This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives. Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy’s daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who recognised and relieved the plight of stateless Armenian refugees. Ottoman subjects—from officials and officers to ordinary townspeople and villagers—faced near-certain death for their entire family by resisting orders and helping Armenians. Unlike the Righteous of the Holocaust, these heroes have been systematically ignored and erased—a major injustice. Based on fresh research, and hoping to repay a moral debt to Ottoman Muslims who braved everything to rescue the authors’ forebears, this book is an important, moving testament to a grievously overlooked aspect of the Armenian tragedy.

Armenian national identity has long been associated with what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Immersing the reader in the history, culture and politics of Armenia – from its foundations as the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the modern-day Republic – Gaïdz Minassian moves past the massacres embedded in the Armenian psyche to position the nation within contemporary global politics. An in-depth study of history and memory, The Armenian Experience examines the characteristics and sentiments of a national identity that spans the globe. Armenia lies in the heart of the Caucasus and once had an empire – under the rule of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC – that stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Beginning with an overview of Armenia's historic position at the crossroads between Rome and Persia, Minassian details invasions from antiquity to modern times by Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Persians and Russians right up to its Soviet experience, and drawing on Armenia's post-Soviet conflict with Azerbaijan in its attempts to reunify with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This book questions an Armenian self-identity dominated by its past and instead looks towards the future. Gaïdz Minassian emphasises the need to recognise that the Armenian story began well before the Genocide 1915, and continues as an on-going modern narrative.