Gulenia Tumtumian was born in Aintab in 1898. Her life was transformed in 1915, the year she turned 17, when Turkish soldiers entered her family home and seized her brother. He was taken from the house in front of family members, and Gulenia never heard from him again.
The upheaval that claimed her brother also separated her from her parents. In the confusion and forced movement that followed, she became responsible for a newborn nephew, Markar Tumtumian. The infant was fragile and silent, and Gulenia hid him beneath her clothing so that he would not be seen and taken. That small concealment skin to skin, breath muffled beneath fabric was a act of defiance in a moment when protections had collapsed.
She and others from her neighborhood were forced into a horse drawn wagon and driven away. The journey stopped in the middle of the desert when the genocidal turk told them he would not continue, ordered them off the vehicle and threw their belongings into the sand. Stripped of possessions and shelter, they began to walk, with Markar still hidden beneath her garments. This walk also known as death walk in the desert during the Armenian genocide.
The march across the desert unfolded amid scenes of profound suffering. Along the route, Gulenia passed people crying, screaming for help and begging for food and water. Bodies lay where life had failed; mothers clutched children who had stopped moving. The air seemed full of exhausted pleas. For many, the roads ended not in safety but in Syrian cities that could offer only provisional respite. Gulenia and those with her reached Aleppo, where they were taken to makeshift shelters crowded with others who had fled violence in Anatolia.
In the shelters, daily life narrowed to essentials: finding food, tending to the sick, keeping infants warm. Gulenia raised Markar on her own. She fed him, soothed him and shielded him from the attention of guards and others whose presence threatened the fragile continuities of family life. The rhythm of her days was set by the infant’s needs; the nights were marked by watchfulness. Family responsibilities that might once have been shared were now concentrated entirely on her shoulders.
Denied formal schooling by the circumstances of displacement, Gulenia turned to whatever printed material she could find. Newspapers and books in the shelters became her tutors. Under the dim light of common rooms and small windows, she taught herself to read. Learning letters and sentences was not an indulgence; it was a practical step toward autonomy. Literacy allowed her to read notices, follow news about relief efforts, and participate in the discussions that organized community aid. It also opened a private horizon of possibility: knowledge that could be used to help others.
As the Armenian community in Aleppo organized relief and reconstituted social institutions, Gulenia’s steady presence and practical skills drew notice. Her work was the kind that keeps communities functioning: identifying who needed help, arranging for supplies, attending church meetings, and offering comfort to grieving neighbors. Years later she was chosen as chairwoman of the Armenian church in Devoudye, a role that formalized the responsibilities she had already carried in quieter ways.
Her leadership was practical rather than ceremonial. She helped oversee distribution of limited resources, coordinated assistance to families and elders, and ensured that communal rituals and religious practice continued. In a time when infrastructure had been shattered, the church and its officers served both spiritual and material functions; Gulenia’s role in that apparatus made her a focal point for a neighborhood determined to endure.
While living in Aleppo she met Garabed Dekermenjian. They married and established a household in the city. The marriage was part of a fragile reconstruction: people created new families and relationships as a means of survival and renewal. Gulenia continued to raise Markar, engage in community service and manage the private work of keeping a household with the limited means available to them.
Family accounts preserve small but vivid memories that give texture to the larger history. They recall the way she would press Markar close beneath her coat when soldiers passed, how she would sit with an open newspaper until the shapes of letters became familiar, and how she would move among neighbors distributing bread with steady hands. Those recollections are precise, not sentimental: they trace the daily acts that kept life going.
The shelters and makeshift communities of Aleppo were overcrowded and under-resourced, yet they were sites where collective survival was organized. Churches, relief committees and neighborhood groups acted as intermediaries for aid and as centers of communal life. Gulenia’s election as chairwoman of the Armenian church in Devoudye reflected communal recognition of her reliability, capability and devotion. In that role she helped maintain a measure of social order and dignity for people who had lost almost everything.
Gulenia’s life after displacement shows how private resilience and public responsibility intersect. Teaching herself to read transformed a survival skill into civic capacity: literacy enabled her to handle correspondence, understand relief procedures and participate in meetings where aid was distributed. Raising Markar ensured continuity for a family line severed by violence. Her leadership kept a community connected and functioning in the aftermath of trauma.
Relatives emphasize that she did not frame her life as exceptional. She spoke plainly of the wagon, the desert, the death march and the mothers clutching their children; she described the empty hands and the thrown belongings without flourish. Yet her response to those horrid events with concealment, caregiving, learning and organizing amounted to a lifelong practice of service. Her story endures in family memory as an example of endurance, practicality, courage and resilience.
Her family continues the fight to this day to have Armenian genocide recognized by Turkey.