As Europe faces migrant crisis, it must recall the time when Armenians Genocide survivors sought sanctuary in European countries, journalist and analyst Mary Fitzgerald wrote in Irish Independent.

“Avenue 24 April 1915 runs through a neighborhood of my adopted city of Marseille, where the names on many local businesses betray their Armenian origins. This district in France's second-largest city is known affectionately as 'Little Armenia'. The avenue that bisects it is named after the date when what many historians and a growing number of countries now call a genocide began in Ottoman Turkey,” she writes.

According to her, the legacy of those mass killings and the accompanying forced deportations, which Turkey still denies to be a genocide, remains a running sore in the region and beyond.

“The forced exiling that accompanied the massacre in 1915 caused Armenians to scatter across the world, so becoming one of the world's largest diasporas, now estimated at up to 10 million people,” the author writes.

She also adds that in Marseille, the memory of that time is preserved in the form of a stone memorial on Avenue 24 April 1915, as well as in the lives of the estimated 80,000 residents of Armenian descent. “The city boasts eight Armenian churches, one cathedral and a bilingual school, where French-Armenians can study the language, culture and history of their homeland,” the article reads.

The Armenian community in Marseille, and France more generally, was formed in the period preceding the killings of 1915, but the majority fled here after the massacre, the author notes.  

“Armenians played a prominent role in the French Resistance during World War Two and have distinguished themselves in French intellectual life, particularly as artists, musicians and writers,” she writes.  

Referring to the migrant crisis in Europe, the analyst says: “ As Europe grapples with massive numbers of refugees fleeing violence and persecution, while xenophobia rises at home, perhaps it would do well to recall a time when desperate Armenians sought and were given sanctuary here.”