Situated at the crossroads of paths and religions, Armenia, a country with a thousand-year history, saw its sovereignty and independence disputed very early on. A look back at the days of glory and the tragic hours of a people who, for centuries, have demonstrated resilience.
Armenia is today a small Republic of the Caucasus, independent since 1991, populated by 3 million inhabitants and which extends over 29,800 km2, the equivalent of Normandy.
But “historic” Armenia, according to the vision of the Armenian community, is a mountainous region, ten times larger than the current Republic, which served as the setting for more than three thousand years for an original civilization.
This so-called Armenian plateau, with an average altitude of 1,700 m, is today shared between Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the three Republics of the South Caucasus: Georgia, Azerbaijan and …the Republic of Armenia which was, before its independence, integrated into the USSR for seven decades.
Yerevan, current capital of the Republic, lies in the shadow of Mount Ararat, with its snow-capped peak, which rises to more than 5,000 m. This sacred mountain, today located on the Turkish side of the border, is at the heart of Armenian mythology.
© Levon Vardanyan / Unspash
A mythical origin
Armenians see their country as the second cradle of humanity, the starting point for the colonization of the Earth after the great catastrophe of the Flood written in the Bible.
In reality, the ancestors of the Armenians would have arrived in the region around 1200 BC. BC, coming from the Balkans, taking advantage of the fall of Troy to rush into Anatolia, advance to the Euphrates River, then populate the valleys of the Armenian plateau around the 6th century BC. AD
Having come under the domination of the Persian Empire of Cyrus, the Armenians took part in the wars against the Greeks. A rare testimony, the Greek historian and mercenary Xenophon, who crossed the region during the retreat of the Ten Thousand, recounts, in 400 BC. BC, the abundance of cereals harvested by Armenian farmers and describes their fortified or troglodyte villages.
Armenian culture, against all odds
After the fall of Persia, an Armenian kingdom reached its peak with King Tigranes the Great, whose territory extended from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea and from the Caucasus to Palestine. Stuck between Rome and the Parthian power, it will be ephemeral (from 83 to 68 BCE), like all the rare periods of independence of Armenia. It will be a constant in its history, made up of invasions, sharing and carving up.
Coin on which appears, on the reverse, the crowned profile of Tigranes the Great.
Coinage of Tigrane II the Great. © Wikimedia Commons
The year 314, however, marks a decisive event in Armenian destiny. A new kingdom of Armenia becomes the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion: the Armenian Church, said to be autocephalous, will always remain independent and will often work as a state substitute.
In 387, Byzantium and the Persian Empire of the Sassanids fixed their border in the heart of Armenia, which was for a long time separated into two distinct provinces: Western Armenia, facing Anatolia, and Eastern Armenia, close to Iran.
To defend its cultural specificity, the Armenian Church gave itself a formidable development tool in 405 by creating an original alphabet of 36 letters which reproduce all the sounds of the Armenian language. This is how this specific writing can be used both in administration, liturgy or the translation of universal works. And will allow Armenian culture to cross the successive Arab, Iranian, Turco-Mongol or Russian dominations.
Last political autonomy before the modern era: a new Armenian kingdom will be created in the wake of the Crusades. It was in the Cilicia plain, in the southwest of Anatolia, and therefore outside the historical Armenian settlement area, that Leo I the Magnificent, “king of the Armenians”, was crowned in 1198. The region was populated by Armenian refugees fleeing the advance of the Seljuk Turks in the Caucasus and Asia Minor.
For nearly two centuries, successively approaching the Frankish crusaders, Byzantium, even establishing an alliance with the Mongols not yet converted to Islam, Cilician Armenia played an active role in this long period of clashes between Christianity and Islam. . Its last king, Leo V of Lusignan, was defeated in 1375 by the Turkish Mamluks of Egypt. The last Armenian kingdom lived.
The awakening of nationalities
For centuries, the Armenians of Anatolia would live as a tolerated minority in Muslim empires. Until the awakening of nationalities in the 19th century, which precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the genocidal project of the Turkish ultranationalists of the Union and Progress committee.
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The defeat of the ultranationalists in 1918 raised hopes of seeing an independent Greater Armenia reborn. An ephemeral first Republic of Armenia will be created in the Caucasus after the withdrawal of Russia carried away by the Bolshevik revolution.
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But, overwhelmed by the influx of survivors, the looming famine, Turkish military pressure, then that of the Bolsheviks and abandoned by the Westerners, it only resisted for two years. In 1920, it was swallowed up by what would shortly after become the USSR, first integrated into the Union of Transcaucasia, with Georgia and Azerbaijan, then as a Federated Republic.
Having become independent in 1991, at the time of the dislocation of the Soviet Union, the “3rd” Republic of Armenia woke up landlocked between Turkey and Azerbaijan, two nationalist regimes with claimed Turkish origins.
A diaspora of 8 million people
This hiatus between an often turbulent, sometimes glorious past, and a present marked for a hundred years by the mourning of the 1915 genocide and the exodus that followed, permeates the memory of a people today mostly dispersed around the world. The figures are approximate, but there are currently 6 to 8 million Armenians in the diaspora, including 2 to 3 million in Russia, more than 1.5 million in the United States and between 500,000 and 700,000 in France.
Between 1922 and 1927, following the genocide, around 58,000 Armenian refugees landed in the port of Marseille, gradually integrating into French society by practicing trades like shoemakers or tailors. But it was above all the Second World War which made them French citizens, their exemplary behavior in the Resistance leading to their massive “naturalization” in 1947-1948. The pantheonization, in 2024, of Missak Manouchian, hero of the Resistance shot by the Nazis in 1944, comes as a new recognition of this integration.
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Hidden Armenians
Armenians also remain in Turkey, around 50,000, mainly in Istanbul. But, in a way, they are much more numerous: they are the “hidden Armenians”. Some historians estimate that 100,000 to 200,000 people, mostly women and children, escaped death at the time of the genocide, either because they were “kidnapped”, “married”, “adopted”, or because they were hidden by Righteous Turks. Governor of Aleppo, then of Konya where he was transferred for disobedience, Celal Bey, the most famous of them, nicknamed the Turkish Schindler, saved 6,000 Armenians in 1915. “I am the State, and the State must protect the weak,” he said. The descendants of these survivors – “the remains of the sword”, according to the cruel expression of the Ottomans – could today represent millions of people in Turkey, some of whom sometimes rediscover their origin by chance after the death of a grandfather. The revealed existence of these “hidden Armenians” symbolizes the final jolt of the events of 1915.
For further
In 1915 and 1916, between 1.2 and 1.5 million Armenians were murdered, victims of a relentless extermination program. More than a hundred years later, and despite the support of 30 countries, the Armenian community continues to work to have these crimes recognized by all as genocide. Starting with their sponsor: Turkey.
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Footnotes
2024-02-19 19:45:29
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