Their love blossomed in the heady days when reconciliation between Turks and Armenians seemed within reach. Ihsan Karayazi, a Turk, first set eyes on Armine Avetisyan, an Armenian, in the eastern Turkish city of Kars in April 2006 — in a police station. She had been spotted photographing a military building, not knowing that she would land herself in trouble. Naif Alibeyoglu, then the mayor of Kars, swiftly intervened. His dreams of transforming the far-flung outpost on the Armenian border, eulogized in Orhan Pamuk’s mesmerizing novel "Snow," into a regional hub of economic and cultural activity in the Caucasus was not to be jeopardized. Alibeyoglu dispatched Karayazi, who was his aide at the time, to disentangle Avetisyan from the clutches of the police. Karayazi, 38, and Avetisyan, 40, are happily married.

What if the same events had played out today? Avetisyan might be in jail, Alibeyoglu potentially fired over his overtures to Armenians, and “there would be absolutely no question of our getting married,” said Karayazi, who now lives in Boston, where he works as a cultural entrepreneur and Avetisyan as a project manager at Brandeis University. “I could never go to Armenia and feel as welcome as I did then, and nor would Armine and I be able to settle in Turkey. The paradigm has shifted, our hearts are broken,” he told Al-Monitor.

On April 24, Joe Biden is widely expected to become the first US president to formally describe the mass extermination of more than a million Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as a genocide. April 24 will mark the 106th anniversary of the bloodletting that all but wiped out Turkey’s ethnic Armenian population. For decades, survivors and their descendants have been pushing for governments and parliaments across the world to acknowledge the genocide, as most credible historians do, in the face of a massive propaganda campaign launched by Turkey arguing that the Armenians died as a result of famine and disease in the midst of war.

Biden was expected to inform Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of his decision in his first phone call as president to the Turkish leader which took place shortly before publication of this article.