Vartan Matiossian
Too much fuss has been made about the use of the expression
Medz Yeghern instead of "Armenian Genocide" since His Holiness John Paul II used it, for the first time by a foreign dignitary, when visiting Armenia in 2001. You can stretch it as much as you want, but the fact is that it literally means "Great Crime" (or whatever synonym of "crime" you may like) and nothing else. It is synonymous with
Medz Vojir (a term also used in the years after the Genocide; Aram Andonian gave this title to his book in Armenian, the original to the book known in English as "Memoirs of Naim Bey"), and
yeghernakordz means exactly the same as
vojrakordz, namely, "criminal." Neither "cataclysm," nor "catastrophe," nor "calamity" (the one preferred by Turkish writers; I wonder who was the Armenian author of this mistranslation) will do justice to its meaning.
