Massacres
of Christians foretold and fulfilled How God during the last
century foretold to a boy in Kara Kala ( |
This person
was known throughout the region as the ‘Boy Prophet’ even though at the time
of the incident with the steer’s head the Boy Prophet was fifty-eight years
old. |
The man’s
real name was Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken, and he had a remarkable history. He
was of Russian origin, his family being among the first Pentecostals to come
across the border, settling permanently in Kara Kala. From earliest childhood
Efim had shown a gift for prayer, frequently going on long fasts, praying
around the clock. |
As everybody
in Kara Kala knew, when Efim was eleven years old he had heard the Lord
calling him again to one of his prayer vigils. This time he persisted for
seven days and nights, and during this time received a vision. |
This in
itself was not extraordinary. Indeed, as Grandfather had been accustomed to
grumble, anyone who went that long without eating or sleeping was bound to
start seeing things. But what Efim was able to do during those seven days was
not so easy to explain. |
Efim could
neither read nor write. Yet, as he sat in the little stone cottage in Kara
Kala, he saw before him a vision of charts and a message in a beautiful
handwriting. Efim asked for pen and paper. And for seven days sitting at the
rough plank-table where the family ate, he laboriously copied down the form
and shape of letters and diagrams that passed before his eyes. |
When he
had finished, the manuscript was taken to people in the village who could
read. It turned out that this illiterate child had written out in Russian characters
a series of instructions and warnings. At some unspecified time in the
future, the boy wrote, every Christian in Kara Kala would be in terrible
danger. He foretold a time of unspeakable tragedy for the entire area, when
hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children would be brutally murdered.
The time would come, he warned, when everyone in the region must flee. They
must go to a land across the sea. Although he had never seen a geography
book, the Boy Prophet drew a map showing exactly where the fleeing Christians
were to go. To the amazement of the adults, the body of water depicted so
accurately in the drawing was not the nearby |
But the
refugees were not to settle down there, the prophecy continued. They were to
continue traveling until they reached the west coast of the new land. There,
the boy wrote, God would bless them and prosper them, and cause their seed to
be a blessing to the nations. (…) |
Well, many
people in Kara Kala smiled at these romances of a little boy. Surely there
must be some explanation of the ‘miraculous’ writing. Perhaps he had secretly
taught himself to read and write, just in order to play this trick on the
village. |
Others
however took to calling Efim the Boy Prophet and were not at all convinced
that the message was not genuine. Every time news of fresh political troubles
reached the tranquil hills around Ararat, they would get out the now-yellowed
pages and read them again. Troubles between the Moslem Turks and the
Christian Armenians did seem to be growing in intensity. In August, 1896 –
four years before Grandfather butchered the blind steer – hadn’t a Turkish
mob murdered more than six thousand Armenians on the streets of |
But |
And then,
a little after the turn of the century, Efim announced that the time was near
for the fulfilment of the words he had written down nearly fifty years
before. ‘We must flee to |
Here and there
in Kara Kala Pentecostal families packed up and left the holdings that had
been their ancestral possessions time out of mind. Efim and his family were
among the first to go. As each group of Pentecostals left |
But the
instructions proved correct. In 1914 a period of unimaginable horror arrived
for |
The few
Armenians who managed to escape the besieged areas brought with them tales of
great heroism. They reported that the Turks sometimes gave Christians an
opportunity to deny their faith in exchange for their lives. The favorite
procedure was to lock a group of Christians in a barn and set it afire: ‘If
you are willing to accept Mohammed in place of Christ we’ll open the doors’.
Time and again, the Christians chose to die, chanting hymns of praise as the
flames engulfed them. |
Those who
had heeded the warning of the Boy Prophet and sought asylum in |
|
From:
The Happiest People on Earth. The
long-awaited personal story of Demos Shakarian as told to John and Elizabeth
Sherrill, |