For me, one of them is the Kurdish refugee exodus of April 1991 in the tumultuous wake of the first Iraq or Gulf war.
Taking to heart American pledges Washington would support an uprising in northern Iraq, Kurds there took up arms in the hope of sparking a wider rebellion against Saddam Hussein's regime.
That no such US support ever materialised and Saddam brutally crushed their uprising is now history.
Also consigned to history is the terrible suffering endured during those days in the wintry mountains as millions of Iraqi Kurdish civilians fleeing reprisals struggled to cross the rugged Iraq-Turkey border through appalling weather. Many died in the bitter cold, snow and mud along the way.
In the course of covering the Kurds' plight, I spent some time in the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, where three-quarters of the population today speak Kurdish.
It was in Diyarbakir yesterday during Kurdish New Year celebrations that tens of thousands of people gathered to hear a speaker read out what was described as a historic announcement by jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan who called for his Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters to lay down arms in their decades-long armed separatist insurgency against Turkey.
More than 40,000 people have died in this 30-year struggle for an ethnic Kurdish homeland in Turkey's south-east.
Yesterday was not the first time the PKK has announced a ceasefire, so why should we expect Ocalan's declaration to be any different this time around?
Well, to begin with, it's perhaps as auspicious a moment as we are likely to get. Just for once it seems the interests of Turkey's two most powerful political leaders – Ocalan and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – now coincide.
Both Ocalan's PKK leadership and the Turkish government have of late gone to some length to revive a strategic road map for a peace accord with the knowledge and cautious support of the bulk of their constituencies.
As for what has encouraged this "collaboration", two major factors can be identified as having been instrumental.
The first is Turkey's strong support for Syrian rebels seeking to oust the Alawite regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad which has created a power vacuum in north-eastern Syria.
A large Kurdish population resides there and its Democratic Union Party, which has strong ties to the PKK in Turkey, has emerged as the dominant Kurdish faction in Syria and has made overtures about seeking to establish an autonomous region in Syria akin to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq.
Faced with this prospect of a fledgling transnational Kurdish state that could reinvigorate a Kurdish claim for autonomy in Turkey, Mr Erdogan and his allies in government have had no choice but to sit up and take notice.
Also inextricably linked to this are the political ambitions of Mr Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (JDP) in forthcoming local and presidential elections in 2014.
Before his three-term stint as prime minister expires in 2015, Mr Erdogan is determined to rewrite Turkey's constitution to change the country's parliamentary system to a presidential one, thereby enabling him to run for president in 2014.
Not everyone in the JDP is enamoured by this idea, however, and even if his party did fully back him, Mr Erdogan would still lack the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to amend the constitution.
A way round this, of course, would be for Mr Erdogan to pull together enough support to put the revised constitution to a national referendum.
Enter the Kurdish card, in the shape of Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party who might just help Mr Erdogan but only if it sees real progress in peace talks with its Kurdish associates.
The benefits for Ocalan from such a tidy arrangement are obvious and would go some way help towards securing his desire for formal recognition of the rights of Kurdish people within Turkey.
While it would be churlish not to acknowledge how much of a positive step yesterday's Turkey-PKK ceasefire announcement is, it would also be remiss not to flag up the difficulties and obstacles that lie ahead.
From Mr Erdogan's perspective, it will surely be viewed with deep suspicion by hardline Turkish nationalists who fear Kurds would resume a drive for independence.
Those same Turkish hardliners are already smarting from recent revelations the country's intelligence service have been involved in secret talks with the PKK in Oslo and talking with Ocalan for many months.
As for Kurdish reservations, there are those who say they smell a rat and a possible sellout. Considering Ocalan has been in jail for more than 14 years, he has maintained a remarkable degree of control over the PKK.
That said, his credibility could be seriously questioned by dissident PKK elements who feel a withdrawal from violence too early in the peace process would be disastrous for the Kurdish cause.
For them, the PKK's armed struggle has historically acted as the ultimate bargaining chip.
Over decades, the Kurds have often felt their rights ignored at home and neglected by the international community which is perhaps why their people coined the saying: "We have no friends but the mountains."
Back in those dark days of the Iraqi Kurdish refugee exodus of 1991, those trapped wanted nothing more than to come down from the cold.
Whether the PKK will fully heed Ocalan's call to leave their own guerrilla mountain stronghold, silence their guns and let politics dominate is an altogether another question.
