Russian-Israeli blogger Alexander Lapshin has come across Armenian graves near a small town of Atlit 20km south of Haifa.
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Atlit is known for its powerful crusader fortress and a creepy prison, built by the Brits and now turned into a museum.
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“Guided by the map, I passed through the whole town and reached a field. A nondescript path led through the fields towards little-known Neolithic era caves. And suddenly I saw two Armenian graves, and not old ones, dating back to 1970s,” the blogger tells in a Facebook post.
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He then walked further to come across several dilapidated buildings.
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“Only after I searched the Internet, I found out that the place was home to an Armenian village of Barikh between 1924 and 1970. In 1924, a dozen Armenian families from Haifa moved here, looking for a more peaceful place to live. In Haifa, relations between Jews and Arabs were getting more and more aggravated (which ultimately led to the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948) and the Armenians tried to stay away from this,” Lapshin says.
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“In 1970, already as part of Israel, the Armenian village of Barikh gradually disappeared. The elderly were dying, and young people were leaving for work in Haifa and Tel Aviv. As a result, there was no single resident in the village in 1971, and only a few graves and ruins remind of this village today,” the blogger adds.
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H/T Public Radio Of Armenia
