International

The extraordinary escape from the 'Armenian Genocide' of Kim Kardashian's ancestors - thanks to a 'prophet' who urged them to uproot to America - can be revealed today for the first time.

MailOnline has unearthed a treasure trove of images showing the reality TV star's ethnic Armenian forebears who fled the tsarist Russian empire in the early 20th century, many of whom obeyed the advice of the sage.

Known at the time as the Kardaschoffs, in Russian style, the family made their way from their home village of Karakale in the late 19th Century to German ports. From there, they travelled to a new life in America on the passenger vessels SS Brandenberg and SS Koln.

By doing so, they escaped the triple horror of the First World War from 1914-18, the 'Armenian Genocide' starting in 1915 - exactly a century ago this year - and the Russian Revolution in 1917.
    

One hundred years after the deadly holocaust decimated their ancestral home, the Kardashians have become one of the most influential families in America.

The most famous of which is Kim who has chosen this year, on the hundredth anniversary of the atrocity, to visit Armenia for the first time.

But her lavish lifestyle, the expensive houses, an army of followers who hang on her every tweet, the marriage to a musical superstar would not exist if her ancestors had ignored the warning of a child 'prophet'.

Among those fleeing Erzurum - then in Armenia, and ruled by last Russian Tsar Nicholas II was family patriarch Hovhannes Miroyan and Kim's great great grandfather, born in 1844. He married the doughty Luciag Chorbajian, born in 1853.

The couple wed in Erzurum, which is now in Turkey, in 1867 but escaped along with their daughter Vartanoosh Mironyan, born in 1886, in the early 20th century.

Vartanoosh's distinctly blonde daughter Haigoohi Arakelian - known as Helen, born in America in 1917, the year the Bolshevik Revolution rocked the Russian Empire - was Kim's grandmother, who later married into the Kardashian clan.

The glamorous and 'dynamic' Helen wed Arthur who ran the largest meat-packing business in southern California.

Helen's son Robert, a celebrity lawyer who died of oesophageal cancer in 2003, married Kris Houghton and fathered the 21st Century's biggest reality TV stars Kourtney, Khloe, Robert Jr and most famous of all - Kim.

Their mother Kris eventually married Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner and together they raised two more TV personalities, Kendall and Kylie.

The flight to freedom of Arthur's parents and grandparents from the village of Karakale - today a snow-covered and entirely Muslim outpost in eastern Turkey where the stone ruins of the old Armenian homes still stand - came later than many in this community.

It was as if they had sought to cling on against the rising ethnic violence and persecution.

The Kardashians - or Kardaschoffs - like other branches of Kim's paternal kith and kin were ethnic Armenian, but they were also religious rebels, at odds with the orthodox faith in their homeland.

They had already fled persecution once before, from another location deeper in Armenia.

'The village bullies harassed and insulted them, dug into their tombs and (violated) the corpses of the deceased - hanging them on trees,' explained Joyce Keosababian-Bivin, whose ancestors also came from Karalala, and whose family is linked by marriage to the Kardashians.

'Because of that they wrote a letter of complaint to Nicholas II.'

The tsar decreed that they could move to Karakale, close to the Russian military settlement, where initially they were safe in what was 'a modern village, with beautiful buildings and wide streets'.

Here, they became close to incoming Russian protestants against the Russian Orthodox Church.

They were a sect called the Molokans, literally translated as 'milk-lovers', so-called because they drank milk, and other banned foods, on fast days.

Some were known as Jumpers, who leapt in the air, raising their hands high, during church services. They were pacifists and, crucially, adhered to the power of prophecy.