Image: Hovsepian Ministries
My family, displaced by the genocide, returned to see Christ at work in our homeland.
One hundred years ago this April, the first genocide of the 20th century began in modern-day Turkey. From 1915 to 1923, 1.5 million Armenians were executed or massacred or died from starvation, torture, or disease. Report by Christianity Today.
The phrase “crimes against humanity” was first used to detail the carnage, which many scholars and historians label genocide. During World War I, killing Armenians was the official policy of Ottoman rulers, who suspected Armenians of supporting Imperial Russia, one of their long-standing adversaries. (At that time, the Ottomans ruled western Armenia, and Russia ruled the smaller eastern region.)
“A campaign of race extermination is in progress,” Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to Turkey, said in a telegram to the State Department on July 16, 1915. Turkish soldiers took all males ages 12 and older from their villages and executed most of them. They sent women, children, and the elderly to concentration camps and the deserts, allowing them to starve by the tens of thousands. About 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam and had their names changed.
The Ottoman government confiscated churches, monasteries, farms, businesses, and money. Dozens of eyewitness accounts were published at the time. But Western nations did little to stop the slaughter, which Armenians call Meds Yeghern (“the Great Catastrophe”). Nearly all the fatalities occurred in Turkey or border areas. The mass killing of Armenians was so well known in Europe that many scholars believe Hitler referred to it one week before invading Poland in 1939.
The Ottoman Empire’s extermination campaign ultimately failed. Today, Armenia is an independent nation about the size of Maryland. The Armenian diaspora now numbers close to 10 million, including some who live in Turkey. The Armenian church lives on in hundreds of congregations worldwide. (In the third century, Armenia was the first nation to accept Christianity as its national faith.) Countless family lines were not extinguished. The Hovsepians—my family—are numbered among them.
In 1919, my great-grandfather, Vartan Deumbekjian, married a teenage war widow, Annig, who had a 4-year-old daughter, Osanna. Vartan joined the Armenian freedom fighters and remained behind in their village. A pregnant Annig and Osanna joined the refugees fleeing to a safer place. Hungry and barefoot, they walked for about a month, crossing the mountains and eventually reaching a harbor from which they sailed to Greece.
Armenian children grow up hearing tragic stories of the war. But because my grandparents and parents were born in Turkey, Egypt, and Greece, and I was born in Canada, I was never drawn to my ancestral homeland of Armenia. Neither was my father, Joseph Hovsepian—until he was almost 70.
In 2008, my mother visited Armenia to reconnect with childhood friends. My father, pastor of Temple Baptist Church in Montreal, joined her, hoping to connect with local pastors in Yerevan, the capital. Though majority-Christian, Armenia is a spiritually thirsty land.
Since then, my father has returned to Armenia four times. He’s brought clothing, medicine, reading glasses, gospel tracts, and books he authored, and has developed solid relationships with many pastors. Local Christians have taken my father from home to home to counsel and pray with people.
His efforts became a puzzle piece in the still unfolding picture of the gospel-based reawakening of Armenia’s soul—one person, one household, and one church at a time. The reawakening is happening amid fresh violence: Last September, fighters from the Islamic State blew up the Armenian genocide memorial complex in Der Zor, Syria—close to the site where Armenian refugees had been forced to march to their deaths in 1915.