Armenians

They've been coming to Urartu Coffee for months, and every day it's the same. They sit. They sip. They smoke. It's hard to explain, the men say -- there's just something about the taste of tar joining java. But Jack Kakoyan, 28, and his friends may soon stop meeting at their usual table, where they spend hours socializing in the sun.

Members of Los Angeles' vast Armenian American community gathered outside the Turkish Consulate on Saturday to condemn the killing of prominent newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was shot Friday on a downtown street in Istanbul after repeated run-ins with Turkish authorities. Dink, who ran Turkey's only Armenian-language newspaper, clashed with Turkish officials over the government's denial of the Armenian genocide, the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey starting in 1915.

Tens of thousands of mourners wound through the heart of this ancient city Tuesday in the funeral procession for an ethnic Armenian journalist whose slaying triggered soul-searching over national identity, freedom of expression and the historical ghosts that shadow Turkey's present. Followed by the largely silent throng, a black hearse slowly bore the flower-strewn coffin of editor Hrant Dink to an Armenian Orthodox church, where he was eulogized as a voice of courage and conscience.

Family ties, church and school are the pillars of Glendale's expanding and tight-knit Armenian American community. Armenians have settled in Glendale for more than half a century, bringing with them traditions from Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and the former Soviet Union.

They were dressed as police officers, but Iraqi physician Nina Grigor knew something was dreadfully wrong when they threw her into a car, blindfolded her, tied her wrists -- and ripped the cross from her neck. For five days last March, the Iraqi Armenian Christian was held somewhere in Baghdad. When she was finally freed after her family paid $100,000 in ransom, she was immediately spirited away to Armenia for safety and then, in July, to Glendale.

For generations, bottled mineral water from the town of Jermuk has been a kind of national tonic in Armenia, proudly sipped like a fine chardonnay in California or taken for its perceived medicinal value, like chicken soup. As the Armenian population here has grown, demand for the water has grown with it.

Campaigning for a seat on the Glendale City Council over the last several weeks dredged up bittersweet childhood memories for John Drayman. A candidates' debate took him to the Oakmont Country Club, where his father wasn't allowed to dine as a guest, let alone join. An invitation to speak at a home in the tony Royal Canyon neighborhood turned out to be at his mother's dream home -- the very one his parents had tried to buy, only to have the sale mysteriously fall out of escrow.

One is an Armenian American priest who resides in Pasadena, the other a Rwandan minister who lives half a world away in Kigali. Across culture and distance, however, Father Vazken Movsesian and Benjamin Kayumba share a powerful if tragic bond: their peoples' traumatic legacy of genocide. Movsesian lost dozens of relatives, including a grandfather, during the early 20th century massacre of about 1.2 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which became the modern republic of Turkey.

Reversing long-standing policy, a major American Jewish organization has officially recognized the early 20th century massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide -- but set off a new furor Wednesday by declining to support a congressional resolution that would do the same.

In an age when new churches can be as boxy and boring as shopping malls, the members of St. Gregory the Illuminator longed for arches. They craved warm-hued stone dug from quarries in their ancestors' Armenia. While other growing parishes settled for former banks or castoff older churches, this parish housed in a former Coca-Cola distribution center wanted a building all its own -- a brand-new structure but one that would look centuries old.