Cries of the Armenian Genocide

Next I will tell my great-grandpa Aram Maranians story. I will let others tell their stories first before I post it so I don't take up and hog all the space. Plus I need to take a break from thinking about this. 95 years later and the wounds still feel as fresh as the day the blade was originally raised on our glorious homeland:(. I'm lucky on my moms side that some family history was preserved through a partial family tree with some photographs that survived. I'm making a video to present them.

After Alice lost both her parents, she was only 14y/o, she was raised by her two older sisters Araxie and Ovsanna. That is until 1915. when the deportation orders reached Cilicia in June/August of 1915, Alice, Araxie and her family, and Ovsanna and her family were put on the death march. They all wound up in Der Zor. Somewhere along the way, Araxie knew of a wealthy Armenian couple, Kevork and Sesseda Bederosian near Aleppo. She begged them to take Alice as their own to try and save her life…

My great-grandma Alice Arellian had 4 sisters, and 3 brothers. Her sisters were Araxie, Ovsanna, and two unnamed sisters who she never knew. Her brothers were Sarkis, Krikor, and one unnamed who she never knew. Her mother Lucin was massacred in Damascus by the turks, family tree says undated. Her father Kechik and older brother Sarkis were both murdered by turks/kurds in Adana in 1914. My great-Uncle Sarkis and my great-great grandpa Kechik were Ottoman soldier conscripts.

My mothers side of my family was originally from the Lake Van basin until the Seljuk invasion as noted in my previous post. When they went with the mass exodus to Cilicia, they wound up settling in Aintab, Cilicia, where they remained until the Genocide. My mothers maternal grandparents family escaped the Genocide by shear luck. Her maternal grandparents ( my great-grandparents, I'm 28y/o by the way), the Kevorkians, escaped to Aleppo just before things started to get bad.

Thank you for your contributions so far. AzadArdziv's story is pretty much my story as well (as he says, we are relatives). I wanted to mention that I am aware of the spelling mistakes in my video (in Armenian and English), but I didn't want to take down the video for that. As long as I make my point, it's good enough.

One typo I absolutely have to point out is when I say «սիակ զաւակը», it's supposed to be «միակ զաւակը» The rest is easily understandable.

My family is originally from Trebzond. We don't know much about our family history for obvious reasons. The only survivor of the Genocide was my Great grandfather at the age of 10. All his family members were slaughtered including his mother, father, brother and two sisters. He was playing at friends house when they slaughtered his family.

…and the sad fact was that she had been burnt to ashes with the house. With Hambardzum's father gone, they buried his grandmother's leftovers and were lucky enough to have food under the floor, which his mother had boldly saved for an "emergency". There was nothing left for them to continue living. The men had been driven out, the town had been burnt down (especially the Armenian quarter) and they decided to escape to Allepo, Syria, like many others. This was a story of some lucky ones…

There was once a large armenian family living in the city of Marash, Western Armenia (Cilicia) in the Ottoman Empire. It was the spring of 1915 or so, when the Koulian family was living its ordinary life, when suddenly word arrived that the Turkish soldiers are coming and taking all the men. My grandmother's father, Hampardzum, was 10 years old. His mother decided to pack some emergency food below the floor of their home, beneath layers of sand. Then, suddenly the Turks were heard entering…