Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Survival
'There is a famous saying in Marash: "When you move from your home, you encounter seventy-two kinds of calamities, the least of which is death."' Paul Bilezikian commenting on the Bilezikian family's ordeal surviving the genocide and fleeing from Marash, Turkey, to the United States. Quoted in THE CILICIAN ARMENIAN ORDEAL by Paren Sanentz (Boson, Hye Intentions, 1989).
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the number '72' is particularly arresting, as it is the very same number of virgins that muslim warriors fighting for the faith and martyred in battle are putatively promised. isn't it interesting how the christian than processes the number of another faith's nirvana into a number of unmitigated suffering. it would be most interesting to know the etymology of that saying. could it have been a coded commentary of their own of the animus that drove their asian neighbors to such great feats of conquest, including the conquest of the Armenian ancestral homelands, an animus that had cradled him and encrypted him in 8 centuries of stony sleep?
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