To the right, Eghisapet Sultanian, great grandmother of musician Derek Sherinian during the 1895 Hamidian massacres



“My grandmother’s mother, Yeghisapet, lost her husband to the massacres. The [Ottoman] Turks killed all the men in the Armenian villages, and thus, the women—their wives—were forced to take up arms and fight back. I have a photograph of my great grandmother, some time after March, with gun in hand. But my grandma was only two or three years old at the time. A family friend had promised to take my grandma out of Turkey and bring her safely to Boston[, Massachusetts], where his acquaintances would care for her. Turns out, that family friend, once in Boston, gave my grandma away to a very wealthy Armenian family. Yeghisapet miraculously survived the Genocide, and after many years of searching for her child, finally found her. “





(Source: vartanm)