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Location: Bldg 420, Rm 041

In recent years, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 has become a searing issue in the international political arena, due to the Turkish government’s refusal to acknowledge its past honestly, and the scholarly and international community’s continued efforts to affirm the historical record on the Armenian Genocide.  

Now, for the first time in English, Grigoris Balakian’s ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA (to be published by Knopf on April 2, 2009) brings us closer to the Armenian Genocide than any other text  has, and is the most dramatic and comprehensive eyewitness account of the plan and process of exterminating the Armenians of Turkey under the cover of World War I.

On April 24, 1915, Balakian was arrested along with some 250 other intellectuals and leaders of Constantinople’s Armenian community. During the next four years, Balakian bears witness to the countless deportation caravans of Armenians, tortured, raped, or slaughtered and subsequently mutilated on their way to death in the Syrian deserts; through the testimony of many survivors, foreign witnesses, and Turkish officials involved in the extermination; and also to some brave, righteous Turks and their German allies who resisted secret extermination orders.

Miraculously, Balakian managed to escape – through forest and over mountain, disguised as, among other things, a railroad worker and then a German soldier—a suspenseful, harrowing odyssey. Full of shrewd insight into the period’s politics, history, and culture, Balakian’s analysis of the Turkish government’s organized plan to annihilate the Armenians has been borne out by decades of scholarship. This memoir, with an essential place in survivor literature, is sure to create a major impact as it illuminates a catastrophic crime that the Turkish government, the Ottomans’ successor, continues to deny to this day.

The recovery of ARMENIAN GOLGOTHA is also an extraordinary story. Only available in Armenian since its publication in 1922, Grigoris Balakian’s great nephew, the poet and memoirist Peter Balakian first learned of his uncle’s memoir in 1991 through a chain of circumstances he describes in his prize winning memoir Black Dog of Fate (now reissued in a 10th anniversary edition).

After a ten year project of translating and editing this memoir, Peter Balakian has brought this story into an elegant edition in English.

The event is co-sponsored by the Armenian Students' Association and the Department of Comparative Literature