I heard secondhand of a Christian tour group taking a bus to Ararat. At one point they were stopped by Turkish authorities and made to cover the windows and told not look outside the bus for the next however-many miles. Naturally they peeked. What they saw was heavy equipment digging and moving the soil, and that soil was full of recognizably human bones — skulls, jawbones, femurs, etc. The Turks were (re)covering the massive pits where slaughtered Armenians had been dumped. Evidently the gravesite had been revealed during a heavy rain. The Turks are truly nasty.
In the movie “Ararat,” the young Armenian protagonist in the 1990s goes to Turkey to get some film footage for a movie they are producing about the genocide (that movie being produced in the movie is also called “Ararat).He visits Mt. Ararat but the Turkish army is guarding the mountain. He pays somebody to get him past the army to visit the what’s left of his ancestral town Van.
That movie depiction sounds consistent with your story about the Christian tour group.
I highly recommend the movie. It is complex and layered plus jumps around in time, so it can be a bit hard to follow. But, it all becomes clear as it progresses. The way they handled the historical flashbacks is amazing.