‘Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia’

Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia, (London: I. B. Tauris, May 2015)

In 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the remarkable story of one family’s survival.

The Armenian world was shattered by the 1915 genocide. Thousand of lives were lost, families were displaced and the narrative threads that connect them to their own past and homelands were forever severed. Many have been left with only fragments of their family histories: a story of survival passed on by a grandparent who made it through the cataclysm or, if lucky, an old photograph of a distant, yet silent, ancestor.

By contrast the Dildilian family chose to speak. Two generations of storytellers gave voice to their experience in audio and video recordings, lengthy written memoirs, in diaries and letters, and most unusually in photographs and drawings. Their story covers a 50-year time span that encompasses three pivotal and often violent moments in Armenian and Ottoman history: the period leading up to and including the Hamidian Massacre of 1894-96; the 1915-1918 deportation and killing of the Ottoman Armenians, during which the Dildilian family rescued and hid dozens of young Armenian men and women; and the massacre and final expulsion of the surviving Armenian population during the Turkish War of Independence, 1919-1923 ”“ an often-overlooked, but no less integral, part of the Armenian story.

Their descendant, Armen T. Marsoobian, uses a unique array of family and public resources to tell this story and, in doing so, brings to life the tumultuous events of the early twentieth century. Their remarkable story is one of survival against overwhelming odds and in the face of mortal peril.

Armen T. Marsoobian is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. He is a descendant of the Dildilian family.

Reviews of Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia

“I was awed by Fragments of a Lost Homeland. I was moved by its precision and poignancy: its authenticity of detail and the wrenching story that emerges image by image and detail by detail. This family memoir is among the most powerful detective stories to emerge from Armenian Genocide.”