Karnig Panian

Karnig Panian
Dialects	Western Armenian
Ancestral villages	Gurin

PRESS RELEASE Armenian Museum of America, Inc. 65 Main Street Watertown, MA 02472 Tel: 617-926-2562 http://www.ArmenianMuseum.org/ Email: info@almainc.org

ARMENIAN CULTURAL FOUNDATION ● ARMENIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICA

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR ARMENIAN STUDIES AND RESEARCH ●TEKEYAN CULTURAL ASSOCIATION

PRESENT: GOODBYE, ANTOURA: A MEMOIR OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE Featuring presentations by Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu Massachusetts Institute of Technology Houry Panian Boyamian Principal, St. Stephens Armenian Elementary School and daughter of author Karnig Panian and by video Dr. Keith D. Watenpaugh University of California, Davis Introduction by Marc A. Mamigonian Director of Academic Affairs, NAASR

Thursday, October 1, 2015 7:30 PM Adele & Haig Der Manuelian Galleries Armenian Museum of America

When World War I began, Karnig Panian, later educator and vice-principal at Djemaran, the Armenian Lyceum, based in Beirut, Lebanon, was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care.

His memoir, Goodbye, Antoura (Stanford Univ. Press, 2015), offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years-as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian Genocide: its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history.

Panian paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian Genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.

Goodbye, Antoura will be available for purchase and signing after the program. Light refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.