The Turkish-Made ‘Great Calamity’: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Became ‘Büyük Felâket’

Vartan Matiossian

The “Metz Yeghern,” which means “Great Evil” in Armenian,
is the name we Armenians use for the genocide.
Robert Attarian (2006)¹

The quote comes from a lecture in Italian by the spokesperson for the Consiglio per la comunità armena di Roma (Council of the Armenian Community of Rome) on April 28, 2006. The use of “Medz Yeghern” and “genocide” in the same sentence shows it to be part of a conscious goal pursued by Italian Armenians as a way to encourage the adoption of the phrase Medz Yeghern to identify the genocide in languages other than Armenian.

As one example among many, young Italian writer Paolo Cossi in 2007 published a graphic novel titled Medz Yeghern, il grande male (Medz Yeghern: The Great Evil). It was clear that, in his mind, Medz Yeghern was not a euphemism. “I made my first book Medz Yeghern to explain and introduce the Armenian Genocide to the Italian people,” said Cossi recently. “My motivation was a very human motivation in the first place, and it was very important because it is the first genocide of the 20^th century. I wanted to create something that can educate the Italian public about genocide because they know very little about it.”² So far, this graphic novel has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, and Korean.