Young victims of Armenian Genocide commemorated in Lebanon

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hundreds of visitors flocked to a new shrine Sunday, May 8 evening at the Lazarist Saint Joseph College in Aintoura, Lebanon, to remember more than 350 orphans who perished there under Ottoman rule.

The shrine, which sits atop a grave of young victims of the Armenian Genocide, was built several months ago and has become a somber and meaningful site for Lebanese and foreign visitors alike.

On Sunday evening, the Armenian Catholic Church held a mass service for the orphans at Aintoura’s grand 19th-century chapel, nearly 100 years after the end of World War I, The Daily Star reports.

“Among the children buried in the grave were more than 300 young Armenian orphans who were the victims of [a policy of] “Turkification” at the hands of Turkish officials assigned by Jamal Pasha in 1916,” said Missak Kelechian, an engineer who researched the history of the site, uncovering the location of the mass grave.

Kelechian’s research took over five years to complete and began with a photograph in a book by Stanley Kerr, a volunteer of the American Near East Relief Agency. The photograph showed Jamal Pasha on the steps of the Saint Joseph College at Aintoura in 1916.

“It is important today that more Lebanese know about the tragic fate of Armenian orphans in Aintoura,” said Vazken Nurpetlian, as he lit a candle at the shrine. “The finding [of the grave] shows that the international Armenian cause [for the recognition of the Armenian genocide] is also a Lebanese cause.”

Of the 1,200 orphans at Aintoura, around 1,000 children were Armenian and the remainder were Kurds. On his arrival to the college, Jamal Pasha assigned Halide Edip Adivar, a well-known Turkish feminist, to conduct the “Turkification” of the Armenian orphans, to erase their identity. After suffering defeat in World War I, Ottoman forces were forced to withdraw from the college and when the French Lazarists arrived, Father Ernest Sarlout helped the surviving orphans to remember their original names and speak Armenian again.