Alchemy near the Chasm of Death: Visiting a Mass Grave of the Armenian Genocide – the Armenian Weekly (photos)

“They brought the Armenians here. Thousands of them. They stripped them of their belongings and threw them into the chasm,” a Kurdish villager told chief editor of the Armenian Weekly Khatchig Mouradian.

“We are standing at the mouth of a deep, eerie cleft—bottomless, according to the locals—called Dudan by Armenians and Kurds for centuries (also known as Yudan Dere). We know from various survivor and perpetrator accounts that the Armenians of Chunkush—around 10,000—were led here by gendarmes and armed chetes in 1915, brutally murdered, and hurled into the chasm,” writes the chief editor.

“There was a woman in our village. She lived to be 104. She saw it all,” the villager told Mouradian.

The murder of the Armenians of Chunkush constitutes one of the largest, most brutal in situ massacres of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenians from Chunkush were marched to Dudan—only two hours away by foot—and massacred on the spot. Historian Raymond Kevorkian writes: “The males were dealt with first, in accordance with a classic procedure: tied together in small groups of fewer than 10, they were handed over to butchers who bayoneted them or killed them with axes and then threw the bodies into the chasm. The method used on the women was quite similar, except that they were first systematically stripped and searched and then had their throats cut, after which their corpses were also thrown into the chasm. Some of them preferred to leap into the abyss themselves, dragging their children with them; thus they cheated their murderers of part of their booty.”

In his memoir, Rev. Henry H. Riggs, an American missionary who served in Kharpert (Harput), describes Dudan as “a famous cavern [that] drops vertically downward several hundred feet.” He adds, “the entire population of the town [of Chunkush] were said to have been driven to their death in this cavern.”

Almost no one survived. The massacre was so comprehensive that “not a single Armenian from Chunkush appeared on the bloody deportation routes…in Aleppo, Der Zor, Damascus, or any part of Arabia,” writes Karnig Kevorkian in his 600-page book on Chunkush.

Khatchig Mouradian writes one of his co-travelers said the place smelled of death and he himself "has never felt any closer to what can best be described as a doorway to hell."

On the way back, the Kurdish villager approached him and said his grandfather found a lot of items belonging to Armenians. “People in my village say these items were all made of gold, but that when they were found, they turned into copper. They also say that if someone can read the Armenian inscriptions on them, they will turn back to gold. So I was wondering whether you’d be willing to read them for me,” he said. Mouradian replied, “I doubt that I have such powers, but bring them!”

The Kurdish villager took out his cell phone and made a call. He then asked them to get back into the van and follow him.
“We hop into the van and follow his car. A few minutes later, he pulls up near a field. We get off, still suspicious, and wait for him to make another phone call. After a few minutes, we see a man, a woman, and several kids with loads of tools and copper and silver trays and utensils walking in our direction…”, Mouradian writes.