Alexis and his father Chris Ohanian in Etchmiadzin in Armenia, April 2015.

The last of the Ohanians

“In the United States, Ohanian is not a common Armenian name. The thing is that in this country it’s great to be an Armenian-American, but you don’t need to interact with many other Armenians. If you live in Los Angeles, it is different, but in other parts there is little interaction,” says Chris Ohanian, Alexis’s father.

Chris Ohanian was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His mother Elizabeth Der-Krikorian’s family was one of the many deported families that left Bitlis for Marseille, France. Later Elizabeth travelled to the United States where she met and married Alexis’s grandfather, John Ohanian.

“My parents were Armenians and I recognized but I didn’t learn the Armenian language. My mother and father would speak Armenian to each other, but mostly as a language that my sister and I couldn’t understand,” Chris Ohanian recalls with a smile. “There was not much conversation about the Genocide in our family. But it’s interesting that as my father got older – somehow older people start to talk about things they didn’t talk about – he began talking about his father.”

Alexis’s grandfather John Ohanian’s family came from Kharput (Kharberd, present-day Elazığ, Turkey). John’s parents were orphans of the Genocide. His mother Manzar was in a march through the Syrian deserts. She lost her parents and siblings and ended up in Aleppo.

His father Avedis saw his parents being killed.

“Turks came to Kharput. They shot Avedis’s father and they shot his mother and then they were going to shoot him. But there were two Turks on horseback and one of them said to the other, ‘He is just a boy, leave him!’ and Avedis ended up in an orphanage. And then somehow he came to America and settled down in Binghamton, which is in upstate New York, with a large Armenian community,” says Chris Ohanian.