By ISABEL DEBREMembers of the Armenian community protest a contentious deal that stands to displace residents and hand over a large section of the Armenian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, Friday, May 19, 2023. Fallout from the 99-year lease of 25% of Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter has forced the highest authority of the Armenian church to cloister himself in a convent and prompted a disgraced priest to flee to southern California.
JERUSALEM — A real estate deal in Jerusalem’s Old City, at the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has sent the historic Armenian community there into a panic as residents search for answers about the feared loss of their homes to a mysterious investor. The 99-year lease of some 25% of the Old City’s Armenian Quarter has touched sensitive nerves in the Holy Land and sparked a controversy extending far beyond the Old City walls. The fallout has forced the highest authority of the Armenian Orthodox Church to cloister himself in a convent and prompted a disgraced priest who is allegedly behind the deal to flee to a Los Angeles suburb.
“If they sell this place, they sell my heart,” Garo Nalbandian, an 80-year-old photojournalist, said of the Ottoman-era barracks where he has lived for five decades among a dwindling community of Armenians. Their ancestors came to Jerusalem over 1,500 years ago and then after 1915, when Ottoman Turks killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in what’s widely regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century.