Part 2

There was almost no hope of saving the men. Yet the two friends, already bonded, decided to take their fate into their own hands.  They're drowning, they're drowning—but at least they would try to save themselves and not wait for the ship to sink beneath them.

Vaghinak placed his passport and his savings—43 pounds sterling—into a rubber envelope, hung it around his neck, and leaped into the frigid waters of the Atlantic. The Frenchman followed. Moren learned how to swim in the Piave River in Italy, while Vaghinak had crossed the waters of the Bosphorus many times.

The last thing Vaghinak Byurat saw was the final destruction of the ship. Reuters' news of the Titanic's sinking had already reached Constantinople before the unconscious Vaghinak was miraculously rescued into a lifeboat. 

Meanwhile, in a New York hospital, Vaghinak awoke. A woman in her fifties, dressed in black, walked through the hospital doors, calling out, “Byurat—Byurat!” She found him, embraced him joyfully, and handed him his passport and his 43 pounds sterling.

That woman was the one who had saved the Armenian passenger of the Titanic. Her husband had perished in the disaster, yet in an act of extraordinary courage, she had pulled a dying young man into her lifeboat. To calm the terrified, angry passengers, she had deceived them, claiming Vaghinak was her son. She would not let him drown as his father had—not allow him to be left behind, alone and forgotten.

Vaghinak Byurat was a lucky man. This was not the first time he had emerged from an adventure unscathed. Though this time he had been soaked to the bone, he had, in a way, remained "dry."

Soon, he learned that his literary cause was making great strides in Boston. While he had battled the waves, volumes of the Modern Series had flown off bookstore shelves. Armenian-Americans had taken a deep interest in their national literature and history.

From his American odyssey, Vaghinak Byurat earned $3,620 from book sales and received $200 in compensation from the White Star Line—a remarkable success.

“But America felt like a thorn in my side,” he later wrote. He returned to Constantinople, determined to carry out major publishing projects with his father—and with a firm decision never to sail again.

Vaghinak Byurat

The publishing business flourished, yet Vaghinak found himself boarding a ship once again—this time with his family. Once more, the vessel’s name began with the letter “T”: Transylvania. But its course was different. This time, it sailed not toward the West but toward the Soviet Union—toward Armenia.

6th Arabkir Street in Yerevan , a year in Garni.. Then, the Malatia, Shahumyan district.

But before repatriation, the Byurat family had much to endure. One year alone carried the weight of it all—1915.

It's me...

On April 24, 1915, father and son—Smbat and Vaghinak—sat together at a café on the Khasgyugh pier. Smbat was in a state of unbearable distress. The waiter brought two cups of coffee and a hookah.

Smbat turned to Vaghinak and asked him to open the window facing the sea. "Perhaps this will be my last chance to breathe the sea air," he said.

He was right.

Words failed him. He already knew of the mass arrests that had taken place at dawn. A short while later, two Turks entered the café and approached the owner.

“Which one is Smbat Byurat?” they asked.

The café owner hesitated. “I don’t know him,” he replied.

A voice cut through the silence.

"It’s me."

Smbat was taken away, exiled to Ayash with a caravan of political prisoners.

His letters followed.

May 3, 1915
"I know very well that sooner or later, justice will be revealed and my innocence will be established."

May 9, 1915
"My conscience is clear."

May 12, 1915
"My beloved wife and my heart-warming children, Vaghinak and Hayk Levon. I am healthy, and I hope that justice will prevail and I will be freed. My children, comfort your poor, blind mother… All my pain and worry are for her."

In August, Smbat Byurat was killed.

The unfulfilled prophecy

"If we do not wake up, if we do not shake off the dust of indifference, if we do not move, if we do not act—we will have dug our own graves with our own hands and sealed the lid upon them.

Europe—the eye of reforms.
The Armenian nation—the arm of reforms.
This is our creed.

We fought and were martyred with hope. We acted with faith—to transform the earthly paradise called ARMENIA into a true paradise."*

So wrote Smbat Byurat in a letter to Theodik in 1914.

The Armenians had failed to turn Armenia into a paradise. The Turks had turned it into hell.

Four years after his father’s martyrdom, on March 27, 1919, Vaghinak—struggling to contain his inner turmoil—traveled to Ayash. He stepped inside the building that had been turned into a prison in 1915.

"The walls were completely covered with the writings of our immortal martyrs," he later recalled.

Then, his eyes fell upon a message written by his father:

"Yes, I am sure that we will be killed. But the end of this war is known. The Turks will lose much. The Armenian nation will not die.
1915, August 14, Ayash."

The Turks have lost nothing. On the contrary, they have gained—expanding their lands, claiming an Armenian civilization that was never theirs, and enriching their tribe with the labor, culture, and beauty of the Armenians. They kidnapped Armenian women, forcibly Islamized them, and, in the end, built and strengthened the very state they had dreamed of—the Turkish state.

But perhaps their greatest success was not territorial. It was the deep-rooted sense of self-esteem and national pride they instilled in future generations—even if it was built on fabrication. A lie, born at the turn of the century, was repeated for decades until it became the only truth they knew.

And the Armenians? The people who had lived and created in their homeland for millennia? They were left empty-handed. Or they were not left at all.

Before his death, he had only one request for his sons: "Don’t think of me. Save my manuscripts."

Those pages held the history of the Armenian people—documents of exceptional historical value, filled with undeniable facts and evidence. Vaghinak saved them, securing their survival with a bribe.

Along with them, he preserved countless important and deeply moving episodes from Armenian life, both before and after the genocide.

Perhaps the most exceptional among them is the history of the “Tzbeh” (rosary) that Vaghinak wrote.

A toy- rosary from fifty angelic girls...

In 1942, Vaghinak was a teacher at the Aramyan School in the Syrian town of Raqqa. On November 16, he was invited to the village of Tahla, to the home of the sheikh, for the celebration of Eid. That day, the sheikh also intended to discuss with Vaghinak the possibility of having his son learn French.

Other guests had gathered as well, including a French captain.

After lunch, as Vaghinak Byurat later wrote, bitter coffee was served. As they sipped, he noticed Sheikh Ahmad El Khalaf feverishly working a tezbeh through his fingers. Curious, Vaghinak asked to see it. Taking it in his hands, he began to count.

There were fifty pairs.

"The surprising thing was that these beads were neither amber nor made of olive pomace. They had a rubbery texture, almost like pieces of dried meat.

Curious, I turned to the sheikh and asked what the rosary was made of.

Sheikh Ahmad El Khalaf’s face brightened, his eyes gleaming with an eerie light. Turning to me, he said:

*"Whenever I move this rosary, I feel younger, as if new life flows through me. My past, filled with adventure, comes rushing back.

These beads… they are made from the nipples of fifty angelic girls—the Houris—whom I loved and enjoyed. For my pleasure and for remembrance, I had this rosary crafted from them."

“The blood in my veins turned to ice. My vision darkened. The bread I had eaten rose back to my throat, choking me with nausea.

That night, I was haunted by relentless nightmares. Until dawn, my mind was consumed by the sheikh’s monstrous confession. How could he have conceived such an unspeakable crime?

I had heard countless horror stories of the Armenian exile—the brutal, hellish atrocities committed, especially in Tigranakert and the surrounding villages.

And as the weight of those memories pressed upon me, a single thought took hold.

Revenge.”

You did what God didn't do...

And so, Vaghinak Byurat took his revenge.

Three days after the dinner, he returned to the sheikh’s house, knowing in advance that the man was alone with his servant. He explained his visit as the start of French lessons for the sheikh’s son—pretending not to know that the son had left the village for several days.

Once inside, Vaghinak and his two friends lured the sheikh servant to the toilet. There, they strangled the servant first, then the sheikh.

When it was over, Vaghinak held the sheikh’s rosary in his hand. They took it and left.

Despite an investigation, the police were unable to determine a motive for the murder. The house, filled with gold and priceless jewels, had not been touched.

A year later, Vaghinak handed over the rosary to Yeghishe Garoyan, the Catholicosate of Cilicia in Beirut, and Khad Ajabahian. That Sunday, during the Feast of the Virgin Mary, a Holy Liturgy and a requiem were held—in memory of the martyred women. The rosary was placed in the Martyrs’ Chapel of the Armenian Cathedral in Beirut.

As for the murder, Archbishop Garoyan looked at Vaghinak and said:

"You did what God did not do. You are forgiven thrice."

Immigration

Five years after the sheikh’s murder, Vaghinak and his family immigrated to Armenia. He was accompanied by his second wife, Bersabe Midinyan, their only child, Smbat, and Bersabe’s surviving son, Aram—one of the twelve children from her first marriage.

Bersabe’s surviving daughter, Araksi, was already married.

Bersabe, Hayk and Vaghinak

They started in Nor Arabkir for a month, then they sent the family to live in Garni for a year, and later settled in the Malatia district.

Perhaps there are still people who remember him—who recall the neighborhood children calling out, “Titanic, Titanic!” as he passed. They had no idea of the hardships he had endured, nor of the heroic chapters of his life. They did not know whose soul they were toying with.

Vaghinak, who had studied at the Mkhitaryan school in Venice, was fluent in Italian, Latin, French, Turkish, and Arabic. He was the first to publish Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo in Armenian and later translated and published its continuation, The Count of Monte Cristo’s Son, into Western Armenian.

Yet, when three others translated the novel from Western Armenian into Eastern Armenian years later, they did not even bother to mention his name.

After a life of great wanderings and countless escapes from imminent death, Vaghinak passed away in Yerevan on January 6, 1972. He was 86 years old.

Fate, however, was far less kind to his brother.  Smbat Byurat’s younger son, born in a prison in the city of Marash, Cilicia 1890. Named Hayk Levon, he carried the names of both the first and last kings of Armenia, yet his life was marked by tragedy.

In 1948, he immigrated to Armenia. The ship Pobeda was returning from New York to Odessa, leaving the eastern coast of America. As it approached the waters of Gibraltar, the captain received a radio message instructing him to dock in an Egyptian port to pick up 2,000 Armenians immigrating to Armenia from Alexandria.

Our compatriots disembarked safely in Batumi. From there, some reached Armenia, while many were sent to Siberia. The ship then continued its voyage to Odessa.

Among the passengers were Soviet diplomats returning from long-term assignments in the United States, high-ranking state officials, and Chinese Marshal Feng Yuxiang, known for his unwavering determination to reunify Manchuria with China.

After departing Batumi, a fire broke out on the steamer. Thick smoke suffocated those onboard, including Marshal Feng Yuxiang. Theories surrounding the incident quickly turned to terrorism. The search for potential arsonists among the 2,000 Armenian immigrants from Alexandria became a priority per the order of Stalin.

Among those accused was Hayk Levon Byurat. Hoping to finally live in his homeland with his wife, he was instead exiled to Siberia on the fabricated charge of being an "Anglo-American spy."

Terribly ill and exhausted, he barely survived in the Siberian prison—just as he had once been born in one. In 1953, as his condition worsened, Soviet authorities, seeking to rid themselves of the burden, sent the dying man home to die, which he did a couple of weeks after getting home.

Hayk Levon

The legacy of Smbat Byurat, an undeservedly underappreciated national and cultural figure, lives on today through Vaghinak's 90-year-old son, Smbat—a distinguished inventor and electrochemist—along with his two sons, Haik and Varuzhan, and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Far from their ancestral home in Zeytun, they now continue their family's history in the United States.