(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Istanbul - Yasmin Rostomyan makes no big outward show of her origins but works daily to keep her Armenian heritage alive and preserve it for the future in modern Turkey.
"Turkey is my country, I do not want to leave," she says. "And I don't want my children to be obliged to leave. If they can stay here, that would make me happy."
Yasmin is one of around 60,000 Turkish-Armenians who form modern Turkey's Armenian community and have remained in the country despite the long shadow of history.
The modern state of Armenia and the Diaspora say that 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the first genocide of the 20th century from 1915 in a targeted Ottoman campaign to wipe them out of eastern Anatolia.
Turkey angrily denies that the Ottoman authorities committed genocide and says hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians were killed in a shared wartime tragedy.
The modern day controversy over World War I massacres - which is coming to a head before the 100th anniversary of the tragedy on April 24 - looms large of the small remainder of the Turkish-Armenian community.
But in daily life they do everything to keep culture and language intact, despite being a tiny Christian community in a majority Muslim country.
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