YEREVAN, JUNE 27, ARMENPRESS. When war broke out in Syria in 2011, some of the wealthier families from the country’s Christian Armenian minority decamped to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, where they rented luxury flats on the city’s Northern Avenue. It felt, some would later say, as though they were on holiday. It took some time for it to dawn on them that they might never go home, The Economist published an article entitled ‘Syria’s Armenians are fleeing to their ancestral homeland’, reports Armenpress.

“Syria’s six-year-old civil war has forced more than 5m of its citizens to seek refuge outside their country. In 2015-16 hundreds of thousands trekked through the Balkans, seeking safety in Europe. But hardly any of Syria’s Armenian minority took this route. Instead, many went to Armenia”, The Economist writes, adding that with its own population shrunken by emigration Armenia was happy to welcome as many Syrian Armenians—most of them educated, middle class and entrepreneurial—as would come.

According to the newspaper, before the war over 90.000 ethnic Armenians were living in Syria, many of whom were descendants of the 1915 Armenian Genocide survivors.

Hrair Aguilan, a 61-year-old businessman, invested his life savings in a furniture factory in Aleppo just before the war, only to see it destroyed. Now he is in Yerevan to stay. “It lasted a hundred years. It is finished,” says Mr Aguilan. “There is no future for Christians in the Middle East.”

The Economist writes currently nearly 30.000 Armenians are believed to remain in Syria. Many dispersed to Lebanon, Canada, Turkey, the Persian Gulf states and elsewhere. The rest, up to 30,000, went to the motherland. Almost all of the refugees have ended up in Yerevan, and 30 families were resettled in Nagorno Karabakh. In addition, some young men who had fought in the Syrian army have volunteered to serve in the Nagorno Karabakh frontline.