The Turkish viziers considered the hope of Aristotle’s Greece awakening to be the delirium of European poets. It was a grave wager: on one side the rebellious poets, intolerant of slavery, seeking the end of their short road, extended a hand; on the other, the murderous logic of rulers—those Greeces, city-states and petty principalities had not vanished to rise again. They had died for the welfare and peace of a united world and were, once and for all, an inalienable part of absolute dominion. But Greece awoke and stood up. The Bulgarians shook off their Turkish skin and stood up as Slavs. The Serbs awoke. The Romanians stood up. Armenia stirred.
Some Mongol now looks with the deep sadness of one dispossessed into the boundless distances of his Genghis Khan past, which went on and on and on and are now gone. Some Russian now looks with the pain of loss at those clear times when Transcaucasia was still abroad, and free Cossacks could ravage prosperous trading Shamakhi there and return to their Terek wearing many pairs of eastern trousers. Some American perhaps recalls images from the days when his country’s plains were open, the herds ran wild with freedom and all these tribes and peoples had not yet found America.
But for me, my tranquil Genghis Khan distances, my Reich, my Peter the Great conquests, my Napoleonic theatre, my free North’s war against the slaveholding South extend back no further than a century. For in no other century have we had so many such lofty people; no age of ours has been so densely populated with the noble sons of my proud people.
From Van to Karin and Constantinople, Dsegh, Madras, Tiflis, Agulis, Petersburg, Shushi and Etchmiadzin, after a five-hundred-year night, like soldiers of an army scattered in darkness, they called to one another and found one another: “Khachatur!” “Mikayel!” “Hovhannes!” “Vardapet!” “Mkrtich!” “Simon!” “Rostom!” “Andranik!” “Paramaz!” “Murad!” “Hamazasp!” “Hakob!”
This old, tired land had become one vast Byurakn. Every slope echoed; from every gorge and little ravine, every spring and forest, every hut and palace, monastery and rock-hewn dwelling, new life burst forth. All the mothers bore sons; all the sons were rebellious.
The people existed; the people bore witness to their immortality among peoples.
The Kurds of Khasun had said, in their Kurdish way: “We are the true Mamguns and the masters of this land. The Turkish sultan demanded our faith or our arms. We gave our faith and kept our arms.”
My Mamikonyans, my Bagratunis, my Artsrunis had slipped beneath the Kurdish koloz cap, into the peasant’s chukha, the priest’s robe. They were bakers, stonemasons, merchants; they worked as carpenters, sang hayrens in Turkish, Kurdish and sometimes Armenian, served as pashas at foreign courts. And only the eagle’s cry betrayed that they were themselves.
Among the causes of the genocide, of the “discord of peoples,” the enemy cites their guilt, as if without them Anatolia would now be swaying amid the applause and laughter of harmonious peoples. The enemy is an enemy precisely because he points to the very thing without which we would not exist at all. The enemy points to Andranik and his kind; therefore they, and he, are our essence.
Turkish rulers left written instructions to one another about them, believing themselves permanent rulers and my princes their eternal servants: “Our Christian peoples soon recovered from our movement that imposed a subordinate condition upon them, and appeared ready to take the place of their former teachers. The conduct of the Armenians in particular assumed a commanding character, but it would be right for us to moderate their zeal.”
Saying that their attempts to moderate our zeal were wasted efforts, let me correct the testament: our conduct did not assume a commanding character—it had it, always had it and has it.
And I have a great testimony: purposes appoint as their gods those who do not turn aside from them.
How good it was for us that they existed; how shameful it would have been had they not existed—those carpenters, saddle-menders, weapon-repairers, nobles in rawhide shoes of mine. “They will not let the enemy cross the Channel,” it was said of the English military aristocracy. Mine had no sea abysses; the enemy’s foot defiled our soil and ravaged our graves. Yet my nobles, through themselves, kept us as far from the enemy’s contempt as perhaps the width of the English Channel. Not from hatred; not from hatred of us, black and blackening hatred. That means that in a duel where there were only us and the enemy, they reduced the enemy to the level of an animal; and now the sole witness—we—must be destroyed. The enemy blackens with hatred to this day and into tomorrow.
It is hard to live beneath that gaze, but it would have been unbearably impossible to drag ourselves through his contempt. We would have stumbled about in confusion and never escaped it, because it would also have been our own contempt for ourselves, humiliated in a duel without witnesses.
My nobles wiped the red shame from their foreheads and ours, cast the burden of hostile contempt out of their souls and ours; today our stride is light and our brow clear.
Grakan Tert, 2 March 1990.