ARMENIA DISPATCH: 6 GENOCIDE MUSEUM
by Erik Olsen

Gadling: Engaged travel for adventurers
Sept 21 2005

Wow, so I got back from a visit to the Armenian Genocide Museum here
in Yerevan. The museum is located up on a hill over-looking the city,
and it is a tasteful and elegant, but very somber and powerful place.

The Armenian genocide gets short shrift in the international and
American media, but the reality is the death of as many as a million
(or more!) Armenians at the hands of the Turks is an event that
should be both remembered and better understood around the world. As
one of the curators as the museum said to me, the Armenian genocide
was the first genocide of the 20th century, and as such it should
have helped prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, but it did not,
partly because it went under-reported around the world.

The museum here does an excellent job telling the story of the genocide
in visual detail (photographs, old journals, etc.). And the grounds
of the museum, which features an eternal flame surrounded by twelve
walls (said to signify the twelve states of Armenia at the time),
as well as an elegant pointed spire, very nicely, and powerfully,
commemorates a horrible human tragedy.