99 - all you should know about the Genocide April, 2014 | Page 69

Arevaluys Amalyan | 01.07.1913, birthplace – Arabkir
In 1915, the Turks killed my father. They took my mother with them, agreeing to the condition that
they would spare us. My brothers, grandfather, aunts, uncles and I were left alive. My mother,
who was a very beautiful woman, was forced to marry a Turk. After my mother was taken away,
we stayed in Arabkir till 1926, then we went to Batum and took a train to Yerevan. We received a
plot of land and built a house. After a few years, I married Sargis, who was a blacksmith and also
from Arabkir. He remembered the Genocide. He had been 6 years old. He lived to be 99. He would
tell me how the Turks would line up 300-400 Armenians at a time on the banks of the Euphrates.
Then they would beat them with sticks, kill them and push them into the river.
My mother, Vergineh, found my brothers in Syria in the 1980s. She wanted to see me too, but I
refused. I said that she should not have gone with a Turk, even if it was to save us. She said that
she had lived as a Turk all her life, but wanted to die as an Armenian. They say she lived to be 117.
The newspapers had written about how she had met with my brothers.
They say that she had a small nook in her house with Armenian icons and crosses, as if to show
everyone that she was an Armenian. When she came to Syria to find her son, her Turk husband
had probably already died.
I remember a lot about Arabkir. We would make food using mulberry as an ingredient. We had
many mulberry trees. But I don’t want to go back.
I have 4 children, my eldest daughter is 82. My grandchildren, great-grandchildren and greatgreat-grandchildren together make up 67 people.

Photographs from Arevaluys Amalyan’s family album (top left photograph – with her husband, 1940s).