Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, Grigoris Balakian, transl. and ed. Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), xliii + 509 pp., hardcover $35.00, paperback $20.00, Kindle edition $9.99, eBook $20.00

Abstract

Some fifty years ago I acquired a copy of the original 429 page volume of Hay Goghgot'an (The Armenian Golgotha) published by the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist Fathers in Vienna in 1922; its subtitle is “Episodes from the Armenian Martyrology,” while a second subtitle reads, “From Berlin to Zor, 1914–1920.” Der Zor was the final destination in the Syrian desert for those who survived the death marches, and the place where survivors who couldn't escape also succumbed. The author, Grigoris Balakian (1876–1934), was a vardapet, or celibate priest, attached to the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. At the end of the published volume he provided a detailed three-page table of contents of a projected second volume: “The Life of a Survivor,” to be 500 pages long and have forty illustrations; the original print run was 3,000, the price (postage included) was one pound sterling in Britain, fifty francs in France, and five dollars in the U.S., and all proceeds were to go for the relief of Armenian orphans (no discounts were offered). Volume two had indeed been written, but it was published only posthumously, nearly four decades later, in 1959, from a manuscript Balakian's sister had kept.