April 24 marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide in which as many as 1.5 million men, women and children were systematically killed off by Ottoman Turks and their accomplices. It is important that we pause to remember this date and commit ourselves to preventing such horrors from being repeated, despite all the evidence indicating we humans are not up to the task.

While it is important to remember April 24 and to continue to seek official acknowledgement from the Turkish government for crimes committed by its predecessors, Armenians need to move on and continue to share their talents with the world.

William Saroyan, until recently likely the most famous Armenian in the world, once said, “It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.”

Please take a look at this list to see that Armenians have contributed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Armenian_Americans

I’ve included photos of some you might have known were wholly or part Armenian and some, I suspect, you did not.

This is the don’t wanna but gotta category–

Bet you didn’t know category–

Bet you really didn’t know–

BACKGROUND: Armenia is an ancient nation, historically covering a large area in what is now eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northern Iran with communities scattered into present-day Syria, Lebanon and Jerusalem. Armenians say they settled around Mt. Ararat after Noah’s ark landed there following the Bible’s Great Flood. It claims that in 301AD it became the first nation to accept Christianity as its official religion.

Being in at a geographically important trade and military crossroads, Armenia has been conquered many times by many different cultures. Most of its ancient homelands came under Ottoman rule during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and remained so for hundreds of years.

During World War I, the region was a chaotic battleground with Turks, Russians, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs and others along with the western Allies fighting it out for the future of the entire Middle East.

On April, 24 1915, Ottoman (Turkish) authorities arrested more than 250-270 Armenian political leaders and intellectuals in Constantinople (now Istanbul). These leaders along with several thousand more were soon killed, jailed or deported. The date is used to commemorate the beginning of The Armenian Genocide.

“While there is no clear consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian genocide and what followed, there seems to be a consensus among Western scholars with the exception of few dissident and Turkish national historians, as to when covering all the period between 1914 to 1923, over a million Armenian might have perished, and the tendency seem recently to be, either presenting 1.2 million as figure or even 1.5 million, while more moderately, “over a million” is presented, as the Turkish historian Fikret Adanir provides as estimation, but excludes what followed 1917.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Armenian_casualties

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

NO CLAIMS TO PHOTOS OR ARTWORK.