Archive: Travels in Eastern Anatolia

On the eve of World War One, there were roughly two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, mostly in Anatolia. By 1917 they were gone, emptied from the land by genocide and deportation. Survivors of the massacres moved on physically to other nations, rebuilding their lives in places like France, America, and Ethiopia, but in their hearts they remained Anatolian. Even their children and grandchildren learned to answer the question “Where are you from?” with the names of older, disappeared places like Kharput, Musa Dagh, Hadjin, and Marash. These children would repeat their parents' stories of The Old Country to their children, turning the reality of Anatolia, a land scarred by history, but filled with moments of great beauty and grace, into more of a legend than an actual place.