Concerned for your children’s Armenian identity? The homeland is calling.

It was not a particular concern until after the Genocide. The idea of losing identity with one’s Armenian heritage was foreign until 1915. After all, most Armenians lived as an indigenous people on their ancestral lands in the western highlands. When you live as an ethnic group in densely populated villages and cities, retaining your identity is essentially taken for granted. You were born into Armenian families, educated at Armenian schools, taught the Christian faith of our people and embraced the culture like the fabric of your clothing. The language you spoke was the mother tongue unless you were prevented from speaking Armenian by the Turkish authorities. This was the case of my maternal grandfather who was raised in the Dardanelles and learned Armenian only when he immigrated to America. The threat to our people concerned their very human existence. It was manifested by the attempt to murder a nation. They failed, but many of our ancestors became victims (now sainted); the remainder were scattered outside their native lands and became what we now refer to as the diaspora. 

After that devastating period, which continued into the 1920s, the primary concern of our rebuilt nation outside of Armenia has been cultural survival. This was not the physical survival that our grandparents experienced, but an identity survival. While continuing the struggle for justice, the diaspora took on another, almost invisible force, called assimilation. The Turkish criminals were convinced that anyone who survived the Genocide and was expelled from their homeland would eventually blend in with their host nation culture and lose their ethnic Armenian identity. They grossly underestimated the resolve of this nation to retain their soul. If the Turks had bothered to understand the Armenians, they would have discovered a history of survival that defied logic going back thousands of years. Even the concept of forced migration was not new, as the Armenians experienced a major demographic shift after the Bagratuni dynasty into the Cilician region. It was here in the land of Adana, Marash and Urfa that Armenia was reborn with the Rupenian dynasty in the 11th century and the seat of the Catholicos in Sis. Only the mass murder of the inhabitants would end their presence. My Adanatzi grandmother actually experienced three horrific massacres as did the Armenians of Cilicia. The first was in 1909 when the Adana massacres claimed the lives of over 30,000 Armenians. My grandmother, who was about nine years old at the time, was sent to live with relatives in Egypt to avoid the atrocities. She returned and lived through the harrowing times of the Genocide, particularly from 1915-1918. After the war ended in the fall of 1918, Armenians were encouraged by the victorious allies to return to their homes in Cilicia. My grandfather was a gamavor stationed with the Armenian Legion in Adana where he met, courted and married my grandmother. They experienced the final betrayal of the “allies,” who withdrew from the region leaving the Armenian population at the mercy of the marauding nationalist Turks under Kemal. Once again, there were atrocities, and the survivors were forced to leave for Syria, Lebanon, Europe or the United States.