Community Conversation: Harut Sassounian

The famed Armenian-American journalist, who lives in Glendale, shares how he’s kept Armenian culture alive
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By Malina Saval,
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January 22, 2025
The arrival of the Internet changed all that, notes Sassounian, who also served as a non-governmental delegate on human rights at the United Nations in Geneva. “I put my column online and suddenly, everybody was asking me about it,” he says. “My columns would go worldwide.”
In Part One of our conversation, Sassounian shares with Pasadena his journey to the States and how his family, who left Armenia 1,000 years ago, has kept its culture and language intact.
Well, this sounds very unreal, and when I say this to people, it blows their minds. My family left Armenia about 1,000 years ago. And I know this because I know Armenian history. Armenia was attacked by the Mongols around the 10th century, and they destroyed a lot of the cities and killed wounded Armenians–but a few thousand escaped Armenia. And they came to an area called Cilicia. And that’s where my family’s origin is. My great, great grandparents wound up in what is now Turkey. Aleppo was sort of the pitstop when the Armenian genocide happened–there were deportations, some survived the desert march. Aleppo is right across from Turkey and was the most natural, quickest place to settle. So that’s how we ended up there.
I speak fluent Armenian. I am a member of the Armenian Church. I follow Armenian customs and traditions. It’s as if I was born and I’m still living there. My life here as an Armenian is similar to an Armenian who never left Armenia 1,000 years ago. What’s really interesting is that the town in Armenia where my family originally comes from, they have their own dialect of Armenian, which I learned as a child. In Aleppo, there was a huge Armenian community, and I went to Armenian schools from kindergarten through high school. Armenians lived in one area of the city, and they spoke Armenian. The shopkeepers were Armenian. The schools, the churches, the business people–they all spoke Armenian. My mother, who was born in Syria, didn’t speak a word of Arabic. I’m from Syria, but I don’t identify as a Syrian. I identify as an Armenian.
Tell me about how you wound up in Glendale, which, together with L.A. County, has the largest population of Armenians outside of Armenia.
My whole family left Aleppo in 1965 and moved to Beirut. In 1969 I came over to the States by myself. My family followed in the years after. I have a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University in NYC and then I got my MBA from Pepperdine. So, I moved to L.A. in 1975.
What are some of the most pressing issues the local Armenian community in the Glendale and Pasadena areas are concerned with on a daily basis?
Locally, the community, like all other immigrant groups that come here, want to perpetuate their culture. They set up Armenian schools, churches, Armenian centers–a couple of them in Pasadena. And so, they teach the Armenian language to the young generation. They get active in Armenian dance groups, and culturally they end up marrying each other. And they all care about the homeland, what’s happening in Armenia. A lot of things are happening in the homeland, especially since the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, which Armenia lost. They also care about the Armenian community in Lebanon, where there is also war. Armenia, sadly, is in very bad shape.