A ghetto by any other name

There isn’t much to see at the monastery of San Lazzaro. In the church there are some paintings by a painter who was, in the words of the guide, abbastanza famoso – sufficiently famous – about right, too; and in the museum a pretty ceiling roundel by Tiepolo the elder, a well preserved Egyptian mummy, and about five rooms of stuff whose significance lies in their having been made, or perhaps made, or owned, or gifted by an Armenian. There is also a gallery of mostly horrible portraits of Armenians who have done well, mostly successful doctors. (Though there is one who’d become an Ottoman government official in Egypt).

The tour quickly deteriorates into what any encounter with an Armenian always and quickly deteriorates: a pitch about the greatness of the Armenian people, all the famous people in the world who are, were, or could have been Armenian (Casanova, maybe – a disconcerting point of pride in our guide who is a Catholic priest), and, of course, the heinousness of the Armenian genocide.

Armenians cannot understand why the Jewish genocide can be such a big thing and the Armenian genocide – not. They do not understand that in the public mind – a very small, crowded space – there can be only one of each: one Miss Universe, one Pope, one love, one home, one mother, one winner of a TV program who married a millionaire, and one holocaust. They also do not realize that all nations who exist have both experienced and dealt holocausts of one sort or another; indeed, all nations who have ever existed. Armenians themselves have once conquered Armenia from a people who lived there before them. Historical records of that event are lost, but is it just possible that they have had to kill to conquer? The guide at San Lazarro insists that that conquest was peaceful but offers no evidence to support the surprising claim.

In any case, when a large body of the middle and upper middle class in the west – the Armenians – spend so much effort on publicizing the Armenian genocide of 1915 but do nothing whatsoever to prevent similar action in Sudan or Rwanda or Bosnia today, it becomes clear that their interests are not noble but self interested, not universal but particular. An Armenian friend once explained: there is a house in Istanbul I could claim. Which is precisely the reason why the Turkish family who now live in it will never admit to any genocide of anybody by anyone. The genocide turns out to be a property dispute.

The island of San Lazarro has a beautiful campanile – tilting like all campanile of Venice. It also has a pleasant sun deck by the water’s edge where one can kill a few hours waiting for his boat. From here, other islands on the lagoon, most abandoned, each with some trees and a ruin of a monastic institution can be seen and the incredibly busy boat traffic between Venice and Lido: white boats, gleaming in the sunlight, slithering on water like snakes. It is peaceful, but not quiet: there is a great, constant hum of engines that hangs over this part of the lagoon. It was not like that when Byron lived here, studying Armenian. Later, he published the first Armenian grammar in English.