<i>Armenian Golgotha</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Armenian Golgotha Robert Melson Grigoris Balakian , Armenian Golgotha. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Pp. 509, cloth. $35.00 US. The twenty-fourth of April 1915 is the date that marks the commencement of the Armenian Genocide. On that day, Grigoris Balakian, a high-ranking Armenian priest, was among the 250 Armenian religious, political, and cultural leaders who were arrested in Constantinople and sent 200 miles east to Chankiri to await their fate. While most of his companions were killed or died during the genocide, Balakian survived both the genocide and World War I. When the war ended in 1918, he started to write Armenian Golgotha. This is an astonishing memoir and meditation on his survival and on the course of the mass murder that destroyed more than half of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. It is first-hand testimony from a terrible time by a knowledgeable and historically informed witness who was intent not only on recalling his experiences but also on leaving a documented record behind. The book was translated by the gifted poet and historian Peter Balakian—Grigoris Balakian was Peter's great-uncle—with the able assistance of Aris Sevag. Peter Balakian supplies an important and illuminating introductory essay that helps the reader navigate the text. Grigoris Balakian had studied at German universities and spoke fluent German by the time he returned to Constantinople in September 1914, on the eve of World War I, when he was thirty-eight years old. His command of German saved his life when later he went into hiding, and it gave him a perspective on the role of Germans and Germany—Turkey's ally—during the genocide. He was also well-connected to the establishment of the Armenian Apostolic Church and a well-known figure in Armenian affairs. He arrived in Constantinople two months before Turkey joined Germany and the Central Powers against the Entente, and left it in 1919 as part of the Armenian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. In those five years he experienced the Armenian Genocide first hand. When he lived in Berlin, he had been alarmed by the ferocity of German nationalism and the millenarian expectations aroused by the coming of the war. He discovered similar emotions raging among Turks as well as Armenians when he returned to Constantinople. He believed that a rabid form of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turkism motivated the Committee of Union and Progress, which seized the opportunity of the war to destroy the Armenians and to transform Turkey into a homogenous Muslim and Turkic state. He was critical of the role of the German military and foreign office as well, which he accused of collaborating in the destruction of the Armenians. During his escape, when he posed as a German soldier, he was shocked to overhear ordinary Germans refer to Armenians as "Christian Jews and as bloodsucking usurers," accusing Armenians of economically exploiting Turkey (281). [End Page 121] Balakian was a fervent Armenian patriot, but he was also quite critical of his own people's attitudes on the eve of the war. Thus, upon returning from Germany, he found Armenian enthusiasm for the coming war and what it might mean for an independent Armenia both alarming and naïve. He feared that it would play into the xenophobia of the Turks. Referring to the massacres of 1894–1896, he noted that "the bloody experiences of the last thirty years had not made the Armenians any more prudent" (28). In a later passage he said, "In this way we provoked the Turks, who had for a long time been looking for an excuse . . . [to annihilate] the entire Armenian population of Turkey" (32). Balakian could not be aware in 1918 that those who would deny the Armenian genocide decades later would argue that it was the Armenians who had provoked the Turks into committing mass murder. After spending ten months in prisonlike conditions in Chankiri, in February 1916, Balakian was made to join a forced march toward Chroum and Yozgat, stations on the way to the killing fields in Der-Zor in Syria. It was during this deportation that he documented his extraordinary conversation—amounting to a prolonged...

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