"Why do you want to find a Muslim cemetery in Caglayan," said the cab driver to my colleague.

"Gold," said my fixer as a joke. "We want to dig up gold."

The elderly cabbie laughed. We cruised by the six-story apartments and businesses that filled the congested urban area. To our right, by a highway, sat a park with several memorials visible from the road.

"Talaat Pasha memorial," said the driver pointing out the window.

"Talaat who?" responded Hozan, playing dumb. "Please, just let us off near the Jewish cemetery at the Sisli Metro stop."

We quickly backtracked without talking. Hozan was not sure why I wanted to find this cemetery for one of the three principal architects of the 20th century's first genocide.

"What do you want to do?" he asked me. "Why do you want to find the grave of this fucker, Talaat Pasha? Do you know who he was?"

I knew exactly who "this fucker" was - a man whose crimes equaled those of Hitler and Stalin. But I did not answer Hozan's questions.

The memorial marked the first of more than two dozen places I photographed in Turkey, to document historic evidence of the attempted extermination of the Armenian people in the early 1900s. My pictures hopefully would tell a little-known story of enormous human evil. At another level, I hoped they would provide additional evidence against what my Armenian journalist friend called the "big lie," or Turkey's denial that Armenians were victims of a government-run, systematic mass murder.

Before this trip, I drafted post-dated letters that my friends were to send to my congressman to raise a fuss if, by chance, I was arrested. I also had spoken with an American filmmaker who had documented Armenian issues about this possibility. He said my risk was minimal if I was smart. He was right.

I may have been over-reacting, but taking no chances made sense. So, I lied, constantly - sometimes by the hour - over a three-week period in Anatolia in October 2001. That meant I had to keep my trip's purpose a secret to Hozan and everyone else I met.

Usually it was simple. I looked like a Western backpacker and played the part, despite my two professional cameras that I mostly kept out of sight. Often I claimed I was a Canadian tourist. Because I really was a tourist, legally taking photos without breaking Turkish law, this guise worked almost everywhere in Turkey.

My tourist cover would not work here, at this memorial in a working-class Istanbul neighborhood that never saw Westerners. To find the location, I gambled and recruited a stranger, Hozan. My project required taking this risk because the monument celebrated the so-called Young Turks, or Ittihadists (members of the Committee of Union and Progress), the masterminds of the Ottoman Empire's anti-Armenian policy.

Mehmet Talaat Pasha, who served as the minister of the interior of the Ottoman Empire and later its grand vizier, was perhaps the most ruthless of the Ittihad. He was ably assisted by Enver Pasha, minister of war, and Ahmed Jemal, minister of the navy and military governor of Syria, where Armenians died by in the tens of thousands in 1915 and 1916.

For the Ittihadists who had seized power of the government of the Ottoman Empire in 1908, the Christian Armenians were subversive revolutionaries. The ethnic minority group posed an obstacle to the Ittihadists' goal of creating a pure Muslim, pan-Turkic state from the Balkans to the Himalayas in what was then a dying, but still ethnically and religiously diverse, empire.

The Ittihadists' solution to the "Armenian problem" was to arrest prominent Armenian intellectuals, imprison all men of fighting age, round-up entire villages, and then forcibly march defenseless civilians to the desert of Syria.

A 1930 account of the events published by the American-run Near East Relief, which aided hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees during and after World War I, described the deportations as an attempt at "a complete annihilation of the people." Numerous other first-hand and press accounts during the Great War years recorded the persecution of Armenians in terms that meet the definition of "genocide," a highly charged and legal term used today to describe this tragedy.

However, the actual word "genocide" - a literal joining of the Latin cida, or "kill," and the Greek genos, or "race" - would have to wait until it was coined by exiled Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, when the Third Reich was completing its mass murder of Jews and Gypsies at Nazi death camps in Poland. The international convention signed in 1948 to prevent and punish this crime eventually defined it as an act "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

Armenians around the world now mark April 24, 1915, as their genocide anniversary day - the date 600 leading Armenians and another 5,000 Armenians in Istanbul were rounded up. Few were seen again. Even before this day, ethnic Armenians were being massacred in the eastern provinces near the cities of Erzerum and Van.

Like the Nazis and Rwanda's Hutu power movement, the Ottomans also relied on special units to carry out their extremist racist policy. The Ittihadists employed army troops and criminal gangs known as chete forces to herd helpless Armenians toward the Syrian desert. If the victims did not die en route in the rough, dry, and unfriendly lands of Anatolia, nearly all perished at remote Syrian locations. An estimated 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children died on these caravans of death or at the desert murder centers such as Ras-ul-Ain, Rakka, and Deir-el-Zor. These names for Armenians are the equivalent of Treblinka and Auschwitz for Jews, or Ntarama and Nyarubuye for Rwandan Tutsis.

Sexual crimes, like those committed during the genocides in Nazi-occupied Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s and in Rwanda in 1994, were commonplace. The most attractive Armenian woman were forced into sexual slavery by Ottoman officers. Others on the death caravans were kidnapped, raped, and murdered by hostile Turks and Kurds.

The Ottoman Turks and ordinary citizens also seized victims' abandoned property. The Ottomans created the Kuvalé Metruké commission (Committee for Abandoned Goods) for that purpose. Property not stolen by Armenians' neighbors or already confiscated by Ottoman authorities was formally decreed state property on Sept. 28, 1915. The acts were an ominous prelude to the systematized murder and robbery carried out by the Nazi state and later by Hutu extremists in Rwanda.

Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Jemal Pasha eventually resigned in 1918 as the Ottoman Empire's armies collapsed after humiliating defeats. All three leaders fled the country. In 1919, war trials convened by the Turkish parliament tried the trio and sentenced each to death in absentia. Proponents of the official Turkish government's position, however, say the Young Turks were scapegoats taking the fall in order to appease the victorious Allied powers.

As with Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichman, this story did not end with the flight from justice.

Talaat Pasha chose Germany for his refuge, where he lived comfortably off an enormous bank account until 1921. In Berlin, he was recognized by another exile, an Armenian genocide survivor named Soghomon Tehlirian. Memories of seeing his family murdered haunted Tehlirian, as did dreams of his mother urging him to seek revenge. It is more likely Tehlirian was an Armenian agent, sent to murder the ex-grand vizier.

On March 15, 1921, Tehlirian succeeded.

He fired a single pistol shot into the former grand vizier's head as he walked to the Berlin zoo. Facing a crowd of witnesses, Tehlirian said, "He was a Turk. I am an Armenian. It is no loss to Germany."

Tehlirian's murder trial attracted international media attention due to the fame of the murder victim - a former head of state and war criminal - and the creative defense of the accused. Tehlirian simply denied premeditation.

Following a courtroom drama that gathered evidence of genocide from diplomats from Europe and America, Tehlirian was acquitted on June 3, 1921. The other principal Ittihadists soon met a similar fate. Jemal Pasha was assassinated by an Armenian in Tblisi, Georgia, on July 25, 1921, and Enver Pasha was killed on Aug. 4, 1922 - likely by an Armenian - leading an ethnic Turkish revolt against Soviet Bolsheviks near Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in Central Asia. Other Young Turks hiding in exile were killed by Armenian assassins at this time.

But this was not the end of the tale of mass murder and vigilante justice, as my trip to the Caglayan slums proved. Barely two decades after these murders, the rehabilitation of the Young Turks began, thanks to Nazi Germany.

In 1943, at the height of the Third Reich's mass murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and Soviet POWs, the Nazis returned the remains of Talaat Pasha to the government of the newly founded Republic of Turkey. That year, Talaat Pasha was buried as a national hero in a state mausoleum on Liberty Hill in Caglayan.

On one side of Liberty Hill is a large, domed green marble mausoleum, resting place of Talaat Pasha. Opposite the plaza is a smaller memorial bearing the name Enver Pasha. The fourth memorial consisted of flanking marble panels with relief carvings honoring the Young Turks.

The smaller Enver Pasha tomb was officially inaugurated on Aug. 5, 1996, a faint two years after the most recent genocide of the 20th century, in which with more than 800,000 civilians were murdered in Rwanda. On that summer day, the remains of Enver Pasha - long buried near the Afghan border - were laid to rest on Liberty Hill, opposite Talaat Pasha's mausoleum.

The state ceremony attracted thousands, including President Suleyman Demirel, ministers, deputies, and Turkey's top generals, and the former war minister was proclaimed a martyr. "Enver Pasha, with his faults and merits, is an important symbol of our recent history," Demirel said. "We have no doubt that history will reach the proper judgements through evaluating past events."

The 1940s-era memorial I saw showed the importance the Turkish government gave to these former rulers. A large, 36-foot marble column sits at the center of a memorial plaza commemorating the Young Turks' 1908 revolution.

The complex, however, is fenced and locked. No sign on the perimeter or adjacent roads indicates its purpose. Clearly, the Turkish government and Istanbul authorities don't want to draw attention to Turkey's recent past, which serves as a lightning rod to Armenians in diaspora who still seek international recognition for the crimes committed against their people. Turkish authorities more than anyone how symbols play in this ongoing debate. That likely explains why the memorial's whereabouts are known to only a few academics and journalists outside of Turkey.

When I sneaked through the iron metal fence surrounding the Talaat Pasha memorial, hardly anyone was in sight, unlike the crowds that had gathered here five years earlier. The Turkish police and criminals, who easily could be making this poor area their home, were one my mind as I took out my camera to photograph the site. My fixer, Hozan, had stayed away. He also feared the authorities, mostly because he was Kurdish. I only spent five minutes inside the memorial and got the hell out of there as fast as I could, practically running. It was a smart choice.

Today, the Turkish government contests all first-hand evidence that the world's first Christian people, the Armenians, were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Turks in the early 20th century. Such an admission could open the door to costly reparations and claims by descendants of the victims, similar to claims recently settled by victims of Nazi crimes.

In Turkey, even mentioning the genocide is grounds for arrest. In October 2000, the government arrested a Syrian Orthodox priest who merely referred to the Armenian genocide. The cleric was charged with "inciting religious, racial and sectarian hatred" for his statements to the press.

In fact, anyone with access to the Internet can read the Turkish government's case for unapologetic genocide denial.

The Web site run by the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. claims that "the Armenian deaths do not constitute genocide." The government refutes that 1.5 million Armenians - the figure widely cited by nearly all credible non-Turkish scholars - were killed from 1915 to 1922. The government puts the Armenian death toll at 600,000 for the 1912-22 period, and acknowledges a "terrible mortality."

The Turkish government further notes that "more than 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims also perished." In an even stranger twist, the government links Armenians to the Nazis by claiming an Armenian battalion served under the Nazi Wermacht and that Armenians published Anti-Semitic propaganda during the second world war.

Imagine the Republic of Germany officially denying the Holocaust. For even the most casual observers, that is unimaginable. In Germany, making these statements is illegal.

But because Turkey is a strategic NATO ally, the only majority-Muslim NATO ally and one that provides vital airbases for U.S. and NATO forces, Western governments have offered only muffled protests to these positions in the form of official statements and declarations recognizing the Armenian genocide.

Not long ago, some exiled Armenians used violent means to wage their political and PR battle. In the 1970s and 1980s a group called the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) carried out terrorist "hits" on Turkish diplomats worldwide to bring attention to the genocide, with some success. The outraged Turkish government responded with its campaign of denial and, as some argue, the destruction of Armenian buildings and artifacts in Turkey that continues today.

Today, ethnic Armenians in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, Switzerland and other countries prefer to lobby their governments to recognize the Armenian genocide as genocide and to woo the world press to their cause. Those debates still attract headlines, as seen in the U.S. Congress in October 2000, when a House resolution to recognize the genocide was withdrawn by Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., partially due to Turkish diplomatic pressure. Diplomatically adept, the Turkish government secured U.S. congressmen to lobby on its behalf during the controversy.

Turkey has befriended even stranger bedfellows to counter the Armenians' PR efforts.

To the shock of many Armenians, Israeli leaders have championed the Turkish government's policy of genocide denial, as part of Israel's quest for better bilateral relations in a hostile Muslim world. Such irony outrages some Armenians, who again feel betrayed by cynical world politics, the way they felt abandoned by the post-World War I peace conferences that failed to secure them a nation.

The politics of genocide have not gone unnoticed. Some respected journalists have criticized the double standards in the way world opinion treats the Armenian genocide compared to the Holocaust.

Reporter Robert Fisk, The Independent's chief Mideast correspondent, has been among the loudest voices by writing articles on the Armenian genocide and even personally unearthing Armenians' bones at old murder sites in Syria. Writing for The Independent in January 2000, Fisk notes how no credible person today would dare write "that Jews were victims of a European civil war," in reference to the Holocaust. Yet, for what Fisk calls "Armenian holocaust," the Turkish version of events is both academically credible and big business.

"No American company selling weapons to Turkey will discuss the holocaust of 1915. Chairs of Ottoman studies are being funded by the Turkish government at American universities in which US [sic] academics - who have to prove they have used Ottoman archives to get their jobs and thus must never have condemned the 1915 slaughters - propagate the lie that the Armenians were merely victims of 'civil war' and that Turks also died in the chaos of 1915."

Prolific traders and travelers, Armenian merchants journeyed as far as east India and China. In 1707, when French Catholic missionaries hobbled into Lhasa, they found five well-settled Armenian merchants. The city of Kabul had its own Armenian quarter when a British-led force took the Afghan city in 1839. In Europe, Armenian merchants moved freely from Paris to Genoa to Poland to the Balkans. As the first Christians, for more than a thousand years they had carved out a quarter in Jerusalem that they retain to this day. At the beginning of the 20th century, Armenians joined the wave of immigrants moving to America.

Armenia's first birth as a nation took place on May 28, 1918, when a short-lived republic was created in the Caucuses region, after Armenians fought off Turkish troops. While Armenians at the post World War I peace talks lobbied for a nation that included areas of present-day eastern Turkey, the combined pressure from Turks and communists led to the republic's collapse in 1920. The area south and east of Mt. Ararat was soon occupied by the Red Army. In 1922, it became part of the Soviet's Transcaucasian republic, and in 1936, Armenia became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. Armenia ultimately achieved its independence in 1991, after the USSR's collapse.

In 1914, most Armenians lived throughout the lands of contemporary Armenia and much of present-day Turkey. Today, some Armenians in diaspora sadly call Turkey's eastern provinces "western Armenia." Before the genocide, there were large populations in most large Turkish cities, such as Izmir, Adana, Erzerum, Van, Sivas, Bitlis, SanliUrfa, Diyarbekir, Ankara, and Trabzon. Now, none live in those cities, or in the hundreds of small villages that were permanently "cleansed."

Istanbul still claims a large Armenian population, including descendants of the genocide. They number 100,000 strong, according to a handful of Armenian men I met at the Holy Mother-of-God Armenian Patriarchal Church in Istanbul's Kumkapi neighborhood.

The facility is a walled-off compound, built like a fortress. During the sporadic anti-Armenian violence before the genocide, it's where Armenians sought refuge. The bell tower of the church, a nearly 500-year-old basilica, is just visible from front entrance. The shape of a cross is visible in tower's stonework. At the entrance, an enormous red flag of Turkey, bearing the Islamic crescent and star, flapped in the coastal breeze. Across the street sat a district police office.

Inside, at around 5 p.m. on my first day in Turkey, a large wedding was underway. The crowd of hundreds looked Turkish to me. Everyone wore either dresses or slacks and jackets. I wandered around and peered at the several buildings in the complex. The Armenians not chatting on cell phones smiled and treated me, an obvious foreigner, warmly.

A group of four Armenian men, one who barely spoke English, gathered around me. They all smoked, as did most men I saw in Turkey.

I soon learned they lived in Istanbul, home to nearly all of Turkey's remaining Armenians. But their families, they told me through the one man who spoke broken English, originally come from small villages near the cities of Bitlis, Sivas, and Mus, all in the heartland of ancient Armenia in central and southeast Turkey. Those areas were systematically depopulated of their Armenian residents 86 years ago with the same efficiency used by the Nazis to make occupied Poland judenfrei during the Holocaust.

The men were curious why I had come to this church. Was I Ermeni, or Armenian? No, I told them, just American.

Soon our conversation turned to trivia about the genocide. They warmly smiled and nodded their head in approval when I correctly named of the man who killed Talaat Pasha - Soghomon Tehlirian, a man still worshipped as a folk hero by Armenians worldwide.

When I showed them my Let's Go guidebook, they carefully studied the pages describing the cities of Ani and Van and the plight of the Armenian people. The book also contained a brief description of the genocide. This book would never and could never be published in Turkey, they said.

With the one man who spoke English, I went into the dark cathedral. A line of at least 100 people had lined up to kiss the bride. The church's interior reminded me of a Catholic cathedral. Paintings of saints hung above the columns. My guide said the building was about 500 years old, which puts its creation around the time of the Ottoman Turks had conquered Constantinople.

This was the only active Armenian church I saw in Istanbul. All the others - hidden behind walls on busy streets, some completely blocked from public access and view - were empty shells. Wandering the maze of neighborhoods, one could see that Istanbul was once a diverse city, home to Muslims, Orthodox Greeks, and Armenians.

In Istanbul's Karakoy neighborhood, I spotted one former Armenian church, a solid structure on the major thoroughfare of Meclisi Mebusan Cadesi. It bore the trademark Armenian spires and domes and masterly stonework. Now, apartments had been built onto it. No entrances existed from the street, and a parking lot surrounded the sides fronting the streets.

I found another abandoned Armenian church in the quiet neighborhood of Kuzguncuk, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. A sign out front said St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Church was built in 1835. Now it's closed and fenced off, sitting next to a garage and mosque.

Still other churches, one in the Galatasaray and one in Ortakoy - neighborhoods in Istanbul - had no names. When I visited them, I feigned ignorance to the tea-drinking men I found at each place.

"Ortodox?" I queried at the Ortakoy church.

"Hiyar. Ermeni," said one man, or, "No. Armenian."

"Kaput," said the building watcher in Galatasaray.

Outside Istanbul, however, there are no signs or markers to show that historic Armenian structures are of Armenian origin. Some buildings possibly of Armenian origin are labeled Seljuk. Many small burial chambers, stone conical buildings with eight-sided spires, are Seljuk and exist in most cities in central and eastern Turkey where the two cultures lived side by side. Some experts believe Armenian architects built these structures known as gumbats, as they borrow heavily from Armenian forms.

An ignorant visitor to Turkey might never know Armenia or Armenians existed, simply because their physical legacy has disappeared and the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge it existed.

Most Armenian ruins have either been completely destroyed or are in a state of collapse. Those still standing are sad reminders of the Armenians' fate, as the hundreds of derelict synagogues in Poland are a legacy to the destruction of that country's Jews by Nazis and their allies during World War II.

In his book From the Holy Mountain, British writer William Dalrymple notes that a survey by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1914, on the eve of the genocide, counted 210 Armenian monasteries, 700 monastic churches, 1,639 parish churches for a total of 2,549 ecclesiastical buildings. A survey done in 1974 of 913 buildings with still-known whereabouts found that 464 had disappeared, 252 were in ruins, and 197 were in sound shape.

Dalrymple also cites repeated examples of official neglect or outright Turkish destruction of Armenian antiquities, such as medieval Armenian cross stones (khachkars), or the of deliberate sabotage of Armenian churches.

Many Armenian scholars are certain the destruction of their cultural heritage is a deliberate Turkish effort to erase their past, which accelerated after Turkish diplomats were killed in the 1970s. "Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey," the curator of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem told Dalrymple. "We will have become a historical myth."

Sivas and Erzerum were sites of initial massacres that began in the fall of 1914 and then continued the following year when the full-scale deportations started. By July 1915, Ottoman officials reported that the Sivas and Erzerum provinces, as well as the Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Trebizond provinces in eastern Turkey, had been completely cleansed of Armenians, who had been marched off toward their deaths in Mosul and Deir-al-Zor.

In areas Armenians called home for more than two millennia, the Armenians had ceased to exist.

I spent a day each in Sivas and Erzerum. I mainly photographed historic sites, such as the Gok Madrasah and Sifahiye Madrasah (Muslim seminaries) in Sivas. In August 1915, 5,000 Armenian intellectuals imprisoned in these ancient Seljuk structures were taken to nearby execution centers and murdered.

In both Sivas and Erzerum, shells of the former Armenian culture are still visible in the mosques and madrasahs that were built around old Armenian mausoleums. No clue to these buildings' Christian past are available on signs. The mosques and madrasahs themselves date back to the 13th and 14th centuries.

The older mausoleums still retain their delicate forms, with spire domes and perfect proportions. Armenians were master stone builders, who hired themselves out to Seljuk Turks and Christian crusaders alike.

In the late afternoon sun, I climbed atop the old walls of the Erzerum fort, where still another gutted Armenian mausoleum sits. The hills and city were lit up in a orange light. Atop the wall, I counted six spire domes, some Armenian, some Seljuk, and some whose origins are disputed. The Armenian presence felt strong here, even today.

The next morning, I took a bus to Kars, a poor frontier city tucked in the northeast corner of Turkey that is predominantly Kurdish. Prior to the genocide, Kars also had a large Armenian population, the bulk of whom fled to Russia during the fighting of World War I. Russians held the town for 43 years, until their departure in 1920. En route to Kars, my bus passed through fertile valleys with basalt cliffs that brought to mind the dry western landscapes of eastern Oregon and the Columbia River basin of central Washington.

Today few Western travelers would ever visit Kars, were it not the gateway to Ani, a massive medieval city and spiritual center of former Armenia. The ruined city is about 45 kilometers east of Kars, right on the Armenian-Turkish border. Permission to visit Ani requires separate visits to the police, the local tourist office, and the Kars museum, plus about $25 (U.S) in fees.

This last about two hours, and I arranged for my police-approved taxi driver to meet me in the morning at my hotel.

With half a day of light left, I decided to explore old Kars, starting where my last driver left me, at the museum. The facility showed a few Christian relics indicating Armenians' historic presence, including a two church doors. I then walked toward through Kars' poor neighborhoods, on my way to the town's old fortress. At its base lie most of the ruins, including the Church of the Apostles.

This 30-foot-tall structure is the only remaining Armenian church in Kars, and is now consecrated as a mosque. Near the church, I met the mosque's muzeen who was on his way to sing the afternoon calls to prayer. He showed me the interior of the totally gutted stone building. All the frescoes were long-stripped from the barren stone walls. No sign of the church's Christian or Armenian past could be seen. The mosque now had carpets on the floor and a speaker system for the muzeen, whose beautiful could be heard once I left the building.

The next day, my driver arrived at dawn. The drive to Ani went through rolling hills and fertile farm country now inhabited by destitute Kurds. Sun streaming through storm clouds lit up the terrain in a brilliant gold.

Sitting on a sensitive border, Ani is a heavily militarized area, where the Turkish police and army keep close watch on the Kurds and their neighbors in Armenia. We passed through two military checkpoints to arrive at the fortress walls. It was stunning.

The ruined city juts five kilometers onto a plateau, surrounded by the Aparcay River valley. I had not expected such natural beauty. I could see why Armenians had chosen this spot to build a great city.

On either side of the basalt cliffs stood watch towers, where the Turkish and Armenian military spied on each other. The entrance to the city of Ani, the Lion's Gate, has had its Christian and Armenian carvings removed during ongoing renovations, according to an Armenian photographer I talked to after I returned. The metal sign by the entrance gives a brief chronology of Ani's history in Turkish and English without once using the words Armenia and Armenians.

At the gate, the Turkish solider who took my tickets told me photos were now forbidden. The policy started six months ago, I learned. Previously, one could take pictures so long as the camera did not point to Armenia. The soldier tucked away my camera in his office and resumed his nap. I then took a two-hour stroll through Armenia's heyday.

At least 10 church ruins are visible at Ani. Of these, seven are still standing, in some visible form. One church, one of the three dedicated to Armenia's patron St. Gregory the Illuminator, had a collapsed dome. No effort had been made to repair the building. The exposed frescoes were scarcely visible and defaced by Turkish graffiti. Reportedly, the dome had fallen when hit by lightning in 1957.

In addition to allowing buildings to fall into ruins, the authorities have revised history. At one of the finest masterpieces of Armenian architecture still standing, the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, built from 939 to 1000 AD, I read the Turkish version of the now dome-less church: "Great Cathedral Fetiy Mosque. This building was started in 987 and was finish [sic] in 1010. This building[']s architect was Tridates Mendet. The done [sic] of the Church of St[.] Sofia in Instanbul after the earthquake in 989." Inside the gutted structure there was graffiti with Turkish names carved into the stone walls.

At least the sign was partially correct. The architect Tridates, an Armenian, did collaborate on the Hagia Sofia's restoration in Constantinople in 989.

The building at Ani in the best shape was, not accidentally, the Seljuk palace, which was recently refurbished by new stonework. Not a single church showed restoration work.

After Ani, my journey next took me to another heavily military frontier city called Dogubeyazit, a place with remarkable geography but little else of interest, except the army. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere. We were about 35 kilometers from the Iranian border, over the mountains to the east.

On the way to Dogubeyazit from Kars, I passed through three military checkpoints. The soldiers carried semiautomatic rifles and wore light-blue berets. Trucks were thoroughly searched. Men in cars were frisked and interrogated. I saw one soldier inspect the inside of a gas tanker. I wasn't sure if he was looking for weapons or hidden terrorists or smuggled goods.

That rainy afternoon, Dogubeyazit was a muddy mess, where farm animals shared the streets with cars and trucks and an occasional armored car. Were it clear, you would have a spectacular view of Mt. Ararat from, the heart and soul of Armenian identity. The sacred mountain, where myth claims Noah's ark supposedly landed after the great flood, still draws tourists to this spot.

Photographing the mountain would be impossible in these conditions, so I took a walk about seven kilometers out of town to the Isak Pasa Palace, a well-preserved 17th century Kurdish structure on the hill overlooking the city that commands an impressive view of the valley.

On my way there, I passed the Turkish army base just outside of town. Dozens of American-made tanks were lined up neatly in open-air sheds, in full view of passersby. The soldiers behind the barbed wired waved.

After reaching the fortress, I climbed a hill above it for pictures. Peering down, I saw it had a familiar domed tower that hinted an Armenian structure preceded its Kurdish successor. So close to Mt. Ararat, it made perfect sense to build an Armenian church here. Others churches been built around its base by Armenians.

After photographing the palace, I saw two Westerners I had seen a day before at Kars. They said they were French photographers working on a photo book on Turkey. I told them I was just a tourist passing through. Only later, when I had returned to America, did I learn they also were photographing historic Armenian sites throughout Turkey. At the time, the younger French photographer told me that the night before, he and his partner were nearly shot by Kurds. They had driven to a small Kurdish town called Cengilli to photograph a well-preserved Armenian church. It was among many churches scattered throughout this part of Turkey.

The Frenchman said Kurds came out with their guns and claimed the two foreigners had come to steal their gold - the gold in the church. The pair talked their way out of the standoff. This story confirmed reports I had heard from other visitors to the area and from writers that gold was allegedly buried in Armenian churches, and that the buildings were plundered during and after the genocide by fortune hunters. The Frenchman insisted that this church and others still had gold.

At about 5:30 p.m. we heard the crackle of rifle fire. The Frenchman said it was time to leave. Soldiers with telescopes were probably watching us right now, he said. I was offered a lift, and accepted. However, we took a quick detour up the valley a few kilometers. There were farms buildings made of mud and stone like Kurdish structures everywhere in eastern Turkey. We stopped, and my French driver got out to speak with a farmer in a passing tractor. The man said at this hour it was no longer safe to be at this pass. Smugglers would be coming by with oil from Iran, and they wouldn't want to see a group of tourists as accidental witnesses.

The next day I went by bus to Van, a large, almost entirely Kurdish city near the shores of the turquoise-blue Lake Van. Steep mountains surrounded the waters. Snows had fallen at higher elevations and the leaves were gold in the autumn chill.

Prior to World War I, it had a large Armenian population, as it had for centuries. Then, the systematic attacks began. Ottomans and local Kurds and Turks massacred 55,000 Armenians in the city and surrounding villages prior to May 1915, when it was liberated by the Russians. The entire city of was decimated, and its victims cremated.

All that remains of old Van are three ruined mud and stone structures and two mosques. Beneath a large rocky outcropping on which sits the ruins of the Van fortress, the flattened remnants of former city are visible on the mud landscape that's almost lunar in its appearance. The new Van was built 5 kilometers away from there.

By the end of 1915, half of the more than 200,000 Armenians who had evaded the Ottoman's clutches and fled to Russia had come from the Van province.

Today, the Van area remains intensely militarized due to the uneasy peace with the Kurds. The Turkish armed forces, backed by armored personnel carriers, monitor all traffic in and out of the area with numerous roadblocks on the main roads. I passed through three checkpoints when I left Van, one requiring full-body and luggage searches for every passenger on my bus.

I didn't show my cameras around the hundreds of Turkish soldiers I saw. Human rights monitors, lawyers, and doctors who document human rights abuses, as well as suspected human rights sympathizers, face intimidation and prosecution, according the U.S. State Department. I could not afford being mistaken for a Kurdish sympathizer by snapping photos of the common roadside stops.

The same night I left the militarized zone around Lake Van, I arrived in Elazig, in the province, or vilayet, of Elazig. It's an unremarkable city, and few foreigners come here. Elazig is beneath a large hill on which sits the old city and Urartian fortress of Harput. Aside from the crumbling fort, almost nothing remains on the hilltop, except some shops, historic mosques, restaurants, a school, and decrepit buildings. Pictures I saw dating from 1919 show an Armenian quarter that today no longer exists. In its place are trees and a park with swings. The buildings, like the Armenians, are long gone.

In 1915, Harput was caught up in the anti-Armenian actions. The province became known for the mass murders of Armenians, likely because of its remoteness. Armenian caravans were marched from cities like Trabzon and Erzerum, and then slaughtered around the nearby Hazar Golu, then called Lake Goeljuk.

An American diplomat named Leslie Davis, who was stationed at the U.S. consulate in Harput during the genocide, witnessed the deportations and wrote one of the most graphic accounts of the events that was later published in a book called The Slaughterhouse Province. In the summer of 1915, Davis helped save hundreds of Armenians, by safeguarding them at his consulate and later smuggling them to safety. He also journeyed to the lake, where he saw thousands of mutilated and bloated bodies of murdered civilians.

"That which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated. It is hard for one living in a civilized country to believe that such things are possible; yet as Lord Bryce has said, 'Things which we find scarcely credible excite little surprise in Turkey.'"

Today, the shores around Hazar Golu that once held Armenian summer homes now have subdivisions, hotels, and mulberry trees. I walked to the lakeshore, where 86 years earlier Davis found bloated bodies and bones of dead Armenians. I saw beach chairs and some boats for tourists by the lapping blue waters. During a half-kilometer walk, I found several odd remnants of bones. I did not know their age or what animal they came from.

In March 2000, New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer wrote about his visit to this lake and the massacres that occurred there in 1915. One local resident told Kinzer, "My father told me that Turkey was weak at that time and the Armenians decided to stage an uprising. Then the order came to kill them. Almost all were killed. It wasn't a war, it was a massacre." I later learned from a researcher who also had been to the area that Kinzer's article caused authorities to harass the locals Kinzer interviewed because their statements challenged the official Turkish version of events.

After the war, Davis gathered his findings into a State Department report published in 1918, and then traveled throughout the East Coast meeting hundreds of American relatives of Armenians who were deported during the genocide. He died in the 1940s, his humanitarian deeds never fully acknowledged. Davis' story of intervening to save countless lives during a genocide, while cleverly dealing with local Ottoman authorities who were carrying out mass murder, rivals the now-famous tale of Oskar Schindler. Davis's tale, however, has not found a producer of Stephen Spielberg's acclaim to bring the Armenians' story to a larger audience.

In 1935, another equally compelling tale about the Armenian genocide nearly made it to the big screen. A year earlier, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer paid the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Werfel a handsome amount for an option for film rights to his novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Originally published in 1933 in German, it was translated and published in America in 1934. Though a film treatment was written, the project was shelved because the Turkish government had threatened MGM it would ban all U.S. films in Turkey.

The book tells a fictionalized account of a true story, in which more than 4,000 Armenian villagers on a Levantine coastal mountain called Musa Dagh had refused deportation orders and repulsed attacks by Ottoman troops. After 53 days of siege by their would-be murderers, the community was rescued when a French ship Guichen spouted their two shrouds hung on the hillside: one had a cross, and the other the words "Christians in distress: rescue." The villagers scrambled off the mountain and were ferried to five Allied ships, which took them to Egypt.

Musa Dagh (literally "Mountain of Moses") is located in the Turkish province Hatay, a historic area whose principal city, Antakya, was once the major Roman and Byzantine city of Antioch. After World War I the French ruled Hatay province, and the Armenians exiles in Egypt returned to their old homes and orchards. However, in 1939, the French ceded the area back to Turkey, and the Armenians of Musa Dagh fled again. The French gave them land in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The valley's main town of Anjar has six segments that are named for now lost villages of Musa Dagh. Musa Dagh's Armenian survivors remain to this day in Lebanon.

Since its first publication, Werfel's best-selling book became a global sensation. It has been translated into 18 languages and has brought the Armenian's story to the world. This story pulled me to this distant corner of Turkey, near the Syrian and Lebanese borders.

I reached Musa Dagh by taking a local bus southwest from Antakya to a dreary coastal city Samandag. To my surprise, I found a dolmus (a passenger van) going directly to the last Armenian village in all of Turkey, Vakifli Koyu.

It was the first village reached on the 5,000-foot peak. Around the small hillside town, orange orchards lined the ravines, and clear water ran in the streams from natural springs higher above. I saw some abandoned homes amid the orange trees, and a few friendly locals walking by. It was rich land - land worth fighting for.

I easily found Vakifli Koyu's new Armenian church off the town's main road. It's a small stone building that contains a church in one wing, which then angles 90 degrees with an additional wing with extra rooms. The eave hangs covers a porch of marble steps. Red tiles line the roof, broken by small Armenian-style spire topped by a cross, just like the ones I saw on Armenian churches in Istanbul. A tiny graveyard shaded by trees sat across the road. Graves of recently buried Armenian Christians are great rarities outside of Istanbul.

When I knocked at the church, no one answered, so I went to a bench to wait for a descending dolmus. An elderly man in a house across from my seat came out to talk with me. Hagop and I confusingly communicated with my Turkish-English dictionary. The 61-year-old had five grown children, all living in Istanbul. Most of the Armenians left in 1939, he said, when the French mandate ended. Only a handful were left, like him.

He told me visitors from Canada, Germany, France, America, and Switzerland have visited Vakifli Koyu because it is the last Armenian Village on Musa Dagh. He offered me "Ermeni chai" and nectarines. Yet, even then, I refused to trust this kind, elderly Armenian man. I told him I never heard of a famous book about this mountain. I said I had never heard about the famous battle here in 1915. I claimed to know nothing about the Armenian exiles in the Bekaa Valley.

Wisely suspicious himself, he forbid me to take his photo.

On my return dolmus, I nodded to the driver when he mentioned the Armenian church in Vakifli Koyu. He knew why I had come, and it made me nervous. He then pointed across the hill and indicated there were three other churches in other villages. I shrugged with indifference, though I desperately wanted to know if other churches were still there. I never learned if there were, and caught a bus back to Antakya.

The following day I journeyed to Adana, an ancient city on the Seyhan River and home to Armenians for a millennium. On the way, I stopped briefly at a coastal caravansary and fort called Payas, where Armenian prisoners were held during the genocide. It was just another beautiful ruin to the eyes, but a place of untold misery to those murdered behind its stone walls. I snapped my pictures and left an hour later.

Adana's sad tale predates that of Payas. Pre-genocidal violence in the area erupted from 1894 to 1896 during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamit, and again under the Young Turks in 1909. During the later massacres, tens of thousands of Armenians died - a practice drill for actions taken in 1915. Were the 1909 massacres in Adana not overshadowed in scale by the genocide of 1915, they might be better known today.

Today, Adana is a modern city, Turkey's sixth largest city, lying just north of Mediterranean and south of the Taurus mountains. It's also home to the strategic Incerlik Airbase, used by U.S. and NATO military forces.

Any traces of Adana's old Armenian merchant quarter have either been built over or destroyed. The only Christian building I found in the old quarter, near the river's edge, was a newly built Catholic Church. All Armenians not murdered were driven from the city and the many surrounding villages during the genocide. On my maps I looked for the names of three villages that were ancestral homes to relatives of my close Swiss-Armenian friend. I did not find them. My friend's father had fled the area as an orphaned boy, his family murdered during the genocide.

On my second day in Adana, I took a bus 60 kilometers north to Kozan, formerly called Sis. For 600 years, it was a residence of an Armenian Catholicosate, and in the 13th and 14th centuries was capital of the kingdom of Cilicia. I came to look for a former fortified monastery and church that existed here prior to 1915. My Armenian contact who told me about Sis before I left on my trip doubted I'd find anything.

The wide-eyed looks I received on Kozan's morning streets made me feel as if I walked off a space ship. Clearly, this town was off the beaten track for any Westerner, and I did not feel comfortable asking locals about any "kilisesi Ermeni" (Armenian church).

Instead, I climbed a massive fortress built on a large, rocky hill overlooking the city and valley. The fortifications stretched three kilometers across. Cilician Armenians began building the fort in 1172, and continued to use it for defensive purposes until Sis was sacked by the Mamelukes in 1375 and thousands were led off to slavery.

It took 40 minutes to reach the summit's upper defenses. The mason work was fabulous. The fortress had 15-foot-high walls made from beautifully carved stones, hidden vaults, and an air of impregnability. Looking down the valley toward the valley I noticed one old stone building on the hillside near the town, which I chose to investigate.

The ruin stood behind some farm houses and was overgrown with cactus and shrub. What was still standing resembled the wing of a basilica, and it now served as a barn. Some broken walls lay nearby. It may well have been part of the monastery, or not. I took some photos and made my way back to town. Soon, I was back in Adana, eating delicious Adana kebob, relieved my photo project had ended.

Three days later, I had may my way across Turkey's touristy southern Mediterranean coast to the Aegean port city of Kusadasi. From here, I could catch a daily ferry to the Greek island of Samos.

That night, my last in Turkey, I was befriended by Ali, a restaurateur near my hotel who solicited my business with a barrage of questions. This was typical in Turkey, as many Turks practiced their English by asking for a visitor's nationality, name, occupation, and hotel. But under less innocent circumstances, I also had met three plainclothes policemen this way, who asked me the same questions on buses and on city streets.

As I had done to some many others, I lied to all of Ali's queries. I claimed I was Canadian. I used a false name. I wouldn't give him my hotel. I evaded other questions by asking him questions.

"You are a journalist," said Ali suddenly. "I'm sure of it."

I felt a tinge of panic, wondering if I had been tailed by the police in towns like Vakifli Koyu and Kozan. It was possible, because my visits to both were far too atypical.

"Ali, if I was a journalist, I'd be in Afghanistan covering the war," I answered, telling the truth for once.

"Don't worry, I'm not the police," said Ali, smiling now, and seeing my confusion. "But I'm confident you're a journalist."

The next morning, the customs and immigration check at the dock lasted minutes. Only a half dozen Westerners on this off-season day in late October showed up for the two-hour boat ride to Samos.

On the small ferry I finally began to unwind the many knots I had been tying inside for three weeks. Researching mass murder, even events more than 80 years old, is not a comfortable task. It hangs over you like the smell of dirty clothes. It occupies your thoughts, and shades how you see a landscape, a country, and a people. It's as if you have a silent partner, whispering to you when you begin to enjoy yourself and forget why you had come this place and what you were supposed to be doing there. I was ready to leave that all behind, at the docks of Kusadasi, but I feared I could never think about Turkey without the noises I had been hearing in my head.

I breathed the clean sea air. I smiled. Now, I could tell the truth again. Feeling relaxed, I talked to two Australian women, Susan and Elizabeth.

The athletic pair had just come from Gallipoli, site of the famous 1915 World War I battle that claimed nearly 300,000 lives - less than a quarter of the number of Armenian civilians killed by the Turks around the same time. For Australians, the battlefield has become a pilgrimage site, where they can honor the memory of the tens of thousands of Australians killed while fighting for the British. Now the two women were off to Athens and Italy.

"What were you doing in Turkey?" asked Susan. "Were you on holidays?"