How can anyone combine mountain biking, orthodontics, journalism and history to serve the Armenian cause? Ask Dr. Pietro Kuciukian, a man with one thing on his mind: justice. He is not belligerent or vengeful, but rather a soft spoken 56-year-old professional with a mission who has made a pledge to himself to be more than just faithful to his Armenian heritage and roots.
"Until 1983, I did not even like fellow Armenians,"Dr. Kuciukian says without hesitation. "That's how I felt."
But then something happened.
"The death of my father in 1983 shook me up. I felt very guilty. My father had spent his life telling us about the Armenian people and their sufferings and there I was: empty of all emotions and feelings toward our past.
"This was bad. How could I have remained so insensitive to what my father and his generation had gone through under Turkish Ottoman rule? What was wrong with me ... the more I thought about this, the guiltier I felt," Kuciukian said during an informal discussion of current affairs at his Milan duplex apartment which is more of a library and research center than a dwelling for the Armenian activist and his wife.
Hundreds of books and magazines fill wall-to-wall shelves while several computer terminals and an Internet hookup to the worldwide web keep Dr. Kuciukian on top of international politics, research on Armenian and Turkish developments, and changes in the world political climate.
When he is not treating patients, Dr. Kuciukian is at his computer writing books, magazine articles and helping other authors with their research. Even his clinic looks like an "Armenian workshop."
Financially "comfortable", Dr. Kuciukian seems to devote more time to research of Armenian issues than orthodontistry by tailoring his other interests to serve his declared objective: justice for A fanatic off-road biker and author of the best-selling book Trial, e Motoalpinismo — a sort of textbook on mountain biking which involves the do's and don'ts of the highly competitive sport — Dr. Kuciukian has channeled his first love to serve his passion for Armenia.
In recent years, Dr. Kuciukian has traveled on his motorcycle to Turkish Anatolia tracing the historical presence of the Armenians on the land which is now part of Turkey.
The journey, which started in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi, covered the old historical Armenian cities of Ani, Van, Kars, A rdahan, Erzerum, Harput and many others inside present-day Turkey before heading back to Georgia to proceed eastward to Tbilisi, and on to Armenia.
Each stop meant more photographs of old Armenian historical churches and monuments, dusty roads and once predominantly Armenian towns.
Another trip concentrated on the Syrian Desert at Deir el Zor and the long torturous route covered by thousands of Armenians who perished during the 1915-22 Genocide by the Ottoman Turks.
His books, a healthy mix of history, present-day life and the vivid descriptive of a keen traveler, Terre Dimenticate: diario di un viaggiatore, and Nel Paese delle Pietre Urlanti — Armenia have both been sold in the thousands across Italy.
"The more I traveled and saw these towns and villages, their old churches and monuments, the more I began to understand how my father felt as an Armenian," he said. By why on a motorcycle and not by car.
Dr. Kdciukian smiles. "You are alone on the motorcycle. No radio, no one to talk to. No distractions from your surroundings, the changing mood, scenery, the wide horizon, the changes in temperature, the sights and smells of the countryside, all this is not possible in a car," he says.
"On a motorcycle, you have an opportunity to get to places that are not otherwise accessible. Try to get to a mountain top old church in a car. Try to go through small dusty villages, try going through the desert to where my ancestors were exiled and killed ... you cannot do all this in an air-conditioned car and get the same feeling of history," Dr. Kuciukian says.
Since what he describes as "my 1983 awakening", Dr. Kuciukian has built a massive archive of notes, interviews with local residents in historical Armenia and thousands of feet of video tape.
"I have 20 hours of video on my tour through Deir Zor which I hope to use as the basis of a documentary film on the Genocide. The video traces the route taken by the exiled and deported Armenians and their mass graves," he says reaching to a large flask of bone fragments from one of the sites.
"We cannot forget them," he says.
His deep interest in the genocide has led to collaboration with other authors who have similar interests.
One "silent" collaboration was with a German author whose father was an eyewitness to the tragedy. The book, entitled Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia, 1915 (Armin T. Wegner and the Armenians in Anatolia, 1915) is a collection of his personal letters and photographs from the scene.
Armin T. Wegner (1886- 1978) was a German lawyer, writer and poet, who was deeply moved by the tragedy of the Armenian people to which he had been eyewitness in Ottoman Turkey.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Wegner enrolled as a volunteer nurse, or first aid worker, in Poland but in April 1915, following the alliance between Germany and Turkey, was sent to the Middle East as a member of the German Sanitary Corps.
It was during 1915-16 that Wegner kept a dramatic diary and took photographs on what he described as the "way of no return" traveled by the Armenian people — from Constantinople to Ras el Ain, Mosul, Baghdad, Babylon, Rakim Pasha, Kalikie, Abu Herera, Abu Kemal, Deir Zor, Rakka, Meskene, Aleppo, and Konya.
In his autobiographical writings, Wegner recalls three episodes that had made a profound impact on him. The first was his father's reading to him of an account of the 1895 Armenian massacres in Turkey. The second was his friendship with a Jewish school friend who, like him, felt different from others, and third was the memory of actually jumping into the Rhine to save a drowning girl.
Dr. Kuciukian leafs through Wegner's book. He stops to talk about his own father, his earlier indifference toward fellow Armenians.
"There is so much work to be done," he says.
