Armenian Golgotha

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Title

First Things

Publication Date

1-2010

Abstract

(Excerpt)

On April 24, 1915, police arrested 250 leaders of the Armenian community in Istanbul and deported them to the Turkish interior. Among them was an Orthodox priest, Fr. Grigoris Balakian. For the next three years, he was an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide, an ethnic-cleansing campaign in which, under pretext of wartime deportations, authorities eliminated the Armenian population of Anatolia—up to one million people. He survived through faith and cunning, eventually escaping disguised as a German railway worker. In this memoir, available for the first time in English, he describes the death marches and recounts how, with government collusion, mobs massacred Armenians with whatever was available—axes, hoes, and clubs.

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