ABSTRACT
I was born at 5:00 p.m., on Friday, November 15, 1895, in the Azabzig neighborhood of Sivas, in a house that was adjacent to a mill and that had been bequeathed to my parents from my maternal grandfather. My family and uncle’s family shared this house. Three days after my birth, the pogroms of 1895 1 began; it was common knowledge of the time that Sultan Hamid had announced that Turks had the government’s permission to fall upon their Armenian neighbors. Soon, the clerics at the mosques were repeating the government’s orders and began distributing knives, swords, and other weapons to the worshippers, inciting them, filling them with bloodlust, and reminding them of their religious duty to attack Armenians. Thus, began the Hamidian massacres. As my mother once said, I was born under an evil star. As soon as I came into this world, I was thrown into violence.
