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Armenia’s Garden of the Righteous is situated at Yerevan, on the hill of Dzidzernagapert, site of the Monument and Museum which recall the genocide suffered by the Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the government of the Young Turks. This place of remembrance was created in 1995 by Laurenti Barseghian, the Museum’s director, and Pietro Kuciukian, founder of the Committee of the Righteous for the Armenians, “Memory is the Future”.
By recalling non-Armenians who helped the Armenians before, during and after the genocide it is possible to prevent the episodes of mass murder and deportation from being simply history as constructed by the aggressors or reinvented by their successors. However its value lies above all in the memory that future generations will have of these acts of resistance to Evil, the exemplary stories of individuals who, when faced with extreme Evil, were capable of saying “no”.
This Garden, moreover, has a distinctive feature: interred here in the Wall of Remembrance are the ashes or fistfuls of earth from the tombs of the Righteous and of the non-Armenian witnesses who came to the aid of the Armenians at the time of the genocide; now also celebrated alongside them, are the still-living personages and witnesses who continue to work to safeguard the memory of those tragic events by opposing Turkey’s negationism.
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