History of the Armenian genocide goes online

Nearly 80 years ago, a priest traveled the world seeking evidence of a genocide that had killed his parents and siblings. More recently, a professor at Clark University in Worcester has published these damning documents, including “killing orders” from an Ottoman bureaucrat and ciphered telegrams. 

The Rev. Father Krikor Guerguerian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, was plagued his entire life by the atrocities he had witnessed. He decided to write his dissertation on the genocide and traveled to the Boghos Nubar Pasha Library in Paris and the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem to photograph and transcribe this very personal research. 

Guerguerian never finished his dissertation. The original documents he found in Paris had disappeared. The priest died in New York in 1988. The microfilms, prints, and notes — a plethora of history and proof — sat almost useless in the Armenian Assembly of America in Washington.

“Some elderly scholars knew that these archives exist,” said professor Taner Akçam , who headed the effort to digitize and publish these documents. But left uncategorized, these documents were almost useless to scholars. “They had not developed an index,” Akçam said. “It was like a big garbage can of materials.”