Richard Hovannisian, a world famous scholar on the genocide, explains why it took him so long before making the journey to visit the sites of historic Western Armenia. Before doing this, he had been to the Armenian Republic numerous times but continually delayed the visit to Western Armenia even though he had written of these areas in his scholarship and spoke of them in many presentations. As he goes through his itinerary showing the remains of cities, churches, and monasteries of Armenians and Greeks and calculates distances of marches of deportees, he is traumatized to experience the distances and wonders how deportees could have dealt with the treks. Hovannisian also wonders about how Kurds reacted—did some help while other tried to dig up what Armenians had hidden. Hovanissian’s journey is a reminder to the loss of an entire culture.
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