By Anna Babajanyan

Constantinople – 1915

When the police came to knock on the door of the home of Varteres Atanasian, a jeweler and district council head, his wife didn’t know what to expect.

The police left. The wife, now in tears, told her neighbor that she had just learnt that her husband had been arrested in April with other Armenian intellectuals of the city.

After some time had passed a coachman visited the house and told Varteres’ wife that he had seen her husband and that he had given him something, requesting that he pass it along to the family. The coachman handed over the item to the wife and left. That was the last the family heard about Varteres.

The item Varteres wanted the family to have was a tesbeh (worry beads).

When family members examined the beads they realized that it wasn’t merely a memento of their disappeared father but a family keepsake. The years past and the tesbeh remained with the family.

It wasn’t until 1965, when people in Armenia came out into the streets to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Genocide and call for justice, when Varteres’ daughter Ejeni Atanasian-Goulbolian realized that her father’s memento was of value not only to her family but the Armenian nation.

That year, Ejeni presented the tesbeh to Armenia’s Museum of History as a gift. The museum staff couldn’t imagine what they had been given. This wasn’t just another personal item of an Armenian exile but a testament to the history of the Armenian people.

For on the largest bead followed by the smaller 99 that make up the tesbeh were engraved the words – Changhruh 1915, April 11, memento. (Changhruh/Çankırı is the name of a Turkish town northeast of Ankara. Of the 250 Armenian leading figures of Constantinople arrested and exiled on April 24, 1915, one group was deported there and another to Ayaş.)

On the 99 beads the names of 103 of the 250 Armenian exiles are engraved.

The name of Gomidas Vartabed is one the first bead. Rupen Sevag appears on the 5th and Daniel Varoujan is on the 40th. The last bead is engraved with the name – Grigoris Archpriest Balakian. The name of Varteres Atanasian appears on the 71st bead. (One bead displays four names and another, two names; the rest have one name)

Karineh Avagyan, a researcher at Armenia’s Museum of History, told me that worry beads were common accessory for men in Constantinople at the time.

“We assume that the man had the tesbeh in his pocket when he was arrested. Realizing the tragedy unfolding around him, in Çankırı Varteres engraved the tesbeh with the surnamesof his friends; sometimes just their first names. The engraving was superb. By the way, there wasn’t an Armenian at the time in Bolis that didn’t master some craft or another and this man utilized his gift at precisely the right moment. He left a testament of 103 exiles, of his people’s history, of the Genocide,” says Avagyan.

Over the years, the tesbeh has brought together the descendants of those exiled Armenians whose names are engraved on its beads.

When the list of names was published, the grandchildren of the individuals whose names are listed on the fourth and 30th beads made their presence known. A friend of the son whose father’s name appears on the 60th bead did the same. So did an acquaintance of the person appearing on the 15th bead.

Thus, Varteres’ engraved tesbeh not only became an important testament regarding the Armenian people’s experiences of that era, it has transcended time itself and continues to work its magic even today.

P.S. The tesbeh remained on display at the ornamental jewllery exhibition at Armenia’s Museum of History from 1965 to 1984. Due to research on the item conducted by Karienh Avagyan the memento has since become a unique testament of the irrefutability of the Armenian Genocide. Grigoris Balakian is the great-uncle of Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American writer and poet.