Nearly a decade after the fight began to remove the cross atop Mt. Davidson because it is a religious symbol on city property, a coalition of a few Bay Area churches held a large service there last Saturday, commemorating the Armenian genocide during WWI.

The entire mountaintop and the cross now belongs to them.

Every April 24, since 1998, Bay Area Armenians have conducted memorial services at the base of the cross to remember the 1.5 million Armenian lives lost “at the hands of the Turkish government,” (as a plaque at the base of the cross reads), the result of an attempted ethnic cleansing. Regardless of the plaque’s epitaph, the genocide has never been officially recognized in the U.S. and Armenians have yet to receive an apology from the Turkish government.

About 300 people gathered for the service as the first warm ocean breezes of an unseasonably cold San Francisco April caressed the city. People who attended represented four generations of Armenian Americans, from Boy and Girl Scouts who were the color guards for the service, to Bay Area working Armenians, to the elderly, some of whom were raised hearing first-hand accounts of the atrocities their parents had witnessed.

“In 1915, my Grandfather, he was about 15 years old, saw the massacre and what was going on at the time, and they were just simply telling us the story, and the same thing was happening in too many families; the People, they knew what was going on, they were telling terrible stories,” said Armen Gelerian, an electronic engineer from Hercules. “But in ten years it’s going to be the hundred years [anniversary] of that incident, and nobody tells anything yet: the whole war, [the Turkish government] did not recognize the genocide that we knew.”

The international community, especially Turkey, has been under increasing pressure for the past decade to recognize the genocide. The Turkish government has refused to issue an apology to Armenia to this day, and for many Armenian Americans, that’s all they want.

“For us, what it means, we are just trying to establish the truth, that’s the goal of our life for this period of time,” Gelerian said. “The People in Turkey: some of them knew what happened, and some, they don’t. If all Countries could recognize that, then there will be truth in the world.”

Although some countries in Europe and the Americas have either officially recognized the genocide, or have started in that direction, the U.S. has not. Gelerian said the U.S. would probably never recognize it because it’s political; they will lose Turkey as an ally. He added that if it is not recognized and put into the history books, in 30 or 40 years, nobody will learn about it.

Back at SF state, a Turkish professor, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained the “Turkish Denial” is from both the Turkish people and their government and is an extremely sensitive issue for both. The professor said many of the Turkish people at the time were living side by side with Armenians, and to this day, ancestors of that generation consider themselves friends with Armenians. Accepting the atrocities is too much for them.

The Turkish government says the alleged war crimes happened under the Ottoman Empire, not the Turkish government. And, it was a civil war within the region, during WWI, with wartime consequences. They admit leading Armenian men who were presumed allied with Britain out of the country, and carelessness on behalf of the Turkish soldiers who led the Armenian refugees out of Armenia and through the Syrian desert and let many of them die “like the Trail of Tears,” said the professor.

Arshak Kerelian, 24, pursuing his masters in speech communications at SF State, is the head of the Armenian Student Association on campus and participated in the service Saturday. His grandparents survived the genocide and have told him stories of families who were forced from their homes, some were starved to death; some beheaded.

“The Germans had trained the Turkish soldiers to become efficient killers to exterminate mass groups of people in different ways, such as hanging them and beheading them and putting their heads on sticks;” Kerelian said, “killing pregnant women – sticking their swords in, and then bring babies out of their bellies; and killing off the clergy by cutting their hands and limbs off.”

Gentle flute music and the low hum of church elders and alter kids supplied the background for the prayers, scriptures, and sermon during the service. A boy scout held the American flag stage right; a girl scout held the Armenian flag stage left. Neither budged the entire time until they were led off by the rest of their troop (#140), in a tightly regimented march – the same way they were led to the stage at the beginning of the ceremony.

“I was very impressed with the children – the Armenian scouts – they were here in great numbers and they represented three chapters in the Bay Area: East Bay, San Francisco, and San Jose,” said Sirarpi Chakalian of Hillsborough. “They are our future and they will carry this on for us.”

Like all the speakers who participated in the service, Father Mesrob Sarafian, from St Vartan’s Armenian church in Oakland, delivered his words in both Armenian and English. St Vartan’s in one of 32 churches, associations, and organizations in northern California who helped organize the memorial.

He said afterward that the atrocities against the Armenians were “perpetrated by the Turkish government as an official policy to eliminate the Armenians from the new republic; first under the Ottoman Empire, and then, later on, under the new Turkish republic. The policy was to keep Turkey for the Turks and have all of the Christian minorities out of the way.”

On April 24, 1915, he explained, all the intellectual leaders of the communities and provinces in western Armenia – the doctors, lawyers, teachers – were captured and immediately put to death. The young men were forced to either fight for the Turkish, or be murdered; the women and children sent through the desert or forced to convert to Islam or die.

“That’s what we commemorate today, the loss of these million-and-a-half people,” he said. “Most of whom were our ancestors and left Turkish Armenia, which had a population of 2.5 million people at the time, in 1914. By 1916 the [Armenian] population in Turkey was about 50-75 thousand.”

Today, he said, there are about 7.5 million Armenians in the world, including about 3 million in Armenia, and one million in the U.S. In California, there’s about 20,000 Armenian Americans in the Bay Area, about 30,000 in Fresno, and a quarter of a million in the greater Los Angeles area.

Whether or not official domestic, Turkish, and wider international acceptance of the genocide occurs, the Armenian associations of northern California will always have a place to conduct the annual service. The land and cross were purchased from the City of San Francisco in 1997 for just $ 2.5 million.

“We were lucky that the auction came at the time when we were looking for a memorial for the genocide,” said Krigor Soghikian, who chairs the Council of Armenian American Organizations of Northern California and whose organization purchased the land. “And fortunately we really didn’t have any opponents at the auction, so it was a fairly easy way of acquiring it.”

It was a good way to solve the “church and state” issue, but since then, Armenian associations have had opposition from the Turkish community about the plaque at the base of the cross which directly charges the Turkish government with the genocide, but Soghikian explained that the New York Times recently started using the phrase “Armenian Genocide” (in “alleged Armenian genocide’s” stead).

The NY Times had found in their archives articles from 1915-1918, which they had published. “So they couldn’t really refute what they had written,” Soghikian said. “Although the term genocide wasn’t coined until 1948,” he added, “they had still reported on attempts of Turks trying to annihilate the Armenian population.”

Evidence, said Soghikian, is in Derzor, a desert region of Syria where mounds of skulls and bones were uncovered, and in caves where archeologists have discovered evidence that masses were scorched in them.

Soghikian said the Turkish government is a successor of the Ottoman empire, but the Turkish government wont admit the Ottoman Empire did it either, but the Bay Area Turkish council, who opposed the plaque, did say the Ottoman’s did it, and he feels that’s a step in a positive direction.

After the dedication on the plaque, a quote from Avedis Aharonian, writer and educator, reads: If evil of this magnitude can be, if our own children forget, then we deserve oblivion and we earn the world’s scorn.