Ravished Armenia

My first real contact with Armenians was while serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in St. Petersburg, Russia.  We regularly ran into Armenians in our efforts to preach on the streets.  One of the members of the branch in Pskov was an ethnic Armenian.  One of the sister missionaries in one of the districts I served in was from Armenia.  It was from her that I first learned about the Armenian alphabet, which was like nothing I had ever seen before.  Since then, I have had a few chances to get to know more Armenians and learn a little about the history of this small country in the Caucasus that has outsized sway around the world because of its ubiquitous and rather tight-knit diaspora.  The diaspora is so large and so widespread, in part, because of the World War I time-frame killings Armenians were subjected to.

Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl Who Survived the Great Massacres by Aurora Mardiganian (Arshalyus Mardiganyan) is an autobiographical account of the Turkish oppression of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire starting in 1915.  The Mardiganian family, relatively wealthy financiers, are warned by their shepherd that he had a dream about the Armenians’ imminent destruction, but his prediction is dismissed.  Soon, though, it comes true, as the family is driven from their home, along with all the other Armenians.  Occasionally, leniency is shown to those who will renounce their Christian faith and adopt Islam, but even then, the freshly converted Armenians are killed by their Turkish and Kurdish oppressors.  Aurora, like most of the women and children, is driven from place to place, guarded by Turkish policemen.  Those who are too slow to keep up during forced marches are dispatched quickly and usually cruelly, although Mardiganian’s account does point out a few instances of decency and humanity from guards or locals in the places the Armenians were marched.  Her story, like many of those who lived during this time, is made all the more tragic because she was there to see the deaths of her father, mother, a sister, and a brother.  She was sold multiple times to be a harem girl.  This never worked out for the buyer because Aurora was never willing to accept Islam.  It really didn’t work out for her, either, though, because her refusals were usually met with abuse and deprivation.  After wandering the Ottoman Empire under the care of the Turkish police or as the property of various rich Turks, having seen so much killing, rape, and pillaging, her old shepherd friend, then working for a Turk trying to get Aurora to submit to Islam before being fully accepted into his harem, helped her escape.  She stayed with friendly Kurds before eventually being helped by Americans in the region and then making her way to Russian-controlled territory and under Russian and Armenian military oversight, made her way to Tbilisi, then Russia, and then the United States.

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes with Armenians will have heard of what they refer to simply as the Genocide.  There are some political implications involved in using that term, but that is what the Armenians refer to it as, and it was, undoubtedly, a terrible time for them.  There are not many things one can compare their suffering to, although maybe the treatment of the Bosniaks when the former Yugoslavia fell apart is a decent comparison.  Aurora’s story was one of suffering and tragedy.  As a memoir meant to tell of her people’s travails, there is no larger discussion of world politics at the time or even the regional situation (in short: it’s the Caucasus and the Middle East, so it’s somewhere beyond complicated).  The reader just gets a relatively young girl’s take on a horrible situation.  On the other hand, despite all the destruction, violence, and despair, there is hope in the book.  I found the willingness she had, along with a few others, to not renounce Christ despite the often gruesome consequences extremely brave and inspiring.  The will to survive and the resourcefulness displayed by those in a tight spot to do so were admirable, too.  There are also lessons in the book about avoiding the totalitarian and authoritarian impulses that so often afflict those in power that lead to so much death and destruction of human life.
 

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.

The Guns of August

When I was in elementary school, the school I went to did this thing called “Whiz Kids ” that was an extracurricular academic project.  Kids who wanted to would put together a presentation, similar to a science fair project, but on any topic of their choosing.  Then, they would present this in class.  As I remember it, someone from the administration, like the principal, would come to give the presentation a grade.  Everyone got a certificate who presented, but there were definitely differences in the grades received.  I once did a presentation on World War I airplanes.  I worked on this for quite a while, including going to the library with my dad to find some information on the different planes and then drawing some of them.  My dad and I also built a pretty cool model of the Fokker Dr.I, the famous red triplane flown by the Red Baron.  I had a lot of fun with the project and learned some stuff, but the presentation was maybe a little weak, and that showed in the fact that I didn’t get the highest marks possible.  Other than that experience, World War I has been something I haven’t learned a lot about.

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman (ISBN: 978-0-345-47609-8), since it is about the first thirty days of the war, doesn’t do much more than mention reconnaissance planes a couple times when it comes to the airplanes of World War I, but the book does provide a very detailed review of those critical early battles in 1914.  The stage is set with an extensive review of both French and German military doctrine leading up to the war, as well as the military and political personalities involved.  After the French and German positions were well established, the reader learned about the English and the Belgians.  Then, things got moving, and the Germans invaded Belgium.  It didn’t go quite as they planned, though, with a lot more Belgian defensive efforts than they planned on and an English response that somehow seemed to not be completely accounted for in German war planning.  The Germans still advanced quickly, taking advantage of their superior numbers and superior firepower.  Once they were well into French territory, the French finally gathered themselves and were able to stop the German advance only miles from Paris.  The French effort was eventually aided by the British, who were shown to, overall, be slow and indecisive during this opening stage of the war, and by the Russians, who opened an eastern front that the Germans were forced to respond to even though it ultimately proved to be less of a concern than initially thought.  Throughout the first thirty days of the war, all parties involved suffered from indecisiveness, incomplete information, and decisions based more on what people had planned on than on what was actually happening.  These mistakes were a large reason the war took the turn that it did, leading to four years of trench warfare that left Europe broken.

The book was an interesting read, heavy on names and dates, although written in a very readable, narrative form, which earned Tuchman the Pulitzer Prize and is considered a classic of history.  As noted above, I know less than I probably should about World War I, but the book solidified for me the overall impression I had of the war: a petty squabble that turned into a worldwide mess that resulted in a ridiculous level of loss of life and destruction.  The war was started by empires itching for a fight.  Once they got in the ring, tactical and strategic blunders turned what could’ve been a knock out in the first round into one of those marathon twelve-round bouts.  Over and over, as I read, it just seemed like so much unnecessary fighting.  Although I found the book a little dry at times, I liked learning more about the war and those involved.  It had a large impact on what would happen only twenty years later.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.

Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip

As a young boy — and to be honest, still today — World War I aircraft fascinated me.  Biplanes and triplanes seemed so exotic and were firmly a part of the romantic age of flying.  The appearance on the scene of monoplanes as the war drew to a close always seemed rather anti-climatic to me and even somewhat disappointing.  Thanks to a bit of help from my dad, I once even presented a special, extra-curricular report in school on WWI aircraft.  Only later did I learn of the stalemate trench warfare that was such a hallmark of WWI.  It was even later, probably in high school, that I was told that one man, then termed a revolutionary, now termed a terrorist, essentially started WWI through his actions alone.  When a Serbian assassin killed Franz Ferdinand of the ruling Hapsburg family, WWI was set in motion.  The high school teachers and textbooks forget that it was really wasn’t that simple, but the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, remained an interesting figure from an interesting part of the world.

Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip by Tony Fabijančić (ISBN: 978-0-88864-519-7) is a travelogue that traces the route of Gavrilo Princip’s travels through the former Yugoslavia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Set largely in the modern-day Balkans, the book uses Princip and his story as a way to understand the region’s complicated history and its rather sticky present through observation, interviews, and referencing historical sources.  The author, rather sympathetic to Princip before undertaking his research and travels, was also optimistic at the outset about the chances for the various ethnic and religious groups of the former Yugoslavia to mend things up a little bit.  By the end of his efforts and the end of the book, after traveling through thick forests, high alps, Mediterranean coastline, and the smog of big cities, he has changed his tune on both counts, considering Princip to have misjudged the impact of his actions, and not just misjudged, but having brought about more harm than good as well as coming to the realization that the peoples of the region, harboring some of the same prejudices and stereotypes as those held about 100 years ago as WWI broke out, aren’t breaking out of those molds any time soon. 

Tracing the life and travels of Princip proved an interesting motif and an interesting background to the pictures of the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia.  I was most struck by the fact that in the larger cities, much had been repaired or rebuilt when it came to buildings or infrastructure, but when it came to people’s feelings, most of those whom the author spoke with had experienced no rebuilding at all since the fall of Communist Yugoslavia.  The author, partially of Croatian descent himself, seemed to think that, much like Communist Russia’s experience, the ethnic harmony of the Communist time in Yugoslavia was not genuine.  While the Left likes to play this type of ethnic and racial strife up in America, I am of the opinion that very little of these types of feelings exist in America, and I think it is because of this that Americans, myself included, have such a hard time understanding an sympathizing with the people of the Balkans.  We’d rather worry about our own families’s welfare, our jobs, and our favorite sports teams than whether or not we should hate the people next door because they say a few words differently than we do, have a different last name, or belong to a different church.  The book was an interesting, although not gripping read, and there are better works out there if one is after pure history, but this provided a slightly lighter approach to both the history and the state of current affairs.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

History is captivating.  America's history, of course, is larger than life.  From the heroes of the Revolutionary War to the trappers, cowboys, and explorers that opened the West and from the Greatest Generation's service in World War II to putting a man on the moon, there are stories and stories of people doing what had to be done at great sacrifice.  I have also enjoyed learning the history of some other nations and peoples as I have become acquainted with them thanks to my mission, marriage, and travel.  What has been especially fascinating is learning about the people who were larger than life for other kids growing up and learning about their own countries and histories.  All the better that, as with American history, there are lessons to be learned.

In the Turkish extermination of the ethnic Armenian population within Turkey's borders during World War I, German author Franz Werfel thought he saw something the world should learn from.  To bring that message to the forefront, he wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (ISBN: 978-1-56792-407-7).  The novel is a fictionalized account of a home-grown Armenian resistance movement that succeeded in holding off far superior — numerically and technically — Turkish forces for fifty-three days (Werfel's forty days were a reference to the symbolic Biblical number), at which point French and British warships rescued the survivors.  The book chronicles the efforts of (the fictional) Gabriel Bagradian and the villagers as they live off the land, fight valiantly for their freedom, and deal with everyday problems exacerbated by the situation.  The story is, of course, an adventure story, what with the battles, mutiny, illicit love, petty jealousies, special missions, and a wide array of characters from mayors, widows, common criminals, and carpenters to German foreign ministry officers, priests, Turkish military leaders, and French admirals.  Werfel told their stories in an attempt to warn the German people that they were headed into something eerily similar with the Germans playing the role of the Turks and the Jews the Armenians.  Werfel's account ends with one twist of his imagination, leaving Bagradian on his hard-won mountain to face certain death, but death as a free man.

The book was an interesting one, but not one that I finished thinking I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The complicated and contentious subject matter may have something to do with that, but Werfel's religious philosophizing probably had more to do with it.  Sometimes he was just too far out there, and his ideas seemed almost as delusional as his starved crazy characters.  It may or may not be fair to fault him for that — he was a Jew fascinated by Catholicism and religious belief in general; it would be natural for him to explore his beliefs in his writing.  When the book cut away from philosophy and focused on battles, night raids, treachery, escapes, and heated confrontation, it was a good read; when it strayed into philosophy, especially as it concerned the adulterous affair of Bagradian's wife and even some of Bagradian's own thoughts and behavior toward another woman, the book bogged down and was hard to push through (this is also how I felt about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina).  Widely considered to be a modern classic, it was indeed a masterful story, but sticking to the story would have improved the book.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.