Armenian Communities Abroad
I will travel to Armenia and Georgia this month. It will be my first trip to the Caucasus region, a region that contains four countries: Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia. I will visit my two Armenian friends both of whom live in Armenia.
Planning my visit prompted me to reflect on the Armenian communities in my home state of Rhode Island. There is a sizable Armenian community in the state, especially in Providence, where there are two Armenian Apostolic churches. Saint Vartanantz Armenian Apostolic Church hosts the annual Armenian festival.
Like most communities in Rhode Island, the Armenian community is very tight-knit. I recall several instances where two Rhode Islanders with Armenian roots knew of each other through a third person from one of the Armenian churches. This is evidence of my hypothesis that there exist only three degrees of separation between two strangers who both grew up in Rhode Island.
An Interactive Map
My Armenian friends told me once that the capital of “Armenian USA” is Glendale, California. I had never heard of this community, but out of curiosity searched for Armenian population estimates for the city. I stumbled across this collection of population estimates and decided to create the map you see below. The data features official and unofficial population estimates for the Armenian diaspora across the world. Unfortunately, estimates for RI are missing…
As with every data project, there are a few steps required to create a clean dataset. I first needed to scrape the Wikipedia table, process the data and then call an API to retrieve the geocoordinates for each location. You can find the code for each step of the process here.
Insights from the Data
Sure enough, one of the regions with the largest Armenian populations according to official data is Los Angeles (Glendale is a city in LA county and its population is folded into this estimate). This figure comes from a 2011 census estimate. Glendale itself does not have official data but its upper unofficial estimate is 100K. This Armenian population estimate is the highest of any city in the United States and supports my friends’ claim.
When considering only upper unofficial estimates, however, Glendale is ranked number five. The four cities that precede it are Moscow, Paris, Sochi and Marseille. Russia has even greater representation when considering Armenian diaspora populations in whole regions. Looking at the map, it’s easy to see that this is for the most part due to their proximity to Armenia. The Krasnodar region has the highest population of Armenians of any region, according to official estimates, with 281K. The Stavropol and Rostov regions have Armenian populations of 161K and 110K, respectively.
Unfortunately only eight countries collected official data on Armenian populations. Relying on the upper unofficial estimates, however, lead to some interesting insights. After Russia and the US, France has the highest number of Armenians (with 420K) followed by the Ukraine and Georgia. The estimates reveal that Argentina has an Armenian population of 94K, which is the same as the estimate in Iran. There are also sizable Armenian populations in Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon and Syria, for which there is historical precedent.
One can glean many more insights from the above map. I encourage you to explore it and to play around with the filters and the data table.
A Unique Diaspora
Each diaspora in its own way blends their traditional customs with the culture of the new country. There also exist differences in diasporic communities of the same origin (i.e. American Armenians differ from Georgian Armenians). As a whole, however, a few features that characterize the Armenian diaspora make it stand out.
The first is that there are more Armenians in diaspora than in Armenia. This is notable when comparing Armenians abroad to other large emigrant groups. For example, the largest diaspora by population are the Indian and Chinese diaspora. However, given how populous these countries are, the number of Indians and Chinese abroad is only a fraction of the domestic population of the countries. In contrast, by some estimates (including the total upper estimate of the population data I scraped) the Armenian population abroad is about 6 million—2x the population of Armenia which is about 3 million.
The second is that the bulk of Armenian emigration was in response to a single event. The Armenian genocide carried out by the government of the Ottoman Empire killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenian people. Starting in 1915, the Ottomans murdered thousands of able-bodied men in large Armenian communities within the empire and conducted mass deportations of women and children. These deportations and the large-scale exodus from Ottoman lands of Armenians who recognized the danger formed the sprawling diaspora we know today.
Sites of Massacres, Deportation Routes and Extermination Centers. 
Many Armenians fled to the Middle East. For the most part, they enlarged communities in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Egypt in which there were already small Armenian enclaves living there. However, many of these countries were politically tumultuous. Thousands of Armenians then moved on to Europe and to North America. In the U.S., Congress chartered the Near East Foundation in response to the genocide of Ottoman Armenians. The organization launched a large-scale public awareness campaign to raise money for the victims. It raised over $100M in direct relief and claims that it saved the lives of over 1 million Armenian refugees including 132,000 orphans.
Two Near East Commissioned Posters that Raise Genocide Awareness 
Since many of these uprooted Armenian communities valued education and entrepreneurship, once they settled abroad many became upwardly mobile. In the United States, many first generation Armenians maintained their trade networks in the Middle East and became rug merchants. Often within a single generation their descendants ascended to the middle-class. It was common for their children to carry on the business traditions of the first generation but in managerial positions and as businesspeople in corporations.
A Similar Circumstance: The Jews and Israel
A diasporic people that are in many ways similar to the Armenian community are the Jews. For one, the Jewish population abroad is much larger than it is in Israel. If we go beyond the modern day condition of the diaspora we see that the communities abroad occupied similar historic roles.
Ancient Cultures
Both Jews and Armenians have a distinct ancient culture. This culture made each community susceptible to “othering” in their respective countries abroad. Like the Jews, Armenians have their own language and alphabet. The language, while Indo-European, occupies its own distinct branch of the language family.
Armenic Branch of the Indo-European Family 
Religion is also an identifying feature of each community. The Armenian Apostolic Church is one of the oldest existing Christian communities. It is a distinct sect of Oriental Orthodoxy and has many ancient traditions—including unique church structures—that are exclusive to Armenian culture. Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Christianity is an essential component of Armenian culture and juxtaposed the Islamic religions of Armenia’s neighbors.
Holy Etchmiadzin, the World’s Oldest Cathedral 
Similar to how local governments treated Jews in Eastern Europe before WWII, the Ottoman Empire at first afforded Armenian Christians certain privileges to practice their religion within the empire. However, the Islamic law characterized Christians as second class citizens and Armenian communities suffered over-taxation, circumscribed religious and legal rights, and frequent outbursts of violence. Discrimination against Armenians only furthered their segregation from their Muslim neighbors.
Similar Economic Roles
In response to this discrimination, Armenians took on economic roles that their Muslim neighbors often considered undesirable. Armenians became traders and merchants and involved themselves in finance. Since Armenian communities were very close-knit, they were able to create extensive trading networks and connections that carried over into diaspora. These networks helped to finance large scale international ventures. First generation Armenian immigrants to America, for example, used these networks to establish themselves in the import of oriental rugs. Extensive foreign investment in modern Armenia exists due to the persistence of these networks.
Armenian communities also valued education and literacy. In Istanbul (Constantinople at the time), Armenian schools offered the highest quality education available in the Ottoman Empire. Even Ottomans competed to send their children to schools in Armenian communities. These schools produced skilled professionals such as engineers and architects. The Ottoman government employed these tradespeople to build the infrastructure that contributed to the prosperity of the empire.
Tragic Fates
The result of religious persecution in the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire is similar to the result it had on the Jewish community in Eastern Europe. Jews, singled out by their religion, were often on shaky legal ground and did not enjoy the religious freedoms of their neighbors. Jews assumed similar economic roles in finance and trade which their Christian neighbors were reluctant to take on. They established large business networks that also exist today. Today Israel, like Armenia, receives large sums of foreign investment from communities abroad. Jewish culture also has a long history of valuing education and rates of literacy were often much higher in Jewish communities than amongst their neighbors.
The respective Christian and Muslim neighbors resented the relative prosperity of the Jewish and Armenian communities. Their second-class citizen status furthered the isolation of their communities from their neighbors and perpetuated a cycle of persecution. This imposed isolation made it easy for neighbors to scapegoat these communities and accuse them of elitism. Just as pogroms were a ubiquitous threat in Eastern Europe, Armenians suffered outbursts of violence such as the Hamidian massacres in the late 19th century. Rafael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, coined the term genocide in 1943 to describe what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He then applied this term to describe the Holocaust which devastated the Jewish community in Eastern Europe during that time.
Differences Exist
While the two diasporic communities share many commonalities, there are notable differences. The Jewish diaspora is for one much older. The Jews were expelled from Israel many years before the birth of Christ, while the Armenian diaspora formed in the 20th century. The Jewish diaspora is one of the most ancient in the world and formed long before the Holocaust occurred. The Armenian diaspora, in contrast, crystallized after the Armenian genocide. Further, the Holocaust occurred in a territory in which Jews were considered foreign outsiders (even after living in these lands for centuries). In contrast, Armenian genocide happened in territory in the Ottoman Empire that they inhabited for thousands of years.
States that Recognize the Genocide 
Despite these differences, both communities are similar in their tragic experience. This makes it all the more ironic that the Israeli government today does not formally recognize the Armenian genocide. Unfortunately, neither does the United States government—although 49 out of the 50 states recognized and commemorate it. Incomprehensibly, only Mississippi does recognize the genocide. With the Armenian community as large as it is in the United States, the federal government is long overdue in recognizing the tragedy of the Armenian genocide.