After the experience of Holocaust Day yesterday, I was a little intrigued by another holocaust event which is scarcely mentioned, or even known about these days. This is the case of the Armenians who also suffered a genocide at the hands of the Ottoman empire. The Armenian genocide was the mass murder of at least 664,000 and up to 1.2 million Armenians by the nationalist ruling party of the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also known as the Young Turks), between 1915 and 1916. The Armenians were a primarily Christian ethnic group who had lived in Eastern Anatolia (modern day Eastern Turkey) for centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century, approximately two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, primarily in rural areas although there were also small communities in large urban areas such as Constantinople. While life was often unpredictable and unjust, under the empire’s millet system in the nineteenth century, the group did enjoy significant administrative and social autonomy, and had their own language and church. As the First World War loomed, the Ottoman Empire was in a state of decline and as a result had become increasingly polarised. Between 1912 and 1913, the Empire lost 83% of its European territories during the largely unsuccessful Balkan Wars. This led to increase in anti-Christian sentiment and amplified the nationalist desire of the Ottoman leaders to create an ethnically homogenous community. It was hoped that this community would then strengthen the empire through shared beliefs and, as a result, ensure its survival. As the majority of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were Muslim, the Christian Armenians were increasingly seen as outsiders and a threat to the harmony of the empire. Armenian genocide survivors were Armenians in the Ottoman Empire who survived the Armenian genocide. After the end of World War I, many tried to return home to the Ottoman rump state, which later became Turkey. The Turkish nationalist movement saw the return of Armenian survivors as a mortal threat to its nationalist ambitions and the interests of its supporters. The return of survivors was therefore impossible in most of Anatolia and thousands of Armenians who tried were murdered. Nearly 100,000 Armenians were massacred in Transcaucasia during the Turkish invasion of Armenia and another 100,000 fled from Cilicia during the French withdrawal. By 1923, about 295,000 Armenians ended up in the Soviet Union, mainly Soviet Armenia; an estimated 200,000 settled in the Middle East, forming a new wave of the Armenian diaspora and about 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 lived in the Turkish provinces, largely women and children who had been forcibly converted. Though Armenians in Constantinople faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey who continued to face forced Islamisation and kidnapping of girls after 1923. Between 1922 and 1929, the Turkish authorities eliminated surviving Armenians from southern Turkey, expelling thousands to French-mandate Syria. To complete this little potted history, by the 1920's nearly 818,000 had made their way to the US.
In the morning, once Meg and I had breakfasted, I got her warmly wrapped in her normal swathe of blankets and we made our way down the hill to our customary venue of Wetherspoons. There we met up with one of our regular friends but not the other as she was afflicted by quite a bad cold so was going to give today a miss. We chatted about some of the items in this day's blog as well as indulging in an egg and bacon breakfast crumpet, accompanied by hot chocolate. In the morning, the care manager had put himself on duty and bin a little concerned about the treatment and analgesics that Meg was (not) getting from the nursing medical teams. So messages were sent off to nurses in one direction and to doctors, in the other. The nursing team were not scheduled to arrive until Thursday whereas I could have done with then somewhat sooner. But later in the day, I received two telephone calls, of which the first was especially welcome. We are due a visit from the SALT (Speech and Language Therapist) specialist who is going to come tomorrow at a time when Meg is trying to eat some food so that he can observe her swallowing reflexes and give us some recommendations. In the early afternoon, I received a phone call from the same Physician Associate who saw Meg about ten days go and we discussed two particular items of concern. The first of these was to discuss what elements of pain relief Meg should be receiving where plainly there is a divergence of view between what the care agency manager is seeing in most of his patients and what the doctor calls 'the start of the analgesic ladder' So we are being prescribed co-codamol which may or may not be effective but will almost certainly be constipating. I am due to give this medication about an hour before the care agencies are starting to handle Meg. The second issue if the contracture in the muscles of Meg's legs which are a consequence of sitting in the same position for hours each day as well as the prevention of bed sores occurring on Meg's back. The care home manager and myself adjusted Meg's specialist seat supports and this may help to keep Meg's legs in a more horizontal position which might assist in subsequent manipulation and handing. The bed sore issue will addressed most fully by the District Nurses who be calling on Thursday which rather clashes with my 'shopping sit' but I will probably need to ensure that I am here one way or another when the Nurses come to call. Now that we are at this stage, I feel as though I am in a large leaking bucket rushing to stop one leak rather than another but I suppose it is inevitable that Meg's needs will grow more and more complex as her overall mobility declines.
I am quite enjoying the Brian Cox programmes on comparisons between the planets in our solar system. Preceding this was a programme on wild life in China where I discovered that China actually has its own supply of elephants in the wild (the 'Asian wild elephant' no less) China has cracked down hard on poaching and, as a result, the wild elephant population in Yunnan province has gone from 193 in the 1990s to about 300 today.
© Mike Hart [2025]