The Seed They Couldn’t Bury

They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds.

As the son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, I have spent much of my life carrying a history I did not live through but could never escape.

The Armenian Genocide claimed the lives of approximately 1.5 million Armenians. Families were separated. Communities disappeared. People who had lived on their ancestral lands for centuries were uprooted, displaced, and killed. For those who survived, the losses did not end when the violence ended. They carried those memories with them for the rest of their lives, and their children carried them too.

My father was one of those survivors.

Growing up, I came to understand that survival is about more than staying alive. It is about carrying forward what others tried to erase. It is about preserving stories, traditions, faith, and identity when history has given you every reason to let them disappear.

One of the hardest truths about the Armenian Genocide is not only what happened, but how easily the world moved on. History teaches us that silence can be dangerous. When suffering is ignored, when injustice is forgotten, the consequences rarely end with one generation.

And yet, despite everything, Armenians endured.

That is the part of the story that continues to inspire me.

We built families. We built churches. We built schools, businesses, communities, and lives. We carried our language, our culture, and our faith across continents. Again and again, Armenians found ways to begin anew.

The story of the Armenian people is not simply a story of suffering. It is a story of resilience.

William Saroyan understood this better than most when he wrote:

"I should like to see any power in this world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people... For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."

Those words have stayed with me throughout my life because they capture something that statistics and history books cannot.

A people can lose homes. They can lose possessions. They can even lose a homeland for a time.

But as long as they remember who they are, they are never truly gone.

Every April 24, we remember those who were lost. We honor those who survived. And we remind ourselves that memory itself is an act of resistance.

They tried to bury us.

They never understood what a seed can do.