Armenian East

If you want to discover the captivating history of Armenian history, then pay attention. Their story is tragic, but their survival is incredible. And that is what makes their tale so inspiring.

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives. Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.

During 1915 to 1923, one and a half million Armenian people were deported and killed in the most appalling ways comprehensible. They were ripped from their homes (in a land where they had lived for longer than history can tell, a land so old that many speculate it was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden) and sent off on death marches across the blistering Syrian Desert. They were shot on the thresholds of the houses where they were raising their children. They were butchered with swords in gruesome ways in order to dishearten those left alive.

A history of Armenian masonry that goes back to the legendary origins of Noah to the operative stone masons to the speculative masons to the lodges of the 1800s, their destruction during the genocide, and their revival in 1991.

Even before World War II, there was a genocide. We are talking about the Armenian deportations that killed between one and two million innocent civilians, an atrocity the Turkish government still doesn’t fully acknowledge. At the time of World War I, the Armenian genocide led to the organized death of around one million ethnic Armenians. The Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and in a cruel act of desperation and vengeance, they decided to take out their empirical frustrations on the Armenians. It became one of the ugliest faces of the First World War in history.

From the depopulation of Julfa to the birth of New Julfa, these Armenians experienced destruction, exodus, and sanctuary. Shah Abbas force marches the Armenians out of old Julfa into Persia. They suffer greatly on the journey, but the Shah builds them a new city New Julfa, where they experience great wealth and peace. But then, oppression returns.