Armenian Genocide memorial

Worth a detour

In the courtyard of the Armenian church on Mihail Lermontov Street stands a memorial erected in 1990 by the sculptor Hari Norhaik Arabyan, to the Armenians deported and killed under the Ottoman empire between 1915 and 1918. It takes ten minutes. It is the kind of thing a visitor walks past without noticing, and it says something about who has lived in this city.

Story

Background

Burgas grew very fast at the end of the nineteenth century and filled up with people who had come from somewhere else — Greeks from Anchialos, Bulgarians from Thrace and Asia Minor, Armenians from Anatolia, Jews, Russians. The Armenian community was already established, with a church from 1853 and a school from 1860, and the arrivals after 1915 came into an existing parish.

The memorial went up in 1990, in the first months after the political change, when it became possible to raise such a thing at all. Its dedication refers to the genocide and to the forced deportation of more than a million people.

It is a modest object in a small courtyard and it is not signposted from the street. Pair it with the church itself and with the other buildings of Burgas's minorities within a few hundred metres — the former synagogue that is now the art gallery, the Catholic churches, the cathedral — and you have a short walk that explains the city better than the museums do. Note that the official tourism portal gives the memorial a different street number from the church; they are the same place, and the number to use is the church's.