Every murder is repugnant, but the murder of an intellectual is beyond any epithet. High-ranking Turkish officials entrusted the dark business of murdering Armenian intellectuals, I believe, neither to their counterparts nor even to their own compatriots.
Something ugly, very ugly, repugnant has happened; it is hard to imagine anything more repugnant. The murder of a director, a minister or a wealthy man can still be subjected to some logic: they are killed so that their killers can occupy their places. This murder lies beyond the limits of thought and even of the darkest imagination. It is delirium. Will they fill with themselves the place called Vardges Petrosyan? There was no such rank — how will they fill it? There was no such position. He himself was a place, a position, a work. Or was the purpose precisely to eliminate this courageous, active, clear-headed, unbroken man, this singular public figure who could create work every day and everywhere and name it “Vardges Petrosyan”? Then this is the outright plundering of our public and political life, across the entire republic and nation; it is an open challenge to the very foundation of our existence.
A couple more muffled blows like these, and the coffin lid of our time will be nailed shut before its hour, and you will no longer have anyone of clear mind among you.
A thousand years ago, our historian already mentioned, from hearsay, a legendary country in the Far East whose inhabitants gather as relatives and eat the head of their deceased elder. What would be strange, delirious, beyond nature would be for elders to devour the young: that would mean the self-destruction of the tribe, and such a tribe would deserve to vanish and cease to exist. Yet even the former is immoral and inhuman to us. To our Armenian understanding, it too is a nightmare, regardless of what the murderers think they have rid themselves of or acquired.
They have rid themselves of his sobering presence. They have acquired an arena in which madness now gives the orders.
Perhaps they really have freed themselves; we, however, have been deprived of his assured, outwardly at least untroubled, creative presence as an elder.
A few more conspiratorial blows, and the signs of a familiar country will disappear. This will not seem a homeland, and it will not be a homeland. It will be a place alien, estranged, even hostile to us, a realm of Far Eastern legends, of which people will testify not as its children but as strangers, not from hearsay but from what they have seen: that reason had been driven out there, and feverish panic was their leader.
What a pity. His Yerkir Nairi gave hope that the Vardges of his younger years had returned and, by means known uniquely to him, would once again fill our day with the same unmalicious malice, the same joyful ardour, the renewing restlessness of a son of the house and the moderate conservatism of its master.
What a pity: another long-familiar, intimate sign has gone, a sign that made this place and this time unmistakably our own.