KeghartBy Jirair Tutunjian, Toronto, 12 March 2026
One is forever surprised and dismayed by the continued tumbling of Armenia’s academic standards. Take the depressing example of one Edita Gzoyan who was appointed director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in 2024. A mere Ph.D in History with an L.L.M, author and editor, Gzoyan was granted the obvious sinecure two years ago. Her incompetence was finally exposed when she (miss) guided through the “Genocide Museum” those great friends of the Armenians, the honorable U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance and his wife Lady Usha Memsahib. Imagine the political short-sightedness and faux pas of talking about genocide in a genocide museum. She told the Twin Eminences a morbid tale of the Armenian experience during the First World War when millions of Europeans were killed and the glorious Ottoman Empire was destroyed by racist agents, including ingrate Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds in the pay of the insipid Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, warmonger Sir Winston Churchill, the Freemasons-Rosicrucians, and homosexual Lawrence of Arabia.
In the face of Gzoyan’s sheer undiplomatic behavior, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan forced her to resign.
Below is a historically accurate guide through the vast complex which sits on prime land in Yerevan.
The visitor enters the complex through an open passageway which is decked by huge slabs of tufa stones carrying the names of Turkish cities…Adana to Zeitun where Armenians lived in peace for a thousand years.
At the end of the open-air passage is a needle-like structure which pierces the sky. It commemorates a millennium of Armenian advancements as honored guests of Ottoman Turkey.
The next stop is the eternal fire which is decked year-round by expensive flowers. It’s an ancient pagan site where unknown people—perhaps the itinerant Phrygians or Hyxos-Hurrian-Hittite brigands gathered and cooked what Armenians now call khorovadz but the world calls shish kebab.
The next stop—the main building—is underground. It’s a dark and morbid place where death cults of various hues are exalted through Photoshop images and maps. It’s a macabre version of Alice in Wonderland where people (some of them Armenian) are shown being mistreated by Kurds, Yezidis, Alans, and Eastern Iberians and Albanians. There is no documentation as to why these people uniformly hated the Armenians. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
It is to this den of inequity that Madame Gzoyan guided the eminent guests from the Centre of the World. It’s reported that the couple’s mood was negatively impacted by Gzoyan’s narration which included irrelevant references to Armenian rebels who fought Azerbaijan’s forces in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Luckily, a quick-witted and always-decisive Prime Minister Pashinyan took quick action and turfed the misinformed-misguided and unprofessional Gzoyan.
Some members of Armenia’s yellow press carped that the prime minister had no right to usher out Gzoyan. Be that as it may, a courageous leader—see President Donald Trump—will do the heavy lifting and dismiss the so-called historic facts which damage the common good.
One hopes unmatched diplomat Pashinyan will change the name and content of the annoying complex. Tourists come to Armenia to have a good time and not to cry. Why not convert Tsitsernakabert to Armenia’s Wonderland featuring heroes from the East (David of Sassoun, Kayl Vahan, Kogh Vasil) versus heroes from the West (Superman, Batman, and Tarzan)?
*****
Keghart
Keghart
keghart.com
6 comments
How ironic that agents of a modern genocide in Gaza (and Donald Trump is a prime agent, and by implication his Vice Prez) should be allowed to pretend they truly care about any genocide, least of all the Armenian one. Let us not forget how long it took the US to even openly admit that there was an Armenian genocide for fear of antagonizing their bosom buddy, Turkey.
Dear Keith,
You raise an uncomfortable but important point. History often shows that states discover their moral language only when it becomes politically convenient. The long hesitation of the United States to recognize the Armenian Genocide is itself a reminder of how closely memory and geopolitics can become intertwined.
At the same time, the meaning of places like Tsitsernakaberd goes beyond the policies of any government. They exist because human beings need spaces where truth and memory can outlast political interests.
For me, remembrance carries another responsibility as well: the memory of one tragedy should deepen our sensitivity to the suffering of others, not narrow it. Otherwise, memory risks becoming yet another instrument of politics rather than a guide for our common humanity
Jirair, your piece reads like a carefully crafted satire. By repeating the language of denial to the point of absurdity, you expose how hollow it becomes once stripped of its diplomatic packaging.
Places like Tsitsernakaberd are not meant to entertain or comfort visitors. They exist so that memory cannot be quietly pushed aside in the name of political convenience. When history begins to sound like public relations, something essential is already being lost.
Your ironic “tour” reminds us how easily the language of memory can be distorted—and why it must be guarded with care.
Armenians cannot understand why Mr Vance “visited” Armenia in the first place. Was the purpose of the visit to make a statement for Moscow’s consumption that the area is now under US jurisdiction?
Was it to pass on a list of more concessions for the nomad Pashinyan to pursue?
Reminder for those who forget. The man called varchsbed was selected by odars, elected not by responsible Armenians to do exactly what he has been doing. Brazenly. Giving up historic Armenian lands that don’t belong to him, taking away the lives of a whole generation of able bodied young Armenians; degrading the Holy See; pleasing the European Union for personal gains, yielding to Trump, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. All single handedly!
To the detriment of the Armenian nation, “they” knew what they were doing when they installed him as varchabed along with his entourage and chalo, the dog.
Nurnisa,
My satire pales when compared to the absurd fictions the enemies of Armenians disseminate. I’ve read we are of Albanian-Phrygian origins and thus not native to Armenia while Turks descend from Turcus, the grandson of Troy’s King Priam. After the fall of Troy, Turcus travelled to Central Asia giving birth to the Turks. The Turcus-Grey Wolf relation remains a salacious mystery. “Homer’s Turk” by Jerry Toner (2013) does a number on this and on other Turkic hallucinations.
Dear Jirair,
You are absolutely right, and perhaps that is what makes your satire so effective. It does not need to invent absurdity, because absurdity is already there, fully formed, in the stories denial keeps producing. That is what strikes me most: denial is never just a matter of erasure. It also creates. It fabricates origins, lineages, and myths in order to fill the space where truth should have stood. In that sense, what appears ridiculous is also revealing, because it shows how much narrative labor goes into avoiding historical reality. Thank you also for mentioning Homer’s Turk; it sounds like exactly the kind of work that helps us see how fantasy dresses itself up as history, and how political invention seeks legitimacy through the language of civilization and ancestry.
Greetings