Like millions of Armenians, Movses Haneshyan will mark the centenary of the 1915 genocide today. He will visit the village cemetery near Vagharshapat, where he will say a prayer for all of those killed in the tragedy – and for his wife who died earlier this month.

But unlike others attending solemn ceremonies around the world, the 105-year-old has first-hand memories of the events 100 years ago in which he lost his mother and most of his family.

Haneshyan was a five-year-old boy when soldiers entered his village as part of a campaign to eradicate Armenians from Anatolia in present-day eastern Turkey. He still has vivid memories of that day.

“Soldiers came and gathered us in the village, pushing their rifles against us,” he said. “My mother was visiting a neighbouring town - we never found out what happened to her.”



‘You cannot deny what happened’. Photograph: Zia Weise

“I was with my father, holding his hand. Half the road was covered with dead people.”



Up to a million and a half Armenians died during the mass deportations into the Syrian desert. Haneshyan and his father, Ibrahim, might have shared that fate had their march not passed through the town of a wealthy Arab man his father had once worked for.



“He saw us and he bribed the soldiers to free my father and me. He put us on his horse and took us to his house, a big house with a garden full of animals,” Haneshyan said.

The pair hid in the house for three years, terrified of being discovered. His father worked as a servant for the family while Haneshyan spent his time playing with the rabbits and chickens. Only when France occupied Hatay in 1918 were they able to return to their village.

After the province was returned to Turkish rule in 1938, Haneshyan moved to Lebanon, then Armenia, where he worked as a grape farmer and factory worker in a village close to the historic capital of Vagharshapat.

With six children, 20 grandchildren, and more great-grandchildren than he can remember, he lives surrounded by family. But the death of his wife Iskuhi, at the age of 99, has left a massive hole.

“We spent 80 years together. She always looked after me. After her death, there is nothing left here for me,” he said, nodding at a portrait of his wife opposite his bed. “Now I will wait for recognition and then I will die.”

By “recognition”, Haneshyan is referring to the ongoing controversy over Turkey’s failure to acknowledge the Ottoman-orchestrated massacres and deportations of Armenians as genocide. The ongoing debate has threatened to overshadow the commemorations, but for Haneshyan, demanding recognition is what the centenary is all about.

“Turkey has to recognise it so it never happens again. If they do not recognise the genocide, they leave open the door for another one,” he said.

“If you had seen it with your own eyes, if you had heard the noises on the way to Deir Ezzor [the site of concentration camps in Syria], you would know it’s all very simple: thousands were killed. You cannot deny that.”

Haneshyan’s bedroom is decorated with a large poster of his village Kebussieh near Musa Dagh, where he lived before being deported in the summer of 1915. Despite his age he still tends to his garden, trying to grow a tree from seeds he brought from his childhood home. Even now, though, he says he is afraid to return to the village.

“I should be happy to see my place of birth again. Just for one day. But how? If I go back, they will kill me,” he said.

