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When war broke out in Syria in 2011, some of the wealthier Armenian families moved to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, where they rented luxury flats on the city’s Northern Avenue.

''It felt, some would later say, as though they were on holiday. [...] It took some time for it to dawn on them that they might never go home,'' an article published in The Economist reads.

According to the article, more than 5 million citizens of Syria left the country as a result of the situation in Syria. Thousands of them headed for Europe, while the representatives of Syria’s Armenian minority took a route to Armenia. ''With its own population shrunken by emigration (falling from 3.6m in 1991 to 3m today), Armenia was happy to welcome as many Syrian Armenians—most of them educated, middle class and entrepreneurial—as would come,'' the article says.

According to the authors, many of the refugees descended from ancestors who had escaped the Genocide committed by the Ottomans. One of them, Hrair Aguilan, 61, invested all his life savings in a furniture factory in Aleppo just before the war, only to see it destroyed. “It lasted a hundred years. It is finished. There is no future for Christians in the Middle East,” he says.

The wealthy Armenians were the first to move to Armenia, while others tried to wait out the war in Syria, fleeing to their homeland only once their means were exhausted. They thus arrived in Armenia with nothing.

Vasken Yacoubian, who once ran a construction company in Damascus, now heads the Armenian branch of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), a global charity. In his words, refugees are still arriving from Syria. 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,'' the authors note.

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