Original subtitles

(somber flute music)

- [Man Voiceover] It's not safe here.

They want to be rid of us.

(horses galloping)

(somber flute music)

(woman screaming)

(woman singing)

(woman screams)

(man shouts)

(man shouts in foreign language)

(heavy breathing)

(woman singing)

(woman cries)

(man speaking in foreign language)

(woman singing)

(coughing)

(man screams)

(man shouting in foreign language)

(laughing)

(eerie classical music)

- His life itself is a metaphor

of the Armenian history.

It's like a personification of our history of centuries.

Were we as a talented people,

given the way we have been geographically

vulnerable to all invasions from the East

coming to the west.

You know, given our history,

it's a miracle of miracles that we have

survived as a people.

- [Man Voiceover] We are still Armenians.

An ancient people of culture and dreams.

- When I was a little girl, in San Francisco

with my grandma Mary, grandma and I,

I would always hear grandma singing songs

and she would sing these old Armenian songs

and I didn't understand the language

and I didn't know who wrote it

but those songs unconsciously went in me

and they stayed there and they ruminated

and it helped me become who I am now as an Armenian.

Komitas, his music taught me who I am.

- My mother learned all this beautiful songs

direct from Komitas Vardapet

and many years later in 50s,

in grammar school, our principal taught us Komitas songs

and through Komitas songs, we appreciate Armenian heritage

culture and Armenian life.

- His contribution is so broad and comprehensive.

You have the spiritual, the religious.

You also have the secular.

You know, he's secular music is just as fascinating

as his religious music and for him

to bring these two together in a way

encompasses and embraces the wealth of our culture.

While it is predominately religious

and yet at the same time there is this secular side of it.

- had many loses as a child.

He lost his mother during the first year of his life

and then during the first decade of his life,

he had many losses.

He lost his father and then he lost

his rapprochement for education.

His grief was so immense

that he started to use the dissociation,

meaning like he put himself in his own

where one doesn't feel any pain.

He used to wander the streets of Kutahya .

Despite all this, he still had his passion for singing

and his beautiful voice and not only the church appreciated

his singing but also his friends on the street.

They would ask him to sing, he will sing,

they'll give him food.

They shared his food with him.

So that helped him to make friends.

So in Komitas' life, it's very interesting

how always, trauma was juxtaposed with his immense

musical talent which empowered him.

The two together always balanced out

and this is why in his childhood

as long as he was able to use his creativity,

his music, his singing, that connected him to people.

- And so Komitas in effect in his very person

personifies Armenian history.

Which in effect was a series of genocides.

What happened to us as a people in 1915

is the last straw that broke the camels back

so to speak.

(somber classical music)

- Consider a million people dying

or six million people dying,

we can't identify with that.

I mean it's a statistics.

But when you see how it impacts on one person,

that you can identify with.

- His whole life had been surrounded with Armenian

and Turkish music and he grew such a great love

for the folk music of the Armenians and the Turks

which I think contributed to his genius

in his later life.

One day, he's just singing a nice old Turkish song

and this priest is passing by his house

and he hears this beautiful strong lovely voice

and he tells his aunt and uncle

that he wants to take him Etchmiadzin

and he wants him to sing in front of the Catholicos

and they agree and they taken him to Etchmiadzin

to the mother church and he has him sing

for the Catholicos and the Catholicos

is just amazed what a wonderful, beautiful,

strong voice this young boy has

and he says to him, Listen,

you're going to be in the church choir,

we're gonna train you.

So they decide to send him to Tiflis, Georgia

to the famous Armenian composer of sacred music,

Armenian circuit music, Yekmalyan

and Yekmalyan realizes the genius quality.

So the Catholicos decides to send him to Berlin

to the university to now start studying

classical music and learning about Bach,

about Brahms, about Beethoven,

all the classical composers, he starts learning about

and at the same time, he starts formally learning

the folk idiom.

Arabic music, Turkish music, Greek music,

Jewish music, he starts learning in a very formal way.

So now, he comes back to Istanbul

and he puts together this 300 boy's chorus.

- Komitas' composition of the divine literature

really stands out among others

in that he has really captured

the very mystical essence of the diving literature.

One could interpret the divine literature

a variety of ways

but there is always this mystical element in it.

In that it is a journey to heaven

and as worshipers, we follow the celibate priest

in this journey to heaven.

It's like heaven also comes down to meet us halfway

in between and to capture this spiritual encounter

between us worshipers, humans, and the divine,

putting these two elements together.

Komitas has done it so remarkable well.

- I was astonished, I was surprised

that when the Turks were planning

to annihilate our nation,

not only Komitas, (mumbles) or other intellectuals

but the whole nation, Komitas part of it

was thinking of opening a conservatory

for the Turks in Constantinople.

- [Man Voiceover] Sensitive heart

and the thinking mind of the Turkish nation,

I wish this for you Turkish people.

- The Turkish language was imposed on him as a child.

Was imposed on (mumbles) Armenians

but despite of that fact, he did not feel any animosity

neither towards the Turks or the critics.

Actually, his mother created songs and in Turkish

and when later on Komitas returned to Kutahya

he collected still people of Kutahya

were singing his mother's song

and he collected them

and he used to sing them.

So for him, music that was the global language.

It was not Turkish, it was not Kurdish,

it was not Armenian, music was global for him.

- [Man voiceover] I tried to get closer to see

what the place they wouldn't let me.

What has he done to deserve this?

- They're geographically all from this area.

They live together, they talk with each other,

they laugh together, the children play together

and then all of a sudden one day,

but it's not like that.

It seems that way but there's growing unrest

all the time, growing unrest.

(tense guitar music)

- In the case of the Armenians,

certainly Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s

and the massacres of 1908 and 1909

were signs that things were deteriorating

and the fact that Turkey was,

the Ottoman Empire was losing

all of its European possessions.

- Conditions radically changed with World War I.

As Turkey enters the war in November of 1914,

as a ally of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,

it is catapulted into a new sociological,

cultural, political moment

and part of that moment, of course, means that

there is now national militarization.

During times of war and as historians

have come to quote this,

total war, societies become militarized

and obsessed with national security

and it becomes much easier to carry out acts

of violence inside the country during war time

than it ever would be during peace time.

So the war provided the young Turk regime,

the CUP, especially with Talaat Pasha

as the Administer of the Interior,

with an opportunity to solve it's

perceived domestic security crisis

with it's largest Christian minority, the Armenians.

- It just didn't happen one day.

It was happening and happening and happening

and then all of a sudden, it was huge.

- Whole sale massacre and deportation,

forced marches, rape, torture, and destruction

of whole cultural entities.

Cities, towns, villages, libraries, churches,

could be carried out without anybody on the outside

having too much visible notion of what was going on

because the war create chaos, distraction for everybody

and so the war is important in context

for this event.

It's arguable that the Young Turk government

could not have carried out genocide as it did

without the screen of World War I as its cover

and its total militarizing social enterprise.

- [Man voiceover] Dearest Margret,

I wish to be with you in Paris instead

of this oppressive environment

of what now is Constantinople.

- Margret Popian came from a highly educated family,

she came from Georgia and then her family

moved to Paris.

Margret befriended Komitas,

Komitas befriended Margret.

Their relationship was very multilayered,

sophisticated, subtle, and it's difficult

to put it in any certain mold.

Just to give you the understanding

of what their relationship was,

when Komitas came from Egypt,

all he had conquered Egypt,

he had given two concert in Cairo

and in Alexandria

and the people there, they felt that Komitas

brought with him piece of Armenia to this foreign lands

and he came and they showered him with gifts

so his self esteem was very strong

and he felt so good about himself

and this was in 19 somewhat, of 1911,

he came to Paris.

He knocks on the door of Margret.

Margret says, "Well here you are.

I'm going on vacation of Isle of White,

why don't you come with me?

You look exhausted."

And here they go together to Isle of White.

They stay in this little inn.

He plays the music, they go on the beach,

to for taking long walks

and here was this celibate priest with this celibate woman

not married musician.

Sophisticated culturally, embedded in the musical world

of France, of Paris at the time.

They went on vacation together

and they had the courage to be together at that time.

Their friendship told them that we need each other.

- [Man Voiceover] I'm in God's hands

but surely I will be rested.

- The priest of Atraban, Grigoris Balakian,

who was arrested on the night

of April 24th in Constantinople and survived.

The next four years in the killing fields of Turkey

to write an extraordinary memoir,

called Armenian Golgotha.

In Armenian Golgotha, the explicit impression

that is conveyed is one of shock and bewilderment.

One of confusion and disbelief.

Balakian is a high ranking (mumbles)

inside the patriarch cave in Constantinople

and is a kind of emissary ambassador

from the patriarch cave to Europe and to Russia.

He's a very worldly guy.

In disbelief to this storm, this bloody storm

as he calls it, that has been brewing,

the impression is this can't be happening.

We have had close relations with the Ottoman

ruling leadership.

We know Talaat in particular.

We are in communication with the Sublime Porte regularly.

How could this plan be evolving in front of our eyes?

- [Man Voiceover] A policeman who felt

that his job was to arrest me.

- How one day they just came along

and pulled all the academics.

It sounds like they just one day they did this.

You don't just one day decide that you're gonna

get rid of somebody.

It's an actual plan, it's a political plan,

it's a governmental bureaucratic kind of plan,

and then they call on the preparator.

The one who's at the trough doing the work

and say gather those people up.

- [Man Voiceover] It was just a precaution,

I imagine, perhaps because of the bombardment.

- There were rumors that the police was gathering names

in cafes where Armenian intellectuals gathered

and they were started to

take up the papers, news papers

and look at the signatures and found out the names

of the people who wrote the editorials.

- [Man voiceover] And no it did not stop them

in 1895 or even just six years ago in Aldana.

But those were the days of the sultan.

We now have a constitution that guarantees us.

- Greeks, the Armenians, the Arabs,

and others supported the Great Revolution of 1908.

The somewhat velvet revolution,

called the Young Turk revolution

which deposed the sultan Abdul Hamid II

from political power.

So July, 1908, the Ottoman Empire

is no longer a theocracy.

It was perceived as a very hopeful exciting moment.

A moment that might finally implement

the long hoped for reforms

for minority groups inside of Turkey,

constitutional reforms that had been promised

since the mid 19th century,

a time that was perceived as bringing

a new multicultural potential equality

through the Ottoman empire

and long sought after change.

- [Man Voiceover] My friends, you must not worry,

the constitution is for us.

You must, I must believe this.

- But the revolution was short lived.

Within half a year, the sultans

counter revolutionary forces

are trying to bring down

the new secular Young Turk government

and I would note that that government of 1908, 1909,

is still a moderate hopeful, more inclusive

and liberal group

but with a succession of violent events,

the counter revolution that I just mentioned

in 1909, and then the outbreak

of the two Balkan Wars, 1912 and 1913,

the moderate new Young Turks were gotten rid of

by violent revolution by this new group,

Enver, Talaat, and Djemal.

Who would seize power in 1913

and institute and implement

more extreme nationalism

and one that was predicated on a pan Turkish

ideology that advocated that Turkey

could only be restored to its health

and well being by purging Turkey

of its minority elements.

Its minority population,

especially the Christian minorities.

So pan Turkism now evolves as a more virulent ideology

of the new Ittihad party,

the new Committee of Union and Progress party

and we are in a very different place by 1914

as the war comes.

We have a group running Turkey with a staunch

and extreme nationalist ideology to make Turkey

Islamically homogenous.

- They didn't have orders to kill them immediately

but they were pre planning, they were weakening them.

This were all very highly educated,

intellectually sophisticated people

who had ideas about liberty, about democracy,

so they knew that all what is happening to them

was illegal and it was not to be done.

So therefore, to be able to break them,

they used all this secrecy

and predictability, this matter of cruelty,

psychological cruelty.

- [Man Voiceover] Come on my friend, this terrible

joke is nearly over.

- It was done in a such a secretive way.

In the middle of the night, they came to their homes

and they say, please come to the central police station.

The commissioner has a few questions to ask you.

Sometimes people left with, you know, their pajamas on

and they went because they were just very consciously,

the were going to be asked a few questions.

Something very funny which confuses them even further

that among the group, there was some other people

who didn't belong to this intellectual

of Armenians of Constantinople.

For example, there was the Butcher of the street.

Armenian Butcher of the street

but his name happened to be the same name

as another Armenian intellectual

so the police didn't differentiate who was,

so this butcher was there with his bloody apron on.

The people didn't understand what he was doing there

which was further confusing them

and they thought, this must be a joke.

- The CUPs plan to solve it's perceived Armenian problem

through genocide, through mass killing,

forced marches, and the destruction

of Armenian cultural artifacts

and architecture and towns and villages and cities.

Evolves, it begins within the context of World War I

began as Enver proclaimed the Armenian soldiers

at the Russian Turkish border

to be unreliable, to be sagacious,

even though Enver made a disastrous

military blunder in the Battle of Sarikamish

in late December of 1914 and early January of 1915,

he really scapegoated the Armenian soldiers.

So by the winter of 1915, the Turkish government

has decided to strip all the Armenian soldiers

of their weapons and put them into labor battalions

and now, they become sitting ducks

to be mass killed.

So they will be killed systematically

throughout the winter and into the summer of 1915

and by this method, the Turkish government

has already succeeded in eradicating

the most potent part of the Armenian population,

its able bodied man from the ages

of about 15 to 45.

The next population that would be targeted

would be the intellectuals and the cultural leaders

and of course this brings us into the story of Komitas.

In Constantinople, now Istanbul, on April 24 of 1915,

about 250 to 300 Armenian cultural leaders

were arrested and by cultural leaders,

I mean poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists,

teachers, academics, clergy, wealthy philanthropists

of culture, publishers, magazine editors, and so on.

All rounded up, arrested from their houses,

taken from their houses in the middle of night

and deported by bus, ferry, and then train

to two prisons about 200 miles East of Istanbul.

Most of them were killed and tortured in these prisons.

A few survived and this act would be

reenacted in the summer of 1915 several times

throughout Turkey in order to eliminate

the cultural elite and the intellectuals

and the logic here is very obvious.

You want to cut the head off of the culture

to pull its tongue out, to silence its voice

because once you get rid of the able bodied

man who could resist massacre,

you want to get rid of those who can speak,

protest, write, and communicate with the outside world,

so no you've gotten rid of that group.

- They didn't know what was going on

cause no one would reveal that information to them.

No one would give them that information.

Whats happening?

They could ask that question as many times as they wanted

but the answer would never come back to them.

They just kept doing what they had to do.

That is, I'm gonna get up in the morning

and I'm gonna take the food

and when they ask me to leave I'm gonna leave

because when they would ask them when are they coming home,

they did not get an answer

and then one day they go and they're all gone.

- By the late spring of 1915,

the bulk of the Armenian population that's left in Turkey

includes women, children, the elderly.

There are still some man and some boys

but mostly women, children, the elderly

and they will now be arrested on mass

and marched south and east

to the Syrian desert

and if they hadn't been killed by the time

they got to the Syrian desert,

they were to die in encampments

and camps in this ungodly hot arid region,

circled around the famous epicenter of Dier ez-Zor

which is really the kind of Auschwitz

of the Armenian genocide

where 400 to 450,000 people perished.

Now add that about 1.2 to 1.5 million,

that's an enormous epicenter of death.

- Komitas identified himself with Armenian people

and here they were being killed on a massive scale.

It was crazy what was going on, it was insane

what was going on and how Komitas was going

to be able to accept what had happened,

what was happening around him.

So here it was, magnified 100 times his childhood.

- If somebody's saying, quick quick quick hurry,

we're leaving.

We're all packed up, we're waiting for you

and there's Turkish soldiers there

saying get ready, why are you taking so much?

You don't have to take so much.

You're probably gonna come back.

We don't know.

Don't lock the door.

You don't have to lock the door.

There's nothing to protect here.

You don't have to worry about it.

Get in the line.

Let's go and there's stories

where they just get into that mode

and they just follow the orders and they do it

because they really don't have the full picture.

They don't see, oh we're gonna go to New York and back.

They don't even have destination in mind.

We're just moving.

We're deporting you,

we're getting you out of here

and when this is all over, you can come back

and they don't understand why

they just know they're doing that.

We can go to Guatemala, where one day

the government sends the perpetrators out.

We need to get rid of all the men in the villages

and so they separate them, take them

in hearing distance of the women and children

and shoot them all

and leave the women and children.

Just to get rid of that indigenous culture in Guatemala.

They were the people that were there first.

It's just like us.

We were the people that were there first.

Let's get them out of here.

- a lot of the killing was done by hand,

it was done with farm implements,

cannery and butcher tools,

it was war time and the Turkish government

was trying to save its resources

for the killing it had to do on the front

and so the killing was gruesome.

It's closer to the kind of killing

that was done during the Rwandan genocide.

- It was just a matter of getting rid of these people

and, I think that,

I think that the people at the bottom

that were doing the work, the killing,

just get so desensitized that it's just nothing to them

and in the case of the Guatemalans,

the anthropologist who's doing the work

in Guatemala to open the graves and look at these bones,

he notices that it's not a matter of them

just shooting them, but they would come and shoot them

and then hit them and then carve them

and continue to kill them and kill them and kill them

when they're already dead in what he states,

is an overkill.

It's an overkill

and in Rwanda, the story was that one of the

perpetrators said the body was soft

and it was easy and it's like

we already hunted them and run them down

and so then we just kill them

and then we just slice them up

because they're soft and it's easy.

- During the Armenian genocide

we have a lot of butchering done

and again, women and children,

it was a high degree of sexual violence,

of rape and of the abduction and theft

of women into harems and into slave auctions.

- And the small children that were

two and three and five and seven and 10

were experiencing things that

were, that are totally unexplainable

if you're a child.

If you're three years old and you've lived 1,000 days or so,

what can you understand about seeing a bloated dead body

along your path?

What can you understand about that?

It's not a cow or a dog or a pig,

it's a human, it's somebody that you're walking next to.

It's the possibility of being you

and you can't even make sense of that

because you're so tiny

and your thought process is so inexperienced with violence.

So then what happens is that

depression and,

and the successive images of violence

are penetrated in the thought process of these children

and they grow up, some of them losing their parents,

some of them never seeing their parents again,

some of them running and hiding and watching

other atrocities

and with no one to talk to about it

expect experiencing a fear

that they don't even understand.

Why am I so afraid?

Why am I so afraid?

I don't even understand this

cause they don't understand death.

They're all new.

- What happens to people when we've had this

wound that no one wants to acknowledge

and how do you deal with that?

- This process of genocide and when

we're having it occur today

and we can't step in and nip it in the bud

so that we don't have it get to this point,

that's scary.

That's very scary, that we are not wise enough

to say, all these steps are happening again

and we're in the 21st century

and we're not gonna stop it

because we're not sure if that's what it is

and then when it's over we say,

I think this might of been genocide

and then we have this whole society that's damaged again.

- After World War I, I mean the story did get out.

The story was big news, it was big news certainly

that Armenians were Christians and there were

so many missionaries who reported on what was happening,

the relief efforts and Morgenthau's statements,

his book came out immediately after the war,

actually during the war.

There was a lot of attention paid

but then when Otto Turk basically restored

Turkish sovereignty and decided

that this shouldn't be part

of the national narrative of Turkey,

the story was largely suppressed

and almost every country that they had relations with,

Turkey, there were economic interest from oil leases

that they got from dismantling the Ottoman Empire

if you were interested in containing communism,

you had Turkey there.

If you were Russians and you had a large Armenian

population, you didn't want there to be too much

Armenian nationalism,

which might draw you into a war.

- Every village, town, and Armenian quarter

of a city was emptied of its Armenian population

and the death tolls range from 1.2 to 1.5 million.

The fact remains that out of about two to 2.5 million

Armenians in Turkey in 1914,

less than 100,000 remained after 1920

to give you a sense of the eradication process

of this particular genocide.

At the cusp of the modern age.

- The 12 month genocide

when genocide reenacts

all (mumbles)

the many many loses, the poverty,

loss of his friends,

loss of his community.

Mass murder of his intellectual friends

with whom all he knew in Constantinople.

- [Man Voiceover] Our journey's almost over.

A place called Cankiri.

- The Cankiri experience was very pivotal

in what happened later on in Komitas' life.

The majority of Armenian intellectuals

of Constantinople were rounded up.

They were in the same party.

The didn't know what was going to happen to them.

They were not told, why were they were arrested

and were they were being taken.

- The journey is marked by

a horrendous night at the central prison

in the center of Constantinople Istanbul.

- During this (mumbles) they had used many vehicles.

Initially they walked and then they were put

on a steam ship and then they were put on trains

and then pushed in carts.

Just imagine yourself,

you're being driven destination you don't know.

You are being taken, you don't know the reason

why you're taken away.

- The Armenians are surrounded by militia and police

in large numbers, you know to the point

where they're shocked that there so many people on them

and of course, they don't really understand

why this is happening to them.

That's what's like dramatic in the Balakian memoir.

Everybody's saying whats going on?

What have we done?

Why is this happening?

- During that three days, that lasted 72 hours,

from Constantinople to Central Jail and then

on those different transportation modalities

until Ayas and Cankiri.

Nobody protested.

Really, there was this still not understandable

to me, helplessness

but over the centuries, being subjected

to the will of a dictatorship,

you lose that common sense that some of the others.

(drowned out by music)

Who wrote his memoirs about road to Cankiri with Komitas,

let's say that we were aware that something was cooking

and very interestingly, Armando says,

like a sheep, taken to the slaughter.

As if our coalition was taken away from us

and he described that helplessness and hopelessness

and then he says on the road,

we realize we better start to understand

and watch what's going on

and because he put on that aloofness,

he was able to survive.

- To see this in a narrative account

of the journey to Cankiri is a great indication

of the sense of shock and terror

that defined the states of minds

of many of the cultural leaders.

Komitas is probably the most dramatic

in that particular moment.

- [Man Voiceover] All of my work, I left behind.

My papers are so fragile.

They're sitting there in room.

- It was immense pressure on the mind

of everyone, especially on the mind of Komitas.

At that moment, he started to like,

somebody else was thinking what was going

to happen to my money, Komitas started to think,

what will happen to my work that I left behind?

All the work of my life's effort

of trying to find the foundation of Armenian (mumbles).

All his works of his multiple orchestration

and the Armenian songs.

That loss was immense.

- [Man Voiceover] My music, where is my music?

- That was enough to break him and it broke him

and very simple cruelty by (mumbles)

was the tip of the iceberg.

(drowned out by breathing)

After that, he was scared.

He was hiding.

He didn't know where to put himself.

He wanted, I suppose he just wanted to close his eyes

and vanish from all that atrocity.

- The scenes really depict a kind of reign of terror

that's happening for this arrested

subset of the Armenian population.

- [Man Voiceover] Look there, did you see him?

The (mumbles) is hiding.

They are hiding in wait for us.

- along the way, people are already beginning

to break down and one of the most dramatic portraits

of a breakdown is Balakian's depiction

of his carriage mate, Komitas,

who begins to lose his composure

and they're in the carriage now,

they're in a carriage (drowned out by noise)

and the carriage is a pretty rough ride

just on wooden planks, bouncing pretty hardly

on this rough terrain

and Komitas asks Balakian to pray for him

and he tells Balakian that he sees fingers

coming out from behind trees

and there are no figures coming out,

Komitas is already beginning to,

You know, become extremely paranoid

and deranged, unhinged.

(eerie chanting)

- When he start to be delusion,

he start to have illusions,

he started to make mistakes between animals and people.

He started to see a donkey

and he thought that was a (mumbles).

So he started to have secondary delusions

that were (mumbles).

- [Man Voiceover] I'm afraid.

- To a stake, (mumbles).

They had lost that under that tremendous pressure

fear anxiety and the future and

to fear of losing his life's work.

- [Man Voiceover] I can't hear the music.

- One of the unique dimensions of the Armenian genocide

is the eradication of the intellectual

and cultural leadership of a whole ethnic group.

There were a few survivors but if we put

this generation of intellectuals

into perspective, we're looking at

the emergence of Armenian modernism

in the second decade of the 20th century

and some of the most important writers

in modern Armenian literature,

Danial Varoujan, Adom Yarjanian

who went by the pen name Siamanto

and others were important voices

coming to their own, they were all young

and they were all snuffed out.

I would mention as well, Krikor Zohrab,

fiction writer, they were all snuffed out

and journalists, musicians, composers,

Komitas is the best known.

He was snuffed out.

- The social structure of the community in Constantinople

was all broken down.

The Armenian patriarchy was closed down.

The government had closed down the Armenian patriarchy

and so still some of his friends, families,

came to help him, gave him a hand.

They took him to one of the isles not very far

from Constantinople.

He recovered there.

He started to play some music and he was feeling much better

and his fear of the (mumbles) coming after him

was significantly diminished

but he stayed there a few months,

he had to come back to Constantinople

and then he had no funds anymore.

He ran out of funds.

He had no other choice but to escape into madness.

On there is no feeling, there is illusion of world

where you make up things and you live with those

and reality's too harsh, too painful to cope.

He came so depressed

they had to hospitalize him in Constantinople.

It was a military hospital.

Imagine Komitas was being treated in a military hospital.

Fear had set in his heart and he was terrified

that we as going to be taken to (mumbles)

or to be taken away again.

He lived in a constant fear.

By 1918, after the armistice,

his friends, Komitas' friends,

realized that he's not gonna get better.

Turkish hospital.

Komitas' relationship with everybody in Constantinople

was severed, he didn't trust anybody,

he was taken by anxiety and fear

and they realized he need somewhere else.

Maybe in Paris, his beloved friend

were helping to come out of his isolation

and interjection of the outside world.

He had conquered France and Paris before

and now he was coming back as a broken man.

His pride hurt and how was he going to face Margret?

He was now a sick man.

Margret became his care taker, his next of kin.

Throughout Komitas' archives, files, medical files,

brought in Ville-Evrard and Villejuif,

these are the two French mental health institutions

where Komitas has stayed from 1918 until 1935, he's there.

You see Margret's signature on receipts.

Payment of bills, on the inventory of his clothes

and everything what a mother, sister, wife,

next of kin will do.

So Margret Balbian was all of that in one person.

The mother that he had lost very early one,

the sister that he didn't have,

the wife that he couldn't have

because he was a celibate priest

and finally next of kin, a daughter or somebody.

- Komitas' life, even through the very end,

is tragic illness

and it's effects on his incapacity

to produce what he was so talented

and equipped to do at the height of his career.

All that had kind of dwindled,

gone down the drain, so to speak

and it continues to illustrate our history to this day

in that we Armenians, everyone of us,

we are survivors of the Armenian genocide

in that both survivors and victims at the same time

because given our absorption with the genocide,

our consumption with it,

has denied us of learning more about our real history,

our true culture.

Armenian civilization in it's richness.

- We have so much but we have lost so much

and when I am singing these songs

it is a funeral dirge,

that's what I'm singing at that time

because I feel, I feel what those words are saying

and they're telling me the loss.

- We're reminded that Lemkin,

the father of the Genocide Convention,

pointed to the destruction of culture

as an important part of the genocidal process

and we don't, we don't only want to focus on

the killing of people, I mean that's important,

but also the loss of culture.

That is the loss of libraries, churches,

museums, artifacts, books,

and the makers themselves.

The cultural producers.

The playwrights, the poets, the fiction writers,

the journalists.

So the assault on the intellectuals

in Constantinople and elsewhere in Harpert in Vaughn,

in Di Ar Bek here, represents this piece of genocidal

destruction, so it's a very significant act

that so many and almost all of these figures

were wiped out.

- He went from village to village and collected

over 3,000 Armenian folk songs

that as a result of the Armenian genocide

would of been totally lost

and we would of been devoid

of these beautiful Armenian village songs for eternity.

(somber flute music)

- Suffered itself as a culture

for a long time because of the absence

of the Armenian and also of the Greek

and the Assyrian presence.

Because of the contributions of these culture groups

to commerce, agriculture, and the other trades

and professions, medicine, pharmacies,

intellectual production, all this was gone

and the remaining Armenian population

which would continue to dwindle, dwindle, dwindle

as would the remaining Greek population.

That was most dramatically dealt with

with the Greek population exchange of the mid 1920s

between Greece and Turkey

but even so, in the Armenian case,

the Armenians became a disappeared group.

A silenced fragment of a once thriving culture

within Ottoman Turkey

and the narrative about what happened to them

was silenced by Turkish taboos

and Turkish law.

The story of the Armenian genocide (mumbles),

the identity of Armenians was hush hush.

Armenians could not speak their own language in public.

They were heavily Islamized in a public sense.

They were allowed to worship

and they could speak what they wanted to at home

but the Armenians became a disappeared minority.

(somber classical music)

- Komitas had no parents but Armenian people

adopted him and he started to identify with them

and when after the Armenian genocide 1915,

when the people with whom he identified

and the people who adopted him,

Armenian people adopted him as their beloved son

when these people started to be massacred

and on a massive scale,

that trauma was too much for him.

- My mother was upset what happened to Komitas,

very much disturbed and I remember one

of our famous writers says,

I forgive Turks if only they would save Komitas.

- This huge baggage of the Armenian genocide

on his psyche was a way to recover

from this, it should have been a miracle

and there was no such a miracle

and he died in 1935 after,

after a physical illness.

He developed an infection in his foot

which became a blood infection

and then he died from it.

There was no antibiotics to treat him at the time.

So here, he melted away.

- When he's taken to the asylum

in Paris, he spent the rest of his life as a insane man

and he died, you know, in this horrible manner.

(somber spiritual music)

- In his childhood, although he was deprived

of many many things, but still he had his creativity,

he had his voice,

it could sing, that was a way of expressing his pain

and through creativity, through music.

- [Man Voiceover] I will show you how to read the notes.

You must trust the music.

You see, the lower notes are necessary

to provide a measure for the high notes.

Sometimes we must trust the suffering

that it will bring us through.

- Oh he sees humanity, how we outreach us to the others,

not only to the Armenians.

I believe that if Komitas

after outliving the genocide and the exile,

he was in normal health condition,

he was going to be a source of inspiration

not only for the Armenians but even for the Turks.

- The powerful story of rebirth

is the story of the Armenia disappeared world wide.

The rebirth of Armenian culture

in communities Europe, in North America,

in US and Canada and South America,

in Australia, in the Middle East,

especially in Syria and Lebanon

and in Russia.

In the soviet republic, now the independent

Republic of Armenia,

who would imagine there could be a republic of Armenia

95 years ago?

So Armenians have emerged from fire,

from the ashes.

- We are more than victims of the genocide, okay?

We are survivors.

(somber folk music)

- Music, I think, is a great way of connecting with people

because it goes directly through emotions.

You know, what does this mean, you know?

It really is how we feel about it

and I think Komitas, he can play that kind of role

as a bridge.

- Because his songs touches everything,

the real life of the Armenian people.

- He must have been a very sensitive deep person

to penetrate the very emotions of human feelings.

This too comes out in his music.

What makes us human in the final analysis

is that we have mutual human feelings.

Regardless of our ethnicity, of our race,

whatever, you know the bottom line,

there are there's mutual common human feelings,

that bind us together as human family.

Komitas has penetrated to the bottom of this.

- Komitas does not belong only to the Armenians,

does not belong only to the years that he lived,

Komitas is not the tragedy

but Komitas is a gift.

Komitas is God's presence among us

through his life through a service,

through his work, and through his immortality.

- You need not be an Armenian to feel at home

with Komitas.

You sense his humanity, his sensitivity in his music.

- [Man Voiceover] There was a king of songs.

A minstrel poet who played and sang

the nation songs of Armenia for princes and kings.

The minstrel lost his position

when he fell out of favor with the king.

It was only then when he was truly free as a (mumbles).

(drowned out by music)

(somber singing in Armenian)

(upbeat folk music)