Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute receives handwritten lament by  Karapet Artinyan, a survivor of the Adana massacres

ArmInfo. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute received a valuable donation from the Artinyan family, who came to Armenia from the United States. It is a handwritten lament by Karapet Artinyan (1879-1925), a survivor of the Adana massacre (1909), which was donated to the Institute by his  great-grandson Robert Artinyan as a result of a unanimous decision of  his heirs, as noted  in a statement issued by the Armenian Genocide  Museum-Institute. It mentions that Karapet Artinian, who lost his  wife and child in the Adana massacres, shortly after, in June 1909,  wrote this lament in Armenian letter Turkish in chronological order  of the massacres. 

The lament (destan) consists of fifty-seven quatrains written in the  third person. The genre of destan, which has Persian origins, was  also widespread in the Ottoman Empire, depicting heroic deeds,  romantic stories, and sometimes tragic events. Due to its secular  nature, the destan was widely used by various religious communities  in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Jews, and  Muslims.

Karapet Artinyan was born in 1879 in Adana. He studied at the  seminary of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Having lost his  parents during the Hamidian massacres, he left the seminary. In 1909,  his wife and child fell victim to the Adana massacres. Despite his  deep emotional experiences, a few years later he married a second  time, taking as his wife a woman named Asante (or Anet). According to  his grandson, Robert Artinian, after the massacres, Artinian and the  rest of his family moved from Adana to Alexandria, then to Argentina,  where they lived until 1917.

    According to US immigration documents, Charles-Karapet Artinian  arrived in New York in January 1917 on the ship "Vestiris". Five  months later, he was joined by his wife, Asante, and children, Maria  and Frank.  The family settled in Malden, Massachusetts, where  Artinian worked as a shoemaker at the Converse Rubber Company from  1917-1918. After living in Malden for a year, the family moved to  Detroit. The traumas that Artinian suffered - the murder of his  parents and family and the horrors he witnessed in Adana - had  serious consequences for his health. He constantly suffered from  health problems. In 1925, at the age of forty-five, Charles-Karapet  Artinian died suddenly of a heart attack.  Historian Petros  Ter-Matosyan discussed Karapet Artinian's valuable work in his  scientific article in 2023.