A leaflet called Azernews, claiming to be the “Nation’s No. 1 international newspaper”, was handed over to me on the Azerbaijan Airlines flight heading to Tbilisi, offered some interesting insight on the small corner of Caucasus I was leaving behind. Peppered between the ecstatic comments of Spain’s Minister of Industry on the local economy, and a sublimely servile feature on the mum of the current president (and wife of the one before), the only international news was dedicated to Armenia. Armenia had assaulted Azerbaijan. Armenia shelled Azeri villages. Armenian soldiers were so unhappy that suicides were rife in the army. Armenian cops had just caressed with batons protesters and journalists at an anti-war parade in Yerevan.

Nothing of that kind – riots, suicides, beaten correspondents – seemed to be going on when I arrived in Yerevan one day later, despite Azernews’ prophecy of more mayhem to come. I wasn’t surprised, for the laughable propaganda foisted on to me was one aspect of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the challenge to the very presence of Armenia as a splinter in the Turkic land.

The Turkic language family starts from the shores of the Bosphorus and ends on the icy coasts of Siberia’s Yakutia. Different alphabets and borders might convey an image of fragmentation, but a little digging – and a vocabulary - is sufficient to unearth the legacy of an awesome empire built on horseback. Mountain is dağ in Turkish and Azeri, tağ in Uyghur, taw in Tatar and dağ again in Tuvan. Nine is doguz in Istanbul, toğiz in Almaty, toğus in the Russian Altai.

In this vast Turkic ocean, only two islands – two oddities, two differences – exist: Georgia and Armenia. Indo-European and Christian, the two nations share almost nothing with their neighbours: history, ethnicity, religion or even alphabet. Whilst Georgia mostly had its dealing with Persia, Armenia’s history was closely interlinked with the Seljuk’s. Living in the vast Anatolian altiplano, the Armenians became one facet in the kaleidoscope of peoples under the Ottoman Empire.

1915 was a momentous years for the moribund Empire. Its participation to the Great War was going disastrously, the Arab provinces were rioting, Tsarists armies were pressing at the borders and there were risks of an Allied action. The feudal Empire was struggling to compete in an industrial, all-out war. As it often happens in times of crisis, delusional leaders tried to shrug off their failures, laying them on someone’s doorstep. Someone who didn’t quite fit in.

Standing on top of Cascade, Yerevan sprawling at the feet of this slightly incongruous monument, I noticed a futuristic sculpture on a nearby hill. It looked deceptively close and I decided, there and then, to head for it. After all, being within shouting distance of the monument to the first genocide in history, only to snub it, seemed too impolite even for my standards.

The cityscape changed time and again along my walk. The view ranged from crumbling Soviet cityscapes to modern block of flats – all seriously tall and desperately ugly – to shopping malls emblazoned with the same sort of logos one would find in London or Dubai. Glimpses of a Soviet je-ne-sais-quoi still resisted, though, under the guises of old Ladas, crumbling GAZ vans and belching PAZ buses, or stray dogs snoring besides the entrance of Yerevan’s first – and so far only – Marks & Spencer.

Finally, having inhaled enough octanes to last me a week, a minimalist grey panel appeared next to an Armenian rarity: a freshly paved road. I had finally arrived to Tsitsernakaberd, or the Armenian Genocide memorial complex.

Genocide is like a steam machine: it takes a bit of time to gain momentum. No mentally stable human being is capable, by himself, to commit the murder of fellow men and women on a grand scale, or at least this is what I choose to believe. But what if this person is constantly exposed to a media barrage aimed at de-humanising the prospective victims? What if one constantly hears propaganda obsessively repeating how a certain ethnicity is alien, inhuman, an enemy and a potential threat to his own existence? Give it time, and out of this substrate violence will inevitably grow. Hitler used these methods to convince an advanced society that Jews needed to go up chimneys. So did the Ottomans with Armenians.

The minister of war, Enver Pasha, accused the Armenians of having orchestrated with the Russians a particular bad defeat that the Ottomans suffered in the Great War. Istanbul’s press echoed it with all sort of absurdities – plots, revolts, and plans to sabotage the war effort. A little later, in February 1915, Enver ordered all Armenian servicemen to be disarmed, leaving their communities without defence. With propaganda pounding, it didn’t take long for local potentates to start taking the matters into their own hands: Van’s Armenian community, one of the most numerous, was encircled and almost wiped out before a Tsarist column was able to breake the siege.

In the night between April 23rd and 24th 1915, as ANZAC troops landed in Gallipoli, the Ottoman government staged its personal version of Kristallnacht: 250 amongst the most preeminent Armenian intellectuals were rounded up in Istanbul and taken to Ankara, where they were then murdered. Campaigners for the recognition of the genocide use this night as its beginning. For me, however, it all started with a very democratic act: the passing, by the Ottoman parliament, of the Tehcir Law on May 29th 1915.

A man was teaching a girl – quite possibly his daughter – how to ride a bicycle in the Memorial’s parking lot while his other son, already a skilled cyclist, ran circles around them. Above, on a belvedere that was offering commanding views of the city, teenagers on a date flirted with gusto. Not exactly what I had expected from the main memorial to this nation’s most tragic event.

I emerged in a vast esplanade, empty but for the monument to the murdered Armenians. It was a masterpiece of Soviet futurism: a circle of angled stone monoliths, half Stonehenge and half launch pit of a Soyuz, stood centre stage; slightly on the side-line stood the Soyuz itself, that obelisk I’d seen from Cascade. A closer inspection revealed a fissure, large enough for kids to play in, running the length of the object. A wreath of red flowers, mounted on a pedestal beside the circle of stones, offered the only note of colour in the whole grey scenario. I started walking towards the stone circle where, in an alcove dug below the ground level, was the eternal flame.

As is the norm with infamies, the proponents of the Tehcir Law attempted to masquerade the bill as a public order one. It was in the name of public peace, indeed, that the Ottomans ordered the military to remove the population of villages which stood accused of engaging in “acts of espionage or treason”. With an efficiency that it didn’t seem to possess when facing the Russians, the army began moving hundreds of thousands of Armenian from their homes to the bleak Syrian desert.

Imperial Germany was the Sultan’s main ally; Germans could be found building Ottoman railways, modernizing its industries, training the army. Those men weren’t blind and soon realised that something terrible was going on. From all across Anatolia, horrified German officials began reporting the death marches, the systematic rapes, the sale of women at bazaars in provincial Syria; all this constituted proof that the Ottoman empire, according to Major General Otto Von Lossow, “have embarked upon the total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia”.

It didn’t take long before reports of pogroms, concentration camps, death marches and mass graves started to appear on the world’s press. Sources were abundant and bipartisan: American ambassador Henry Morgenthau, British diplomat Gertrude Bell and German ambassador von Wangenheim all denounced the desire of the Sublime Porte to “exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire”. German doctor Armin Wegner also took hundreds of photos of starving civilians, left to fend for themselves in the Syrian desert.

As the killing happened the Sublime Porte enacted a second piece of legislation, veritably the real motivation behind the whole barbarity. The bill allowed the government to seize all the possessions of those it’d sent to die of starvation in the desert. Armenians were amongst the wealthiest of the nationalities in the Ottoman society and, in doing so, the Sultan gave himself a much needed lifeline to keep on fighting the war. It is this legacy – the paper trail, if you will – and the related accountabilities that make modern Turkey so weary of admitting the 1915-1918 acts for the genocide they were.

It wasn’t enough. Genocide didn’t save the Ottomans: the war was lost, the Empire carved in pieces and those responsible – Mehmet Pasha, Grand Vizier; Enver Pasha, war minister; Ahmed Djemal Pasha, minister of the Navy – fled Turkey, where they were sentenced to death in absentia. In the meantime, forces at their orders killed between 800,000 and 1.5 million civilians.

The atmosphere at the Memorial was oddly jovial. I was overtaken by a group of garrulous and plump kids on my way to the stone circle: holding flowers and wearing gaudy sweaters covered in racing cars logos – Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull – they arrived to the cenotaph before me.

A group of middle-aged men and women, accompanied by a few teenage youths, stood in circle around the flame. Something in their clothing and stride gave me the impression they were French, sons and grandsons of Armenian émigrés, returning to their ancestral land. They held scores and, led by an ample movement by their director, the choir – because that was what they were – began to sing.

It wasn’t a joyous hymn. Mysterious words, sung in a language I couldn’t understand, rolled by and ascended towards the slice of sky above us. I needn’t an interpreter to grasp what stories those songs must’ve been telling.

I stood on the margin of the circle, fearful of breaking the magic spell that had descended on the Monument. More visitors kept on arriving and all remained silent, recognising the tones of hymns that, evidently, united this scattered people. I saw a few of the cantors struggling with their emotions, their director weeping openly as she waved instructions, song after song.

It didn’t take long before I spotted the children I met before. Standing solemn with their hands held behind their backs, looking like the grown men they’ll become, they listened respectfully to the chant of those visitors that they didn’t know, but with whom they shared the legacy of the world’s first modern genocide.

I left the Memorial almost on tiptoe, a brick-sized of emotions wedged in my throat. Before the choir, the songs, the tears the whole concept of the Armenian genocide felt remote, distant and all too political, a object of contention without too much grounding. Now, it was as raw as back then.

Less than half the world recognises the genocide of Armenians. Even fewer took notice of the wars that saw it pitted against Azerbaijan and its powerful proxy, Turkey. The world’s lack of care isn’t a new phenomenon, for it was remarked by one Adolf Hitler.

On the evening of the invasion of Poland, in September 1939, he told his military leadership to be merciless against the Slavs, whom he considered to be inferiors. He didn’t expect the world to raise an eyebrow because, “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”