This is the twenty-sixth and last part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump.

Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia, now the center of the Armenian nation (in the Caucasus), which until the 1915 genocide was spread across much of what is now Turkey. Photo: Matthew Stevenson.

I was happy to be back in Republic Square. On my only other trip to Armenia, in 2002, I had stayed in a hotel that overlooked the broad plaza. On that trip, I was scouting potential companies for western investors who might want to put money into the newly independent Republic of Armenia. 

I spent three days in the company of various business groups, which took turns driving me around Armenia and showing me things like hydro-electric generators that could use an injection of foreign capital. (Mostly these days, Armenia is part of Russia’s orbit, economically and diplomatically.)

Armenia is not a big country, and over the course of three days we went to most corners of the republic, including Spitak and Leninakan, where in 1988 a 6.8 earthquake had killed thousands. In 2002, many of the surrounding neighborhoods were still mounds of rubble. 

We stopped at a number of rural Armenian churches and monasteries, many of which were located on lonely bluffs overlooking Lake Sevan, where—the case can be made—Christianity got its start.

Before leaving, I was driven to Khor Virap, a monastery seemingly at the foot of Mount Ararat, although that famous peak is across the sealed border in Turkey. Standing on the walls Khor Virap, I could look down on the border fences and see Turkish soldiers patrolling with dogs.

For all that Europe and its surrounding regions would like to think they belong to “one world,” there’s still a lot barbed wire on the borders between Vienna and the Caucasus. 

+++

After my 2002 visit to Armenia, I collected a number of books about the 1915 genocide. They had titles such as Visions of Ararat: Writings on Armenia or The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, and with this small library I had continued my Armenian reading and travels whenever a chance arose. 

In spring 2010, for example, our son Charles and I took trains, buses, and shared taxis from Europe to Aleppo (the Syrian war started in 2011). In Aleppo we made friends with a woman at Baron’s Hotel whose grandfather was the only member of a large caravan of Armenians to make it alive into Aleppo. In turn, she introduced us to the Armenian quarter in Aleppo, where many survivors of the holocaust deportations ended up. 

Then in 2019, just before the pandemic shutdowns, I traveled across Macedonia to Thessaloniki, to understand the landscapes of the 1878 treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, which had such devastating consequences for many communities across Europe, including the Armenians. 

At the end of that trip, I detoured to Gallipoli, where in April 1915 the Allied landings were made a day after the Armenian genocide began. To me there has always been cause and effect between the two events. 

For all these reasons I wanted on this trip at least to glimpse Yerevan and Armenia again, if only to bring some of my readings about the genocide back into focus.

+++

From my downtown picnic location, I rode around Yerevan, which by this point was waking up but still not very crowded with cars. I found my 2002 hotel on the square and rode past the National Gallery (which I had loved) and the Opera and Ballet Theatre, which is reason enough to make a trip to Yerevan. Then it was time for me to ride to the airport, which is about seven miles west of the downtown. 

I didn’t have GPS service on my phone, so I had to ask directions from some policemen who were walking the beat downtown. One of them joked that to find the airport, all I had to do was stick to the sidewalks on the main road and follow the thin blue line of policemen who would be lining the route. (Some foreign dignitary was arriving that morning.) 

That I did, and in less than an hour I was on my hands and knees in the departure hall, cramming my worldly goods and bicycle into an IKEA Dimpa bag and having it shrink-wrapped in swirling plastic.

+++

For plane reading (I was flying to Milan) and then for the train home to Geneva—an all-day journey—I chose Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris, which was published in 2003 and was a New York Times bestseller. 

I had owned my copy since it was published, but had never read it, as the history it covers matched many of the books that I had read before and after my 2002 travels to Ararat, including Balakian’s own Black Dog of Fate, which is an excellent memoir of growing up in an Armenian-American family in New Jersey. 

I knew Balakian slightly, as we had gone to the same college, Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania. As he was a senior when I was a freshman I cannot say we were close friends, although we had professors in common, and when one them died we each contributed an essay to a book in his honor.

+++

Black Dog of Fate is a personal story of growing up in America in a family that had distinct memories of the genocide, while The Burning Tigris is a more historical account of both the genocide and the response to it by American diplomats in Turkey and by Americans in the United States. 

It was an American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who produced the first book in English using eye-witness accounts to link the polices and actions of the Ottoman Young Turk leadership to the genocide. (Balakian writes: “Morgenthau reported, ‘He [Talaat Pasha] said that I must not get the idea that the deportations had been decided upon hastily; in reality, they were the result of prolonged and careful deliberation.’”) 

And it was an American consul in Aleppo, Jesse Benjamin Jackson, who recorded the testimony of Armenian survivors as they struggled into Aleppo after the 1915 deportations. 

Such were the ties between America and Armenia that in the settlements after World War I it was proposed that the United States be given a mandate to govern the new state of Armenia. In spring 1920 President Woodrow Wilson rejected the suggestion.

+++

My return flight to western Europe took almost five hours, and I cannot say it was a pleasure to be wedged into the small seat of a discount airline, but I enjoyed The Burning Tigris as it touched on many of the places I had seen outbound in my several weeks on the rails. 

Admittedly, there is very little connection between Mayerling—Austria’s end of empire in the Vienna Woods—and the struggles to dominate eastern Turkey and the Caucasus, although it was Austria’s push to complete the narrow gauge rail line from Sarajevo to Salonika that unleashed the dogs of war in World War I and put the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire into the Allies’ war aims.

From Transylvania onward, I could well have been reading Balakian to understand the forces that had the Balkan states in rebellion against Constantinople. 

For example, he writes: 

At the outbreak of the “Bulgarian horrors” in 1876, Gladstone campaigned vigorously to raise consciousness in Great Britain with the hope of forcing the British government to take action. Gladstone’s pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East went through several printings and became a celebrated treatise on Turkish cruelty and Ottoman misrule. If the Ottoman Empire was a member of the “Concert of Europe,” as it had been since 1865, it was also responsible for the “Duties of a civilised Community.’’

It was Benjamin Disraeli, not his nemesis William Gladstone, who negotiated—some would say imposed—the 1878 Treaty of Berlin on the Ottoman Empire, although the views of the two British leaders corresponded on this subject more than on others. 

Gladstone appreciated that the Allies were finally holding the Ottomans accountable for the fate of its Christian minorities—even though, when finally played out over fifty years, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire unleashed a generation of instability across the Middle East (although on its own it was hardly stable or enlightened). 

+++

Here are some other passages from the Balakian book that I wish I had seen earlier in my travels.

—About Turkish nationalism, which is so on display in Ankara, Balakian writes: “The Young Turk leaders, especially Enver Pasha, went beyond pan-Turkism and became obsessed with the idea of pan-Turanism, an ideology based on the hope of reclaiming the Caucasus and central Asia—an idea laced with some of the occultlike fantasy characterized by the Nazi belief about ruling the world for a thousand years.” 

This might even explain the size of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidential mansion (of Astrodome proportions).

—Of Erzurum in 1890, Balakian describes one of the first attacks on an Armenian community: “In the summer of 1890 in Erzurum, about two hundred Armenians met in the cathedral yard to draw up a petition to protest the conditions under which Armenians were living throughout the empire. The police interrupted the rally and before long an Ottoman battalion was dispatched to Erzurum. Before it was over, the Armenian quarter was attacked and looted, and there were more than a dozen dead and 250 wounded.”

—About Sarikamish, he writes: “Even Enver’s disastrous offensive in the Caucasus at Sarikamish in the winter of 1914-15 is inexplicable without his fanatical commitment to this pan-Turanist vision. If he could wipe out the Armenians in the Caucasus, he could push eastward and unite the Turkic peoples living under Russian rule.”

—Of Kars in 1920, he writes: “Thus the boundaries of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic were shaped by the Treaty of Moscow (March 16, 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (October 13, 1921), which emerged in the wake of Soviet-Turkish negotiations. The Armenians were spared some of the crushing conditions of the Treaty of Alexandropol, but the template of the Turkish demands at Alexandropol shaped the basic terms of the new Armenian Soviet republic. Under the new treaties of Kars and Moscow, Armenia was forced to cede Kars and the surrounding areas the Turks had invaded in September 1920. The border was redrawn along the Araxes River, a border that remains today. Finally—and tragically—Armenia was asked to declare the Treaty of Sèvres null and void.” 

It was the Treaty of Sèvres, signed just a month earlier in Paris, that had given Armenians the great hope that the new Republic of Armenia might correspond to the geographic disposition of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire prior to the genocide

+++

I also appreciated Balakian’s description of both the Armenia that remains and that which was lost in 1915, and the subsequent sealing of the borders between Armenia and Turkey. He writes:

Armenians built hundreds of churches in the rocky highlands during this period, many of them innovative in their structure and artistically sophisticated with their decorative stone carvings and inscriptions. The city of Ani, the capital of the kingdom, was so refulgent with churches, cathedrals, and chapels that it was known as the city of a thousand and one churches. Today the remains of those churches lie in ruins in Turkey, just yards from the Armenian border. (Thousands of other Armenian churches throughout Turkey also lie in ruins and are used as stables or army barracks, while others are demolished by local people or destroyed by dynamite).

The book ends somberly with a short Epilogue on “Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide and U.S. Complicity,” which points out that as early as 1920, Turkey was sowing the seeds of the denialism that is with us today. He writes:

“In Turkey,” he [Turkish general Kiazim Karabekir] responded, “there has been neither an Armenia nor territory inhabited by Armenians. . . . Those [Armenians] living in Turkey committed murder and massacres, and have escaped to Iran, America, Europe, and some of them to Armenia. How is it possible to call back these murderers and give them the right to vote.” When Soviet foreign commissar Chicherin put the same proposal to the Turkish delegation that had come to Moscow for peace talks, the Turks replied: “No Armenian provinces have ever existed in Turkey.”

The American complicity cited in the Epilogue alludes to the failure of the Bill Clinton administration to pass a simple resolution confirming that the Armenians had been the victims of a genocide. The Turkish government, an important NATO ally, had threatened to close American military bases in Turkey if the vote was approved. 

It puts into perspective Balakian’s earlier passage: “One gets a deeper sense of what Deborah Lipstadt means when she writes that ‘denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators, and is—indeed—the final stage of genocide.’”

+++

When I got home, Trump looked pretty much as he did before I departed: as corrupt and depraved as some Turkish bey presiding over a seraglio of eunuchs (think of Pete Hegseth) and concubines (your pick). But at least I had spared myself the constant soundbites from either the virtual throne room or Mar-a-Harem. Instead, I had passed my time with strangers of the road, who for a few weeks anyway allowed me to see a wider world than my inbox or social media feed.

Plus I could wallow in quotes such as that of the French statesman Adolphe Thiers, who summed up the first Crimean War by calling it: “A war to give a few wretched monks the key of a Grotto.” (I am not sure the subsequent wars around the Crimea were fought for a higher purpose.)

Best of all in my travels, I made the literary acquaintance of Rose Macaulay (1881 – 1958) and her oblique, drôle, amusing take on Armenia in The Towers of Trebizond (1956), which allowed her to write: “I spent the nine days’ voyage partly sketching my Turkish fellow-passengers, and partly trying to learn Turkish, and after a time I was able to say, ‘I would like a shoehorn…’”

 

The post Armenia’s Trail of Tears appeared first on CounterPunch.org.