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.

The Evil That We Do Not Know: "Medz Yeghern" and the "Old Language"

Then he stopped and announced, ‘You know, there was on this land a medz yeghern,
a great cataclysm,’ as the survivors called the genocide.

—Aris Janigian (2009)¹

The following spring, the Armenian and Turkish ministries announced that they had agreed on a plan of good relations, which allowed President Barack Obama, in his anticipated April 24 address, to refer to the events of 1915 not by the desired designation but by an Armenian alternative: Medz Yeghern, meaning ‘great calamity.’

—Garin Hovannisian (2010)²

If you are not Armenian, you probably know little about the deportations and the massacres:
the death of a million and a half civilians. Meds Yeghern. The Great Catastrophe.

—Chris Bohjalian (2012)³

Above are quotes from Armenian-American fiction and non-fiction writers. These excerpts indicate that “Great Calamity” and similar terms have become a common translation for “Medz Yeghern.” The trend has also been seen in academia, where non-Armenian academics have used the term. Among them is diaspora theorist William Safran, who wrote, “These events took place in the homeland, but they served to mark the ethnonational consciousness in the diaspora as well, especially events of a negative nature, such as…the Armenian yeghern (catastrophe), the Turkish genocide…”⁴ Of course, the dominant discourse of the Turkish mainstream, be it as “Great Calamity”⁵ or as “Great Catastrophe,” is seen in books authored or co-authored by Turkish and Turkish-Armenian writers and scholars.⁶We may assume that the latter either follow the flow or are genuinely convinced that this is the actual translation of the phrase.

However, an internet search may also yield many English-language Armenian outlets that translate Medz Yeghern as “Great Calamity,” or, sometimes, “Great Crime.” There is a duality that makes necessary, after the survey of Armenian-Turkish and Armenian-English vocabularies, to explore their ultimate source: the Armenian language.

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.