A Toronto woman believed to have been one of the last Canadians to have survived the Armenian genocide died on Thursday, four months shy of her 105th birthday. Eugenie Papazian (Kokorian-Yerganian) passed away on January 14, 2020,
Papazian was born in Turkey, in the Ionia district of Samsun by the Black Sea in 1915. She never knew her parents. Her father was taken to the army in 1915 and did not return home, while her mother died when she was still a newborn. She had a large family: two sisters, Arousiag and Azniv, three brothers, as well as three maternal aunts and uncles, whom she has not met or seen.
At the start of the 1915 deportations, the members of her extended family gathered and found refuge in the mountains, and then descended into the gorge, where she was born. Seeing how frail her mother was, many advised and almost forced her to leave Eugenie there on the road, in order to avoid hard times. Naturally, her mother could not agree. Others argued against abandoning her, considering it a sin committed against God’s will. Due in part to her beauty and golden hair, they named her Voski (Gold). After Eugenie’s birth, her mother, exhausted, died in a place her daughter would never know.
Papazian was born in Turkey, in the Ionia district of Samsun by the Black Sea in 1915. She never knew her parents. Her father was taken to the army in 1915 and did not return home, while her mother died when she was still a newborn. She had a large family: two sisters, Arousiag and Azniv, three brothers, as well as three maternal aunts and uncles, whom she has not met or seen.
At the start of the 1915 deportations, the members of her extended family gathered and found refuge in the mountains, and then descended into the gorge, where she was born. Seeing how frail her mother was, many advised and almost forced her to leave Eugenie there on the road, in order to avoid hard times. Naturally, her mother could not agree. Others argued against abandoning her, considering it a sin committed against God’s will. Due in part to her beauty and golden hair, they named her Voski (Gold). After Eugenie’s birth, her mother, exhausted, died in a place her daughter would never know.