Interesting facts from the history of Armenia

In 591 Armenia was partitioned by Emperor Maurice of Byzantium. Persia took 40 percent while Byzantium took 60 percent. To create a no man’s land between Byzantium and Persia, Maurice depopulated the frontier area by transporting 10,000 Armenians to Cyprus, 12,000 to Macedonia, 8,000 to Pergamus, and 10,000 to Thrace.

In 1189, Frederick, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, joined the Third Crusade. However, before reaching the Holy Land, the emperor known as Barbarossa drowned in June 1190 while crossing the Saleph River in Armenian Cilicia.

In “Armenian Origins of Etruscans,” Robert Ellis (1861) cited the following words which are found in Armenian and in Etruscan: Hamatam, oknell, yerk, pazoom, vazel, bagas, ot, heut, pots, and shirim. In total, 50 words.

In the mid-15^th century, Armenian merchants took melon seeds to Italy. The sweet melons were an instant hit in Italy. In 1471 Pope Paul II died from eating too many of the melons from the papal garden of Cantalupo (from which the name ‘cantaloupe’ was derived).

In “Inner Folds of the Ottoman Revolution”, Mevlan Zadeh Rifat (1929) wrote: “the Armenian genocide was decided in August 1910 and October 1911 by a Young Turk committee composed entirely of displaced Balkan Jews in the format of a syncretist Jewish-Muslim sect which included Tala’at, Enver, Behaeddin Shakir, Jemal, and Nizam posing as Muslims. It met in the Rothschild-funded Grand Orient loge/hotel of Salonika.

By Jirair Tutunjian, Toronto keghart.org