26.04.2024
Service Marks 109th Anniversary of Start of Armenian Genocide
Members of the Armenian Community in Ireland gathered in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, on Saturday evening (April 27) to commemorate the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The reflective service of Choral Evensong featured performances of Armenian piano music and moving prayers from Armenian children.
The Armenian Genocide began with the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals on April 24 1915. Over the following years more than one million Armenians died in Ottoman Turkey and Armenian people were scattered around the world.
Archbishop Michael Jackson gave a reflection at the service in which he looked at remembrance. He emphasised the importance of remembering in the midst of being bombarded daily with information.
“Remembrance brings the redemption of time, if not the redemption of events or of memories. Memories carry events and events underpin memories. The events and the memories of the Armenian Genocide beginning on April 24th 1915 are not capable of eradication and need constantly to be remembered. Otherwise, they are consigned to the amnesia of history. This danger is now more acute than ever it has been since the arrival and the influence of Artificial Intelligence. Such a situation makes a commemoration like today’s Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide as pressing and as urgent as ever it has been. We are more informed than ever we have been. At the same time, information is more vulnerable and fragile than ever. Why? Because it is wide open to distortion,” he said.
Remembrance could not bring back those who had been killed or lost but it gave hope by preventing the erosion of facts, the Archbishop added. Remembrance pointed forward in hope and this movement could give room for faith and love, he said.
Following the service those present congregated at the Khachkar Memorial in the cathedral grounds where flowers were laid in memory of those who died.