…Ever louder the Armenians
Sing, the storm attains its height…
Thus they drink and sing…Survivors
of a brave and martyr race.
Children of a captive mother
Heroes with no resting place.
Six lines from the poem ARMENIANS written by Bulgarian poet, Peyo Yavorov in 1899. Dedicated to the Armenians who left Ottoman Turkey for Bulgaria after the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-1896.
This poem was introduced to me in 2024 by Ivan, the father of Kristian at that time a junior at one of our local high schools in Alameda. Kristian volunteered every Saturday in the library of the Alameda Naval Air Museum where I work.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II was the supreme ruler of the Ottoman Empire when the massacres took place. A cunning ruler he had already moved scores of Kurds into the Armenian areas of the Eastern provinces decades before the signal was given to begin to kill and decimate Armenians. The Christian Armenians did not have the right to bear arms but the Kurds and Turks did and were heavily armed thanks to the sultan and ready.
At a given signal and throughout the Empire from the smallest hamlets to the larger cities the carnage began. Men were cut down, farms burned, businesses ruined, and crops razed. Destruction was everywhere.
Three hundred thousand Armenians were killed in three years, fifty thousand Armenian women and children were forcibly taken and Islamized.
The poet learned of these events from the Armenian refugees who converged on Bulgaria afterward. The only thing he could do to alleviate their pain was to write and he did. His poem is considered the crown jewel of his works. The poem, ARMENIANS is still in Bulgaria’s school curricula and studied and written about by students, in the upper grades, in their final exams.
