Warriors of Resistance - Story of Onnik Melikian
Story of Onnik Melikian
This dagger was the weapon used by Onnik Melikian during the genocide as he fought and killed the Turkish soldiers that were committing acts of genocide against the Armenian people. Listen to Lisa Natcharian, Onnik's descendant, tell the story below. For the transcript of this section see the bottom of this page.
Onnik, his cousins, and other resistance fighters like them fought to defend their people and to exact vengeance on their families' killers. Through their acts of violent resistance, they were able to make a difference in the defense of the Armenian people. While Onnik's efforts eventually forced him to flee, his rebel spirit lived with him, and his old knife, for the rest of his life. Armenians like Onnik were not going to let the Ottoman Empire destroy his culture without a fight. It is people like Onnik that are responsible for the Armenian way of life surviving the Turkish onslaught.
From the Collection of Lisa Natcharian
Transcript
The other thing that I’m going to show you. So I think it made him sort of feel like it reminded him of how he felt to come to a new country and feel like this is it. I’m going to start all over again, and everything will be much better than it was before. It was hard, but this obviously meant something to him. When I was a kid, this was always stashed away in sort of a metal lock box with, you know, in the basement. It was never anything super special, but every once in a while, when it would come out, my father would pull everything out and spread it out and, and speak so reverently about it. I realized even at a young age that this was very important, even though it wasn’t very valuable. Then the other thing that I have, that I feel really lucky that I’m the person in the family who gets to hold on to this is a dagger.
That is the only other thing that my grandfather brought with him when he escaped the Armenian genocide. This used to hang in his house on the wall, above the television. He had a really big console television, this old sort of 1950s thing, and this was sort of in pride of place up on the wall. And kind of ironically, someone had also stuck a cross made out of an old Palm left from Palm Sunday next to this weapon that actually killed people. He wasn’t religious at all. He actually felt like someday he’d be able to go back to Armenia and reclaim everything that had been lost. I think this was you know, right out there in the middle of the living room to remind him of everything he went through. It actually was pointed out to me many times as a kid that he never cleaned this.
He actually did kill people with it and never wiped it down because again, to remember everything that he had gone through. My father was his youngest son and it was a very pacifist kind of a guy, very quiet, very gentle, became an engineer, and I have a sister. So here’s this very pacifist guy with two daughters. And here he is explaining to us how we’ll see how there’s a groove in the middle of this that causes more damage when you stab somebody with it. So here I am, this little kid learning this really bizarre knowledge about weapons. Basically, because everybody in the family wanted to make sure that no one forgot what my grandfather had gone through so that we could be here.
So I’ll start back in the beginning of the genocide, he was about 15 years old at the time. He was an only child and his mother had died. She was struck by lightning when he was 11. So he had been sent off to boarding school and his father went and found a job in Russia for a noble family. He was sort of like the head of household, almost like the head butler of this fairly well to do family that had connections with the Russian government. He was able to find out ahead of time through these connections that the Turks were coming to the village where all of the family still lived. So he got word to my grandfather who left school, came back to the village, tried to pass on the message, but because he was so young, no one really believed him.
There were about 135 members of the family that lived in that village at the time, and just about all of them were killed with the exception of my grandfather and a number of his cousins. There was about 10 of them altogether. They chose to collect some weapons and leave the village and go hide out in the caves in the mountainous area around this village. For four years they lived up there in these caves, in the, in the mountains where they would sort of conduct these guerrilla raids down into the village, which had now been taken over by Turkish soldiers. Sneak in at night and kill a few people and sneak back out again. All of them obviously had a price on their heads. There was a lot of fighting, you know, but apparently it was very difficult to find them because of the wilderness in which they were hiding out. So he obviously used this knife and potentially other weapons to try to make up for what had happened to his family that was killed. He wasn’t able to, obviously it’s just a few of them against all of the rest of these actual soldiers. Eventually he was the last one left. They all got killed in various different fights over the course of the four years. So he ended up escaping to Constantinople and took this with him.