Armenian Golgotha

Armenian Golgotha
Author: Grigoris Balakian
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2010-03-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1400096774

On April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. It was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey—a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the empire. Over the next four years, Balakian would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood, surviving to recount his miraculous escape and expose the atrocities that led to over a million deaths. Armenian Golgotha is Balakian’s devastating eyewitness account—a haunting reminder of the first modern genocide and a controversial historical document that is destined to become a classic of survivor literature.

Armenian Golgotha

Armenian Golgotha
Author: Grigoris Balakian
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307271382

On April 24, 1915, Grigoris Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. It was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey—a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the empire. Over the next four years, Balakian would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood, surviving to recount his miraculous escape and expose the atrocities that led to over a million deaths. Armenian Golgotha is Balakian’s devastating eyewitness account—a haunting reminder of the first modern genocide and a controversial historical document that is destined to become a classic of survivor literature.

Armenian Golgotha

Armenian Golgotha
Author: Grigoris Palakʻean
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 030726288X

On April 24, 1915, the author, along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of Constantinople's Armenian community, were arrested in the launch of a systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian minority from Anatolia while countless deportation caravans of Armenians were tortured, raped, slaughtered and mutilated on their way to the Syrian deserts.

A Shameful Act

A Shameful Act
Author: Taner Akçam
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2007-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466832126

A landmark assessment of Turkish culpability in the Armenian genocide, the first history of its kind by a Turkish historian In 1915, under the cover of a world war, some one million Armenians were killed through starvation, forced marches, forced exile, and mass acts of slaughter. Although Armenians and world opinion have held the Ottoman powers responsible, Turkey has consistently rejected any claim of intentional genocide. Now, in a pioneering work of excavation, Turkish historian Taner Akçam has made extensive and unprecedented use of Ottoman and other sources to produce a scrupulous charge sheet against the Turkish authorities. The first scholar of any nationality to have mined the significant evidence—in Turkish military and court records, parliamentary minutes, letters, and eyewitness accounts—Akçam follows the chain of events leading up to the killing and then reconstructs its systematic orchestration by coordinated departments of the Ottoman state, the ruling political parties, and the military. He also probes the crucial question of how Turkey succeeded in evading responsibility, pointing to competing international interests in the region, the priorities of Turkish nationalists, and the international community's inadequate attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice. As Turkey lobbies to enter the European Union, Akçam's work becomes ever more important and relevant. Beyond its timeliness, A Shameful Act is sure to take its lasting place as a classic and necessary work on the subject.

Goodbye, Antoura

Goodbye, Antoura
Author: Karnig Panian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2015-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0804796343

“This searing account of a little boy wrenched from family and innocence” during the Armenian genocide “is a literary gem” (Financial Times). When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly a thousand Armenian and four hundred Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: Its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.

Survivors

Survivors
Author: Donald E. Miller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1999-02-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520219562

"A superb work of scholarship and a deeply moving human document. . . . A unique work, one that will serve truth, understanding, and decency."—Roger W. Smith, College of William and Mary

The Ruins of Ani

The Ruins of Ani
Author: Grigoris Palakʻean
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2018-12-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1978802919

Part historical study, part travel memoir, The Ruins of Ani takes readers on a thousand-year journey back to the former capital of the Armenian kingdom, once world-renowned for its magnificent buildings. This new translation by the author's great-nephew, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian, eloquently captures the book's vivid descriptions and lyrical prose.

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else"

Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2015-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400865581

A definitive history of the 20th century's first major genocide on its 100th anniversary Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent—more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian interpretations of events. In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny cuts through nationalist myths, propaganda, and denial to provide an unmatched account of when, how, and why the atrocities of 1915–16 were committed. Drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts, this is an unforgettable chronicle of a cataclysm that set a tragic pattern for a century of genocide and crimes against humanity.