A new book, now available in Yerevan bookstores, traces the plight of Armenian children left parentless in the wake of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who were sent to Romania. 

A 1923 photo of two hundred Armenian orphans arriving at the port of Constanța (Romania) appears on the cover of Strunga Armenian Orphanage: Testimonies of Broken Destinies authored by Arsen Arzumanyan.

Arzumanyan, a Doctor of Political Sciences and Yerevan State University graduate, has researched the Armenian community of Romania, one of the oldest communities of the Armenian diaspora.

The book, published in Bucharest and available in Romanian and Armenian, is dedicated to the one-hundredth anniversary of the orphanage’s founding, an initiative of the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul.

The two hundred Armenian orphans, many afflicted with malaria and other diseases, who arrived in Constanța on April 12, 1923 were destined for the new orphanage in the village of Strunga for shelter and schooling.

In the second half of the 19th century, the number of Armenians in Romania gradually decreased, but because of the 1890s Hamidian massacres and the 1915 Genocide, the number of Armenians increased several times. Tens of thousands of Armenians found refuge in big and small Romanian cities.

"As a result of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul faced a serious challenge. A solution had to be found for around 120,000 Armenian children deprived of parental care. To provide them with basic living conditions, to find their relatives and to ease the arduous task they had undertaken, Istanbul community and spiritual leaders visited various Armenian communities and asked for their help. One of those colonies was the Armenian community of Romania," Arzumanyan tells Hetq.

Book launch in Yerevan

Arzumanyan researched hundreds of articles published in the Romanian press, in Armenian and Romanian, as a basis for his book. He says that after defending his doctorate dissertation (The Armenian community of Romania: Preserving the Heritage of the National Minority), he began to delve deeper into the topic and found a huge amount of material that hadn’t been published before. He began to focus on those regions of Romania where the Armenian footprint was large. One of them is Iași, a county in Western Moldavia where the village of Strunga is located.

"I started to travel from village to village, from city to city, and discovered the Armenian tracks. I have even been to Romanian villages where there were few Romanians. I was collecting testimonies. I understood that it’s not possible to present the entire Armenian community of Romania in one work. We are talking about tens of thousands of pages. I focused on Iași,  in the north-eastern part of Romania. Armenians settled in the area and formed communities some seven to eight hundred years ago," says Arzumanyan.

He singles out an article about the dating of the Armenian church in the Iași  regional center. He says that there were debates in Romanian historiographical circles about the dating of the church, because the date of construction on the main inscription, 1395, was obviously added later. The debate was about whether this date was right or wrong.

"Thanks to the Armenian sources, I managed to prove that the date is actually correct. And imagine, Romanian historians widely accepted it. The article was published in a famous Romanian scientific journal. They also use that date now. Why is this important? The Armenian church is the oldest evidence of the city of Iași," says Arzumanyan.

Arzumanyan in Strunga at unveiling of stone monument dedicated to the centenary of the establishment of Armenian orphanage

"Strunga village in Romania, surrounded by leafy forests and pure springs, awakens deep emotional feelings in the Romanian-Armenian community," this is how the author begins the story, immediately transporting the reader to the small Romanian village where two hundred Armenian children had been sheltered.

Arzumanyan says the orphanage had carpet weaving, shoemaking, and tailoring workshops to provide the children with the skills needed later in life. The orphanage was tasked with getting the children adopted.

The book, in a separate chapter, presents the history of the orphanage's liquidation, and the efforts made to find the relatives of the children or hand them over to foster families. At the end, an album of the orphans was published, displaying their names, ages, and places of birth.

In 2023, to mark the centenary of the orphanage, a pink tuff-stone memorial was placed near the Strunga central highway in front of the local council hall and library. 

Memorial sculptor, Bogdan Hovhannisyan, in the book, relates how surprised he was to find some black stone inside the big pink rock he was carving.

"For me, it was more than symbolic that this miracle of nature occurred during the work dedicated to the Armenian orphanage. The black stone that came out of the pink tuff seemed to symbolize, in the form of the orphanage, the wound that the Armenian people suffered," Hovhannisyan says

Photos from Arsen Arzumanyan's Facebook page