Armenian emigration refers to the process whereby ethnic Armenians have migrated away from the traditional homelands of the Armenian people in Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus to other parts of the world. Groups of Armenians migrated out of historic Armenia as far back as the time of the Roman Empire when military and political disturbances created instability here in the main, narrow terrestrial entryway from Europe to the Middle East. Yet the period of really intense Armenian emigration only really began in the late nineteenth century as Armenians experienced growing amounts of persecution at the hands of the Ottoman Turks who ruled most of the Middle East between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Armenian genocide during the First World War exacerbated this process. Armenian emigration continued through the twentieth century. Today there are large Armenian diaspora communities in disparate locations like Sochi in south-western Russia, in the French capital, Paris, and in Glendale in California as a result of various waves of Armenian emigration.[1]
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Armenian emigration chronology of eventsArmenian emigration chronology of events
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Like many other countries, historic Armenia once covered a much larger span of territory than the modern-day nation of Armenia. The Kingdom of Armenia emerged in 331 BC after a local Armenian warlord and ruler, Orontes I, established his own kingdom after allying with Alexander the Great in his conquest of the Persian Empire. The kingdom was in existence for nearly 800 years thereafter and was an important buffer state in the Southern Caucasus and Middle East that played a role in the long-running wars between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire in late antiquity. At its height this Kingdom of Armenia ruled over a Greater Armenia that covered modern-day Armenia and Azerbaijan, along with parts of Georgia, eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. This meant that ethnic Armenians have always lived in a much wider part of the Caucasus and Middle East than just the region of modern-day Armenia. As a result, geopolitical developments in places like Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and even places like Syria and Lebanon in modern times have had implications for Armenian migration.[2]
Voluntary Armenian emigration and often forced migration began as early as late antiquity as the Kingdom of Armenia came to an end as a political power and the Armenian people found themselves being pushed north, south, east and west by various powers in West Asia such as the Byzantine Empire from the west, the Sassanid Persians and later the Arab Caliphate from the south, as well as Asiatic tribal confederacies such as the Cumans, Pechenegs and Turks who migrated across Eurasia and often pushed south through the Caucasus into the Middle East. Therefore, much like the Jewish people, though not on the same scale, there was already a widely dispersed Armenian diaspora emerging in medieval times.[3]
Armenian people continued to inhabit broad parts of the Caucasus and the northern extremities of the Middle East down to modern times. From the fifteenth century onwards they were increasingly under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, which replaced the Byzantine Empire as the prevailing power in Anatolia and then expanded to control the Middle East and the Balkans. Armenian persecution within the Turkish state was a relatively late development in Ottoman history. Typically the Ottomans had been more tolerant of non-Muslims and other ethnic groups within their empire than had Christians been of religious and ethnic minorities within the lands of their states in early modern times. That changed in the late nineteenth century as a new radicalism entered the politics of the rapidly declining Ottoman Empire. This in turn led to the Armenian genocide during the First World War, one of the worst genocides in human history. The death toll is disputed owing to imprecise historical records, but at least 600,000 Armenians were killed and the figure probably lies closer to the upper range of one and half million.[4]
The Armenian genocide led to a wave of modern mass migration of Armenians out of the lands they had inhabited for millennia, especially so as some of these lands remained within the territory of the new Turkish state that replaced the Ottoman Empire after the Turkish War of Independence and Greco-Turkish War ended in 1923. The other parts of historic Armenia, broadly correlating with the modern-day nation of Armenia, were incorporated into the USSR as one of the component Soviet Socialist Republics in the course of the Russian Civil War. This meant that the Armenian people were broadly deprived of their political independence until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War in 1991. Even since then, Armenians have experienced migratory pressures owing to regular conflicts with neighboring Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. All of these twentieth-century developments have acted as major spurs to Armenian emigration.[5]
Extent of Armenian emigrationExtent of Armenian emigration
Many thousands of Armenians had been leaving the Ottoman Empire already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the Armenian genocide ever occurred. They left for varied locations. For instance, small groups of Armenians settled in New England in the northeast of the United States. There was a much larger wave of migration after the genocide and during the years when the Turkish War of Independence and the Russian Civil War were simultaneously underway and deciding the fate of post-war historic Armenia. In some instances the distance moved was limited. For example, hundreds of thousands of Armenians moved from what is now Turkey in the 1920s into the Caucasus or onwards again to Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.[6] The cities of Sochi and Tbilisi in south-western Russian and Georgia became two major magnets for Armenian émigrés at this time. The Armenian communities continued to grow here for decades thereafter.[7]
Others went further. At the end of the First World War, France, as one of the victorious powers in the conflict, had occupied part of Turkey known as Cilicia and also took over the Mandates of Syria and Lebanon as de-facto French colonies that had been previously ruled by the Ottomans since the early sixteenth century. French administrators in the Middle East liaised with their own government in Paris and leaders of the Armenian community in the aftermath of the genocide and organized for tens of thousands of Armenians to be resettled in France.[8] This was the beginning of the major Armenian diaspora community in Paris, one which grew further in the course of the twentieth century.
Another major center of Armenian emigration was the United States and in particular California. There were a sporadic handful of Armenians arrived every now and then to North America between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. A number of Armenians even served in the American Civil War (1861–1865).[9] It was only following a series of pogroms against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire such as the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, which resulted in the deaths of several hundred thousand Armenians over several years, that Armenians began arriving to the United States in larger numbers. An estimated 12,000 Armenians arrived in the 1890s.[10] By the start of the 1920s some 80,000 Armenians were resident in the US and this continued to grow thereafter. Many settled in California and formed a Little Armenia in the Glendale suburb of Los Angeles. Today there are believed to be upwards of one and a half million Americans of one degree of Armenian ancestry or another, though some migrated between the 1970s and 1990s via Lebanon as a result of the Lebanese Civil War.[11] Many Armenians who migrated in in the nineteenth century or early twentieth will often be recorded as Turkish or Russian in immigration records since they were generally coming from the Ottoman Empire or Russian Empire, a factor which complicates tracing one's Armenian genealogy back to this period.
Demographic impact of Armenian emigrationDemographic impact of Armenian emigration
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The demographic impact of Armenian emigration has been felt around the world. The Armenian diaspora is estimated to be at least ten million people strong, making it well over three times the size of the population of Armenia itself today. This demographic impact has been felt keenly not just in specific countries but even in specific cities. The Armenian community in Paris, for example, is believed to be around 300,000, while there are around 650,000 people of Armenian heritage in France as a whole.[12] This means Paris is home to an Armenian community one-tenth the size of the entire population of Armenia. Approximately 40% of the population of Glendale in California, a city of 187,000 people, is Armenian. Between 150,000 and 180,000 people in Sochi are Armenian.[13] Thus, taking the three cities of Paris, Glendale and Sochi together, approximately 550,000 people of Armenian descent live in these three urban centers alone. This points towards how the demographic impact of Armenian emigration has been felt all around the world, but has often been concentrated in very specific cities and towns, a phenomenon mirrored in so many other diasporas.
See alsoSee also
Explore more about Armenian emigrationExplore more about Armenian emigration
- Armenia, Voters List 2019 records collection on MyHeritage
- Former Russian Empire, World War I Casualties records collection on MyHeritage
- Russians Immigrating to the United States records collection on MyHeritage
- California Newspapers, 1847-2009 records collection on MyHeritage
- California, Births and Christenings, 1812-1988 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Cemetery Records records collection on MyHeritage
- Armenian Exceptionalism at The Atlantic
- Parisian Armenians at The Armenian Mirror-Spectator
References
- ↑ http://diaspora.gov.am/en/diasporas
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/armenia/
- ↑ Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, ‘Aristocrats, Mercenaries, Clergymen and Refugees: Deliberate and Forced Mobility of Armenians in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (6th to 11th Century a.d.)’, in Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt and Yannis Stouraitis (eds.), Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone (Leiden, 2020), pp. 327–384.
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-armenian-genocide-1915-16-overview
- ↑ https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/nagorno-karabakh-conflict
- ↑ https://journals.openedition.org/eac/2709
- ↑ https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3285487
- ↑ Chris Gratien, ‘The Sick Mandate of Europe: Local and Global Humanitarianism in French Cilicia, 1918–1922’, in Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 3, No. 1 (May, 2016), pp. 165–190.
- ↑ http://diaspora.gov.am/en/pages/3/usa
- ↑ Gevorg H. Vardanyan and Narine S. Hakobyan, ‘“Thanksgiving for Americans, We Mourn Massacred Armenians”: Commemoration, Identity, and the Search for Prevention in the American Armenian Response to the Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s’, in Nationalities Papers (2025), pp. 1–21.
- ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/glendale-armenians/475926/
- ↑ https://armenianweekly.com/2024/01/08/all-roads-lead-to-armenia/
- ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/glendale-armenians/475926/