Messages, Lessons and Blessings

Maria Titizian

 



Two years before his death in 1921, Hovhannes Tumanian wrote a letter to Avetik Isahakian.

“…I do not want and cannot write long from our country, although you ask this of me. In short, I will say that we have destroyed our country from within and from beyond. Mainly we. I am saying we, and herein lies the truth. Some are unruly scoundrels, others are robbers and thieves, others are incompetent derelicts and there wasn’t a multitude, at the very least a small group, who would uncover the renewed breath or moral capability. Amidst the calamities and the losses, not a single guilty person was revealed, no one was brought to justice and no one answered. And it continues. Now it is the same people on the same journey… And not a single person committed suicide to show that shame and conscience exists among these people.”

The Self-Delusion of "Great Calamity": What "Medz Yeghern" Actually Means Today

Vartan Matiossian

Towards the metropolis of the Medz Yeghern 
(Avetis Aharonian, 1918)¹

In our previous article, we established that “Medz Yeghern” literally meant “Great Crime” for the survivors of the genocide. It becomes clear that the phrase cannot be arbitrarily translated to a completely different semantic field like “calamity,” even if the meaning of the word had fundamentally changed later at some point in the past hundred years. Here, we will see that, 1) It is not only the survivors who understood yeghern as “crime,” contemporary Eastern Armenian writers who were not victims of the genocide also understood it that way; 2) the following generations also understood it as “crime” until this day.

The Great Crime that Was Brewing: The Meaning of ‘Medz Yeghern’ before 1915

Vartan Matiossian

 



We want to believe in the victory of Freedom and of tomorrow’s brotherhood,

we want to enjoy smiles, we want to strengthen our faith

that famine is not eternal, blood is not eternal, yeghern is not eternal.
E. Aknuni (1910)¹

The meaning of yeghern in Classical Armenian (“evil,” “crime,” and “calamity”) may seem to give some credence to claims that Medz Yeghern does indeed mean “Great Calamity.” However, before we accept these claims, we must first verify whether those three meanings have survived in Modern Armenian. Their survival is contingent not only on their presence in dictionaries, but also on their actual usagein literature. As translators know firsthand, dictionaries may give definitions, but the key to using them effectively depends on one’s ability to place a given literal definition within its proper context.

In this study, we will first overview the definitions of yeghern in Modern Armenian dictionaries, both monolingual and multilingual, published before and after 1915, to validate the accuracy of the “Great Calamity” translation.