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The scene within Zora's head was both surreal and horrible Surreal, because despite how real it felt I knew the basis for all this i in real time Horrible, because such a scene of utter destruction and death had ever occurred, especially because the one I loved had lived through this

The heat of the fires consu hot, but I continued to make my way down the bloodstained street une was a church noreathed in flaled body of what had once been a nition, but intuitively I knew this man was Zora's father Torn up hy and curling from the heat of the nearby flae following the trail of many feet Here and there a dead body lay off to the side of the forced march

TheI was suddenly at a larger town It wasn't burning Indeed so had happened Not so for others

Some parts of the toere vacant Their owners ripped from their lands and homes

At the one end of the toas a stockade Here countless people had been kept like a herd of beef cows at a slaughterhouse The pen once filled with its huh my beloved's memory

The terrain turned more desert like and the heat of the hot sun overhead beca up its victims

At first they were in the hundreds and then the bodies lying sightless in the sand mounted into the thousands

Buzzards, crows , and desert jackals tore at the naked bodies, as I walked through the scene of so many people's tortured end I knehere I was now

I alking along the lane of one of the worst unsung ethnic cleansings in history Everything I was seeing and experiencing was the evidence of a genocide whose perpetrators said had never happened This was the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place around the time period of World War I

Armenia had been an old country with very early Christian roots that dated back to the early days of the Christian church At some point it had ceased to be a country and was assimilated into the boundaries of Turkey Muslims and Christians had coexisted in an uneasy truce within the same border of a nation