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.”
