Kim Kardashian may have been destined for fame and fortune.
In his upcoming book, Citizen Kim, Jonathan Van Meter traces The Kardashians star’s remarkable rise from suburban Los Angeles to media icon and business powerhouse. But none of it would have happened if her ancestors hadn’t heeded the message of a 19th century Armenian prophet.
Kim Kardashian’s ancestors escaped a genocide
In the 1850s, an 11-year-old Armenian boy named Efim Klubnikin shared a prediction with his followers, who were part of a religious sect known as the Molokans.
“Those who believe in this will go on a journey to a far land, while the unbelievers will remain in place,” he said, according to Thinking Faith Network. “Our people will go on a long journey over the great and deep waters. People from all countries will go there. There will be a great war. All kings will shed blood like great rivers. Two steamships will leave to cross the impassable ocean.”
Decades later, Klubnikin renewed his prophecy, urging people to leave their homeland because the violence he predicted would soon come to pass. He specifically directed them to California. Those who believed his prophecy and traveled to America – including Kim’s grandfather Tatos Kardashian – thus escaped the Armenian Genocide, which began in 1913 and in which as many as 1.5 million people were killed. They also avoided the chaos of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
“The story of the prophet is one that Robert Kardashian told his daughter over and over when she was a child,” Van Meter shares in his book, which was excerpted in Vanity Fair.
“My great-grandparents … came from Armenia, and in their village, there was a boy who couldn’t read or write, and he supposedly went into a trance and wrote two letters,” Kim said. “The first letter he said to open but not the second letter. And so the first letter said: Everyone will be massacred; go to Los Angeles, California.… The tale has always been that the second letter can’t be opened until it’s time and that a ‘chosen’ Armenian will be drawn to open it one day.”
The Kardashian family believes ‘everything happens for a reason’
Whether or not you believe in the idea of prophecy, it’s clear that Kim and her family have built remarkable lives in the U.S.
“Kim’s ancestors’ Armenian immigrant story gets at something fundamental about her family’s creed: the verging-on-mystical belief that everything happens for a reason,” notes Van Meter. “It was meant to be, as they all say all the time. This is a family more given to the idea of preordination than any I’ve ever met.”
Many years after a prophecy prompted Kim’s relatives to flee Armenia, her father visited a psychic, who had another message for the family.
“She saw my last name and said, ‘Kardashian will be internationally known,’” Robert Kardashian later told Kim, according to GQ. “This is how I know they’re full of sh*t!”
Before he died in 2003, at age 59, Robert also told Kim he sensed that things would work out for his children.
“I know you’re going to be OK,” he told his daughter. “It’s almost like I can see ahead. I know you’re going to be OK, but just take care of your siblings for me. Just make sure you take care of them.”
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