Houshamadyan: Armenian Memory Books
April 24th marks the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. I grew up in the 1950s in New York in the shadow of that tragedy. I was surrounded by survivors named Garabedian, Giragosian, Hagopian and others who always spoke fondly of “yergeer,” the country they were forced to abandon. My mother, Araxie, was from Dubneh, a village near Diyarbakir, and my father, Bedros, was from Nbishi, a village near Palu in what is now Eastern Turkey. Their memories, and those of others from the “old” country, filled my ears as did their tales of how they escaped death and got to America. I’d listened to their stories in Armenian, not understanding everything, but knowing for them, “yergeer” was a special place. It was home. Houshamadyan are precious memory books of a millennial-old civilization virtually lost but not forgotten.
Recorded at the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
Speaker
Khatchig Mouradian
Khatchig Mouradian is the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress and a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies at NYU. He was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University. He is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918. He is co-editor of The Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy, and editor of the journal The Armenian Review.
From Vahram in New York –
This was great, thank you. I heard it on WBAI.
These types of programs are really important, not just for Armenians but for humanity in general, as we see more than 100 years after our Genocide, governments continue killing and implementing ethnic cleansing and Genocides in different parts of the world.
Kevork George Keleshian –
IT WILL BE 1,000 % .