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Before Syria’s six-year-old civil war 90,000 ethnic Armenians lived in the country, two-thirds of them in Aleppo. No more than 30,000 Syrian Armenians are believed to remain in Syria, according to a report by The Economist.

The source reminds that many Syrian-Armenians were descended from ancestors who had fled their homeland in 1915, escaping systematic Ottoman massacres and ethnic cleansing. 

For most of them, the civil war has put an end to a century-long story. 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.”

Many Syrian Armenians dispersed to Lebanon, Canada, Turkey, the Persian Gulf states and elsewhere. The rest, up to 30,000, went to what they regard as the motherland. The wealthy, who found it easy to move, came first. Others tried to wait out the war in Syria, fleeing only once their means were exhausted. They arrived in Armenia with nothing.

Vartan Oskanian, a former foreign minister of Armenia who was born in Aleppo, says many of the refugees have started small businesses. In Syria, members of the Armenian minority tended to be skilled professionals or artisans; they were known as jewellers, doctors, engineers and industrialists. Native Armenians are delighted by the restaurants opened by the newcomers.

The media outlet notes that some 30 families were resettled in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Vasken Yacoubian, who once ran a construction company in Damascus, says refugees are still arriving from Syria, if no longer in large numbers. A few have even gone back, especially those with property (if only to try to sell it). Some Syrian Armenians argue that they have a duty to return: their diaspora forms an important branch of Armenian civilisation, and must be preserved