Hovhaness Melkonian and Maryam Balyozian
My name is Caroline Melkonian Ylitalo. Our grandfather Hovhaness Melkonian was born in 1885 to a family with extensive landholdings near the city of Urfa. Because his father died soon after Hovhaness was born, his mother believed the baby was “bad luck.” For the next nine years he was fostered out to Fnekh, the sheikh (head) of a nearby village owned by the Melkonian family. Fnekh and his wife raised the boy as their own son until he returned to Urfa.
By 1915 Hovhaness, age 30, had a wife and children of his own. He was away on business when the genocide began in Urfa and his brother Dawood was murdered. As word of the violence spread throughout the villages, Fnekh found and sheltered Hovhaness in his childhood home, then sent him to some Bedouin relatives who lived as nomads near what is now the Iraqi border. Afterwards Fnekh was tortured to death for refusing to divulge where his foster son had gone. Hovhaness never saw his wife or children again.
Some years later, while traveling with the Bedouins, Hovhaness learned that an Armenian girl was living with an Arab family in a nearby village.
Maryam Balyozian had been the only child of a wealthy family near the city of Kharpert. In 1915 the men of her village, including her father and uncles, were rounded up, marched away, and massacred. The women and children, including 17-year-old Maryam, were stripped naked and driven like cattle for more than 350 miles over mountains and deserts, subjected to atrocities all along the way. One day a gang of Arabs attacked the caravan, raping and kidnapping the women and girls. The gang leader grabbed Maryam and took her home to become his second wife, but he was killed in a raid before he could marry her.
After two years as a servant in the home of the gang leader’s uncle, Maryam met with Hovhaness and agreed to go away with him. They married in Baghdad, then moved back to Urfa after the war. By 1920, realizing they could have no future in Turkey, the couple and their growing brood resettled once more in Aleppo. It was there, in a refugee camp, that Hovhaness found his niece Khanim, Dawood’s daughter, the only other survivor from the Melkonians of Urfa.
The scissors and the comb I’m holding belonged to my grandmother Maryam. To prepare for the march toward the Syrian desert, Maryam and her mother loaded a donkey with clothing, food, and household items. Along the road, most of their belongings were stolen or confiscated by the Turkish soldiers; other items were sold for food. Only the scissors and comb were left. My grandmother kept them as a reminder of her old life in Kharpert.