【Armenian Genocide Museum】
The Armenian Genocide Memorial is located on the Tsitsernakaberd "Swallow Castle" hill in the southwest of Yerevan. It was built after the 50th anniversary demonstration of the genocide in Yerevan in 1965. The memorial is not large in scale, but the exhibition covers a wide range of content, including the situation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the genocide, the genocide itself, the reactions of countries around the world at that time, and the impact of the genocide on later history.
There were three most brutal massacres in the 20th century. The Chinese are more familiar with the German Nazi massacre of Jews and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. However, not many people know about the Armenian genocide. Under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, the Christian Armenians were naturally not recognized by Muslims. And the Armenians were also famous for being thorns in history, and they have always resisted tyranny. When the Ottoman Empire was weak and dying, it was worried that the Armenians would collude with Russia to oppose them, so it kept finding all kinds of reasons to massacre the Armenians, until it reached a climax during the First World War.
Similar to the fate of the Jews, the Armenians had actually suffered many massacres in the late 19th century, but there was no large-scale killing. Until the First World War, the Ottomans joined the German side and became the opposite of Britain, France and Russia. When the World War broke out in 1914, the Ottomans faced Russia and suffered a disastrous defeat. Its government was even more worried that the Armenians would join forces with the Tsarist Russia to attack them. So, they began to systematically drive out and massacre Armenians and Kurds. According to records, there were 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before World War I, and the number dropped sharply to 500,000 after World War I.
The Armenians have been resisting the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. Their resistance organization "Fifth Column" has been resisting with the help of Tsarist Russia. The Ottoman government used this as an excuse to expel all the Armenians on the Anatolian Peninsula and drive them to the desolate Transcaucasus region. That is the wasteland and desert that I kept seeing along the way from the car, a land that could not be more barren. In the end, this expulsion policy gradually escalated into a genocide.
Although the death toll is not accurate, scholars generally believe that 1-1.5 million people died during the First World War. In 1991, Armenia became independent from the Soviet Union and its land area was only 11.5% of the Armenian Plateau. This more or less laid the fuse for the serious situation in the Transcaucasus region in the future.
Address: 8, 8 Tsitsernakaberd Hwy, Yerevan 0028 Armenia
Transportation: Take bus No. 70 or 87 on the roadside under the Yerevan Stairs
Time: 10:00-15:30