    • No offense, but have you actually been reading Matiossian’s articles? If so, can you explain why and how you arrive at the translation ‘Calamity’ for Yeghern, since the whole focus of his articles has been that this translation is fundamentally wrong?

  2. Vahe, I disagree; ‘The Calamity’ doesn’t capture the intentional nature of the genocidal campaign of the CUP. It was a calamity to be sure, but call it what it was: The Armenian Genocide.

    • Boyajian, you are absolutely right. The English word calamity is devoid of the intentional nature of things. Your objection is valid and is well understood.

      The word crime in English language does not adequately describe Yeghern in Armenian, as far as I am concerned. In Armenian we say one committed a crime – vojer kordsets. I have no recollection of ever reading in Armenian that one committed a Yeghern.

      A Yeghern in Armenian, as I have understood it to be, is a happening, a calamity, a disaster of immense proportion that comes out of nowhere and destroys everything in its path causing much anguish. Another word for Yeghern in Armenian in Aghed, which I think is more used in Eastern Armenian usage than Western.

      In true sense the English word calamity will never be a true substitute for the Armenian word Yeghern. However, I know no other appropriate alternative in English.

    • Vahe, thanks for your explanation. Since we are looking for a unique name to associate with our calamity, and since calamity doesn’t quite convey the full impact of that event, how about ‘The Blood-letting’ or ‘The Great Killing.’ Or better yet, how about ‘The Armenian Genocide.’ Seriously, why must we try so hard for a label when the right one already exists?

  3. “It is time for us to coin our Word, much like the word holocaust has now come to define the WWII Jewish experience. Incidentally Winston Churchill has used the word holocaust to characterize the Armenian experience. But that is now history.”

    Robert Fisk, a leading Middle East historian, routinely refers to the Armenian Genocide as a holocaust. In his international bestseller The Great War for Civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East, Harper Perennial, 2006, you will find that Chapter 10 is headed; The First Holocaust. Facing this title page is a map showing the principal routes of deportation, the centers of massacre, etc. The map is titled; The 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Turkish Empire. Here is an excerpt found on p. 390: “The Turks brought whole families up here to kill them. It went on for days. They would tie them together in lines, men, children, women, most of them starving and sick, many naked. Then they would push them off the hill into the river and shoot one of them. The dead body would then carry the others down and drown them. It was cheap that way. It cost only one bullet.”

    Here is an excerpt from P. 391; “The soldiers then came and in front of the mothers, they picked up each child – maybe the child was six or seven or eight – and they threw them up in the air and let them drop on the old stones. If they survived, the Turkish soldiers picked them up again by their feet and beat their brains out on the stones.”

    This does not sound like a “calamity” to me. It sounds like Genocide. Robert Fisk has got it right; what was done to us is called the Armenian Genocide. On page 414, Fisk writes; “It was a Polish-born Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who in 1944 invented the word ‘genocide’ for the Armenians, an act which helped to put in place the legal and moral basis for a culture of human rights.”

    Not only does Robert Fisk have it right, but so did Raphael Lemkin. What was done to the Armenians in 1915 is called the Armenian Genocide. Everything else is meaningless chatter.

    • Perouz

      Churchill has used the word holocaust in its descriptive form: “Destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, esp. caused by fire or nuclear war: a nuclear holocaust” (Wikipedia.

      Robert Fisk has used the capitalized word meaning “The mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–45.” (Wikipedia).

      I think whenever one comes across the word holocaust, even if not capitalized, a mental connection to the extermination of the Jews is usually made.

      In advocating using the word Calamity for Yeghern as uniquely descriptive word for the Armenian Genocide, akin to holocaust, I never meant to belittle the use of the word Genocide, of course. However, I did not consider the matter to be a meaningless chatter given the unique place of the word Yeghern in the post 1915 Armenian literature.
      The word – Yeghern- served to echo sentiments of the many apparently because the word tseghspanoutiun would not.

  4. The Turkish massacre of the Armenians started in 1877, after the Ottoman Empire lost a war with Russia. It went on further, when the Balkan peoples rebelled and got their independence from the Ottoman Empire, with Russian help. This is what led to the Young Turk Party to have a party meeting in Salonika in 1911. Where it was not to be massacres like what happened from 1894 to 1896, and 1909, but forced marches out into the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, while under the cover of World War I. No different than Nazi Germany’s Final Solution under the cover of World War II.

    • Yessss,

      The very event of genocide had foot prints of violance by Ottomans behind it. The Hamidian massecars of 1896 was one.

      The Turks not only lost against Christian Bulkans and Russia and had to device a plan, they started hating the Christians, including Armenians who wanted reform from Ottoman high ranks.

      I can almost say that the Ottoman empire was already gone in the 1800’s and the rebelions within it started in the 1700’s.
      And the same way as the violances which predated the genocide lead to it, the Armenian genocide lead to the jewish holocost and many others which took place in the last few decades.

  5. Re: Stan, no offense indeed.

    I read Vartan Motiossian’s study of the evolution of the word yeghern BEFORE 1915. He concludes study as follows: “Before 1915, then, yeghern was solidly established, both in dictionaries and in literary texts, with the meaning of “crime.” The genocide would bring the use of the word to a higher level.” and that being that the word Yeghern meant the Armenian Genocide. I do not think that there can be any dispute to my assertion.

    It is my gut feelings that I voice for I do not have the resources nor do I have the academic preparation in matters relating to Armenian language. I doubt very much that even before 1915 the word Yeghern was synonymous with the commonly used Armenian word for crime, vojer – ոճիր. In fact I have no recollection of ever having come across the word yeghern to describe a crime, in the sense we ordinarily understand crime. Vartan may shed light on the use of these two Armenian words Yeghern and Vojer for crime.

    One of the most fascinating books I have read is Antranig Dsarougian’s “Sere Yegherni Mech”, which literary means “Love During the Yeghern”. I hope that one day someone translates the book in English. I believe it will make one fascinating and informative reading. Out of curiosity, I wonder how would the readers translate the title of the book? I doubt it could possibly be “Love During the Armenian Genocide” for a novel.

    We have a unique Armenian word for the Armenian Genocide, Yeghern. The Jews have their unique word as well, as I understand it to be the Hebrew word Shoah. The word in holocaust in English language has now to mean the extermination of the Jews even if not capitalized. We do not have such a word in English. I have opted for the word THE CALAMITY. Most will differ and would prefer to use Armenian Genocide instead. That is perfectly fine and understood. However, the word Yeghern will continue to reverberate in me deep-seated feelings that the word tseghabanoutium will never do.

  6. From: Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective
    By Kurt Jonassohn, Karin Solveig Björnson

    “Scholars of comparative genocide studies soon applied this new term [genocide] to genocides that had occurred since antiquity. This practice was objected to by some less than inspired critics on the grounds that a phenomenon could not exist before it had a name. That a phenomenon has to have a name in order to exist is too ridiculous a proposition to require further rebuttal.”

    Since at least the 1880’s yeghern and vojir have been synonymous. They meant crime. There is no point in making such a big mystery out of yeghern, although the emotions attaching to it that Vahe Apelian reports are very moving to hear about and that feeling is widespread. When used in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, yeghern meant the “crime of crimes”, genocide–yes, genocide–even before Raphael Lemkin coined the word! That is the point. See the quotation above from the Jonassohn/Björnson book. You don’t need to have or use the word genocide to recognize and name the genocide you have just survived! That is my point in presenting the quotation from the book.

    Armenians knew that they had just suffered a genocide and did not just wring their hands and remain content to refer to it as a calamity, although they gave it that name too. But as to the main name they gave it: It was a name that was designed to stick and be a lasting indictment of the criminals who planned their extermination. That was the point. But in the last few years, because of the orchestrated campaign of Turkish denialists to sow confusion and cover the CUP’s fingerprints all over the Armenian Genocide and falsify the meaning of the word, yeghern has been redefined as “calamity”. This linguistic tsunami has swept even many Armenian academics, intellectuals, commentators off their feet to the point that they have helplessly volunteered to propagate the same harmful nonsense.

    No, it is not “meaningless chatter” to defend the true meaning of Medz Yeghern. If that is “meaningless chatter” then we can kiss our language and our history goodbye. . . .

  7. for what it’s worth:
    The word holocaust was used to describe Armenian atrocities in the September 10, 1895 New York Times headline.

    The word holocaust signaled that something extraordinary was happening to the Armenian people.

    Nobody owns the word.

  8. Over twenty countries have accepted Lemkin’s definition of what was done to the Armenians and call it the Armenian Genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars calls it the Armenian Genocide. The Turks reading this page are hoping that we will call it something else – anything else – just free them from the word genocide. Not a chance.

  9. This is an interesting article. However, the author Mr. Matiossian may have also wanted to reference Ajarian’s masterpiece the Dictionary of Armenian Root Words which he penned in the 1920s. There (volume 2, page 17 in the 1979 reprint) Ajarian states that the word means “crime” (vochir, ոճիր) in modern Armenian literature, and meant “misfortune (portsank, փորձանք), evil (charik, չարիք” in the classical Armenian sense.

    Indeed, the conclusion of the author Mr. Mattiosian is correct and is in tune with Hrachia Ajarian’s explanation of this word. See this link: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=7&query=եղեռն

  10. Let me add one more important element to this article. It turns out that there is indeed an Armenian word (a single word) մեծեղեռն which is an adjective meaning “heinous”. I first came across this word in Father Haroutioun Avkerian’s 1821 English-Armenian dictionary, under the headword “heinous”. Here (on page 421) we read the following definition: Heinous ածական. Անագորոյն, ապիրատ, մեծեղեռն, անգութ, տմարդի, սաստիկ, անհնարին, դժնեայ, ահագին, սոսկալի։

    Mind you. This dictionary is printed in 1821, about 100 years before 1915. And what does “heinous” refer to? Indeed, to a crime. Therefore, even in the 1820s մեծեղեռն as an adjective referred to the quality of a crime: its being heinous.

    Doing some further cross-checking, it turns out մեծեղեռն has an entry in the Նոր Հայկազեան Բառարան (NHB 1836-1837) and in Jakhjakhian’s Armenian-Italian Dictionary (Բառգիրք ի բարբառ հայ եւ իտալական, JB 1837) we have: Մեծեղեռն ա. Scelleratissimo.

    Scelleratissimo in Italian translates as “most wicked,” according to Google Translate, and as “Very wicked” according to Wiktionary. All of this corroborates the author’s point that Մեծ Եղեռն refers to a Great Crime. But this goes even deeper — մեծեղեռն itself is a word from Classical Armenian, and it refers to adjective describing “the Most Wicked” of Crimes!

    For NHB 1836-1837 see: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=26&query=մեծեղեռն
    For JB 1837 see: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=54&query=մեծեղեռն

    It is also noteworthy that Simon Kapamajian in his Նոր բառագիրք հայերէն լեզուի (1910, Constantinople) has an entry as well: Մեծեղեռն ածական. չարագործ։ Չարագործ meaning “evil-doing” in Armenian.

    Malkhasiants, too, has an entry for մեծեղեռն and notes it as an old or archaic term: շատ եղեռնական, շատ եղեռնագործ։ The last dictionary to have the word seems to be Jizmejian’s 1954 work.

    For Kapamajian see: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=14&query=մեծեղեռն

    For Makhasiants see: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=6&query=մեծեղեռն

    Finally, and importantly, Father Bedrossian’s seminal 1875 New Dictionary Armenian-English (Venice) has an entry:
    Մեծեղեռն a. execrable, abominable; very wicked, heinous;
    մեծեղեռն ամբարշտութիւն, horrible crime;
    մեծեղեռն յանցանք, crime.

    Clearly, Մեծեղեռն is an adjective used to describe a “very wicked” or “heinous” crime.

    For Bedrossian 1875 see: http://www.nayiri.com/imagedDictionaryBrowser.jsp?dictionaryId=16&query=մեծեղեռն

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