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.