Journeys of Heroes, The

Description

This is a book about the Armenian struggle to survive as a Christian minority towards the end of World War I, when a key part of the Turkish national agenda included elimination of the Armenians and other Christian minorities from their ancestral homes in eastern Anatolia. While the world was busy fighting a world war, and the Russians had withdrawn from the Caucasus, the Turks found the perfect opportunity to solve their Armenian “problem,” by ethnically cleansing all of eastern Anatolia of its native Armenians, and at the point in history of this story, they continued the deadly cleansing process across their eastern border into eastern Armenia in the areas of Gyumri and Nakhijevan. These areas had been under Russian influence until the Russian Revolution precipitated the departure of Tsarist troops back to Russia, thus leaving the Armenians unprotected from Turkish aggression. This story is in two parts, one told through the eyes of Yeghishe Catchouny, General Antranig’s personal secretary, in the form of a day to day, contemporaneous diary of events, and the other through the oral history of Vagharshag Shahinian as interviewed by his son Antranig Shahinian, well after the fact. They are parallel stories, relating parallel events in a similar time and place in Syunik, also known as Zangezur, which is in the south of present-day Armenia.