Armenian Museum of America

The Armenian Museum of America (AMA) preserves and displays works of Armenian history and culture. It’s a surprisingly large museum, with four floors that hold history and ethnographic exhibits, a contemporary art and performance gallery and a library, all dedicated to the 3,000 years of Armenian culture.

The Armenian Museum also holds a collection of artifacts from the Armenian Genocide, a seven-year period of history during which the Ottoman Empire attempted to eradicate the entire Armenian population. More than a million Armenians died as a result of the atrocity.

Although AMA has had large exhibits on the tragedy in the past, currently they have a small display that’s more memorial than anything else. A small, spiral corridor lined with quotes and images concerning the genocide lead to a single large glass case. In it is a menacing-looking metal dog collar that one victim had been forced to wear after being castrated and enslaved, the tattered outfit of a dead child, an Armenian Bible, and a handful of bone fragments from a massacre.

AMA also houses and sometimes displays the collected painting of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the assisted suicide crusader, whose parents were Armenian refugees.

Adapted with Permission from: The New England Grimpendium by J.W. Ocker