See the green hills surrounding his Adabazar, where his dreams of becoming the town’s first courier had taken root, before they withered and died in the desert.” In 2007, MacKeen hired a translator and went by herself to Syria and Turkey, in search of…what? Answers? To feel her grandfather’s presence? More survivors? Clues as to why these events took place? She didn’t quite know, but her compulsion to be there was too strong to ignore, even though it was illegal at the time to even mention that part of history, a dangerous venture to be sure.Īnd so THE HUNDRED-YEAR WALK: An Armenian Odyssey is part memoir, part reportage, with the story jumping from Stepan Miskjian’s to Dawn MacKeen’s, as she sought to retrace her grandfather’s march. “I needed to taste his thirst, touch the land where he walked. The more MacKeen delved into her family’s past, the stronger her need became to go there. Unspeakable cruelty-beatings, theft, hunger, rape, torture, humiliation-was multiplied exponentially for Miskjian and the other Armenians (as well as Greek Orthodox Christians) on their way to slaughter. More than one million people died-half the population-during the forced relocation and Miskjian spared no detail. During the Great War, when the world’s attention lay elsewhere, the Ottoman government ordered Miskjian’s family and other Armenians out of their homes, under the guise that the Christian minority had sided with the enemy. MacKeen had in her hands a precious and rare first-hand account of the 20th century’s first holocaust. Then slowly, with the help of her mother and her tight-knit Armenian community of friends and neighbors, Stepan Miskjian’s journals were translated. But she couldn’t read Armenian! And besides, there wasn’t enough information to write a whole book. It’s in his journals.” It was only when, exhausted from her fast-paced life as a journalist in New York City, she moved home to Los Angeles that she realized the enormity of that request, and how imperative it was that she answer the call. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension.Author Dawn Anahid MacKeen THE HUNDRED-YEAR WALK: An Armenian Odyssey is the story of one man who miraculously survived the genocide, brought to the page by his incredibly talented, fearless granddaughter, an investigative journalist with an enormous heart and incomparable intuition who learned as much about herself as she did about the horrific events that occurred one hundred years ago, and are, in a way, repeating today.ĭawn Anahid MacKeen had been hearing it from her mother for years. Reading this rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. The Hundred-Year Walk alternates between Stepan's saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals. In his desperate bid for survival, Stepan dons disguises, outmaneuvers gendarmes, and, when he least expects it, encounters the miraculous kindness of strangers. Just before killing squads slaughter his caravan during a forced desert march, Stepan manages to escape, making a perilous six-day trek to the Euphrates River. Gradually realizing the unthinkable-that they are all being driven to their deaths-he fights, through starvation and thirst, not to lose hope. He is separated from his family as they are swept up in the government's mass deportation of Armenians into internment camps. In the heart of the Ottoman Empire as World War I rages, Stepan Miskjian's world becomes undone.
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