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fter only a few months in the village of Anjar, 73-yearold Antranig Chakerian decided the blank exterior walls of his new home should be his canvas. He began to draw. The pictures, however, do not depict scenes of Aleppo, the northern Syrian city where he was born and from where he recently fled with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandson. Instead, the walls sport icons, images and poems dedicated to his ancestral homeland, historic Armenia, parts of which now lie in eastern Turkey. There are drawings of Armenian churches with five paths leading to them, symbolizing Armenian exile. There is also a sketch of Mount Ararat, highly symbolic to Armenians, which looms above Armenia behind its western border with Turkey. And Mr. Chakerian has drawn an image of an obelisk-style monument that
commemorates what many refer to as the Armenian Genocide: the death of more than 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1918. Between the various drawings are blocks of handwritten text. “These are nationalistic poems — patriotic poems,” explains Mr. Chakerian, who arrived in Anjar in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in September 2012. “These are poems about the great martyrs.” For all Armenians, the period between 1915 and 1918 constitutes the ultimate exile. It was a catastrophic uprooting that defines and binds them together tightly, even as they remain scattered across the globe. For Syrian Armenians, their flight from their Syrian refuge for neighboring Lebanon is a sad reverberation of their original catastrophe. “We were confronted with bombs and rockets day and night for a long time,” says Mr. Chakerian of
p Syrian Armenian Antranig Chakerian shows a key chain he made, decorated with Armenia-inspired images. z Mr. Chakerian transformed the walls of his house into a canvas.
OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF CNEWA
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