I moved from my Armenian American community in Los Angeles to my family’s ancestral homeland of Armenia — and my whole new world began to fall apart a week later.
A war started, and each day that passed, the fear of losing land and people, including my loved ones, grew. It was 2020, and my college classmates in the city of Yerevan were soon getting drafted.
I wasn’t sure if I would see them again.
Soon, I was scanning the television screen showing the list of Armenian soldiers who had lost their lives in search of familiar names. I didn’t want other people to lose their lives, and I especially didn’t want to lose my loved ones.
Looking back, experiencing war and hardships seems like a natural extension of being Armenian.
Modern history has treated Armenians harshly. Our ancestors’ suffering in the early 20th century gave the world the term “genocide.” Then, they endured seven decades of Soviet occupation and, after its collapse, an energy crisis due to the Spitak earthquake, where the Metsamor nuclear power plant was, which provided a significant amount of Armenia's electricity. That era is referred to as the “dark and cold years.”
Since independence in 1991, the past has continued to cast a huge shadow over Armenia and its Diaspora around the world, including through several wars to fend off neighboring Azerbaijan — like the one that welcomed me just after I moved to the Armenian capital.
Vazken Movsesian, a priest in the Armenian church in California, says that when he was a child, he would ask his father why they spoke Armenian at home, and his father's response was simple: “One day, we’re going to go back to our land.”
He put into words a common dream of so many Armenians living outside of their homeland, to return.
But a recurring question, given the traumas of our past, is how do we respond to continuing threats to our homeland and, at times, our identity? For some Armenians, the answer is about helping to make sure we survive — and thrive — as a country, but also a culture.
For Zepiur Chahrozian, a Mental Health Psycho Social Services manager in Yerevan, it all boils down to what “we can really contribute together.”
Unhealed Wounds
The Ottoman Empire, which later became modern Turkey, began the deportation of Armenians in the country’s northeastern regions. Leaders in Constantinople, now Istanbul, feared that Armenians would align with their Russian, enemies.
Thousands of orphans were raised as non-Armenians due to the Armenian Genocide that took place between 1915 and 1916, and according to the Armenian National institute, the population of historic Armenia on the eastern side of Anatolia was almost entirely wiped off the map. Refugees dispersed around the world and mostly settled in two-dozen countries, and according to the Observer Research Foundation, the genoicide caused the forced displacement of 1.75 million Armenians during the mid-1910s.According to the Armenian National Institute, when the Red Army sovietized Armenia in 1920, Armenians lived in an area equal to about 10 percent of their historic homeland.
Under Soviet Rule
Armenian fears for the survival of an independent Armenia were reinforced when the Soviet Union took over what remained of the country and turned it into a Soviet state. Under the U.S.S.R., people in Armenia had guaranteed employment and education, but their lives were restricted with no access to what was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.“In the Soviet Union, everything was planned, everything was planned starting from the economy,” says Karine Abrahamyan, a Yerevan resident.
Meanwhile, those in the Diaspora were working to build new lives and communities in the United States, France, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Fast forward to September of 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, leading to the restoration of Armenia as an independent country, but a moment of national restoration quickly turned sour when the breakup of the Soviet Empire reawakened long-standing territorial disputes with another post-Soviet state, Azerbaijan. These days, Armenians talk about the repeated aggression of their Azerbaijani neighbors, most recently during the Nagorno-Karabakh 2020 war.Azerbaijani history and culture are connected to Turkey. It is a Muslim country, and religious differences have contributed to tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
But, according to Davit Khachatryan, a specialist in international law, the causes of the post-Soviet fighting date back to the early 20th century when Artsakh, known to the world as Nagorno-Karabakh, was populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians, and remained as an autonomous region within Azerbaijan.
In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh eventually wanted to break from Azerbaijan and unite with Armenia, but Azerbaijan disagreed, and war followed. When the war ended in 1994, Armenia gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh
Then, in 2016, four days of fighting killed hundreds of people.
Four years later, a war started, when Azerbaijan launched military attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenia initiated a draft to bolster its army, and the war ended with Azerbaijan defeating the Armenian army.
Following the November 9 trilateral statement that ended the war by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, orders were given for the exchange of prisoners of war, hostages, detainees, and the return of deceased persons.
Armenia, per the peace agreement, agreed to return 15 to 20 percent of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory captured by Azerbaijan in the recent fighting. A November 2020 ceasefire mediated by Moscow brought the arrival of Russian peacekeepers in the region.
But in December of 2022 — the dead of winter — Azerbaijan blocked the only road that connects Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, called the Lachin Corridor, depriving the people of Nagorno-Karabakh of essentials such as food, medicine, and fuel. Armenia argued that this blockade amounted to racial discrimination against the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and deprived them of basic humanitarian needs.
In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched what authorities there referred to as an "anti-terrorist operation" in Nagorno-Karabakh, which led to the defeat of the Armenian army and the dissolution of its allied government there.
A Leap of Faith
Many Armenians around the world, due to displacement, feel the responsibility to help their motherland progress, develop, flourish.
Gregory Chahrozian moved from Australia to Armenia with his family in 2020. He moved to the land of his ancestors after he and his wife had their fourth child.
Chahrozian is an adjunct lecturer who teaches STEM-related courses at the American University in Yerevan and a teacher at the Cambridge International School of Armenia.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don't really feel fulfilled or not satisfied. I love what I do, and it’s very gratifying, but it’s also very challenging,” he says.
Chahrozian acknowledges problems within the education system, such as a shortage of resources and qualified teachers, especially in rural areas. According to the World Bank Group, Armenia's public spending on education is under 2.7 percent of GDP, which is half that of the European Union.
Rather than return to Australia, the need is a big part of what makes Chahrozian stay to contribute to the “long-term prosperity of education in the country.”
When ethnic Armenians abroad who have been living in wealthier countires like the United States, France, or elsewhere move back to Armenia, they foten face a question: "Why did you move here?" Locals tend to ask to try to understand why people who are assumed to be well-off overseas would return to a land with less wealth and opportunity, and fewer freedoms.
It can be hard for Armenians in their own country to comprehend, that their homeland has a magnetic pull from family stories, keepsakes, and strong cultural values and beliefs. Some visist the country as grown-ups and fall in love with the hospitality and majestic nature, and discover a sense of belonging
For some, it may be a sense of pull to the motherland from the stories, photos, and cultural values they’ve grown up with, or they visited once and fell in love with the hospitality, gorgeous nature, and sense of belonging.
Chahrozian's experience was quite the opposite
Having spoken Arabic at home — since his parents were from Egypt — Chahrozian adds that, “I never really had an Armenian kind of upbringing, or a very rich Armenian set of surroundings.” He didn’t attend Armenian schools either. “The only true connection I had was photos, some of my grandmother, who] was still alive at the time…and having stories passed down from dad.”
The photos were of Chahrozian’s grandmother and her family, and the stories were about how the family had survived the genocide and the challenges of starting a new life in Egypt.
Australia is known, Chahrozian says, for celebrating its cultural diversity, and he grew up proud of his last name and roots. But, he adds, “I also felt a very big gap in, I guess, in my own cultural kind of void.”
He notes that he missed out on the sort of deeper Armenian experience of some others in the diaspora. By coming to the homeland with his children, he was able to give them a richer Armenian experience.
An Armenian who grew up abroad can have ideas about the homeland that conflict with reality, but Chahrozian had few expectations when he moved to Armenia. “We just literally took a leap of faith,” Chahrozian says.
Sarin Keofteian, an English teacher from the Lebanese village of Anjar, felt a similar pull from her ancestral homeland. Anjar is the definition of a small town, with a population of just 2,400,— nearly all Armenians in a country estimated to contain more than 150,000 ethnic Armenians. The migration of Armenians to Lebanon is linked to theto the Genocide.
After a 40-day battle with Turks during what later came to be known as the Armenian Genocide, people in Musa Dagh — a place of great resistance to the Genocide — were rescued by the French Navy and taken to Egypt, according to CivilNet. After World War I ended in 1918, they were able to go back to their villages. But two decades later, the Franco-Turkish Treaty of 1938 gave the region to Turkey, and the Armenians of Musa Dagh were pushed out, this time to Lebanon.
“As a child (in Lebanon), I always had a dream to see Armenia,” says Keofteian. In 2017, she visited a youth camp by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s Lebanese Youth Association, which spent 5 days at the campsite and then a week touring Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
In Anjar, Keofteian had worked at a boarding school, tutored students, and became involved with an organization of volunteers who teach English to Armenian students living in villages in the homeland. The program director told Keofteian about a program called Teach for Armenia twhich recruits teachers, including from the nation’s diaspora, and sends them to remote Armenian villages to teach courses for two-year stints.
Keofteian was accepted into the program and moved to the village of Privolnoye in June of 2023.
“In the beginning, I was scared — like, how would they accept me? How would they see me?” but her worries went away because she says that everyone was welcoming.
When Keofteian spoke with colleagues and parents of her students about the idea of “Հայրենասիրություն,” which translates to patriotism. But for Armenians, it’s more about love toward the homeland. She tells people why not try to get out of their comfort zone since, especially in the villages, women aren’t allowed to go out much and they are expected to marry soon after finishing school. “They just need to see the other sides too.”
Human Rights
Sheila Paylan, a human rights lawyer born and raised in Montreal, Canada, was also involved in an Armenian camp called Nubar in upstate New York that provides the experience of a traditional American summer camp while embracing the Armenian culture and heritage that made her feel connected to her roots.
“I felt disconnected [from] everything. I went to camp Nubar when I was 14 [and] I think that was the first time I really felt, like, among Armenians.” Paylan adds that she felt the same when she went to Armenia in 2020.
Paylan’s main exposure to Armenian culture was through her family. Other than a few events, like weddings, she wasn’t immersed in the culture. It didn’t bother her at the time that she didn’t speak Armenian. But now that she lives in Armenia, she has concluded that she has much catching up to do.
She says that “a lot of people think it’s cute that there’s so much I don’t know, and yet I’m still willing to be here and be like ‘I don’t know really basic stuff.’”
Paylan had never focused on Armenia in her human rights work, and the idea didn’t make sense until the war for Artsakh in 2020 that resulted in the dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“I decided to stop everything else and focus full-time entirely on Armenia for a while,” Paylan says.
Heart and Soul
Michael Goorjian, an Armenian American filmmaker and director from Northern California, tapped into his roots to make a widely applauded film, Amerikatsi, which is Armenian for The American, in 2022.
Goorjian’s paternal grandfather, from a village called Palu, survived the genocide, as did the woman who became his wife.
The younger Goorjian didn’t grow up connected to his Armenian roots. It was only after he moved to Los Angeles and met more Armenians that he get involved in the community.
The film “Amerikatsi” or “The American” follows an American-Armenian named Charlie Bakhchinyan who returns to Soviet Armenia in hopes of learning more and connecting with his Armenian identity that he lost due to the genocide. Charlie then gets accused of being a spy and gets imprisoned. He grapples with the harsh conditions of the prison and proving his innocence.
Goorjian had several sparks of inspiration to make the film. One of them was Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018, which saw the country shift from an oligarchic, corrupt, and fraud-filled government to one that pushed domestic reforms led by a journalist-turned-Prime Minister named Nikol Pashinyan.
Having acted in the television show Party of Five and won a Supporting Actor Emmy Goorjian directed the film Illusion with Kirk Douglas. But nothing suggested that he would make a foreign film like Amerikatsi, which is mostly in Armenian and Russian, and set in an unstable Armenia just after World War II.
But he visited Armenia in 2006 and fell in love with the place and the people.
Since then, he says, “The idea of doing a film in Armenia has always been something that … I’ve been drawn toward.”
Goorjian explains that the concept for Amerikatsi grew partly out of the country’s Velvet Revolution, which he saw on videos and in the press. He came across an article about the historic repatriation of modern Armenians from the Diaspora back to their homeland.
“I learned about the different phases of repatriation, and … right after World War II, (something) really struck me about what took place,” Goorjian says. After the formation of the Soviet Union in Armenia in the 1920s, the government encouraged exiled Armenians to return to the homeland, and between 1921 and 1936, more than 42,000 Armenians returned. Another wave followed after World War II.
Inspired partly by his research, Goorjian put a script together.
In the film,he plays a character named Charlie Bakhchinyan, an Armenian-American who returns to Soviet Armenia, and then gets imprisoned on absurd charges, but on the unspoken pretext that he might be a spy. Goorjian reflects on the naivety of his character and says that traumatized members of the Diaspora sometimes perceived their lost homeland in romanticized ways that were disconnected from reality.
Goorjian talks about what he learned about the experiences of repatriates of the Soviet era, saying that when they returned, some felt it had been stripped of its culture by the Soviet Union. Many people had even Russianized their last names.
As for his own connection to Armenia, Goorjian wrestles with whether he has a sense of duty. “I’m not a big fan of the word responsibility, I think people should do what they love,” he says, adding that the creation of the film grew out of love.
Goorjian plans to make more films in Armenia, and he hopes that the next film he works on will require him to stay there for a while.
Of his previous experience working there, he says, “The support and the vibe in Armenia was amazing.” During the seven months he spent preparing and filming in Armenia, he recounts, more and more people gradually got involved with the concept and vision of the film, and invested their hearts and souls — just as he did.
Sahag Mesrob Armenian Christian School, Jan 22, 2025, Photo by Araz Madatian
Movsesian says he’s working on an initiative to spread the message of the Armenian church outside of the community.
Movsesian emphasizes the connection between faith and the instinct of survival among Armenians and explains the importance of faith in the Armenian culture and identity.
“We’ve had this faith that is also given us a language, because there was a translation of the scriptures,” and adds that “We owe all of our being as Armenians to this faith.”
Movsesian talks about the project his working on and says that “We have the metaverse (virtual world) that are available, and we have churches that don’t belong to us anymore, because the Azeris have taken them away.”
Movsesian adds that with the digitization of the churches, people can visit them today and not see them as converted mosques.
Movsesian shows a photograph of a group of tourists at Zvartnots International airport landing in Armenia and seeing Mount Ararat from the window for the first time, and getting emotional.
Mount Ararat has been asscoiated the Noah’s Ark story from the Book of Genesis (Genesis 8:4) and is currently in the eastern region of Turkey. The mountain is a prominent part of the Armenian identity, as the people of the ark, and historian Movses Khorenatsi described the Armenians as the descendants of Hayk who, as the legend goes all Armenians are all descended from and is an ancestor of Noah. Ararat holds a significant value for Armenians not only religiously, but also culturally, and stands as one of the country’s most important symbols.
Movsesian says the tourists got emotional seeing Ararat from a distance because they feel connected to the memories of their ancestors and what they felt.
“I think that there’s a mystical quality to it that you can’t define,” and adds, “It’s like inside of your DNA, now science is telling you that we carry trauma through our DNA, we have memories through our DNA.”
Volunteering and the Armenian Identity
Anoush Tatevossian, who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and volunteered in Armenia while studying, says growing up having a strong Armenian identity was a given.
“It's as simple as the sky is blue for me,” Tatevossian says.
Tatevossian says the thought of visiting Armenia didn’t cross her mind until she was in college. She adds that she was researching and curious about the Peace Corps, and she learned about the Armenian Volunteer Corps and volunteered in Armenia in 2004.
“My job became placing more diasporan volunteers in volunteer sites, and I really got even more deeply engaged”, she says.
Tatevossian says she’s a big advocate for people to visit and thinks it’s a valuable way that can “Root your Armenian identity into something real and tangible and make it stronger.”
Tatevossian says she often meets diasporans who say they are losing their identity because their grandparents are passing away, or they are only half Armenian, but she says the answer is to go there regardless of the circumstances.
“The easiest and fastest way to get back that identity that you feel like is getting lost is to go there,” says Tatevossian.
Tatevossian says there is a lot of value in joining organizations like the Armenian Volunteer Corps because it allows you to meet people of similar backgrounds, and she says that it “is a very profound way to get to know Armenian society in the country today.”
From her time in Armenia, Tatevossian has many memories, and one of them that sticks out is when she was in a little van called a “mashrutka” visiting schools in villages.
“We would sometimes go to six or ten or twelve village schools in a day by driving around,” and adds, “I have vivid memories of driving up these like bumpy roads, asking villagers out the window, like, where’s the school?”
Tatevossian has visited Armenia a couple of times and created core memories, including her wedding and her daughter's baptism.
The above information is derived from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, Brussels Times, and Council on Foreign Relations