As today marks the 98th anniversary of the largest massacre of Christian Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government in Turkey, I decided to leave the latest finished watercolor painting for another day.
It is a sad story, one that some survivors refused to talk about, and yet others allowed their sadness spill out.
Confiscated arms, loss of income, loss of religious freedom, leading to deportations, marches through the desert, men and boys rounded up never to be seen again, rapes of women young and old. Children separated from families and sent to become servants in Muslim homes, (homes confiscated from Armenians),renounce their Christianity, their names, their Armenian identity.
Sounds eerily familiar in the world today.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”~Adolf Hitler, 1939
Quite a few years ago the venerable television news anchorman, Peter Jennings, did a segment on the Armenian Genocide.
Armenian Genocide, World News with Peter Jennings
Also, more recently, I found the following video of a talk on the Armenian Genocide by Prof. Ugur Ungor on books: The Making of Modern Turkey, and Confiscation and Destruction: Genocide and the Confiscation of Armenian Property.
from Armenian-Turkish Dialogue for Peace
There are questions that have no answers. Why, is the hardest question to pose because the responsible party refuses to acknowledge these events took place as the survivors remember.
