Stephan Bagradian lived from 1901 to 1989, in a world where there was no deracination of the Ottoman territories. He was not killed in 1915, with 1.5 million of his compatriots. Indeed, as demanded by Article 301 of the Turkish Penal code (below), there was no Armenian genocide. 
With no genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks that did not take place between 1915 and 1922, Constantinople has remained a polyglot center of civilization as it has been for millennia, rivaling New York as a epicenter of culture.
Stephan Bagradian is not a fictional character who was killed off in 1915, as the banned book* The Forty Days of Musa Dagh states. He lived past his teenage years and became a successful painter, working with many other talented artists who were attracted by the bright city. These artists included Francis Picabia, Markus Rothko, Mina Loy, Rabo Karabelian, Marcel Duchamp, David Burliuk, and Vostanik Adoyan.**

Turkish Penal Code
Article 301
• A person who publicly denigrates the Turkish Nation, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.
Article 312
• Whoever incites people on the grounds of class, race, religion, denomination or regional differences to provoke vengeance and enmity, shall be punished by between one year and three years’ imprisonment and shall be subject to a heavy fine.***

Reminder to visitors to this website:
We have made every effort to ensure that the delicate feelings of the Turkish Nation, the Republic and the Grand National Assembly remain un-trod upon. Any conclusions you reach are yours alone.

“No country in the world, perhaps, contains a population so heterogeneous as that of Turkey. In addition to the various peaceable immigrations of Jews and Tartars, Circassians and Gipsies, succeeding waves of invasion from East, West, North, and South have through countless centuries thrown upon its shores and frontiers hordes of conquering aliens, in their turn to be vanquished and subjected by a later arrival. And at the present day we find in Turkey, living side by side in varying degrees of amity or enmity, a dozen different races — Kurds, Circassians and Albanians, Greeks and Vlachs, Armenians and Bulgarians, and many others, all finally subjected by the Ottoman. Turks, or, as they call themselves, Osmanlis. Originally, and as late as the thirteenth century, but a mere wandering band of warriors from Central Asia, numbering some fifteen hundred families, these Ottoman Turks have for the last five hundred years, in the face of enormous difficulties, kept all these diverse subject peoples within the bond of a united Empire. 
Specimens of these races and many others may be met with every day in the streets of Constantinople and the large seaports of the Levant; every provincial town of any importance includes representatives of at least half a dozen; and even villages may contain families belonging to two or three different nationalities. Largely as the Turkish element has increased since its first appearance in history, it forms but a small proportion of the population of European Turkey; in the Armenian provinces of Asia Minor it scarcely amounts to a third; and it is only in its first habitat, the province of Konieh — the ancient Iconium — and part of Broussa and of Aidin, that the mass of the population may be considered Turkish. Greeks predominate everywhere on the coasts of the AEgean, and in all the large towns, save in Macedonia, are found important Armenian communities. The Turks, during their five centuries of rule over these Christian nationalities of South-eastern Europe, have done little to assimilate them, and still less have they been assimilated by them have they been assimilated by them, notwithstanding the fact that all Osmanlis, save perhaps those of the peasant class, are, owing to the institution of slavery, of very mixed descent indeed. Pride of race is excessive in the Turks, and the habit of domination has been developed by their position as a ruling people surrounded by subject nationalities. As a nation, they display an overweening sense of their superiority to the subject races, having no interests or aspirations in common with them, never acquiring their languages, or attempting to understand their manners and customs, which they may be said to regard generally with a somewhat contemptuous toleration.”

Turkish Life in Town and Country
Edited by William Harbutt Dawson
Copyright, 1904 by G.P. Putnam’s sons

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell

"I challenge the accepted version of history because I do not write about things in black and white. People here are used to black and white; that’s why they are astonished that there are other shades, too."
Hrant Dink

“The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.”
 William Saroyan

*The 1933 novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, is banned in Turkey and was forbidden in Nazi occupied territories.
**If there was no Armenian genocide, Vostanik Adoyan would have never changed his name to Arshille Gorky as he never had to flee anything.
***As an example, the Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was prosecuted under the Article 301 for insulting Turkishness, for stating the fact that the Armenian genocide occurred. Turkish nationalists assassinated him before prison time was served.