Home in foreign lands

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Armenian Weekly’s June 2026 magazine, “Reclaiming Home and Heritage,” which explores how the Armenian community maintains its heritage and culture following genocide and displacement. The issue was edited by Weekly magazine editor Pauline Getzoyan. Not long ago, I found myself standing in my childhood bedroom in Toronto, surrounded by things that had gone untouched for years. I had returned suddenly because of a family emergency, and in the few hours between hospital visits and managing the surrounding logistics, I decided to deal with the life I had left behind — a task I could only tackle during these visits that were becoming fewer and farther between. The room had gradually become a storage space of school binders, faded notebooks, community newsletters and stacks of books that had followed me through adolescence and then unceremoniously abandoned once adulthood began scattering life in different directions. I started sorting through them the way one does in moments like this: keep, donate, throw away. At some point, I came across a thin, photocopied school newsletter from my Armenian school. The paper itself felt fragile in my hands, the layout unmistakably from another era of desktop publishing. I flipped through it absentmindedly until I reached a small blurb with my own name under it. I had written it in eighth grade. At the time, our school had just expanded to include a high school program. For years, Armenian students in Toronto attended Armenian elementary schools and then dispersed into the city’s public, parochial or private education systems. My class would go on to become only the second graduating cohort of the new high school four years later. The newsletter had asked students to reflect on what it meant for the community to have an Armenian high school, and reading what my 14-year-old self had written was both amusing and disorienting. The sentences were earnest and dramatic in the way only teenagers can be, full of the sweeping language that Armenian education at the time cultivated. But one phrase stopped me cold. In describing life outside the Armenian school environment, I had referred to Toronto as օտար հողեր, “foreign lands.” I sat there for a moment staring at the page. Toronto, foreign lands. The phrase felt strange to read now. I was born there; I grew up there; my earliest memories, friendships, habits and instincts were formed in that city I loved, and the idea that I had once described it as foreign felt almost absurd. Yet the phrase was not accidental; it reflected a worldview that had been slowly built into us through language, community institutions and historical memory. Within that framework, the Diaspora was a temporary space — necessary, perhaps even comfortable, but still fundamentally outside the natural geography of Armenian life. Of course, that worldview did not appear out of nowhere. My generation, like those before us, grew up in communities formed by the survivors of genocide and displacement. The idea that we were living on “foreign lands” carried an echo of that history. Our grandparents and great-grandparents had not left their homes voluntarily. They were forced from places that Armenians had inhabited for centuries, across what some call Historic Armenia. Those places remain deeply embedded in Armenian memory, even if they sit beyond the borders of the modern Armenian state. The Diaspora itself was born from that rupture. Nearly a quarter century later, that line reads differently. Not because it was wrong exactly, but because life has complicated the categories. Today, I live in Yerevan. I moved here in 2020 with my partner, and over the past few years, this city has gradually become the place where our routines unfold, where our dog expects her walks, and where the view of Ararat still surprises me on the occasional clear morning. If someone asks where I live, the answer is simple enough: Armenia. Yet the language we use to describe that move has always made me slightly uncomfortable. People often refer to us as repatriates. The word appears in articles, conversations and sometimes even introductions, and each time I hear it, something in me hesitates. Repatriation implies a return. It suggests that you have gone back to the place where you originated, retracing a path interrupted by history. But if I follow my own family’s story, that is not what happened. My parents are not from the Republic of Armenia, and their parents were not either. Our family roots stretch across places that lie outside the borders of the Armenian state: Musa Dagh, Kayseri, Arapgir. After the Genocide, those lives were forced in different directions — my mother’s family ended up in Istanbul, my father’s family in Anjar, and eventually, both paths led to Canada. Like so many Armenian families, our geography is a map of displacement layered across generations. So when I moved to Yerevan, what exactly was I returning to? The truth is simpler than the rhetoric often surrounding repatriation. I keep telling myself, and those who ask, that I came here because I preferred my life here. That explanation can sound almost suspiciously casual in Armenian conversations, where decisions about Armenia are frequently framed in terms of sacrifice or duty. We are accustomed to hearing the move described as a burden willingly carried, an act of national responsibility or a form of ideological commitment. Those elements certainly exist, but they are not the entire story. I grew up within the sturdy architecture of the Toronto Armenian community. It was a self-contained world designed to anchor us, providing the language and logic we needed to understand our place in the world. They taught us how to think about ourselves, how to navigate multiple worlds and how to maintain continuity across generations that had been scattered. In many ways, diaspora communities became the spaces where Armenians rebuilt cultural life after genocide and displacement had shattered it. At the same time, life in the Diaspora always carries a certain structural tension. Armenian culture is something you sustain intentionally; language requires effort; and community life depends on institutions that must constantly be maintained and renewed. Nothing about it is passive. Living in Armenia changes that equation. Armenian life becomes the background rather than the project. The language you speak in the grocery store, the political debates you overhear at the next table, the commemorations marked on the public calendar — these things no longer require deliberate preservation; they simply exist. That shift does not make someone “more Armenian,” a phrase that has always felt meaningless to me, but it does alter the texture of daily life. When I think back to that 14-year-old version of myself writing about “foreign lands,” I no longer see the phrase as embarrassing or naive. It was a borrowed vocabulary, part of a worldview built into our schools and churches by generations who had been forced from their homes. They taught us that Armenian life ultimately pointed somewhere beyond the places where we happened to grow up, maintaining a sense of continuity across continents through a shared orientation toward a center. So, when I read those words today, the dissonance I feel isn’t because the 14-year-old was wrong, but because life has complicated his definitions. Toronto is not foreign to me; it is the city that formed me. Yet, I can see how the worldview embedded in that school newsletter nudged my thinking long before I understood it myself. I often tell people I ended up in Armenia simply because I prefer my life here, but preference does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows out of the sensibilities that shape us before we ever begin making our own decisions. That ‘stubborn streak of patriotism’ my friends joke about isn’t a separate impulse — it’s the result of those early lessons finally taking root. In that sense, the language of my youth may not have been entirely wrong after all. It was part of a story about continuity, about a people scattered across the world but still oriented toward a shared center. In the Armenian story, reclaiming home has rarely meant a literal return to a point of origin. More often, it has meant carrying memory and heritage forward and planting them somewhere they can finally take root. I realize now that those early lessons did more than preserve my identity; they prepared me to recognize a home I hadn’t yet visited. And that is why, decades after writing those earnest sentences in a school newsletter, I eventually found myself living here. I’ve come to see that Toronto and Yerevan aren’t opposing worlds, but the two coordinates that finally allowed me to locate myself. Perhaps the journey wasn’t about choosing one land over another, but about realizing that the “foreign” soil of my youth was exactly what I needed to take root in this home today.

Home in foreign lands

This story is FREE for you...

Rupen Janbazian

This story is FREE for you...

Rupen Janbazian

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