Forty Martyrs Armenian Chanting From Aleppo

In one of Aleppo's oldest quarters sits a church, once a hub and a harbor. The head priest there, Reverend Yeznig Zegchanian, agreed to chant, but he was going to do it now and he was only going to do it once. Jason Hamacher, a drummer from DC who had stumbled into a serious fascination with Syria's endangered spiritual traditions, sprinted back to his hotel to grab his equipment. The result, recorded in the resonant Forty Martyrs Armenian Orthodox Church, captures a time, place, and language poised to blink out of existence. The city is embroiled in Syria's heartrending civil war. The church's congregants, descendants of several waves of Armenian refugees, have been scattered to the four winds. The language of the chants, West Armenian, once spoken in what is now Turkey, seems destined to die out in a generation. To honor this embattled community and the city that sheltered it, Lost Origin Sounds Series is releasing Forty Martyrs: Armenian Chants from Aleppo at the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, the tragic and bloody Ottoman campaign that drove many Armenians to the centuries-old community in Aleppo.