By Naira Bulghadaryan, Daisy Sindelar
August 24, 2012
Gevorg Payasian’s father, Asatur, was just 15 years old when he was forced to flee his home in the ancient city of Ayntap in what is
now southeastern Turkey.
His entire family had been killed by Ottoman troops in what many historians now term the Armenian genocide, the mass slaughter and deportation of Anatolia’s ethnic Armenians between 1915 and 1922.
Alone, he set out on foot, walking about 130 kilometers before reaching a haven in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Unbeknownst to him, his 9-year-old sister, Nektar, had somehow survived the massacre and was making the same journey.
Asatur went on to reunite with his sister in Aleppo. He went to school, started a family, and built a successful horse-breeding business from scratch.
But his son Gevorg, now a 69-year-old businessman specializing in radio equipment, believes even as he praised Syria’s “merciful embrace” of his people, his father never recovered from the trauma of seeing his home and family destroyed:
“My father always remembered his ancestral home in Ayntap,” he says. “He would tell me about how he fled from the Turks and reached Syria. The Turks had killed his parents and relatives. My father and his sister were the only survivors in their family.”
Nearly a century later, it is the son who is fleeing — leaving the city that offered his father safe harbor as the bloody 17-month battle between government loyalists and opposition rebels settles over Aleppo.
Rich History, Uncertain Future
Hundreds of Aleppans have been injured and dozens killed in the recent weeks of fighting in Syria’s largest city, with government jets bombarding residential buildings and rebels waging a street-level war for control.
Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated the city in a desperate bid to escape the violence, including up to 3,000 Armenians, who have decamped for Lebanon and Armenia, leaving behind a rich history and a highly uncertain future.
Even before the World War One-era massacres, Armenians had made a home in Aleppo for centuries. The Forty Martyrs Cathedral, a 15th-century Apostolic church, is one of the oldest functioning churches in the Armenian diaspora, and the Armenian presence in the city is believed to reach back as far as the 1st century B.C.
But it was the so-called Armenian genocide, the Turkish slaughter and mass deportation of Armenians in the early 20th century, that laid the foundation for the city’s contemporary Armenian community.