Armenians Found Community in This Plymouth Neighborhood on the Beach

“I’ve traveled around the world and to me, this is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” Steve says. “It’s breathtaking. Not a bad place at all.”

The Kurkjians bought a cottage in Manomet in 1948. The father, Anooshavan, was a toddler during Armenian Genocide by Turkey in 1915, when as many as

1.5 million are believed to have died. He came to America with his mother, the only surviving members of their family. He grew up to become a respected commercial artist and portrait painter in Boston. Anooshavan and his wife Rosella wanted their children Stephen, Karolyn and Elizabeth to enjoy all the fruits this new and exciting country bore.

“We didn’t even own a car when we first started coming here,” Steve recalls. “We would get a ride from cousins and friends. We would stay for the summer and my father would come down on weekends and for his vacation. I remember there were always people at the house – 25 or so at a time. The women were constantly cooking. I don’t know where all those people slept because the cottages were tiny back then!”

Affable and athletic, young Steve made friends easily and played with other children in the neighborhood. Baseball and epic late-night games of tag ranging across the neighborhood filled their summer. One of his younger companions was Miriam “Mimi” O’Neal, who still visits the family home in Manomet during the warm-weather months.

“I always thought I was Armenian,” says Mimi, who is as Irish as the day as long. “All my friends were Armenian. I loved the language and the food. I didn’t know ethnicity as a child. Steve’s father cooked pancakes every Saturday morning for the neighborhood kids. We spent time together and all blended as one.”

Like an extended clan, everyone in the community kept an eye on the younger ones. Neighbors dutifully watched out for the children to make sure everyone was safe and would report youthful indiscretions. Once, Anooshaven caught Mimi’s older sister smoking and told her parents about her illicit activity.

“She was horrified,” she recalls. “But that’s what happened here. It was very family-oriented.”

Mimi also attended the Idlewild dances with Steve’s sister Elizabeth. Well, they didn’t really go into the dance hall since children were prohibited. Rather, they sat outside in back of the inn and listened to the lively and strangely enjoyable music as it poured forth from doors and windows left open in a futile attempt to cool sweaty bodies from the summer heat.

“Elizabeth never really wanted to go, but I made her,” she says. “I think she was uncomfortable because it was the older generation of her family, but I loved it.”

Manomet’s Armenian enclave also mingled with neighbors on the beach. The community gathered together on the shore to bask in the sun and enjoy the salt water. Steve still remembers all the Armenian women holding hands and walking tentatively into cold Cape Cod Bay.

“The women were always busy cooking and running the home,” he says. “This is where they could rest and bond together. They would walk arm and arm into the water and hold hands in a circle. No one ever swam because it was too cold.”

One of those women was Ann Kalajian. She started coming to Manomet in 1947 with her husband Charles and later her three sons, Edward and twins Arthur and Peter. They also stayed at the Idlewild Inn before purchasing a cottage on Vinal Avenue. Ann, 91 and an ethnic Armenian who was born in Syria, lives year- round in the home now.

“It was a nice community,” she says. “You could hear the music from the bands at the Idlewild all over the neighborhood. The inn had good food and service.”

For Arthur, summers in Manomet were all about the beach and swimming. His family would head down the stairs in the morning to enjoy as much time as possible in the surf, sand and sun.

“We would spend a full day at the beach,” he remembers. “It was a lot fun. My mother taught me how to swim. How she learned to swim, I don’t know. She grew up in Damascus, where there is no water.”

Of course, all things must change. Just as the summer winds give way to the cool breezes of autumn and the carefree days of childhood drift into the endless demands of adulthood, Manomet would begin to evolve again.

The Sarafians sold the Idlewild Inn in 1968. It still welcomes all guests, but no Armenian bands play music late into the night on weekends anymore. The nearby summer cottages were replaced with expansive year-round homes.

Families moved away seeking better opportunities. New people arrived in and made those houses their own. Nothing bad about that; just different.

Today, a few Armenians live in the neighborhood, which now has a much more diverse population. People are still friendly and care about their neighbors, but the ambiance has changed. Bigger homes and the increased demands of 21st century life mean less opportunity to rub elbows and to connect as a community.

Manomet is now Steve Kurkjian’s full-time address. He loves the casual feel of the neighborhood and cheerfully greets everyone he sees while around – whether he has known them for 70 years or met them last week at the beach. For him, the place is home. He wrote about it recently in a reflection of his recollections growing up in that friendly corner of Plymouth:

“I spent my boyhood summers in Manomet and though I delighted in growing up in a vibrant Dorchester neighborhood, my favorite memories come from the weeks spent here between the last day of school and Labor Day. From making it all the way through the list of 20-plus flavors of ice cream offered at Gellars to playing hours of baseball with great friends at Briggs Field to hearing the calliope music announcing the arrival of another two-week stint of Colbert’s Fiesta on the empty lot beside St. Bonaventure’s Church, my growth from boyhood to young adult wended along that stretch of Route 3A from Rogers (now Luke’s) and Lisa Jean’s ice cream shop where now Marshland is located.

“When people asked me why I didn’t know more about the attractions of the Cape, I would answer if you knew the enjoyment I gained with friends and family from my patch of sand on Manomet Beach, swimming at high tide in the freezing cold water out to House Rock, or marveling at the Bluffs to the north knowing that the Pilgrims would have taken in the same breathtaking vista as the Mayflower sailed from Provincetown to America’s Home Town in 1620, you would understand why I was fine just where I was.

“And at some later point, I began to understand what this same expanse of sand and the neighborhood around the Idlewild Inn had meant to that generation of older Armenians who had found their way to Manomet when it was acquired in

the 1930s, and thrived during the years of my youth. And as I have grown older, so many different Armenians whom I have met realize that we’re really not strangers but that our families knew each other from the vacation weeks they had spent in Manomet. But it was the older generation, the one that had survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in Ottoman Turkey and had had lost their parents, siblings, cousins and even children to it, that Manomet meant the most .

“These mostly older women had gained safety in America, and though most never had spoken about their suffering or what they had lost, you could see them drawing comfort and strength in Manomet’s summer warmth. I can still see them, small groups of older Armenian women, all dressed in their billowing black bathing suits, walking together down the long flight of stairs onto the warm sands, then wading hand in hand into the water, conversing in soft somber tones in their native Armenian, yet shouting, almost with laughter, as another cold wave came splashing towards them.”