The National Museum of South Ossetia hosted an evening dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Ossetian genocide, organized by Maya Bekoeva, a teacher of Russian and Ossetian language and literature and a member of the Ossetian Writers ' Union.
Opening the event, the museum director Merab Zasseev has noted that there is no way to the future if we forget our history.
“Today here gathered the people who are not indifferent to the history and pain of their nation. This is a huge, unhealed wound of our people. There is no path ahead if we forget our history. Who if not we, members of the Writers' Union, will talk about it,” Zasseev said?
Maya Bekoeva recounted her great-grandfather's memories of the 1920 Ossetian genocide.
“My great-grandfather was a brave man. Once, the Gori prince borrowed money from him, but was not going to return it back. When the great-grandfather once again came for a debt, and the prince began to mock him, my great-grandfather killed him. He was arrested, but he did not regret a bit about what he had done, he believed that he had defended the honor of the Ossetian. My father was still a teenager, he had also a one-month-old sister, and when the family were forced to flee with their fellow villagers, my grandmother was asked to leave the baby, they were afraid that the child would not survive the road. The grandmother firmly said that she would not leave the child, “let fate decide in its own way,” she said. According to my father's recollections, many children died on the way. Our guys stood in the mountains, and seeing the refugees, they tried to help them. My ancestors in North Ossetia did not stay long, when everything calmed down, they returned to their native village,” said Maya.
Bekoeva told a few more stories about the representatives of her family associated with the genocide.
The publicist Asiat Nanieva, who is from the Leningor district, has that in 1920 the Georgians did not burn villages in the region and did not kill people, which suggests that the Georgians already knew in advance that the Leningor region would belong to them.
“In 1920, the Mensheviks did not burn a single village in Leningor district. Only in his memoirs, my husband, a poet Gersan Kodalaev, describes in his work "Bur nymatdzhynta" how the armed Mensheviks stopped at his village to rest, they drove their horses into a field sown with corn. One of the villagers reprimanded them, saying that it was not good to ruin someone else's harvest. The Mensheviks were silent, drove out their horses, but after that there was an explosion. When everything calmed down, everyone saw a huge hole in the sanctuary, which is still in the wall. By this they wanted to say that one should not object to them,” Asiat said.
Naniyeva asked her colleagues to try to write about every case related to the genocide of Ossetians. She herself published a book in two copies based on real events.
The guest of the event, Alla Gagieva, read out one of the nine chapters of the poem "Sast Khid" by her now deceased mother, a teacher of the Ossetian language and literature Yuza Kharebova, dedicated to the genocide of Ossetians.
According to Alla Gagieva, her mother never wrote poetry, but the events of 1991-1992 forced her to take up the pen.
“She was probably a great patriot at heart. Therefore, I began to write poetry. I am very happy that today I had the opportunity to read out my mother's poems,” she said.
The poems of her own composition about the genocide were read out by Olga Chekhoyeva, a member of the Union of Writers of Ossetia, a fairy tale writer, a teacher of the South Ossetia State University Bella Dzhigkaeva, mathematics teacher Ella Parastayeva and a poet Elena Tuaeva. A poem by Merab Zasseev based on Arsen Kotsoev's "Solomi" about the events of the genocide of 1920 was presented by Roman Gobozov.
At the evening, poems and songs were also sounded by the graduates of the 3rd school.
At such a young age, a pupil of school № 3 Lena Kotayeva dedicated her poems to the bloody events of a century ago.
The event ended with the poems by Merab Zassev that he had recently written.
