Haig Toroyan’s account of his journey from Dikranagerd (Diyarbakir in modern-day southeastern Turkey) along the Euphrates River to Mesopotamia and Iran is a unique and hauntingly detailed account of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Recounting first the ominous final months of 1914, Toroyan is employed in Jarabalus by a sympathetic German Army Sergeant, Otto Oehlmann, as his assistant and interpreter, on a mission to transport arms to Iran. Posing as a Syrian Catholic Arab, Toroyan keeps notes on the atrocities he sees being committed against his own people but knows he cannot reveal his true ethnicity. He records the stories of the refugees he meets, as well as the conversations he can have with Turkish soldiers, unaware they are speaking with an Armenian.
In the summer of 1916, Haiyg Toroyan told his story to celebrated Armenian writer Zabel Yessayan, who had herself escaped from the round-up of intellectuals in Istanbul in April 1915. Yessayan published his testimony in 1917 in Western Armenian.

With this translation, Haig Toroyan’s testimony, the first full-length eyewitness account of the Armenian Genocide ever published in Armenian in the wake of 1915, is available in English for the first time.

Minassian delivers a hauntingly beautiful English translation of this important document that at once shocks and moves its readers to confront the unspeakable atrocities witnessed by Haig Toroyan, who traversed several deportation routes during the Armenian genocide. First recorded by the prolific writer Zabel Yesayan, Toroyan’s testimony arrives here to the Anglophone world in the raw and unfiltered quality of its original, which itself mimics the urgency of the oral account. Agony of a People will become an invaluable source for scholars of genocide, trauma, and Armenian studies. * Talar Chahinian, Lecturer, University of California, Irvine, USA *

Zabel Yesayan was a prominent Armenian writer and intellectual whose many novels and non-fiction works include In the Ruins, her account of the Adana massacres.

Arakel Minassian is a PhD candidate at at the University of Michigan, USA