Like everyone growing up in Turkey, I was taught at school that Armenians were an ungrateful race who sided with the Russians during World War I in order to carve up the Ottoman Empire, only to be deported en mass in 1915 as an emergency measure. We learned that while some Armenians died along the way, they had massacred many Turks, that this kind of stuff happens in wartime, and that the world was conspiring to spread lies about “the so-called genocide” in order to weaken us, the Republic of Turkey.

It took me almost 20 years...