Amalia Abramyan

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Hey, beautiful people! Welcome back to The Medz Mamas!
I'm your host, Anoush Bargamian!

Today, granddaughter Violetta Sagatela honors her paternal grandmother, Amalia Abramyan.

"Amalia was born in 1924 in Khtsaberd, a village which was populated by an Armenian ethnic majority before 1989, before the displacement of Armenians from their ancestral land by the Azeri government. Since then, Khtsaberd has been renamed and now bears an Azeri name.

Amalia was always proud of her contribution to the war effort (behind the front lines) in defeating the Nazis in 1945. She often described the day she first heard the announcement of the end of World War 2 on the loudspeaker.

Amalia moved to Baku before the 1950s to find work as a seamstress and to start a family. Amalia married when she was in her mid-20s, an old maid by those standards, and had two children, the younger of whom was my father. Babo worked as a seamstress and made clothes for her children, but her dream was to attend medical school, which never materialized. A lifelong lover of the arts, she was particularly fond of theater and was the first to take me to a live show. Babo was always ahead of her time, which was not embraced in a rigid society that expected women to know their place and not deviate from the norm. Being a trailblazer, she was one of the few women not to take her husband's last name upon marriage and to leave an abusive marriage.

What is most notable about her is how fiercely she fought for me when confronted with bullying classmates or an unkind teacher. I spent many days with her as a child, and I inherited her love of plants and animals. Babo's favorites were stray cats, which she fed and gave shelter to as they passed through her home. To this day, I sing to cats, as she often did when I was a child, which always brought great joy." -Violetta Sagatela
 
In this episode, we referred to the Armenian Relief Society, an NGO. To learn more about the  Armenian Relief Society, please visit arseastusa.org.

Special thanks to sound designer and musician Aris Buechele for creating the beautiful music for Season 2. You can find Aris @noiseship on Instagram.

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Created by:  Anoush Bargamian @sweetangst_art @themedzmamas

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