Then he stopped and announced, ‘You know, there was on this land a medz yeghern,
a great cataclysm,’ as the survivors called the genocide.
—Aris Janigian (2009)1
The following spring, the Armenian and Turkish ministries announced that they had agreed on a plan of good relations, which allowed President Barack Obama, in his anticipated April 24 address, to refer to the events of 1915 not by the desired designation but by an Armenian alternative: Medz Yeghern, meaning ‘great calamity.’
—Garin Hovannisian (2010)2
If you are not Armenian, you probably know little about the deportations and the massacres:
the death of a million and a half civilians. Meds Yeghern. The Great Catastrophe.
—Chris Bohjalian (2012)3
Above are quotes from Armenian-American fiction and non-fiction writers. These excerpts indicate that “Great Calamity” and similar terms have become a common translation for “Medz Yeghern.” The trend has also been seen in academia, where non-Armenian academics have used the term. Among them is diaspora theorist William Safran, who wrote, “These events took place in the homeland, but they served to mark the ethnonational consciousness in the diaspora as well, especially events of a negative nature, such as…the Armenian yeghern (catastrophe), the Turkish genocide…”4 Of course, the dominant discourse of the Turkish mainstream, be it as “Great Calamity”5 or as “Great Catastrophe,” is seen in books authored or co-authored by Turkish and Turkish-Armenian writers and scholars.6We may assume that the latter either follow the flow or are genuinely convinced that this is the actual translation of the phrase.
However, an internet search may also yield many English-language Armenian outlets that translate Medz Yeghern as “Great Calamity,” or, sometimes, “Great Crime.” There is a duality that makes necessary, after the survey of Armenian-Turkish and Armenian-English vocabularies, to explore their ultimate source: the Armenian language.