I was having dinner recently with a group of Armenians in a wonderful restaurant on a hill overlooking their capital city, Yerevan. Even though I have traveled through much of the so-called developing world, I hadn't witnessed toasts like these before. But looking around the table, I could see that the Armenians were listening very carefully to each of the toasts. Their heads were bowed and a light smile played upon their lips as words were weighed and the sentiments considered. Even when given in Armenian, I could tell a good toast just by watching the eyes of the dinner guests sparkle with pleasure.
Few nations have a longer history that Armenia.
As a people, their common history stretches back five thousand years, much of it a tale of conquest and persecution. Most vivid in public memory is, of course, the persecution, deportation and massacre of Armenians within the Ottoman Turkish empire, which began in 1894 and ascended to particularly brutal heights between 1915 and 1916. Independent historians estimate that in the course of deporting some 1,750,000 Armenians to Syria and Iraq, about 600,000 died of starvation or were killed by Turkish soldiers and police. Those that survived were scattered all over the world. From once being called the Empire of the three seas, Armenia is now a landlocked fraction of its former self.