Armenian Genocide: Recall events that took place 100 years after his death

In 1915, a million people gathered today, together with Turkey, and marched near Deir-al-Zour to modern Syria. In just one hundred years, only a handful of survivors are left to tell the stories of Armenian genocide they have witnessed.

By Diana Markosian

After hundreds of years of Armenian genocide, filmmaker Diana Markosian found two survivors who witnessed the deportation, death and denial of the events of 1915. They went back to the past together.

I was never interested in continuing the work on the Armenian genocide. When I started this project, it was still just a vague historical narrative. I knew, in 1915, that the Ottomans embarked on a policy of deportation and a machete of slaughter to destroy their Armenian population. And, at the end of World War I, more than one million people were removed from what is now Turkey today. But genocide was exactly in my family because of the personal toll, or the sense of connection I would feel when doing this piece.

I am Armenian, but I was born in Moscow and raised in America. For the rest of my life, I struggled with my Armenian identity because of its inherent history. This is something I have understood, but I have never fully embraced it. A year ago, when I was approaching a foundation in Armenia, I asked for help finding survivors of the remaining genocides. I made online voter registration to see who was born before 1915 and then traveled to different countries to find them. That’s how I met Moveses and Yepraksia – they lived in their hundredth year.

When I met them, they shared memories of my early homes with me. Movses was born in the Kebusie village of Musa Dagh on the Syrian border. Yepraksia lived in a small village near Kars on the Armenian border. They haven’t seen their home since they escaped a century ago. Somehow I wanted to gather everyone alive with their homeland. I decided to return to Turkey to see my last memories again.

When I told survivors that I was going to visit their hometown, everyone asked me to fulfill a wish. Moves, from Musa Dagh, drew a map of his town and asked me to find his church and leave his portrait now in the ruins. When he was 98, he didn’t see his house. In his village, I found everything he described to me: the sheep, the fruit he remembered to eat, and the sea. I also found the remains of what used to be his church. Yepraksia of a small town in Kars asked me to help her older brother after 1915.

When I returned to Armenia, I created posters of surviving villages as a way of bridging the past and the present. Years later, after delivering the image, the survivors were captured, as if they had been taken to a place called home many years ago. It’s the story of the house, everything they had, everything they lost. And what I found again.

CREDITS:

Assistant Producer: Vahe Hakobyan
Sound player: Harutyun Mangasaryan
Rural Producer: Arevik Avanesyan
Color: Boyd Nagle
Video Editor: Andy Kemp

It is shot, produced and directed by Diana Markosian

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