Communities of Difference Share a Final Resting Place: The last name (which ends in the distinctive -ian) leads you to believe that the person buried here is Armenian, but the alphabet is not the Armenian alphabet. It looks like Arabic, but when you consult the verso, you find one of the Persian language's unique characters, a K sound (common in the Arabic language) transformed into a G sound (common in the Persian language but absent from standard Arabic). Then, when you look at his very unusual (for the US) first name, it seems to be Muslim; it carries the name of God (-ollah), and probably means "thanks to God." Another clue is in the scenery. The mountain peak could be from a childhood home in northwestern Iran (near the border with Armenia) or it could be the sacred (to the Armenian Apostolic Church) Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey. All things considered, he seems to be an Iranian immigrant of Armenian descent who may have come to the U.S. in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In any case, his memorial adds the Persian alphabet to the collection that now includes Armenian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, English, Japanese, and now Persian. Mount Hope Cemetery. [2020]
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