PanARMENIAN.Net

Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian published in English
12.03.2009 15:26 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The English version of one of the most dramatic
books on Armenian Genocide, Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian has
been published in the USA. Owing to Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag’s
translation, beginning from March 31 English readers of the U.S. will
be able to obtain a book on the witness’s reminiscences, one of the
victim’s of the 20th century genocide.

The book depicts four years from a priest’s life. He is one of 250
Armenian intelligentsia representatives of Constantinople, who was
arrested April 24, 1915 and exiled to the deserts of Syria along with
hundred thousands Armenians.

It was the beginning of the Ottoman Turkish government’s systematic
attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey; it was a
campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the
Ottoman Empire, by which time more than a million Armenians had been
annihilated and expunged from their historic homeland. For Grigoris
Balakian, himself condemned, it was also the beginning of a four-year
ordeal during which he would bear witness to a seemingly endless
caravan of blood.

Balakian sees his countrymen sent in carts, on donkeys, or on foot to
face certain death in the desert of northern Syria. Many would not
even survive the journey, suffering starvation, disease, mutilation,
and rape, among other tortures, before being slaughtered en route. In
these pages, he brings to life the words and deeds of survivors,
foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the massacre
process, and also of those few brave, righteous Turks, who, with some
of their German allies working for the Baghdad Railway, resisted
orders calling for the death of the Armenians. Miraculously, Balakian
manages to escape, and his flight-through forest and over mountains,
in disguise as a railroad worker and then as a German soldier-is a
suspenseful, harrowing odyssey that makes possible his singular
testimony.

Born in 1876, Griforis Balakian was one of the leading intellectuals
Armenian of his generation. Educated in Germany and the Ottoman
Empire, he was ordained as a celibate priest in 1901 and served the
Armenian Apostolic church as an emissary to Europe, Russia in
particular. He wrote a number of books, some of which were confiscated
by the Turkish Government in 1915 and subsequently destroyed by the
Turkish Government. Having survived the genocide, he later became
bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France. He died in
Marseilles in 1934.

Peter Balakian is the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin
Prize, a New York Times best seller, and a New York Times Notable
Book; and of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award
for the Art of Memoir, also a New York Times Notable Book. Grigoris
Balakian was his great-uncle.