Bedros Keljik, rug dealer and immigrant from Armenia, wove an inspiring Minnesota tale

Curt Brown

 

“He succeeded from the start in this venture and in a short time began selling Oriental rugs. The growth of his business has been phenomenal, and he has attained an important position … His rugs are known over the entire Northwest.”

— St. Paul Rotarian, 1915

 

His boots ground down as soldiers with pointed sticks jabbed at him for resting. He was forced to march 40 miles a day. So Bedros Keljik, a 15-year-old Armenian thirsting to emigrate to America, shredded his shirt and wrapped the strips around his inflamed feet.

“A terrible journey, and I shall never forget it,” Keljik told the New York Times five years later, in 1894. “The sun beat down upon us, the ground was scorching, but we had to march on. In two days our boots had been worn off, and the hot ground being unbearable we had to tear off our clothes and bandage our feet.”

A few days later, Keljik and two older brothers were tossed in a prison on the banks of the Euphrates River — “one great dark hole, no distinction being made between murderers, thieves, or so-called political prisoners.”

Book Review: ‘Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt’

Richard G. Hovannisian (*)

 

Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt. By Justin McCarthy, Ömer Turan, and Cemalettin Taşkiran. (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2014. Pp. 496. $32.00.)

The Sasun crisis in 1894 was a watershed in Ottoman-Armenian history, as it marked the beginning of the process of elimination of the native Armenian population, continuing with widespread massacres in 1895-1896 and in 1909 and culminating in the genocidal deportations and massacres of 1915 to 1923. The historiography of more than a century has described and analyzed in detail the tribulations of the Armenian peasantry in the mountains of Sasun in the eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, their being stirred up by revolutionaries to resist Kurdish predations, and their victimization in 1894, reportedly with the involvement of regular Turkish armed forces.

Hollywood's New Armenian Genocide Denial Epic

Michael Daly

 

Ben Kingsley and Josh Hartnett and Hera Hilmar surely would not have signed on to star in The Ottoman Lieutenant if they even imagined they would be parties to genocide denial.

And screenwriter Jeff Stockwell—who is by every indication a very decent person—says that everybody he spoke to in connection with the making of The Ottoman Lieutenant was aware of the Turkish government’s longtime denial of responsibility for the deliberate murder of 1.6 million innocent Armenians.

“The desire to be sure we were not supporting that denial weighed on me and everyone else I talked to who was hired on to the project—so much so that the climax of the film is built around the leads interrupting a death march,” Stockwell said in an email to The Daily Beast.

The movie—which came out in March and is reported by the website Box Office Mojo to have taken in less than $250,000 in American theaters despite its big-name cast—indeed has a scene where Turkish soldiers are herding Armenian civilians on a death march, complete with summary executions.

Why is Turkey reviving an Ottoman sultan?

Mustafa Akyol

 

In Turkey, there has been an unmistakable revival of the image of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The powerful Ottoman monarch who ruled the empire single-handedly from 1876 to 1909 is praised with a flood of articles in the pro-government press, endless messages on social media and various conferences and panels. The speaker of the Turkish parliament, Ismail Kahraman, a confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even hosted an “International Symposium on Sultan Abdulhamid II and His Era,” at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, a relic from the latter-day Ottoman Empire. The great sultan, Kahraman said, “is a mariner’s compass to give us direction and enlighten our future.”

How Herzl sold out the Armenians

 Rachel Elboim-Dror

The Armenian question has occupied the Zionist movement since a mass killing of Armenians was carried out by the Turks in the mid 1890s – prior even to the First Zionist Congress. [Theodor] Herzl’s strategy was based on the idea of an exchange: The Jews would pay off the Ottoman Empire’s huge debt, in return for the acquisition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there, with the major powers’ consent. Herzl had been working hard to persuade Sultan Abdul Hamid II to accept the proposal, but to no avail.