Varuzhan Geghamyan, an Armenian scholar focusing on Turkey, has revealed incoming British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Turkish heritage.
The former London Mayor and British Foreign Minister is the great-grandson of the Ottoman Empire’s last interior minister, Ali Kemal.
Like Johnson, his great-grandfather was a journalist who went into government.
Kemal was known for condemning the attacks on and massacres of the Empire’s Armenians during the First World War. He inveighed against the Union and Progress Party as the authors of that crime, relentlessly demanding their prosecution and punishment.
On 4 November 1922, Kemal was captured and lynched by nationalists fighting to establish the Turkish state.
His blood-covered body was subsequently hanged with an epitaph across his chest which intentionally misspelled his name as “Artin Kemal” implying that he was Armenian and not Muslim.
Meanwhile, Turkey celebrated incoming British prime minister Boris Johnson’s Turkish heritage on Wednesday, with politicians and media proclaiming that the “Ottoman grandson” could strengthen ties between two countries on Europe’s fringes, Reuters reported.
