Wow, so I got back from a visit to the
Armenian Genocide Museum here in Yerevan. The museum is located up on a hill over-looking the
city, and it is a tasteful and elegant, but very somber and powerful place. The Armenian genocide gets short shrift in
the international and American media, but the reality is the death of as many as a million (or more!) Armenians at the
hands of the Turks is an event that should be both remembered and better understood around the world. As one of the
curators as the museum said to me, the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century, and as such it
should have helped prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, but it did not, partly because it went under-reported around
the world.
The museum here does an excellent job telling the story of the genocide in visual detail (photographs, old journals,
etc.). And the grounds of the museum, which features an eternal flame surrounded by twelve walls (said to signify the
twelve states of Armenia at the time), as well as an elegant pointed spire, very nicely, and powerfully, commemorates a
horrible human tragedy.