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Armenia.

A small country of nearly 3 million people,

located north of Iran and south of Georgia.

Its history goes back millennia.

Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity

as the official state religion in the early 4th century.

The Armenians have their own language

and rich cultural and intellectual traditions.

In the 1500s, the Armenians were absorbed

into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, where they lived under a system

that allowed them to live side by side with the Ottomans

but often relegated them to a lower status.

In the early 20th century,

the Ottomans turned on the Armenians

and committed genocide,

slaughtering as many as 1.5 million Armenians

in the most violent ways imaginable.

To this day, the Ottomans' successor,

the Turkish government, denies the genocide ever happened.

Ultimately, a small part of the historic Armenian homeland

was absorbed into the Soviet Union,

where Armenians lived under communist rule.

This land became free in 1991.

This is the land that today we call Armenia.

To a certain extent, Armenia is a state of mind.

Certainly when I was a child, that was the case

because when I would go to Armenia,

I wasn't going to a Soviet republic.

I was going to my grandparents' house in Tuckahoe, New York,

where the vinyl record albums were Armenian,

where a lot of the books were Armenian,

where my grandmother tried to teach me the Armenian alphabet.

The notion that there's a piece of earth called Armenia

that's part of the Soviet Union

wasn't something that was top of mind

to an Armenian diasporic kid in Westchester

in the 1960s and the 1970s.

I remember when I was a kid,

one day, my father brought a globe of the world.

You know, like a globe.

And it was a small globe like this.

And like every Armenian,

the first thing you do is look for Armenia, you know?

And we were kids. There were, like, three, four of us.

We got together, and we're looking for Armenia,

and it's not there.

And it was so disappointing. I literally started crying.

"There is no Armenia. You've been lying all this time."

It was like, "No. It's there. It's too small. You can't see."

Although it was one of the republics of the Soviet Union,

we grew up with Armenia as part of our lives.

In those days, they had shortwave radios

and Armenia had programs.

And every night, we would listen on shortwave radio,

Armenian programs,

recitations, things like that.

We knew we had a country not free, not independent,

but at the same time, it was Armenia.

My father was a survivor of the genocide.

And my mother was born and raised in Beirut.

And for them, Armenia was the only thing

that was supposed to keep us alive.

We idealized the Armenia in our minds.

And you think in Armenia there are no pickpockets,

there is no theft, there is no crime.

You know, it's this ideal place.

The first time I went to Armenia was 1964.

Coming there, I suddenly realized, "Whoa,

These people are accepting me as some kind of relative."

But it was very easy to get used to it.

The food was familiar, the language I was studying.

And they accepted me as if I was,

you know, a barekam-- a friend, a relative.

That word, by the way, barekam,

is used both for "friend" and "relative" in Armenian.

So I fell in love with the place.

I remember packing a suitcase,

and my friend helped me,

and I had all kinds of things in it

because we knew when you went,

you would take things like gum, jeans.

And she said to me, "How come you're taking all this?

You know, who-- Do you have relatives?"

I said, "No. When you're Armenian,

like, everybody's your relative."

I had the opportunity to actually go to Armenia

as a senior in high school.

It was 1981.

Now, Armenia at that time was Soviet.

It was Soviet Armenia.

None of the food was the food

that I had had at my grandparents'.

Um, really, none of the music, except the church music,

was familiar at all.

There was no pineapple or banana.

We had mulberries.

It was just a very, very different place,

but incredibly special.

Driving by bus

from Moscow south in 1987.

I was with my family.

Watching the landscape change

as you got to the Northern Caucasus

was extraordinary.

A transformative journey.

You start seeing Armenian architecture,

medieval churches,

this beautiful, lush and sometimes dry

and mountainous landscape moving through it.

Getting to Yerevan,

uh, on a late summer evening in 1987,

was entering a new zone.

Soviet. Armenian.

Put those two together.

It was one of the great journeys of my life.

One thing that-- It was a kind of a custom,

especially New Year's, like, 12:00 when time changes.

And there was one song that the community would sing.

Everybody would stand up and say,

"I hope next year Armenia will be free."

That was the community attitude.

Everybody would sing that song.

"Hopefully next year Armenia will be free.

And Armenia will be free. Armenia will be free."

This concept of Armenia was this dream

that we were working towards.

So that was infused for me from a very young age,

just this idea of this, like, magical Camelot.

We named my daughter Yeraz because that means "dream."

And that was for Armenia to be independent again one day.

And which was.

1990, '91, it became independent.

So our dream came true.

Whoever thought that Soviet Union would fall,

whoever thought that Armenia was going to become

an independent nation again, it was-- No.

It was completely unreal.

And, yes, we were elated.

It's kind of a miraculous thing if you're an Armenian.

All of a sudden, there's an Armenian state on the map.

This becomes a new center of gravity

for Armenians worldwide.

They have a nation. They have a place.

Yerevan is its capital.

Today, the little republic of Armenia

is a fraction of what was historic Armenia.

The idea of Armenia was almost easy.

This is a people who came out of

a desperate, miserable situation

at the beginning of the 20th century, post-genocide,

just looking for safety, refuge.

And they found it in different places.

And then eventually they found it

in the concept of an Armenia,

a place that would be something to aspire to

that is better than what came before.

We didn't realize that--

that also means that you're now a landlord.

You own this place.

And that means the doors need to be fixed

and the windows need to be fixed and the roof is often leaking.

This is a serious long-term commitment,

and that's hard because you're switching from dream

with no responsibilities

to a real place

with huge opportunity and responsibilities.

The first time I visited Armenia was in 1999.

And to sum up the experience,

I would say it took the concept of Armenia

from abstraction into reality.

The moment I set foot on that ground,

I said, "Okay. So they weren't lying. It exists."

I love it when I get on the plane

and everybody's speaking Armenian.

I get off the plane, and everybody's speaking Armenian.

When I get off the plane in Armenia,

I feel a sense of relief.

I feel a sense of peace. I feel a sense of family.

The policeman looked like my Uncle Johnny.

And they had the same color eyes and just looked the same.

And I don't know what I was expecting,

but everybody was Armenian, naturally.

It was pretty exciting.

I had never been to Armenia before,

but when I got to Armenia,

it really just felt like I came home.

Each country or nation has a cultural identity,

and we have one that goes far back

before the genocide into ancient history.

And that culture is full of all kinds of pride and poetry,

like, a sense of who we are as a beautiful people.

The thing was, when we entered the space,

uh, for Armenia,

that's what everything was-- kind of became real.

This is a real thing with people...

with their struggles, with their understanding,

with their issues.

Some things, I can't put into words.

We have something called in Armenian hogi and vogi.

It's your Armenian soul and spirit.

And that means a lot to Armenians.

The hogi.

You-- You just have this love of Armenia.

It's a love that you don't know until you see it.

We come from a past that is thousands of years.

I cannot ignore that.

Whatever I do, it is part of--

You know, there's something in me,

in my psyche, in my brain.

Uh, I carry that.

And when I went to Armenia,

I mean, those things became alive.

I remember the first night I went to bed,

and there was howling, uh, all night.

You know, dogs were fighting outside.

And so I was like, "Where did I come?

Where is this place?"

You know, there wasn't much electricity.

Water, uh, was a problem.

And the next morning, I got up, and here I was,

walking down the street, smiling to everyone.

And, of course, no one smiled back.

They were like, "Who is this guy with two braids?"

There were a lot of Armenians flying with us to Armenia.

And when we just about entered

the kind of airspace of Armenia,

someone said, "Mount Ararat! Mount Ararat! Mount Ararat!"

I kind of collapsed.

I had not seen Mount Ararat, you know, from--

Then when we landed, I mean, it was--

It was a sacred, you know--

As if you were visiting a sacred land,

a sacred something that was within you

but you had missed.

You didn't know. Here's the reality.

Armenia, Armenia, Armenia. But it's here. It is real.

I think everyone remembers their first moment

of seeing Ararat, you know, remembers that.

You see the mountain.

This is something that's so exhilarating.

My daughter is only one fourth Armenian,

and I was unprepared...

to be standing with her...

looking at Mount Ararat...

across the border where it sits in Turkey--

not where it belongs, but where it is.

And my daughter was crying.

And suddenly I had all the feelings, too.

There was the geography of the Armenian soul.

Mount Ararat.

Ararat.

The two majestic peaks of Sis and Masis.

Ararat is central to the Armenian story

because, according to tradition,

Noah's Ark landed on Ararat after the flood.

As the story goes,

Noah and his wife were the great-grandparents of Hayk,

who is known as the father of the Armenian people.

So, every time when I watch the Mount Ararat,

I see the resilience,

Noah's resilience, salvation,

and also the survival of humankind.

My grandfather was very, um--

He was very Armenio-centric.

And so he had all these theories.

He had the theory about Noah's Ark

making everybody in the world Armenian.

And he believed that there were many secret Armenians

in the world.

Specifically for him, Cary Grant was Armenian,

which, um-- I don't know if that's true or not.

Indeed, my grandmother used to tell me

that all of the world's population

originally spoke Armenian.

My grandmother also told me that you had to speak Armenian

because Armenian was the language of heaven.

Apparently there's an entrance exam to get in,

and you better know your Armenian.

I don't know what.

It's ingrained in our blood, I guess.

When you look at it, whether it's a picture

or, of course, when you see it in real life,

it's like--

I'm getting goosebumps thinking, "How do I explain that?"

I mean, I have no idea.

It just means so much to us.

I was completely speechless.

The weather was beautiful,

and it was just quiet and peaceful and serene

and completely untouched.

Um, and I think that that's one of the moments

where I think my jaw was just open,

just looking at where I was.

It's a famous line from an Armenian poem.

"Ararat, you were ours, and then you were not ours."

So Ararat was part of Armenia.

And when the boundaries were drawn,

Ararat was no longer a part of Armenia.

When you see Mount Ararat, it's right there,

the huge contradiction, the historical schism

that we must experience as Armenians.

And, yet, it's not in Armenia. It's in Turkey.

And that right there,

I felt it when I was looking at it--

sort of an exhilaration and sadness at the same time.

The whole issue of Ararat as Armenia's cultural symbol

haunts the nation,

because, of course, it's situated

a mile on the other side of the border

of the country that committed genocide

against the Armenian people.

You can't find a more ironic, tragic,

and inspiring natural symbol

than Ararat for Armenians.

I live in Vermont, and my car has a vanity plate.

"ARARAT." A-R-A-R-A-T.

Twice-- Twice,

I've met other cars that have the ARARAT license plate.

I met the new Jersey one, and I met the Massachusetts one.

Because it's a small Armenian community,

and, obviously, at certain Armenian events,

there's going to be multiple ARARAT cars

if there are people from multiple states.

Ararat is so embedded in our culture,

in our, uh, mentality, the way we're brought up.

This is why everywhere you go, all over the world--

all over the world-- you see Ararat football team,

Ararat barber shop, Ararat old-age home,

Ararat restaurant.

Everywhere. Everywhere.

Yerevan.

It is the capital of the modern Armenian state

and one of the oldest continually inhabited cities

in the world.

When the Soviets came in December of 1920,

this Yerevan, now a city of a million people,

was a dusty little place,

and it then organized itself.

And under Soviet rule,

under an architect named Tamanian,

it became a modern city and a modern country.

This was going to be a town of about 100,000-- 150,000.

It was like a wheel with spokes.

But the legend is

that if you looked at Yerevan from the air,

it was supposed to look like the hammer and sickle.

I think what I love about Yerevan,

which I think is very interesting

is there's still so much Soviet influence that's there.

And the Soviet era

has a very specific architectural look.

And then next to it, you'll see something

that is quintessentially Armenian.

But Armenians are warm,

and we're warmer than that architecture.

So our architecture contrasted with that architecture

is almost a sign of how far we've come.

Some of my favorite memories as an adult

are visiting Yerevan.

I mean, when I think of the places on this planet

that are ground zero for my soul,

among them is the corner

of Abovyan and Aram Streets in Yerevan.

Because Aram was my father's name.

It is my middle name.

And Abovyan was the first modern Armenian novelist.

Yerevan is kind of like a bustling city now.

If you're in Yerevan in the summer,

you're gonna bump into someone you know.

It's like a reunion.

I like the fact that I can get off the plane at 8:30,

drop off my suitcases, go sit at my favorite café,

and meet people and talk until 12:00.

Plan a schedule. Get work done.

Find long-lost cousins from Brazil,

which is what's happened to me in Yerevan.

It's a real place.

One of the reasons why it's such a gorgeous city

is because it was built largely by an architect

who had a great vision for what he wanted to do.

I mean, a city where the streets are named after poets...

...where there's sculptures everywhere...

where there are fountains...

and literally-- literally museums

and places like the Cascades

that feels like falling water made of marble.

One of the days, we went to The Cascade,

which is very striking.

I think if you're looking at it and you look up,

I mean, there are these white steps and they're gigantic.

That monument is near my grandparents' home,

and I have this one particular awesome memory

of just--

It was New Year's Day, and my uncle took me,

and it was-- I don't know why I remember this so well,

but we went up there.

I've been there so many times,

but that moment of us going together...

I went to an outdoor market in Yerevan,

and I bought some earrings

and then I also bought a painting.

It was nice to bring-- I kind of brought

a little bit of Armenia back with me.

When we were first driving around,

I remember my face was just pressed up

against the glass, just looking at everything.

And you just see people just enjoying their life,

just living life in this beautiful city.

And the people there are so welcoming.

I was with a very tall Irishman

and a group of people who aren't Armenian,

and people were so welcoming towards us.

I first went to Armenia in 2012,

and I flew on an airline called Armavia.

May it rest in peace.

But I land, and I was met by a friend of a friend

I had never met.

A guy named Moses Babian.

And Moses gives me a whirlwind four-day tour of Armenia,

completely ignoring his business,

completely ignoring his friends.

And we're standing in front of the statue

of Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian-American

playwright and screenwriter

and short-story writer William Saroyan.

And Moses says, "Chris, you need coat."

And he immediately takes his own coat off

and puts the coat on me, so it looks like the coat

that Saroyan is wearing in the statue.

And it's one of my favorite photos ever.

My last trip to Armenia was with my husband

and our twin boy and girl,

which was amazing because, for us,

it was a way to introduce them to their heritage

and really show them the beauty of Armenia.

For me, seeing Armenia through their eyes

was-- was really special.

And for them to understand that, you know, you're Armenian,

you know, your family, your ancestors came from here,

and what that meant, was astonishing.

One of the most incredible sights in Armenia

is the pre-Christian temple of Garni.

Though its exact history is unknown,

some believe it was built in the first century

by an Armenian king to honor a sun god.

Garni is singular in its part of the world.

The only Hellenic temple in all of the Soviet Union

was at Garni in Armenia.

This beautifully proportioned

Greek-style temple

with columns

pitched at the precipice of a ravine.

Armenian architects really love drama.

When the sun is setting,

it's very, very, very pretty.

There's so much history to it, too,

the fact that it's existed for so long

and you're standing or sitting there

and you're like, "Wow. You know. This is incredible."

You know, it was just an incredible construction

from ancient times.

I really loved Garni.

I loved the feeling of the region,

the cherry trees that were up there.

It was the end of the summer.

And I thought if I ever were to want to retire

to some place, this is the area

that I would come to, up in these mountains.

One of the most amazing things about Armenia

is that you can go from summer to winter

in just a few hours of driving.

Here at the top of Mount Aragat,

the snow falls in the middle of June.

And also located here

is the famed Aragats Cosmic Ray Research Station,

where countless scientific breakthroughs

were made by Armenian and other scientists over the decades.

In the middle of Armenia

is one of the most beautiful bodies of water in the world.

Lake Sevan.

The famed Russian writer Maxim Gorky said

it was a piece of heaven that had fallen to the earth.

My favorite place to go to in Armenia

is probably Lake Sevan.

It's so beautiful and so peaceful,

and it feels almost out of place to where it is.

I went to Lake Sevan a couple of times.

That was pretty incredible.

And that little church up on the hill.

I named my daughter Sevan after Lake Sevan.

Even though everyone mispronounces it.

And I make a point to tell her,

"Make sure you tell people how to say it."

They say "suh-VON" or "seven," which is nuts.

So I make sure she corrects people.

Armenia is also home to the Jermuk Waterfall.

As some say, it flows down the side of the mountain

like the hair of a princess.

Jermuk Waterfall is absolutely stunning.

It's breathtaking.

There's almost a sense of peace to it.

Armenia is in many ways

inseparable from its Christianity.

Its Christian story begins

with a man named Krikor, or Gregory,

in the late third century.

According to tradition, Gregory preached Christianity

to the king of Armenia, Tiridates,

but rather than accept Christianity,

the king threw him into a deep pit.

Centuries later, a church was built over the pit.

It is a pilgrimage site for thousands of people every year.

Back then, it was a prison.

It wasn't this beautiful monastery that we have today.

It was a prison filled with snakes and scorpions.

And the legend says that Saint Gregory survived

because one of the ladies from a village

would bring bread to help the saint.

But, of course, 13 years living in that small pit,

it's only through and thanks to the faith

and the trust in God that someone can live

and can survive that kind of imprisonment,

that kind of hardship.

You go down there, and you look around,

and it's like-- I mean, it's prison, right?

So it can be really powerful.

I never went to church when I was growing up.

Um, and then we-- we went to Khor Virap.

And listening the beautiful music,

the centuries-old hymns,

and smelling the khunk, the incense,

and witnessing people's worship, people's presence,

prayerful presence in the church,

that took my breath away.

And that day, I told to myself,

"I want to be here.

I want to live here."

Because I felt something,

uh, a presence in the church.

When you go to Khor Virap,

there are two kinds of people--

people who go down into the pit

and people who don't go into the pit.

I went into the pit.

I unfortunately was not brave enough to go down.

But back to the story of King Tiridates and Krikor.

God's wrath came down on that king,

and the king was turned into a wild boar.

And only when his daughter convinced the king,

somehow, in wild boar form,

to convert Armenia and liberate Gregory,

by the way, who then preached to him for a very long time,

was the king restored to his human form.

And he decided, "Yes, of course, we'll convert to Christianity."

And the Armenians created their own Christian church.

It's not Orthodox. It's not Catholic.

It's its own national church.

And it's that national church that has kept Armenians unified.

And that tradition is the core

of how they maintained their existence through genocide,

through the attempt of the Ottoman Turks

to eliminate them as a people from their historic homeland

into the present day.

While the Church unified Armenia's religion,

making Armenia the first Christian nation

in the year 301,

it was the brilliance of a fifth-century man

named Mesrop Mashtots

who strengthened that unity

with the creation of the Armenian alphabet.

Mesrop Mashtots was the inventor

of the Armenian alphabet,

and therefore Armenians have a written literature

from that time.

At the time that he was born, Armenia was kind of divided.

Mesrop Mashtots was that man who invented,

unifying the Armenian alphabet through language,

through the alphabet that he invented.

And this is something that you cannot see.

It is not-- It is not a weapon.

You cannot shoot, you cannot kill, but you can survive.

I love the Armenian language. I do.

And I love reading Armenian.

I can feel other wheels spinning in my brain

and the realness of Armenian.

I don't know how to describe this, but, you know,

when you're actually using a language every day to function,

it's very different from knowing it

as a heritage language, you know, living at home.

It's not kitchen Armenian anymore.

It's real. And I love it.

Not far from Yerevan,

an artist so loved the Armenian alphabet

that he created a field

filled with giant Armenian letters

to decorate the countryside.

You know, here's all these big letters.

And, of course, you stand in front of the one--

Like, I stood in front of the tyun...

When I drive out of Yerevan,

I find myself driving into moors, highlands,

grassy plateaus...

canyons, ravines.

And the grassy highlands are very dramatic landscapes.

The great monasteries and churches

built in some of these locations.

When I'm on the outskirts, when I'm in the villages,

when I'm in the mountains,

kind of going outside of the city,

I can't recommend that enough.

Leaving Yerevan and going out to the outskirts,

that's where I feel--

Well, that's where I feel at home.

So, as we were driving,

all of a sudden, there was a blockade of sheep.

Just white fluffy coats stopping us.

And, you know, they're just not in a rush.

They're taking their time, these sheep.

The landscape is so incredible,

and so you never know what you're gonna see.

The historic buildings, the ancient churches,

they're absolutely beautiful.

You feel the history when you walk into these places.

And that's why when I went into this one church

and it was still being used,

that it wasn't just a relic of the past.

It was representing the future also.

What I love about Geghard

is that it's this church that's carved into a mountain.

And there's parts of the church

where you see the trickles of water across the floor,

and you really get the sense that you're in this mountain.

Geghard was mind-blowing the first time I saw it.

Remains mind-blowing every time I go.

Uh...

Medieval church built into rocky,

mountainous highlands

with monastery appendices

rolling into the rocky mountainside behind it.

Ornately decorated caves.

Uh, khachkars carved into walls.

There's this coldness, dampness, this--

And you smell that dampness in the air.

But it's almost like you're smelling how old it is,

which in and of itself is pretty amazing.

And then you'll hear, you know, one of the priests singing,

and the acoustics in that building

in that mountain are unbelievable.

I mean, it gives me goosebumps

even just imagining the sounds that I've heard in that church

or seeing the rows and rows of beeswax candles

just all burning down into the sand.

There's something-- I don't know-- so mystical,

truly mystical about that place.

Anytime I go, I'm always lighting one for each person.

So there are lots of candles. I take over.

Um, but-- but it's, uh--

it's very moving-- to watch people do it

and for you to do it yourself, as well.

Monastery at Tatev is really a dramatic,

one-of-a-kind environment.

You glide off this extraordinary cable car

into a medieval monastery

that's a gorgeous formation church.

And you feel that you're in some mythical place.

You're transported into medieval Armenian culture

in this incredible mountain environment.

And yet, you know, it's 2020, it's 2023.

And it's alive and well.

The word "Tatev" means "giving wings."

And every time when you go to Tatev Monastery,

you feel that presence, that breathtaking--

It gives me wings to see that beautiful monastery,

beautiful nature, and feeling the history

and the presence of countless of faithful and monks

who lived there and who created that center

as not only as a monastery, but also as a university,

as a center of cultural and intellectual development.

When I go to these churches, I wish I was a believer.

Maybe, you know, this-- this is the closest thing

that comes to believing in something.

Because I love the fact that some things have lasted,

endured a couple of thousand years and they're still there.

And it's a reminder that you-- you have existed all this time.

And it gives you hope that if we have existed all these years,

you know, maybe we'll-- we will continue existing.

In general, they're just, like, meditative spaces.

There's, like, this austere, calm, spiritual--

I don't know what the right words are.

They're buildings that are centuries-old.

To look at the architecture and see how it was built

and think about all the hands that were involved.

They didn't have machines. That we know of, right?

Modern machines.

So, how many hundreds of people did it take?

How many lives were lost?

I'm walking in the monastery.

And I notice as I'm walking--

I look down, and there are sort of big tiles.

They're, like, big rectangular tiles,

essentially, in the floor.

The guy's giving us a tour,

and I see sort of shapes carved into these tiles,

and I'm realizing they're sort of

stick figures or human figures.

And some are smaller and some are larger.

And I'm like, "What is this?"

And the guy says, "Oh, these are the graves

of the townspeople who died."

And then he said the cultural tradition

is if you walk on the graves,

their souls are not forgotten.

Etchmiadzin, of course, is a great cultural center.

It is Armenia's Vatican.

It is a source of learning, a place of training.

Priests and clergy for centuries,

for more, for millennia. It's essential.

Anybody that wants to understand Armenia

needs to spend time at Etchmiadzin.

I visit there every time that I go,

not only the church, but the church people

who are buried on that site.

Everyone goes to Etchmiadzin. It's a special place.

I mean, it's enough of a special place for me

to want to take my kids there to be baptized.

There's meaning to it.

I went to Etchmiadzin,

and we sat inside the church at the very front.

I was there on Easter.

And I'm not really religious,

but to be there and hear the hymns

and to see the people.

And after, you know, they're kind of carrying a cross.

And all these people

were raising their hands and reaching for it.

And it was a spiritual experience for me

to be there around all these people doing that.

One of the things that my grandpa told me

was that I needed to go to Etchmiadzin,

and I needed to light a candle there.

So I went to Etchmiadzin.

But when I went into that church specifically,

I felt this very sort of strong sense

of, like, just spirituality just overwhelm me.

And I felt it when I walked in.

And I did what my grandpa wanted.

I went and I lit a few candles for, you know, my family,

for everybody back home.

I said a few prayers,

and it was a really kind of beautiful moment

that I had to myself,

and I was just really happy that I got a chance to do that.

A painful chapter for Armenians

is that of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh.

Located outside the formal borders

of the current state of Armenia in neighboring Azerbaijan,

it has been home to an ethnic majority

of hundreds of thousands of Armenians

going back millennia.

My family has been in Artsakh for generations.

Our father's lineage can be traced back.

The house that we had in Artsakh

was built by my great-grandfather,

and we visited almost every summer as kids,

as did my dad growing up.

Artsakh for me is motherland

because my mother's side is from Artsakh.

And Armenia and Artsakh, for me, they are one.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union,

there have been repeated violent conflicts over the land,

with both countries viewing it as their own.

The region has been governed by ethnic Armenians

since the early 1990s

when they defeated Azerbaijan's armies

after several years of war.

In September of 2023, however,

Azerbaijan attacked and captured Artsakh completely.

Many Armenians were killed,

and virtually the entire Armenian population,

as many as 120,000 people,

were forced to leave their historic homeland

to resettle in Armenia and other lands.

I was at work when I got the news

that the war had started,

that the escalation has gone forward, um,

and it almost felt, like, unreal.

It felt as if the ground was pulled from under me

or the carpet was pulled from under me.

Tears. Pain.

This is what ethnic cleansing looks like.

Over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing.

This is the first time in thousands of years

that the indigenous Armenian population

has not been in Artsakh.

I was very sad about the--

the loss of life in Artsakh

and the terrific hardships

on the people who had to leave.

Because of the shift in the politics over there,

they were able to do what they'd wanted to do for a long time,

which was, you know, hurt Armenia deeply.

I was thinking how... I cannot really feel.

What is that like

to leave your home

and get in a caravan of cars

leaving your home land, really?

And starting all over again.

Our churches are always raising money

and trying to do what we can to help them.

It's just incomprehensible to me how it could have happened.

And how-- how could the whole world be silent?

The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan

is an extraordinary place.

It's a monument set in a plateau,

looking out at hills and sky.

And the designers of it

orchestrated the museum and monument

so that you had to walk down a long path,

a kind of mourning path,

with poplar trees flanking the sides.

It's a large environment.

There are these gorgeous,

powerful twin obelisks

that define the space.

And then there's the center of the memorial,

with 12 basalt slabs to signify

the 12 provinces of historic Armenia.

And you really brood on the meaning

of the Armenian genocide when you're there.

It's a unique space, and everyone should encounter it.

The Genocide Memorial was one of our last stops,

and I don't know if anything has hit me as hard as that has.

I think that was one of the most sort of profound moments

of my life.

There is a wall of all these cities and towns and villages

that were directly hit by the genocide

that had the most casualties.

And my dad is from a town called Sebastia, or Sivas.

Sivas is, I think, the American translation for it.

And the moment I saw that, I just remember

just being very overwhelmed with emotion.

I hope people who visit the Tsitsernakaberd memorial,

it reminds them about preventing,

about taking a stand against any genocides

and preventing that kind of calamity and tragedy

to happen again.

There are times when I think

I have the emotional depth of a rock.

The first time I went to the Armenian Genocide Memorial,

the facade was gone.

I was a mess.

You stand at the memorial with the flame,

and you realize that you are a part of a historical continuum

that somebody once tried to obliterate.

I went on April 24th,

and I walked with--

I don't know how many people were around me,

but I just-- surrounded by people.

It felt like a pilgrimage for me to walk toward this monument.

In the middle, there's this flame

that's burning that won't go out.

And that's what you think of.

You just never want to forget.

You never want to forget. You never want to forget.

I want everyone to know what happened to the Armenians.

We're walking there, and we get up to the top,

and there are flowers

like 2 to 3 feet high

off of the bottom of the memorial.

Everyone's just putting the flowers around the flame.

And a little girl says to her dad,

"Papa, are there as many flowers as people died?"

And he says, "No.

They're-- No, not at all. Don't worry. No.

Way more flowers than people died."

And I lost it because the answer was, "Yes and more." Right?

Way more people died than the flowers.

I grew up with a grandmother

who was a survivor of the genocide,

a child survivor, who only knew her name

because she was grabbed off her mother's lap as a child,

and her mother screamed her name.

And she lived her whole life

knowing that she didn't know if she had anybody in the world

except her daughter, my mother, and us.

There was nothing I could do

to make her pain lighter or better.

My solution has been

that I need to make a corner of the world better.

Why not my corner?

Armenia is important for us for so many reasons.

Because the diaspora outside

can't survive without a connection to the homeland.

Um, the language is being lost already.

Our connection to heritage through assimilation

is happening already.

So we need the land

because that's the original land that we had,

but we also need the land because of a connection to it.

To see Armenia as a country grow and prosper

makes all Armenians happy.

It's not just something that we grew up dreaming about.

It's actually a place that we go and populate and visit.

It's very hard to hold the Armenians down

because we are stubborn

and we work very hard and we're very smart.

I mean, it's been said many times by Armenians,

and I am an Armenian chauvinist.

I can't really do anything about it, 'cause facts are facts.

But given what an incredibly small percentage

of the world's population we are,

uh, those of us with Armenian ancestry,

it's incredible the mark we've made

on the world between music,

inventions, art, all these things.

We have a big footprint in the world.

And that's something to be proud of!

And I am proud of it!

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