Armenian people

“ They have tended to solidify and unify the national character, and it is just this process of solidification that gives significance to the whole fabric of beliefs, legends, and festivals of the people. [8]
As a nation, the Armenian people are exclusive, but this is an entirely different matter. For three years I have had occasion to observe groups of students belonging to different nations, chiefly Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Jews, Persians, Turks, and Armenians, and the latter always showed a most persistent determination to confine their friendships and social intercourse to themselves. ”

“ The younger generation of the Armenian people, becoming intoxicated with great ideas and dreams of a national kingdom, overlooked the impossibility of establishing any such thing in any particular part of the Ottoman dominions, and did not realise that their people formed a miserable minority everywhere. ”

“ In a word, does he have any more intellectual, moral, or business part in the life of modern civilization than a Hottentot or a Matabele? And do not the Armenians do and have all these things? Are they not in the stream of the same kind of cultivated Christian life led by Americans? Nowhere else on earth, but in the Turkish Empire, can one find millions of gentlemen and ladies and civilized modern citizens ruled over, oppressed, and massacred in hundreds of thousands by a gang of mediaeval Asiatic barbarians, not advanced from the time of Timour or Jenghiz Khan. ”

“ It is at this time that the Armenian people are first heard from, and it is this horde, therefore, that is regarded as the foundation stock of the Armenian people. They seem to have been an Indo-European people residing in the territory north of the Black Sea, for, coming from the west they must have entered Asia from Europe by crossing the straits. ”

“ Who are the Armenians? The average American knows very little about them, while few even of the educated classes have much knowledge of the race or its history. Many people regard them as barbarians, partially Christianized. Some think them of Chinese type; most often they are considered as Turks because the chief portion of Armenia is part of the Turkish Empire; every Armenian feels justly indignant at the latter classification. ”

“ It was captured by the Turks in 1375, and their last king Levon VI was captured and deposed. It was this land the Armenians hoped to get back after the world war, but the great powers did not keep their promises.
The Armenians are an intelligent, diligent and frugal people who, with tenacious perseverance, have stayed upraised despite terrible hardships, distress and persecution. 80% of them are farmers, but there are also many educated people. - probably no Armenian people would have existed today if Christianity had not taken root so early. ”

“ The Armenians of the present day are the direct descendants of the people who inhabited the country 3,000 years ago. Their origin is so ancient that it is lost in fable and mystery. There are still undeciphered cuneiform inscriptions on the rocky hills of Van, the largest Armenian city, that have led certain scholars—though not many, I must admit—to identify the Armenian race with the Hittites of the Bible. What is definitely known about the Armenians, however, is that for ages they have constituted the most civilized and most industrious race in the Eastern section of the Ottoman Empire. ”

“ A number of Armenian young men have married American women; I believe ninety per cent. are happy. After forty or fifty years, there will be a large class of American citizens of Armenian blood, and many millionaires among them. They are gifted in business, and they are a sober, honest, and faithful people. I do not think that there is a single criminal among the 10,000 Armenians in this country. ”

“ This oldest of Armenian legends, quaint and simple as it is in accounting for the beginnings of a people, savours of the Old Testament and is suggestive of the Assyrian invasion which took place about the ninth century before Christ. It is significant that the Armenians refused the protection of Bel, and that in the very beginning of their legendary history, they insisted on standing firm and maintaining their independence, for no single quality is more characteristic of this people than a proud, haughty, even at times disdainful independence. ”

“ Europeans will flock in, and a new era dawn. Who are the commercial class? The Armenian Christians or Europeans; not a Turk or a Kurd among them. Commerce means, then, the increase of the Christian population; wealth, greatness, security for the Armenians; finally freedom from the Ottoman power. Therefore that power forbids any improvement of the backward conditions. [39]
1 The word “Armenian” is not altogether indicative of race, it refers more particularly to those who are Christians. Any who have forsaken the faith and become Mohammedans are no longer regarded as Armenians, but are Turks. ”

“ Religious more than racial differences have kept them apart. This fact should be borne in mind when we consider the Armenian problem. Armenia is no longer a geographical term in any national sense; it represents a persecuted people, almost living as outlaws both in their own original land and in many other places, chiefly Turkish, Russian, and Persian. ”

“ Thus the Armenian race became scattered over the face of the earth, whilst only a remnant still lives in the land of its ancestors. The Armenians are to be met with all over the East. There are large numbers of them at Constantinople and a few other towns, such as Adrianople, Gallipoli, and Rodosto. In the towns of the interior, however, their number is small. ”

“ When the Greeks won, they tortured the Armenians; when the Persians won, they tortured the Armenians; later, when the Mohammedans won, they also tortured the Armenians. The mediaeval history of Armenia is that of a battle-ground between contending races—Greeks, Persians, Scythians, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Ottoman Turks, Mongols, and so on. Millions of its people were slain; millions died of famine and disease; millions of its women were forced to embrace Mohammedanism and become the wives and mothers of Mohammedans,—half the blood of those who are called Turks at this day is Armenian ”

“ From their mountains they have spread over the Sultan’s dominions, and form a considerable element in the population of all the large cities. Everywhere they are known for their industry, their intelligence and their decent and orderly lives. They are so superior to the Turks intellectually and morally that much of the business and industry has passed into their hands. With the Greeks, the Armenians constituted the economic strength of the Empire. These people became Christians in the fourth century and established the Armenian Church as their [16] state religion. ”

“ Indeed the Armenian is ubiquitous in the Nearer Asia, from [428] the northern province of Persia to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Yet this people as a whole can scarcely amount to more than 3,000,000 souls, a round figure of which the principal components are as follows:—
Two sets of causes are responsible for the recent outbreaks of Armenian sentiment in regions where this people are an insignificant minority, separated from the natural and historical seats of their race. ”

“ As just and accurate an estimate of the Armenian character as any I have read is that written by Sir Charles William Wilson, perhaps the foremost authority on the subject, for the Encyclopædia Britannica: "The Armenians are essentially an Oriental people, possessing, like the Jews, whom they resemble in their exclusiveness and widespread dispersion, a remarkable tenacity of race and faculty of adaptation to circumstances. They are frugal, sober, industrious and intelligent and their sturdiness of character has enabled them to preserve their nationality and religion under the sorest trials. ”

“ We were speaking of the Armenians, they are Christians, and good ones, I believe.’
‘I have understood very orthodox.’ ‘Go to Armenia, and you will not find an Armenian. They, too, are an expatriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: “In every city of the East I find a home.” They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races, and little degenerated: with all our industry, and much of our energy ”

“ There are about five millions of Armenians in the world at present: three millions in the Turkish Empire, a million and a half in Russian Armenia, and half a million more scattered through Persia, India, and Burmah, Egypt, Europe (there are two or three hundred thousand in the Austrian Empire) , and America. ”

“ Any socially well-knit people possessing a distinctive social tradition, and characterized by a highly developed national consciousness, may make its contribution to the world’s work, if it is given the necessary freedom. [96] As the period of the Arsacidae kings brought forth the golden age of Armenian literature, so greater achievements may follow the political independence that is hoped for, and for which Armenians have valiantly struggled. ”

“ The fact goes far towards explaining the isolation of Armenia, the remoteness throughout history of the great grain-growing plains of the interior from the coast towns of the Black Sea. While the Greek cities of the seaboard, sheltered behind the barrier of the range, found a natural and almost uninterrupted connection with the main currents of Western history and Western life, the Armenian country and people, full exposed to the revolutions of Asia, belonged essentially to the East. ”

“ Lord Bryce writes of the Armenian race, “It is the only one of the native races of Western Asia that is capable of restoring productive industry and assured prosperity to the now desolate region that was the earliest home of civilization.” In the past, the energy of the people has been wasted in ceaseless conflict. ”

“ The American Bible House is a great depot of Christian literature. These [236] are all American Christian institutions, and nine-tenths of their inmates are Armenians.
The reader can clearly see how the Armenians have become a wholly new race; they have had the advantage of American education, and it has revolutionized the nation. It has elevated, refined, and prospered them. This great improvement among the Armenians aroused the jealousy of the Sultan and his underlings. He first began to close the schools; then to imprison the native Armenian teachers and preachers ”

“ Whatever progress has been realized by the Armenians has been despite the systematic opposition of the Turkish government. They have smuggled, so to say, European elements of civilization into Armenia. But Armenian experience proved that it is vain, it is even dangerous, for Christians under Moslem rule to try to progress, to multiply schools and churches and colleges, to educate the children, to send the young men to the Universities of Europe and America, to be economical and industrious, to grow rich and to be influential or merely to be born beautiful under the Turkish flag. ”

“ But when you cross the Euphrates, you enter a land of insecurity and fear. The peasant and townsman live on sufferance; the mastery is with the nomad; you are setting foot on the domain of the Kurd.
This insecurity was the chronic condition of Armenia proper, and it was not merely due to the unfortunate political experiences of the land. In its geographical configuration, as well as in its history, the Armenian plateau is a country of more accentuated characteristics and violent contrasts than the Anatolian Peninsula which adjoins it on the west. ”

“ He is the joy of his mother, the protector of his sister, the lover of his wife, the server of his church and the martyr of his fatherland, so full of charming scenery and sacred memories.
The ideal and the highest ambition of the Armenian is, and always has been, and always will be, Liberty in his home-land. The accumulation of wealth is not their highest desire, though they have rare chances and natural ability for that. The luxuries of life are not the greatest attraction for them, though they have the worst example before their eyes. ”

“ Arme′nia, a country in Western Asia, W. of the Caspian Sea and N. of Kurdistan Mts., anciently independent, now divided between Turkey, Russia, and Persia, occupying a plateau interspersed with fertile valleys, which culminates in Mt. Ararat, in which the Euphrates and Tigris have their sources.
Armenians, a people of the Aryan race occupying Armenia, early converted to Christianity of the Eutychian type; from early times have emigrated into adjoining, and even remote, countries, and are, like the Jews, mainly engaged in commercial pursuits, the wealthier of them especially in banking. ”

“ Its population, a medley of all the races of Asia, amounts in number to 45,703, the bulk of whom are Russians, Kalmucks, and Tatars. The Armenians are shopkeepers here, just as they are in all countries in the world; notwithstanding their religion, which should make them coalesce with the Westerns, they retain in their manners and customs every thing belonging to the East. The Armenian carries everywhere with him that spirit of traffic which is common to him with the Jew; always at work on some stroke of business, always ready to seize a flying opportunity ”

“ It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. ”

“ Many died on the roadside, many lost their parents, many were left unburied, many were picked up by the Russian cossacks and were taken to the Russian Caucasus to be there cared for by Armenians and others. Such was their plight when they reached Russia, and in some way or another were provided for in the Syrian and Armenian villages in Erivan and in Tiflis, where they passed their time till the spring, when they again wearied of their lives and returned to Urmi and Salmas in the months of May and June. ”