Sardarapat §

Survival battle of May 1918

Sardarapat is the site of the May 1918 battle that stopped the Ottoman advance toward Yerevan during the collapse of the Transcaucasian front. Alongside Bash-Aparan and Karakilisa, it helped preserve a small Armenian core at the moment when Ottoman forces had already destroyed much of western Armenian life and were advancing into the eastern Armenian plain.

The battle's military significance is inseparable from its symbolic weight. Armenian memory treats Sardarapat as the moment a stateless, refugee-filled people avoided final political extinction. That is a national myth, but it rests on a real military and demographic emergency. Without the May battles, the First Republic declared on 28 May 1918 might not have had a viable capital or territorial core. editorial

In the atlas, Sardarapat is where genocide memory turns into state survival. It links the Ottoman eastern front, the founding of the First Republic and the later Soviet and post-Soviet Armenian state.