Istanbul Armenian Genocide memorial

The Monument to the Armenian Genocide in Istanbul, in Armenian Husartsan, was the first memorial in the world dedicated to the victims of the genocide when it was erected in 1919. Built on the grounds of what was then the Armenian Pangalti cemetery, where Gezi Park and Taksim Square stand today, the marble monument was unveiled during the brief period of allied occupation of Istanbul. With the victory of the Kemalist movement and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, however, the memorial was destroyed, the Armenian cemetery flattened and the entire site built over. Nothing of the original monument survives today; it is documented only by a handful of contemporary photographs. Anyone standing at Taksim or in Gezi Park stands on an invisible site of memory whose history has only been recovered by Armenian and Turkish historians in recent decades.