“God cried”: Charles’ “destan” on the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
When our grandfather died in 1986, he left a manilla envelope in his desk for his youngest son, Jim. “My dad’s writings” was printed across the face, and inside were withered pages no one had ever seen, written in an Armenian script none of us could read.
So, our Uncle Jim asked around to learn more about this document written by his grandfather, Garabed Artinian (who adopted the name Charles when he immigrated to the United States). He tried to re-learn the Armenian he had studied in college and conferred with other students and scholars. When he tracked down his old professors, they told him this was not any standard Armenian they knew—neither Western nor Eastern. His grandfather, they said, had written “Turkish words in Armenian letters.” No one seemed to know why.
At last, Jim found someone who could translate it. He took notes while they dictated passages—a process that took several sessions. These “writings,” they discovered, detailed the brutal massacres of Armenians in Adana by Turkish citizens, migrant workers and the Turkish military in 1909—an event that prompted our family to leave Anatolia and served as the prelude to the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923).
But the document’s style was mystifying. This wasn’t a letter or the start of a memoir. There were lots of numbered paragraphs but not much clarity. Jim made a copy of the original manuscript, along with the provisional English and Armenian translations, plus a Turkish transliteration, and sent them to everyone he could think of. He heard nothing back. Eventually, Jim placed the manuscript and all his copies in an envelope and put it in his desk.
There they sat for another 30 years, until Uncle Jim gave the envelope to his nephew, Robert. Robert’s research led him to Bedross Der Matossian, a historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who was writing a history of the Adana massacres. Robert emailed him a copy of the manuscript.
Professor Der Matossian asked to speak by phone. “Robert,” he said excitedly, “I have read everything from Adana—all the literary remains—and there is nothing like this among them. There are poems, sure, a few short poems. But nothing of this length and detail and erudition.” He marvelled that someone like our great grandfather, with just a seminary education, could compose a work of such sophistication. He asked to do a full translation and write an article about it.
Several things were immediately obvious to Der Matossian. First, the text of the document was written in Armeno-Turkish, the language that literate Armenians predominately used in the public sphere in the late Ottoman Empire. Before 1928, Turkish was written in Arabic, Armenian or other scripts, until President Kemal Ataturk passed a law to render Turkish using the Latin alphabet and bring Turkey closer to the West.
It was likely the earliest literary witness to the Adana massacres from a survivor.
The author’s perspective was also clear. Der Matossian could tell the poem was written by someone living in the city of Adana at the time of the massacres, due to its granular level of detail. Though poetic, the account was strictly chronological—recording the prelude to the violence, its central events and the aftermath of the atrocities, while concluding with the date of writing: “June 4, 1909.” As such, Der Matossian explained, it was likely the earliest literary witness to the Adana massacres from a survivor.
According to modern estimates, over 20,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed by Turkish and other Muslim people in Adana in southern Turkey in April of 1909. The previous July of 1908, the Young Turks had come to power in the Ottoman Empire on a constitutionalist platform, and hope surged for a new day of self-determination and democracy. Turks, Armenians, Kurds and many others rejoiced. But a strident sense of Turkish nationalism took hold. Fears of an Armenian uprising and a growing desire among Armenians for their own independent nation terrified the Young Turks. Rumors and conspiracy theories of a burgeoning Armenian uprising filled Turkish newspapers. These fears, along with economic jealousies (many Armenians in Adana, including our family, were landowners), erupted in Adana in April 1909.
Its prelude was the disarming of Adana’s Armenians and the forced closure of their stores. Then followed the burning of Armenian neighborhoods, the shooting of Armenian civilians and the looting of Armenian properties. While many of the victims in Adana died by rifle, fire dominated Charles’ recollection. He chose smoke as the first image of the opening line. Fire quickly spreads through the poem, just as it engulfed the Armenian neighborhoods of Adana. “They started the fire…the fire spread…all our people are in flames,” he wrote. For Charles, it was a monolith—“the fire and the massacre.”
Alongside the fires, Charles set a lens on a singular outrage: the rape of Armenian women and girls, first by local Turks and migrant workers, then at the hands of the Turkish military. Charles had three sisters in Adana, along with a wife and child; we know only that one sister survived. “Girls were abducted… So many of the virgin girls are naked… Whoever listens cannot bear their wailing and cries,” he wrote. In one scene, fire and sexual violence unite, likely reflecting the work of perpetrators who aimed to conceal one act with another. “So many tall and beautiful ones, burned and destroyed you, ah, the fires,” Charles wrote.
Writing with a “betrayed pen,” Charles critiqued the Turkish authorities’ representations of Armenians and events on the ground. He condemned the rumor mongering of the Turkish newspaper Itidal for igniting the second wave of massacres. He castigated the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Turkish military, whose soldiers referred to the Armenians of Adana as “rodents” (a justification for their elimination) and “merchandise” (a pretense for their trafficking and rape). He rebuked their Orwellian double-speak: “We are the army of freedom, they say; do not be afraid.” He exposed how Turkish degradation of Adana’s Armenians, in deed and word, had shaped international perceptions and trivialized Turkish atrocities. “‘You get used to it,’ they say to desperate people like us. Every little word like a thousand daggers.”
Against this backdrop of dehumanization and disregard, Charles juxtaposed the experience of the Armenian survivors, starved and marched out of Adana: “Those who knew their original selves cried.” This telling articulation suggests that Charles’ decision to write was an attempt to reclaim the identity of the Armenian people. Scholars who study the narratives of enslaved African Americans from the 18th and 19th centuries have described a similar motivation—the act of writing yourself into being in a society that denies your humanity. Such writing is a tool of embodiment, carrying the weight of the truths that those in power have sought to efface.
In an epilogue to the poem, Charles records a circuitous boat trip around the Mediterranean, which begins on the date of the poem’s completion—from Iskenderun to Latakia, Tarablus, Beirut, Haifa, Jaffa, back to Beirut and then, perhaps, to Alexandria—attempting to escape what they had experienced in Adana.
At some point, Charles met our great grandmother, Asanet Essayian, and from Cyprus or Alexandria (there are contradictory family stories and public records), they escaped Turkey for Argentina, where our grandfather was born in 1914. They lived there until 1917, when they immigrated to the United States with the help of Charles’ older sister, Nora—an American citizen already and the only other known survivor in his family. Throughout this long journey, the poem traveled with Charles. How it survived, we do not know. Charles died of a heart attack at 46 in 1925, but his poem would continue its journey without him.
Yet, he wrote his destan in the language of his perpetrators, to call on the world to act: “What a lamentation is this, hear Europe! What are you waiting for, oh America? We were all sacrificed on the road to freedom.”
That Charles crafted an epic poem in Armeno-Turkish was significant. According to Der Matossian, most accounts from survivors of the Adana massacres were written later and in Armenian. As a former seminarian who had studied to become an Armenian Orthodox priest, Charles could write in Armenian. Yet he wrote his destan in the language of his perpetrators, to call on the world to act: “What a lamentation is this, hear Europe! What are you waiting for, oh America? We were all sacrificed on the road to freedom.”
April marks the 116th anniversary of the Adana massacres and the 110th of the Armenian Genocide. But such catastrophes are not relics of the past. Recent years have witnessed ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, Myanmar, Gaza and Sudan, with more than 100,000 Armenians displaced from Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh).
So many of the conditions Charles described in his destan are present-tense realities—as is suppression of the truth. In China, where untold thousands of a minority Uyghur population have been subjected to mass imprisonment, there is no freedom of speech or press to document the extent of the crimes. In Gaza, at least 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7, 2023—an attempt to prevent documentation of events on the ground.
In fall 2023, Professor Bedross Der Matossian published an article and translation of Charles’ destan into English and Turkish in the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies. It is now accessible for anyone to read. The original will be placed in the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan. Charles believed in the power of the word. He physically carried it with him—from Adana throughout the Ottoman Empire to Buenos Aires and the United States. Almost nothing else made it from that journey, but he made sure his account survived.
Jeanne Theoharis
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- “God cried”: Charles’ “destan” on the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide - February 27, 2025
Robert Artinian
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- “God cried”: Charles’ “destan” on the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide - February 27, 2025
Many thanks Jeanne and Robert.
Brings back memories of my grandparents all from Adana. Had to flee in 1921. Never to see their homeland again.
Thank you for this article. Each of these memories must be preserved and shared.