On a gray Istanbul morning, Raffi Hovannisian, a prominent Armenian opposition politician stood outside the historic Haydarpasha rail station on the Asian shore of Istanbul and began to speak. “It was more than a million and a half lives, it was more than genocide — it was a loss of 3,000 years of schools and churches, an entire civilization and a way of life.”

Hovannisian was speaking on the 99th anniversary of the mass slaughter of more than a million Ottoman Armenians, which most respected scholars (and a growing number of Turks, myself included) say constituted the first genocide of the 20th century. His grandmother was among those who survived, thanks to the “brave Turkish and Kurdish families who saved Armenians' lives.”

For Armenians worldwide, the tragedy began on April 24, 1915, when over 200 Armenian intellectuals, including the world-famous musician Gomidas, were rounded up in Istanbul and brought to Haydarpasha for a sinister journey that, for many, ended in death.

As I listened to Raffi, a treasured friend from my days in the Armenian capital Yerevan, where I spent three exhilarating years from 2007 to 2010, I was filled with a mix of grief and nostalgia but also hope. I say hope because until recently it would have been unthinkable for anyone to utter the word “genocide” in public without being branded a traitor and hauled into court, as Orhan Pamuk, the world-acclaimed Turkish novelist found out.