27.08.2025


The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute has recently received a significant donation from the Artinian family of the United States: the handwritten lament composed by Karapet Artinian (1879–1925), a survivor of the 1909 Adana massacres. The manuscript, preserved by the family for more than a century, was donated to the Museum by his great-grandson, Robert Artinian, in accordance with the unanimous decision of the descendants.

In June 1909, having lost his wife and child in the Adana massacres, Karapet Artinian composed this lament in Armeno-Turkish, presenting the atrocities in chronological sequence. The work, consisting of fifty-seven quatrains and written in the third person, belongs to the genre of the destan. Originating in Persian tradition, the destan was widely cultivated in the Ottoman Empire to recount heroic deeds, romances, and, at times, profound tragedies. Its secular character allowed it to be embraced by diverse religious communities—Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Jews, and Muslims alike.

Karapet Artinian was born in Adana in 1879. He studied at the Armenian Patriarchate’s Seminary in Jerusalem, but during the Hamidian massacres lost his parents and was forced to leave his studies. In 1909, the Adana massacres claimed the lives of his wife and child. Despite this devastating loss, he remarried a few years later to a woman named Asante (or Anet). According to family testimony preserved by his great-grandson Robert, Artinian and his surviving relatives left Adana for Alexandria, and later moved to Argentina, where they lived until 1917.

U.S. immigration records indicate that Charles-Karapet Artinian arrived in New York in January 1917 aboard the Vestris. Five months later, he was joined by his wife Asante and their children, Marian and Frank. The family first settled in Malden, Massachusetts, where Artinian worked as a shoemaker at the Converse Rubber Company in 1917–1918. After a year, they relocated to Detroit. The traumas he had endured—the murder of his parents and family and the horrors of Adana—left deep scars on his health. He suffered chronic ailments throughout his life, and in 1925, at the age of forty-five, Charles-Karapet Artinian died suddenly of a heart attack.

In 2023, historian Petros Ter-Matosyan examined Artinian’s remarkable work in a scholarly article, highlighting its significance for the study of survivor testimony and memory.

The article: https://agmipublications.am/index.php/ijags/article/view/75/89.