“You’re Armenian? Well, I know you fought Azerbaijan and won,” a Scandinavian girl told me when we were first introduced a few years ago. I did not comprehend the value of those words back then.
Never had a stranger brought up that war as the first term of reference; usually the genocide was the only historical sign post. But she knew nothing of the genocide, which made me question the quality of education in Europe.
But over the years, as I dug deeper into the essence and history of Armenians, a dissident voice within me whispered ever more quietly, so as not to cause a storm: “Maybe her not knowing about our darkest years was not such a bad thing after all… Maybe.”
For a long time now I have been lingering between the two narratives of Armenians: the ones who lost, and the ones who won. The world in general, though, has had virtually no interaction with the latter: the Armenian who stood his/her ground and fought.
That was made ever more clear a few nights ago, when a...
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