QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – As the memory of the Armenian massacre approaches, Hagop Dornadian, a doctor from the city of Qamishli, smells, the same smell of death and blood, which was creeping into his nose when his grandparents were telling him about those massacres.
“Today marks the Easter holiday of the Syriac who follow the eastern calendar, and at the same time it is a watershed moment in the Armenians’ lives, as more than a million and a half Armenians were exterminated a day after the Easter holiday,” Dornadian told North Press.
This came during a memorial ceremony organized by the Armenian Orthodox Church in Qamishli, on the 107th anniversary of the Armenian massacres, which spanned between 1915 and 1917.
Closing his eyes with grief and heartbreak, Dornadian describes this day as “the cloud that blocked the sun from the Armenians,” considering that “there must come a day and the sun will shine again and the Armenians will demand their right that the Ottomans (Turkey) deprived them of.”
In 2021, President Biden recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide,
Mary Melcon, a member of the media committee of the Armenian Orthodox Archdiocese of Qamishli, called on the international community to “recognize” the massacres, which “history does not deny,” she said.
In 2020, the Syrian government recognized the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottomans, and before that, 30 countries around the world had recognized it. Turkey, however, refuses to recognize it, saying that they were killed due to the conflict between Turkey and Russia, at the time.
Pointing her finger at the remains of the victims of the genocide that were brought from the city of Deir ez-Zor from the Churches of the Holy Martyrs and Markadah, Mary says that these are “our relics of the martyrs, which we obtained after excavations in the Syrian desert.”
Markadah has caves of the skulls of the victims of the Armenian massacres. Armenians have kept the remains of the victims in a sacred sacrifice, but the terrorist bombings during the years of Syrian war caused the loss of a large part of them.
The journalist considers the towns of Markadah and al-Shaddadi are witnesses to their ancestors who died of hunger and thirst.
Many Armenians have emigrated from Syria, especially in recent years, as a result of the poor economic and security conditions, due to the war.
“We are still here, and even if only one Armenian remains, they will still demand that Turkey and the world recognize the massacres,” says Mary.