Eric Nazarian
I haven’t had time to digest what I saw this past week on the heels
of my first journey to the womb of Armenian civilization:
Van/Vaspurakan. Dikranakert. Kharpert, the fabled green villages of
Bitlis, and the hinterlands of Palu and Sakrat. My fellow travelers, now
brothers and sisters for life, trekked across these majestic and cruel
roads that hold many secrets. The stubborn rocks jetting from the earth
gave us anchor. The mud-covered ruins inside the Armenian cemetery in
Edremit in Van, though, put holes in our hearts as we stood before it,
bulldozed and abandoned, next to the fresh asphalt of a curving street.
It was not development. It was erasure. Rest assured that the bones, now
dust, still silently scatter on spirits like us who wander through
these roads seeking ancestral root. Not politics, nor the millions spent
on genocide denial, can change what remains in the crevices of these
stones, where our dead lie buried and anonymous but never forgotten.
Perhaps that is the last defense of a people that has been erased from
its historic cradle—to hold a flame to memory and preserve what remains
of a civilization that flourished once upon a time in Historic Armenia.
