Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian published in English

PanARMENIAN.Net - The English version of one of the most dramatic books on Armenian Genocide, Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian has been published in the USA. Owing to Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag's translation, beginning from March 31 English readers of the U.S. will be able to obtain a book on the witness's reminiscences, one of the victim's of the 20th century genocide.



The book depicts four years from a priest's life. He is one of 250 Armenian intelligentsia representatives of Constantinople, who was arrested April 24, 1915 and exiled to the deserts of Syria along with hundred thousands Armenians.



It was the beginning of the Ottoman Turkish government's systematic attempt to eliminate the Armenian people from Turkey; it was a campaign that continued through World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, by which time more than a million Armenians had been annihilated and expunged from their historic homeland. For Grigoris Balakian, himself condemned, it was also the beginning of a four-year ordeal during which he would bear witness to a seemingly endless caravan of blood.



Balakian sees his countrymen sent in carts, on donkeys, or on foot to face certain death in the desert of northern Syria. Many would not even survive the journey, suffering starvation, disease, mutilation, and rape, among other tortures, before being slaughtered en route. In these pages, he brings to life the words and deeds of survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the massacre process, and also of those few brave, righteous Turks, who, with some of their German allies working for the Baghdad Railway, resisted orders calling for the death of the Armenians. Miraculously, Balakian manages to escape, and his flight-through forest and over mountains, in disguise as a railroad worker and then as a German soldier-is a suspenseful, harrowing odyssey that makes possible his singular testimony.



Born in 1876, Griforis Balakian was one of the leading intellectuals Armenian of his generation. Educated in Germany and the Ottoman Empire, he was ordained as a celibate priest in 1901 and served the Armenian Apostolic church as an emissary to Europe, Russia in particular. He wrote a number of books, some of which were confiscated by the Turkish Government in 1915 and subsequently destroyed by the Turkish Government. Having survived the genocide, he later became bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church in southern France. He died in Marseilles in 1934.



Peter Balakian is the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize, a New York Times best seller, and a New York Times Notable Book; and of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of Memoir, also a New York Times Notable Book. Grigoris Balakian was his great-uncle.