A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory 9781503631656

Citation preview

A

H o u s e

i n

t h e

H o m e l a n d

Wor lding the Middle E a st

A House in the Homeland Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory

Carel Bertram

Sta n for d Uni ve r s i t y P r e s s Sta n for d, Ca lifor n i a

Sta n for d Un ive r si t y Pr e ss Stanford, California ©2022 by Carel Bertram. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper MAP © Carel Bertram. Excerpt from “What I Can Tell You” is reproduced with the permission of Gregory Djanikian and Carnegie Mellon University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bertram, Carel, 1943– author. Title: A house in the homeland : Armenian pilgrimages to places of ancestral memory / Carel Bertram. Other titles: Worlding the Middle East. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2022] | Series: Worlding the Middle East | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021045116 (print) | LCCN 2021045117 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503630208 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631649 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631656 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Armenians—Travel—Turkey. | Pilgrims and pilgrimages—Turkey. | Armenian Genocide, 1915–1923. | Armenian diaspora. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC DS172.2 .B47 2022 (print) | LCC DS172.2 (ebook) | DDC 956.6/20154—dc23/eng/20211012 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045116 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045117 Cover design: Angela Moody Cover image: The town of Yozgat by Vahan Berberian, painted from memory in 1911. Used with permission from his great niece Mary Ann Arakelian Kazanjian. Typeset by Newgen in Arno Pro 11/14

To Denise Spellberg:  For her mentoring, supported by a dialogue of the mind—and framed by her heart. To the memory of my mother, Manya Bertram:  For her life's work of Tikkun Olam based on her authentic, energetic, selfless love for people. And to Armen Aroyan:   For the power of his pilgrimages, and for accepting me.

Contents



Note on Language, Transliteration, and Place-Names viii Map of Historical Armenia x

In trodu ct ion. Where Memory Takes Place  1 Part I. The House in the Homeland



1 The Family Mansion 15



2 An Erased Village and an Inhabited House 24



3 The House, Its Sacred Geography, and the Intrusion of the Profane 37



4 Music as the Sacred Memory of Home 46



5 The House-Place and Memory-Stories 56 Part II. Rituals in the Realm of the Sacred



6 The Emergence of Rituals 65



7 Relics: Engaging the Spirits 75



8 Communion: A Unification of Souls 82



9 Sacred and Profane: A Poetic Encounter 91

10 Votives I: Deferment 101 11 Votives II: Restoration 112 12 Ex-Votos: Gratitude 119 13 Shrines: Making Visible the Invisible 128 14 Blessings: At My Father’s House 134

Contents

Part III. Homeland: A Repertoire of Feeling

15 Homeland Music Performs the Village 145 16 Village Music Performs the Homeland 155 17 Traveling through a Trauma-scape 166 18 Traveling as Wholeness 178 Part IV. The Future of What Remains

19 The Last Armenians 189 20 Armenians “Everywhere” 198 21 A Homeland of Mirrors 208 Conclu sion. Revealing the Emotional Weight of Home 220 Acknowledgments: Making a Book 229 Notes 237 Bibliography 265 Index 285

vii

Note on Language, Transliteration, and Place-Names

T u r k i s h La n g u a g e a n d T r a n s l i t e r a t i o n s 1

Those ancestors and elders of the Western Armenian pilgrims who spoke and read Turkish used Arabic orthography. This was replaced by the Roman alphabet according to the language reforms of the early Turkish Republic. This book uses only this romanized Turkish alphabet, whether referring to the Ottoman or the Republican period. Here is a guide to the pronunciation of letters not used in the English alphabet, or used differently than in English: C “j” as in “journey” Ç “ch” as in “cherry” Ğ (soft g) lengthens the sound of the vowel preceding it; silent when between two vowels I (dotless i [ı]) “i” as in “girl” or “thinner” İ (dotted i, also dotted as a capital letter) “ee” as in “tree.” Note the difference between the two “I”s in the Turkish spelling of “Diyarbakır” Ö “u” as in “turn” or “eu” in French “feu” Ş “sh” as in “shallow” Ü “u” as in “cube” or “u” as in French “aigu” Ea s t e r n a n d W e s t e r n A r m e n i a n La n g u a g e a n d T r a n s l i t e r a t i o n s

Many of my print sources are in Armenian—as were many of my oral sources. When a source uses the Armenian alphabet and orthography, I have tried to viii

L a nguage , Tr a nsliter ation, a nd Pl ace Na me s

supply a pronounceable Roman alphabet transliteration of the Western Armenian spelling, as Western Armenian is the language spoken by the people who appear in this book. However, I preserve Eastern Armenian spelling when it appears in the title of a book or in a WorldCat entry. And when the name of an author or other individual is typically given in Eastern spelling, I use that spelling or I give both the Eastern and Western spellings. G e o g r a p h i c a l P l a c e - Na m e s

Similarly, I have used the Western Armenian spellings of geographical placenames, as used by the pilgrims or known by their elders and ancestors. When possible, I include known variants. Providing place-names is further complicated by people’s frequent use of the name of a larger town (e.g., Van) to stand in for the name of a small village (e.g., Ankugh) in the larger town’s orbit.2 I have also included current Turkish (T:) place-names, where applicable, to help readers find or research their hometowns. These Turkish names appear with the first substantive reference to a place. Only a hundred or so of the thousands of Historical Armenia’s villages [and towns] are visited or referenced in this book. Nonetheless, this is still too many to represent on our map. Moreover, those that do appear are given only approximate locations. For exact locations of any places mentioned in this book, readers may enter the current Turkish (T:) place-name here: https://nisanyanmap.com/.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n : W h e r e M e m o r y Ta k e s P l a c e

F o l l o w i n g t h e A r m e n i a n g e n o c i d e o f 1 9 1 5 , the United States be-

came an important refuge for genocide survivors. It was a host-land to those who had suffered unspeakable brutalities and were anguished by the loss of a wholeness they had lived with their families in towns and villages in the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire—which later became eastern and southeastern Turkey. For these survivors, even the idea of returning to a homeland emptied of Armenians and filled with memories of death and terror was unthinkable, and few ever saw their beloved homes again. But starting in the 1950s, and with increasing momentum in the 1990s, the survivors’ children, and then their grandchildren, began to make forays to Turkey in search of their families’ lost houses in the towns and villages that they had heard so much about. Although they had never traveled to Turkey before, they bristled at the term tourists, as their profound attachments made them feel they were hardly just curious visitors but were, in a sense, returning home. Instead, many called their journeys pilgrimages, and referred to themselves as pilgrims. These are the people you will meet in this book, and as we follow them, we will refer to them as pilgrims too. Osky was one of them. Almost eighty years after her mother had survived the Armenian genocide, Osky travelled from Rhode Island to Govdun, a village near Sivas in today’s Turkey, in search of her mother’s family house. She found no trace of it, nor were there any Armenians left. Yet “the Armenians” were still part 1

2

Introduction

of village memory, and finding that some older villagers knew stories about her mother’s famous Uncle Murad, she felt moved to stoop down and dig some earth from an empty plot to take home. Then, suddenly, Osky stood up and began to talk to her mother, who had died years before: “OK, Ma, you got your dream. Ma, I’m here. I’m here on your land. And I know that you never really ever thought I’d ever come here. You had no idea that I’d come here! But here I am! And I’m beginning to become proud, Ma. I wish you could have come back to see it.” It seemed that by digging the earth Osky had activated its spirits, opening a channel to her mother. Using experiences like these, this book identifies the many but specific ways in which such encounters can change the pilgrim. In the process, this book also changes our understanding of what pilgrimages can do. The stories these pilgrims bring with them are part of an Armenian saga that stems from what is often considered one of the earliest modern instances of genocide, and a defining event of the 20th century: that is, the Armenians’ traumatic annihilation in—or exile from—their own homeland in eastern and southeastern Anatolia.1 For them, this area was the western part of a larger Armenia, where Armenian communities had lived for thousands of years, even since time immemorial. By the 16th century, however, these communities had been incorporated into the growing Ottoman Empire, an Islamic state that came to encompass a variety of ethnic and religious enclaves from the Balkans through North Africa and into the Middle East. Then, in the 19th century, the Ottomans began to lose territory as the rising nationalism of its subsumed groups led to the formation of autonomous states such as Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. The Ottomans responded with a nationalism of their own in which they defined their authentic core as an ethnically Turkish and religiously Sunni Muslim population.2 This was coupled with the intention of providing this core with an exclusive homeland in Thrace (including Istanbul) and Anatolia. Thus, between 1915 and 1918 especially, Ottoman campaigns targeted this area’s Christian populations—­ Assyrian, Greek, and Armenian—all of whom were then living in their ancestral homelands as Ottoman citizens. For the Armenian community, the new Ottoman Turkish nationalism led to the systematic, town by town and village by village murders of Armenian men. These murders were followed by forced, usually fatal, marches of the remaining Armenian women and children to the deserts near Deir al-Zor, then in Ottoman Syria. Estimates of the

W h e r e M e m o ry Ta k e s P l ace

numbers who died hover between one and one and a half million, or at least half of the total number of Armenians who had once lived in what had been referred to as the “Armenian provinces” in eastern and southeastern Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I finally ended the genocide, but that empire’s successor, the Republic of Turkey (established in 1923), continued to carry out the Ottomans’ nationalist program. It denied the genocide, which it variously rebranded either as internal civil strife or as the deserved punishment of a seditious group (although never described as state policy). It also continued the appropriation of Armenian property, while prohibiting the return of those exiled Armenians who had survived. Furthermore, successive Turkish administrations have not only criminalized the very discussion of the genocide, but have worked to erase any memory of local Armenian history by denying it a place in school curricula and by supporting a continual destruction of Armenian churches, monasteries and schools as well as the obliteration of Armenian village names. Many survivors of the genocide made their way from their Armenian communities in Ottoman Armenia to Eastern Armenia, which was then part of Tsarist Russia; later they would become citizens of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. Many others fled west, to Istanbul, where an Armenian population had established roots even before the Ottomans arrived. Those who gave shape to what would become the great Armenian diaspora, however, went in every direction: to Russia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece and France, for example. Large numbers went to the Americas, especially to the United States, rescued by fathers and uncles, brothers and husbands who had left their Ottoman Armenian homeland earlier, usually with a plan either to return with funds for their houses and farms or to send for their families to join them. But in 1915, all their correspondence from home suddenly stopped. Only through a network of missionaries, newspapers and word of mouth would reunions be made possible, allowing the Armenian-American diaspora to settle and grow in safety. Osky’s mother was one example. In about 1910, her husband had left her and their small daughter in the village of Govdun and emigrated, finally finding work in Providence, Rhode Island. He lost contact with her in 1915 when she and their daughter were taken up in the Ottoman mass village deportation marches. Their small daughter died along the way, but Osky’s mother survived, and within a few years she was able to make contact with her

3

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Introduction

husband and was brought to the United States. There, they had three more children. The first was named for the child who was lost. Osky was the second. The third was named for Uncle Murad.3 A r m e n A roya n , P i lg r i ms a n d P i lg r i m ag es

It was only in the 1950s, upon the relaxation of Turkish laws that restricted general travel into the interior of the country, that Turkey became a feasible travel destination for the exiled or their descendants. Even then, only a rare few had the resources and the stomach—or courage—to find their remote home villages, at that time often accessible only on horseback or on foot.4 It was not until the 1990s that someone ventured to take Armenians of the diaspora to the place that so many considered to be their real homeland, that is, their villages, a term that I often use to stand for what we might call their hometowns. For even if their ancestors had come from larger enclaves such as Lidje, or even towns and cities such as Yozgat, Marash and Diyarbakir, the pilgrims’ focus was on the close-knit Armenian neighborhoods where their family house had been. The person who would take them there was Armen Aroyan, an Armenian living in California but born in Egypt to a family exiled from southeastern Anatolia. In 1988, as an American engineer who traveled to Turkey for professional reasons, Aroyan had been able to visit his father’s village of Jibin, by then made accessible via a network of newly built highways, even if they still led to dirt roads. When Aroyan returned to the United States and spoke to church and community groups about his journey, an excited ripple of possibility went through the diaspora’s soul, spreading by word of mouth to exiled Armenians and their descendants in the American host-land and even beyond. Aroyan’s decision to guide a few Armenians in finding their ancestral villages grew to the point that his helpful shepherding soon became his life’s work. And so, starting in the early 1990s, he cautiously began to lead small groups into a country that denied that the genocide had ever happened, and that was angry that Armenians still existed to bring the subject up. By 2015, he had taken as many as two thousand pilgrims “home.”5 Osky, traveling in 1994, was on one of Aroyan’s earliest trips.6 In those early years, Aroyan cautioned pilgrims to ask little about the past, and not to speak Armenian unless they were inside the bus. Tensions relaxed somewhat over time, but were again heightened in 2007 with the assassination of Hrank Dink, the editor of Istanbul’s Armenian newspaper, Agos, although his violent

W h e r e M e m o ry Ta k e s P l ace

death also opened a window to hear the many voices of those in Turkey who were sympathetic to Armenians and angry about their current and historical mistreatment. In fact, by the time of the genocide’s centennial commemoration, in April of 2015, pilgrims rarely hid their identities and their quests. But almost immediately afterward, following the Turkish state’s reaction to electoral gains by the Armenian-friendly pro-Kurdish party in June of 2015, followed by a coup attempt in July of 2016, the state shone a searchlight on every supposed “enemy,” which, together with the state’s resurgent nationalism, again made being openly Armenian problematic for pilgrims, a situation that poses a continuing risk for Armenians still living in Turkey. Thus, the displacement and liquidation of the Armenian populations of the Ottoman Empire not only constituted a formative Armenian historical trauma, but it remains raw. Central to the present study are over a dozen of these Aroyan group pilgrimages that I accompanied between 2007 and 2015, along with several of my own trips with individual pilgrims. These experiences made clear how the homeland was defined by the house, or by the village where that house once stood (Figure 1). Aroyan organized his trips around groups whose home villages were somewhat near to one another, although traveling between them could still turn out to be difficult because the land is often mountainous, and villages that seem close on a map may be separated by many hours of driving on tortuous roads. Our days were long and hard, often with no places for food or rest stops, but not as hard for us as they were for Aroyan, who daily gave every ounce of energy to finding everyone’s village, getting there, and then helping pilgrims locate markers of their family memories: he remembered such things as a pilgrim’s having spoken about the large tree that a grandparent had described; if it was there, he would find it, even if the house itself was gone. Calling ahead from the front of the bus as it began to get dark, he arranged for dinners to appear long after everything was closed, often surprising pilgrims with familiar local dishes; and at the end of each day, we found that he had reserved (always adequate but most often quite luxurious) accommodations for tired travelers returning from their long day’s journey. The difficulty of travel, including finding villages that seemed to have disappeared, or whose names had been changed, meant that only a relatively small number of pilgrims would travel alone. A few traveled in groups led by organizers other than Aroyan. I am able to draw on a relatively large group

5

F igur e 1.   A pilgrim, hoping to find her ancestral house, walks as she photographs an old neighborhood in Kharpert, 2007. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

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of pilgrims because, along with my personal observations of well over one hundred pilgrims, including conversations and written communications that span an eight-year travel period, I have also constructed an archive of several hundred other pilgrims’ journals, memoirs, blogs, photographs, letters, maps, drawings and creative works. Many of these travelers were among the several thousand pilgrims who have traveled with Aroyan over the years, and my information about them comes in part from the videos Aroyan took during every pilgrimage (now in the Armen Aroyan Collection at the University of Southern California Institute of Armenian Studies) as well as from the many articles about their trips that they wrote and then sent to him for a collection that is yet unpublished. I also found and personally contacted many of these pilgrims, whether they had traveled with Aroyan, alone, or with others. Although most of the pilgrims I follow are from the American diaspora, some are from outside it including some Armenians who had fled to Istanbul.7 I also have materials from pilgrimages that predate these contemporary trips. None of them traveled because they wanted to see the tourists sites of Turkey; their goal was the little known, often hard to find and hard to reach domestic places in the interior, and when asked “Why?” each would surely give the same answer Chris Bohjalian gave: “Because I am Armenian and that’s where my family once lived.”8 In all, my archive spans over fifty years. I treat both the experiences I witnessed and the documents I collected as ethnographies that disclose individual, shared, and communal memories and sensibilities, and it is these experiences and documents that anchor my analyses. The earliest of the materials concern return journeys made by survivors, whom I term natives; these pilgrims search for their houses in the neighborhoods where they were born and that feature in their personal memories from before the genocide. However, most of the travelers presented in this book are descendants, the children or grandchildren of survivors who have no personal memories of these places, yet learned early on that the family house was the central marker of homeland. This is made clear in the descendants’ memory-stories, the term I use for what inspired, even impelled, their journeys: that is, the stories and attachments heard or learned from their survivor parents and grandparents, and which they have assembled as their received truths. However, this book also goes further, and identifies what happens when these assemblages of memory-stories arrive at the places where they took

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Introduction

place; there the pilgrims’ stories are reassembled when, by the pilgrims’ actions, they are forced into the house’s story, giving it a new meaning and even new permanence. Pilgrims’ responses include imaginatively inhabiting real and proxy houses; using poetry and song to insert themselves into a house’s lost world; and inventing a group of rituals that, by defying time, satisfy a range of spiritual yearnings. I focus on a select few pilgrims to illustrate particular types of responses, such as the collection of relics or the ritual of communion. However, other pilgrims, drawn from a multitude of examples, may make cameo appearances when what they said, saw, did or felt, corroborates the larger patterns that I have discovered. In all cases, I attempt to honor these pilgrims by using their real first names. Homeland

When we understand the house, or its village or the hometown, as the pilgrim’s primary goal, we come to understand homeland from a changed perspective. At the very least, the centrality of the house, whether found or not, was rooted in a materiality that was visceral and mappable, in fact pilgrims’ houses were in villages that most often could be found on a map of the Six Vilayets (provinces) that made up Ottoman Armenia: Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbakir, Sivas, and Mamuret-ul-Aziz (Kharpert). Ottoman Armenia was a term that the Russians were forced to accept as they withdrew from eastern Turkey in 1878, at the end of the Russo-Turkish War. As the language of the pilgrims’ own parents or grandparents shows, the use of this name continued, undeterred by Sultan Abdul Hamid who, around the time of the treaty, banned his subjects from using the term Armenia at all; no doubt hoping that by imperial decree, an Armenian identity would cease to exist.9 This Ottoman Armenia is not to be confused with what would become today’s Republic of Armenia, an eastern part of historical Armenia that had been ruled by the Russian tsars from 1828 until, after a brief moment of independence, it became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922. Only in 1991 did it finally become the fully independent Armenia that we know today. Nonetheless, most of the pilgrims we will follow, like most Armenians in their various diasporas, feel a compelling, even loving attachment to this Republic, which also houses the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church, with a cathedral rooted in the establishment of Armenia in the third century CE as Christianity’s first Christian nation. It also holds an array of intact ancient

W h e r e M e m o ry Ta k e s P l ace

and medieval sites whose counterparts in Anatolia have mostly been lost. But most precious of all, it offers the security of knowing that it holds the safety of home for all Armenians, even if they do not live there. Yet an affective loyalty to the Republic of Armenia does not replace the pilgrims’ sense of rootedness in the Western Armenia of Ottoman lands, with its distinctive history and culture that differ significantly from those of Eastern Armenia. For example, over the centuries, the Armenian language developed into markedly different Eastern and Western dialects, and Eastern and Western cultural forms took on their own characteristic musical, culinary and other traditions. Eastern Armenian traditions were influenced by the cultures of the Iranian and later Russian empires, while Western Armenian cultural practices overlapped with Ottoman ones. It is these Western forms that survivors took to the diaspora as their own. However, many pilgrims felt that with the loss of the preponderance of Western Armenian culture, Eastern Armenian traditions were establishing a cultural hegemony that suggested not only that Eastern Armenian music and foods were more authentic but that Ottoman Armenian cultural forms were tainted by their association with Turkish culture. This put pilgrims in an uncomfortable position, as many pilgrimage stories show. On the one hand, pilgrims often felt alien when they traveled to the Republic of Armenia while they felt at home with the music they heard in Turkey, and the foods there seemed as if made in their mothers’ kitchens.10 On the other hand, they could not identify with the local Turkish and Kurdish citizens, whose culture (but not their religion or language) they sometimes shared. Instead, the pilgrims carried their knowledge of genocide and erasure as both facts and feelings. Thus, just as their rage must be understood, so too must their bravery not be understated as they searched for their homes in an inhospitable homeland. In the end, pilgrims found no single comfortable name for their longedfor homeland: sometimes they used Armenia (although not referencing the current country of Armenia); sometimes they used Western Armenia (often suggestive of their hope for a future reunification with the Republic of Armenia in the east); and sometimes historical Armenia (or occasionally Ottoman Armenia, referring to the western part of a greater Armenia that had lost its Armenian population following 1915). This book uses the term historical Armenia, with a sense more geographical than political. However, another frequently used, and perhaps better term may be yergir, to which pilgrims gave

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Introduction

more homey associations. Meaning “the land,” yergir might be translated as “the old country” by pilgrims whose elders used it to mean a homeland imagined as a conflation of their individual home and a cultural landscape of lost Armenian towns and villages with local idioms, music, and food, and with the comfortingly familiar rituals of school, markets, and church. The one name that pilgrims never used for homeland was Turkey. As time passes, fewer and fewer pilgrims have been able to find their houses or even identifiable remains of their ancestral pasts; in part this is because their memory-stories hold fewer clues, in part this is because old neighborhoods continue to have their Armenian traces demolished, and in part this is because of the march of modernity. Nonetheless, a softening political climate at the beginning of the 21st century allowed pilgrims to encounter their homeland in a radically new way, as they increasingly found what formerly seemed almost inconceivable: Muslim Armenians—even some who were relatives. Although the effect this discovery has had on identity for both groups continues, the opening of opportunities to explore these connections unfortunately did not.11 Furthermore, facing a series of new political difficulties in Turkey, Aroyan, having long put off retirement in order to help his community fulfill its dreams, ended his career. His protégé, Annie Kahkejian, has continued his mission, and the historical Armenia scholars Khatchig Mouradian and George Aghjayan continue to use their skills to help descendants find their ancestral homes; but each increasingly guides travelers who, unlike Osky, did not learn the stories of their ancestral homes directly from the people who were forced to leave them, changing the quality—although not the level—of their attachments. With fewer first- and second-generation descendants, and without Aroyan’s leadership, 2015 may mark the waning of this generation of pilgrims. In many ways, then, this book preserves a series of linked moments in time as well as generational links that won’t be seen again for this community. In the following pages, I hope to show how pilgrimage powerfully connects memory and place. As a granular ethnography discloses the porous boundaries between house and homeland and even host-land—as well as between past and present—these Armenian pilgrimages from the American diaspora reflect the brutal reach of trauma, separation, and exile. As examples of the interactions between private, shared, and collective memory, they show how the forces of family bonds, real, mythical, lost and enduring, as well

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as social and religious communities, tie cherished identities together. Above all, as this book shows, they document how a confrontation of memory and place, when that place evokes the meaning of home, can open a space for the soul, release the powers of the spiritual, and perhaps most importantly, expose a wellspring of humanity, such as when, even as they suspect that those they meet are the descendants of perpetrators, Armenian pilgrims embrace the Turkish children who live in their ancestral villages. The ethnographic detail that follows invites you, the reader, to share in the intimate experiences of these pilgrims’ journeys. Moreover, as an exploration of memory and place, house and home, loss and wholeness, this Armenian story might well resonate with something that each of us, whatever our history, will recognize in ourselves.

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Part I

The House in the Homeland

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Chapter 1

Th e F a m i l y Ma n s i o n

W h e n Ma r y A n n

showed me what she had brought in her suitcase, I began to grasp the powerful intimacy of each pilgrim’s search for their ancestral house. In a thick blue folder, Mary Ann had gathered an array of items that were markers of deeply profound memory-stories. She would confront these stories where they had taken place, and I would watch as their meanings changed for her, in surprisingly satisfying ways. We were traveling in a caravan of two minibuses led by Armen Aroyan, heading to towns and villages in Anatolia where each of twelve pilgrims hoped to find their family house. Our first town on that trip was Mary Ann’s ancestral town of Yozgat, just above the geographical center of Anatolia. Mary Ann’s father, Badrig Arakelian, had been born in Yozgat in 1909. His family had lived there for generations, and it was believed that a great mansion had been part of the family’s property until 1915. Our caravan reached Yozgat in the late dusk of a summer’s day. Mary Ann sat holding the blue folder’s most cherished possession, a painting of Yozgat by her great-uncle Vahan, showing pine-­ covered mountains and a substantial town along the river in the valley below (Figure 2). That night, it was too dark to do more than imagine the scene outside. However, when Mary Ann awoke in the Hotel Çamlik (Pinetree Hotel) in the pine-covered mountains of her uncle’s memory, she opened the window to a view that confirmed that she was in the right place. Aroyan, having been shown Uncle Vahan’s painting, had called ahead to Yozgat to 15

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Chapter One

F igur e 2.   “View of Yozgat.” Uncle Vahan’s painting, made from memory, 1911. Courtesy of Mary Ann Kazanjian.

arrange that her room would have this view. She sighed. Her husband, Ed, took a photograph of what she saw (Figure 3). Mary Ann considered the painting a kind of map, and she had hoped to find the huge building that her uncle had depicted by the river. But the Kızılırmak River (T: Alis; the ancient Halys) could no longer be a clue as, alas, it had been diverted underground. Slowly, she also realized that the large building Uncle Vahan had painted could not have been their family mansion, as she had imagined, but probably was an Ottoman government building. Finding the actual house would require some help. Of all the pilgrims I have known, Mary Ann was the most prepared for this search. Safely kept within her blue folder, along with a copy of her uncle’s memory painting, were copies of letters; fragments of family memoirs; an invitation to a 1907 Yozgat family wedding; a Yozgat insurance receipt from 1908; and a hand-drawn Yozgat family tree. She had also packed a collection of photographs. Like her other items, each photograph had a local, Ottoman Yozgat family story to tell. She also carried a notebook, and made continuous,

Family Mansion

F igur e 3.   View of Yozgat from the Hotel Çamlik, 2009. Photo by Edward Kazanjian.

copious notes, which she later shared with me. The things she carried were a burden for her. Even before the group reached Yozgat, Mary Ann would rifle through her folder, with a palpable anxiety. She had shown it to Armen Aroyan as soon as they met in Istanbul, wanting to make certain that he understood how each item contained the weight of her history, and that—in her small window of time in Yozgat—all must be brought to their own rightful place. Aroyan’s sleuthing had found that the family house had survived, preserved as an ethnographic museum (Figure 4). Although its Armenian history was no longer a part of its narrative, and did not appear in the official brochure, it was known to its staff as the Arslanian home.1 According to the family tree she carried with her, Mary Ann’s great-great-great-great-­ grandfather, Ohan Çorbacı Arslanian, and his family had been one of the founding families of Yozgat, and Arslanian had been her paternal greatgrandmother’s family name. Mary Ann surmised that when Uncle Vahan left for America in 1910, he had left from this house. Except for a niece, and

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F igur e 4.   The Nizamoğlu Konağı (Mansion), a Yozgat ethnographic museum said to be known locally as the Arslanian House, 2009. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

the nephew who would become Mary Ann’s father, he saw none of his family again. But the house seemed to confirm what she had heard from her father and her uncle: the family had been prosperous, and their pre-genocide life had been happy. “I felt like it was just like what I was told,” she said, “but I always thought it was an exaggeration; you know, we were wealthy, we were this and we were that. But this is what they were talking about!” In her trip journal, she wrote: “The interior of the museum home was just as magnificent as the exterior and depicted a very wealthy, comfortable existence for the family. The museum was furnished as it was at the turn of the century with many original and beautiful art works and details on the walls, cabinet and ceiling reliefs.” Th e S t o r i e s F i n d Th e i r H o u s e

For Mary Ann, the mansion gave place to her images and memory-stories, that is, to the stories she had heard from her family. Here, she could emplace

Family Mansion

items from her folder, such as her grandparents’ 1907 wedding invitation and wedding photo, in a context of affluence. But the details of the past also evoked the people who had told her these stories, and even the places where those stories were told and heard. She also referred to her Uncle Vahan’s oral history, taken in America, to stories he had written down, and to a letter he had received in 1913 from his father, who had remained in Yozgat. And so, in Yozgat, not only the stories told by her father and by her uncle but even a bit of Philadelphia became a part of the house that welcomed Mary Ann that day. “We would visit that uncle [in Philadelphia], and he would tell us the same stories.” Holding her folder, she continued: “This uncle from Philadelphia did these paintings and documented things in the stories. He wrote a story. He wrote it. I brought it along. I have it. I showed you the letter!” At another time she said: “I heard these stories from my uncle every summer. Being an only child, I had the advantage of being with the adults. That’s what you did—you visited the relatives. If it weren’t for him passing on all this material to me years back, I would have known nothing.” “I was his favorite,” she added. Mary Ann had not brought all her family photos to Yozgat, but later she showed me the photograph of her two daughters meeting their great-greatuncle Vahan. “They met him when he was in his 90s. When they walked in and saw him, they froze in their tracks. ‘Oh, my gosh, he looks just like grandpa!’ They sat at his feet and stared.” She chose that photo to show me because it was on that visit to Philadelphia, with her children, that Uncle Vahan took out the picture of his own parents in Yozgat, no doubt sent to him in America by his father before 1915. In it, Mary Ann’s own father, Badrig, at about the age of three and carrying a large white Panama hat, is holding the hand of his well-dressed grandfather, who is wearing a Turkish fez (Figure 5). Mary Ann lovingly called this photo the “Panama Hat Picture.” Perhaps it was taken in 1912, just before Badrig, his parents, two sisters and a young aunt (perhaps to help with the young children) had moved from Yozgat, in the center of Anatolia, to Samsun, on the Black Sea. In Samsun in 1915 came what every Armenian family feared, the knock on the door that meant the men of the family would be taken into “custody,” and then disappear. Badrig’s mother, pregnant with her fourth child, took her young daughters in search of

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F igur e 5.   Mary Ann’s father, Badrig Arakelian, standing in front of his grandmother, Sasade Arslanian-Berberian. His left hand holds the hand of his grandfather, Roupen Berberian, and his right hand holds his Panama hat. Yozgat, 1912. Courtesy of Mary Ann Kazanjian.

her husband, never to be seen again. Badrig and his aunt, however, survived a long and arduous escape, finally making it to Pennsylvania, where they were greeted by Uncle Vahan. Her uncle had wanted to give her the original photo, but Mary Ann couldn’t bear to take it from him, so she made a copy; and a copy of this copy came along on the trip. Reassembling Memory

When the “Panama Hat Picture” returned home to Yozgat, it arrived with its new accumulation of associations and memories from Mary Ann’s life in the United States. Here, as she began to experience the house in Yozgat as home, Mary Ann could add to those associations, reassembling her memory yet again. Mary Ann wrote in her journal, “There, in one of the upstairs salons, was a turn of the century organ with a Mason and Hamlin Boston label, which I felt was truly a sign to me, as a church organist, that this was my family

Family Mansion

home and also that it was welcoming me back.” Later she added, “Imagine, an organ, and from Boston!” (Mary Ann grew up and still lives in the greater Boston area.) “I was also astonished to see the Singer sewing machine and felt it was another sign, since Uncle Vahan and my father were tailors.” And then she further recalled, as if this sign were not clear enough, that another Yozgat great-aunt who had made it to America was the one who “would sew and design all my flower girl dresses.” In some ways, the museum house was an assembled memory of its own, as museum houses rarely exhibit a moment in time. Rather, they are conscious installations that attempt to reproduce an image of time. Thus, having been made into a depersonalized, anonymous, generic icon of an era, even if this house were Mary Ann’s house, it also was not. Yet when Mary Ann came upon the sewing machine, the organ, and the stage-like settings in its furnished rooms, its ghost came to life, making images not unlike her ­photographs—to which Mary Ann had assigned meaning by giving them captions. These would join the other items and stories she carried, generating a new configuration of memory. M e m o r y a s “ Th i n g s Ca r r i e d ”

Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” in which he considers soldiers and their experiences of Vietnam, describes the very visceral connections between the personal items carried into battle and the soldiers’ emotional histories, and does so in a way that parallels the power radiated by the items brought by the pilgrims in this book. In O’Brien’s story, the things they carried were objects such as first-aid kits and love letters, and the stories these items elicited disclosed the emotional burdens and soulful yearnings of the soldiers’ experience of war. Thus, the meaning of that place, Vietnam, is what we are to extract from that story’s heady combination of emotion-laden objects and images. However, when items such as Mary Ann’s photo of her father as a child, with all its personal memories, are brought to the place where the photograph was taken, the experiential meaning, even the affective truth, of the ancestral house is not just revealed, it is constructed. Furthermore, by reassembling memories and memory-stories, this meaning is understood, even experienced, in a way that allows it to become a part of Mary Ann’s story: In her poetic imagination, that sewing machine was “as if ” it had been used by

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her father, her uncle, and even her aunt, all of whom had escaped to tell about it. There might even have been a moment when everything seemed to shift, a type of reverie or realm in which, as the philosopher Edmund Husserl might suggest, Mary Ann’s imagination was able to stand apart from “the pitfalls of naturalistic positing,”2 or the lining up of facts. Husserl’s contemporary, Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher concerned with the emotional resonance of houses, might even have predicted that when Mary Ann’s imagination added new images to old, she would experience a shift that was driven by deep, even poetic truths. “Imagination,” wrote Bachelard, “is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality.” In fact, for Bachelard, when our imaginations confront our houses, which are made up of “dispersed images and a body of images at the same time, . . . imagination augments the values of reality.”3 As Mary Ann began to meld the images she had brought with her with those she was experiencing, it became possible for her, imaginatively, to move back in. Yet for Mary Ann, the finding of her family house was also a tense moment, as she could find no acknowledgment that it was an Armenian house, let alone hers. Instead, it had become a marker of a homogenized Turkish history, signaled by the Turkish flag that stood in front of it. If history had not been what it was, she might have shown her photographs to the receptionist or to the armed guards at the door. Mary Ann’s husband, Ed, however, looking at the two Turkish-speaking guards, had no desire to use her family’s photographs in an attempt to replace past appropriations with new commonalities. Instead, with his ever-present wit, and feeling sure that they would not understand, he said to them, in clear English, “This is my wife’s house and you are fired!” Mary Ann, on the other hand, at least in the moment, was less engaged than her husband with the loss of the house and the genocide that caused it, or with the Turkish denial that erased its history; instead, her experience disclosed potential healing. It could not heal what had happened to her family, nor change the reasons why she never knew her own grandmother, but by giving her house a positive and personal meaning, it could heal some of the separation between her present self and her ancestral past. Experiencing the house through the lens of an amalgam of new and old memory images had brought the house from death to life, making it available as a gift to the future.

Family Mansion

The next day, as the caravan of pilgrims moved on to other towns, she said to Aroyan, “I just want to tell you how comfortable it felt yesterday, and I was very proud of this beautiful location, that they had the life that they had there, and proud that they made such a nice life for themselves; they accomplished a lot in the short time that they had”; the unspoken ending being: “in this homeland that we can never live in again.”

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An Erased Village and an I n ha b i t e d H o u s e

Ma r y A n n f o u n d

her ancestral house in Yozgat, but when Muriel finally arrived where her house should have been, there was nothing left of it: the entire village of Dzak (Tsack; T: İn or İnköy) was gone. It did not appear on Turkish maps either, because the name of the village had been erased too. Armen Aroyan spent almost a full day trying to locate the village, which he said that he had found once, almost ten years earlier. Before 1915, Muriel’s extended maternal family had lived in Dzak with as many as 150 other Armenian families, a population large enough to support its own church. Now, with her ancestors’ village unmapped and unmarked, leveled and deserted, Muriel seemed to have nowhere to “place” her two miracle stories: the miraculous birth and perhaps even more miraculous survival of her mother, Artemis. M e m o ry-Sto r i e s f r o m Dz a k

The first of these two miracle stories was the birth of Artemis, who was the only child to live after her mother had suffered the loss of her other children during pregnancy or childbirth. In that story, Artemis’s grandmother “had lovingly fashioned a distinctive pinafore” using an auspicious forty pieces of cloth, and also a bracelet of forty pieces of silver, made as part of a religious practice, or Novena, in this instance of prayers for the health and survival of this much wanted baby. Artemis had been told that the bracelet “was blessed by the church priest and my mother inscribed ‘Artemis’ on it, and when I 24

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

was Christened, the words, ‘May you live,’ were added.”1 Baby Artemis wore the pinafore often to secure good fortune, and Muriel’s thought was that the prayers embedded in the bracelet and pinafore seemed to have worked. Not only did baby Artemis survive, but because of her distinctive, evil-eye deflecting clothes, after the genocide, her mother’s cousin, Joovar, would identify Artemis for certain, and take her back into the family. That was the second miracle. But Muriel had only recently learned this story. Unlike Mary Ann, Muriel heard no stories from aunts or uncles about lost landscapes as she grew up, nor were there corroborative street names, wedding invitations, passports or insurance policies. In fact, both her father and her mother had made conscious decisions to keep their own experiences of massacres not only unspoken, but—to the extent possible—unconscious.2 Her mother, like many survivors, had “successfully blocked out all but the most harmless reminiscences of her earliest years.” As Muriel would write, it was only later that she leaned how her parents’ personal histories had been impacted by “what had occurred historically.”3 Nonetheless, like many other descendants of survivors, Muriel had been raised with a great awareness of social justice and injustice. In fact, as an adult she became dedicated not only to documenting but in some cases also helping during humanitarian disasters in which governments conducted operations against their civilian populations, especially children. Her book Through the Wall of Fire describes the 1915 genocide of the Armenians, the war in Iraq during the post-1991 period, and the deportations and displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 and 2008 to 2009. Unexpectedly, it was Muriel’s telling her mother about her personal work in Iraq that shook her mother’s subconscious, “unleashing the floodgates” that would not only inaugurate Muriel’s personal historical consciousness but also lead to her Armenian pilgrimage in 2011. Muriel told her mother the story of Sabreen, a four-year old Iraqi child, and showed her mother photos of Sabreen. Sabreen had been severely injured in Iraq, and the war and US embargo‒caused impoverishment had made a needed bone transplant impossible. Muriel, who was working with a humanitarian relief effort, met Sabreen in the local Najaf hospital, where she was being cared for by her mother. Separating her from her family, Muriel accompanied Sabreen to Germany, where she was successfully treated for

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more than a year before being returned to her home. Muriel later wrote that when she told Artemis this, it “detonated a minor explosion in my mother’s mind, and she began to tell me stories of her childhood that I had never heard before.”4 What struck Muriel’s mother about this story was not the child’s physical injury but how her trauma had left her unable to speak. Only with the peace and care provided in Germany did she relearn language; although this time, the language was German. She also began to set down new roots. Upon leaving her German sanctuary and reentering what felt like a new family, Sabreen began an emotionally difficult process, including the relearning of Arabic.5 In Arlington, Massachusetts, Muriel’s mother recognized this story as her own. During the genocide, Artemis had been one of the Kılıç Artıkları, a Turkish phrase meaning the “remains of the sword,” referring to those who had escaped the universal death that the genocide was meant to accomplish.6 After the massacres in Dzak, Artemis had been found, barely a toddler, alive among a pile of corpses. Eventually, she was taken in by a Turkish family in the nearby town of Agn (T: Eğin; now Kemaliye), where she became attached to her new mother and spoke only Turkish. Later, identified by her pinafore, she was found by her older cousin Joovar and reclaimed, aided by a new Turkish law that mandated Armenian organizations, the Red Cross, and the Middle East Relief Society to find Armenian children that had been taken into Muslim homes and return them to Armenian community care, often to orphanages in Istanbul. Penalties for noncompliance were severe.7 Yet in describing this reclaiming, Artemis also described the anguish that it had caused her young heart, feeling it as abandonment by the only family she knew. When “my Ana [Turkish for “mother”] and her husband left me, I cried and cried after them. I wanted to go back with them. But I went with Joovar to her village. I had to. Yet, the only person I knew there was Joovar Ablah [“older sister,” but used as an honorific for older girls or women felt to be close], my cousin. . . . Everyone here was Armenian, and I could not understand one word of Armenian.”8 After Muriel heard her mother’s Dzak story, her own childhood memories about her two great-aunts started to make sense. They had been called “the Nannies,” but in fact were her parents’ surrogate mothers, and survivors themselves.9 The “Watertown Nanny” was Muriel’s mother’s cousin Joovar, the one who had recovered Artemis from Dzak and eventually taken her to

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

America. The “Medford Nanny” was Muriel’s paternal great-aunt, who had found Muriel’s father orphaned but alive and, as with Muriel’s mother, in the care of a Turkish family. She, too, had then managed to bring him with her to America. As a child, the two aunts’ place in the family had always confused Muriel: “Were they aunts, great-aunts, or what?” Muriel knew they were not grandmothers because “we did not call them Grandma, as my friends called their grandmothers.” As the centerpieces of alternating Sunday dinners, the Nannies had a large presence, yet at each Nanny’s house, Muriel felt that this presence hid something unbearably sad. The sadness of the two houses seemed connected because at each house she felt watched over by similar images hanging on the walls. One was painted and one was embroidered, but both were of a sad young woman sitting among ruins, with broken columns representing a lost culture and with strewn weapons representing that this loss was due to violence, not time. Muriel would later come to understand that these were depictions of Mother Armenia mourning her losses,10 and that similar images were found in many Armenian homes (Figure 6). As her family stories emerged, Muriel not only began to understand who these two nannies really were; she also began to realize that in spite of her parents’ silences, the genocide had been within her all the same. These memory images and stories that were rooted in the Massachusetts towns of Arlington, Watertown and Medford were what Muriel would “carry” when she, her husband, Michael, and her brother, Robert, arranged to travel first to Dzak and then to Agn with Armen Aroyan. And just as Mary Ann had cherished family photographs in her blue folder, Muriel had the photographs in her book Through the Wall of Fire that included her world-family and images of children personally known to her. Even though she had not brought a copy of her book on this trip, those pictures certainly were salient in the crevices of her mental luggage. Muriel, Mary Ann and most of the other pilgrims carried personal memory links to their ancestral homes, but Muriel’s included images of Iraqi and Palestinian children (one could even argue that these children are “her” children in terms of her long commitment to helping them). Muriel would fold in these Iraqi images with her parents’ latelyuncovered survivor memories and also the two images of Mother Armenia mourning her losses that hung on the walls of her two Nannies’ Massachusetts homes, reverberating their sadness.

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F igur e 6.   “Mother Armenia Mourning Her Losses,” by Hagop Keledjian, n.d. Courtesy of the Armenian Museum of America, Georges Bezdjian Collection. P l a c i n g M e m o ry-Sto r i e s i n a Lo st V i l l a g e

What little remained of Muriel’s ancestral village was akin to the stones lamented by Mother Armenia, and so it was in part an appropriate place for her to place her memory-stories. This experience of being confronted by emptiness was shared by many pilgrims in Muriel’s generation of pilgrims and was a problem each of them had to personally manage. For example, in her 1999 search for the village of Karakala (T: Karakale), Joyce B. encountered a nameless landscape of broken foundation stones, identifiable only because the villagers knew “where the Armenians had lived.” In the pilgrim Sona M.’s neighborhood in Kırşehir, there were no houses left in the Armenian section, only a paved road, and a gas station. Additionally, at some point in their journey, every pilgrim was confronted by landscapes of destroyed or decaying churches, monasteries, cemeteries and cathedrals.11 Hrair Hawk

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

Khatcherian, a pilgrim who traveled with Aroyan in 2002, had already made it his life’s mission to photograph what remained of every Armenian church, and thus document both these structures’ greatness and the neglect or dismantling intended to relegate them to anonymity.12 Ani H. returned after her first pilgrimages in 2012 and 2013 to make a documentary film that uncovers Armenian architectural relics and the silenced stories buried beneath the surface of modern-day Turkey. Muriel was struck by these losses too; for as far as she could see, all of historical Armenia had become a vast emptiness, and anything left was merely Kılıç Artıkları, the “remains of the sword.” In some ways, then, she apprehended her own village as indistinct from historical Armenia as a whole. Dzak had been renamed İn, more an adjective, or perhaps more a decree, than a name.13 The Turkish word in connotes a sense of darkness and neglect, a place unclaimed, or a village of silence, perhaps a strategic silence, such that the fiction that there had never been Armenians there, or that they had somehow just up and left, could be maintained. In this context, without a specific place for the assemblage of the learned, felt or experienced truths that she had carried with her, Muriel began to refer to contemporary Turkey as a “mythical landscape.”14 But this phrase did not convey the idea of a legend of origins; rather, for Muriel, “mythical landscape” spoke to the near-impossibility of the emplacement of memory, because Turkey, by erasing Armenian places, had turned its past into a fiction. Th e H o u s e B e c o m e s t h e “ H o u s e - P l a c e ”

Even though there was no house to move her memory into, Muriel found that Dzak, as the place of her house, led her toward a powerful moment that broke through the “mythical” present. Homi Bhabha calls such a confrontational moment “unhomely.” For Bhabha, “unhomely” is what one experiences when (quoting Walter Benjamin) a specific era is blasted “out of the homogeneous course of history,” causing one to relate “the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence.”15 In just this way, Muriel was experiencing an unhomely moment in the present. Dzak was evidence that her own history reverberated as an individual moment in time, yet viscerally and personally it was understood as part of a larger political process. What was called for was the use of all her creative powers of reassembling images to engage in a discomfiting search for

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a resolution to this discomfort. For this, all of Dzak would become her houseplace. Empty as it was, with no way of finding even the footprint of her actual house, the entirety of its barren landscape would stand for her lost house and provide an opportunity to engage with it. In the emptiness of Dzak, an opportunity for this engagement appeared. As Muriel gazed across what was once her ancestral village, with only three houses in sight, a woman, perhaps in her 60s or 70s, came out from one of those houses, across the road from the rocks and grass of the destroyed village. She greeted Muriel and her party warmly. On hearing that they were Armenians, Muriel remembers, she told them that she herself was half Armenian. Her mother had been saved as a child and later married to a Turkish man. “I remember only,” the woman said, “that she always cried. She had lost everything, everyone, all her family.” The woman went on to tell her own story, saying, “I too was married to a Turkish man, and as a bride I also did nothing but cry.” Visibly shaken by her retreat into memory, she excused herself: “I have high blood pressure and cannot speak much longer.”16 This woman could have been Muriel’s mirror. What if the young Artemis had stayed in Dzak and had never been returned to Joovar? If that Artemis, who would now, of course, be a practicing Muslim, had later married a Turkish man, her daughter might, too, be living on the edge of Dzak, with two identities, if not an overwhelming sorrow. As was also true for other pilgrims who met descendants of the “left behind,” the thought that “this could have been me” (or “this, in part, is me”) was not at all lost on Muriel: “It was crystal clear to me in Dzak that I could have been living there or, more likely, in Agn today, had my mother stayed there. [In fact] my thoughts went further, to speculate on what Turkey would look like today had all the Armenians who were driven out stayed behind; or, in another, happier version, had the genocide never taken place and had they continued to live there.”17 In this way, Muriel could add a story about what hadn’t happened in Dzak to her memorystories of what did. R e a s s e m b l i n g M e m o r y i n S i s : Ta t e o s s ’ s H o u s e

I have introduced memory as a variety of stories that pilgrims bring from their ancestors. Each memory-story represents a type of knowledge which pilgrims combine to form their received and personally accepted understanding of an element of the past, and each has the validity of being a

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

pilgrim’s personal truth. Memory-stories may be attached to items or songs, but all have real or intrinsic narratives that, when brought to the places of lost houses, are reassembled to incorporate new realities and new feelings: for example, when pilgrims imaginatively reimagine their houses, and even “inhabit” them—even if they are physically changed or entirely empty. Mary Ann’s half-timbered mansion in Yozgat (Chapter 1) was intact, but being recast as a museum had emptied it of its own stories. Muriel’s house and even its location was more than empty; the village had been leveled, and the woman she met who could connect her to it had run away like a specter, more fearful than fearsome. Standing apart from these two extremes was the house of Stephen D.’s father, Tateoss, in Sis (T: Çataloluk, near Şebinkarahisar), as it was an example of a house that was still alive. Made of rubble stone and adobe mortar, supported and repaired with untreated tree limbs, plastered with mud and re-roofed with tin, it stood on a hilly village street across from Sis’s landmark egg-shaped boulder. Its plain flat facade had a low, wood-framed door and small, wood-framed windows. Rugs were airing on the back verandah, and the inside displayed how village life was still embraced by textiles, which covered every surface or wrapped anything not in use. An unwrapped television took up as much room on one wall as a treasured rug depicting Mecca did on another. The family who now owned this house had said they were not currently living in it, but it was clearly being used and it was spotlessly clean. When that family came up the road to greet Stephen and his family group, which included Charles D., the son of one of Tateoss’s brothers, they all took turns sitting outside on the seki, the stone bench typical of these village houses. This bench was built against the front of the house as a structural support, but it was also integral to village life, as was made clear by the neighbors who stopped by to talk or even sit with them (Figure 7). Together they looked at photos that Stephen had brought from his and his wife Angele’s two former trips; and so, the Sis/Çataloluk family had already heard that Stephen’s father, Tateoss, had lived in this house with his parents, his wife and his three children along with his brothers and sister. They may also have known some, or at least the beginning, of the story that followed. In 1912, at age 27, Tateoss was drafted into the Ottoman Army to fight against the Greeks and Bulgarians in the Balkan Wars. Not wanting to kill Christians, he escaped to join the “enemy” side, and eventually made it to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he

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F igur e 7.   The current owners sitting outside Tateoss’s house in Sis, 2012. Photo by Sona Gevorkian.

had a relative. There, he hoped to start a new life and eventually bring his family. But in 1915, his parents along with his wife and children who lived in that house were killed, either in the village itself or on the death-marches. He never knew for certain. However, two of Tateoss’s brothers and a sister survived by being taken in by Turkish families and converted. At the end of World War II they were found, perhaps during the same campaign that supported the retrieval of Muriel’s mother, Artemis, from the village of Agn, over 100 miles to the southeast. Tateoss’s surviving siblings were then brought to Istanbul. His sister married and went to Greece, but Tateoss was reunited with his brothers in the United States where they had been sent, along with other Armenian orphans, by relief organizations to sponsors in the diaspora.18 The brothers arrived in Massachusetts in 1920, bringing with them a bride for Tateoss, the young Satenig, who had lost her first husband and their children and who indeed was the sole Armenian survivor from her village of Goteh (Koter; Kötür; T: Bağpınar) in the province of Erzurum.

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

M e m o r i a l Ca n d l e s

Stephen carried photographs to mark his connection to the house’s new owners. But the most meaningful story he carried from the past was himself, for he was a memorial candle. The memorial candle is a concept applied to children of Holocaust survivors who are assigned to keep the flame of the past alive, like the long-burning Yahrzeit candles lighted in Jewish households on the anniversary of a parent’s death.19 Gregory Aftandilian discusses this in the context of the many American-born Armenian children who were named after their parents’ lost or murdered children. Many pilgrims traveled as poignant enlargements of the meaning of these memory candles; Aftandilian’s uncle, John Baronian, was one of them, and had himself traveled with Aroyan to Kesserig in 1993.20 Stephen carried the name of one of his father’s sons who had been born in this house in Sis and lost in 1915. And Stephen’s children were part of this tradition as well, for Tateoss had pleaded with him to name them after Tateoss’s three lost ones—Stephen, Oskian and Osana—and he had complied. Stephen’s son Deran Oskian had not come on the trip described here, but his other three adult children had: Satenig (named for his mother), Stephen Jr., and Sona, named for the lost Osana. It was Sona who used her pilgrimage to activate her role as a memorial candle for the house’s future. A professional photographer, she photographed the house room by room, wall by wall, textile by textile, and thus “collected” the “belongings” that made the house alive. Then, in an astonishingly magical moment, she was given one of the old house keys. The kind owner had told them, “Take anything you want!” But Sona had wanted nothing until she saw the keys hanging inside the door. She asked Hikmet, a neighbor acting as an interpreter, to see if she could have one, and when he asked the owner, she just reached into her pocket, pulled out a small knife and cut one off for Sona. Exiles the world over are known for cherishing the keys of their lost houses for generations. Palestinians still write about owning them; even my family from Sephardic Spain talked about having theirs at least till they were in Ottoman Palestine. Sona cradled hers on the way home, and then made a type of reliquary box to hold it. She also made copies of this box, including copies of the key, for her parents and for each of her siblings. Moreover, her photo of the full set of keys, in situ in the old house, became the cover of her pilgrimage photo album, as if that would explain everything (Figure 8).

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F igur e 8.   The keys to Tateoss’s house in Sis. Photo by Sona Gevorkian.

An Erased Village and an Inhabited House

Having been given back the key and with the house’s memory-stories reassembled, the family could now imagine that their ownership had been restored and that their house-story no longer ended in 1915. Moreover, this action certainly changed the story of the house for its current owners too. The woman who gave the key to Sona had probably lived there most of her life, but now her story would not only reach further back in time but would also be alive in the present in a newly shared way. She could now relate how she had given that key to the great-grandchildren of the house’s original, Armenian, owner. Other pilgrims often felt this type of shift in memory-stories when they found and engaged with the current inhabitants of “their” houses. In his autobiography, Gabriel Garcia Márquez commented, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”21 But what we see here goes far deeper than selective memory; it shows how past and future are negotiated and individually transformed by actions in the present, especially when a person responds to the powers of place.

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F igur e 9.   A pilgrim holds a drawing of her ancestral house as she sets out to search for it in Kharpert, 2007. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

Chapter 3

Th e H o u s e , I t s Sa c r e d G e o g r a p h y , a n d t h e I n t r u s i o n o f t h e P r o fa n e

I n Ma y o f 2 0 0 2 , Carl followed an old village map of Husenig (Hussenig;

Hüsnyag; T: Ulukent) to find the house where his father was born.1 A video of this moment shows him pointing to a photograph of his father taken before 1915, posing with his prosperous family.2 “So,” Carl says, “they’re all dressed fairly nice; they have nice shoes. My dad is holding a book; he’s got a book! And this brother, he came to America. He came to—Massachusetts. Then he came to California. And this brother came to California, and my father came to California.” The house Carl was looking for had been rebuilt, but the original foundations were there, and he was elated to find the garden. Although his camera hung from his wrist, he hardly used it because he wanted to touch everything instead. “An apricot tree, an apple tree! And what is that one? A fig? No, it’s a mulberry!” With a mischievous smile, he gathered some soil from near its roots so he could scatter it in his own garden in California: “Now my fruit will be twice the size. They always said that everything here was twice the size of everything at home.” Because the pomegranate tree looked the oldest, he mused that it must have been planted by his own family, and so he gently stroked the bark and then inhaled deeply to take in its scent. Then he washed his face in the fountain, sure that his father had done the same long ago. Finally, he cupped his hand to his mouth and yelled out into the air, “I’m here!! I’m back!!” 37

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As a beloved family member is invoked and an Eden-like quality is evoked, the pilgrim-traveler gives his found house a sacred character. Corresponding to the yearnings of pilgrims of many religions to be buried at the site of their holy goal, Carl had even told his wife: “If I die over there, if I get sick and die, just bury me there—in Husenig.” Yet at the very same time that these uplifting, joyous moments of return were being experienced, they were scarred by their poignant opposite; for as Carl looked across to the rubble that was once the Armenian cemetery, he mumbled: “I hope they put his head with his body.” Th e A p p e a r a n c e o f t h e P r o fa n e

“My grandfather, my dad’s father, was killed in 1896. Probably November the 11th. And my father could remember, when he was four or five years old, how his father’s head was rolling down the hill.”3 And so, Carl continued to walk, looking at the ground: “Somewhere around here—hopefully—they put the head with the body. Somewhere around here—I’m sure he’s here. Where else would they put him?” Carl’s sacred Eden had been shattered by the story of what happened at this house. Although it was surrounded by fruiting trees, his house was also the fundamental space of loss, and the sacred was now located in the space of the profane. Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, outlines the spiritual dimension of a spatial understanding of the world: for him, existential meaning can be understood at the world’s sacred centers because they are tied to the transcendent. For this reason, sacred centers radiate an irresistible attraction. For those like Carl, a family house’s association with a time of existential wholeness accounts for its magnetic call to return, and makes these return journeys into pilgrimages. Eliade imagined sacred places as existing in opposition to profane ones, places without a spiritual centrality and thus offering no magnetism. Perhaps, as imagined in the time of creation, Eliade’s profane places harbored the inchoate, or even the chaos of the unknown; yet they were not aligned with either good or evil. But Carl’s experience suggests a different interpretation of the profane and its spaces, one introduced by another sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. For Halbwachs, the non-sacred, the non-holy, or the profane is in no way neutral. Instead, Halbwachs imagines that “profane sites are inhabited by enemies of God, which may even be cursed and where eyes and ears must be closed.”4 In other words, rather than having the magnetism of the sacred, profane spaces are repellent.

The House, Its Sacred Geography

Consider the experience of Sato Moughalian. In 2014, she visited the Anatolian town of Kütahya, where her grandfather had learned to be a ceramicist; but it was also the site of his deportation during the death marches of 1915. “On my third day in Kütahya, I had planned to visit the Alayunt train station. It would have been a short taxi ride, but I couldn’t get myself out of my room. The thought of visiting the site of so much anguish, where thousands of deported Armenians had clung to life in tattered encampments, felt intolerable.”5 Defining the profane as a place so repellant that “eyes and ears must be closed” parallels our contemporary understanding of the traumatic as unspeakable. Because of the “unspeakability”6 arising from the pain of recall, and perhaps as well due to a wish to protect the next generation, descendants of genocide survivors, such as Muriel (Chapter 1), may never have heard of their family’s experiences. Carl knew about the rolling head of his grandfather, but not much else: “My Dad couldn’t talk about it. It was too emotional.” The poet Tatul Sonentz-Papazian wrote of a similar story about his grandfather, Hovsep, and how fragments of memory haunted him. “The face of my grandfather . . . has been an obsession of mine for years. What was he like? He was 25 when he was murdered. I’ve been thinking about him for years, thinking of his face.”7 Sonentz-Papazian captured those fragments and his feelings about them in this poem: Hovsep—my faceless headless silent forebear forever spouse and parent yet a mute and blind memory . . . of a lost grandfather.8

Some descendants remember parents and grandparents sadly staring off into space; others heard screams in the night. Barbara B., who also found her ancestral house in Husenig, said of her family: “They never talked about the genocide. They’d get to a certain point and then they’d start crying, so we never got the whole story.”9 Halbwachs counters the sacred with a profane that calls to mind the obscene and repugnant, such that it seems to inscribe space with a sense of profanity. This understanding works well for Armenians who may seem to travel in such a binary space of opposites but who in fact travel in Barbara’s painful double reverberation. The house and the landscape of the town or

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village, which might seem benign or neutral to a non-Armenian observer, is alive for the pilgrim as evidence of all that was sacred and how it was brutally destroyed. “But,” Barbara added of her family, “they talked about the house. They talked about the house because their lives were so good there, and they talked about the beautiful mountains.” Clearly, always floating above the silenced and silencing profane was the sacred house. The conceptually separate but physically intertwined sacred and profane became especially clear in Vasak Toroyan’s trip in 2000, traveling from the Republic of Armenia to Arpi (Harpi; T: Ballı), a village in Bitlis. Once in Arpi, in a state of such intense emotion that he found he would be able to experience it only through the videos he was taking, he literally ran through the village to find the place where the Toro family house, the house of his father, Hovhannes, had been. He followed his father’s topographical stories10 and was also helped by the surprising discovery of locals who spoke his Armenian dialect. I asked this person “which one is Toro’s house? Where is Toro’s house?” This person turns to look at me . . . “I am working,” he tells, “this is Toro’s house.” . . . So, I turned . . . I am recalling everything else from the camera, because, indeed . . . only there I found out that tears may not only flow, they may also splash and sprinkle. . . . “I am the son of Hovhannes.” He tells “what is the son of Hovhannes doing here?” I said “well, my father died, I came here, and I need to take some water and soil.” I told this calmly, like that. He said, “Hovhannes has died?” I said, “yes.” We were talking in Armenian, in our dialect.

But then the story took a twist: I said, “is this Toro’s tree?” [I believe he is now speaking about his great grandfather.] He first said “yes” without hesitation, then I asked him again, I said “Is this certainly Toro’s tree?” He said “it seems to me, I don’t know, indeed.” That tree, it has some history attached to it. . . . Simply, they killed Toro on that tree . . . that tree. . . . Toro was ninety something years old, it was near their house, and the tree was near our house. Is this tree still there? . . . I don’t know, was it that very tree on which they killed him? It was a large nut tree. . . . We approached the tree, two of us; we picked a few nuts from that tree . . . but it wasn’t ripe then.11

When Vasak returned to the Republic of Armenia, he first distributed water and earth from Arpi to friends and family in Shgharshik, the village where

The House, Its Sacred Geography

survivors from Arpi had settled. Then, as Carl would do, he broadcast his Arpi earth over his father’s and brother’s graves. But what made the power of the old house and even the village’s sanctity especially clear was that the painful appearance of his father in Vasak’s dreams stopped as soon as he had made his visit. His arrival home, like arriving at a pilgrimage site, had conferred some sacred peace. Pilgrims travel to a place that exists in this double reverberation. As the symbol of the centrality of the family that gave these pilgrims their deepest identity, these places have a sacred magnetism that calls forth veneration; as the places where the sacred and the humane have been violated, and where that violation cannot be mourned or commemorated, they have a profane, repelling and repellent force that calls forth a mute grief. Na t i v e P i l g r i m s : M e m o r y a n d R e v e r i e

The returns of native pilgrims, those who return to the places where they were born, introduce the process by which the ancestral house manifests itself as a sacred place. At the same time, natives’ experiences provide a baseline that helps in understanding how rituals emerge to fulfill the different needs of descendant pilgrims, those who know their ancestral houses through the stories of their elders and ancestors. Between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s, a few natives of Ottoman Armenia who had themselves survived killings and forced exile, made journeys of return. These native travelers form a separate and limited group. They had left Anatolia not as infants or toddlers but as children or young adults, old enough to have substantive memories about the places they had left. Some of these natives traveled back in search of lost relatives, some returned to look for property, but most of those whose goal included finding or reviving the memories of their houses were on spiritual journeys. H a m p a r t z o u m V a s i l i a n : 1 9 5 1 : Ba g h i n , a V i l l a g e o f Pa l u

When the young Hampartzoum Vasilian left his village of Baghin (T: Bağin, Dedebağ), it felt momentous.12 He remembered that date exactly: on August 3, 1910, he had become a bantukhd, an émigré or migrant worker, a sojourner; on that day he left home to find work in Istanbul, a common practice among Armenian teenage village boys, especially following the Hamidian and the later Adana massacres,13 but they never thought it would be a permanent move. We do not know how he found out about the fate of his family, but it

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seems that none survived the 1915 massacre. That is, except for his three-yearold brother, Sarkis, who had been “left behind” in the care of a Kurdish family and then raised as a Muslim. Thirty-six years later, in 1951, “taking advantage of a special ordinance of the Turkish Government, which permitted tourists to pay temporary visits to the interior of the country,”14 Vasilian returned to Baghin. In 1952, he chronicled his trip in the Armenian Review, calling it “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey.” Because Vasilian’s lengthy article was written as a report to survivors in the diaspora about the state of Armenians who still lived in Anatolia, it does not focus on Vasilian’s personal story of loss. Yet he had learned that his brother was alive, and so his journey included the pressing personal goal of meeting his brother. It also had the goal of finding his childhood house. In fact, rather than satisfying the reader’s curiosity about his now Muslim brother, his article is focused on his house, and it is there that he rushes first. “I scrambled through the ruins to my ancestral home with tearful eyes—­ broken walls, and old relics buried under the debris.”15 After finding the house in ruins, he then investigates the remains of remembered village landmarks, spending a full hour at the village spring while allowing memories to continue their resurgence. “Then I went to our village spring where I washed my hands and face and drank deep of its cool, refreshing water. I could hardly hold my tears back. How many precious memories [these places] brought back to me!”16 H o w M e m o r y I d e n t i f i e s Sa c r e d S p a c e

Here we begin to see how the onrush of memory identifies sacred space in a way similar to Mircea Eliade’s understanding of how places make their sacredness known. For Eliade, the sacred is disclosed by a sudden break in the homogeneity of quotidian space. One of his examples is the Abrahamic God abruptly appearing to Moses at Mount Horeb in the form of a fire that burned continually, yet miraculously did not consume the bush that held it. This appearance or “revealing” interrupted the expected qualities of mundane space and marked that place as holy. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”17 But for the pilgrim traveler, it is memories or stories of their ancestors, rather than sacred personages or magical events, that erupt at the place of the

The House, Its Sacred Geography

sacred (Eliade used the term “irruption.”) Paralleling manifestations of higher beings, these eruptions appear as memories in the places the pilgrim seeks, ones dearly loved but irrevocably lost. Eliade’s example, then, rings true because, just as for Moses, such experiences reveal what is held sacred in the mental world of the pilgrim. Reverie, Registers of Consciousness, and Spiritual Returns

By referring to the work of Gaston Bachelard,18 we can posit that the eruption of this sacred memory opens an attendant reverie that makes the sacred present in a space-related state of mind or as a memory-induced register of consciousness. That is, when engendered by one’s childhood or ancestral house, reveries distill that home’s sacred, spiritual or poetic essence and also give it presence. Thus, we recognize that the memories that erupt in the minds of Vasilian and other pilgrim-travelers when they return evoke reveries as Bachelard understood them. Included in Vasilian’s memory-reverie was a reliving of how, every day, he, his family and his entire village would stand where he was now standing to look at a boulder on the top of the mountain: “From its shadow they figured the hour of the day. When the shadow was round, the peasants knew that it was 12 o’clock. I checked with my watch and it was exactly 12.”19 Memory-reveries such as this make present a core of elements that are alive in the soul but seemed lost to the past. Eliade would call the presence of these memories an “eternal return,” which is a symbolic or ritual return, or in this case, a sensed return to the time of the mythic past, to the time of sacred stories, when the world was begun or when the world was whole.20 At the personal level, childhood remembered as a time of having an intact family can represent the lost wholeness of the adult’s world, with timeless values that are meant to reach into the future. This timelessness is the “eternal” in Eliade’s return. But for pilgrims, a return establishes the centrality of space, and the importance of being there. In other words, although the return may be to a mythical, nonspecific time, for pilgrims it is defined by a very specific place. To differentiate between Eliade’s time-centered eternal return and the pilgrims’ emphasis on how timelessness takes place, I refer to these sacred moments marked by memory-reveries as spiritual returns. By reliving—in ­reverie—the story of the boulder, and by using the spring as his family had used it, perhaps

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since time immemorial, Vasilian had made such a spiritual return, an entry through the imagination or an active and conscious dream state (reverie) into the place of the past that was being revealed to him as sacred. Having drunk from the spring and washed his face in it, Vasilian collected some water to take home with him: not as holy water to be used liturgically, but as a type of holy souvenir of a sacred place whose veneration deserved a tangible memorial. “I sat there for nearly an hour and filled a bottle with water which I would bring to America.”21 But what about his brother, Sarkis? Vasilian spent a week with his brother, who was now living in Arkni (T: Arkıni, Arğıni, or Arğına; now Ergani), not far south of Baghin. His brother was now Muslim, and went by the name of Khedir Nural. Interestingly, Vasilian writes almost nothing about this visit. We do learn that Sarkis had three children, who would be Vasilian’s nephews or nieces, but all we know is that when he left, he seemed to be closing a door: his brother “remembered nothing of the old days [and so] I left him to his lot and returned to Aleppo along the same route which I had taken to Arkni.”22 It seems he was sure that his readers would understand. Bedros Kushigian, 1953: Govdun

Much like Vasilian, and only two years later, Bedros Kushigian returned to the village of Govdun (T: Göydün), in the province of Sivas, after which he too was marshaled by the Armenian Review to give an eye-witness report of the lost homeland.23 Kushigian had left Govdun forty-one years earlier, in 1911, at the age of 15; perhaps, like Vasilian, he had been a bantukhd in search of work but with a plan and a longing to return. Certainly, like Vasilian’s plan, his own plan had been halted by the events of 1915, when his mother and father and two brothers and two sisters “disappeared.” Ten years later, however, in 1925, he found one sister alive in Syria; a second was located there in 1932. Finding that they had somehow survived the deportation marches, he brought them both to America. Still, he wanted to see his house. But like Vasilian, he could not return to Anatolia until the travel restrictions had been lifted. Only in 1953 could he cross Turkey’s eastern border. Starting in Beirut, he crossed from Lebanon to Turkey and made his way to Sivas; then he rented a horse for the twelve-mile ride that was the only way to get to his home village. Arriving in Govdun, he found a dear childhood friend named Michael, an Armenian who had managed to survive. In fact, as

The House, Its Sacred Geography

the only literate man in the area, Michael had become the village mukhtar, or mayor. Yet unlike Vasilian’s brother, Michael still considered himself fully Armenian, and had raised his children as Armenians. Nevertheless, Kushigian was one of the few to learn this as, at least for public purposes, Michael had taken on a Kurdish identity, and was known locally as Kurd Ahmed. Together and solemnly, Michael and Bedros walked toward the Kushigian family house, which, although merely rubble, induced a reverie in Bedros because of the way that it seemed to radiate its memories: “On the screen of my mind I could see like a motion picture the blissful days of my childhood, my native home, my parents on whose lap[s] I had woven so many of my childish dreams.”24 This memory-reverie made the sacred past present, allowing a spiritual return, but one that made its double reverberation clear. Reverently and with swelling emotion, I advanced toward our old home which now was in ruins. I bent low and kissed several stones jutting out through the ruins and gathering a fistful of earth, tenderly wrapped it in my handkerchief. Again and again I kissed that handful of earth as if it was the ashes of my hapless parents whose premature departure from this life put an end to their dreams and ardent longings. This sacred memento of my paternal home I have brought with me and shall keep it until my dying breath, charging my heirs that they shall scatter it on my grave when I am dead.25

The house was a reification of the sacred memory of his parents, but not deployed nostalgically “with its pain removed.” 26 Rather, it was situated among memories violated by the profane, as we understand the profane from Maurice Halbwachs: among memories “inhabited by enemies of God . . . where eyes and ears must be closed.”27 Attesting to this memory’s traumatic nature, both he and Michael were made almost mute. “Throughout the ordeal of sorrow and anguish, Michael was a sharer of my emotions. We both were silent, reluctant to separate from each other. By now the shadows were falling, and taking my arm, Michael led me to his home. We did not exchange a single word on the way. I spent the night in meditations and dreams.”28

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M u s i c a s t h e Sa c r e d M e m o r y o f H o m e

A t h i r d n a t i v e A r m e n i a n who took advantage of the Turkish government’s opening of Anatolia to travel in the 1950s was a Mr. Kavar, who returned to the village/small town of Agn.1 He stated his reasons simply: he had come to see his father’s house and “our gardens” with his own eyes once more. Although the Agn he once knew was in ruins, Kavar’s own childhood house had survived, perhaps because it was on the edge of town. Moreover, he was able to go inside. “Its new owner welcomed me in and told me to look around. I was even able to sit in the same place in the kitchen where my father sat when he read the newspaper.”2 Although his book is long, Kavar writes nothing more of this experience with his family house. One imagines a certain level of discomfort in visiting with a stranger who had taken possession of your family house under conditions best left undiscussed; and it is doubtful that, at that moment, there was time or psychological space to lapse into a memory-induced reverie. Yet it is clear that the house, as the goal of his pilgrimage, worked its magic, for during Kavar’s short visit it seems that it appeared in his thoughts and reveries over and over again. Discovering a childhood friend from one of the few remaining Armenian families, he was, of course, welcomed into their household. Safely there, surrounded by familiarity, he lapsed into a memory-­ reverie as if he were in his own lost house. “My heart filled with nostalgia when I heard them say something that I hadn’t heard in many, many years:

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Music as the Sacred Memory of Home

my childhood’s rocking dialect and its rhythm. They said ‘welcome welcome’ . . . and, ‘Like the water shall you go and come back easily’ [Churi bes tiurin yertas u tiurin veratarnas]; it dawns on me after a very long absence, that I had returned to my father’s house: and if I open the door and go through the threshold, I will find my mother there in the kitchen working on her endless domestic tasks.”3 When Kavar writes, “Someone is peeling cucumbers, someone is filling his bowl with ripe mulberries and someone had brought basil,”4 it is as hard for the reader as it was perhaps for him to tell what is reverie and what was happening in this Armenian home that had become a proxy for his own. But it is clear that Kavar was filled with joy. Yet even more than by its expressive dialect, tastes, or even warmth, his lost Agn house comes alive in his reveries when he hears music. Th e S o j o u r n e r a n d S o n g s o f L o n g i n g

While sitting in the garden eating the foods of his childhood, Kavar hears a song that is part of a genre of bantukhd (sojourner or temporary émigré) songs, which are always songs of longing when far from home. But this song too has its own “dialect, tastes, or even warmth,” as it is an Agn song, part of a subgenre of bantukhd songs that are usually sung in Turkish,5 as was this one, but written and composed by Armenians. Kavar writes: “We were eating kufta [spiced meat balls] and eggplant when suddenly from the garden’s trees, as if it were a Zephyr, came a familiar melody. We cocked our heads and listened and our food stayed un-chewed in our mouths.”6 This is the first of the songs he heard: Agn has turned into a ruin And it [the nightingale] doesn’t sing any more. If I tell the sun my troubles I am worried that the sun will never return.7

These types of songs are not merely beloved; they are such rooted markers of home that Kavar’s host suggested that his guest might have come to Agn—above all else—just to hear these songs. He even reminded Kavar that because they were sung in all the houses, they are akin to a villager’s mother’s milk (mor gat)8 and thus, for each Agntsi (native of Agn), they are formative and constitutional. In other words, Kavar is not merely listening to a melody

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that asks him to think of home, he is listening to a melody that seems to express himself as home. Perhaps the most beloved of all Armenian songs of longing, “Crane” (Grung), was performed for Kavar by an oud-playing Armenian musician. In this song, the crane is begged by the bantukhd to bring news of home, with the idea that the crane’s flight defines the radius that still ties the émigré or exile to his lost center. Crane, where do you come from? I am a slave to your voice, Crane, don’t you have news from our land? ........................................ You did not answer me and you flew away, Oh crane, go, fly away from our land.9

On hearing this song, Kavar is filled with longing. “Suddenly, my childhood house, birthplace and paternal home came back, with all its details, in front of my eyes, mind, and soul with pain and bitterness. In front of my eyes were our proud hills and mountains, [our] murmuring waters . . . And our house, that house that I had come [to] on pilgrimage, the house where my childhood had blossomed, [but] where the pieces of my heart were no longer.”10 These bantukhd songs allowed all of Agn to stand for his house, and also to be a house-world as well as a house-place, able to activate the personal, intimate, and place-related reverie of spiritual return.11 When Kavar left Agn, he hired an Armenian driver to take him to the town of Amasya. The oud player from Agn joined them for the long day’s drive, and en route played his Agn music. Listening, Kavar felt his own house emerge in reverie as a sacred center, just as Eliade would express it: a place where two worlds meet. “Here are the stars that climb down the stairs of heaven and shine through the black-blue fog; they were shining even when I dozed the sleep of a child on my father’s home’s windowsill, or when I listened to my grandmother’s fairy tales.”12 With these music-induced reveries, we see how Kavar’s reverie was a spiritual return of the exile, the bantukhd, to the place of his own sacred story, one that was tied to a mythic past when the world was begun or when the world was whole but that took place here. He even understood that his story had an immortal quality that would survive whether or not the places in which the stories took place did. When his driver explained that the Turks were destroying

Music as the Sacred Memory of Home

all vestiges of Armenian life in the area, Kavar countered that Armenians’ stories remained, so the Turks’ destruction was for naught.13 Clearly, his active reverie in a destroyed town felt like proof of that. It was certainly true that the image of his longed-for house would not leave him, for the house had been the goal of his trip and so anything that revived its memory re-created it, restarted reverie, and extended his experience of the sacred. And nothing did this more clearly than the bantukhd songs. Even in the town of Amasya, listening again to the oud, he was transported back to his house in Agn. All of a sudden, he feels “as if he is a child being rocked by his mother, as if his childhood home and birthplace had come back, whole, in front of his eyes, mind, and soul.”14 For Kavar, these songs would have many levels of poignancy. He would be proud of and familiar with the Agn repertoire; and he no doubt knew the folklore of young bantukhds sent off to fight historic battles, and he could certainly remember young bantukhds of his own youth, whose longing these songs chronicled. But most of all, these songs must have reminded him of migrants now living in places far from their village homes, whether in Istanbul or Boston. But he also understood how the pain they would feel had moved to a different register: for when the bantukhd émigré became a post-genocide exile, like himself, any hope of the longed-for return was destroyed.15 Travel prohibitions on return aside, if anything at all was left, it was no longer intact. Bantukhd! An Exile! I felt the pain of being thrown out of my father’s house pinch my heart. What kind of a fate is this, my God, that my soul is here, but my home is far away, in a hospitable land.16 How did a nine-century old village turn out like this, I say with pain. Even the name is changed; now, they call it Kemaliye. Did Kemal help to put rock on top of rock? To build this village?17 As for the lower streets, [pan cher mnatsadz] there was nothing left; as for the church, [pan cher mnatsadz] there was nothing left. And as for the beautiful two-story houses, [pan cher mnatsadz] there was nothing left. [Nonetheless, Kavar recognized the rubble of their foundations and was able to name their missing owners.] The Kalusjian house, the Jamgochian house, the Kurkjian house and the houses of other rich people of their circle, those houses are gone. Even the four-story Donjigian house. . . . We go by the Diradurian and Vartabed­ian houses—actually near where they used to be. Those houses aren’t there anymore.18

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But what was important to Kavar personally was that the longing the bantukhd songs expressed was his own longing, a longing to repair a separation reparable only at the level of the soul: “Like the people who collected the Andunis, think of my book like that, a story of a boy who by some miracle survived and heard the call of the homeland, and I went back.19 And I’m collecting the stories and the memories that were left there.”20 B r i n g i n g t h e Pa s t i n t o t h e P r e s e n t

Thoughts of hope and despair came up often in Kavar’s discussions with his young driver, who drove Kavar and the oud player from Agn to Amasya. For example, the young man stopped en route, at an Armenian woman’s home, perhaps in the driver’s hometown of Sivas (A: Sepasdia). The driver must have known her well, as he described her two grandsons as being “neither Armenian, nor Turk. . . . They’re Armenians at home, Turks outside,” he explained with disdain. And he lamented that because they did not speak Armenian, they would soon forget their Armenian-ness altogether. The driver, in contrast, had not lost his identity. For one thing, he refused to help Kavar find a hotel, saying that the Armenians in Amasya would crucify him for allowing Kavar to pay for a room instead of bringing him to stay with one of them. Musing on this Armenian dilemma, Kavar developed a growing fondness for this young man from Sivas, seeing him as an antidote to the bitterness Kavar himself felt in the face of so much loss. Certainly, the future of Armenians in this devastated landscape was a topic he met everywhere, and that consumed his thoughts. For example, he wrote: In Agn, I met an old man—he was wise. I sat with him for a long while, and I listened to what he said. He said: “You know, my boy, we village Armenians are like a tree that’s been cut—but our roots are deep. We don’t show it, but we continue living—one day our branches will rise out of the earth. It’s true that our numbers are small, but still, we are alive, we’re here, we’re a presence. We may not show ourselves for a while, but our descendants will bloom from the trunk.” This man’s words energized and somewhat comforted me. So, truly, it was not all lost, I thought to myself as I listened to him.21

Kavar did not say this, but he no doubt recognized the old man’s use of images and sentiments from two famous Armenian poets: Leon (Levon) Zaven Surmelian and Baruyr Sevag (Paruyr Sevak), the first using the metaphor of

Music as the Sacred Memory of Home

a tree for Armenian rootedness, strength and survival, and the second using growth as multiplying, and relating pride in an Armenian presence to the perseverance of communal values. Surmelian had been born in the town of Trabzon, where he lost both parents in the 1915 genocide. Educated in the Armenian Getronagan school in Istanbul, at just 16 he wrote a collection of poems in Armenian that would be published after he migrated to America in 1922. This collection, called Luys Zvart (Joyous Light), included poems that imagined Armenian strength being like a great tree with deep roots. Under the Armenian sun with large green leaves I am a tree my feet are strong.22

Baruyr Sevag, whose family had fled Ottoman Armenia, was born in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia in 1924, just as Surmelian’s Joyous Light was being published. “We Are Few But We Are Called Armenians” (Menk Kich Enk, Sakayn Mez Hay En Asum) is his signature poem: . . . Simply we know how to build from the rock, a monastery How to make fish from stone, how to make man from clay To learn to become the student of the beautiful, the kind, the noble, and the good. .......................... . . . We are called Armenians And why should we not feel pride about that. We are, we shall be, and become many.23

Sevag’s poem, perhaps written in the 1950s (he died in 1971, just after Kavar’s pilgrimages), quickly became known by Armenians everywhere, and this poem was felt as a type of anthem for the diaspora. By the time of Kavar’s travels, the poems from Surmelian’s Joyous Light were also globally known.24 It seems likely that both Kavar and the old man knew these poems and used their images to share their message as both had already identified that what “blooms from the trunk” comes from that magnet at the house’s sacred center. It was this rooted Armenian-ness that was worthy of a spiritual return: Armenians caring for each other, families that offered faith, safety, continuity

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and their houses—my mother there in the kitchen working on her “endless domestic tasks”; my grandmother’s fairy tales. As he left Amasya, Kavar made a touching gesture that added to the memorial power of his image of his house in Agn. As if it were a votive, expressing his desire that all he held sacred would flourish, he offered his pet songbird to his young driver. “I had brought a beloved canary here all the way from Agn, in a cage that hung from my hand. I gave it to the young Sepasdatsi lad [the driver from Sivas] and said, ‘Here, this is for you. Take good care of it, keep it like your greatest treasure, like the light of your eye. It’s a great singer. Every time you look at it, every time you hear it sing, remember us.’”25 It is likely that Kavar was also familiar with the words of yet another Armenian writer, the revolutionary Avedis Aharonyan, who was once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Aharonyan, who died in 1948, had written that those who no longer lived in their homeland, meaning their home villages, “stop singing, just like a bird whose nest has been destroyed.”26 This would have resonated with Kavar who was feeling his soul “rocked by the old wonderful days of memories. You feel your mother, father, other lost loved ones’ breath on your forehead, on your chin, and your hands. And your heart flutters under its cage.”27 The canary, then, was his heart, given as a votive offered toward repair. But the gesture was also the construction of a new memory that he would take home, one that reassembled his Agn story. His home in Agn, given additional life, even as conflated with Amasya, would enter memory as the place where he had felt that Agn could return from ruin, and sing again. Th e I n t r u s i o n o f Ra g e

Kavar had experienced the profane outside his doorstep when he catalogued all the Armenian houses that had disappeared from Agn. But Aliza had felt how the sacred had been consumed by the profane. Aliza found her childhood house, the once wealthy Kekhoua family’s compound in Viranshehir (T: Viranşehir), in 1985. It was forsaken, and the gate was locked. Nonetheless, memories of the foods and the tastes and aromas of preparations for the Easter festivities of 1915 flooded to meet her. These images were of a household filled with women making special dishes from complex recipes, including lokhum (Turkish delight) and baklava and especially the kleecha made by her Syrian grandmother, “a delicious pastry made into many shapes, such as

Music as the Sacred Memory of Home

braided doughnuts and gingerbread figures, which kept well and could be eaten for weeks.” Her childhood eyes watched cigarettes being rolled, coffee being roasted, and new clothing being distributed. Heirloom silver was newly polished and the cousins were coloring Easter eggs, knowing they would soon receive gifts of gold coins. Merging with memories of these preparations were memories of the house after church, when talkative visitors came and went. “On major social occasions there would be as many as twenty-five pairs of shoes in our foyer.”28 Christmas, baptisms and name-day celebrations also came alive, as “the fulsomeness of the house’s being” often integrated with the Armenian Christian calendar. That year, Easter fell on April 4th, only twenty days before what Armenians would later consider the “official” start of the genocide: the April 24th arrest and deportation of about 250 Armenian intellectuals, civic leaders and some regular folk in Istanbul, only a few of whom would escape being killed.29 But in spite of the preceding buildup of anti-Armenian rhetoric following Enver Pasha’s January 1915 losses to Russia at Sarikamish (T: Sarıkamış), and the late March and early April arrests of Armenian intellectuals, business and religious leaders in Anatolia’s west coast city of Bursa, some being hanged immediately, others marched to execution,30 Aliza’s Easter contained no sense of foreboding. Yet sixty-six years later, while standing in front of her childhood house in Viranshehir, now “neglected and overgrown with weeds,” Aliza also remembered what had followed that last dinner that her Aunt Martha had given “for all of us in the beautiful courtyard before [the first group to leave] departed to their ghastly deaths on the first caravan.”31 On June 7th, two months after Easter, two weeks after the roundup of the Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, and just two days after Aliza’s father had been offered help by a “noble hearted” Muslim Arab,32 “Turkish soldiers” entered Viranshehir.33 Her father, her uncles, and all the adult men were taken to the barracks as prisoners, but when Aliza and her mother and siblings went the next day to find them, no one was there; they were never seen again. The women were beaten away, and a series of deportations began soon after. It was in this atmosphere that Aliza ate her last meal with the family who were left, a meal that entered her reverie as she stood in Viranshehir, staring at her house. “A sense of doom hung over us as we sat in the garden just before sunset, surrounded by beautiful rose bushes and exotic trees, for our last supper together. The flowers that grew in abundance were heartbreakingly lovely at

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the moment: soft lemon-yellow irises, vivid red tulips, narcissus and gladiolus, fragrant hyacinth, white ‘Madonna’ lilies, and red lilies known as Turk’s cap, said to have been in Solomon’s garden.”34 On July 26th, 1915, Aliza, her mother, and her siblings left Viranshehir, in the third and final bout of deportations from that village. Her grandmother (spared because she was Syrian) smeared pomegranate juice on Aliza’s face so that she would look ill and unappealing; her mother swallowed a few gold coins; their names were called, and they were marched out of town. “Starved, bleeding, and dying by the highways, we cried and no one heard.” 35 Thus, Aliza’s memory of her house combines imagery of an Eden slipping away, the holiness of a last supper, and a rising terror that would envelop them all. These house-related eruptions of memory put into relief how the sacred and the profane are not separated binaries but co-exist on the ground. Spatially, the sacred is centered in the house, with values radiating outward. The profane, in contrast, originates outside the house and forces its way in, ready to destroy or disperse the family at its sacred center, but always unable to annihilate its sacredness. Thus, along with experiencing the sacred revealed through stories of wholeness, pilgrims are also confronted by memories tagged with evil, or by an eruption of the profane. Here we see how, as an incursive intrusion into the psyche and the spirit, profane memory interrupts reverie, and often leads to a state of rage. Aliza felt an indignant fury. Standing where she had brutally lost her father, cousins, aunts and uncles and all her friends—“people who had done no wrong!”—Aliza was enraged that “grave crimes against humanity” had gone unpunished and that her house, and all the others’ houses, and all their riches of the past that had given them their fulsomeness, had been taken or destroyed, and that “I had no say in the matter of my leaving home.”36 Rage interrupted many pilgrims’ homecomings. Archbishop Sebuh Chuljyan’s family had stayed in Malatya after the genocide, where they were subjected to the continued local and national stigmatization of Armenians in Turkey. In 1969, the family moved to the Republic of Armenia, feeling they could endure that stigma no longer. Sebuh was 10, and thus a “native” survivor, but of a different era. In 2007, after forty-eight years away, he returned to Malatya to visit his family’s house. Yet, his spiritual return was denied: “When I went there for the first time, the Turk who was living in our house didn’t let me in, he expelled me and said, ‘You have nothing to do here,’ and

Music as the Sacred Memory of Home

then he closed the door on my face. I was startled and tears stuck in my throat again but my age and my dignity didn’t let me cry. I felt I was experiencing the sad days from my childhood again.”37 With this rejection, the potential for a soul-satisfying reverie was replaced with unsettling memories of the profane that had surrounded the house: “I remember how much my parents were worrying for us every time we were going out of the house. They were telling us to go back home early and not to fight even when we are sworn at.” Even though the Turkish boys of his age called him and other Armenians “gâvur Hayer” (infidel Armenians), or sometimes terms meaning dog Armenians or often traitor Armenians, “my parents were telling us the same thing every single day. They were not letting us even appear in the area of the Armenian Church of St. Trinity, which was actually in our block (even though it was always closed and forbidden to enter). They were doing it so as not to infuriate our Turkish neighbors as they didn’t want them to either harm us or damage the church.”38 Still longing for some satisfaction, Sebuh returned to Malatya two years later. On this second trip, he found that his house had a new owner who opened the doors and let him walk around freely, allowing the house to virtually erupt with memories. “It took just some seconds when the images I had in my mind from my childhood started appearing in front of my eyes like a movie. Every corner, door, window, spring, grape tree, everything was the same and it was the reality and not a dream.” But the reverie of his Eden was interrupted: “When the owner of our house noticed that I was taking many pictures he told me mockingly ‘take our pictures too, we are the owners of this house.’” For the owner, this was a wry comment hidden in hospitality. For the Archbishop, it was a second affront; but it also felt like a type of success. The new owner’s belligerence seemed a recognition that the house had a history that paralleled another history; otherwise, why would its ownership be an issue? As Sebuh put it, “The loss of historical memory is restored in the very place where one has lost it;” that is, by his presence, he felt that he made some gains in the memory wars about justice and injustice. But his rage remained, although what I would call “rage,” he more restrainedly called “wounded dignity.”39 Nonetheless, Sebuh reminds us of Kavar who wrote, “I felt the pain of being thrown out of my father’s home,”40 and of Aliza who lamented, “I had no say in the matter of my leaving home,” and who added that “these grave crimes against humanity should not go unpunished.”41

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Th e H o u s e - P l a c e a n d M e m o r y - S t o r i e s

In 2010, Hourig traveled to her grandparents’ town of Kharpert with her daughter and son-in-law. “I wanted to see the houses,” she said. “My cousins Maro and Zareh sent me a panoramic picture of Kharpert, which includes Yeprad [Euphrates] College in the background, Sourp Hagop [St. Jacob] church in the middle, and my grandmother’s house, not too far from the church” (Figure 10).1 She explained further: “In the middle foreground, with the dome, that’s Sourp Hagop Church. If you continue from the left corner of the church, up the hill, the first or second house belonged to my grandmother.”2 But what Hourig actually saw is shown in Figure 11.3 The house was no longer there. All that remained was her grandmother’s house-place, the affective space where the house once was. Yet this houseplace panorama allowed Hourig’s memory-stories to erupt, bringing to mind her grandmother and the two of her grandmother’s children who had survived the genocide and returned with her grandmother to Kharpert. One child was Hourig’s mother, the other her mother’s brother, Uncle Baghdo (Baghdasar). Both were important sources of Hourig’s Kharpert stories. Hourig recalled that while at home in Detroit, her mother often recounted “an incident from when she was still quite young,” still a child in Kharpert. She had been taught an Armenian patriotic song but had been instructed never to sing it outside the house, as it might endanger the family. But, Hourig added, “My mother, Eugenie, promptly forgot the warning, 56

F igur e 10.   The American Missionary Compound and Euphrates College buildings in Upper Kharpert; the place of Hourig’s grandmother’s house is circled; Surp Hagop [Saint Jacob] Armenian Church is below, center. Pre-1915. American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives; ABC 78.2 (Box 17: 14). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

F igur e 11.   The ruins of Surp Hagop [Saint Jacob] Armenian Church of Kharpert, 2021. Photo by Annie Kahkejian.

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and as she was climbing the stairs outside her house, she started singing it with great gusto. Her brother [Baghdo], older and wiser, stopped her and scolded her.” Memory Sources for Descendant Pilgrims

This story of Kharpert was Hourig’s mother’s memory, a native’s memory, often repeated. Hourig’s mother had never returned to Kharpert, but if she had, the story would have acted like other native pilgrims’ reveries that flow from a resurgence of memory after a long absence. But descendant pilgrims have no direct memory of the place they have traveled so far to see. The knowledge and the feelings about family places of the descendant pilgrims in this book—who are always direct descendants, such as Hourig—came from or were memories about their own parents and grandparents or other survivor family. The nature of intergenerational conversations combined with the nature of survivor experiences has meant that descendants’ knowledge of the homeland is intimately tied to family members, yet that knowledge had arrived in fragments. Sometimes photographs or objects jogged family memories or induced stories; some stories were painfully recorded in personal memoirs; sometimes survivors’ place-related identities of wholeness were revealed through village music or dance, or through the making of foods, or stories of weddings or baptisms; sometimes their losses, traumas and anguish were exposed through cries in the night, sometimes through complete silence.4 Thus, whereas native pilgrims call forth autobiographical memories of a lived past in places like Kharpert, Tokat, Moush, and Van, descendant pilgrims connect to these places through their families in Detroit, Philadelphia, Providence and Fresno. The hearing of these stories is thus deeply autobiographical, a part of each pilgrim’s own lived experience, and it is why these descendants make their journeys. Th e H o u s e - P l a c e a n d t h e H o u s e - W o r l d

Like Hourig, most descendants return to find that the family house itself has disappeared. Although it may leave a footprint on a street or in foundations, descendants can expect to be met with a landscape of anonymous dwellings, surviving village fountains, wells or springs, gardens or orchards, mills, vandalized cemeteries, crumbling churches, and rebuilt plots or in many cases,

The House-Pl ace and Memory-Stories

as for Muriel, bare land where the village once was. Yet as a space that stands for the house, these places may be convincingly imagined as extensions of the house, or as the outdoor life of those who would daily return to the personal interiors of their houses. If the house itself can be imagined here, it can be referred to as the house-place; if the scene is the larger environs, yet specific enough to call forth memory-stories and musings, it can be referred to as the house-world. These similar concepts suggest places with enough imaginative substance to illicit a place-related register of consciousness that allows the pilgrim to make a spiritual return. In Istanos (T: Çimenyenice), Nancy A. watched as her aunt Agnes tried to convince herself that she had found her mother’s house. “‘I really think that was the house’ Agnes said as we walked away. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the 1954 inscription, that the room was probably built long after Grammy’s family had been banished. Because even if this building wasn’t her house, this place was her home. I could imagine [Grammy] stealing the cream off the milk to give to the Kurdish girls, playing with the birds outside, and looking out over the plains below.”5 In Mersin, Nancy K. said: “I gave up trying to look for traces, and I started imagining that long ago my grandmother had walked those same streets I was walking. I imagined drinking from the same fountain, looking at the same sky. There were palm trees by the roadside, followed by pink oleanders and tall thistles.”6 Here, where the house itself had disappeared, a view became its sacred proxy, a substitution with great imaginative potential because the searched-for house is always part metonymy, a place that stands for its profoundest meanings. Whether as proxy neighborhood, a spring, or merely the view of the mountains that “they would have had,” the house-place and the house-world can be felt as real because the emphasis that was once on the container (the house) is replaced by an emphasis on “the thing contained,”7 such as life-ways, traditions, or attributes of wholeness made up of values. For this reason, standing in the house-place, the area where the house must have been, or by adopting a proxy house, the pilgrim feels its presence. But left without such pointers as Hourig’s photographs or Carl’s map (Chapter 3), pilgrims may ask for validation from their ancestors’ spirits: they may ask for or receive “signs” or speak to ghosts that appear, like the burning bush; each event or feeling signifying that they are in the right place.

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Chapter Five S i g n s a n d S y m b o l s C o n f i r m t h e Sa c r e d

In the town of Lidje (T: Lice), fifty miles northeast of Diyarbakir (Dikranagerd; Tigranakert; T: Diyarbakır), Pelin and her father searched for his grandmother’s grave. The Armenian cemetery was all but destroyed, the few remaining stones rendered anonymous by defacement. Pelin had always been favorably compared to that Saadet (“Felicity”), who had tenaciously remained in Lidje after her husband had been killed and she was left with a baby son and a horse. Saadetthen made herself beloved among the local Kurds by using what she had learned from her physician-husband to help the entire village, with no concern for religion or background. Her son would eventually go off to Diyarbakir and would become Pelin’s father, and Pelin herself would also be born in Diyarbakir. Now, as the pilgrim father and daughter peered at the cemetery’s blank stones, a big thorn pierced Pelin’s wrist. That stopped her, and she said to herself, “How lucky I am to attract you!” Opening another level of consciousness, she understood that her grandmother’s spirit had come to offer a sign.8 Although house-places will elicit memory-stories, Mircea Eliade has noted that a full eruption of memory may not be needed, as sometimes a “sign suffices to indicate the sacredness of a place.” In such cases, a sign may put “an end to relativity or confusion.”9 The thorn prick was the sign that that Pelin had been found by her great-grandmother, and made clear that their connection was valid and strong. With her husband, Paul, Priscilla searched for her father’s childhood house among the houses of Husenig. According to her map (the same one used by Carl as described in Chapter 3), it could have been on either of two streets. Because she knew that the family had been wealthy, the first street looked too poor; but the second street had one large house that just could have been hers, and so she mentally asked her father for a sign that she was in the right place. Within minutes, a group of boys came up to them. “One boy held out a baby chick to me, asking if I wanted it. To you this might mean nothing, but to me it was like a miracle. I must tell you that nowhere else on this trip did I see any chickens. I must also tell you that when I was a child, my father would give my sister and me and our cousins baby chicks or baby ducklings for Easter. I immediately had the feeling that he was right there with me.”10 To hammer this down, a woman came walking by who looked “exactly” like Priscilla’s aunt. (Priscilla wanted to take a photograph with her, but the woman refused.) She was now confidant that she had found her house.

The House-Pl ace and Memory-Stories

Brittany’s sign was a ladybug. As she walked with Max, her travel companion, in the wintry streets of her great-grandmother’s town of Kharpert, she stopped to be photographed beside an old stone facade and, as she wrote in a blog, “wondered if [her great-grandmother] had lived in one of these houses.” And then, “while picking up rocks to bring home to my family, where it was snowing and freezing and there was no other sign of life besides Max and myself, I saw her.” She had discovered a ladybug. Max took a picture of her holding it, and then Brittany posted the photo with the title: “Here she is. This is my Auntie Alison. This is my family. Say hello.” Brittany explained on her blog that “when I was six years old, my aunt died in a car crash. It was very hard on my family. Right when she died, there was a ladybug infestation at our house. Our family now believes whenever we see a ladybug, it is Auntie Alison coming to visit us.”11 It made complete sense to Brittany that the spirit of Auntie Alison, who had lived and died in the diaspora, would appear in the ancestral home. In this register, as Brittany surveyed the crumbling houses, her own rootedness felt confirmed, and she began to imagine that her own face might once have been familiar in this town. This house-place is the metonymic house that lives imaginatively in the place where the house once was. Because it feels—almost—good enough, an entire area, even an empty one, can assume a strong sense of affective “rightness,” and the transcendent source of the sign confirms its sacrality. When the house-place or house-world can operate imaginatively as if it were the house, perhaps that is its “mysterious plus.” Using this engaging idea from William James, we can see the house-place not as a mere concept or generic idea, but operating with its own facticity. For, “in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function. This function is the ‘mysterious plus,’ the understood [and the felt] meaning.” James is suggesting that if we restore “the vague to its psychological rights, the matter presents no further difficulty.”12 Thus, as Dorothy stepped off the bus in Husenig, she said to the open air in front of her, “I’m coming home, Grandpa.” In 2002, Vahé Baladouni captured the emotional tenor of several vans full of pilgrims searching for their houses: “And the caravans began to move, now under the scorching midday sun, now in the cool of slumbering night; now with joyous tinkling of bells, now with heavy, sorrowful hearts. The caravan

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of pilgrims now stopped at an address where the parents of one among us had lived some ninety years ago; now we searched in vain for a house that once stood by a village square.”13 But whether the pilgrim finds the actual house, mobilizes another as a proxy, or uses its neighborhood or even empty land metonymically, its sacrality reverberates through memory-stories that may be authenticated through signs provided by ancestral help. Each sign suggests that an opening in space and an opening in consciousness have been made together. It is in these openings that individual rituals emerge that allow pilgrims to engage with this landscape as a personal door to the transcendent and to experience inner change.

Part II

Rituals in the Realm of the Sacred

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Chapter 6

Th e E m e r g e n c e o f R i t u a l s

S o m e t h i n g s e e m s t o h app e n

when the pilgrims who reach their destination feel it as a spiritual axis, as many feel compelled to create and perform their own personal rituals. These may mirror conventional ritual forms brought from home; but the most interesting are those that emerge, like the eruption of memory-stories, in ways that make the imaginative world of a pilgrim’s past become a real and present part of the pilgrim’s self. But whether formal or emergent, they are nontransferable: they can only happen here. Formal or Conventional Rituals

Conventional rituals used by pilgrims usually reference the Armenian Apostolic Church, but at times other Christian traditions as well, and take the form of memorized prayers, hymns, or bodily practices, such as crossing oneself, lighting candles, burning incense, or convening impromptu worship services. These types of rituals are especially common in already sacred places, such as a town or village church, or the site where a church once was. If clergy are among the pilgrims, a full requiem service (Hokehankisd) might be offered. The words “And the Lord who is holy please also keep holy . . . ” may be followed by a recitation of the names of the pilgrim’s family members who were torn from there, who perished there or whose extended family perished there, or even the names of those who lived and died in the diaspora but who considered this their spiritual home. Others who are familiar with 65

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the liturgy might join in songs or recitations. But all those in the pilgrimage group, even those whose home village is in another area, usually participate as fellow congregants, for, as the pilgrim Haig noted, the genocide had transformed O ­ ttoman Turkey into a countrwide cemetery, in fact the graveyard of our families.1 Liturgical prayers and specifically religious rituals also may be performed in the house-world as if one were present at the house itself. In Adana, Nova and a group of other descendants of Adana families found a small plot of dirt outside a restaurant, where they quietly (but publicly) lit candles and prayed in memory of their families. In Afyonkarahisar, Anie chose a grassy spot on a hill overlooking what Aroyan had identified as that town’s Armenian neighborhood. There, saying that this place would have to stand for her own family house, which she had no way of finding, she and her friends lit candles and burned incense (Figure 12). In the Armenian Apostolic tradition,

F igur e 12.   A small group of pilgrims in Afyonkarahisar, in 2007, burn incense and say prayers in memory of a pilgrim’s father who had been born there. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

Emergence of Rituals

incense symbolizes the burning of one’s soul with the Lord’s love. Incense also was (and is) an important part of a ritual of blessing the house, as it bestows God’s protective care over it and over the Christian values it houses. Thus, conventional rituals follow formats with set religious meanings and associations established by the pilgrims’ religious background and education in the diaspora. Liturgical prayers offered in the memory of the departed are expected to be understood by the Almighty and to be accepted and acted on by Him. It is this belief, as well as the prayers’ traditional presentation and structure, that gives these rituals authority and the possibility of being both satisfying and effective. And because they are communally learned and predetermined in form, with known meanings, even when impromptu they offer possibilities for shared participation. It is exactly for these reasons that they differ from the pilgrimage rituals that I discuss in the following pages: that is, the emergent rituals of invocations, collecting relics, experiencing communion, offering votives and ex-votos, making shrines and asking for blessings. Descendants’ Rituals of Pilgrimage

Pilgrims’ emergent rituals are unconventional, or at least only peripherally conventional, as they take their shape, their efficacy and their meaning from being performed at or near the ancestral house or in the house-place, the place where the house once was. Although it might be argued that the emergent ritual of digging soil is performed by both natives and descendants, the following rituals, performed in the ways that I define, appear only among descendants, who may feel that the Armenian place they have found is evidence that the gap between where they were born and their affective identification with the place they are now has been closed. It will also become clear that participating in these rituals makes the rituals a space for the reassembling of memory. A few emergent rituals, such as invocations and the leaving of votives, may or may not have been planned before the pilgrim leaves home, but in all cases, they are creative, personal, and dynamic because, in the moment of performance, they revise the place and change the pilgrim by actively re-situating both in a living history. Emergent rituals also differ from conventional rituals in that they are not specifically religious, yet they unequivocally identify those who create them as pilgrims: that is, they arise from a desire to reach a sacred space in a quest for spiritual reward.

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A review of pilgrim experiences suggests that emergent rituals are of two types. The first set is composed of interactive rituals that perform some type of flow between the pilgrim and the ancestor. I have typologized these as invocations, engagements with or collection of relics, and communion, and as my examples will show, the focus of interactive rituals is on people or on souls. The second set of rituals emphasizes taking agency. These rituals comprise conscious, performative enactments of change. Because their purpose is to make an intervention in the story or narrative of the place encountered, their focus is on place. These are typologized as the leaving of votives, the making of shrines, and asking for blessings. Whether affecting souls or affecting place, both show some similarity to religious rituals, as reflected in the names I have chosen for them. Yet because most, but not all, serve no specific theological purpose, they can be performed by those who make no religious association as well as by those who come from various confessional and liturgical traditions (Armenian Apostolic, Catholic or Evangelical, for example). Furthermore, just as not all who carried items such as photographs or title deeds seemed to be “assembling memory,” not all who found their houses or their villages experienced them in spiritual ways. The following section on rituals, however, drawing from the stories and experiences of well over four hundred travelers, selects the many who did. Thus, each of the following ­categories—invocations, collecting relics, experiencing communion, offering votives and ex-votos, making shrines, and asking for blessing—uses examples from a few to exemplify what was experienced by many. I n t e r act i v e R i t ua ls: I n vo c at i o n s

Although he was now, in 1992, just over 80 and he had left at the age of three, when Anooshavan reached the village of Keghi (T: Kığı) in the province of Kayseri, he rushed ahead of the group into the village as if he knew exactly where to go.2 Leaving behind his adult son, Stephen, along with Armen Aroyan, Aroyan’s driver and adjunct Cemal (pronounced Jemal), and another pilgrim family, he rushed straight to the village stream in its rocky bed, and said, “My house was over there. It’s fallen down.” Anooshavan felt an urgency to find his house because he had prepared a speech to deliver to his father, and he felt it critical to deliver it at the house. Anooshavan’s knowledge seemed visceral, yet centered on one fleeting memory: that his house had been by a stream, and that the family had kept

Emergence of Rituals

their yogurt in that stream, to keep it cool and fresh. Still, arriving seventyeight years after having left as a toddler, his memory relied heavily on memorystories. So, although he was a native, his experience mirrors those of descendants. He had been told that in 1915 his father had died defending his family and that his mother had carried him from Keghi to Aleppo, at least 300 miles, and on foot. They were accompanied by his 18-year-old aunt, Araxie (his father’s sister), and his father’s brother Balthasar. They had survived, but afterward no one had wanted to talk about it, and he was unsure whether or not he even wanted to know. In fact, he he had only recently learned from his aunt Araxie, then in her 90s, that he had once had two siblings, but they had not survived the family’s forced march. He also learned that his father had not died defending his family but had been taken away and shot. As Anooshavan’s son, Stephen, wrote: “The last the family heard of him was several months later, when his name was found inexplicably scrawled on a stone wall sixty miles away, near a field where bodies were found of other Armenian men who had been shot to death.”3 It was this information that sealed Anooshavan’s desire to visit Keghi and search for the house that had been the last place he had seen his father, making it feel like an opening to the transcendent. And so, after much clambering over large river stones, and after one of the local residents offered to help him find the water mill, as that might be the place where yogurt was cooled and where his house had once been, Anooshavan determined that he had found the place to give his speech. “My father,” he began. But then he stopped, overcome by emotion. After a pause he continued, looking at his text for prompts, yet turning his face upward to speak. “I’ve come here with my son to pay my respects to you.” He stopped again, weeping. “And I’m going to name all in the family that know you from my description.” He then summoned and invoked the spirit of his father in the name of his father’s living family: first the ones who had survived—­himself, his mother and his father’s sister and brother. He followed this with the names of all the children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews who were his father’s American-born descendants. He ended his list with his own child: “my son, Stephen, who’s named after you.” Saying this, Anooshavan pointed to Stephen to make sure that his father saw him, and to reiterate that his father’s legacy was unbroken. Without a doubt, Anooshavan felt that his father had been made present (clearly indicated by his pointing his son out to his father). Invoking him with

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the words “My Father” associated him with the Divine through the Lord’s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” and also made clear that this place connected two worlds and was thus open to spiritual return. Thus, invocations, like sudden “signs” and the appearance of spirits indicate that the pilgrim feels that they stand at the opening to a sacred world, one that invites them to enter through a realm or a register of consciousness that will offer a connection to the people of sacred memory. Significantly, Anooshavan had chosen to separate this sacred space from the profane: his invocation did not mention what he knew about his father’s death. Yet, invocations may also establish the profane as an overlay on, or intrusion into, the sacred space of the house-world, rather than regarding it just as the other one of two separate spatial or affective landscapes. Pilgrims are aware of this paradox but, owing to a variety of factors and admixtures of factors, accommodate them differently. For Vahe, for example, who had come on this same trip, an awareness of profaned space was primary. Vahe had always harbored an antipathy toward meeting Turks, much less going to Turkey itself. Yet he too, in the same year and on the same trip as Anooshavan, but in a different village—and without a shared plan, would choose the houseworld as the place to invoke the presence of his ancestors, suggesting that this choice might deflect some of the pain of the profane by its association with positive values and spiritual strength. Vahe M. made an invocation in Munjusun (Mounjousoun; T: Muncusun; Güneşli), the Gesaria (Caesaria; T: Kayseri) village associated with both his father, Armenag, who was born there, and his mother, Vergeen, born in the city of Kayseri itself.4 His father had been born in Munjusun in 1891 but had left for the United States in 1910 at the age of 19, a bantukhd, with the intention of returning to marry Vergeen, a then eight-year-old girl who the family thought would be an appropriate wife when she came of age. Vergeen would become Vahe’s mother, but only after a tortuous survival story. In 1915, at age 13, she had left Kayseri on one of the death marches but survived by being taken in by a Beduin family, only to become their servant/slave. They had tattooed her face and then murdered her mother, Lousaper. Vergeen eventually escaped to work as a nurse in a military hospital in Aleppo. Through the postgenocide information network, she was located by Armenag, who brought her to the United States. When she arrived, she was deeply worried about her tattooed chin and the sexual abuse she had experienced, and wondered

Emergence of Rituals

if Armenag would accept her. As it turned out, her worries did not recognize how grateful he was that she had survived, and how well he understood the context. “You don’t have to hide those marks from me,” Armenag assured her, “I will always regard those marks as symbols of your valor and honor.”5 They married in 1921; one of their children would be Vahe. Vergeen’s story had never been hidden from her family, including Vahe’s four daughters, who had lived with her and who were on this trip. Moreover, a memoir of her story, Vergeen, A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide, would be published in 1996, five years after this pilgrimage. This story that had been so profound for the family, and was so emblematic of the Armenian experience of 1915, would become a classic in the Armenian community. Vahe’s father, Armenag, frustrated, angry, but safe in the United States, had spent the genocide years in active political activities. He had even changed his family name to one with Armenian rather than Turkish roots. Vahe had prepared a message to his ancestors, which he chose to read while standing close to the former Armenian houses of Munjusun that Cemal had shown them. But he had no way to identify any one house as his own. In front of him was a gathering of local children, and he placed his arms around some of them, musing on how he or his family could have been one of them but that “fate,” that is the genocide, had meant he was now here as a pilgrim. He then addressed his grandparents by name, Krikor and Alys Balyan and Bardasar and Lousaper Tashjian Kalanderian, and, continuing in Armenian, told them: “We have come back. We’ve come back to breathe the . . . sweet good air of yours so that we may have the breath of life. We are content and thankful to you for our lives. Grandmother, Grandfathers, we remember you. We haven’t seen you but we feel your spirit and your soul. When I was little, I always would look on the map for Gesaria. Where is Gesaria? It was only one point. Now Gesaria is not just a point, it’s our life. We’re here, your children, and we’re here to see you, and to feel you. And Lousaper, you gave your life so that Vergeen could live. And you did right. Without your sacrifice, today we could not—we couldn’t do these things today. Your child had a hard life, but she was always happy, she sang. And I remember a number of songs.” Having delivered his invocation in Armenian, Vahe then offered a distilled version of it in English for his children and son-in-law: “We are here. And we’re here to love your land; to breathe the sweet air, clear air, to give us life, taking life from your pure air and feel a bond with the rocks and the

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land—and all that’s around us. To feel your presence.” Vahe had prepared his talk in Armenian because, as he told his daughters afterward, “I was speaking to my grandparents and your great-grandparents on both my father’s side and my mother’s side. . . . I was talking to them and their spirit; and their spirit is Armenian. I tried to be with them, one with them in Armenian, and address them one by one, by name, on each side.” He continued: “I said to your greatgrandmother”—and at this point he became too teary to speak for a long time— “You gave your life to let your daughter live, and you succeeded. And it was life for us.” Like Anooshavan’s speech to his father, Vahe’s speech used the language of praise and gratitude familiar to worshippers in the presence of the Divine. Yet although Anooshavan’s vocabulary might recall the language of prayer, or at least the comfort of prayer, neither his nor Vahe’s invocation invoked a divinity, attesting to the breadth of the sacred, with ample room for spirits and a spirituality not specifically affiliated with religion. Vahe, in fact, may have spoken in the spirit of his mother, whose religious faith had ended with the genocide, as she was “convinced that no God would have allowed such suffering to befall a people.”6 This was a sentiment shared by others too. When Apo Torosyan would question his father about the events of 1915 in Edincik (Aydıncık), all his father would say was, “There is no God. If there was a God, what happened would not have happened!”7 Nonetheless, these rituals of invocation, and others like them, illustrate how the house-world, even when profane stories intrude into it, is perceived as having a distinctive sacred reality, whether associated with a religious system, or not. That perception is pivotal, as it is the frame for the pilgrims’ thoughts and actions when they are there. Generated by proximity to the house and the stories and signs that give it a sacred character as a “place apart,”8 these invocations become a type of sacred performance, with a style that relates them to traditional sacred services or, at the least, to prayerlike invocations given at formal gatherings.9 Since they always have an audience, usually the family of the pilgrim but often other pilgrims as well, invocations not only indicate an inner mood or disposition10 but also give meaning to the stage on which this register of consciousness is performed, and thus have a reciprocal relationship with it. Invocations suggest how registers of consciousness might manifest as a reverie, but in no case are they to be confused with a state of altered

Emergence of Rituals

consciousness. A simple example of a register of consciousness that mixes past and present and invites feelings and images from elsewhere might arise when one travels to places that connote the historic or exotic, such as Istanbul or Delhi. There it would not be uncommon to hope to take a photo of a “traditional” setting that includes an “appropriate” local. If one could capture a bent and elderly man or a veiled woman or even a horse and cart in the frame, the image would feel more “authentic” to one’s register of consciousness. If a villager on a cell phone or an urban taxi intrudes into the viewfinder or the screen, one waits for it to pass before clicking the shutter. But one is not shocked by either the phone or the taxi. Assuming that what happens is not untoward and the focus or mood is not pierced, one merely allows it to pass and returns to trying to keep experience in harmony with one’s frame of mind. A spiritual return demands a register of consciousness that experiences time and space in just this way. When Anooshavan entered Kığı, he traveled between two registers, the quotidian experience of his current trip and the highly imaginative state that

F igur e 13.   A family of pilgrims offers candy to local children, 2012. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

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allowed his spiritual return, his entry into the place of the past that was being revealed through place-related memories and memory-stories. As he began his search for his house, he was surrounded by a group of children who followed him happily and curiously. And as he began his invocation, he chose one child he could identify with, to help him become the child he was when he left. “I’d say [placing his hands on a boy’s shoulder] this one, right here, where I’ve got him.” Yet after choosing his child, he did not lose himself or forget that the time was now. Instead, he looked at the collected group and, wrestling in his heart with the fact that they were Kurdish, not Armenian, he said: “And all these kids, I don’t know. They’re God’s children.” In Munjusun, Vahe spoke to his ancestors while surrounded by children who had recently been given candy by his daughters. At one point he interrupted his own talk with the spirits of his family in order to point to one of the children, and with a concerned look said, “Did this little kid get anything? Gum?” (Figure 13). In these alert reveries, the boundaries between the mental space of the past and that of the present are porous. So too is the mental space between the sacred and the profane. Yet to the degree that the house calls forth the sacred, the signs seen and the invocations made here suggest how not just the house, but the entire house-world, is primarily, even fundamentally experienced from a sacred register of consciousness. As Zaven K., a participant in a later pilgrimage, made clear, these signs are seen with hokevor achkerov, that is, with “spiritual eyes.”11

Chapter 7

Relics: Engaging the Spirits

A s t h e h o u s e , or more often house-world, becomes spiritually available

as a sacred center, other ritual performances emerge, such as the gathering of earth in that place as a sacred relic of enduring spirits. Before her own journey, “Sossi” (a pseudonym) heard about another pilgrim’s trip. “Oh my God,” she recalled, “it was like a message from space! It was like someone had gone to the moon and brought back a rock. Like the moon has been in the sky all this time, but it still feels—intangible. And when someone goes to the moon, and they bring this rock back, and say ‘Really, seriously, I went to the moon, I reached down, I picked this rock up,’ you look at it and you say, ‘Oh my God, you brought back a rock? That was from the moon?’ That was how it felt.” On the bus, Ray confided that historical Armenia had seemed so inaccessible and remote that “it might just as well have been on Pluto.” Or as Rosemary said, “And the fact of the matter is, you never thought, as you grew up, that you would be here. Ever. Never.” At its basic level, gathered earth is a souvenir; proof that the traveler was really at that place. For the pilgrim descendants of exiles, however, it validates something deeper: that the goal of their journey, in fact, exists at all. In some ways, then, gathering earth or rocks in one’s ancestral village is like pinching oneself, parallel in importance and frequency to having one’s picture taken with the village sign—a photo-trophy that authenticates the land, and one that is coveted by virtually every pilgrim. In 1963, William 75

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F igur e 14.   A pilgrim collects stones in Pazmashen, 2009. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

Saroyan made sure that he had photographs of himself sitting next to the sign that announced Bitlis; and many a skid mark has been made on Turkish roads when a bus carrying pilgrims veers to park near a sign it just passed. But it is the rocks and earth that are collected on one’s ancestral land that hold a complexity more worthy of our attention, for they can be understood as radiating an intrinsic sacrality when pilgrims collect them from their house-worlds as relics with sacred attributes and even with special powers (Figure 14). Ea r t h a n d S t o n e s f r o m t h e Sa c r e d C e n t e r

Mardick saw the earth as holding the souls of an entire community. On his 2012 pilgrimage, he asked the driver, Cemal, to stop the bus so that he could gather a rock along the road near Van in order to take it to the village of Pazmashen (Bizmishin; T: Sarıçubuk), over 200 miles to the west. As a Pazmashentsi himself, he had read that all Pazmashentsis traced their roots to Van, but at one time in the ancestral past, the entire village had moved

Relics

from Van to Pazmashen—as a group. In carrying the stones, he was carrying people: “What am I going to do with it? I’m going to take it to Pazmashen like the rest.” He didn’t want anyone left behind. We saw in Chapter 3 how Bedros Kushigian, in 1952, dug up earth in Govdun, from the place where his house had been, and kissed it over and over, “as if,” he said, “it was the ashes of my hapless parents.” In fact, earth and the stones on it are always collected with this sensibility, as embodiments of spirits, usually those of the ancestors who lived on their sacred land, or as a part that stands for the whole of the ancestral home that was lost. In other words, by gathering earth, pilgrims make soul to soul connections with ancestors, even acknowledging that earth’s power to ritually reverse their ancestors’ separation from the lost family or a lost home or a lost world. Alidz gave the title “My Ear to the Earth” to one of the poems that she wrote about her pilgrimage (see Chapter 9). In 2000, Margaret dug the earth with the idea of reunion in mind.1 She dug into the hard soil of Chunkush (T: Çüngüş) with a spoon, putting the dirt into a paper bag held by her husband. Her father, Yenov, had been born there in 1894 and had survived the Hamidian massacres of 1895. In 1912, in anticipation of worse things to come, he had been sent off to Chicago with a brother; but he had talked about Chunkush for the rest of his life. Margaret had no idea of where her father’s house might have been, but preparing to stoop down to dig, she recounted her father’s stories of sleeping on the roof in the hot summer, and of the fruit orchards—and especially about the delicious figs. Activating her father’s memory-stories of the wholeness of his family was entwined with the process of digging, and part of the recognition of the earth’s sanctity. Yet, other than himself and the one brother he had traveled with back in 1912, every member of her father’s family, in fact every remaining Armenian in Chunkush itself, had been killed in 1915. The family that her father had hoped to bring to America was never heard from again. As Margaret had already related, by reading aloud from the chronicle of Henry Riggs2—a Christian missionary stationed in Kharpert—all the men of Chunkush had been marched out of town and brutally murdered; the remaining population of eight to ten thousand had been thrown into a cavern, a bottomless pit called Dudan by Armenians.3 Margaret did not gather her earth near that pit. On these trips, there are no rituals of reunion in the space of the profane.4 Rather, unable to locate her father’s house, she chose the exposed dirt floor in the remains of Chunkush’s

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Surp Asdvadzadzin (Holy Mother of God) Church. It would serve as a personal opening to the transcendent, as she felt certain that her family had gone there for prayer. In touching the earth, Margaret had touched her father’s lost family, physically communicating to them that they were remembered. Furthermore, her actual digging of this earth activated its spirits, as it had done for Osky (in the Introduction), allowing Margaret to tell her father of her effort to heal the separation that had caused him anguish throughout his life. “And I just wanted to say [sobbing], Dad, this trip is for you. And this is a tribute to you. May your spirit rest in peace now.” As she finished her speech to her father, her husband kissed her. As in many cultures, earth as a healer of separation is used in rituals that hope to satisfy a soul’s wish to return home. On these trips, pilgrims have even been known to bring earth from family graves in the diaspora to their ancestors’ home village in Anatolia, to be sprinkled over the earth as a symbolic reunification or return.5 Vahé Baladouni wrote about such an attempt of spiritual reunification made by a co-pilgrim in 2001: At some unidentifiable geographic point, a pilgrim got up from his seat, approached the bus driver, and requested him to stop the vehicle for a brief moment. Then, taking his tearful wife by the arm, he got off the bus. The two slowly walked to the edge of a ravine where the wife tenderly produced an urn from under her arm, opened the lid with longing and affection, and sprinkled the contents over the surroundings; husband and wife marked themselves with the sign of the cross and stood there for a minute or two in meditation before returning to the bus. She had fulfilled a solemn promise she had long ago made to her mother, a survivor of the Genocide.6

Even William Saroyan had thoughts of being buried in the soil of Bitlis to reunite himself with his ancestors. At least one of Aroyan’s pilgrims, Jack, traveling on a pilgrimage in 1994, reported that when Saroyan died in 1981, half of his ashes were interred in Yerevan and half in Fresno; “his will, however, had a provision that when Bitlis became free, the urn from Fresno would be taken to Bitlis for interment.”7 It is more common, however, for pilgrimtravelers to do the reverse: they collect earth or stones from the family village in Anatolia with the intention of uniting this soil with the earth in which their ancestor is now buried—far from his or her place of origin—in order to

Relics

reunite separated individuals, or to unite loved ones with the ancestral spirits rooted in that Anatolian earth. Engaging the Spirits of the Soil

For Zarouhi and Alma, two sisters who, with their brother Vahan, visited the rubble of Khorsana (Horsana; T: Dikmencik) in 2000, the earth they gathered was the first part of a ritual that would end by symbolically reuniting family who had been torn apart during the genocide.8 As they walked in what had once been their mother’s village, they continually stooped down to add earth and flowers to the plastic bag they carried. As they focused on this earth, memories revealed how their mother’s story was embedded in it. Their mother’s life in this village had been hard, as her own mother had died when she was a year old. But for the next six years she was lovingly cared for by her beloved sister, whom Zarouhi referred to as Makruhi Morakuyr ([maternal] Aunt Makruhi). But when she was seven, her sister married and left Khorsana. With no one to care for her, she was sent to relatives in Istanbul, where she was to be educated, but the relatives placed her with a Turkish woman as a maid. In about 1925, when she was 17, she made it to the United States where she found that a brother had also survived, and they were reunited. All along, she believed that her sister had perished. But thirty-five years later, in 1961, Zarouhi traveled to what was then Soviet Armenia and found her mother’s sister, still alive. However, it was the height of the Cold War, so both the United States and the Soviet Union demanded many layers of permissions, and by the time the paperwork was completed and Zarouhi’s mother was able to travel, her sister had died. “We have a picture of my mother leaning over her grave,” Zarouhi said. Later, after her mother too had died, Zarouhi had done her best to assuage the pain her mother had always felt after being torn from her beloved sister—and torn from Khorsana, the place of their shared happiness. The first thing Zarouhi had done was to take some of her mother’s ashes, which were buried next to her husband’s, and move them to her mother’s sister’s grave in Gyumri. In fact, one of the purposes of all that earth gathered in Khorsana was to take it to Gyumri too. By saying, “I am going to mix it with the soil where she is [now] buried with her sister whom she never saw again after the genocide,” Zarouhi signaled the importance of her ritual performance: for her, the placing of that earth in the grave with the two sisters’ ashes not only

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effects a Khorsana reunion but, because she had collected it herself, becomes a filial act of devotion. Many pilgrims also saved some ancestral earth for themselves. In 2007, Leo, another Khorsanatsi, and also an oud virtuoso who performs Khorsana music, collected two containers of earth. One was for his father’s grave, but he planned to share the second with his brother so they could have Khorsana’s earth sprinkled over their own caskets when they died. In this way, digging the earth not only marked the importance that the parent or ancestor had given to their home village but also gave notice that the descendants were not just intermediaries; rather, their family stories had established their own rootedness—so much so that they wanted to, at least symbolically, be buried in that land too. Once in the house-world, pilgrims collect earth as a sacred relic with special powers. In an Apostolic and Catholic imaginary, as well as in many other religious imaginaries, a relic might be the actual body part of a saint, such as a bone or hair, or it might be the remnant of items worn by or touched by holy personages. As surviving traces, relics allow direct contact between a devotee and the holy, and may bestow healing powers. Pilgrims at all levels of faith and all over the world are known to gather earth as a type of relic, one believed to be imbued with the power of a place and the divinity or spiritual beings associated with that place. Before the genocide, Armenians in the Catholic village of Pirkinik (T: Çayboyu), for example, would travel to a nearby village associated with the story of the beheading of the fourth-century Saint Severian of Sivas and bring back red dirt to place in an urn in their homes.9 The earth was a complex mixture of the saint himself (by association, because he had walked there) and the place-related story of the martyrdom that gave him holiness. The earth, as a sacred relic, would act as an intermediary, able to unite the holy person and the place where the holiness originated, the devotee through his act of collecting it, and the devotee’s village house. Given their reverential character, all ritual activities might well be considered a type of worship, an act of homage for something spiritually transcendent, whether or not as part of a religious cosmology. The ritual of gathering the earth seems especially fitting here, as the Armenian term for worship (yergir bakanel; yergrbakel) literally means “to kiss the earth.” It also conveys a sense of kissing the land as homeland (yergir). Moreover, the Armenian word for land, hogh, when associated with homeland, is considered holy

Relics

(surp). This must have resonated especially for Sebouh, who dug hogh from his ancestral village of Hoghe (Hoghul; T: Hoği; Yurtbaşı), which means “of the soil/earth,” for he first crossed himself and then collected the soil of his forefathers’ yergir as a prayerful act of devotion. In February 2011, during his father’s funeral, Sebouh spread a handful of this holy soil over his father’s coffin, making his ritual complete. Certainly, earth and stones might be understood as simple symbols, with earth and stone standing for the house, or the house-world, and especially for the people who gave it meaning. But as Eliade explains, objects are venerated not because they are what they are (e.g., a stone or a tree), “but because they embody (i.e., ‘reveal’), something other than themselves,” which is their sacredness.10 This sacredness is revealed when the pilgrim gathers the earth and moves it, for it is the pilgrim’s actions that activate the earth’s sacred powers, and direct them toward the healing of loss.

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Com m u n i o n: A U n i f i c at i o n o f S o u ls

Digging ancestral earth

allows pilgrims to feel the closeness of ancestral spirits, but the pilgrimage ritual of communion produces a unification of souls. As in Christian communion, in which a devotee is united with Christ, a pilgrimage communion is an action between the ancestor and the pilgrim through an imagined sharing of experience in their ancestral place. Gary, for example, photographed his father’s village against the setting sun because, he said: “My father, Alexander, described to me that their village was a four-hour donkey ride west of Gürün. He knew it was west because they left in the morning with the sun on their back and returned to Gürün in the late afternoon with the sun on their back.”1 Here, the performative moment that enacts unification is when the shutter clicks: at that moment pilgrim and ancestor share one body. In this sense, the embodied action of photographing is not concerned with empirical documentation; rather, like other pilgrimage rituals, it creates a space of spiritual return in which place can be inhabited, or recognized as one’s own. The concern of this embodied ritual is making the inner world and the external world into a single, tangible space that erases time and parallels memory.2 And thus Gary’s picture taking is an example of how communion, when both embodied and active, can be experienced as a sense of unification. As with the relic, the “thingness” of the photograph, its “artifact-ness”—no matter what might be done with it later—is secondary to the encounter that 82

Communion

produces it. What is central to photography as communion is that the photographer is, for example, standing on his father’s land and framing the landscape of his father’s stories with his viewfinder or screen; he thus has the potential of becoming his own father, sensed as seeing with his father’s eyes. Pa r t i a l C o m m u n i o n

In most cases, however, the act of photographing can be only a fragmented, poignant attempt at communion, especially when what was seen in the past did not survive either as memory-stories or as places. Pilgrims who scour existing landscapes of houses, hoping that—somehow—they will see their “own” house, may also take photographs, trying to connect with what their families saw and experienced as home (Figure 15). As the pilgrim Mardick mused from behind his camera: “Very probably my mother, as a kid, as she was from this Vari Tagh [Lower District] of Hadjin [T: Saimbeyli], saw the same sights I am seeing. . . . [H]ave you seen how tremendous this is! There’s

F igur e 15.   A pilgrim, standing in the door of the bus, photographs a deserted Armenian house in Sivas, 2012. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

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the ruin, and the valley and it’s so pretty.” Sometimes pilgrims enter the photograph themselves in order to participate in this partial communion. Handing their cameras to others, they stand close to locals who make them feel as if they are standing next to someone ancestral merely because the local person was born in this same village or because they “look Armenian”—or just because they just look old. Limited communion arises from a sense that the ancestral home can offer satisfaction for this yearning for union. Shushan inhaled “the cool night air of Aintab” (T: Gaziantep), thinking of all the Nazaretians and Krajians who had lived there. Many pilgrims expressed a desire to walk where their ancestors had walked; and even if they did not find exact locations, many felt that the soles of their feet were overlapping their ancestors’ footsteps, and thus they were walking as if they were, somehow, them. In Khulakiugh, the village where his grandfather had served as the last priest before the genocide, Garbis said: “It was as though I were in a different world with all my ancestors who had lived there. I knew I was walking on the same streets where my grandfather had walked to church, viewing the land, now stone-strewn, which they knew so well.”3 In Zeytun (T: Süleymanlı), Nayiri said: “It was sacred to stand where my grandparents had stood, to breathe the air they breathed, to have my skin be touched by the sun that touched theirs, to be refreshed by the water of the spring from which they had drunk, and to gaze at the majestic snowy mountains and the clear blue waters of the lakes and sea.”4 Brittany (Chapter 5) was one of the many pilgrims who felt the ground under their feet as a magic transformer, so that by walking, feet, foot, footprint, and bodies merged. And in Marash, Ankene had an urge to pull up floor tiles and paving stones to reach what she thought must be the level original to the time of her grandparents, allowing her not merely to walk where they had walked but to feel her own feet sharing their walking on that same ground: “Because I felt like if I touched the dirt and I closed my eyes, I could almost see them and feel them. I touched the walls. I touched the bricks.” Nancy Kay, who was fortunate enough to find her family house, felt “that by seeing the house, I was in my family’s shoes. I felt what it was like to walk on that ground, feel what the animals felt, played games, made love, where they put their beds on the roof to cool off, raised their crops. My soul in their soul, my heart in their heart, my head in their head.”5

Communion

A partial communion that arises from a sense of the ancestor’s traces begins to cross over into full communion when the pilgrim takes action, such as in photographing as if seeing with the ancestor’s eyes, and thus induces a state of consciousness that makes the pilgrim feel that he or she and a specific ancestor are close together. Such communions may appear in actions taken with a goal of healing: for example, hoping to heal the ancestor’s pained exile from their beloved home, the pilgrim may act to become a proxy for the ancestor in order to enact a restorative moment. Alberta drank from one of the springs in her ancestral town of Bitias, one of the five villages of the mountain of Musa Dagh (A: Musa Ler; T: Musa Dağı), saying, “I just drank some of it; I’m going to drink some more.” Then she told this story: “My sister Anna told me that I should have two drinks of water here. One for me, and one for my grandfather.” Her grandfather had died after surviving the march through the deserts of Syria and reaching Hama. His wife had died on the march. “According to our mother, soon, within a few months after they got there, [he had said] I would be OK if someone could bring me a glass of cold water from my favorite orchard, which was Chaghlaghan.”6 Vasak had drunk at the spring in his village of Arpi: “There, naturally . . . I was looking at this water, [but] I was thinking the following: for a single drop of this water, what they would give . . . those who aren’t with us anymore . . . our people. But now you came, the spring is in front of you, drink as much as you want, you can wash for everyone, if you want, do whatever you want. . . . That is it. . . . Either you drink it, or you wash.” Later he reflected on the high emotional state he was in at the time, and explained, “You do not understand what are you doing.”7 Drinking water, or washing one’s face in the local fountain is a common type of pilgrimage communion. Seeing this ritual again and again, Cemal Kökmen, Armen’s long-term driver, guide and friend, captured in verse how he saw drinking water or washing one’s face in the local fountain as a satisfying reward of pilgrimage. Van Memory [Van Anısı] I climbed over the mountains and came to Van Longing for my mother and my father I drank its water thirstily, My beloved Van, you used to say, [ Just as] Van is in the world, faith is in the after-life.8

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Full Communion

But full communion as a ritual of pilgrimage goes beyond a sensing of place as shared place, or a sensing of the presence of the ancestors or their way of life; rather, full communion actively re-creates a shared moment in that shared place. That is, full communion happens as a ritual only when the pilgrim’s actions unite the pilgrim with the ancestor not merely by replicating the ancestor’s activities, but by sensing that the pilgrim and the ancestor are performing them in tandem; spirit to spirit in a type of wordless poetry. And just as a full pilgrimage communion connects the pilgrim with a specific ancestor, it also turns that absence to presence in a specific way. That is, unlike Osky, who spoke to her mother as she gathered soil in Govdun (Introduction), it is not communication; and unlike Shushan or Nayiri who breathed the same air, it is not a sense of experiencing the land just as their ancestors might have done; nor is it having an experience that suddenly invokes ancestors as Adrina did in Kharpert when she ate “an authentic Kharpertsi meal with Kharpert kufta and the works, [and she] felt the presence of [her] grandmother and grandfather.” Rather, in a full ritual of communion, action evokes an enveloping, visceral connection to a specific ancestor such that ancestor and pilgrim are united in their activity outside of time. As Zarouhi and her sister Alma ate yemlik (a wild herb) in their mother’s village of Khorsana, Zarouhi said to her sister, “We’re not only breathing the air, but we’re eating the food. We’re breaking bread.” Breaking bread, a term that also may be used sacramentally, fundamentally suggests having a meal together. What Zarouhi understood was that she was not merely eating the same food that her mother once ate; rather, by actively and ritually eating, she was also experiencing the sharing of food with her mother in her mother’s own home (Chapter 7). In her mother’s village of Malatya, Sossi felt this sense of sharing when she watched a local woman use a hallatch (T: hallaç), a wooden beater, to fluff up wool that had been tucked inside the family’s yorgans (quilts) for a year. This sharing was enhanced as she observed her own mother, with whom she was traveling, watching it. She was keenly aware that her mother was remembering her own mother fluffing wool—just as she had learned to do it right there in Malatya. Sossi remembered that grandmother too. As she and her mother watched, they already knew how the freshened wool would then be spread

Communion

out between two sheets, and then, deftly, if not miraculously, rolled back inside the quilt cover, to be re-sewn. The comfort of quilts and yearly beating of the wool is a household ritual remembered with warmth in both Turkish and Western Armenian culture. In fact the words hallatch and yorgan are part of both vocabularies. This warmth is captured here by a Turkish poet: The quilt gets its wool back Fluffier, warmer and smelling of the rays of the sun Again.9

Sossi understood how fluffing wool was “such a small act, but it took on all that meaning. Mom had memories of my grandma doing that in New Jersey or New York, and then we saw it! And it was like, Oh my God! OK, so we didn’t experience this, Mom experienced this. But—Grandma did it!—before we were born, and Mom told us about it, and then we got to go back over there, and we got to see it, which was like getting to live Grandma’s life.”10 This annual cleaning of the yorgan wool was completely actuated as communion by Bob K. in Sivas, in 2012. When the pilgrims’ minibus stopped so Aroyan could ask for directions at a neighborhood shop, it parked right by a woman who was out on the sidewalk fluffing the wool for her yorgan (Figure 16). As several pilgrims with similar memories got off the bus to see this up close, one of them, Sylvia, said to all the others, and yet to no one in particular, “Your grandmother did it the way they do it here.”11 Another, Ruth, shyly asked if she could buy a piece of the wool, as if it carried, like a relic, spiritual power from her own past. (Of course, the woman gave her some.) But Bob, who had learned this art from the women in his Yozgatsi family (Chapter 12), used creative gestures to ask the woman if he could just take over. For the next few minutes he used the hallatch like a professional, astounding the woman who owned it and drawing the delighted attention of every passerby who saw him do what they themselves might often do, or at least what they watched at home. Beating the wool rhythmically in the exact way he had learned it, Bob entered a realm of consciousness in which his mother became present, and they came together in a merged world. Because it provides an object of focused action, communion almost always demands an intermediary, such as this wool, or food or water. In a Christian context, for example, a believer is invited to feel united with the

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F igur e 16.   A woman in Sivas beats wool with a hallatch (beating stick), 2012. Bob would later ask the woman for permission to take over her task. Photo by Steven Barsamian.

presence of Christ; but it is the partaking of bread and wine that makes that union ritually real. Unlike Christian communion, however, it is place that is crucial to the creation of a pilgrim’s shared moment, as pilgrimage communion begins with the insistence that the land holds the spirit, and so communion emerges here. But what makes communion work is, first of all, its sense of immediacy, as time in this place is erased. Whether the ancestor is being pulled into the present or the pilgrim is feeling drawn to the past is of no consequence. The second factor is that the moment of communion is attained through action; it is a ritual of touching, seeing, eating, drinking, or walking that performs a seemingly shared sensual consciousness: that is, as con-­sensory, it is “felt together.” Enclosed in a momentary register of consciousness or reverie, this communion is experienced as a “relational form of being lived in the immemorial.”12 Significantly, communion—through place, action, and activation of the senses—is not an act of sudden-recall of the pilgrim’s or an ancestor’s memory-stories; it is not an act of remembering an ancestor similar to Marcel Proust’s famous remembrance upon eating a madeleine. The taste of a

Communion

madeleine in Paris sent the adult Proust into a reverie of the past to the point of forgetting about the madeleine he was eating in the present. True, the taste of the madeleine sent him into a mental reexperiencing of his own childhood that might be interpreted as a chance communion, a reunion with the love felt for his aunt during the Sunday mornings when she had shared her breakfast madeleines, first dipping them into her own tea. But for Proust, it was by eating that “suddenly, the memory revealed itself.”13 For the pilgrim however, memory is not the unexpected result of the experiences in this place; rather memory sets the stage for the experience. Although the pilgrims may not have come to their ancestral town or village thinking specifically of quilt making, the minute they set foot in it, they have entered a world where memory associations are both expected and even searched for, often with a deep hope of finding traces of ancestors’ real or historical presence. Following Rudolf Otto’s concept of numen, a religious emotion or experience awakened in the presence of something holy, the desire for this type of connection at heritage sites has even earned the name numen-seeking, the “desire to make a personal connection with the people and spirit of earlier times.”14 This expectation gives electrical charge and authenticity to the rituals that emerge. Communion in this place, then, emphasizes the understanding that this is the real ancestral home, and if the ancestors are now deceased, their spirit is just as much here as it might be in Philadelphia—or in heaven. Thus, unlike the memories aroused by madeleines for Marcel Proust, the pilgrim’s ritual of communion does not move the pilgrim into the past but occurs in a larger time that consciously includes the present, and maybe an afterworld too. The moment of communion that creates this shared timelessness, one that merges both the pilgrim with the past and the ancestor with the present, also creates a new image of place, one in which the past and the present of the village share a single timeless moment that allows the pilgrim and the ancestor to be actively there together. Proust’s return to a moment in the past was random, serendipitous and accidental; but ritual is never a chance occurrence. Like a Christian communicant who takes bread and wine, the pilgrim undertakes actions that are purposeful; they occur in a chosen place, with body and soul prepared. The Christian communicant’s action is defined by years of tradition and repetitions such that the hoped-for outcome of communion, that is, union and transformation, is clear. Likewise, many

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pilgrims who experience communion have traveled a long way to a very specific place with an embedded hope of coming soul to soul with their ancestors. Rituals of communion emerge to meet this fundamental yearning in different ways. And as with other rituals, their power comes from an image of place that holds the pilgrim’s self as well as the ancestor’s, demanding an updating and reassembling of memory-images of home.

Chapter 9

Sa c r e d a n d P r o fa n e : A P o e t i c E n c o u n t e r

I t m ay b e t h at i t

is yearning that opens the village or the house-world to the sacred, and thus the possibility of communion, but the double reverberation caused by the profane might also make the success of these rituals feel impossible. Mardick sighed deeply as he tasted the bread fresh from the village tonir (stone pit-oven), but it was a sorrowful sigh. My father said that tonir bread was the best. There was a tonir in the middle of the village, and each house had a tonir in the living area so it heated the house . . . at least his house had one. When the kids would come in, and smell it, their mother gave them some, but he was very happy because she would give it to him first. . . . Can you imagine, his story? From a little boy who has not seen his mother since the age of eight or nine . . . or his father . . . [having lost them in the genocide] and his memory of something smelling so good, and a loving person giving him that . . . he grows older with that memory. He missed many more years of that. So every time there was something like a bakery or something like that, and they would say, “Isn’t this good?” he would say, “I know what good bread out of a tonir is.”

Alberta and Vasak, in drinking from village springs, merged with father or grandfather respectively in an attempt to satisfy those ancestors’ thirst. Mardick’s father’s loss, however, could not be healed by union because it was in no way material. What was missing was a spiritual encounter. “Well, now you’ve 91

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had it,” said another pilgrim when Mardick was offered fresh tonir bread. But his response was a sad, “Yes; but it’s not the same thing. It wasn’t my mother that gave it to me.” But many pilgrims, while acknowledging the profane, are able to counteract it, in part, through a ritual communion with the spirits who carry the positive values once housed in the ancestral home. Alidz’s poem shows that on her visit to her mother’s village of Hasanbeyli, she put her rage aside. I give myself permission these few days to enjoy my homeland its air and water that I would have enjoyed if my people’s fate had been different.1

Instead of returning to a cruel 1915, Alidz chose a return to a place whose sacred qualities of the past would engulf her in the present. Perhaps this open-heartedness stemmed from her Christian beliefs, or from a desire to honor the Christian beliefs of her Hasanbeyli family, who remain dedicated to an Armenian Evangelical Christianity that had begun in Istanbul in 1846 as a Protestant offshoot of the Armenian Apostolic Church.2 And so, even anticipating a change in consciousness, she tells us: I return with the permission to dream tied around my waist.

On arriving in Hasanbeyli, Alidz found that memory-stories arose to identify the sacred realm of her house that “was, from my childhood, inscribed on my soul”3 through a treasury of stories heard from her grandmother when they lived together in Beirut. This led to a flood of daydreams and reveries: I’m sitting next to my grandmother my eyes on her sewing basket and colorful wools I’m eight years old.

Alidz’s grandmother’s “story-ed” house in Hasanbeyli seemed to be bathed in the sacred light of the Christian calendar.

Sacred and Profane

The first time I heard my grandmother say Hasanbeyli’s name My grandmother’s Glad tidings from Hasanbeyli was every Christmas Eve The Three Magi those wise beings Melkona, Kaspara and Badarasara from far away they found a way to have the good news of Christ’s birth come to our door.

Alidz made two pilgrimages to Hasanbeyli, in 2006 with her husband and in 2007 with a group of cousins. In 2006, she found an old house with the inscription “God is Love” (Asdvadz ser e) and used that house as a proxy, or at least, to help her imagine the two-story house she had heard about. On her second trip, the following year, Alidz found the actual mill that had been below the family house; the imagined house from her first trip, together with this mill and the nearby family orchards found later, combined to become the house-place that could accept her memory-stories. Mulberry trees, pomegranate trees and apricot trees with multicolored fruits decorated the plentiful garden where the Koundakjian’s large family’s children Dipped during summer days, [regularly] In the Koundakjian’s garden with the running children and with the trailing laughter.4

But even though it was inscribed with “God is love,” the world of her house also evoked the profane landscape of the village outside it: “I find its hidden things [secrets] and the things it says [its sayings].”5 Alidz’s great-grandfather, the Reverend Hagop Koundakjian, Pastor of the Armenian Evangelical Church in Hasanbeyli, was murdered during the large sweep of the Adana massacres of 1909; and after that, most of Maryam and

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Hagop Koundakjian’s thirteen children were forced from their house only to lose their lives in brutal ways.6 Alidz’s resourceful great-grandmother had escaped from Hasanbeyli with her surviving orphaned grandchildren, including Güle, the mother of one of the cousins on this pilgrimage. Alidz and that cousin shared the memory-story image of a fleeing Maryam, one hand holding Güle, the other holding a cooking pot with a meal that had been made to be eaten in the house, as they now fled for the mountains. from the corner of my eye I spy my cousin whose eyes were focused on the ground stayed a little away from us her mother, Güle orphaned of mother and father just a little girl, held our great grandmother and her grandmother Maryam Koundakjian’s hand and the last meal of the hearth-pot a tragic day.7

Nearby, in a Hasanbeyli tea garden, Alidz and her family of pilgrims gathered around a table where their lunch became a small but poignant ritual that would counter the force of the profane by returning their focus to the sacredness of the past. After all, pilgrims do not return to their villages to relive horrors but rather to acknowledge, honor, commemorate, sense and be invigorated by the life-forces that are their heritage. Their communion had a pointed Christian quality. The setting included fish, which, with its symbolism, demarcated the location as holy; the lahmajun (flatbread with ground meat, tomato, onion and parsley, and a squeeze of lemon [T: lahmacun]) and tan (a drink of yogurt and water [T: ayran]) seemed to stand for the body and blood of Christ, or at least alluded to the possibility of a Christian communion. The seven cousins then placed photographs of their great-grandparents on the table, enabling all to perform the ritual together. We are holding our great grandfather’s, Reverend Hagop Koundakjian and great grandmother,

Sacred and Profane

Maryam Koundakjian’s pictures, and remembering them born sacrificed and still alive a whole family [extended family] we soulfully sing sacred songs songs [that] in times of crisis our elders’ faith unyielding kept.8

Thus, with the consciousness that ritual demands, their ancestors’ presence was assured; not merely honored, but honored as Christlike (that is, “born, sacrificed, and still alive [dagavin kentani]). Sacrificed in the genocide, they returned to life through the survival of the family who were now at that table. Finally, by singing sacred songs with their ancestors, the cousins felt fully how they all were alive right there. In Hasanbeyli, the ritual of communion took place where the ancestral spirits once and still resided, made clear by their spiritual appearance. Although communion could not restore a lost place, the descendants could, by participating with them, confirm that they kept alive their ancestors’ timeless values. R i t u a l a s P o e t r y, P i l g r i m a s P o e t

In their active reverie, pilgrims experience all rituals, including communion, as if they have “brushed against a reality unlike all other they know, a dimension of existence that is alarmingly powerful, strangely different, surpassingly real and enduring.”9 What must be understood here, however, is that these pilgrims are creating this experience through the ritual they inventively perform, and in this way their ritual is a kind of poetry and they are poets. For, unlike narratives, which have a goal of explaining, poetry has an aesthetic goal of conveying an experience of being moved, and even of conveying it as an experiential whole. Again unlike narratives, the concern of poetry is not with how things happen or the order by which they happen, and so too, the pilgrim’s ritual is not a story. Although the experience may have “narrative fidelity,”10 such that it resonates with ancestral and cultural memory as it has been told, rituals unfold poetically through metaphor (the water, for example) and action (the click of the camera), and bodily experience (the beating of the

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wool; the drinking). In fact, because ritual moments cannot be narrated, because they have so much immediacy they cannot be unpacked without losing the essential quality of the experience, they must unfold poetically. Furthermore, the active or activated experience of rituals, such as Christian communions, has its own poetic nature: if I accept the bread or drink the wine that has been blessed and offered to me, I will experience nothing unless I all at once both accept their holy nature and by my bodily participation enter an opening between two cosmic planes. Similarly, if the pilgrimage ritual of communion were merely embodiment, or even merely metaphor, it would be just that; it would stop there. However, it is not that “they drank” and now “I drink,” or that this water becomes that water, or that I engage with my ancestors. Rather, the poetic nature of pilgrimage rituals, most clearly seen in communion, is in the electric charge between the souls of the two drinkers, an electric relay that makes this sensed experience con-sensual. Walter Benjamin expressed the explosion of this wholeness as an electrical arc that creates a unified moment in time: It’s “not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather . . . what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation . . . flashing up in the now of its recognizability.”11 The pilgrims are who they are, the ancestors are who they are, the water is what it is, the mulberry trees bear their fruit, the mountains rise behind, but a ritual, like a poem, captures it whole.12 The poet David Kherdian amplifies the distinction between narrative and poetry’s flash of emotional clarity when he muses that compared to writing a novel or an autobiography, “poetry is a very different animal. You cannot start a poem. A poem starts in you. . . . Suddenly a power appears inside of you and you have a connection to the unconscious that you don’t have ordinarily. And you find that you want to write something, you begin to write something: you’re being touched by someone way beyond you and transmitting this energy.”13 With an audience of a pilgrim’s other self, pilgrims’ rituals create poetically what they feel profoundly yet can’t make comprehensible—or even take in—in other ways. “You know,” said Sossi, “it’s like, you’re not just eating mulberries; you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I’m eating mulberries.’ Eating the mulberries . . . it was like communion or something.” Nancy Kay experienced communion through eating watermelon. “In Tadem, my grandfather’s village, a farmer was drawn to us because we were videotaping. And he brought us

Sacred and Profane

some watermelon! And my grandfather grew watermelon in North Dinuba! Near Fresno!” In Husenig, she experienced communion by eating bread. “And in Husenig we saw a woman making bread, and she gave some of it to all of us. And we broke bread with all of them. You know, you go to everyone’s villages, but not anywhere, except in Tadem and Husenig was food offered to us. It was just like being with my grandparents. Never did I leave my grandparents’ home, ever, hungry. They had candy-covered ‘noush’ [almonds] and ‘leblebi’ [roasted chickpeas] and‘roejig’ [walnuts embedded in a fruit-leather sausage-like roll] and even dried mulberries.” The physical action of eating watermelon or bread, or of drinking water, or of beating wool, integrates flashes of recognition into the constellations of communion. That is, like the bread and water of a religious communion, objects do not stand apart as symbols. As Bachelard writes, “Poetic imagination therefore brings interpenetration of subject and object, artist and image”: that is, pilgrim and experience. “Thanks to a fruit, the whole being of the dreamer becomes round. Thanks to a flower, the whole being of the dreamer relaxes . . . this flower born in poetic reverie, then, is the very being of the dreamer, his flowering being.”14 Just as with the active ritual of gathering earth as a relic, what matters is not the “thing-ness” that the pilgrim saw, collected, drank or ate and thus what it “stands for,” but the experience that the pilgrim had while doing it. Thing-ness is immaterial, so to speak. Tadem and Husenig; grandmother, grandfather; drinking and praying; today and far-away yesterdays; the taste of dried fruit leather with walnuts inside; Nancy Kay. In fact, all pilgrim rituals are exactly what a poem communicates: a powerful moment of an integrated, textured entirety that is movingly felt. Thus, in their creation of a timeless but place-specific spiritual return, movingly felt as a distilled whole, all the rituals of pilgrimage may be regarded as spiritual/poetic moments and every pilgrim as a poet. David Kherdian’s “Mulberry Trees” exemplifies how poetry and actions are counterparts. Here, his partaking of mulberries to embody his parents’ memory-stories was felt as a single powerful poetic moment, and one that changed the poet forever. Mulberry Trees When as a small boy I saw them ripen against the early summer sun

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I stopped alone for an hour and ate until my fingers took an ancient purple stain until something remembered a small, knotty tree in a barren, rocky landscape before an older, quieter sun and I went home a little sadder, a little gladdened and standing on the porch my mother and father saw their Armenian son.15

In this poem, Kherdian did not travel to his ancestral village of Adana; Adana came to him through the mulberries. But the eating of the mulberries and the connecting to his ancestors, to their village, and to his parents and their stories in new ways, and the revelation of a transformed self were all experienced as “of a piece.” The rituals that pilgrims create mimic this “of a piece-ness”— and its transformative power too. A classic and convincing example is the experience conveyed in Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.16

Sacred and Profane

Rilke makes you experience what happened to him. Throughout the poem, he uses affective language to describe how he perceives the headless Apollo, but it is his astonishing, unexpected final words, “You must change your life,” spoken to him by Apollo, to him by Beauty, by him to himself, and finally by him to us, that startle us into co-experiencing his experience of Apollo, in its entirely and with all its immediacy, as if a single comet has hit us with a single message. Th e P o e t i c I m m e d i a c y o f R i t u a l

By watching and listening to these pilgrims as poets, we understand the Kherdian- and Rilke-like poetic immediacy of the experiences they create. As poetic moments, their rituals allow the experience of the ancestral landscape, no matter how fragmented, to be one still “suffused with brilliance from inside,” able to rise above its defacement, and able to have such a powerful, living inner force that it engages with us: it sees us. We feel with Kherdian his reflection of himself in the mulberries, which change him as they are picked, held, and ingested. In 1993, Berge B. understood this when he said, “We sensed our ancestors’ spirits even if we found little physical evidence of their historic presence. . . . We all felt some indescribable sense of completeness.”17 Of course, not every ritual evokes Rilke’s stunning inner call for transformation, and few are later expressed as actual poems. But several are, and Herand Markarian’s communion did both. Herand’s father’s house had been in the Van village of Shoushants (T: Şuşants; Kevenli), near the Garmavor Vank (Reddish [or “Crimson”] Monastery), established by St. Gregory the Illuminator in the fourth century. Shoushants had been given as a dowry gift from King Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni (d. 1026) to his daughter Shoushan as a summer residence, and he ordered a village built in her name. With no hope of finding the house, Herand searched instead for the Bracelet Spring (Abaranchan Aghpiur) that his father had often talked about. Perhaps knowing that there, like Apollo’s body, the village’s inner soul and its brilliance could still shine, Herand performed a communion. He could only hope that he had found the correct spring. Kneeling at the Bracelet Spring in the mountains of Shoushants, where my kind ancestors sang joyfully and praised the life they lived

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I drink the honey sweet water.

Herand joins these ancestors in this place: Kneeling at the Spring I pray with the souls of my forefathers who on Saturday nights burnt incense and beseeched goodness for mankind from the Crimson Lady Madonna.

Like Rilke’s, Herand’s transformative call is built into the moment. With knowledge of his father’s loss of his first wife and child on the death march out of Shoushants, the connection to the spirits of this place evoked a redemptive promise to rededicate his life to healing the anguish of a peoples’ genocidal separation. Kneeling at the Spring I vow to the desecrated lands, and the uprooted mothers, that I am the unbroken link of this crumbled chain, the chain that links my birth to the summits of these mountains.18

Just as the experience of every communicant is a poetic experience, all the rituals that I chronicle in this book as emergent rituals of pilgrimage are the poetry that pilgrims are writing with their bodies. Such a poetry involves a unification of the body in action, a specific place, significant objects, and a belief in grace. Like Bachelard’s reveries in which place is all important and time is timeless, ritual, too, occurs in a poetic space in which “we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”19 Thus, as a methodology, reading pilgrimage rituals as poetry and the pilgrim as poet illuminates truths that might be gotten in no other way.

Chapter 10

Votives I: Deferment

W h e n p i lg r i ms s ay

that rituals “work,” they mean that something has happened, that something has changed. Through the rituals of gathering earth, invocations, and communion, something new or profound was felt to have happened between the pilgrim and the ancestor. Although place is crucial, as these rituals occur in the house-place or house-world’s sacred opening, the important result is what happens to souls or between souls. In this section, however, I discuss rituals that hope to or seem to transform the place itself. In the place where the house is, once was, or might have been, votives are hidden, shrines are constructed, or re-consecrations are enacted in order to give materiality to a spiritual need. Although these actions are performed for—or in the name of—the souls of ancestors, the pilgrims’ attempts show how the place is changed for themselves. Ph o t o g r a p h s a s V o t i v e s

In Husenig, Robert D. stood next to his mother on the steps to what had been his grandfather’s house and, holding his grandfather’s photo, said to the camera: “My grandfather, a Fresno farmer. He always [sigh], he loved Husenig. Every 4th of July, all the Husenigtsis from Fresno would go up into the park and play Tavli [backgammon; T: tavla], have a good time, drink lots of beer . . . and raki. They just loved Husenig.” And then, as he looked directly at the image of his grandfather, he added: “And, grandpa, we brought you back.”1 After this, Robert took his grandfather’s photograph back home with him. 101

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However, the rituals described in the following passages show how photographs or other items are left behind, hidden in ancestral houses or in proxy houses where family spirits and memory should rightfully be. Nonetheless, by watching what pilgrims actually do, in the context of what they know, I argue against the assumption that the placement of these items represents “bringing the ancestor home.” Furthermore, when we understand rituals as devotional acts, we understand that the changes that rituals effect are always changes to the devotee. V ot i v es : D i ya r b a k i r

Shepherded by Armen Aroyan, with Selçuk at the wheel, Lynn and a small family group made their way through the towns and landscape of Southwest Turkey toward the city of Diyarbakir (A: Dikranagerd), once the home of Lynn’s grandparents on both sides.2 Along with a printed family tree, she carried two photographs. Because Lynn knew that she would not find their houses, her plan was to hide the two family photos in Diyarbakir’s magnificent Surp Giragos Church. It seemed possible that her grandmother, Nafina, had been married there, and it was the place where both her mother and her aunt had been baptized; in fact, she felt certain that this church had played a part in the lives of all her Diyarbakir family. Lynn had not brought her photo of Nafina with her two daughters (Lynn’s mother and aunt) as it was on a large passport document (Figure 17). But she had brought one of Nafina, taken in Aleppo after her escape from the death marches with these daughters, Gladys and Alice. Nafina was about 29 in this photo. She had recently barely survived cholera and then found a way to help pay for passage to the United States. Gladys, who would become Lynn’s aunt, was six; Alice, who would become Lynn’s mother, was four years old. The other photograph Lynn had brought, taken in Diyarbakir, depicted Nafina’s sister, two of her brothers, and a niece and nephew. All had been lost in the genocide. On this pilgrimage trip, Lynn was traveling with her own sister, her mother’s half-sister, and several cousins; however, the items that she planned to leave as votives carried her own memories, her own stories, and represented her own searches, and so this felt like a very personal journey. “So, it was really just me. It wasn’t the family.” Lynn had known her grandmother Nafina well. She and her sister, Karen, would travel from Fresno to New Jersey to spend the summer with the family.

Figur e 17.   Passport for Nafina and her two daughters: Alice/Arshaluis is to her left and Gladys/Zvart is to her right. Passport photo, April 24, 1920. Issued by the short-lived Kingdom of Greater Syria under King Faisal. Courtesy of Lynn Derderian.

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There, she loved to brush her grandmother’s long hair, using the jade green brush from the Bakelite set that sat in front of the mirror. “As I was doing that she would tell me stories, only two of which I remember.” The first was that she had never had to brush her own hair at home as this was always done by servants. And she added that when she went horseback riding at their country home, she wore a belt studded with jewels. The second was that they lived in an enormous house, with a huge cellar where her father, Karnig, a dry goods merchant, would store goods in jars that were so large that she could not see their tops. During one New Jersey summer, a Diyarbakir friend of Nafina’s—who seemed mysterious to Lynn because she was old and covered with tattoos3—had come to visit the family. Pulling Lynn aside, she whispered, “You have to understand that your grandmother’s family was so rich, they were like the Rockefellers.” But Nafina gave her family no details. “She remembered everything—but she never talked about anything—it was a deep dark mystery to us,” said Lynn. Her grandchildren did not even know that Nafina had survived a death march with her two daughters, or that her husband, Lynn’s own grandfather, had died because of it. In the United States, Nafina remarried in 1920 and gave her new married name to these daughters to merge them with the two other daughters, Lucille and Arax, whom she had by this second husband. In that silence, it seems that no one had ever asked the name of Nafina’s first husband, Lynn’s own grandfather. No one had asked how an Armenian woman could have no sisters and brothers. Even questions had disappeared into the silences until Lynn’s cousin, Peter Balakian, Nafina’s grandson by her second marriage, began to ask questions that led him into shock. He chronicled the resulting poignant and poetic quest in his book Black Dog of Fate.4 Peter was also the one who had organized this pilgrimage, bringing his mother, Arax, then already almost 88, along. He also organized his sisters, his brother, his children and his cousins to travel on the bus with Armen Aroyan. Because he and Lynn had been especially close all their lives, they sat together as they traveled “homeward,” she holding her photographs as Diyarbakir came into view. These photographs had already accompanied Lynn on two other trips. In 1984 she had traveled to Armenia with her mother, her aunt Gladys, and her aunt Lucille, but Armenia held no sense of home for her. “We made that journey together. But we don’t have roots in Armenia. Actually, I felt like Michael [ J.] Arlen who went ‘back’ to Armenia—and he just felt nothing. I felt

Votives I

exactly the same way.” In 2010, Lynn had carried the photos to Aleppo, the city where Nafina had made a five-year-long, almost permanent stop on her perilous journey from Diyarbakir to New Jersey. The “old city” of Aleppo, its church and all its records would be destroyed a few years later in yet another act of massacre and terror. But arriving ahead of this, Lynn had found the orphanage where her mother had stayed while Nafina had fought cholera, and the address of their house. She was moved to tears as she walked down streets where she knew her family had walked. But she still did not feel as if she had returned home. On this last trip, however, Lynn said that she felt something new: “I had this hidden hope. Maybe I’ll see something, and maybe I won’t. Maybe nothing will really happen because nothing has happened before.” And then she described how, on the approach to Diyarbakir, the spiritual return she had longed for began to take place. “We looked out the window and Peter said, ‘This looks like Colorado—the South West.’ ” “No. No. No, Peter. This is Interstate 5 going to Fresno. This is the San Joaquin Valley,” Lynn replied. “I get chills just thinking about it because that was the first stunning recognition for me. It was like Oh, God, this is my landscape! This is the landscape I grew up in and this is the landscape of my ancestors. This is where they lived. I can see why Armenians came to California and why they stayed—because that landscape was home. So, this was my first sense of home—going down that highway on the way into Diyarbakir. . . . The whole notion of home started happening in that moment.” The group reached the hotel in the evening, but Lynn had a sleepless night, as the two photographs and the family tree began to vibrate in her mind. What hit her unexpectedly was the importance of everyone’s names; and she felt an urge to write everyone’s name in her own hand below the printed list that she had brought along. This meant adding her father’s family to the list. “I just thought, oh, what a good idea, I’ll write all the names down . . . with no thought of what would happen.” And so, the members of her father’s side of the family also made their appearance in Diyarbakir. In the late morning, the group drove to Surp Giragos Church. After first inhaling its sheer presence, Lynn began her ritual by lighting a candle. She then opened the paper with the names. It was at that moment that, suddenly, everything became a rush of emotion: the genocide in its overwhelming magnitude and the stories of the people lost. And just as suddenly, and just

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as unexpectedly, Lynn began, as if saying a prayer, to read her family names aloud. “And I lit the candles, and I thought, I have to read the names! There was no intention, there was no plan, nothing. But it really hit me that this was the first time I’d said those names aloud—because that was the family I had lost. They were all killed, all of them.” “It just happened. Truly—just—happened. When I started reading those names, that’s when I really choked up, right on the first syllable; it was like, Oh my God, I am saying those names here. That was the culminating moment of my sense of—my sense of return. It was a powerful—an overwhelming sense that I was bringing these people home. All of them.” In a flash of understanding, in a poetic moment, a truly sacred space, a numinous space, in fact a home-related sacred space, was created by this ritual. Rudolf Otto saw the “numinous” as a “wholly other” sacred sensibility “unlike anything that we have encountered or ever will encounter, and with powers unrelated to the natural world, it arouses in us a mental state of stupor, a blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”5 For him, it stood at the core of religion. But for Lynn, although this wholly other place was demarcated by the lit candles and a ritual that filled space with the sound of the names close to her heart, there were no prayers to God. The space that her ritual had created was a spiritual space of home at its most profound level. It was the place where her religious ancestors might well have stood to light candles. But her numinous space was not a religious space. Centered on family, it was one enveloping moment in a new experiential realm. “That was my moment alone. That was not anyone’s. No one contributed to it, it was just my little moment by myself. I was unaware of my surroundings. I did remember a hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t know whose it was when I was there. I only found out it was Jamie’s (Peter’s son) when I saw the photograph later. I was out there somewhere; lost in the mists of time.” The numinous state is an always inarticulate, liminal, almost dream state that can include fear and awe, satisfaction and gratitude, and perhaps a sense of what is “infinitely good and perfect.”6 Otto would call it a “shudder of the soul.”7 At that moment, Lynn was not in a “church,” but in a place “qualitatively different. . . . Something that does not belong to this world.”8 She was at her sacred center, or the center of her ancestral house-world. “It was the family I didn’t know; the people who were murdered; it was gratitude for those who survived; it was anger that I know nothing. Gratitude that I was there right then. Gratitude that I was bringing them home.”

Votives I

Yet, I am arguing that she was not bringing them home at all. Following Sontag and Barthes, Marianne Hirsch suggests that seeing and touching a photograph allows one to “try to re-animate it by undoing the finality of the photographic ‘take.’”9 Certainly, Lynn’s invoking her family by saying their names in her own voice and standing with them in their own place might feel like a reanimation. It certainly felt “profound.” And yet, as Hirsch points out, when family images are of a real or mythical “before time,” that is, before a catastrophe, as it was with the photograph of Lynn’s mother’s lost family, photographs may also ironically “signal the deep loss of safety in the world.”10 A photo of Nafina and her daughters soon after the loss of her husband, a situation so traumatic that it truly was unspeakable, further emphasized the impossibility of an intervention in the fixity of that loss, and thus increased the emotional risk of animating those ancestors. It is here, in their reverberations, that the photographs actually lose their possibilities of being surrogates for the people they represent. Moreover, even if Lynn had indeed brought her family along, their resonating stories would never let her “leave” them behind, even if she had found the lost house, which she could not do. Nafina’s daughter Gladys, who had survived along with Lynn’s mother, Alice, had told Peter why that house would never be found: “We had been at the country house, where the family went every summer. Mind you, I don’t recall this, it was told to me years later. It was midsummer, and we were returning from our country house where we had been on vacation. We traveled by horse. We were riding back to the city house—my father, mother, Alice and me, and some servants—and we were stopped by friends and told our house had been burned down and that everyone in the family had been killed. Before long we were rounded up and put on a deportation march.”11 Clearly, Lynn would never leave behind her aunt Gladys, who knew why Lynn would never find her house. Clearly, she would not leave behind her mother, Alice, who had found happiness in America;12 and certainly, she would not leave behind her grandmother, the brave Nafina, who had told her daughter Arax, “I never want to see Diyarbakir again in my life. Never!”13 V o t i v e s : R e - h o m i n g t h e fa m i l y

In the rituals described here, the photographs change from being proxy family to representing the pilgrim’s own hopes, despairs and needs for solace. As votives, Lynn’s photographs and list of names could become the “means

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by which man is capable of inserting himself [herself] symbolically into an equally symbolic representation of the cosmos, a means by which man can express his [her] place in the spiritual world and his [her] relationship to other spiritual beings.”14 In other words, a votive is never a surrogate for someone else, it is always an extension of the devotee. Of course, the photo of her mother, her grandmother and her aunt, and the handwritten name of her father, also carried the sadness of their loss when they died in America and so she certainly felt death’s poignant incontrovertibility. Bringing and placing the entire Diyarbakir family here would signify Lynn’s vow of commitment to their memories as well as to the homes that had formed them, to all that they had loved, and also to remembering how they had lost those homes. Furthermore, although Lynn would leave Diyarbakir, the votive that she left behind would ensure that her devotion to what emanated from this place was also her own inheritance. After a bit of consultation with Armen, and after most people had left the church, the ritual was completed when her votives were hidden under the rug on top of the lectern of the central altar of Surp Giragos, right above its cross. And there these votives, the photographs and the family tree, were meant to remain, working their permanence. Although it was clear that the photographs were not proxies for her family, it did seem clear that Surp Giragos Church, where no prayers were offered, was a proxy for the house that she felt no hope of finding. This can be seen because, apart from her numinous moments in front of the candles, Lynn’s most powerful sense of place came later, when she and Peter were taken by Armen Aroyan to a neighborhood not far from the church where there were some Armenian mansions, now falling apart (Figure 18). Their guide was the Kurdish writer Seymus Diken, whose many books on his home town revived memories of a time “when Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, etc. still lived together in relative harmony,”15 perhaps even into the 1970s. Lynn’s tour through one of these houses made all her grandmother’s stories feel real and present. Certainly, the huge dark cellar could have held those jars that were so large that the young Nafina could not see their tops. And when Lynn returned to tell Peter’s mother and sister about their find, they truly almost swooned. They wanted so badly to go there themselves that even her 88-yearold aunt Arax suggested buying flashlights and returning that night, as their plane left early the next day. It seemed that the pull of Nafina’s house was

Votives I

F igur e 18.   The Armenian mansion that Lynn visited in Diyarbakir’s Sur district, in 2015. The entire area was destroyed not long afterward. Photo by Lynn Derderian.

that powerful—although this particular mansion could not, of course, have been hers. For Lynn, being in Diyarbakir was intensely emotional yet surprisingly satisfying. Surp Giragos had recently been restored, mostly through the joint efforts of local Kurds and some Turkish Armenians in Istanbul and abroad. The Kurds, who had been active butchers of the Armenians in 1895, 1909 and 1915, had begun to understand that what the state had done to the Armenians was now being done to them. A pro-Kurdish movement had taken this to heart and had publicly apologized.16 In keeping with this sense of brotherhood, Lynn’s cousin Peter was feted with a joint poetry reading with the beloved Kurdish poet Kawa Nemir, who also provided translations. A large cafe in Diyarbakir was packed with students, teachers, locals and journalists eager to celebrate this historic cultural opening. After weeks of travel in a denialist Turkey, and a historical Armenia that seemed to have nothing Armenian remaining, Lynn experienced

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Diyarbakir as an enormous embrace, especially when Nemir welcomed the family back to their home, “your home.”17 “Here we are—we’re Armenians and we’re going into ‘Kurdlandia’ [she smiled]; right? What is this going to be like? But it was so not what we thought! We were welcomed back to our home as Armenians. That embrace!” I n s u ff i c i e n c y

And yet, Lynn’s votive affirmation of her connection to Diyarbakir would remain in her memory alongside her recognition of the impossibility of its viability. As her group’s minibus left Diyarbakir, a friend and fellow pilgrim, Armen Marsoobian, who had joined them for the next leg of the trip, read aloud the last letter from his great-grandfather, written from Chunkush in 1885, and it made this impossibility come rushing back to her. “We were hardly awake,” Armen read, “when Reverend B. Keosayan brought the news that 500 Kurds are coming and they are very close by. This news proved to be certain. It is now 3:30 p.m. and the Kurds are already near Chimjek, on the other side of the bridge, at the head of Yenijek. We are in great danger and our lives are hanging by a thread. My beloved son, probably this will be my last letter to you.”18 “When he read that I was shattered,” said Lynn, “and it all came right back. We had just had this huge embrace, but by God, it could all happen again tomorrow. In fact, it was still happening.” The Turkish denial that had angered her before she came to Diyarbakir, and that she had seen throughout her journey, had been momentarily eased by the Kurds’ acknowledgment and welcome. Yet ironically, or through her generosity, it was the precarious situation of the Kurds that made clear the futility of any attempt to make this place her place. Perhaps she might return one day to Diyarbakir, but only as a tourist or a researcher to find out more about her own history. “I, as an Armenian can never go back there. No matter how welcoming people are. It’s back to this question, the big question about denial; and if you deny, it never ends.” Lynn’s votive objects, the photographs and names of her Diyarbakir family, represented the family members’ stories and her devotion to that family, particularized to how this place had inflected their lives. Lynn’s votive act had made an abstract place real. Emplacement materialized Diyarbakir as a realm that allowed the family, including Lynn, to be there together, and to be envisioned together, even in the future. And because her votives were meant

Votives I

to endure as a permanent spiritual claim on her family’s Diyarbakir, leaving these items behind was meant as an act of agency. But the place itself had not been transformed. In the face of the stories she had brought and of her experiences while in Turkey, her votives could only be place-holders. With no immediate hope or promise of a future, redemptive wholeness, their placement could only reflect why her rooting seemed provisional, and why she herself must leave.

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V o t i v e s II : R e s t o r a t i o n

Nubar could share

precious few stories with his daughter about his Armenian history because he had heard so few himself. “We weren’t told anything about the genocide. I didn’t learn anything about it until I was a teenager.”1 “Nobody discussed this in my family; nobody discussed the genocide in my family. My grandparents didn’t discuss it, my parents never discussed it with me, and I never discussed it with our daughter.”2 Yet, in spite of the loss of this history, and although her mother was not Armenian, Nubar’s daughter Abby felt a sense of being Armenian herself; it was a strong feeling but nevertheless amorphous, having no stories and no past to connect to. “I don’t speak Armenian. I’ve never been to the Republic of Armenia. I rarely eat the food or attend Armenian Church services. But I can’t shake the feeling that I am definitely Armenian. Yet as much as I feel that I am Armenian, I also can’t seem to figure out what that means.” And so in 2011, while in her early 20s, Abby said to Nubar, “Dad, will you come to Armenia with me?”3 Her father was startled; but he was also delighted. Because Nubar is a photojournalist and filmmaker, and because Abby had been his apprentice, they decided to document their “trip to Armenia,”4 which, they found, did not mean a trip to the Republic of Armenia but to Turkey, where their family’s Armenia had once been. To prepare for their trip, father and daughter talked to Nubar’s parents, and looked at old photographs, some of which they would bring with them when they traveled to eastern Turkey with Armen Aroyan, a few other pilgrims, and me. Nubar’s mother told them how her own mother, Vartui, 112

Votives II

F igur e 19.   Abby and her grandfather hold hands during the telling of painful stories. Photo ©Nubar Alexanian, 2012.

from Chengiler (T: Çengiler; now Sugören in the province of Yalova) had lost both of her parents, her brother, her first husband, and her three small daughters in the genocide. Somehow, Vartui had made it to Aleppo, where she was taken in as the cook for the family of a kind Turkish doctor. It was he who arranged for and paid Vartui’s passage to the United States. This great loss in his own grandmother’s life was shocking news to Nubar. “She never talked about it; I never knew she was in a death march, she never talked about it.” Abby was deeply moved: “My great-­grandmother was among the few survivors of the longest death march in the genocide era.”5 As Abby listened to her grandmother tell her own mother’s story, she held her grandfather’s hand (Figure 19). Nubar’s father’s parents were from two villages that were satellites of the heavily Armenian town of Kharpert (T: Harput) in the jurisdiction, or kaza, of the same name. Nubar’s father’s father was from Shentil (T: Bahçekapı) and his father’s mother from Husenig. The American Protestant Missionary Herman Norton Barnum wrote about Kharpert in 1892: “No city in Turkey is the centre of so many Armenian villages, and most of them are large.”6 Barnum was also there during the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) that had

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devastated the Armenian population. He remembered that as buildings were burning around him in Kharpert, the commander of the Turkish troops came to him at Euphrates College to ask him to remove the missionaries and their families from a building where they were sheltering with Armenian students and faculty. His plan was to burn the building, but he wanted only Armenians in it. Barnum refused, saying if they were to burn the Armenians, the missionaries would die with them. The commander left the building intact.7 As a response to these Hamidian massacres,8 families began to send their young sons to America as bantukhds (sojourners), in hope of raising funds for their families back home, either to bring them to America or to help them ride out a storm they hoped would end. Nubar’s paternal grandfather, Parsek, left for America in 1902. Nubar’s paternal grandmother, Varter [Rose] Goshdigian left for America in 1911, propelled by the Adana massacres of 1909.9 Ma s s a c r e s a n d T r a u m a t i c S i l e n c e s

In 1909, the Armenian intellectual and author Zabel Yessayan learned the origins of traumatic silences from her travels from Constantinople to Adana after the massacres there. She traveled with a delegation from the Armenian Patriarchate in order to aid the survivors and to help search for orphans, but the pain of what she saw was so great that, to save her own sanity, she returned to Constantinople after less than three months. There she began to write In the Ruins.10 “Those who lived through it are also incapable of recounting it as a whole. Everyone stammers, sighs, weeps, and can bring out only bits of pieces of the events.” What Yessayan understood, writes Marc Nichanian, is that a traumatic event even “shattered the speech that was supposed to account for it.”11 The next generation, the descendants who were exposed to this type of silence, might retroactively explain it as a parental offering of protection from pain, or as the offering of a gift of assimilation and a new life. But scholarship suggests that trauma often surrounds itself with an unchosen silence, a silence that arises because, by its very nature, trauma is unspeakable. Thus, a characteristic of victims of trauma, as we saw so pointedly with Muriel’s story in Chapter 2, is that shattered language signifies invisible scars. As his parents’ stories unfolded, Nubar, like other descendants, was led to suspect that the scars that had led to silence—as well as the silence

Votives II

itself—had left scars on him. Just as many pilgrims understood that the stories they carried were central to their identity, others began to wonder if the lack of stories also, ironically, contributed to something deeply constitutive of themselves. “In silences, other things happen,” says Eileen Claveloux, who has explored how the Armenian genocide “reverberates through the lives of survivor descendants,” such as her own Armenian father.12 Perhaps this explained why Nubar had left his home and his heritage behind at the age of 18, only to be attracted to documenting other people’s stories of struggle, such as those taking place in the Andean culture of Peru.13 And indeed, he found that “[a] lot of my Armenian colleagues commented about my Peru book of photographs being the right project in the wrong country.”14 Clearly, he acknowledged, “I have this hole in me, which is the legacy of silence passed down.”15 And so Nubar’s and Abby’s pilgrimage became a spiritual quest. In honor of his Husenigtsi grandmother, Nubar had put on a clean shirt and shaved before he and Abby were driven to Husenig to find the Goshdig­ ian land. But when they arrived, the former Goshdigian plot was devoid of any trace of its familial or Armenian past. It was, in fact, empty of anything at all. In a neighborhood that had once been the site of several lively Goshdigian households, there was only dry dirt and stones (Figure 20). Small dwellings had cropped up at what might have been its edges, but it felt undefined and uncentered. Worse still, although her spirit most certainly appreciated that Nubar had put on a fresh shirt, little of his grandmother was “there” to call forth a symphony of memory-stories. Because these were still being uncovered, their Husenig home was still an embodiment of the same silences and secrets that were a part of the Massachusetts household that had replaced it. What seemed to be needed was an active engagement with the land itself, for on finding their house-place, they decided to dig into the soil to bury the wedding photograph of Nubar’s paternal grandparents that they had brought with them. The idea was immediate and spontaneous, but the ritual was a slow and measured undertaking (so to speak). Together, they dug a small hole, buried the photograph, covered the hole with dirt, and then marked it with small stones. Later they realized that, unconsciously, they had configured their stones to be reminiscent of an Armenian khachkar, a stone stele with carvings of a cross (khach) and often other designs (Figure 21). In Chapter 10, we saw how Lynn had hidden a photo and a family tree in Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakir, but her ritual votive would not have been

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F igur e 20.   Abby consults an Armenian map of pre-1915 Husenig to verify that they have found the correct plot, 2012. Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

F igur e 21.   Abby fashioned a cross to mark where she and her father had buried a photograph of her grandparents, 2012. Photo ©Nubar Alexanian.

Votives II

imaginable if the souls of her ancestors were not already there. Nubar and Abby’s ritual was similarly dependent on the idea that ancestral souls and spirits are attached to the ancestors’ old homes or house-world. But Nubar and Abby were in a doubly precarious position because if, along with their ancestral places, their ancestral stories were lost to memory, their ancestral spirits would lose their immortality. The sorry consequence would be that Nubar and Abby’s hopes for rebonding with their history might be, well, dispiriting. With some shifts, Uncle Vorotan, in William Soroyan’s story “Madness in the Family,” would have understood how rootedness is tied to the places of one’s family’s spirits. Uncle Vorotan could not accept Fresno, California, as his new home because no one was buried there yet, and therefore all his family spirits were still in the soil of his native Bitlis. We were in Fresno, but we were nowhere, too. How could we really be in a place until death had caught up with one of us, and we had buried him and knew he was there? . . . Each evening when [Uncle Vorotan] reached his home, he asked both his wife and his mother, “Has anybody died yet, to heal this fearful loneliness, this aimless walking about, the emptiness and the disconnection?” And each evening everybody in every branch of the family was not only still alive but getting stronger and bigger. . . . He wanted somebody to die, to be buried so that he, as well as the rest of us, might know that a tradition had been established, that a culture must inevitably follow, and that, consequently, we might all be permitted to believe that we were in fact in Fresno, in California, in America, and in all probability would stay. . . . But some of the older men felt uncomfortable when he looked at them and some of the women, especially those who had married into the family, cried out, “Don’t look at me with those eyes. I’m in perfect health, and pregnant!”16

Uncle Vorotan knew who and where his ancestral spirits were. But there was no going back, and so it seemed vital that the soil of his new home be given new cuttings. Nubar and Abby were doing the opposite, but with a similar goal. They, too, wished for the future of their own culture, with its stories and values, but this would not be possible, certainly for them, if their ancestral spirits had lost their connection to the past. What was called for was a rerooting of seemingly untethered spirits in their original ground. And so their ritual of restoration was enacted on the soil of their family house, although they used the opportunity to embed all the spirits they knew, from both sides

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of Nubar’s family, reaching from hilly Husenig to the Kharpert plain, perhaps even to the far west, to Nubar’s maternal grandmother’s village of Chengiler. Abby chose to read aloud from Marderos Deranian and Hagop Martin Deranian’s The Village of Hussenig,17 which she had brought along, and then father and daughter discussed some of what they now knew about the hundreds of years of Husenig’s Armenian history, perhaps giving courage to their own family spirits who were being asked to be their connection to this past. But in that moment, by the act of replacing their ancestors, they made a votive commitment to keeping these stories alive, assuring that their family history would emanate from this land again. The reward was immediate, for Abby’s impromptu marking of the freshly dug earth with stones in the shape of the crosses found on khachkars did more than re-consecrate their house through the return of its spirits, it signified the filling of the hole that Nubar had felt in himself and that his daughter had inherited. As a ritual of restoration, it was a life-affirming moment for themselves as well as for their ancestors. That the stones would disappear was immaterial. The poet Bedros Tourian would have understood how it was memory that hung in the balance in these pilgrimage rituals. Many pilgrims knew at least the ending to his poem “My Death,” lines that are also inscribed on his tombstone in the Surp Hatch cemetery in Istanbul, which is a site that pilgrims regularly visited on Aroyan-led trips. But when my grave forgotten shall remain In some dim nook, neglected and passed by, When from the world my memory fades away, That is the time when I indeed shall die.18

Nubar returned to Husenig the following year to gather more images for his and Abby’s film. I do not know if he looked for or found the khachkar that showed how he and his daughter had made this house-place deeply their own. But his return signaled that their ritual had been successful, that the spirits had indeed been replenished, and that they were there to greet him. He could now say, with the poet Leon Zaven Surmelian, that he had reached the crumbly and black soil that my fathers sleep in. I, their (grown) grandchild, am again the owner of this land And under the sun I blossom with their name under my breath.”19

Chapter 12

E x-Voto s: G r at i t u d e

Bob K. and Steve B.,

two cousins from Philadelphia, brought a family photograph to their ancestral town of Yozgat with the intention of hiding it in a surviving Armenian house. Like Lynn’s photograph from Diyarbakir (Chapter 10), their photograph carried fragments of memory-stories. But unlike Lynn, whose fragments could fit into a consistent chronology, the cousins found that their memory-stories did not easily add up. And when compared to the experiences of Lynn and of Nubar and Abby, their experience shows that the meanings of seemingly similar gestures, such as hiding photographs in the ancestral house-place, must be individually evaluated in the context of each pilgrim’s memory-stories and how those stories are assembled and then reassembled. For the emplacement of a photograph is always an emplacement of a story—not for its narrative arc but as an emotional totality as understood by those who position it. In fact, as Gerta Austin writes about ritual, “Rituals can tell our stories, . . . even when the story makes no sense,” as they “can round off the parts that do not fit.”1 Bob and Steve seemed in agreement on what had happened to their families in Yozgat, even though they had three different accounts that were conflicting and also ever shifting, perhaps to suppress something that carried the potential for shame. But in the end, their photograph became an ex-voto, signifying that discontinuities had been resolved and painful omissions absolved and, moreover, that the ritual of embedding it marked the ancestral house with the victory of wholeness. 119

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S t o r y # 1 : Th e Ma r k e t S q u a r e S t o r y , a s T o l d i n t h e Ma r k e t S q u a r e

Standing together in the market square in Yozgat, Bob and Steve recounted an abridged version of their family story. Each cousin was a direct descendant of one of two Yozgatsi sisters: Paremsema, who was Steve’s great-grandmother, and Alemsema, who was Bob’s maternal grandmother. In this version, Alemsema, two of Alemsema’s children, and the husbands of both Alemsema and Paremsema had been taken to this same square in 1915, and shot (Figure 22). The surviving sister, Paremsema, became the family matriarch as she gathered Alemsema’s remaining two children, raised them as the “siblings” of her own three daughters, and eventually brought all the children to the United States. Steve said later, “I felt very lucky to look at the clock-tower and know that it was the same clock that my grandmother looked at.” Then he added, “But when they said, ‘smile for the camera,’ I couldn’t, because fifty feet away my ancestors got shot.” An hour earlier, as the pilgrims’ bus was heading toward Yozgat, Bob had read aloud from a second story, written by Paremsema’s daughter, Vertime. Bob’s own mother was Armenhouie, Alemsema’s orphaned daughter, and thus Vertime’s first cousin, but raised as her sister. Vertime’s first-hand story did not quite match the story the cousins recounted when they got off the bus in the market square, perhaps because it led the family history in an uncomfortable direction. Story #2: Aunt Vertime’s Story

The part of the memoir that Bob read aloud began with Vertime recounting that Alemsema (Bob’s grandmother) and her husband “had four children: Armenouhie and Avedis [and also] Avatun, and one other daughter.2 When my Uncle and Aunt’s lives were taken, Avedis and Armenouhie came to live with us, and we were raised like sister and brother. Avedis was about eight years old.” When Bob and Steve told Story #1 in the marketplace, they interpreted all the family deaths as a marketplace massacre. Yet, as Bob continued reading Vertime’s memoir aloud, that source stated that only the men had been taken at first: in “April 1915 the Turks came. My uncle and my father— and all the Armenian businessmen from their shops—the next day they were all taken away and never seen again.” The image conjured at this point made

F igur e 22.   The Yozgat market square as it would have looked in 1915. Courtesy of Ray Garabedian.

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the small audience of pilgrims on the bus shudder, and several offered similar arrest-and-disappearance stories. Finally, Steve said, “It’s hard to read this stuff, what happened; you know, that mentality.” In the back of the bus, Zaven D. could only recoil, “I don’t want to hear them.” Vertime’s rendition suggested that the husbands’ deaths had occurred in some unknown place. Her story then went on to describe how, “a few weeks later, the Turks made us leave our homes, and all our possessions were put in a wagon and we traveled for eight days until we reached a small cornfield where there were thousands of other Armenians. They started taking us away in small groups to be killed.” But then Vertime’s story took an extraordinary turn. Suddenly, she was spotted and pulled aside by a Turkish soldier who had been a friend of her father’s. “He saw me and said, and I’ll never forget: ‘My dear girl, why are you here? Did they bring your family here, also?’ I replied, Yes. They were here. He told me to quickly get all my family and stay in this spot. I got my mother [Paremsema], and sisters, and Avedis, and Armenouhie [two of Alemsema’s children] and placed them in that area. I looked for my aunt [Alemsema] and grandmother, but could not find them.” According to this story, in the melee, the young Vertime was able to grab her mother, her two sisters and two of her cousins. She could not find her aunt Alemsema (and her baby), nor her grandmother, and so they were left behind to their fate. She further reported that the soldier then hid their group in a Turkish house for three weeks, after which they walked back to Yozgat, no doubt under his supervision. One thing is true in this rendition: being saved by a Turkish man. One thing is not: Vertime did not find Armenouhie, which we might expect Bob to have known, as Armenouhie was his mother. This becomes clear in a third story, recounted by Armenouhie’s brother Avedis in his own oral history, which fills in what seems to have become unspeakable gaps. Avedis’s rendition is what makes the story truly astonishing, including what had happened to his sister, Armenouhie. It seems that because his story is set in the profane, it had become a memory-story to disremember. S t o r y # 3 : A v e d i s ’ s S t o r y — Th e Pa r t s Tha t D i d N o t F i t

Avedis’s telling of his story had been filmed in 1986 for the Zoryan Institute’s Oral History Project.3 Although the video had not been brought along on the

Ex-Votos

pilgrimage, it was a part of the cousins’ memory repertoire, as Steve even gave it to me later. The following recounting comes from it. Avedis remembered the circumstance of both his mother’s and father’s deaths, which had been conflated by Bob and Steve when they told the story in the market square, but which had actually happened on separate occasions and in different places. All versions might agree that Avedis’s father, a wealthy merchant, had been taken summarily from his store at the Yozgat marketplace. But how this happened, and what happened next are the details that matter. And Avedis had been there. Well. I was in the store . . . when three Jendermehs [gendarmes; T: jandarma, pl: jandarmalar, the Ottoman paramilitary policing force] came, and said to him, “Mr. Alabilikian, you are wanted in the city hall.” And my father said, “I sent my shoes to be repaired. I’ll send my employee to bring my shoes, and I’ll go with you.” They said, “we have no time to wait. You must come with us.” So, he got himself a brand-new pair of shoes, put [them] on, and they took him away. So. I was in the store. And the employee got scared, a young man, he closed the store, and took me home. “Next morning. He wasn’t the only one [who] was taken out of the marketplace. There was 500 of them.4 Next morning, their arms were tied together, the 500 people that they gathered in the city. All the well-known people. Such as businessmen. They were put in jail overnight. Next morning, their arms were tied together and marched out of the city. Just men. Men over thirty-five‒forty years old. Older than that. And next morning, they were marched out of the city, and we never heard anything about them. Where they were, what happened.

According to Avedis, there were four deportations and killings in all, with about 500 Armenians in each group. Following the roundup of the men, these deportations were of women and children. He was in this final group. When they reached “Kelesh,”5 having been given no food or water (many had brought food along, but some died), and after having been divested of any valuables they had taken with them, they were given the opportunity to convert to Islam. “We got there. There was a small bridge. A small bridge. Four ladies, four of them standing on each corner, and they told you, if you want to change your religion, you will be saved. If not, you’ll be killed.” At that point, Avedis’s story turned to the Turkish man who had saved them: “So we’re in there. There was a man on horseback. He turned around

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to my aunt [Paremsema] and just said, “Follow me! What are you doing in here?” So he took her, and her three daughters out of this killing place—and me. . . . That’s the one that saved us. And the reason why he did that was, he knew my aunt’s husband, a little bit closer. So, when he saw my aunt in there, he pulled us out of that killing spot.” Avedis remembered the Turkish soldier recognizing his aunt, Paremsema, rather than recognizing his cousin, Vertime. But what must be indisputable, and indisputably important, is that according to Avedis, his own sister, Armenouhie, had not been saved at that time, only he and Paremsema and her three daughters, along with several other girls. All were then taken to a house outside of town for distribution. “They wanted to make daughters out of them, they wanted to make their wives out of them, whatever.” It was in that chaos that they heard that Avedis’s sister Armenhouie had been saved too, but had already been claimed by a Turk.6 Then Avedis’s story became still more astounding. “So, he [the Turkish soldier] brought us back . . . back to Yozgat. [And] while we were in Yozgat, this man that I’m speaking of married my aunt.” Sha m e ?

For Armenian survivors, it is at this juncture that the story becomes potentially shameful, as the family then converted to Islam, exactly what Avedis’s own mother had died to prevent. “We became Muslims. We changed our religion. If we didn’t change our religion, we wouldn’t be living! I changed mine, automatically. Because he took me as his son.” Thus, Avedis was circumcised and sent to a Turkish school. On top of that, as the son of this wealthy Turk— who had been one of those in charge of the round-ups and killings, and who, no doubt, was a benefactor of the official confiscation of their property7— Avedis had learned to hate Armenians. Everyone’s conversion, but especially Avedis’s full rejection of his heritage, had been dropped from the cousins’ narrative, just as similar stories had been dropped by other Armenian families, including pilgrims who had found those stories unutterable, unbearable, or impossible to assimilate into a coherent self.8 For women, the shame of marriage with the enemy is mitigated somewhat because it was forced.9 “He had to marry her,” Avedis said; “I mean she married him to save the rest of us. Because she had three daughters and me.

Ex-Votos

He was my father because I didn’t know any better. I went to Turkish school. I hated Armenians. I called the Armenians ‘Gavur’ [Infidel], which means Christian. And this was a bad word as far as the Turks were concerned.” Yet there was an even greater potential for shame, which revolved around what might have happened to Armenouhie, Avedis’s missing sister, who would become Bob’s mother. Paremsema immediately set out to find Armenouhie by enlisting the services of the tax collector. In the course of his collections, he would, she surmised, know every household in the district, so she gave him a clear description and, no doubt, a promise of reward—and he found her. Nonetheless, it turned out to be a struggle to free her, as the man who had taken her did not want to give her up. But, as Avedis said, everyone is afraid of a tax collector: “You know, when you say, ‘tax collector’s coming,’ everybody sort of shakes.” So the man finally relented and returned Armenouhie for the sum of  “five gold Turkish dollars.” The possibility of this other shame originates here, but how she was treated will never be known. She was probably about 11 years old.10 Chapter 2 has a discussion of how Muriel’s mother found her own story too painful to tell; but Bob and Steve give examples of stories that are too painful to hear. Recall that Zaven D. could not bear to listen to Bob’s story on the bus. Other pilgrims have had similar experiences. Hourig had said that she always tried not to delve into the stories of the Armenian genocide because “they wreak havoc in my soul.” Even, or perhaps even especially in their imaginations, pilgrims did not want to enter places “inhabited by enemies of God, which may even be cursed and where eyes and ears must be closed.”11 It seems likely that even Paremsema never spoke of that time again, as Avedis had trouble remembering his stepfather’s name. With Armenouhie returned to the family, Paremsema began to work on a plan to escape. Certainly, they could not live safely in Yozgat, let alone as Armenians. She slowly sent her daughters off to Istanbul, one by one, and then, telling her husband that she needed an operation at an Istanbul hospital, she and Avedis, the last two of the family remaining in Yozgat, made the final escape in 1920. Avedis was sure that his stepfather, the Turkish soldier, knew what was happening. Perhaps the timing related to the Armistice of 1918, which ended World War I, or perhaps it was a good time for him to let this family go, especially if he was one of those who recently had been charged with war crimes in the local Turkish Military Tribunals of 1917 and 1919.12

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Th e Ph o t o a s E x - V o t o : G r a t i t u d e

Carrying their stories filled with dissonances and discrepancies, the cousins separated from the pilgrim group and found a museum house, which was, in fact, close to Mary Ann’s museum house (Chapter 1), and looked very much like it. This previously Armenian quarter was being made into a type of outdoor “Ottoman era” museum, and was therefore open to the public; in other words, the cousins could get in. Moreover, their choice seemed perfect, as it approximated the house Vertime had described in her memoir from the “before time”: it was not all that far from the market square, it had a six-foot wall, and it had a garden with fruits and flowers. Whether or not it had the wine cellar that Vertime remembered, it could have housed a secure and wholesome life, provided a place to entertain friends and teachers, and been the setting for her graduation party from sewing school, when her uncle (Bob’s grandfather) gave her a steam iron; perhaps it even had “a sitting room next to the kitchen that was always warm and cozy.” In this house, hospitable to the family’s memory-stories of wholeness, Steve concealed his family photograph behind a molding that was obscured by a cabinet that stood against the wall. Bob stood guard. They had two objectives: they did not want to be caught, and they wanted its emplacement to be permanent. Steve placed it where “no one will find it unless they dismantle the place.” And then he added that the people in the photo “ran for their lives or hid and got out somehow. So, I’m back; I’m bringing them back.” Lynn had said the same thing. But, as with the placement of Lynn’s votive, Bob and Steve’s placement, when understood in the context of their reassembled story, reiterates that the cousins were not bringing anyone anywhere at all. Their action was not meant to intervene in the lives of the ancestors, magically allowing them to reclaim the lives they had been denied. Instead, it was meant to impact the meaning of place. As a photograph of the family thriving in the United States, it truly was an ex-voto, a token representing gratitude for the fulfillment of the deepest of all requests and a declaration of success. The photograph of a healthy, reconstituted family was visual proof of the miracle they had become. As an ex-voto, the photograph also carried the cousins’ recognition that the honor of their family and their family house had been restored. Steve made this clear when he described why he planned this ritual. “One of the

Ex-Votos

things that I wanted was to honor my grandparents.” With the cousins’ ritual, then, the genocide-inflected landscape became a launching pad of pride. The cousins left uplifted, even exuberant, having signified that what was rooted there had not just survived, but had flourished—albeit elsewhere. The connection between the house and the ex-voto became even clearer the month following the cousins’ return to the United States, when they held a reunion of those related to the photographed family. Steve hosted it at his house, preparing a feast of Armenian food, and laughingly describing himself as an “Armenian Betty Crocker.” The video of Avedis’s interview played as a continuous loop in the background. No matter that Bob’s slide show and Steve’s narration used the market-square redaction, for what mattered was that the family was enabled to experience a shared ancestral house with a timeless wholeness, grounded by the ex-voto that radiated gratefulness for their intact family. In this way, the warmth of the reunion in one house could merge with an imagined family history in another, making the two spaces, the house of Yozgat (imagined as the ancestral house) and the affective space of the descendants’ reunion in their host-land, into a single imagined “topography of intimate being,”13 giving the reunion a numinous moment of its own. Unlike Lynn’s impulse to leave, repelled by the realization that the distance between then and now was so narrow that there was no space for even a moment’s restorative nostalgia, the cousins’ ritual reclaiming of the family house was a resilient triumph over difficult emotional truths.

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Chapter 13

Sh r i n e s : Ma k i n g V i s i b l e t h e I n v i s i b l e

W h e n A n i H . f i r s t traveled to Turkey in 2012, the invisibility of Armenians felt personal: “I lived my entire life obsessed with the genocide, with loss, with writhing feelings towards Turks, with the need to tell the world and somehow make it better.1 But on arriving in Istanbul, even before reaching the villages that were my true destinations, I realized that, we, the Armenians, didn’t exist—even as a passing thought—to the endless stream of faces and bodies and laughter and conversation passing me by. I was haunted and determined to find what was left of Armenians; I felt invisible.”2 Ani’s mother had felt something similar when she had made a pilgrimage seventeen years before: “The land inherited by my generation, flooded with blood, is an abandoned ruin, condemned by the criminal’s dastardly historiography, to be forgotten.”3 Another pilgrim, the poet-scholar Peter Balakian, sees this erasure as a type of wall between the homeland and the Armenian as tourist, a wall that “locks them out.”4 Certainly, most traces of an Armenian presence have been carefully eradicated. Armen Aroyan confronted physical cultural loss with a continual photography project; Khatchig Mouradian and George Aghjayan, historians, geographers and pilgrims in their own right, continue to document and publicize this destruction.5 Laurent Dissard discusses how an eagerness for tourism in Turkey prompts towns to gesture to former Armenian populations in order to boost their “rich history,” but with a vagueness and separation from history that serves to erase those populations

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even more permanently.6 Nonetheless, when Ani found “Babi [Grandfather] Hovakim’s,” her mother’s father’s house, in the Erzurum village of Dzitogh (T: Yolgeçti), her ancestors’ stories rose from the landscape to greet her, and so she felt called upon to address the holiness of the place by making a shrine. Ani and her father, Richard, were traveling with a group of pilgrims led by Armen Aroyan, but the two set out separately from the rest of the group once they arrived in Ani’s grandfather’s village, as Richard had been there before. Nonetheless, he carried Ani’s grandfather’s long out-of-date, hand-drawn diagram of where the Dzitoghtsi Armenians had lived.7 Ani recalled that “he turned left onto a street and bent down and picked up a stone . . . and I knew that we were near.” After picking up the stones, he “turned right to a door . . . a door painted, maybe blue . . . a wooden door with the wooden frame and stone, the remnants of a home. It was what was left of my grandfather’s home.”8 Assembling Stories

“Have you had cookies and milk?” Ani’s Fresno grandfather, Babi Hovakim, would say when the grandchildren came to visit from Los Angeles. “He spoke little English, but he would watch Mission Impossible and my grandmother would watch I Love Lucy.” But Ani understood him. Her grandparents and parents had taught Armenian to the children, all born in Fresno, even before they learned English. Now, in order to make sure that the family grew together as one, Ani’s parents would pile their children into the car every Friday for a long weekend in Fresno and Tulare, to be with their grandparents and all their cousins. Often it was just her mother who drove, taking time from her medical practice if her father could not get away.9 Ani also remembered “the raw dough of the choereg [a sweet, rich Armenian bread], and lemon candies and the Armenian coffee that they sneaked to me. If there is anyone I could call pure in this world it would be these people, all of them: Like my mother’s mother who had been separated from her family. I remember her long, braided snow-white hair that was usually rolled into a bun, her gentle eyes, silent tears and kind heart and I remember how she adored and nurtured us. She was a saint.” But along with memories of their love and goodness came stories of their traumatic pasts, which in part had been introduced to the children by their grandfather’s nightmares. Ani “knew that the screams were from the

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horrors he’d experienced during the genocide . . . they never left him. I also remember that Babi didn’t have toes, because they’d been frostbitten in the mountains during battles to defend his people. I have a vivid image of his toeless feet alongside a book that my mother and he had written about Dzitogh.10 The book included a long family tree, which was also cut off in 1915. We would unfold the pages of the tree onto the floor where it would lie next to his feet. I always remember that. I knew that many unspeakable things had happened.” The details of Babi Hovakim’s story that had begun in Dzitogh were pieced together as Ani got older, and contextualized through her study of Armenian history, taught by her father at the University of California in Los Angeles. But when she was finally standing at her grandfather’s original house, it was her own memories that transported her into a state of near communion with her grandfather; yet, at the same time, her alert reverie allowed her the critical distance of absence. My father left the doorway—-and I was taken to a different place. I’m describing it to you; I’ve told people, but not like this. And there was a lock, but it was not locked. I removed it and opened the door and walked in. And then, immediately, there was another door without a lock. There was hay in the first part. Then a second door. . . . I opened the door to a cow and chickens. . . . I thought: ‘this was Babi Hovakim’s home!’ . . . I do know that I let a chicken go free and I was so happy for that. That meant something to me. I almost felt like this place was mine so I had no fear, but my Dad said, this belongs to someone and could cause a problem. But I felt like I was where my grandfather was from; and because of how he had left and what had happened here I was terribly sad. My grandfather had been sent to the Caucasus in 1913 to avoid conscription in the Ottoman Army, but during the genocide he returned to volunteer in the Armenian defense movement. When he returned to Dzitogh, no one was left. None of his eight brothers and sisters, none of his large family, and none of his neighbors. The village was empty.

All of Ani’s encounter with her grandfather’s house happened in a very short time, as Dzitogh was not on Aroyan’s formal itinerary and her side trip was throwing off the schedule of the others. Feeling the village’s powerfully magnetic draw, she begged to stay longer: “I could not bear to leave that village. I was literally forced to leave that village.” She begged to stay alone and

Shrines

have the group that was waiting in town go off without her, but her father cautioned against it. It did not feel safe. And so, she vowed to return. A Sh r i n e i n t h e V i l l a g e o f D z i t o g h

Ani returned to Dzitogh the following year for a slightly longer visit, still desperate to find signs of its Armenian life.11 “It’s as if seeing a trace of something Armenian would make me and us visible again.”12 On that trip, Ani was shown the village wells that she felt were surely the ones that had been in her grandfather’s stories; and she even was shown a stone with an Armenian inscription. It was lying face down in the dirt, but a villager had turned it face side up and washed it off with water. It was the gravestone of a child who had been born the same year as her grandfather, 1895. That was the only evidence of Armenians other than an ominous sign near the entrance to the village that alluded to them by pointing to near-by villages “as sites where Turks had been massacred13—as if they were the victims!” Ani was both reexperiencing the pain she felt through her grandfather’s stories and witnessing an active repudiation of her deepest self by a willful Turkish denial that those stories had ever taken place. And so, by the “skeletal remains” of her ancestral home, her Babi Hovakim’s house in Dzitogh, a house being used as a barn, barely intact, its history annulled, Ani made a cairn from stones gathered at Armenian historical sites and then, near them she placed leaves and soil carefully brought from her family towns and villages, including her grandmother’s native Ordu, and from Kharpert, Moush, and her namesake, the medieval Armenian capital of Ani. As all shrines do, Ani’s gave material weight to the spirits that belonged to that place. When shrines further establish sites where miracles have been performed, they may become the goals of pilgrimages, where devotees can receive associated blessings. In this way, Ani’s shrine made ritually visible her otherwise unmarked goal, the place made holy by her “sainted” ancestors, where she could give thanks that she was blessed by their miracle, the preservation of her heritage, which was their gift to her. But she, too, was a spirit of this place, and so her spirit needed to make its presence felt as well, and so she decided to leave her shoes (Figure 23). This act made clear that her shrine was, indeed, an opening in the cosmos for her, a place to feel and venerate holiness. As Mircea Eliade has reminded us: “For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions,

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F igur e 23.   Ani’s Shrine in Dzitogh, 2014. Photo by Ani Hovannisian.

breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. ‘Draw not nigh hither,’ says the Lord to Moses; ‘Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’”14 (Exodus, 3:5). Other pilgrims also made personal shrines and cairns. Joan gathered seventeen rocks and placed them by the sign to her ancestral town of Arapgir to represent the seventeen relatives of her father massacred in 1915. These acts followed, wittingly or instinctively, the tradition of marking places to memorialize and venerate something that had happened there. The plain of Erzurum (A: Garin), which harbored the village of Dzitogh, for example, once had many shrines to mark the places where Armenian martyrs had died resisting forced conversions from Christianity to Islam. Until 1915, Erzurum Armenians had also made local pilgrimages to the sanctuary-shrine of Surp Minas in the village of Gez (T: Gezköy). Minas was a Christian martyr known for miracles and healing, and so “the first teeth of children were placed behind this monument with prayers that they might have good teeth when they grew up.15 Shrines, then, are often also altars, appropriate places

Shrines

for votives that represent both the devotees and their prayers. Perhaps that is why Ani added her shoes to her rock shrine: a votive offering of her feet to recall her grandfather’s toeless ones, or to support, in perpetuity, her commitment to the memory of his war-scarred legs and to the continuation of the steps he passed on to her. She felt that leaving her shoes could convey many messages. As Ani said later, “I just didn’t want to be torn apart from that place, and I guess it’s that same feeling where I had to leave part of myself there, so that he knows that we are always there, so that I know that we’re always there and that he’s always with us.” As she placed them, she even explained to her grandfather how they represented her permanent devotion and commitment to what he stood for: “And these shoes, Babi, if I could take one of your steps! . . . but always, always, always, always, always, always you’re with me. I remember you well and will always love you, dear Babi. I love you.” Unlike the secretive and hidden photographs that served as votives for Lynn and the cousins Bob and Steve (Chapters 10 and 12), Ani’s shrine was intended to bring the past out of its forced hiding.16 In her heart, her offerings would ring with her words, said aloud as she finished her shrine: “[These] will remain here with you, with us, and we will always be together, Babi Hovakim. We will always stay together. This home will remain for us.” With this, Ani had defiantly reconvened her family in what her nephew had called this “forbidden land.”17 Ani’s shrine itself might be ephemeral, immutable only in the photographs she took of it; but its placement in the cosmic spot of the house, where her devotion and her rage intersected, gave her ancestral home a transcendent visibility and Ani herself an enduring place in it. By her own “stepping into” the flow of memory, her ancestral house had become, as Eliade might characterize it, “surpassingly real.”18

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Chapter 14

B l ess i n g s: At My Fat h e r’s H o us e

In 2006, Zaven K. found

his father’s family house in the village of Aghen (T: Ağın) (Figure 24). He knew he would find it, and so he came prepared: “Well before leaving, my wife, Sona, and I had thought about how we would make our trip back to this house, our pilgrimage, meaningful. We had already thought, we had decided, and we had made plans. I already knew why I brought a walnut tree.”2 It would be central to a ritual recuperation of the house’s sanctity. Zaven knew he would find the house because, with the lifting of travel restrictions, his own father, Vazken, had returned from exile in Aleppo in 1953 to visit it.3 Vazken had met its new owners, whom, in fact, he had known from childhood. Vazken returned again in 1964, bringing his wife, Vergin, also from Aghen (and who also visited her lost house). On this visit, they met the new owner’s 13-year-old son, Hüseyin. Twenty-eight years later, in 1992, Zaven’s brother Dikran and his sister Anahid met Hüseyin and his parents when they traveled with Armen Aroyan. In 1994, Zaven’s other sister, Laura, had done the same. Zaven had called their travels “Babenagan Armad,”4 or “ancestral root” trips. Zaven, however, did not choose to visit Turkey himself until 2006. He had been too angry. Then he began to notice that a few open-minded and courageous Turkish writers and scholars had opened the door to the possibilities of genocide re­ cognition, and in a land without Armenians, members of another courageous group were admitting their own Armenian ancestry.5 But what finally made 1

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F igur e 24.   Carrying a walnut sapling, Zaven knocks at the door to his father’s house in Aghen, 2006. Photo by Armen Aroyan.

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him change his mind was that he found a common denominator with Turks: the majority of them, as well as he, were opposed to the American occupation of Iraq that had begun with the 2003 invasion. “For the first time I found something that would make me feel akin to the Turk. Now I was ready to visit my ancestral home, although it was under a Turkish flag.”6 And so, in 2006, as had his siblings before him, he traveled to Aghen in a group with Armen Aroyan. Even before he got to the door of his father’s house, Zaven was struck by the spiritual power of the place, as it opened a realm, or a register, of consciousness filled with memory-stories that erased time. His first feelings were joyful: “I started feeling like I was communing with my father, as if I were seeing him as a child, running up and down between the trees.7 At the same time, however, the house stood for what was lost. “We’re at my father’s house. At my grandfather’s house. One hundred years ago, in this house, my father was born, and my uncle. One hundred years ago, approximately. From here, two young lives were ruined by the Turks; two young lives were dragged [from this house], orphaned, and their only fault was their background: being Armenian.”8 Zav e n ’ s F a t h e r ’ s S t o r y

Zaven’s father, Vazken, had been born in this house in 1912, a year after it had been built by his own father. He had lived there with his parents, Dikran and Lusaper, along with his older brother (also named Zaven), until 1915. That year the young Vazken’s father and his maternal grandfather and all other adult Armenian men of Aghen were taken from their houses and murdered at the edge of town. Pregnant Lusaper and her sons, then about five and three, were sent (along with the rest of the town’s Armenian women and children) on the deportation marches, on which Lusaper gave birth to—and lost—a baby boy. But by a stroke of good fortune due to the intervention of German Protes­ tant Missionaries,9 Lusaper and the boys were rescued from the march, and in 1916 they returned to Aghen. There they would meet other survivors who also had nowhere else to go. Although Zaven’s family was fortunate to have survived, they could not return to their own house, as the “Abandoned Property” law, as well as new power arrangements, meant that it was now occupied by the town Müdür (mayor).10 Certainly there was no popular support

Blessings

for their return, as “the economic gains made through property theft had effectively turned much of the population into accomplices of genocide and expulsion.”11 Instead, the family members were allowed to make their home in the stable, and later in other out-buildings.12 In 1928, when Zaven’s father was 15, a new governmental decree forced those who did not hold citizenship in the new Turkish Republic to leave.13 Zaven’s family and their Aghen community of Armenians left for Aleppo. Zaven’s brother, Dikran, had a particular memory from those years: My father used to wake up every morning in Aleppo and tell the story again, that in his dream he was back in Aghen. He was in the stream or river, or on top of the mulberry tree, or picking apples, or at school; “Every morning I was there; I was there in my dreams.” We would make fun of him. “Stop that village talk! You are in Aleppo!” In the morning, if he didn’t mention his dream, we would say, “What happened? What was your dream?” He never said anything bad. “Oh, in my dreams I was in the village, in the plains, with my friends in the running stream.”14

This same joy and sadness during displacement was captured by the Iraqi Assyrian poet Sargon Boulos (1944–2007), who wrote: I always find the house in the dream. I open the door. All that furniture devoured by distances.15

Thus, although living in the family house—that his grandfather had built for his grandmother—was denied them, Vazken left Aghen with good memories of his Turkish school and even of kind neighbors. One of these (perhaps the Müdür himself) had either found or had been shown the gold that Lusaper had buried before they had left on the march. Surreptitiously (as aiding Armenians was a risk),16 he would give these gold coins to Lusaper, one by one, which she then turned into cash. When Lusaper and her sons left for Aleppo, she was given the remainder of these coins, and when her two granddaughters, Anahid and Laura, graduated from high school at the Aleppo College for girls, she gave them one gold coin each (Figure 25).17

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F igur e 25.   One of Lusaper’s gold coins, dated 1293 AH [1876 CE]. These were used by ordinary people for storing their savings. Courtesy of Ashley Dodd, Lusaper’s greatgranddaughter, who received it as a wedding gift from Laura “Morakuyr,” her “maternal aunt” Laura. Coin information courtesy of Evrim Binbaş.

Th e H o u s e O p e n s I t s D o o r s

Zaven’s sister Laura, one of the recipients of those coins, cried whenever she remembered her visit to her ancestral house, because Hüseyin’s mother had told her, “You or any other of your family, when they come to visit us, we will accept them as if they were the owners of this house.”18 Hüseyin must have agreed, as he renewed his mother’s invitation to Zaven by telling him that he should consider the house his own. He had even mused, aloud, asking, to their astonishment, “Is this house yours or mine?” This struck Zaven so forcefully that he named his book about his pilgrimage after it.19 Hüseyin was not the only one with that dilemma. As early as 1969, the Kurdish chieftain

Blessings

who lived in the pilgrim Mitch’s father-in-law’s house in Sogkom (Sgham; T: Pınartepe) had said, “You must come back with your family, this home belongs to your wife.”20 In 2004, in Husenig, residents apologized for being in Robert D.’s grandfather’s house. In the same year, Mary and her fellow pilgrims were invited in for tea by an elder in one of the villages they were visiting: “May I invite you to tea. You are our guests and I would like to honor you.” And then he added, “I’m not sure who is whose guest any more, since your ancestors lived here.”21 Mary froze at the admission. What did it mean? Could it be that inklings of wrong-doing had mixed with generous natures among individuals educated by a state that maintained a strange denial of genocide? The state somehow held strongly to a position that “it did not happen,” but “they deserved it.” Pilgrims, then, were speechless when locals, on finding they were Armenians, often lit up with pleasure: “We are so happy to see you here!” Yet this was often followed by, “But why did you ever leave?” Even Hüseyin did not seem to know why the Armenians had left. He could only offer that he knew that his father had purchased the house in 1936, but he did not know, exactly, from whom. In his fragmented understanding of history, there had been some irreconcilable disagreement between the Turkish government and the Dashnags (Armenian Revolutionary Party members) of the diaspora, and he suggested that, for some reason, the real victim was today’s Armenia—perhaps referring to the closed borders between the Republic of Armenia and Turkey, which limited Armenia’s trading options.22 In 2006, it was Hüseyin who, at age 49, opened the door and greeted Zaven with a welcome. As the two talked together (in Turkish and Armenian, with another pilgrim, the Archdeacon Datev Karibian, translating), Zaven was struck by Hüseyin’s memory that when Zaven’s father had returned to visit, he was intent on finding “an engraving that says, ‘God is Love.’ But he couldn’t find it.”23 These engravings were commonly put in Armenian homes after the house had been blessed by a priest. Alidz (Chapter 9) had a similar memory-story about her house in Hasanbeyli. But since the blessing and the commemorative engraving would have been in Armenian, there would be no reason for the new owners to keep it, and ample reasons for them not to. Th e T r e e Sha r e s I t s B l e s s i n g s

Zaven traveled with this sense of blessing, as this was what he felt that the house needed now. For his part, he, like Alidz, would set rage aside, to ensure

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that his ritual planting of a tree as the material sign of spiritual blessings would take root. But it was also Hüseyin’s welcome that allowed him to do this. Zaven, clearly aware of this, made the blessing he gave the tree fully inclusive. The liturgy for his ritual was “God bless this young tree,” from a poem by the beloved Armenian poet Leon Zaven Surmelian. In this poem, the planting of a tree is a sign of the poet’s attachment to his ancestral land and its ancestral values, but whether Zaven chose the poem because it fit his ritual, or whether the poem inspired the ritual is unclear. A Saying about Planting a Tree God bless this young tree, I plant this tree in the crumbly and black soil that my fathers sleep in. I, their (grown) grandchild, am again the owner of this land And under the sun I blossom with their name under my breath. This tree will open its branches and soul Carrying my father’s last immortal breaths. Let this lonesome graceful tree Be a prayer; And embrace its trunk, all those that come to this village. The luminous history of this familiar land Brings tears to my eyes. So much glory and so much death In my old land whose grandchild I am; alive with fertile thoughts, with gently swaying dreams. As if a cross to my dead, I plant this tree.24

Zaven knew this poem well, but he had decided to paraphrase it: perhaps for Hüseyin’s benefit, or merely to truncate the ceremony. And so, all he said aloud was (in Armenian): “As a cross to the dead, I planted this tree [Merelnerus iprev khach’ yes ays dzare dngetsi]. Let this tree that I’m planting act as a cross to the dead; now, today, for me for you, for all of us, for all of our dead, let this act as a cross.” And then, affirming that this land held the spirits of his ancestors, he listed those who had died, saying: this tree is “for my family that was martyred, my two grandfathers, in their memory, the memory of my father in Aghen, and all, all of them, in memory of those who were martyred for being Armenian.”25

Blessings

It was a personalized ceremony within a larger Christian context. The tree, “as if a cross,” could signify Christ’s and thus all Christian martyrdom. But it would also signify Christ’s rebirth; and as a living tree in this garden, it was a prayer that the house in the future would be nurtured by its ancestral spirits, their values, and their sacrifice. The tree also held his prayer that, planted in the name of his father, its promise would reach the next generation, for he prayed that it would “make deep roots and [yield] big branches with my children, Vazken, Hrag and Vana, my grandchildren, Sevag, Saro, Zaven, Van, Aren. Thank God for them and for the life that is still making deep roots.”26 Moreover, Zaven made clear that this was a joint effort. Hüseyin was there with him, and it was his shovel that prepared the hole. “Hüseyin and I planted it,” he repeated. “After hitting a couple of roots, we finally find a good place for it, and together we dig with shovel, by hand, on foot, on knees, and we lower the little tree into the hole and cover its roots. Huseyin brings water and gives life to the little sprout with a pail.” By paraphrasing Surmelian, Zaven also made clear that the prayer was for a shared blessing: not to be shared merely among his own family and all Armenians but also with Hüseyin and thus all of Turkey. And so he prayed “that this walnut tree lives a long life, grows and prospers. May it give shade and shelter to all those that are under it or live near it. Let its fruit give sustenance and pleasure to them. Let it be a strong, well established and long-lived tree, a spring of good life for many, many years.” To which he added, “I give thanks to God that one hundred years later, approximately, the opportunity was given to me to be here, and with this house’s current owner’s permission and with his presence, together, we planted this tree.” Zaven ended this prayer with “for ever and ever” (havideans havidenits). He then turned to the Archdeacon and asked that he “bless this tree, this house, and the people that live in this house now.”27 Zaven had made every effort to restore the house’s blessed state; and no doubt his father would have felt, under the circumstances, that his son had found the perfect corrective to the house’s loss of the “God is Love” engraving, with its inclusive message. For his part, Hüseyin, in taking on the future responsibility of watering the tree, would be not only the beneficiary of its walnuts but also the protector of its story, which he must now affirm, and even share.

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Part III

Homeland: A Repertoire of Feeling

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Chapter 15

Homeland Music Performs the Village

On the bus,

Zvart sang hauntingly:

In my mind, I yearn to fly to my house, where my mother waits for me My longing is endless to see the rushing stream that every Spring Ripples through the mountains.1

It was only when Zvart reached Sepasdia (T: Sivas) that her soul felt satisfied. Although this was actually her father’s rather than her mother’s birthplace— as the song might suggest—the point was that she had come to see “home” with her own eyes. “I came to satisfy my soul. Until today, my soul wasn’t at peace. I always wanted to see it. Now my wish has come true. Now I am at peace. I can continue living my life in peace.”2 This song expressed Zvart’s longing for her parent’s soul in Sepasdia, but another pilgrim could sing the same song while longing for her mother’s soul in Kharpert. Although for each it could call forth the image of a particular town or village, for all, as part of a communal repertoire of songs, it would evoke a spiritual homeland, where their ancestors’ spirits, by all rights, and with love, must certainly be waiting for them. Zaven K. had used the first line of the song “Kele Lao”—which begins, “Come on my child, let’s go to our 145

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land” (Kele lao kele ertank mr ergir)—as the title for a chapter of his book about his trip to his ancestral villages. That song, too, shows that the goal is the place where one’s parents or ancestors are waiting. Kele Lao Come on my child, let’s go to our land Let’s go to our Van, our Moush, and Sasun Come on my child, let’s go to our land Let’s go to that valley and pick fresh rhubarb Let us pick it and let’s heal ourselves with it Come on my child, let’s go to our land There bustards sing beak to beak Swallows flap their wings Stones cry in our absence Come on my child, let’s go to our land Our father and mother blossom there3 They cry sweetly and call us with their painful voices How can we not go to our homeland? Come on my child, let’s go to our land.4

The first song, sung by Zvart, stems from Armenian participation with Soviet Russian forces in fighting against Nazi Germany;5 only the second, “Kele Lao,” loved by pilgrims and referenced by Zaven K., refers to the genocide.6 But both are part of a genre of Armenian songs of longing that post-­genocide descendants sing to express the feeling that there is a flight of displaced ancestral souls, always headed homeward, toward their own villages. Nubar and Abby, for example (Chapter 11), were, in part, intervening in what they felt had been an interrupted journey of their ancestors’ spirits. In a similar vein, the Armenian folk singer Hasmik Harutyunyan recalled that “while my grandmother was dying, she said to my father ‘Please take me to home, to Moush’; and my father said, ‘I can’t, I can’t do that, there is a border, I can’t do that, don’t ask me that. How I am going to leave you after you die?’ That is so painful. Your parent is asking you to take and bury her in her homeland and you can’t do that. Then she said, ‘What is a border for a dead person? Because a dead person’s spirit can fly, so there is no border for that person.’ ”7 “Kele Lao” originated as a song of longing to return to Moush (T: Muş). Although it was part of Hasmik Harutyunyan’s professional repertoire of

Homeland Music Performs the Village

performance songs, surely she sings it as her own, as she has said herself, “My whole life is about Moush. I grew up with this music.”8 The rendition here includes Van and Sasun as well. But the return to any town or village, as a return to “our homeland,” made Zaven K. from Aghen feel “Kele Lao” as his own song too, because his “return” to Aghen was a soul-healing reunion that offered a blessing that could heal even the souls of his ancestors and the soul of the house itself. Not all the songs of longing that pilgrims sing refer to ancestral spirits, but all are like love songs that individuals sing with their own specific beloved in mind, while at the same time being fully aware that they are drawing on a genre that speaks to the shared experience of people called lovers. Thus, whenever pilgrims sing a song of return in reference to their own house or house-world, they are also singing about a shared homeland, and thereby mapping that house into it, as its beating heart. In what follows, by exploring one pilgrim’s experience in depth, I show how communal songs assume the form of musical memory-stories particularized to the pilgrim’s own village, even when understood as homeland songs too. Th e R o s e o f Ka r a t s o r

In 1999, Charles went on the first of several trips to Turkey with an Aroyan group. He would travel there at least four more times. His destination was his family’s land in Khulakiugh, in the purview of the monastery-village of Khulavank (T: Şahinkaya) close to Kharpert. His father’s neighborhood was no longer recognizable, but he knew that his father’s house had been a short distance from the cemetery, which still existed, although only as an empty field (Figure 26). He had also been told that the house was near a spring that the Armenians of Khulakiugh had called Aghlez (Salt-Lick). With no house to find, a sense of house-place surfaced for Charles when he found his family orchard, in the area called Karatsor, between the cemetery and the monastery. The orchards still had the walnut and mulberry trees that had been planted by his ancestors. There, Charles chose to sing the seven songs most loved by his father. These would open a realm of consciousness in which his ancestral village was brought to life through his memories of hearing these same songs sung in the diaspora, but especially because of their meaning to his father. Thus, although the songs were part of an Armenian repertoire of homeland songs, for Charles they were songs of his father’s

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F igur e 26.   Students from the Central School (High School) of Kharpert during a visit to the old Armenian cemetery of Khulakiugh, early 20th century. In the background are Armen­ ian khachkars [cross-stones]. Nothing of this remains. Photo from Vahé Haig, Harput and Its Golden Plain [in Armenian], New York, 1959. Courtesy of Houshamadyan.org.

village. In this way, particular hometowns and villages were embedded in— or mapped onto—the homeland. The first song that he sang was “Kna Plpul” (Depart, Nightingale), a song close to his father’s heart. Depart from our world, nightingale, No longer sing here, Our days are gloomy and our lives full of pain, No longer sing in this county. The tormented heart sings sweetly, crumbles deeply, The heart’s sorrow from your song, Echoes over the mountains. Depart from our world, nightingale, Go and sing in another country,

Homeland Music Performs the Village

There tell that our roses, Have the odor of fresh blood.9

“Kna Plpul” might seem to be just the opposite of the bantukhd songs of longing for home described earlier, as the nightingale in this song has the sad assignment of spreading the word that the home, whether neighborhood, culture or homeland—that is, “our world”—is a destroyed or hopeless goal. Charles said that his father and all the diaspora had come to associate this song with the genocide, but in fact, it was written in 1906, in response to the second unsuccessful Sasun (Sassoun) rebellion of Armenians against the Ottomans, in 1904, which had ended with brutality of almost genocidal proportions.10 But for Charles, this song was a musical memory-story that seemed to tell one of the most important stories of his father’s life, a story that I have titled “The Rose of Karatsor.” The story was about a type of miracle. The Rose of Karatsor was Heghnar (Helen). Charles called her Aunt Helen although she was actually his father’s first cousin. As he sang “Kna Plpul” in Karatsor in 1998, Helen, at age 92, was at home in Racine, Wisconsin, waiting for news and photographs. She had been born in Khulakiugh in 1906, in the same year this song was composed, and far to the west of where its author, Gusan Sheram, lived in then Russian Armenia. Helen’s father, Ke­ vork, and her mother, Miriam, had died when she was a toddler, so Helen had been raised by another Khulakiugh family. Charles’s father, Jacob (Hagop), had known them all before he left as a 19-year-old bantukhd in 1913, ending up in Racine. Helen herself could not remember her parents, but as she later told Charles, she certainly remembered 1915, when “Turkish soldiers” entered their village. She was nine years old. The village children were put into the church, packed with people. Fearing that the soldiers planned to set the church on fire, they advised each other to escape, and she, her aunt, and a cousin succeeded. But the aunt and cousin soon died, leaving Helen alone and foraging “like a chicken,” although she sometimes was offered bits of food from kindly Turks. After a time, she returned to the destroyed village where there were some survivors, even some family, and where the monastery of Khulavank had been turned into an orphanage. When Charles returned to show photographs of it, she remembered waiting there for food. While she was in that orphanage, relatives in Khulakiugh had written to relatives in Racine, assuring them that, in 1922 at least, Helen, now 16, was still

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safe. News from everyone then stopped, and it wasn’t until 1926 that Helen was found again, by which time she was 20. The way in which she was found is what made her the Rose of Karatsor. In 1926, Charles’s father, Jacob, having become seriously ill as a result of fighting as an American serviceman in World War I, was in a Veterans Administration hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee. Told that he was not expected to live, his Racine relatives rushed to make the 700-mile trip to see him. But when they arrived, they found him alert and smiling. He had been revived by a dream in which he and his Aunt Miriam (Helen’s mother) were together in the Khulakiugh gardens of Karatsor. There, Miriam had pointed to the garden’s last rose, and told him to pick it and to take it with him. Finding him in better health than expected, his relatives showed him a current copy of the Armenian-American Hairenik, a daily newspaper they had brought along.11 Among its notices of survivors, which diaspora communities read hungrily, they had found the name of Heghnar Kherdian, who was alive in an orphanage in Corinth, Greece. At that moment, Jacob’s dream became clear to him: Heghnar/Helen was the last Rose of Karatsor, ready to be picked. Jacob vowed to find her and bring her to America—and he did.12 But it was not so simple to pluck the rose. Jacob first traveled to Corinth, where he posed as Helen’s brother in order to get permission for her to be released to him. He then took her to Cuba, where she would wait as he looked for an American citizen willing to marry her. Through the Cuban arm of the Armenian Relief network,13 Jacob was connected to the process by which Armenian-American grooms were found to help these survivors immigrate. He then went home to wait. A groom, in fact, was brought to Cuba and married Helen. After Helen rejoined family members in America, the couple kept in touch, and after a while, the two decided to make their marriage a real one. Jacob died when Charles was just 15; but his aunt Helen lived to the age of 108. She had been Charles’s closest connection to his ancestral past through her stories of Khulakiugh, which she combined with what she had learned from Charles’s father when Charles himself was still a child. “Kna Plpul” encapsulated these as a personal musical memory-story that, as a pilgrim, he considered a song of home. Many pilgrims bring songs that they associate with their villages, and there is a personal story behind each connection, but we rarely know all their details, as we do with Charles. Yet there are many parallels. When Haikaz, for

Homeland Music Performs the Village

example, arrived in his father’s Van village of Pakan (near Narik; T: Yemişlik), he spontaneously broke out singing “Ganche Grung” (Sing, Crane!):14 Ganche, grung, ganche, kani karun e Gharipneru sirde kunt-kunt ariun e ................................. Ganche, grung, ganche, kani arev e Ashnan gertas yergir, yaris pareve. [Sing, crane, sing, while it is springtime Hearts of those away from home are heavily bleeding .................................. Sing, crane, sing, while it is sunshine When you go to my homeland in the Fall, give my regards to my sweetheart.]

When he finished, he said, “I sang it exactly as I had learned it from my father.”15 Singing this song in his father’s lost village, Haikaz could feel his father’s homesickness and “the depth of his sorrow—when I used to hear him sing with his beautiful tenor voice.” This led to a moment of near-communion: “for a moment in my reverie, I thought my father was singing along with me.” Haikaz also remembered that “in every gathering [his parents] used to verbalize the wish for returning to the homeland, and [sing] the praises of its beauty and glory.” Yet it was clear that their wish was meant as a magical return to a “before time,” before they had been sent out to the deserts of Iraq, ending up in Iran. Before they lost their first child when forced to flee. Before the unbearable guilt of surviving, of “not having done enough,” even after fighting in the Armenian Volunteer Army; before the loss made him “a physical and emotional orphan,” with the orphan’s need for permanence and a continual “longing for the loss of loved ones, and anticipating future losses.”16 Like other descendants who bring memory-stories whose story-tellers have died, Haikaz mourned his father’s story, but also mourned his father: “I also realized my strong identification with my father, and not having had the opportunity to fully mourn his death.” Yet, although he could not bring his father back, in Pakan’s “cool mountains, running springs, orchards and grazing lands for sheep and cattle,” Haikaz felt that he could begin to integrate the pain of the genocide that was passed on from father to son. And perhaps, he

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could fulfill a wish of his father, to bring his father’s greetings to his beloved home. A Repertoire of Longing

Haikaz called “Ganche Grung” a song of the diaspora: music through which survivors’ both expressed their ache for their own lost home and bequeathed this ache to their descendants. But it is also music with a history. Rather than coming directly from village memories, like many other songs of longing, it reached the diaspora having first been filtered through Armenian song collectors and composers and performers from the turn of the 20th century. As a part of the national homeland awakening project, this collected music was arranged into art songs in a Western European classical musical idiom; this meant that in order to be heard, these songs would need to be performed. This was brought to its full realization by the musical genius of Gomidas Vartabed (Komitas Vardapet, in Eastern Armenian), with the aid of particular performers. Gomidas, like a number of other musicians of his time, was an intrepid collector of vernacular music, and as a musician he also made it his project to isolate and re-work what he saw as the intrinsic “Armenian qualities” of his homeland’s music.17 Music, then, would be an important language of a new “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson defines that term in describing a shared print culture.18 These arranged and staged village songs were meant to transport urban Armenian listeners to the kavar, the provinces, whether they were actual émigrés (bantukhds) from the village to the city or longterm urbanites now being asked to reconceptualize their histories as linked to village cottages in an idealized place. A journalist known as “Anais,” who wrote about these performances, recalled hearing the original, folk rendition of “Grung” when she was a child in Istanbul. She had heard it sung “on the hills of Beşiktaş” (on the Bosphorus, just north of the historic peninsula of Istanbul) by an Armenian farmer, now a bantukhd. Hearing the Gomidas version in 1910, she wrote, “I wouldn’t imagine that such a simple, rough melody could one day be arranged so beautifully and turned into a concert piece.”19 By the late 19th century, bantukhd songs of longing gained a new meaning in this nationalized repertoire, fortified by making the bantukhd a familiar literary character.20 An example is this excerpt from the 1886 novella Gharip Mshetsi (The “Far From Home/Lonely Stranger” from Moush), by

Homeland Music Performs the Village

the popular novelist Raffi,21 who, although writing in Eastern Armenian, was widely read in Istanbul and by Western Armenian readers in general. -“Where are you from?” -“From Moush.” -“I see . . . So, you’ve come to earn some money . . . What is your name?” -“Ohan.” -“Then may Saint Ohannes, the lord of Moush, watch over you,” exclaimed the porter, and embraced his compatriot with particular ardor. The old man had no need to ask further questions. The fact that the youth was Armenian, and from Moush, was sufficient for him. Everything else could be discussed at a later time. He knew why the young men of Moush would leave their homes and take the road to “foreign” lands. He knew what they sought in the chaotic, noisy whirlpool of Istanbul. The old man knew it all, because he, too, was from Moush. He, too, had taken the same fateful path, and had left his native land for the same reasons.22

Through collected songs of longing and other village music, “native lands” or personal homelands like Moush, with their rich musical repertoire, could be integrated into a common homeland, making the homeland a shared claim. Although part of this repertoire had arrived in the diaspora before 1915, when it was, again, brought to the United States by survivors, these songs became signs of yearning for a homeland lost to the genocide. For example, the lyrics of “Dle Yaman” (Alas) refer to yearning for a lover; but in the diaspora the missing lover is the lost home. In 2002, the pilgrim George H. sang “Dle Yaman” on the shores of Lake Van in memory of his Vanetsi father. Dle yaman, arevn arer Vana dzovin Dle yaman, yes kez siri ashnan hovin Yaman, yaman, hey. [Alas, the sun touched the Sea of Van Alas, I fell in love with you in the Autumn breeze Yaman, yaman, hey.]23

It makes sense that the emotional weight carried by songs of longing for home moved up by many registers of poignancy when it moved from the bantukhd’s sorrow to the genocide survivors’ anguish over irretrievable loss and

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separation. Chapter 4 suggested how the term anduni had begun to include all songs of loss of home, perhaps because its meaning, “without home,” was so apt. Kavar (Chapter 4) listened to these songs with understanding as he sat among a small group of Armenians who still lived in Anatolia in the 1960s but who had seen their world destroyed. Yet it also makes sense that the place most receptive to and in need of these songs would become the diaspora. Gomidas’s genius and the movement to gather and distill Ottoman Armenian music to make a collective repertoire that tied a nation to its land was ironically prescient, as it could then become available to this displaced and suffering group. But that surely would not have happened without the help of two important performers, Armenag Shah-Mouradian and Zabelle Panosian, and with the 78 rpm recordings of the Columbia Ethnic Series. Shah-Mouradian was born in 1878 in Moush, but his extraordinary voice led him to become a student and then co-performer with Gomidas in Paris as well as in Ottoman cities (and he was also a featured performer in the Paris Opera). Zabelle Panosian had emigrated to the United States in 1896 as a fiveyear-old child. Her family was from Bardizag (T: Bahçecik) in the Vilayet of Iznik. She performed extensively on her own, but also joined with ShahMouradian, and in 1917 and 1918 they made recordings in Western Armenian for those eager to hear the sound of their homeland. Zabelle’s “bestseller” was her recording of “Grung,” although it was not Gomidas’s version but her own rendition or that of another contemporary composer. Columbia kept these recordings available through numerous pressings until 1931.24 Shah Mouradian became a US citizen in 1921. In 1933, William Saroyan wrote an ode, “To the Voice of Shah-Mouradian,” in which he tells ShahMouradian that his singing is central to keeping the soul of the Armenian people alive.25 It has even been suggested that Panosian’s and especially Shah Mouradian’s recordings were owned by every Armenian with a phonograph. Certainly, it was Gomidas’s achievement and the Armenian repertoire of songs disseminated by Shah-Mouradian and Panoian that gave the diaspora a poetic voice through which to both express a common grief and particularize or localize it to personal losses. It is often this music, embraced by their parents and grandparents in the diaspora as an expression of their own story, that pilgrims brought back to their hometowns as offerings of filial love, loyalty, compassion and remembrance.

Chapter 16

Village Music Performs the Homeland

I n h i s f a m i ly o r c h a r d s

in the village of Khulakiugh, Charles sang songs that his father had associated with his village. In his home village of Ankugh, the clarinetist Hachig Kazarian played melodies that originated there, and that he had been raised with in Michigan. Hachig’s grandfather had brought this music to America from the province of Van, which included the Van village of Ankugh (Ankğ; Ankeğ; T: Engil; Dönemeç), where Hachig’s father had been born. So when Hachig traveled to Ankugh and saw a local wedding caravan passing by, he took out his clarinet and played “Hars Ou Pesa” (Bride and Groom). He could not be sure that the Kurdish wedding party knew this Armenian song, but he could be sure that, on hearing its local tempo, they would know that he was speaking their language. Hachig is a professional musician from Detroit. As far back as he can remember, he loved the music of the villages of Van that his father and grandfather danced to.1 At the age of 10, he began clarinet lessons from his father’s Vanetsi friend Haig Krikorian, whom Hachig’s father respectfully referred to as Baron Haig (Mr. or Sir Haig) and who taught him to play Armenian village songs and dance melodies. In fact, Baron Haig taught him at least seventy of them. He would say: “this song is from Yerznga, this is from Sepasdia, this is a dance from Moush.” By age 12, Hachig had organized his first band, which included his brother Kazar, and called it “The Vanities,” playing on the term Vanetsies, or “people from Van.” “Why? Because my parents were from Van 155

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and that’s all we heard about in our home.” 2 Later, he would study classical music at Juilliard; but afterward, even though he has, as his friend and fellow pilgrim Zaven D. put it, “more degrees than a thermometer,” Hachig returned to village, or hometown, music and dedicated his musical life to it.3 As he played with other Armenian musicians as well as for audiences with various Armenian and even other Ottoman village heritages, Hachig came to understand how village music is its own vernacular that belongs to all the people rooted in the same place. “It’s in that land, in that soil, in that water. It’s not being Armenians or Turks or Kurds, it’s in that land. And I can’t put it into words—I feel that music, and that dialect, is in that land, and even if the Armenians are not there today. On YouTube I listen and I say, I‘ve heard that melody before; it’s just a little different.” Hachig and Armen’s Kurdish assistant and driver Cemal proved this common sensibility. “Cemal would play Kurdish or Turkish tapes and see me through the rear-view mirror and say, ‘How wonderful!’” Meaning that he recognized something they had in common. Other musicians felt this too. The Armenian singer Onnik Dinkjian, the son of survivors from Diyarbakir, and his composer and oud-playing son Ara, have often traveled to Turkey to perform repertoires of local songs for local audiences. To these they add Ara’s own compositions, which emerge from these genres. While in Diyarbakir, Ara put it this way: “[If] we were on the moon, looking at the earth, I can tell you that I’m from this area here. Of course, there’s no lines, no political lines—it’s—it’s a land, an area. And with that land, there’s a taste, a smell, an atmosphere. The music has a certain tempo. The music has a specific maqam [melodic mode]. And that is the connection. It doesn’t matter when you are talking about. If you are connected to your land, if you know where you are from, those sounds will come.”4 Hachig, Onnik and Ara felt their music was intrinsic to the land, like its mineral content, and that meant its Armenian-ness was, essentially, not unique but common to all the people from that same place. Hachig’s father had meant just this when he said, “If you really want to know your roots you have to feel its [your place’s] soil.”5 So, when Hachig greeted the wedding party with his clarinet, he felt that by speaking an internalized language that had grown from the earth, he was signaling a deep commonality. He was even certain that the Ankugh women by the stream, who were beating their rugs with sticks, were beating in time to his music, which added to his feeling: “I

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felt I was home, I truly felt at home, even looking at those Kurds, I felt they could be our neighbors.”6 Catherine John, writing on African music explains how “music that is played, performed, danced to, and even listened to, is an embodied experience, learned through one’s movements and senses, perhaps emitting its own type of ancestral knowledge that is both ‘conscious and unconscious.’”7 So too for the pilgrim: playing or hearing local music on its own land opens a register of consciousness that can offer a special type of homecoming. Th e D o u b l e - P r e s e n c e o f H o m e i n t h e H o m e l a n d

Music that is “brought home” has two echoes: the first recalls the pilgrim’s ancestor’s specific village, and the second recalls the pilgrim’s own home, or “back home” in the host-land, or diaspora, where the music was learned, such as in Fresno, Racine, Providence, Glendale or Watertown. Hachig associated his family music with hearing and learning it in Detroit. “My father would come home and bathe and shave and then have fun; he’d sing and dance with the family—and with the various other friends who would come after work [to relax as a larger family.]” Such memories of “back home” flood the realm, or register, of consciousness that is created when descendants such as Hachig play their village music in their ancestral village in the homeland. Although their music is inherently tied to a place because it originated there, at the same time, it is tied to places in the host-land, where one’s family performed and sustained it. After playing his Vanetsi melodies, Hachig sighed and said, “It was very emotional and gratifying. I felt like my family was watching.”8 But he did not mean the land’s ancestral spirits; he meant that it felt as if his family back home were with him there. “In my mind’s eye, I imagine my dad or grandfather dancing to these melodies or Haig Krikorian singing these songs to me in order for me to learn them.” Hachig felt a “double-presence that is both in the here and now and in the imagination,”9 but perhaps even more layered. On a land where nothing remained but rocks that formed the shell of the village church, music allowed Hachig to be a part of the house-world of the homeland, imagined as mirroring how it lived on in the diaspora. On his first pilgrimage in search of his family house, Zaven D. brought along a cassette of his father and uncle singing songs from Lidje (T: Lice; both pronounced Lee-jeh), their village, once in the Ottoman Armenian

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province of Diyarbakir. But the cassettes had been made in Rhode Island in 1946, where another relative was excited about his new recording machine. The lyrics of some of the songs they sang were in Armenian and some were in Turkish, but most were in Kurdish. These were songs Zaven had heard when he was a young boy, and were part of the family culture that had led him to play the oud himself. Zaven may have agreed with Hachig and the Dinkjians that this local music was intrinsic to every community with roots in Lidje’s soil, whether Armenian or not; but what felt relevant to him on his pilgrimage was that this music connected his Rhode Island family to his grandfather’s huge Lidje house, albeit he could only imagine that home when he found its now empty plot. His father and his uncle were Lidjetsis who had married daughters of that big house, although the weddings were in Rhode Island after the genocide. The music Zaven brought used a Lidjetsi musical vocabulary that his mother and aunt and all Lidjetsis shared. So of course, by bringing their music he, like Hachig, brought memories of all of them too. We have seen how Armenians from the diaspora might be thrust into an imaginative reverie of the homeland through memories or stories told by their survivor elders; but here we see how this works the other way too. The memory-stories that pilgrims bring to the places of these stories also propel the pilgrims back to the place where they heard them. In 2012, in the village of Govdun in the province of Sepastia (T: Sivas), Louis played Govdun melodies in front of the remains of the church where his grandparents had been married and also on the emptied land where their house had been. He played again in a Govdun neighborhood of Armenian houses that were still intact. For Louis, all of Govdun was his ancestral houseworld. One family that he met there “farmed, made their own bread and lived a simple life not too different from my grandparents’ in a house that looked like theirs.”10 Louis had brought along the same clarinet that his Govduntsi grandmother had purchased for $10 when he was a child in Providence, Rhode Island. Her hope was that he would become part of a new generation that would play Govduntsi music in the Mourad Marching Band, the musical arm of Providence’s Govdun Youth of America (Figure 27). Named for Murad of Sepasdia, the famous freedom fighter mentioned earlier as Osky’s mother’s uncle (Introduction), the band had been started by Govduntsi survivors in the 1930s. Louis’s grandmother, Sultan, was one of these. Like Osky’s mother, and possibly in tandem with her, by strength and luck, Sultan had survived the death march, but her children had not. Her

Village Music Performs the Homeland

F igur e 27.   The Armenian Mourad Marching Band, Providence, RI, 1937. Courtesy of Louis Najarian.

husband, Krikor, who had left in 1911 as a bantukhd, was able to bring her to Providence in 1920, where they had three more children, two, like the memorial candles in Chapter 2, were named for the two they had lost. The third was Asdghig (Starre), who would become Louis’s mother. When Starre and Louis traveled to Govdun with Armen Aroyan in 2008 (her second trip), they carried Rhode Island along in their photograph of the marching band made up of Starre and her siblings and cousins—all second-generation Govduntsis. Louis had known most of them, but had not been a member as the band had ended during World War II, when many of its young musicians went to war or joined the war effort. When Louis played his clarinet in Govdun in 2012, he was playing in part to honor this memory-story. And when he mused that “a very mysterious core of our Armenian heritage remains in that village of Govdun that my grandparents brought with them and passed down to subsequent generations,”11 he also displayed his pride in and attachment to the survival in America of a heritage that had become his own core too.

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It was in the diaspora, especially in America, that the music of the survivors’ individual villages became the general homeland music of their descendants. As a musician, Hachig was a part of this transformation by which Western Armenian music became an Armenian-American genre of its own. At first, bantukhd and post-genocide emigrants brought their music and their village instruments, such as the kanun, oud, violin and clarinet.12 As some of these musicians began to work professionally, they joined not only with Armenians from other villages but also with other Ottoman emigres to create a music scene that typifies Hachig’s sense of music’s deep roots. To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916–1929, a three-disc album compiled by Ian Nagoski in 2011, shows how geographical and ethnic lines blur when “melodic and rhythmic connections get made between cultures, all thriving in a small chunk of downtown Manhattan.”13 In their personal lives, early emigres, bantukhds, and the genocide survivors who followed, banded together in groups from the same village, often finding each other through ads in Boston’s Armenian newspaper, Hairenik. When possible, they would congregate in the same neighborhoods. As Hachig described them, these ads said simply: “‘I’m looking for so and so,’ and when they knew there was a Harputsi [compatriot from Kharpert], they would go there.” At first people sought each other for emotional and practical support in their new country, but they also wanted to help those left behind. Bob K. remembered that the part of his family that was from Lidje had “put together a committee . . . they would contribute money and somehow they got the money to people who needed it. I don’t know how or to whom. But they did gather funds and send money to the Lidje people who needed money in order to live.”14 As the emigre population became larger and of course permanent, small compatriotic groups became organized compatriotic unions (hayrenagtsagan miutiunner), creating their own social worlds that gave emigres the comfort of a living village culture. “There were so many hayrenagits!” wrote Hourig: When we were growing up, we used to hear this word a lot: hayrenagits. It is a compound word: the first part comes from the word “hayrenik” which means fatherland, and the second part, “geets” [gits], means close by, or next door.

Village Music Performs the Homeland

Hayrenagits then is a person from the same town, or the same area. My parents’ generation, having lost everything, yearned not only to be around Armenians, but also (and mostly) around people from the same town or the same county. The “hayrenagits” was like the parent, the brother or the sister they had lost. Whenever they met another Armenian, the first question out of their mouth was “Urdeghatsi es?”: the awkward translation being “Where are you a citizen of?” or simply, “Where are you from?”15

Perhaps the most memorable of the hayrenagtsagan miutiunner events were weekly picnics where, joined by their children, first-generation compatriots cooked their local foods, spoke their local dialects, and played, sang and danced to their local melodies. Onnik, when living in France as a child, remembered sometimes thinking “that all Armenians were from Diyarbakir. When I came to the USA, I realized it was not so. They [the new Armenians that he met] were speaking a different dialect of Armenian. So Armenians were not all from Diyarbakir!”16 In the words of the musician John Vosbikian, these picnics created a community tied together by a remembered or imagined place made up of “the combination of the aromas of the food, the hypnotic sounds of the music, the dancing, singing, clapping, shouting, the stamping of feet, and the electricity of everyone being happy, all at the same time.”17 Or as Mark Gavoor wrote, “We lived in the magical illusion everything we surveyed was [our Western] Armenia . . . and for those few hours on Sunday August afternoons it was.”18 Second-, and even third-generation pilgrims often knew these songs and dances from their own family or from these larger family picnics. On the three pilgrimages that Hachig made, his second- and third-generation co-travelers would ask for these songs when they reached their villages, and Hachig would oblige: “So I played the Sepasdia song in Govdun. I played the songs Haig had taught me.” Louis did this for his co-travelers, too. Just before the pilgrims’ arrival in Lidje, Zaven D. taught Hachig the melody to one of the songs Zaven’s uncle had sung on the cassette. Hachig was to play it as a surprise for Zaven’s cousin Sylvia, that uncle’s daughter, whom Zaven had brought with him on this trip. Hachig played it just where their family house had been; Sylvia immediately began to dance. Such identifying with specific villages (or sometimes a network of villages) shows how the village was understood as the yergir, the old country.

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Compatriotic societies preserved some of this insulation of the village as the homeland, and pilgrims often used yergir in just this way, a place where the people of other villages were felt to be “foreign,” and the music and language of others felt “not right,” or “not ours.” Heghnar W.’s family had said, “We couldn’t possibly marry anyone who wasn’t from Tokat.” 19 Her mother’s family had moved to Cairo following the Hamidian massacres, but they continued to get brides from Tokat because that’s where you would find the women you were to marry, who spoke your dialect, and cooked your food. In the old country, if one didn’t marry from the same town or village, one married from one that was paired with yours for marriage. Hayrenagtsagan miutiunner might try to serve an endogamous matchmaking function, but they could not prevent the inevitable move toward fragmented identities that began in post-genocide relocation camps and then in churches, schools and social and affinity groups where Armenians from different villages mixed, and eventually intermarried. Soon this encouraged a new “whole” by protecting the fragments. When asked, “Urdeghatsi es?” (Where are you from?), the expected and accepted answer would include as many places as needed: Stephen’s father was from the village of Sis (Chapter 2). His mother was the sole survivor of the village of Goteh. Born in America, Stephen married Angele, whose parents were from Adabazar (T: Adapazarı) and Bilejik (T: Bilecik). This meant that their yergir had a new inclusivity, and they had four goals for their pilgrimage. Hachig has documented how it was music that led to venues for socialization that could go beyond compatriotic, hayrenagtsagan miutiunner societies.20 At the dance halls, clubs, resorts and youth organizations and camps and at church get-togethers of the 1950s, music not only served a new generation but served it in a new way by creating a new genre: a collection of songs, melodies and improvisations taken from the music of many villages, music that the entire Ottoman-Armenian community could share as “our music.” With the emergence of a dance scene, Kef music was born, an American version of Western Armenian music that gave joy to community affairs. Hachig has not only chronicled this, but was one of its lights;21 its heartbeat was Detroit (and sometimes the East Coast), but records and traveling musicians took it across the United States. In 1959, as far from Detroit as Fresno, it was clear that, as one observer said, “the congregation of people from many different parts of Armenia [Ottoman, Western, historical] has caused

Village Music Performs the Homeland

a sharing of traditions to the extent that the Armenians themselves are not sure of the origin of certain tunes and dances. This blending factor, coupled with the encroachment of Western musical ideas, is gradually forming . . . an American-Armenian tradition.”22 Armenian America Comes to Ankugh

The existence of a musically shared homeland that had been honed in America became evident in Ankugh when Hachig played the Vanetsi tune “Im Vortin Sokhag” (My Son, Sokhag), also known in the local dialect as “Vans kyakhk” (The City of Van) or, in Western Armenian, “Vanay Kaghak.” As Hachig played, a few of his fellow pilgrims began a line dance, as they would have done at any church, community or club affair. The minute they crossed his line of vision, Hachig followed his instincts as one who played for the joy of the people on the dance-floor: he switched to the non-Vanetsi tune “Zungalo”23 because its melody would match the steps that they were doing. Only when he saw Armen’s video of this moment, did he realize he had done this. He could not readily teach the pilgrim dancers Ankugh’s local steps, nor how to recognize the differences between dance modes, but he could support their desires to share his homeland space by playing what they knew. The process of music becoming the diaspora’s experience of homeland is in some ways similar to the late 19th- and early 20th-century processes of Gomidas Vartabed and the other Armenian musicologists who removed music from its village source, sometimes distilling it, in order to revise and present it as proof of a collective national whole. But whereas that effort was constructed instrumentally (so to speak) to define an “imagined community”24 that would serve Armenian nationalist visions in a larger context, its American counterpart was a repertoire that grew organically in a diaspora that loved and felt at home in their homeland culture but also desired to remember their individual origins. Music maps the far-away homeland for pilgrims just as do food and language: similarities denote a shared homeland; particularities and differences signal an authentic membership in the group. For example, in the village of Malatya, Aroyan brought a group of Malatya­ tsi pilgrims to the house of an Armenian woman who offered them homemade choereg (a rich bread, often braided). The pilgrim Armenie recognized it with delight as identical to her mother’s. “We go to the Armenian stores, but their choereg is never like this. It’s always got sugar in it and flour on it. But my

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mother made it just like this! Cut in diamonds just like this! And you eat it, it’s bread. It’s not cake.” At the same event, two brothers, Vahan and Diran, felt at home because of their host’s dialect. “I haven’t heard this kind of pronunciation in years! . . . She reminds me of my Aunt Esther. My older Aunt Esther. She reminds me of my Mother.” But it was not just the pronunciation: “it’s the rhythm! we changed our language because we’re among . . . Beiruttsis.”25 “ O u r M u s i c ” : Th e B o r d e r s o f H o m e l a n d

The entrance of Beiruttsis into the conversation as just described, highlights a fault-line that has complicated the concept of home for many former Ottoman Armenians.26 Although most Armenians in Beirut were Ottoman genocide survivors or their descendants—that is, Western Armenians—Beirut’s closeness to the Republic of Armenia may be what led to an erosion of some Western cultural forms, or perhaps that occurred because having an antipathy toward anything Turkish was sometimes seen as evidence of support for the Republic of Armenia as the authentic homeland. Of course, this pressure to have Armenia as the only authentic homeland came from Armenia too.27 The result was an insistence by many in this orbit on removing any traces of Turkish or Ottoman culture from Armenian memory as not authentically “Armenian.” This included translating into Armenian and singing in Armenian songs that had once been written and sung in Turkish. Pilgrims, at least from north America, often expressed this as the increasing hegemony of the culture of the Republic of Armenia as “authentically Armenian,” even though it, itself, was infused with Soviet-style foods, music, and aesthetics as well as the use of the Eastern Armenian language, whereas Western Armenian had once been the dialect of most Armenians. Even pilgrims with intense loyalties to Armenia, or with the most antipathy to modern Turkey, often felt that unlike what they experienced in the Republic of Armenia, only the food, smells, landscapes and music of historical Armenia were congruent with what they expected of an “Armenia” as the homeland that they knew from their survivor families in America. The suggestion was that one can play or hear “Im Vortin Sokhag” in either Detroit or Ankugh; but it might feel out of place in Yerevan. Shortly before Lucille left on her pilgrimage to her parents’ village of Yegheki (T: Aksaray) now a neighborhood in Mezre (T: Elazig), her brother, Roger Derderian, a Kef musician, died unexpectedly. On his computer she found a pensive piece that resonated with her during her travels, and so she

Village Music Performs the Homeland

included it in a piece she wrote for Armen Aroyan’s book, The Pilgrim Speaks. For her, “it accurately articulated what we, the first generation [of ArmenianAmericans], have inherited.” They are all gone now. All that remains are the tattered and yellowed photographs, faded letters, and the distant memories of the young Armenians who arrived on America’s shores at the dawn of the 20th century. Forced to leave their ancestral homeland in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, they brought with them the yearning for a new life in a new land of hope and promise. They persevered in their newly adopted country despite the sadness of the separation from family members whose fate was always in doubt, and in many cases, never to be known. But they also brought with them a rich, ancient language and culture that was multi-faceted and most notably, expressed through their deep and abiding Christian faith, a faith whose roots trace back to biblical times. Who were these people? They were my ancestors. And their cultural legacy and gift to me was the music they brought with them, music inspired by Sayat Nova and Gomidas Vartabed. That was a gift I have cherished for over the thirty years I have been performing with other Armenian American musicians. Sometimes as I gaze out at the crowd at a dance or picnic, I envision the early twentieth century generation with their smiling faces, their animated conversation, their overflowing joy and sense of pride. But most of all, I remember and hear their ancestral voices.28

For the generation of pilgrims in this book, the western Armenian music that had been lovingly carried from historical Armenia’s towns and villages held the power not merely to maintain, but to renew their attachment to a home that was lost, and even to take vigor and promise from it. Whether playing this music for their community, or singing, dancing or listening to it, their experiences often echo those of the poet Leon Surmelian, whose displacement led him to write: I search for my house with my songs My house which is now only a memory, while day by day its intimate image fades away My house is a song whose lyrics I no longer remember My house is a sweetheart whom I love on my own.29

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T r av e l i n g t h r o u g h a T r a u m a - s c a p e

T h e d i v e rs e r a n g e o f p i lg r i m

stories and actions establishes a connection between memory and place while confirming that there is no single “Armenian” response; yet in the fields of responses uncovered here, homeland becomes clear as a communally understood affective mosaic, or repertoire, of feelings. Rituals and music make this especially clear. At the same time, there is an aspect to group travel that gives these pilgrimages their own coloration. I refer to this group experience as “the bus,” because most of the pilgrims introduced to you here have traveled to their home villages on buses (albeit almost always minibuses), and for the most part shepherded by Armen Aroyan. What follows considers how the shared group experience of the Aroyan pilgrimages defines the homeland in new ways. O u ts i d e t h e B us: A T r au m a-s c a p e o f Fac es

Pilgrims looked out the windows of their bus at the risk of emotional peril. Aram had always felt that the only way to escape the pain of Chunkush was by leaving it “in a haze, like a bad dream from which one can flee by awakening to reality. If Chunkush got too vivid” he said, “it would be as though Aram, Hagop and Maryam were peering at me through a window. I did not want to see them. If they were not real for me, then their slaughter would not be real”1 Even though the pilgrims might have danced like their fathers danced in Lidje, or determined that the yakhnili kufta (butter- and walnut-filled 166

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meatballs in a yogurt-based soup) that they ate in Aintab was authentic because it tasted like their mother’s, behind these moments of commonality was another story. Their families had escaped Lidje and Aintab to name their sons Vrej, which means revenge, exemplifying how the pilgrim’s image of home and homeland is always accompanied by a cloud of rage. This was evident on the bus, where the causes of rage were often translated as a living fear of a population of Turks and Kurds. Outside the bus, every face might be a perpetrator’s or, at least, the face of the offspring of a perpetrator carrying hatred into the present, or part of a “constructed” perception of Armenians in Turkey as enemies or traitors, as well as structural discrimination.2 Or it might be perceived as the face of denial, which most Armenians consider a living genocide. In almost all cases, then, what was outside the bus was a trauma-scape. “So, you know,” said Ankene, “[on our trip] there were times when I would see a very nice person—and I’d try not to have that thing in my mind like hmmmmm, I wonder if their ancestors . . . I had that continuously. I don’t care if it’s the shoeshine person, shopkeeper, the simit guy who’s selling the simit ­[sesame-dredged rounds, like crusty bagels] on the corner. Every time I looked at them, every one of them, that’s what I had in my mind.”3 Dominick LaCapra would call this “acting out,”4 which is a reliving of the traumatic past as if it were fully present, and thus yielding an incessant continuation of trauma. We have all heard stories of survivors who relive their pasts in a variety of behaviors, including nightmares. Even the hearer of their stories, whom LaCapra calls the “secondary witnesses,” may “undergo empathic unsettlement or even muted trauma.”5 The descendant generation’s repeated feeling as if they were reliving another’s trauma qualifies as “acting out,” and the pilgrims’ internalization of these fears often leads to small breakdowns when they must step off the bus into the trauma-scape itself. Maryam seemed to disintegrate in Shabinkarahisar (T: Şebinkarahisar) in the Pontic mountains of northeastern Turkey. Our bus had taken a few of us to the top of a hill where the town had dwindled to a scattering of houses. A few hearty pilgrims began a climb to the fortress, the site of the town’s famous resistance to the Ottomans; the rest of us investigated an old Ottoman caravansary or looked at the currently occupied old houses, wondering if this had been an Armenian neighborhood, although this was unlikely as before climbing to the fort, the 5,000 Shabinkarahisar Armenians had set fire to their

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houses and fields. A local man in this neighborhood struck up a conversation and tried to lead us toward his own house, inviting us for tea and to meet his family. As some tried to follow him, Maryam’s fear surfaced: “Who is he? Why are we following him? Where is he taking us?” In an attempt to calm her own anxiety, she looked for our bus, but Cemal had taken it down to the town to be with the rest of our group. With the loss of her traveling “home,” Maryam began to shake, convinced that we had been lured up the hill so that the bus could be stolen. Later, another pilgrim reviewed what had happened, and described Maryam as feelings that “we were going to be trapped in that town,” and “God knows what was going to happen to us.” Maryam was unnerved for the rest of the day. Shabinkarahisar was not her ancestral town, and so she brought no personal stories. But she did know that hardly any of the 5,000 Armenians who had climbed to the fort had survived. Paul M., traveling there at another time with pilgrims in a group led by Garbis Der Yeghiayan, had noticed everyone’s uneasiness as they got off the bus. During her 2005 trip, Carolann had nightmares: “Our hotel in Kars was old, but again met our basic needs of a clean comfortable bed, a bathroom, hot water, and heat. That night, in Kars my sleep was unsettled. That night, I had a nightmare. In it I was screaming and pleading with everyone around me—‘Don’t tell them we are Armenian. If they know, they will kill us, they will kill us. Don’t tell them we are Armenian.’ George [her husband] heard my incoherent yells and shook me out of my terror.”6 Some pilgrims conceal even more haunting tensions: that the faces outside the bus are the ghosts of those who perished (Figure 28) or the faces of the descendants of children left behind. Priscilla’s was not an uncommon story but no less wrenching for that: “I am going to tell you something,” she said: You know my father was, and his mother was, a good cook, we knew that. So, after the night that they escaped from the death march, and after going here and there, she ended up cooking for the Germans building the railroad.7 And this Turkish man who worked for the railroad took them in. And they lived with this Turkish man for quite a long time because she had two children there. They never talked about that. Even when my father got to this country (meaning America), he never talked about it. His mother never talked about it. What happened is when the war was over, they heard they could have free travel to

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F igur e 28.   Soghomon Tehlirian, arraigned for the assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin in 1921, relives the genocide for the trial jury. Here he returns to his house in Yerznga [T: Erzincan] shortly after the massacres to find it haunted by his family, whom he had seen murdered. From the graphic novel, Special Mission: Nemesis. © Sigest, EAN 9782917329719. 2014:16. Artist: Paolo Cossi. Djian, Nemesis: 16.

Aleppo. So his mother took, well, his mother had two [more] children [by the Turk], one of whom was a girl, she was very small; the other was a boy, about two years old. She took the boy to the neighbor and said, ‘This is his child,’ and left him.” At this point, Priscilla began to sob. “So, I have relatives here, but I don’t know who they are. My father’s brother . . . it was his half-brother that was left here.”8

She was not sure where she should look. Near Malatya? Diyarbakir? Could she find the railroad line? For Priscilla, the landscape outside the bus always mirrored the face of this missing child. Images of Ataturk were interpreted as signs of an enduring ethnic nationalism, and police and security officers were disturbing reminders of the pilgrims’ family histories, and of their own marginality (Figure 29). Rosemary’s memory-story, although humorous, was testament to a deeply held fear of

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F igur e 29.   Atatürk’s shadow, a mural photographed in Diyarbakir, 2014. The quotation from Atatürk reads: “People from Diyarbakır, from Van, from Erzurum, from Trabzon, from Istanbul, from Thrace and from Macedonia, always sons of one race, always the veins of the same ore.” Photo by the author, Carel Bertram.

anything Turkish or Ottoman: when her mother had entered New York from Ellis Island after a long escape from Diyarbakir via Aleppo, she saw a Shriners’ parade, with men in their Shriner’s fezzes parading down a street in New York. She froze in fright, saying, “Are they here, too?” Jack said his group had come to Turkey prepared: “We didn’t worry, for many of us were carrying Armenian insurance, little blue beads in our pockets.”9 Yet, such humor always spoke to the ever-present sense of traveling through an endless trauma-scape where every image awakened vignettes of danger and distrust, leading to a strange combination of rage, grief and sensory overload.

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Th e P i l g r i m a s M e m o r i a l i n a T r a u m a scape of Anti-monuments

Trauma was also embedded in the landscape itself. Along with ruined monasteries, and churches made into mosques—or barns—pilgrims were bound to stop at one or another of the many killing fields that are often part of their personal as well as collective knowledge. They found no monuments there; these sites all remain unmarked. At Lake Dzovk (T: Gölcük Gölü; Hazar Gölü) pilgrims stood quietly in small groups, walked alone, offered flowers or even sang hymns. Once a picnic area within walking distance of Kharpert, in 1915 it became a site of mass drownings. Pilgrims also stood on bridges where Armenians had been cast into the Euphrates. Both the lake and bridge atrocities had been documented and commemorated in films by the Khar­ pertsi ­Michael J. Hagopian: Voices from the Lake (2000) and The River Ran Red (2008). On one of the bridges, Abby whispered to no one: “How can anyone hate anyone that much? I don’t understand it!” There were no memorials at the Dudan either; the gorge where the bodies of the massacred Armenian population of Chunkush were thrown. The massacre was so comprehensive that “not a single Armenian from Chunkush appeared on the bloody deportation routes . . . [that led to] Aleppo, Deir alZor, Damascus, or any part of Arabia.”10 With no memorials, pilgrims became memorials themselves, albeit fleetingly. If a pilgrim had a personal relationship to a site, they became the memorial marker around whom the others gathered, reciting what should have been on a monument: they named names, gave dates and told their stories. In 2009, Ray became a memorial at Chunkush as he told his story. His grandfather knew what was about to happen but could not take his family, including newborn twins, to safety and so decided to flee alone in the middle of the night. His leaving awakened his eight-year-old son, and so, for fear of his awakening the others, he took him along, traveling in the dark and on foot. Eventually, sponsored by cousins in Fresno, the two reached the United States (Figure 30). That boy would become Ray’s father. Ray mused: “I can’t judge him [my grandfather] for leaving the way he did because I can’t say what I would have done under the circumstances. Two years later my grandfather would die in Fresno of pulmonary tuberculosis, be buried in a pauper’s grave without any records to show where he is, and leave my

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F igur e 30.   Ray’s father and grandfather in 1913, having reached Fresno, CA after escaping Chunkush. Courtesy Ray Garabedian.

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father as an orphan in a new country with his sponsoring cousins who were too poor to support him.”11 When otherwise unmarked killing fields had monuments to Turks who had died there, they were felt as anti-memorials, producing a communal sense of rage against the Turkish present, with its erasure of history.12 On the Gamakh bridge (T: Kemah), where 25,000 Armenians of Erzinga (T: Erzincan) had been thrown into the Euphrates river below, Adriana threw bunches of flowers into the water. The only formal memorial was to fourteen Turkish citizens who had died there in a car accident. Pilgrims who participated in the 2013 commemoration of the genocide, however, had a more hopeful moment. Ara Sarafian (a Dikranagerdtsi; that is, person from Diyarbakir), who had founded the Gomidas Institute, and whose press had published Harry Riggs’s account that Margaret read in Chunkush (Chapter 7), had organized this genocide commemoration in the heavily Kurdish town of Diyarbakir. The Gomidas Institute actively encourages possibilities for reconciliation, so not only did Sarafian obtain permission to hold it on a bridge over the Tigris but he invited local participation.13 Thus Armenians from the diaspora and local Kurds became a memorial together as they threw rose petals into the river. But anti-memorials remain, including particularly galling memorials to perpetrators. In Evereg-Fenesse (T: Develi), Garbis Der-Yeghiayan noticed that the street facing the Armenian church had, no doubt strategically, been renamed in honor of Talaat Pasha,14 one of the three state organizers of the genocide. Indeed, streets, neighborhoods and schools named Talaat Pasha appear throughout Turkey.15 Most unnerving were memorials to the “Turkish victims of Armenians.” Horrified pilgrims saw these in Zeytun (T: Süleymanlı), Marash (T: Kahramanmaraş), and even in the small village of Ardzati (T. Yeşilyayla) near Erzurum. Excavations of mass graves in the provinces of Erzurum, Kars, Iğdır and Van have been claimed by the state to be the skeletons of Turks killed by Armenians in an attempted genocide by the Armenians against the Turkish people.16 In October 2006 in Nusaybin (southeast of Mardin), a mass grave was discovered by the locals, with skulls and other bones in it, but the bones disappeared before forensic work could be done.17 The Turkish-Armenian dissident intellectual Sevan Nişanyan would consider this “a displacement of guilt” that makes these buried skeletons into representations of the skeletons in the Turkish closet. Turks, he writes, are, in

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fact, “extremely afraid of those skeletons,” and dealing with them is what he considers to be a part of their “skeleton business,” an example of the type of opinion for which he faced a life prison sentence.18 Pilgrims are unnerved by museum installations that are another type of anti-memorial. In 1997, Amos K. described the Van museum’s “anti-­Armenian, racist stereotypes of untrustworthiness, scheming, disloyalty [and] cunning, with accusations of treason.”19 Other pilgrims were enraged by this as well. Opened in 1990, the Armenian section of the Van Museum contained “skele­ tons of Turkish victims.” But pilgrims after 2006 did not see this, as the museum was closed between 2006 and 2008 for renovations. Ara Sarafian, on investigating this after the museum’s reopening, noticed that mention of the atrocities had been removed, but so had any reference to Armenians in Van at all.20 After visiting Zeytun, Heghnar Watenpaugh summed up what she saw like this: “The Armenians were nameless, while the Turkish leaders had names. The Armenians were isyancılar—rebels. The officials were martyrs who upheld the social order. Armenian violence was illegitimate; Turkish violence was legitimate.”21 Commenting on the state’s simultaneous erasure of any Armenian presence in the past and a narrative of the Armenians’ danger as a fifth column, the scholar and pilgrim Robert Hewsen remarked, “How a people who did not exist could suddenly rebel against anyone is difficult to grasp.”22 But when pilgrims see a panorama of sites without any mention of their history, the landscape outside the bus turns into yet another type of killing field.23 Such enraging experiences were felt by every pilgrim who visited the historic city of Ani and found that Armenians were mentioned nowhere in its signage. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Ani had been the Armenian Bagrat­id capital, and once so rich with churches and cathedrals that it was called the city of 1,000 churches. Peter Balakian writes that Ani “is for Armenians what Florence is for the Italians.”24 It deteriorated under the Ottomans and was devastated by an earthquake at the beginning of the 14th century, but the majestic shells of its remaining churches often led Armen Aroyan, who also served as the choir director of the Armenian Cilicia Evangelical Church in Pasadena, California, to stand in these hollow sanctuaries and sing or lead a Hayr Mer (Our Father) or Der Voghormia (Lord Have Mercy) hymn, to the joy and tears of pilgrims and tourists fortunate enough to hear it. Pilgrims feel these prayers as a resuscitation of Ani’s spiritual breath, in spite of the state’s

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F igur e 31.   Pilgrims sing the Hayr Mer [The Lord’s Prayer] in the Surp Khach [Holy Cross Church] on the island of Aghtamar, 2009. Photo by Ray Garabedian.

attempt to relegate the city’s past to an anonymous memory, an attempt made clear by the renaming of Ani to Anı, a Turkish word meaning a mere recollection. Aroyan led these hymns at other churches as well, no matter their condition, including the Surp Khach (Holy Cross) Church on the island of Aghtamar (T: Akdamar) before and after its “restoration” by the state (Figure 31). These gestures provided some intervention in, and even some level of healing resistance to, the silencing of these spaces. Visiting as a pilgrim in 2014, Nancy Kricorian sang the Der Voghormia prayer in the chapel at Aghtamar, even as a Turkish guard approached “saying that singing is forbidden.” With the music echoing after me, I leave the church to sit outside behind a tall metal candle stand, weeping. As a very-much lapsed Armenian Evangelical, I think of religion as a tool of oppression. But here a prayer has, for a moment, transformed this so-called museum—a state-controlled space concerned as much with forgetting as remembering—into the host of something radically

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incarnate. Here, where Armenian churches have been razed, ruined, turned into barns, made into prisons, wedding halls, cultural centers, mosques, and museums, we sing this prayer as an act of pure resistance: Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, All Holy Trinity, give peace to the world, and healing to the sick and Heaven to those who are asleep.25 Stopping the Bus: Intervention in the Trauma-scape

Sometimes, as the bus traveled through this trauma-scape, it stopped to deliberately celebrate pride instead of victimhood. These stops, all over eastern and southeastern Turkey, acknowledged places where 19th- and 20th-­century bands of Armenian volunteers, or fedayi (resistance fighters), had taken up arms in response to Ottoman Kurdish and Turkish persecution, pillaging and massacres, including the Hamidian massacres. Although such resistance groups were not always nationalist, their purpose always included Armenian protection and self-determination. Pilgrims well-versed in history were familiar with the resistance in Zeytun (T: Süleymanlı) and Sasun, and in the defense of Van during the genocide,26 and many knew the songs that had been written in encouragement of the fedayi, or to commemorate their bravery and their cause. Pilgrims whose families had come from areas of active resistance were often the ones who knew these songs, and asked to stop to sing them. Others may have learned them in groups whose mission included demands for the return of land. On a bus of pilgrims who were members of the Western Division of the Armenian Relief Society, an organization that developed as a type of international Armenian Red Cross but that also had a mission of cultural preser­ vation, Lucy leaned over to me to explain that they had learned all the fedayi songs as children, from their grandparents. “Our ears are full of them.” For some, their singing celebrated ancestral heroism, but over time the songs had come to be associated with support for Armenian independence from Soviet rule and then a demonstration of general allegiance to an Armenian country. But not everyone had ears full of fedayi songs or had heard them at home. On a different trip, Robert was surprised when suddenly people would burst out in patriotic songs: “This was all new to me. I didn’t know the songs. They seemed to know a song for every town. In Zeytun they were singing about Zeytun . . . Tad’ a!” The—against all odds—success of the Zeytun fedayiled rebellion during the 1894–1896 Hamidian massacres inspired Armenian

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rebellions in other cities and villages, including Van, Erzurum and Moush, so much so that Zeytun became an almost mythical place. Although few pilgrims’ families originated there, its fame seemed to make everyone want to visit it, and when it was approached, or even its direction indicated, pilgrims often sang songs that referred to its mythical bravery. On yet another trip, Ani H. sang one of these songs, “Verkerov Li” (Full of Wounds) to connect directly to her paternal grandfather (whom she callled Babi Kaspar), at what remained of his house in Pazmashen. His father had been taken by the Turks, and his mother and two-year-old brother had been sent on the marches, but Ani’s grandfather, at age 12, was taken in by a Kurd to care for his sheep and his orchards. His story then turned to one of escape and self-empowerment, making him finally able return home as a fedayi with a rifle, in this case as a volunteer in an Armenian unit of the Russian Army. Verkerov li chan fedayi em Taparagan dun chunim Yaris pokhan zenks em krgel Mi degh hankisd dun chunim. [Full of wounds, I am a fedayi Wandering, I have no home, Instead of my lover, I embrace my gun, I have no peaceful home.]27

“That’s what came out of my mouth in Pazmashen,” said Ani H.28 Fedayi songs may have celebrated the rebellions of local towns, such as Sasun, but for those who sang them, even if the singer was from that town, these songs were not associated with the wholeness of home and family but of resistance in a homeland mapped by injustice. Priscilla, who had learned them at church, thought they were great songs because they allowed Armenians a sense of pride. But not everyone liked them, especially as they were often associated with contemporary causes. Her husband, Paul, had bristled. “Don’t use the term pride. It’s nationalism. They don’t know when to give it up. They are not helping!” Yet, no one could deny that although singing songs of bravery and dedication might give comfort to their spirits, it concealed an immense sadness in their hearts.

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Armen Aroyan

(Figure 32) always sits in the front of the bus, next to Cemal or Cemal’s son Selçuk, with whom he speaks in Turkish. Periodically, he turns on his microphone to speak to the group. On one trip he called for the attention of the group in order to report on his conversation with Selçuk: Aroyan I want to tell you what Selçuk just said. [Then he paused and asked:] Are you taking notes, Carel? Carel [From the very rear of the bus:] Yes, I always am. Aroyan I thought so! He says that these people, never in their lives, thought that they would be able to come to see these places. And he is saying that they were probably afraid to come.

Nevertheless, on his buses, at least, Aroyan typically deflected the group’s fraught apprehension—the feelings Selçuk had sensed—such that a very different affective sense of homeland emerged: a regenerative one that was rooted in the pilgrims’ lived experiences in their host-land, in most cases, America. This was Aroyan’s gift. Aroyan’s driving force was the well-being of the Armenian community as seen through its individuals. By the time I traveled with him, he had led well over a thousand pilgrims to their Western Armenian towns and villages, and he seemed to remember all of them and their stories, and to have kept up with what had happened to them since. He also seemed to have access 178

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F igur e 32.   Armen Aroyan, 2012. Photo by Steven Barsamian.

to a mental archive of the many other Armenians he had met in places he had traveled to for lectures, or whom he had just read about. This proclivity, or ability, enabled him to divert individual conversations on the bus toward group conversations that called forth a variety of ways in which the pilgrims being shown their ancestral homes were interwoven in the American hostland’s Armenian communities. By repositioning this already rehearsed, already networked host-land way of “connecting as Armenians” through settlement patterns and church and Armenian community activities, as described earlier, Aroyan activated the host-land as a primary player in the homeland experience. This host-land infused experience of homeland, which, after all, is always and already an affectively created place, would generate a positive mental charge that could offer comfort and also real protection against the corrosive fears and anxieties that seemed to press on those in the bus from

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outside. By consistently conflating homeland with the affective and even spatial communities it spawned in the host-land, Aroyan subverted the traumascape with an overlay of vitality and durability—exactly what had seemingly been destroyed. Aroyan’s interventions mobilized two essential but also mappable aspects of the pilgrims’ experience as Armenian Americans. First was their attachment to their individual historically Armenian towns and villages as personal identity markers as well as their most fundamental indicator of homeland. This dedicated identification with a specific town or its village was what had brought these particular pilgrims on this trip; but that attachment had also led to early settlement patterns in America with neighborhoods seemingly defined by village roots (Chapter 16). Furthermore, these patterns represented village attachments that had a certain longevity, even as their populations came to include families with ancestors from a number of places. The second essential aspect of the pilgrims’ experience was that the American host-land nurtured the growth of networks of Armenians, who, although variously connected, were never a single Armenian body. These networks included the grids of extended and inter-village-married families and of participation in various churches, community organizations, social events, schools, summer camps, and entertainment venues, all of which allowed Armenians to see themselves as parts of a larger host-land map, with a breadth and even precision that the restraints of mobility, endogamy and tradition would have made impossible in the historical homeland. Thus, the Armenian-American diaspora was, in some ways, conceptually like the homeland; but also not. It might even be argued that for those from small towns and villages, the larger Armenian geography of Western Armenia came into focus only in the diaspora. What certified the homeland as understood as many towns and villages might have been the simple question they had asked each other: “Where are you from?” (Chapter 16). Aroyan then inverted this question. By asking it while in the homeland, he deflected the answer back to America, at which point the answer might be, for example, Glendale, California. On these trips, Aroyan combined his passion for bringing pilgrims to their “home” villages with his archival knowledge of diaspora communities such that pilgrims began to feel that the map they were following in their homeland was a type of over-lay, or somehow mirrored the map of their host-land.

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A D o u b l y I n f l e c t e d Ma p : A H o m e l a n d ‒ H o s t - La n d Ov e r l a y .

Using his mic at the front of the bus, Aroyan often directed questions to specific pilgrims, such as in this conversation with a pilgrim whose parents were from Husenig. His questions followed this pattern: Aroyan Can you name some of the Husenigtsi families that you know? Pilgrim Yes. Der Ananian, Janigian, Rustigian. Oh my God, if I miss any they are going to get mad. Aroyan Der Ananian? Pilgrim Der Ananian! Harry’s family. But there was a large, large group from Husenig that today live in . . . I believe the Aghavians could have been from Husenig . . . that are very influential back at home. Aroyan And did some of them settle in Worcester? Pilgrim Yes. And from what I’ve read, it’s where the first Armenian church was established. . . . But Husenigtsis came there, worked there, and came back to Husenig, back and forth several times, some of them. But a lot of them moved out, after that, to the Boston area. Rhode Island. So this area here was quite a thing, but [sad smile] you can see there’s nothing left of it.

Pilgrims found these extremely engaging, often grabbing their notebooks when Aroyan grabbed his microphone and started to connect villages and towns outside the window to places in the United States. Aroyan Who lives in Troy and Albany in New York? [He waits for people to call out their names and then sums them up as] Anteptsis! W here do the Tademtsis live? Waukegan! Tomarzatsis? Racine! Kighetsis? . . . Wholeness

Redirecting consciousness to the diaspora, while maintaining a force field defined by village identities, exemplifies what LaCapra calls “working through,” a process that allows a person to gain a sense of critical distance from a traumatic event and move beyond it, without denying its central importance.1 This performance serves to replace “acting out” (Chapter 17), which imagines past trauma and victimization as current reality. “Working through,” instead of perpetuating a sense of trauma, allows for a present reality of empathic

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relations and trust.2 Repopulating historical Armenia with a panorama of host-land neighborhoods gave the pilgrims relief from the anguish of history and even replaced that anguish with a grounded sense of wholeness. Aroyan also liked to talk about other pilgrims who had traveled with him to these villages, whether the bus was going to that particular village or was just in its vicinity. Tellingly, he chose anecdotes about these travelers’ hostland life, not about their genocide memory-stories. Aroyan Have you heard of Chakmak (T: Çakmak)? It’s a village near here. The Yardumians are from Chakmak. They live in Villanova, the next town to Steve. Steve Right! He has a niece, Alice, in California, who is a lawyer.

And as with the reference to Steve, his choices are never random, but made for the benefit of people who are on the bus right then, and who know the protagonists. On the long drives of every trip, Aroyan makes these village connections into a lively game or entertainment, as people shout out the names of people they know. As the bus travels through or by them, the towns seem to exist on a map superimposed on a map of the United States, on which Keserig (T: Kızılay) lines up over Worcester and Morenig (T: Çatalçeşme) lines up over Providence. In this way, the trauma of the past is felt as the source of present good feelings and memories. Aroyan [From the front of the bus, while in the town of Morenig:] Where do people from Morenig live? Providence! Walter [From the back of the bus:]There was a big place in North Providence called Bagramian’s farm. And practically every week during the summer we’d have a picnic there. And sometimes there’d only be people from here, Morenig. Just Morenigtsis would be there. And they all had some good times together. I remember them talking about the yergir [homeland; old country]. [Walter then looked around and out the bus windows.] Yergir! Funny thing, at that time, all they talked about was the good times when they were kids.

As the technology became available, Aroyan began to bring the diasporic host-land into the homeland by showing videos or slides of former trips on a monitor at the front of the passenger section of the bus. These views were chosen to engage the current audience, who were expected to know the

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people on the screen, so that more and more people from “back home,” in the diaspora, are given a shout-out. This makes the affective location of the journey less and less clear: is the bus traveling from Arapgir to Antep or from Philadelphia to New York? When the village of Gürün came up, Grace, who was sitting up front, mentioned that she had what she called “connections” in Massachusetts from there. Zaven D., sitting in back, asked who they were, only to discover that he and Grace had “almost relatives” in common. His daughter Lisa, leaned over to me to say: “That’s just an example of how, you know, when you mention names, of how it’s almost inevitable that there’s a connection. I think that is special to our group of people. It might be to other groups as well, but when you connect, you always feel a bond. That’s something we have.” Zaven D. [Listening in, adds:] I’ve always said that. Lisa You feel a bond. Zaven D. If you talk to Armenians long enough . . . Lisa You’ll find . . . Zaven D. A connection. Lisa Yeah. Zaven D. You’ll always have it. Always.

At which point Anto [Andrew] interjected, “You take a trip like this and you find out you know even more people.” The sense of the layering of the maps of host-land and homeland is facilitated by Aroyan in other ways as well. Discussion of food and foodways is one of these methods, as foods tasted in Turkey are discussed as Armenian, and proven so by how they are made in, for example, Boston.3 When Aroyan announced that the Kharpert specialty surum, a dish of toasted flat-bread soaked in a hot yogurt-garlic sauce, would be served at a Kharpert restaurant that night, most of the pilgrims were just confused. But Carolann and her aunt Hasmieg were both delighted and astonished. Their families were from Kharpert villages, but they had never eaten surum outside their own houses in Boston and had never seen it in any cookbook. “It is a forgotten food! Hasmieg and I simply could not believe that Surum was here, in this desolate town.”4 On another trip, after eating surum, Anto talked about his encounter with it, telling a story from Rhode Island. “I make it the way that I learned it from my mother from Sepasdia. My mother used to make the bread early in

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the morning [in Providence] and dip it in the coffee. What was left at night was used for the surum.” Anto relived his experience as we drove toward the restaurant, allowing his own and his mother’s Providence experience to merge with his experience of Kharpert. You roll the lavash [flat bread] into a long coil and cut it into one-inch small coils—like pinwheels. We buy that Joseph’s lavash bread . . . it’s not too thick. Put them in a pan and put it in the oven for a couple of minutes. Then you heat madzoon [yogurt], a big container, or more, on low. Add some water to the madzoon and keep stirring. Then you get the butter and melt it separately. If you like garlic, chop it in. I put garlic on the side. Pull the bread out of the oven and ladle the whole madzoon over it. Fill the cracks! Add the butter and garlic and put it back in 2 to 3 minutes; if it’s too hot it boils and curdles.

By the time he ate it, he felt he was eating his mother’s cooking. Another pilgrim, listening in, brought Philadelphia into the mix: “My ex-mother-inlaw used to make it. She was Kharpertsi. I don’t remember the butter part, but I’m sure she used it.” Watching surum being made in the diaspora may have brought the villages to life, but eating surum in Kharpert brought to life in Anatolia the comfortable and safe homes in Providence, Boston and Philadelphia. Tölölyan discusses the preservation of homeland habits and customs in the diaspora as exilic practices that, in the face of the painful distance from one’s center, preserve a group’s identity in and against the host-land’s new culture: In this context, whether or not the members of the exilic diaspora actually intend to return to the restored homeland as settlers is difficult to determine; rhetorically, they want to go back to Zion, or depi yergir, to the land, as the Armenian nationalist slogan put it before the Genocide. Yet the consistently central feature of exilic nationalism is not the physical return, the literal reversal of exile, but rather the maintenance of the center as the ideal space of belonging and as the font of the material and symbolic features that anchor national identity in both homeland and diaspora.5

Louisa, in fact, used the word “maintenance”6 to describe the village skills (and chores), such as making yogurt, that were part of her own Paterson,

T r av e l i n g a s W h o l e n e s s

New Jersey, life. All the fond memories of the foodways of her ancestral Musa Dagh village of Bitias were centered in New Jersey and Maryland. Thus, along with the authenticity of the homeland being verified and preserved in the host-land, the affective homeland that was created on the bus as a parallel place in the host-land, suggests that the homeland that appears destroyed feels quite alive. While looking out the windows, the interior of the bus as host-land becomes a comforting retreat, and a living space of belonging.7 The conversations and memory-stories that seem to ring true for everyone are what Durkheim would have called a “collective effervescence”; Turner called it “communitas,”8 a unifying sense of pleasure that comes when feelings and thoughts, as well as actions, are perceived as being experienced together. This shared bonding infuses the experienced homeland with what might be one’s most basic associations with a sense of home that is connected to one’s most authentic self. This is what is associated with the safety and security essential to “working through.”9 Although the fraught history of Ottoman Armenia is in no way abrogated, this double mapping gives a positive charge to the bus, becoming an antidote to the internal and external anxieties that flow from a homeland resonant with the traumas in its past. In the United States, the first generation of Pazmashentsis in Detroit were such a tightly knit group in the same neighborhood that when they neared home after riding together on the city bus, the bus driver would call out “Next stop, Pazmashen!” Second- and third-generation pilgrims might have felt something similar if, on arriving at Pazmashen, Aroyan were to have called out, “next stop, Detroit.” A Repertoire of Feelings

We have already seen how the experience of the village or hometown, as the place of the family house, is the pilgrim’s most immediate understanding of homeland. For the pilgrim, the house cradles the spirits or souls of the family’s elders and ancestors, especially the survivors whom the pilgrim knew; and what drew these spirits back, has drawn the pilgrim too. Moreover, music introduces how the house and homeland became locked in an interactive fusion. When Charles sang his father’s favorite song in his father’s lost orchards, he showed how a shared homeland repertoire was felt to belong to one’s own house or village. Hachig, in contrast, showed how music from a particular village had come to represent the larger homeland. However, the place of this

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fusion was the host-land; For Charles, the village and the homeland were connected by Racine, where he had heard his father’s songs; for Hachig; it was in Detroit that village dance music had become everyone’s homeland music. Additionally, traveling with a group allowed Aroyan to create an imaginative link between homeland villages and specific places in the diaspora where groups from a single village had settled, such that host-land came to reflect the recovery of a homeland wholeness that could have been lost.

Part IV

The Future of What Remains

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Chapter 19

Th e La s t A r m e n i a n s

Returning to historical Armenia

in 1993, Barkev found that Sinamud, an Armenian neighborhood on the slopes of the town of Kharpert that he had left as a small child, had been entirely destroyed. His hopes and longings for reunion were completely deflated: “I expected to see the houses intact—even if in ruins, I mean like the [other] places we visited. But this is absolute calamity, absolute calamity. I don’t know—how it got destroyed—if the Turks did it or an earthquake. It’s just rubble! A calamity! I don’t understand how the place got demolished, what demolished the city!”1 Fortunately, when the group arrived the next day in Jibin (T: Cibin; Saylakkaya), Barkev met “Blind Nuri,” the last Armenian left in this village whose name, which derived from chur puyn, meaning “water nest,” showed its Armenian roots.2 Now Barkev could pour out his sorrow in Armenian. After crying with Nuri, and feeling his upbeat spirit and hearing his Armenian songs, Barkev was finally calmed and felt that he had at least come close to finding the past he was searching for. Better still, he had found it not in dead or dying buildings but in a living person. In their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Eng and Kazanjian suggest that as soon as the question “What is lost?” is posed, we invariably slip into another question, “What remains?”3 In asking this question, they frequently referred to material remains, but it is a human existential question as well. Certainly, the pilgrims would concur with Eng and Kazanjian that 189

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loss is inseparable from what remains because what is lost is known only by what remains of it. In Turkey, where virtually nothing remains of anyone’s Armenian heritage, the thrill of meeting Armenians is like finding a part of the self that was missing. Starting in the late 1950s, a limited few from the survivor generation, such as Kushigian and Vasilian, and then Kavar (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4), began to investigate what was left of the people and the culture so unwillingly left behind. Later pilgrims would find fewer and fewer Armenians and less and less of their tangible past. This chapter follows pilgrims as they meet Armenians, usually in unexpected and challenging ways. “Blind Nuri” of Jibin

Blind Nuri had been “discovered” by Armen Aroyan in 1988 on his first visit to his own grandfather’s village of Jibin, the visit that launched a thousand pilgrimages. Armen took his name from this grandfather, Armenag Arogil, who was born in Jibin in 1878. The suffix -gil is a local iteration of the -ian or -yan ending on Armenian names, meaning “from the family of.” In 1988, villagers rushed to meet him, touch him, and ask about people he might know.4 Especially excited were those few Armenian women still alive from the thirty Armenian girls who had been left for their safety with local families when their mothers were forced on the death marches. As no one returned from the marches, these girls became part of the community, and often were married to a son of the harboring family. Whether the thirty young women were formally converted or not, they were all given Turkish names and their children were Muslim. On meeting Armen, one of these women, then in her 80s, began to cry. “They abandoned me and they never came back.” Her son, Recep, said nothing. But Topal, the village schoolteacher reminded her, “You’re a Muslim now and you should not cry about your Armenian past.”5 Clearly, the women who “remained” in Jibin all remembered their families— and some remembered Armen’s grandfather. Even their children had heard the Arogil name, or had heard about the Arogil family house and pistachio orchards. Some of those left behind, and thus their children, were even related to Armen, through his grandfather. And they all encouraged Armen to seek out Jibin’s reclusive Blind Nuri. Blind Nuri, then in his 60s, was the son of Yeva Madirosian, one of those thirty girls who was now deceased. She had married the Turkish Muslim

The Last Armenians

Davut Güngören. Nuri, however, had been sent away from the village to an Armenian school in Aleppo, owing to his having been blinded by smallpox at the age of four. He was in Aleppo for two years, and then he moved to an Armenian home for the blind in Lebanon where he was in school for another eight years. After graduating, Nuri returned to Jibin, but now with an Armenian religious education, a familiarity with Armenian literature, and of course, fluency in Western Armenian (with an Aleppo accent). He returned to Jibin in order to be with his three younger brothers who lived as Muslims and knew only Turkish, which, in fact, had been the only language that the Armenians of Jibin spoke, as Armenian itself had been prohibited there in Ottoman times. Thus, even though Nuri had known many of the survivors of his mother’s generation, when Aroyan first arrived in 1988, he had not spoken Armenian to anyone for almost fifty years. Remaining single, and not speaking Armenian to a soul, he had never had his religious identity or his loyalties questioned. However, he admitted to Aroyan that he listened to the Armen­ ian radio station that was broadcast from Beirut; and he said that he always sang Armenian prayers and songs to himself and recited the poetry he had learned at school. Armen Aroyan’s first meeting with Nuri touched both deeply. Aroyan remembers: “We were led through the narrow village roads to a small grocery store. Our guide pointed to a man in his sixties sitting in a squatting position in the doorway, and said, ‘He is blind!’ As I approached him, I said in Armenian, ‘Hello, how are you?’ The blind man stood up immediately, stunned to hear Armenian. The first word that came out of his mouth was ‘Voghchuyn!’ a classical Armenian word meaning ‘Hail,’ or ‘Greetings!’”6 From then until his death in 2005, and to the dismay of other villagers, even his family, Nuri began speaking Armenian again, but this time to a parade of pilgrims brought by Aroyan. He conversed happily with the pilgrims who knew Armenian or Turkish, and sang medleys of songs, including an epic Hadjin (T: Hacın; Saimbeyli) song and a love song (“Lover Waiting for Three Years”), as well as “Cilicia,”7 one of the seven songs that Charles’s father had identified as a song of home. Nuri, with his songs, his faith, and his tenacity gave comfort, and addressed that painful sense of absence that the pilgrims yearned to fill. Indeed, Nuri was what remained; but he was guarded about it. When Aro­yan would call to say he was coming to visit, those who overheard would laugh and say, “Oh, he’s speaking the Div’s language,” the language of the evil

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eye. But since the villagers, whether of Armenian background or not, knew only Turkish, Nuri and Aroyan, or Nuri and the pilgrims who knew Armenian, could speak freely to each other. In one exchange, Aroyan asked Nuri how he felt when Armenia got its independence in 1991. He answered with a laugh: “Armen, are you serious? I live in Turkey! I can’t have an opinion on this!” But he then added: “It did affect me. Lenin predicted that all the nations that are in the USSR will sooner or later ask for and get their independence. I read this in his book.” Another time he confided: “Now or later the Turks are going to have to admit what they did. That’s my belief.” And then he added, “Listen Armen, what I’m saying right now should not reach anyone else!” Aroyan replied: “Don’t worry! Tu medz kants es mez hamar! [You are a great treasure for us].” And this was true. Many pilgrims spoke about the joy he brought to them. Gregory N., who had yearned like many to speak the mayr lezoo (mother tongue) with another Armenian, said, “the sound of [Nuri’s] smooth sweet rendition of ‘Cilicia,’ as I gazed out over the flat roofs of the surrounding homes, was one of the most touching moments of the trip.”8 And Zaven D. told me that meeting Nuri, which he did several times, “was probably, aside from going to my own village, was the next highlight of all my trips. He learned Armenian, and he retained it! That was the thing! After all those years!”9 Sa r k i s o f A r a p g i r

Another remarkable exemplar of those who might be the last Armenians of their village or area was Sarkis of Arapgir (Figure 33). In the province of Malatya, Arapgir had been home to the 13th-century Surp Asdvadzadzin (Holy Mother of God) Cathedral. Although it and its Armenian life had been destroyed in 1915, Arapgir had maintained a small Armenian community into the 1950s.10 But after that only a few families remained. Whereas Nuri’s Armenian bona fides were in his language and his songs; Sarkis’s were in his family’s house with its orchard-like garden of mulberries and walnuts. In 1992, on their pilgrimage with Armen Aroyan, brother and sister Dikran and Laura visited Sarkis while visiting remnants of their mother’s extended family in Arapgir. (At that time there were about nine Armenian families left.) They considered Sarkis to be family as he had raised an orphaned Armenian girl who would later marry their mother’s brother. When that brother died,

The Last Armenians

F igur e 33.   Sarkis Miranshahian, in Arapgir, 2009. Photo by Charles Jamgotchian.

Dikran and Laura’s parents had taken over their sister-in-law’s care, and thus kept the family in touch with Sarkis. But Sarkis considered all Armenians to be family, and pilgrims were always invited in. Those on the earlier pilgrimages were also welcomed by Sarkis’s wife, Mayreni; after her death, and as Sarkis aged, the welcoming included meeting Sarkis’s companion-housekeeper. Pilgrims were ushered into his sitting room and sat on the traditional, built-in, cushioned benches (sedirs) that lined the walls. They were surrounded by Armenian-related artifacts, including the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian, crucifixes, pictures of Saints, a rug woven with a large image of Jesus, and from over the years, calendars with photographs of Ani and Mount Ararat. In 1992, Dikran had laughed when he saw these calendars on the walls and in stacks on end tables. He knew that his own father had sent these calendars yearly, as they were published by the Armenian Evangelical Community in Lebanon. He picked up the most recent one, which was from 1976, and turned to Sarkis:

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I say, “Baron Sarkis [Sarkis, Sir], where is the one following this?” He says, “I never got one!” I say, “You know why you didn’t get one? Because my father passed away in that year. He didn’t send one in 1977 because he wasn’t around.” [He says,] “Oooh, that’s what it is! Ohhhh, so that’s how it is. Yes.”11

But for most every other pilgrim, this might feel as close as they would ever get to their own Armenian houses of the past, and be where they felt an Armenian homeland familiarity, whether that was owing to the religious references on the walls or the tea that was always offered. Walking us out to the bus, Sarkis sang Arapgirtsi songs with Barbara P., whose grandmother had left Arapgir during the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896. In 2006, at the age of 95, Sarkis’s voice still thundered as he spoke, although, as Paul M. noted that same year, his thick Arapgirtsi dialect made his words nearly unintelligible. But Paul understood him when he said: “I am the last Armenian of Arapgir. The things I have seen in my life, the things I have seen in my life!”12 A F a m i l y i n Kha r p e r t

In 2012, as Michaelle, who had chosen “Kharpertgal” as her email address, was planning to take her 80-year-old mother and her 17-year-old daughter on a private pilgrimage, she said the whole trip would be worth it if she just could find an Armenian in Kharpert who could speak to her mother. “It’s meeting Armenians that I’m most after . . . that is what I really want to do. Gosh, I keep repeating myself!!!” Michaelle’s wish was made possible because, although she and her mother and daughter traveled on their own, Armen Aroyan put her in touch with two Armenian brothers from Kharpert, now living in the nearby city of Elazig, where they ran a large gas station and garage. Aroyan would often have his buses stop at the Manoyan Service Station and then surprise everyone by having Stefan get on board and start to speak in Armenian. So with Armen’s contacts and Melissa Bilal’s outreach for local help, Michaelle and her family spent almost two days with the brothers and their families. Excerpts from Michaelle’s letters to me show that what affected her most was not the content of the conversations, but the brothers’ presence. It felt life-changing. Yes, Carel, coming here to the place does matter. It does make a difference. How did I feel? I felt that I had a beginning, this is really where I was from. He

The Last Armenians

[Stefan] took us to his house, his mother, wife, kids, another relative and their kids, and another family comes to join, sitting outside, we’re sitting outside and my mom talks to someone from the same village in the same dialect. These were my people. It makes me feel like I belong somewhere. It makes me feel Armenian. We were family. I would have been friends with [them all.] It would be a community. [And then she added] Oh, and once the two brothers came to our hotel, the price dropped, too.13

Vakef: Historical Armenia’s last Armenian Village

Over the years, pilgrims had met Armenians who considered themselves “the last Armenian of ” Amasya, Gümüşhacıköy, Arapgir, Diyarbakir, Bitlis, Bingöl, Ordu, Chunkush, Satikoy (Satou-Kegh), Kharpert, Evereg, Hadjin, Tarsus, Kayseri, Khorkon, Khoops, and Van, at the very least. But by the early years of the 21st century, this cohort, the last of the last Armenians, like Blind Nuri, had aged and disappeared. But for all of the pilgrims, there is still Vakef, “the last Armenian village,” which offers an exhilarating sense of a persisting homeland for all of them and, for some, a sense of hope for the future. Vakef was once one of the six villages of Musa Dagh (Mt. Moses. A: Musa Ler; T: Musa Dağı); that is: Bitias (T: Batıayaz), Haji Habibli (T: Eriklikuyu), Yoghunoluk (T: Yoğunoluk), Kheder Beg (T: Hıdırbey), Kabusiye (T: Kapısuyu), and Vakef (T: Vakıf; or Vakıflı). This mountain full of villages was made famous by Franz Werfel’s 1933 historical novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.14 It chronicles how two-thirds of the villagers of these six villages resisted the 1915 Ottoman deportation orders by hiding on the mountain, finally to be rescued by the French Marines. Those who had not fled to the mountains were sent on a forced march to Syria, the survivors ending up in Hama. This had been the fate of Alberta’s grandfather (Chapter 8), who longed for the water of his orchards in his Musa Dagh village of Bitias. In 1920, survivors of that deportation returned to their villages, which, as a part of the former Ottoman Syrian province of Iskenderun (Alexandretta), had come under the protection of France. Thus, after the genocide, the villages of Musa Dagh, now outside Turkish control, began to revive. But in 1939, with the loss of French protection and the immanent transfer of the area to the new Republic of Turkey, the Armenian inhabitants of five of the six villages left, most becoming refugees, but finally resettling in Anjar in Lebanon. Those who

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stayed congregated in Vakef, where they repaired its destruction and slowly brought the village back to life. Vakef is now the only Christian village left in Turkey. It has an active church, Surp Asdvadzadzin (Holy Mother of God), and a minuscule population of at most 150 people, which doubles in the summer with visiting relatives who have migrated to Istanbul and abroad.15 Western Armenian is still spoken, although many Vakef residents can no longer read or write it, and only a scarce few maintain the distinctive Musa Dagh dialect. Yet, for the pilgrims, Vakef is a type of miracle. In 2007, its last genocide survivor, 93-year-old Avedis Demirjian, was still alive, and still able to sing the signature Musa Dagh folksong, “Germer Fsdan Hekudz i” (She Has Worn a Red Dress) or, using its refrain as a title, “Hele Ninnaye.” Aurora sang with him. She had been born in the Musa Dagh village of Bitias, but had left in her early teens, in 1938, when the area lost its protected status. In 2012, Ani H. met Avedis just before he died: “Here, I touched and kissed a living Armenian, blessed and cursed with the life and memory of our people.”16 Hardly a throwback to pre-genocide times, Vakef lives consciously in the Turkish present, sustaining itself economically by selling its organic farm products on the world market. However, it also lives precariously, and its population speaks cautiously; they emphasize allegiance to Turkey and always refuse to speak publicly of the genocide. Although international groups planned genocide centennial commemorations for many towns in Turkey, Vakef opted out.17 These challenges make community survival seem all the more miraculous, and the experience for pilgrims even more precious. In a homeland seemingly bereft of Armenians, meeting “the last Armenian” offers ways to physically feel that the connection to one’s personal past has not, after all, been wholly shattered. These may be momentary sensations, but they live on for the pilgrim as having had a real experience of home. This feels especially true when pilgrims find an Armenian in their own ancestral village, as did Michaelle’s mother in Kharpert, or as had a group of Malatyatsi pilgrims when they met a Malatya Armenian woman who spoke the local dialect and offered them her homemade, Malatya-style choereg (Chapter 16). Pilgrims constantly encounter dishes prepared by Turks and Kurds that remind them of their mothers’ cooking, but instead of comfort, these often suggest irony. The village of Vakef, however, is a unique experience because it offers a vast pride and also some relief in the present. In 2007, Gerine asked me: Can

The Last Armenians

you feel what we feel here? When we see this church—all the swollen feet are worth this. We must go home and support this place. Whoever thought we would find this?” And when Norair made a 2014 pilgrimage to his ancestral house in Urfa, he made room for a visit to Vakef, saying that he was going off to meet with his “relatives.”18 Curiously and somewhat unnervingly, some pilgrims, perhaps all pilgrims, even suspected that they did not have to travel beyond their own village to find relatives, as they felt haunted by faces that looked strikingly like those of people in their only families. Charles J. labeled one of his photos from Khorsana “Armenian Eyes.”19 And Alidz wrote: Looking in the round eyes of the little kids from these, in so many of them, I see my beloved’s blood.20

When they realized that such relationships were probable, or at least possible, their view of a barren landscape, empty of Armenians, was forced to shift.

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A r m e n i a n s “ Ev e r y wh e r e ”

W i l l i a m Sa r o y a n w a s s o

overwhelmed by his pilgrimage to his ancestral town of Bitlis that he did not write about it until over twenty years later, finally allowing a character named Bill in his one-act play Bitlis to relive it for him. “I know my dead for centuries are here,” muses Bill, “and I feel them, I feel their livingness from when they were alive . . . I see and hear and smell them in the people who are here now. And when the Kurdish redheaded bard made up a song of welcome, sung to me, to Veelyam Sar-o-yan, pronounced precisely as the name is pronounced in proper Armenian, I felt that that man was my cousin at the very least.”1 Like Saroyan, pilgrims often found familiar faces in their towns and villages. Moreover, some pilgrims had known family members in eastern Turkey and visiting them was a planned part of the pilgrimage. Although these reunions often felt like ambiguous miracles, as these relatives were now Muslim, the fact that such reunions were possible introduces a new chapter in the meaning of Armenians in the homeland. R e l at i v es

Nancy A. was in her 20s in 1998 when she and her aunt traveled with Armen Aroyan to her beloved grandmother’s village of Istanos (T: Çimenyenice).2 As mentioned earlier, she writes about this visit in a semi-autobiographical novel in which she explores how the “Armenianness” in her family might 198

Armenians “Everywhere”

have formed her, for better or for worse. The names in her novel are changed, but the story is her own, subjective truth. Nancy chronicles how she arrived in Istanos prepared to feel angry, as she was armed with the bitter taste of the early life of her “Grammy,” who lost her family at the hands of “Muslim Turks,” grew up in an orphanage, and finally made it to the United States, only to be married off before she was 15. Nancy even suspected that her grandmother’s trauma had led to her own years of painful panic attacks, which she had long felt were the “result of stress, a psychosomatic symptom, the intensity of being Armenian.” A bit dismayed to learn these flare-ups were due to appendicitis, she still hoped that going to her grandmother’s village “to stand on the dry land whence my blood evolved, would somehow give a sense of clarity, completeness.”3 Her mother had not been happy with her decision: “I don’t understand why you would want to go to Turkey, to the middle of nowhere, and contribute to their economy after all that they did.” “Because I want to see where my grandmother came from,” she had replied. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy in the middle of nowhere where there’s nothing but rubble and you can kiss the dirt where your grandmother stood,” said her mom.4 As it turned out, Nancy’s aunt had arranged to meet distant relatives who had been found in Istanos, which did indeed feel like the middle of nowhere. Furthermore, because these relatives were now Muslim, Nancy was overcome by anxiety and alarm. Nancy’s aunt had one single, yet doomed, focus: an attempt to find the family bible; but Nancy’s own quest seemed worse than doomed, as she felt that this Istanos “family” could offer nothing to help her understand what it meant to be Armenian as they were its antithesis. She felt utterly alienated; in fact, she felt unnerved. “I was feeling shaky, I didn’t know what to say or do, and I felt I should. I should know what to say or do. . . . If one of my ancestors had converted his faith, I wouldn’t exist, and part of my spirit, I imagined, would be living here with them.” When the “new family” gathered outside for photographs, Nancy felt an implacable urge to connect with her “real” Armenian ancestors, and so she “ran into a field to gather some dirt into a tiny film container, picking up the dirt my ancestors were composed of. . . . All I wanted was to have my moment with the dirt, to feel its properties, to be joined with my heritage through its minerals.”5 She had come to Istanos

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to reexperience her grandmother, and her instincts told her that her grandmother’s spirit was in this earth. And yet ultimately. she also felt the humanity of her new family breaking through. Standing with her relatives for that photograph, “I found myself too shy to look into their faces [but] their warmth rose up in me.”6 And later, as they parted and as she turned to look back, she could not forget how she was met by the smiling eyes of a young cousin with the word “MEMORY” written on her shirt. This lost family could not answer her inner questions, nor did she know their story; but they were hers, and they were there, holding a piece of her past. In 2005, Araxie also made use of an Aroyan pilgrimage to meet cousins for the first time. They were the grown children of her father’s younger brother, Minas, who had been “left behind” in the Kayseri village of Efkere when her father and his sister had escaped, eventually reaching Beirut. Uncle Minas had been “found” in the 1950s when an Armenian woman from Beirut traveled back to look for her own relatives. By then, Minas was in his late 30s and had a family of his own; and he was a Muslim, now named Mehmet. On hearing this news, Araxie’s father immediately arranged to meet Minas/Mehmet, in Istanbul, possibly because traveling in the interior was still difficult in those days. In Istanbul, they had taken a picture together, which Araxie had brought along (Figure 34).7 She also brought a question that had bothered her for years. If Minas had been found, why didn’t he return to Beirut with his brother, that is, return to being Armenian? To Araxie, her uncle Minas was the “lost beloved” her father had mourned when he sang “Gesi Bağları” (The Orchards of Gesi), which takes place in a lovely green area by a nearby village. As a child, she had often heard her father singing it while working or just as he walked. The words were in Turkish,8 but it was an Armenian song about a kidnapped Armenian woman whose bereft beloved looks for her in the orchards. I am wandering in the orchards of Gesi I lost my beloved, alas, I cannot find her O my beloved, I trust you are all right [healthy]. Come, sit next to me, Let me tell you how I’m doing [what I have been through] What am I to do [as my beloved] has no idea what I have been through.9

F igur e 34.   Araxie’s father, Mugeurditch, meeting his younger brother, Minas, in Istanbul, 1950. Courtesy of Araxie Djiknavorian Hardy.

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By 2005, not only had Araxie moved from Beirut to Racine but also her uncle had died. She no longer had his contact information, but because she had brought the cherished Istanbul picture of her father and his brother, her small group stopped at the local barbershop in Gesi where everyone just might know everyone else. Araxie, Aroyan, and Cemal, and to some degree Araxie’s husband, Charles, spoke Turkish, so a lively conversation ensued, during which Cemal took the opportunity to get a haircut and shave. The barber indeed recognized the photo of Uncle Minas but said he had died seven years earlier, in 1997 (his children would later say it was twelve years earlier); however, three of his children still lived locally. At that point, a blind man who had been sitting in the corner joined in, asking Araxie: “ So how are you related to Minas?” “He’s my uncle,” said Araxie. “Are you from Beirut?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “Did your father go to Istanbul to see his brother in 1950? “Yes,” she said. “Well, my father went with him!”

The blind man, furthermore, had a mobile phone number for Minas’s son, Mevlut, and in a short time they were meeting at Mevlut’s summer cottage. Looking at her first cousin for the first time, Araxie pronounced, “He looks like my big brother!” And when she showed Mevlut the photo, he grabbed and kissed it, saying, on seeing his own father’s brother for the first time, “My uncle, my uncle!” When Araxie said that her father would point to the photo and say that Minas was wearing the suit he had brought him from Beirut, her cousin said that he had heard that story too. They were soon joined by two more of Araxie’s first cousins (Mevlut’s sisters) and some of their children and grandchildren. Naturally, they talked about their families; but they avoided the topic of 1915. During it all, Araxie was anxiously waiting for a time to ask her question, but in the end, feeling uncomfortable, Aroyan posed it for her. He asked the question squarely: “In the sürgün10 [exile], why did your father stay here?” And Mevlut answered simply: “My father was only a child. We [meaning his grandfather’s family] hid him, and he was happy.” Things suddenly fell into place for Araxie. “Now I get it!” she said. “My father always

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used to say, ‘the Agha [T: Ağa; a Kurdish tribal leader or a wealthy landlord] protected us. When they came to take them out and kill them, [the Agha and his wife] would keep us under the blankets. And they would say to the authorities, “There are no Armenians here: Hosh chi’ga, Hosh chi’ga [there are none, there are none].” ’” Of course, Araxie was quoting her father, speaking to her in Armenian; not the Agha, who would have said this in Turkish. “So,” continued Araxie, “after the authorities left they would uncover the blankets and that’s why my father would tell me, ‘the Agha hid us.’ Whoever this Agha was, he and his wife didn’t have a child. So, he kept my uncle as his own child. That’s why he stayed here! He was only a year and a half.” At this point, Aroyan asked Mevlut: “And what was this Agha’s name?” He answered, smiling, “Mevlut. The same as me.” He had been named for the “grandfather” who, at enormous risk, had saved his own father.11 And then, because Aroyan asked him to, he sang “Gesi Bağları.” Mevlut’s sister, Mukaddes, then told Araxie this story: “Last night I had a dream, and in the dream I died. But then someone said to me, ‘Why are you dying? You’re young still!’ I said, ‘Because it’s my turn to die.’ And then, when I came here today, I understood that this was the reason I didn’t die.” She then took the picture of the two brothers and, looking at the image of her father, began to cry. “We loved him so much.” Clearly, this was a powerful meeting for both sides. Araxie now fully understood why her uncle had not accepted her father’s plea that he return with him to Beirut and rejoin his Armenian community. His Armenian past was not a secret, but he had been lovingly raised and had been a Muslim for all the life he could remember, and he had produced an affectionate Muslim family of his own.12 Araxie’s homeland thus housed her own first cousins, but not as “Armenians.” For all the cousins, their connection gave comfort to a lost past, but for Araxie at least, that connection seemed to have no viable future, as geographical and especially cultural differences made it hard for them to connect in a permanent way. They kept in touch for several years but then less and less so. In some ways, perhaps, finding relatives had only made the fissure from the genocide more harsh and the loss of home more real. The few pilgrims who visited relatives had “found” them through a variety of connections that had been maintained after the genocide; for example, girls or young women taken into Muslim homes and converted may have made contact with brothers or fathers who had either escaped or had moved

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earlier to the United States, and had corresponded with them, sometimes even exchanging photos. Joyce’s Armenian grandparents from Karakala in the then Russian Oblast of Kars, having become Christian Molokans, had fled from persecution there to the United States in 1906 with 2,000 others from Kars villages. When Joyce discovered saved letters that showed her grandfather had kept in touch with his older sister, she traced the family back to Injesu (T: Incesu), another village of Kars, finding that sister’s granddaughter, who had married a Turk and converted to Islam.13 She used her Aroyan pilgrimage to meet this cousin. Although she felt little connection at first, she made an effort to return and soon established warm relations with her cousin and her family. Nancy, Araxie and Joyce were among the few who met family after such a long separation, but pilgrims were increasingly to discover that Muslims with Armenian heritage were, apparently, everywhere—at least in the areas of eastern and southeastern Turkey that had been heavily Armenian. This was no shock to Armen Aroyan, who had long announced on the bus that by the time pilgrims got to Moush, “everyone” they would meet would have an Armenian grandmother. In fact, in 2008, Lucy said that after they danced in honor of resistance fighters on the bridge at Sulukh (Suluk; T: Muratgören), near Moush, a man came up to them and said that his grandmother was Armenian. “He said her name was Diruhi! He said ‘Shnorhagal em!’ [I thank you]. I heard it with my own ears! And he was a very handsome man!” The entire bus then posed for pictures with this apparition. A few years earlier when Carolann, her husband, George, and her aunt Hasmeig had gone into a shop in Van, “George struck up a conversation with the clerk. ‘Van is a very nice city,’ he said slowly, hoping she would be able to understand. ‘Yes,’ she managed. ‘Van is.’ And then, to our utter amazement, she said: ‘Van’ is a city of ’ Armenians.’ She placed her palm on her chest. ‘I am Armenian,’ she said.”14 But not everyone felt comfortable with a full reveal of their roots. Lucille recalled an event in Kharpert in 2011: [D]uring breakfast, one of the young bus-boys was very attentive to our group. He asked where we were from and of course, we gave the usual answer, that we were Armenians from America who were visiting our ancestral villages. At that point, he said he wanted to treat us to Turkish (really Armenian) coffee. We accepted and it was soon brought to our table. We exchanged pleasantries

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and I learned that he was 24 years old, had a girlfriend, and that his name was Resul (proudly pointing to his name tag). As we were leaving the dining room, he came up beside me, took me by the elbow, faced me and softly said, “Pray for me.”15

These discoveries activated a mixture of responses in the pilgrims from antipathy to joy, often all at once, for they experienced these new acquaintances as nearly relatives—yet not. A r m e n i a n s — o r “ A r m e n i a n s ” — A r e Ev e r y wh e r e

Turkey has a strikingly complex, contested and literally innumerable population of Turkish citizens of Armenian heritage.16 The oldest group must be the Hemshin, who had begun to embrace Islam as early as the 16th century and were fully Muslim by the 19th century.17 However, as they were isolated (and to this day remain somewhat so) near the Black Sea, not only did they continue to keep a communal identity but also one of the two Hemshin groups still speaks a dialect of Western Armenian understandable to the Armenianspeaking pilgrims who meet them. A second group of Turkish citizens with Armenian heritage has been typologized as “crypto” (coded) or “hidden” Armenians: people who have kept their personal identity as Armenian Christians, but secretly, while publicly identifying as Muslims, for fear of social consequences.18 Many Anatolian Armenians became “hidden” after surviving the genocide. Some were able to band together as families or even as whole villages while passing as Muslims; this often enabled them to intermarry with other hidden Armenians. Some groups remained together into the early 1940s and some into the 1970s, when political and social pressures led them either to move to Istanbul, where they could come out of hiding, or to remain in place and convert.19 The term Islamized Armenians usually refers to Armenians who converted to Islam under pressure, usually due to the 19th-century Hamidian massacres or the 1915 genocide or its aftermath: that is, for reasons of survival rather than faith. Although their new religious identity was of great importance, these identities were further layered by new ethnic identifications as Turks or Kurds. But not all Islamized Armenians were converted one hundred or more years ago. Sofia Hagopian suggests that “probably around 70–80% of the conversions of Armenians and Crypto Armenians may have happened in

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the mid-20th century, as various forms of repression loomed again.20 Moreover, the term Islamized Armenians lacks specificity because it also refers to the descendants of the converted, given that the Turkish curating of genealogy insists that Armenian ancestry is permanent and may be totalizing. Perhaps a less fraught term might be heritage Armenians.21 Certainly, not having a term for them threatens to erase their reality as a typology or, as in the case here, as almost a cohort, one surviving despite having a forbidden history and thus in inner conflict, and being mostly invisible. R e t u r n o f t h e La s t A r m e n i a n : M y G r a n d m o t h e r

This hidden population’s near complete veiling was abruptly lifted when Fethiye Çetin’s 2004 book Anneannem (published in English in 2012 as My Grandmother) hit Turkey’s bookstores like a bomb.22 In it, Çetin narrates the discovery that her beloved grandmother was not named Seher but Heranush, and that before 1915 she had had an Armenian childhood in the village of Havav (T: Ekinözu). She had been on the death marches, torn from her mother, adopted by an Ottoman soldier, and then married to a Muslim in Maden, not far from her childhood village. Çetin poignantly presents her personal struggle with this story and its cover-up. This “moment of public discovery”23 catapulted this hidden population into the Turkish public consciousness, and soon countless others in Turkey began to tell their own stories or ask questions they had not thought to ask before. It also opened a new field of research in the fraught politics of heritage,24 perhaps because it had hit a raw nerve in private homes. In 2005, the Ordu-born Turkish filmmaker Berke Baş,25 while investigating and then making a documentary about the life of her Armenian grandmother, commented on how any spatial knowledge of the Armenian past had completely vanished in Ordu by the time of her generation, many of whom were the grandchildren of the Armenian children who, like her grandmother, were taken in by local Muslim families. She and her family, including that grandmother, would picnic in the hills of Ordu with what was called “the Armenian Cliff ” in the background. Only during her research did she come to understand that the Armenian Cliff was a place where Armenians had been pushed to their deaths. She mused that her parents, and certainly her grandmother, who was nine at the time of the genocide, must have known this, but that knowledge was not passed on to her because, she said, it was taboo.

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Çetin’s book put a finger on what Christine Philliou calls the central taboo at the heart of the modern Turkish nation-state.26 In fact, its most controversial revelation might have been that Çetin had an Armenian grandmother at all, inasmuch as Turkish state efforts like the “skeleton business,” described in Chapter 17, maintained that there could be no survivor population because there had been no genocide. Ayse Gül Altınay views My Grandmother as “critical storytelling, a kind of storytelling that (in Lisa Disch’s terms) ‘serves not to settle questions but to unsettle them and to inspire spontaneous critical thinking in its audience’ [becoming] a powerful tool in confronting totalitarian narratives.”27 Certainly, the ongoing discovery that an entire population has been hidden from view, often, in fact, right where they had been left behind, has created the unsettling possibility of an irreparable rent in the Turkish narrative of a homogeneous nation, and thus in what it could mean “to be Turkish.” The recognition of heritage Armenians would also affect what it means to be “Armenian,” and with some immediacy for Armenian pilgrims, it had the power to change their idea of homeland. Battling the state’s homogenizing narrative that denied the Armenian story, the Kurdish populations of Turkey had already begun to activate a pluralistic historical consciousness among themselves, one that gained power by having a place for Armenians in it. The progression of their awakening identity suggests it is they who have taken the lead in the development of a new politics of introspection, even institutionalizing it in the Kurdish east.

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A Homeland of Mirrors

In 2015, one hundred years

after the genocide, Armen Demircian sat in the courtyard of Surp Giragos Church with his own version of a “blue folder.” It wasn’t blue, nor was it a folder, but like Mary Ann (Chapter 1), he carried an array of family memorabilia as his material claim to home, a home that Surp Giragos Church represented. “It means everything to me,” he said. “It’s the gift of our ancestors to us. As an Armenian, I can see myself here.”1 And yet he also identified as a Muslim Kurdish citizen of Turkey. Demircian carried the death records of his great-grandfather, grandfather and uncle. All were listed as “Christian,” “Married,” and dead in 1915. He also had the death record of his father, but there the entry for religion said “Islam.”2 In fact, his father’s passport even showed that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Conversely, his father’s ID card revealed that his ancestral name was an Armenian one: Demircian (pronounced Demirjian).3 The son had begun to search for these documents in the mid-1980s, when, following his father’s death, he learned of his Armenian heritage from an uncle in his Diyarbakir village of Lidje. His father had been about four at the time of the genocide, surviving only because a neighbor had hidden him in a barn. He was then taken in and raised by a local Kurdish family. When he grew up, he married one of its daughters. Until his father’s death, then, Demircian felt himself as nothing other than Kurdish. His family spoke only Kurdish at home, sang Kurdish songs and 208

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identified with Kurdish traditions.4 Perplexed and a bit shaken, he worked hard to find out as much as he could about this new past, although he already understood that being Armenian was a secret to be kept. In fact, it suddenly made sense why as a child he had been taunted with the Kurdish word filleh, which, along with bavfilleh and gawir (T: gavur: “unbeliever” or “infidel”) were used for Armenian genocide survivors who had been converted to Islam, and then for their progeny.5 Eventually, he decided to take his father’s original last name of Demircian; but he has kept his original Muslim first name of Abdurrahim, introducing himself as Armen only to those who knew or shared his story. By the time he showed his documents to New York Times reporter Tim Arango in 2015, he had become not only a new type of “Armenian pilgrim” but also a volunteer guide and caretaker at Surp Giragos Church.6 How he came out of hiding and enlarged his identity to “Armenian-­ Kurdish,” without changing his religion, parallels the astonishing maturation of a Kurdish political movement that came to include a recognition of the Armenian genocide—and even of Kurdish culpability in it. A K u r d i s h A wa k e n i n g

For many hundreds of years, the homeland of ethnic Kurdish tribes has been the mountainous areas where eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq and northern Syria intersect. With their own languages and culture, the Kurds have considered themselves a distinct ethnicity in these areas since time immemorial. Those who came under Ottoman rule resisted its centralizing control, and by the 19th century, there were semiorganized revolts against Ottoman domination.7 But the position of the Kurds under the new Republic of Turkey was demonstrably worse than it had been under the Ottomans, even insufferable, as they found themselves often marginalized by a new government concept that linked citizenship with being an ethnic Turk—leaving aside those who identified with any of the variety of other ethnicities that had been part of the Ottoman Empire—and with being Sunni rather than Shi‘a Muslim. (A major segment of the Kurdish population is Sunni, but a large section identifies as Alevi, a syncretic variety of Shi‘a Islam.) From the Turkish state’s inception, then, Kurds discovered that they were ideologically excluded from it, sometimes in brutal fashion. The official nationalist discourse of the Turkish state referred to them with the euphemism

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“Mountain Turks,” a phrase that ascribed their difference to their geographical setting and suppressed any notion of their separate ethnic or linguistic identity by transforming them into a “kind of ” Turk. Over the course of the Republican period, massacres or forcible resettling to the west, with a concomitant repopulating of Kurdish areas with ethnic Turks, were not uncommon,8 and reminiscent of the Hamidian repression of the Armenians, it became illegal in Turkey even to use the words Kurd, Kurdistan, or Kurdish. Hampartzoum Vasilian, whose 1951 itinerary included Diyarbakir, wrote that “mutual relations between the Turks and the Kurds are far from cordial. The Kurds are not trusted and enjoy a lower social status. The Government is very stern toward them. In all probability this is the reason for the presence of a Turkish force inside the city, numbering 5,000.” He also pointed out that the inner area of Diyarbakir was almost entirely Kurdish. Turks lived in the newer section outside the walls.9 In multiple ways, then, the Kurds were treated as had been the Armenians before them. A brief liberalization period, between the Turkish coup of 1960 and the one in 1980, allowed a surge of Kurdish political consciousness and activities, leading to the founding of the PKK (K: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê [Kurdistan Workers Party]) in 1973, by Abdullah Öcalan. Among Kurds, the PKK became known for its armed resistance; the Turkish government (and many other states) declared it a terrorist organization, a designation its supporters contest. What is uncontested is that it opened the way for the rise of “pro-Kurdish” representative political parties (that is, those with a Kurdish social justice agenda), which led to the formation of the HDP (T: Halkların Demokratik Partisi [Peoples’ Democratic Party]). Following the 1980 coup, this first opening was closed by the promulgation of the 1982 Constitution, still in force today. Political rights were again curtailed, and most ominously, the ruling party took control of the judiciary and increased the military’s role in domestic affairs. As the activist Ragip Zarakolu relates, it was at this point that the coup’s leader, General Kenan Evren, erased the words Armenia and Kurdistan from all historical maps used in Turkey,10 and the Kurdish language was banned by law. Evren was also the official who added the modifier “socalled” (T: sözde) to the phrase “Armenian genocide.” From this point forward, those activists in Kurdish nationalist organizations who were not killed ended up in the Diyarbakir prison, newly established by the Ministry of Justice and infamous for systematic torture,

A Homeland of Mirrors

until it was closed in 2004. In prison, the members of the pro-Kurdish resistance movement sharpened their ideologies and developed networks of colleagues.11 Prison was also where the Armenian genocide began to be understood as a precursor to what was happening to the Kurds. Later, this idea would be reiterated in a story related by the pro-Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir: when a Kurd insulted an Armenian priest, he was told, “We were the breakfast for them, you will be the lunch. Don’t forget.”12 One of these activists was Recep Maraşlı, a writer and later publisher who was detained in the Diyarbakir prison in 1980 at the age of 17, but later was moved to the Alemdağ prison. There he and his fellow prisoners wrote a series of pamphlets that may have been the first works on the Armenian genocide to circulate in Kurdish circles13 and that were certainly instrumental in the decision by the PKK in 1982 to recognize the Armenian genocide, an astounding development first announced in the party newspaper, Serxwebûn (Independence).14 Kurdish activists then went even further: not only was the genocide of the Armenians recognized but so too was Kurdish participation in it. That story too would be written in the Diyarbakir prison, where Serdar Can (pronounced John) decided that giving permanence to this history was an act of conscience. Still, it was no secret. Certainly, Kurdish complicity in the pogrom against the Armenians in 1915 was discussed everywhere in Diyarbakir, whether in private homes or in public. In fact, a major source for Can was the family stories told to him by his Kurdish fellow prisoners. For his book, he said that he just “changed some of the names and places and set them up in a literary form.”15 He also said that he used a fabulist form because, “I could not use the word ‘Armenian’ directly. I could not do this because of articles 141 and 142 of the Penal Code.”16 His fellow inmates were surprised by what he wrote, thinking he would write about prison conditions; but no one contested its truth. Can’s book was published as part of his 1991 work Nenemin Masalları (Tales of My Grandmother), which included stories he had heard from his own Armenian grandmother, Xelat, and whose publication predated Fethiye Çetin’s 2004 My Grandmother by over a decade. Can’s grandmother had no doubt been “rescued” as a small child from the town of Xelat (T: Ahlat; A: Khlat), on the northwestern shore of Lake Van, during the murder of its Armenian population by Kurds in 1915,17 and as a young girl she became the third wife of a man in one of Diyarbakir’s many Kurdish villages. By calling

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attention to the fact that many Kurds had an Armenian parent or grandparent who as a child had been absorbed into a Muslim family, Can conveyed solidarity with Armenians at a deep level, making his work an act of bravery as well as an act of memory, especially as inmates suspected of being of Armenian origin were subjected to special violence. By recognizing the genocide, their complicity in it, and the fact that many Kurds had a hidden Armenian heritage, the pro-Kurdish movement had jumped the divide between the Armenian and the Kurdish struggles. By no means did—or does—this movement include all Kurds,18 although it would be hard to find Kurds who feel at home with the state narrative of Turkish nationalism. But as Bilgin Ayata argues, an acceptance of the past and the Kurdish place in it allowed the pro-Kurdish movement to develop “an emancipatory vision of politics based on a heightened sense of justice, pluralism, and radical democracy.”19 Ayata goes even further to suggest that the struggle for Armenian equity and recognition could only be driven by the Kurds, in part because they were sufficiently numerous to matter in Turkey. Making up a good 20 to 25 percent of the population, Kurds did not need to waste energy on fighting being called “enemies of the state.” Armen­ ians, in contrast, making up less than 1 percent of the population, needed to consolidate their energies in such a fight against the state, merely to survive in it.20 Adnan Çelik summarizes the pro-Kurdish move into mainstream politics in these terms: “In the 1999 general elections, candidates aligned with the Kurdish political movement in Turkey—the cadres and sympathizers of the PKK and the supporters of the legal Kurdish and pro-Kurdish parties, currently the DBP and HDP—were elected as mayors and won a majority of city council seats in most municipalities in the Kurdistan region, including Diyarbakir. These gains inaugurated what imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan referred to as a Cultural Revolution. Urban spaces were now seen as the new organizational sphere for the Kurdish movement, where Kurdish past, identity and culture would be explored.”21 The de facto Kurdish capital, and the center of this pro-Kurdish (and Armenian-supportive) movement remains Diyarbakir. In 2004, the year that Turkey, with an eye to European Union membership, closed the Diyarbakir prison, Osman Baydemir, as the new mayor of the city, promised a city with “multi-ethnicity, multi-identity, [and a] multi-cultural character.”22 Abdullah

A Homeland of Mirrors

Demirbaş, the mayor of Sur, the city’s historical center, would soon make Kurdish the city’s official language and add its once local languages, like Armenian, to its public signage. As the idea of Armenian language and people became more visible and less toxic,23 ethnic Kurds and Turks of partly or wholly Armenian parentage, but whose Armenian heritage had until then felt taboo, began to appear more frequently. For many, the personal incentive to publicly claim their Armenian ancestry was boosted in 2007 by the visceral anger and loss they felt when the prominent Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered in Istanbul. One example is Fatmanur Çete,24 whose family is from the Diyarbakir area village of Kulp (Kulb; T: Alaca).25 His Armenian grandfather had been taken into a Kurdish family as a child, had been converted to Islam, and was later given to an also-converted Armenian bride, which was often the case for these converted children, even if they did not know this themselves. In fact, raised in Diyarbakir, Fatmanur had not been told of his Armenian heritage, and was even trained to disparage Armenians. Finding out about his heritage later in life, he said: “I think the death of Hrant Dink had also a decisive role. For example, my mother prayed Namaz five times a day, she was a very religious Muslim, but when Hrant Dink was murdered, she cried for days, could not control herself. As if our past memories were refreshed.”26 Another example is Abdullah (Armen) Demircian, mentioned earlier, and who had struggled to digest what he had been told about his Armenian heritage in the 1980s, at age 25. He chose to make this heritage public only twenty years later, after Hrant Dink was assassinated. “After his death, I decided to take risks.” he said. “There is a limit to fear.”27 In spite of the opposition of the Turkish state and that state’s supporters, the pro-Kurdish movement has forged ahead. In 2008, it even took issue with an online public apology to the Armenians (“Özür Diliyorum” [I apologize]) that had been made by social justice‒minded Turkish citizens, both intellectuals and individuals. Within a year the apology had 30,000 signatures. Whereas the state reacted angrily to any recognition that there was something to apologize for, the pro-Kurdish movement chastised the letter writers for their weakness because they spoke of the “great catastrophe” (büyük felaket) instead of saying the taboo word “genocide” (soykırım; lit. “lineage destruction”). Recep Maraşlı, who had inspired a Kurdish recognition of the genocide from prison in 1982, had been one of the letter’s signatories.28

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F igur e 35.   Surp Giragos Church, Diyarbakir, as restored in 2011. View of the main altar from the balcony, 2015. Photo by Lynn Derderian.

Furthermore, in 2009, in spite of an environment of state interference in Kurdish politics, the pro-Kurdish party in Diyarbakir supported the restoration of Surp Giragos Church, the largest Armenian church in the Middle East, as appropriate to the multicultural city they valued. Although primary financial support and oversight came from Istanbul’s Surp Giragos Armenian Church Foundation and the diaspora’s Armenian communities, the valuable financial participation of the pro-Kurdish party bespoke a desire to reverse the state’s official strategy of erasing non-Muslim history. 29 (Figure 35). In 2011, Surp Giragos was reopened and re-consecrated by the Armenian Archbishop Aram Ateşyan, who was welcomed by the city’s mayor, Osman Baydemir. Baydemir concluded the opening program by addressing the Armenians who had come back to celebrate, saying: “Today is not just an opportunity for celebration but also a day to express our [hope for] forgiveness for the regrettable incidents of the past. We wish for you to come again, not as tourists but as compatriots returning to your home. Here it is not [just] tolerance that will be shown toward you but respect as well”30 Armenian communities

A Homeland of Mirrors

in Turkey and in the diaspora were well aware of how this differed from the state’s message when it had restored Surp Khach (Holy Cross) Church, the 10th-century Armenian church on Lake Van’s island of Aghtamar. When Surp Khach was reopened in 2020, it was as a secular museum, out of the control of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul or any Armenian community, and available for a Divine Liturgy service only once a year.31 Despite Mayor Baydemir’s appeal, traveling there in 2015, Flora felt that Diyarbakir exemplified what she called a dilemma of “presence and absence.” “Diyarbakir is making this real effort to have an Armenian presence, rebuilding the church, etc. But there are hardly any Armenians there so it’s almost like a ghost presence or a memorial presence.” When she posed this dilemma to the Kurdish poet Kawa Nemir (see Chapter 10), she was surprised by the “exact words he used: ‘Come back.’” She mused in her journal that this was “just not going to happen with Armenians,” and ended by asking herself: “What is the relationship to this land that was/is ours, Armenians—but is not mine in any way, except in fragmented memory?”32 I know of only one diasporic Armenian who repatriated: in 2013, Udi Yervant Bostancı answered Mayor Baydemir’s invitation and moved back to Diyarbakir, after twenty-one years of exile in the United States, and soon began to organize social and cultural groups at Surp Giragos.33 The church had become a place to greet Armenians from Istanbul and the diaspora, but it now had an added function as a gathering place for the growing group of local people who had discovered their Armenian parentage, whether they were among the few who embraced their Christian past or the majority who wished to explore their Armenian past without relinquishing their Muslim present. At the church they could discuss Armenian history and culture and even take Armenian language classes. The pilgrims who travelled with Armen Aroyan, whether they knew this political history or not, were already primed for Kurdish compassion by the warmth of Cemal ( Jemal) Kökmen, the Kurdish driver of their bus. Cemal had joined Aroyan in the early 1990s and was later assisted by his son Selçuk (Seljuk). For most pilgrims, Cemal and Selçuk were the first Kurds they had ever met. The pilgrim Krikor, who referred to them affectionately as “Kurd Cemal and his precious son, Selçuk,” wrote: “[Cemal] knows and understands our painful hearts and psychological condition very well,” and “with a sensitive pen, wrote poems of love about Moush, Ani, Aghtamar, and Mother

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Arax [the ancient river Araxes that divides Armenia and Turkey (T: Aras)]. And he greeted us with flowers.”34 Cemal would even make cardboard “keys” to cities for individual pilgrims, putting them on a string so he could place them around their necks when they arrived at “their” homes. Selçuk offered his own sensitivity as a balm to the rawness of the pilgrims’ emotions. Lucille called Selçuk “our driver and friend.”35 Mayor Baydemir’s message was a political welcome, but for the pilgrims, Cemal and Selçuk were proof of its authenticity. By 2015, the time of the centennial commemoration of the genocide, Surp Giragos was a bona fide pilgrimage site for Armenians of any history, and for tourists in general. It had opened a gift shop offering towels with embroidered images of the historical church tower, ceramic cups, small plates, magnets and T-shirts with similar images, along with a variety of reading materials in several languages. Visitors could sit at outdoor tables shaded by trees, and drink endless glasses of tea. Surp Giragos had become “the nerve centre of that little community which is trying to rebuild itself after years of forced sleep.”36 Yet by the fall of that same year, Diyarbakir had fallen victim to the painful, sudden closure of the slow opening that pro-Kurdish activists and citizens had shared with Armenians. The process is summarized and contextualized by Adnan Çelik: Around November 2015, it turned out that the Turkish state didn’t quite consent to the new historical narrative and memory construction of the Kurdish movement. Starting in October 2015 and intensified around November, armed confrontations broke out between the Turkish security forces and Kurdish ­militants—mostly young residents of Sur [the historic center where Surp Giragos is located] who organized themselves in an army group to demand self-­ governance. For about 110 days the neighborhood was the scene of a resistance for self-governance and a relentless state siege trying to annihilate the resistance. . . . Never-ending curfews and sieges based on a policy of depopulating the district and demolishing it to the ground, not only led to the death of people, material damages or displacement of thousands but it also destroyed, almost completely, the sites of memory that had carried the thousand years of historical heritage.37

Surp Giragos was attacked and vandalized and the state even attempted to repossess it, but perhaps pressured by those in Turkey and the diaspora who so lovingly supported the church, Turkish courts stopped this insult.38 All the

A Homeland of Mirrors

instrumental pro-Kurdish actors, including Osman Baydemir and Abdullah Demirbaş, were given prison sentences. Selahattin Demirtaş, who was the HDP’s presidential candidate in 2014, was jailed indefinitely; in 2018 he ran a second campaign from prison.39 But Surp Giragos and its pro-Kurdish supporters had already inspired the Gomidas Institute to call upon Armenians, especially in the diaspora, to reciprocate Kurdish solidarity with Armenian empathy. As Ara Sarafian put it: “to draw attention to the humiliation and brutalization of the Kurds in the Turkish Republic, the destruction of thousands of villages by the Turkish Army in the 1980s and 1990s, people driven into the cities as internally displaced people where they have lived in abject poverty. . . . The last one hundred years of Kurdish history and its legacy are something that Armenians need to understand better.”40 Furthermore, in spite of an increased crackdown by the state, the closure of Surp Giragos Church, the subsequent decrease in pilgrimages, and a world pandemic, the hunger for connections between Armenian pilgrims and local Kurds and Turks has shown an urge to rebound. Moreover, the introduction of DNA testing has revealed opportunities for new connections as has the sharing of stories and histories at the most fundamental level of family—with the possibility of overcoming long-held distrusts. Ray, whose father was from Chunkush, discovered a Kurdish fifth cousin through a DNA test taken at random. An e-mail correspondence began enthusiastically, but when the topic of the genocide was broached, the exchange was ended by the cousin, still in the thrall of the state narrative. Laura G., however, had a different experience when she found two brothers, Sharif (T: Şerif) and Mehmet, living in her great-grandfather’s house in Havav (T: Ekinözü).41 They were not exactly in it, but in a replacement, as, sadly, they had torn the original house down just a month before her arrival, as it was in a state of decay. But not only had they been raised in it as their ancestral house, they reported that their grandmother had been Armenian. Laura received this news as a surreal shock. Were they relatives or were they the descendants of perpetrators—or both? Mehmet agreed to take a DNA test, as one of Laura’s co-travelers had auspiciously (and illegally, as home DNA-based testing kits are banned in Turkey) brought a genetic testing kit along. Laura, of course, would take one, too. A few weeks later, at home in the United States, the results made clear that Laura and the brothers had a common ancestor. It now seemed not at all unlikely that Mehmet and Sharif ’s Armenian grandmother

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was one of the “left behind,” given to or stolen by a Muslim family; and moreover, she was most likely the sister of Laura’s great-grandfather, who had escaped from Havav, but who never talked about it. The brothers had agreed to DNA testing because they were excited to learn about their own past; they had already known and accepted that they had an Armenian heritage. Laura, on the other hand, understanding how the house had left the family, had much to digest. “I don’t think I was truly prepared for what I found,” she said. George Aghjayan, the geographer and Director of the Armenian Historical Archives, who had helped Laura find her house, had himself joined the Armenian DNA Project with the explicit hope of recovering family from the dead.42 In 2015, his tests showed that he had a male first or second cousin in Turkey. They contacted each other online and determined that this man’s mother, Muslimeh, who had been plucked from a death march and ended up married to a Muslim in Chunkush, had been George’s great-grandmother’s sister Vazkanoush. Later, George and his new cousin Cengiz were able to meet in person, and they have become close friends. They traveled together throughout the Armenian highlands, and in 2019 they made a pilgrimage to the grave of Vazkanoush in Chunkush. As George put it, “The sentiments were clear, our family was together again.” Coincidentally, George had already met his cousin’s neighbors on an earlier trip to Chunkush, when he had been led to meet a woman named Asiya because she was known as an Armenian. As a very young child she had been saved with her mother from death in the Chunkush gorge. George felt a kinship with Asiya and had promised her that he would try to find her relatives, although she remembered only first names. In 2017 he traveled to Chunkush to give her a DNA test. The search has not ended, but at least, before her death in February 2021, he could report to her that her grandparents had been part of the Aslanian family who lived north of the village of Hoghe.43 The search for family by Turkish citizens who are descendants of Armenians in the homeland parallels the one by the descendants of survivors in the diaspora. Even Abdullah (Armen) Demircian, the caretaker at Surp Giragos, had found two Armenian cousins, one in Amsterdam, another in Marseilles, and he had an article about a potential third who was an antiques dealer in New York.44 Moreover, like but counter to the pilgrims from the diaspora who search Anatolia for faces of relatives, he searched the faces of the diasporic pilgrims for relatives of his own.45

A Homeland of Mirrors

Certainly, by reflecting each other, varied groups find their common homeland has become a landscape of mirrors. However, the stakes are much higher for Turkish citizens for whom, under the current constitution, ethnic identity defines citizenship, determines personal security, and can be a lethal weapon. Perhaps as a warning shot, in 2018 Turkish citizens found that the government held a secret coding system for ethnic background. In this system, “Greeks were 1, Armenians were 2, and Jews were 3.”46 Along with its message of “we know who you are,” the collection and then the publication of this seemingly surveillant database may be interpreted as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [ Justice and Development Party]) administration circling the wagons of a nationalism that has been a forceful component of its claim to power.47 When the United States recognized the Armenian genocide in 2021, the far-right MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi [Nationalist Movement Party]) leader, Devlet Bahçeli, a staunch ally of the AKP, used this news of recognition to refocus attention on the proKurdish HDP; not only did he denigrate them for having recognized the genocide years before but also attempted to malign them as Armenians themselves: “The roots of the HDP are Armenian, so is their identity. The gates of Yerevan are open for these thugs who say that our nation committed a genocide.”48 In Diyarbakir, Varduhi Balyan wrote that “because of the clashes in Sur province of Diyarbakir, destruction of Sur, and Surp Giragos being out of reach, Armenians of Diyarbakir once again ‘retired into their shells like turtles.’”49 Clearly, each of the many thousands of citizens of Turkey who have, or will find that they have, an Armenian heritage must negotiate their identity with great moral courage. Ethnic and religious identity is one of the through lines of this book as well as a fault line between Armenians with an Ottoman past and Turkish citizens today. Pilgrims like Laura in Havav or Nancy A. in Istanos found it disconcerting to be connected to either Turks or Kurds. George felt it as a sibling bond. But each Armenian, pilgrim or not, who looks into this new mirror to welcome those with Armenian ancestry into their own story, looks straight into an unforeseen opportunity to help fuse what Flora felt as presence and absence and to join these others in restoring memory to what has been a sadly barren landscape.

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Revealing the Emotional Weight of Home

Thanks to the trust

and generosity of Armen Aroyan and to the many Armenian-American pilgrims who let me join them on their journeys, I sat with pilgrims on their buses, listened to their stories and conversations, and watched the ways in which they approached and experienced their quest to find their ancestral homes in Turkey, wrested from their families during the Armenian genocide. Being welcomed into their groups enabled me to capture the details and gradations of their attachments, actions and reactions. Furthermore, a consequent familiarity with their itineraries, and especially with the physical, cultural and emotional terrains that they encountered allowed a focused and sensitized examination of other pilgrims’ reports of their own journeys: that is, those I did not travel with myself. These materials, which I collected over a decade, include the reflective essays the pilgrims wrote for Aroyan and the pilgrimage videos he took, but also blog postings, maps, memoirs, journals and even works such as poetry and films created by pilgrims who had traveled with him or independently. Altogether, these observations and texts and other materials comprise an archive drawn from several hundred pilgrimages spanning a period of over fifty years. What sets this book apart from other studies of such tragic losses of homeland and pilgrimages of return is the depth and richness of its documentation, which not only preserves an amalgam of individual experiences that might otherwise be lost but has also led to the development of a unique theoretical structure, 220

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methodology and vocabulary that combines ethnography and a poetic vision suitable for working with a subject carrying such emotional weight. This analytical framework developed organically as I tried to understand and translate how profound and often inchoate longings were expressed and even satisfied in places that felt like the scariest sites on earth. Central to the pilgrims’ experiences was the search for their family houses: real places that loom in their histories as distillations of all the emotions held by exiles forced from home—warmth, wholeness, fear, trauma and rage. What drove them, then, was memory. Yet it was clear, almost by definition, that “memory” of their houses or of the genocide was applicable only for the earliest pilgrims, those who had once lived in those houses. By having information from both groups, however, I was able to construct a new category of memory that differentiated pilgrims who were the direct descendants of these survivors from the survivors themselves. I term this descendant category memory-stories, because the memories these descendants brought with them were not their own but were stories they remembered hearing from their relatives in the survivor generation. Thus, because the descendant pilgrims themselves had no firsthand memories of the houses and places they sought, the emotional burden ascribed to those lost houses was in large part a resonance of the pilgrims’ attachment to the survivors in their families back home—in places like North Providence, RI, Belmont, Worcester and Watertown, MA, Fresno and Glendale, CA, and New York City, NY. In this way, the memory-stories that tie descendants to their houses is different from yet equal to the memories of the survivors, as both are wholly autobiographical. The great majority of the descendant pilgrims presented in this book carried their memory-stories as narratives, but some also possessed memorystories reified as material objects or bodily knowledge. They would deploy both types—from their grandparents’ wedding photos and their father’s village dances to stories of mulberry trees and disappearances—as an arsenal of affect. It was by looking carefully at how these related to the varied things they did that I began to apprehend the depth and complexity of their experience. I could then typologize these actions on an intimate scale. But what was needed to understand the layered meanings of all these activities was an analytical framework. It was not the mere fact that pilgrims took home dirt from their family house or that they hid photos in authentic or proxy houses, but that these actions, which were undertaken by many and

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which appeared similar, were prompted by personal memory-stories, and it was this individuation that accounted for the range of the needs they satisfied and the ways by which they acquired their powers. As I began to see the pilgrims’ activities and processes as efforts to establish a congruency between what they felt on the inside and what was happening on the outside, I felt the need for a vision and a vocabulary that could embrace what appeared to be a profoundly poetic reach of the soul. Referencing Mircea Eliade’s focus on the sacred,1 I conceived the houseworld that the pilgrims entered as having its own sacred meaning, making it receptive to, even summoning actions and perceptions of the spiritual or soulful nature of home. A fundamental argument made by Eliade concerns spatial relations, for he sees sacred space as radiating from its own center, where it is connected to the eternal by a cosmic axis. This center is the place of one’s existential reality, and thus the place where one chooses to live, physically and symbolically; it is the place of home. One comes to recognize the realm of the sacred by what Eliade calls a hierophany, a revelation of the transcendent in the otherwise mundane. (He gives the example of Moses being confronted by the burning bush.) This reminded me of the memory-stories that were continually called into consciousness for the pilgrims when they found their houses, or the places where those homes had once stood, and that were repeated and rehearsed over and over when they appeared. This suggested that these stories were like hierophanies and represented higher beings, manifested as ancestors whose presence, through their stories, seemingly emanated from the house itself, making the house the center of the sacred, a pole with access to the Divine. Gaston Bachelard might call this burst of stories a “sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.”2 This made clear how the house was apprehended with an inherent sacredness. It was this that led me to typologize many of the pilgrims’ actions as rituals that allowed the pilgrims a visceral, almost real-time participation in the past of a place felt to be currently lost, and that offset an erasure experienced as a type of theft. The result might even be considered a type of healing. Along with being indebted to Eliade, I also gesture to Gaston Bachelard’s insight that memories of houses that live in daydreams can create a poetic solace. For descendants, I suggest that the memory-stories seemingly erupting from a house can be seen to open in the pilgrim a thoughtful daydream-like reverie or register of consciousness: an imaginative state in which the house

the Emotional Weight of Home

is distilled down to the most precious essences or values it holds. This corresponds to the epiphany Rilke conveyed in his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a poem that makes sure its readers can have the poet’s visionary experience as a whole too. The pilgrim creates a poetic script of actions, especially rituals, that perform the experience, captured in reverie, of receiving the house’s sacred resonance. Comparable to ritual, music too can perform an affirmation of a house’s connection to the sacred from memory-stories refined in reverie. ˙However, music, owing to its communal nature, also functions to connect the house to the homeland: a song shared across towns and villages can be particularized to a pilgrim’s house, as was shown in Chapter 15, or conversely, a dance that belongs to a particular village can be generalized to express the entire homeland (Chapter 16). All these musical and ritual actions are embodied poems, with the pilgrims as poets who, as authors of their own narratives, are able to realize poetry’s special alchemy (Chapter 9). Eliade’s understanding of sacred space extends to an understanding of profane space, which he defines as a type of prosaic, or non-spiritual space. Yet the profane can be considered spiritual as well, and in line with the same impetus that recognizes the house as sacred, pilgrims’ responses suggest to me that what is experienced as the opposite of sacred is a profanity. With this sense, when pilgrims confront a profane place, one where everything that is held sacred is “deliberately violated,” it causes “a feeling that chaos, evil, and fear was loose in the world.”3 Whereas the sacred invites the possibility of harmony, the profane calls forth a debilitating rage. Yet an astonishing observation was that a storied house made present in reverie can be used as a strategic assault on the profane. Although pilgrims know that the place where they are standing is where something wonderful happened, they are ever aware that something terrifyingly violent happened there too. Every house exists in the space of this double reverberation of the sacred and the profane. What sustained observation made clear is that pilgrims are always working to make a choice, and that they almost always use their agency to restore to the house a wholeness that was lost, rather than to mark its annihilation in a profane realm such as that described by Maurice Halbwachs as “inhabited by enemies of God, which may even be cursed and where eyes and ears must be closed.”4 By their actions, the profane is prohibited from consuming their house-world, and thus they also defy its erasure. That is, rather than having only an image of a place where a head was cut

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off, they also see their house as a place where one can join with the spirits of beloved people or can greet the children who live there now with sincere warmth. This active agency in recovering the past in a way that sustains rather than destroys is a remarkable way to cope with the worst things that can happen to families, and also a testament to the power of home. In describing how they make their past homes present, this work identifies the many prongs of pilgrims’ agency, especially as they take the opportunity to insert themselves into a positive narrative of the house, which forever more will include their own affective experiences; for example as the place where they saw “the family’s” Mason and Hamlin organ or where they sang along with their grandparents. This intervention process is what I term a reassembling of memory, for as pilgrims become actors in their house’s narrative, the story comes to includes them too. They have made their house, house-place, or house-world into a place where they themselves have interacted with their ancestors and reiterated their values, becoming a living part of its story. As Bachelard says, our newly created house “takes root in us. . . . It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being.”5 By affirming the sacredness of the house through its memory-stories, and reifying it by participating in it, pilgrims revive the generative dimensions of their house-worlds rather than eulogizing an ancestral past that is over. In this way, pilgrims from the diaspora who journeyed to the remnants of their ancestors’ Ottoman past created a future they could live with, a future that felt whole because it encompassed a more complete story of their origins. Finding a repellant landscape of destruction, rejection and erasure, their retreat into the spiritual and the poetic as a way to retrieve wholeness may have been a brilliant strategy, or even their only one. The ancestral house sits in the ancestral homeland, but pilgrims approach these two presences from different perspectives. At its most basic, homeland, as an idea, is an always shared space and a marker of an identity that ties pilgrims together. However, in Ottoman times, it was the locale of the ancestral house that was the definitive marker of individual identity. Although Armenians of course understood that they belonged to a greater religious and institutionally connected community (imagined or understood with its communal sites), individuals identified themselves through family and local compatriotic bonds and socially imposed boundaries (such as which villages

the Emotional Weight of Home

had suitable marriage partners), offering a sense of cohesion and pride. This study shows a continuing centrality of the local, for these pilgrims apprehend homeland from their own house as the center of the sacred; that is, homeland is imagined from the house outward. Moreover, the pilgrims’ ability to access affective spaces through memory-stories and subsequent actions may work for homeland as well: such things as singing hymns at churches or fedayi (resistance) songs at battlefields, or dancing Armenian line dances at Ararat define collective connections. Nonetheless, the pilgrimages surveyed here indicate how homeland is fundamentally animated by the intimate and personal space of the house and house-world. Even homeland as the trauma-scape outside the bus refers back to memory-stories tied to the village. As we have seen, attachment to an Armenian homeland (at first within the Empire) began to develop as an allegiance only during the late 19th-century rise of ethno-nationalism as a method of transcending a local consciousness based on house, family, and village or town (Chapter 15). It can be argued, however, that this broader Armenian consciousness matured in the diaspora, where it became a geographical but also historical nationalism, although one that competed with loyalties to the struggle for a Republic of Armenia as well as attachments to the host-land. Moreover, exiles who banded together by old compatriotic localities, such as Hadjin, Habousi (T: İkizdemir) and Sebastia, reinforced the centrality of village and town through those localities’ hostland incarnations as neighborhoods or compatriotic societies in such places as Pasadena, Boston, and New York City, each one becoming an individual’s personal coordinate or knot on the net that holds that other homeland together. I have shown how this connection is exemplified inside the bus, where the memory-stories that tie pilgrims to their ancestral houses are given autobiographical weight by those same pilgrims’ bonds to compatriots in their host-land lives, enabling the homeland and the host-land to map each other through local attachments. This localized host-land‒homeland connection— by which descendants and their survivor elders are organically tied together through memory-stories—undergirds the sense of wholeness that pilgrims experienced “inside the bus” (Chapter 18) and is a consistently fruitful finding within the experiences described here. Furthermore, almost every chapter displays how this connection is summoned into a poetic consciousness that allows the host-land and homeland to be experienced together, owing to the generosity and porous boundaries of reverie.

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The combination of ethnography and a poetry of the soul allowed me to identify categories of agency, suggest typologies, and offer a new vocabulary whose context is the life-world rather than sociological or demographic concepts that may tell us more about class, age, and gender, for example.6 Those have an importance of their own, but the approach here works at a different explanatory level, one that recognizes voices and then gives those voices power, place and meaning. For this reason, this study can be considered a theoretical and methodological intervention that goes beyond an Armenian experience, for it is transferable to other displaced populations who have attachments to places they cannot have and who seek to satisfy their yearnings for home through various attempts at homecoming. Another productive discovery of this approach is new ways to access the complex issue of affective and spatial memory over generations, with a focus on how memory-stories are central to intergenerational relationships at the individual and collective level. This includes their iterations as narratives, inherited items, and cherished practices such as traditional music and dance, which, by definition, operate across generational boundaries. Most importantly, this approach shows how it is the construction of a type of poetic consciousness that invites agency and allows an intervention within memory by inserting oneself into a narrative from the past. For example, when the pilgrims in this study make their memory-stories current and then reassemble them, identifying how the stories of place will be handed down anew to influence the next generation, they have changed the narrative landscape. By giving compassionate attention to the diversity of the detailed ethnographies and the multiple voices found among the pilgrims, this work makes clear that it is not possible to essentialize, level or equalize the pilgrims’ individual experiences, as neither these nor their feelings are scripted. Nonetheless, the approach of this book identifies how particularities do form a mosaic of something Armenian. Each element that documents an archive of Armenian agency, for example, is personal and unique to these individuals yet responds to a common understanding of a specific genocide and a shared history. Indeed, the terms, categories and typologies that operate in this book may be understood as a blueprint for studying other groups for their at once idiosyncratic and local and thus comparable qualities, while at the same time allowing the universal to be revealed. Further, this work suggests that only an ethnographic study at a human, even intimate scale can acknowledge universal human urges, such as those that might activate primitive scripts that have

the Emotional Weight of Home

to do with ancestors or that petition the vast universe in hope of answering a deep longing to feel whole, safe and at home. In recent years a feature of the Armenian past that might address this particularized and yet universal longing has emerged: cohorts of Turkish citizens corresponding to the generations represented by the pilgrims in this book, conceivably a single cohort whose parents or grandparents were fully Armenian, but whose link to that past had been lost or concealed. The existence of these cohorts has meant that the landscape of Turkey, perhaps geographically more eastern and southeastern, but conceptually everywhere, can be imagined with new nets of kinship whereby Armenians from the ­diaspora—or even from Istanbul—and these Turkish citizens with Armenian forebears meet each other as pilgrims at newly recognized sites of common ancestry, including Surp Giragos Church. The challenge has become making this new visibility into a new belonging. Certainly, as co-pilgrims to a shared past, the promise of their presence does more than change the contours of a terrain once assiduously emptied of Armenians to one, albeit differently, inclusive of them. Moreover, their combined presence establishes a different historical truth, reinforced by shared memory-stories that give that truth, through their connection to each other in the present, its ultimate meaning. Grasping this new alignment with a once forbidden past, and supported by the courage of justice-minded Turkish activists, intellectuals and individuals, and together with a focused pro-Kurdish politics of inclusion that battles the destructive forces of the state, pilgrims following their homeward dream may be met—if not with the closure they need—then at least with the prospect of an opening that they also crave, or even with a welcome that once seemed thoroughly unimaginable. I can tell you it was a village fertile and full of grain, that the moon grew full above it before it darkened. And I can tell you that the dream I have is to walk back to this village and stand in the square for a moment, feeling the history of it on my skin, a history of departures, vanishings.7

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Acknowledgments: Making a Book

This book began when my mother insisted that I meet my cousin Nancy. I’m not sure what level of cousinage we have, as Nancy is married to my stepfirst-cousin Robert Vinetz; but for my mother, family was family, and there were no rankings or levels. Nancy, my mother said, with particular firmness, had been to Turkey, and she wanted to talk about her trip. Everyone knew that Turkey was the center of my world, and in fact, I finally met Nancy at the party my parents gave to celebrate my completing my PhD degree in Islamic art and architecture, with an emphasis on Turkey and its Ottoman past. But my new cousin Nancy Kezlarian had been to a Turkey I did not know. She had traveled there with Armen Aroyan and a small group of other Armenians and had visited her father’s birthplace of Sivas, her paternal grandfather’s hometown of Tokat, and her maternal grandfather’s village of Tadem. In Husenig, she even found her maternal grandmother’s house; and she had brought back stones from all four ancestral places. Meeting Nancy was a cosmic moment. My first book, Imagining the Turkish House, had been concerned with the importance of Ottoman houses as images in Turkish memory as the Ottoman empire waned and the Turkish Republic emerged. In other words, it was about how memory gets stuck to houses. But I had not considered that the period I was covering was also the period of the Armenian genocide, which was the reason that Nancy’s family had lost their houses and their connection to their beloved homeland. It was why her trip had been a pilgrimage rather than a vacation. 229

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Only during my research in Anatolia for that first book in the mid-1990s had I come to realize that there was an ominous black hole in my received knowledge and thus in my own work. But I didn’t know how to go about repairing it until Nancy appeared with her stories about people who were searching for their houses. I had probably been in some of them. Nancy (referred to as Nancy Kay in this book), then, is the one who introduced me to Armen Aroyan. Armen, as this book shows, made Nancy’s and thousands of others’ “homecomings” possible. It is Armen Aroyan who is at the heart of A House in the Homeland. He welcomed me on his buses, which then gave the pilgrims permission to welcome me, a non-Armenian, on their very personal trips. Later, he shared with me the essays that many wrote for a book he was compiling (see Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks) and a selection of the videos he had made of these journeys (see Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection). Every pilgrim could write, and many have, intensely felt thank-yous for bringing them home. But in some ways he brought me home too, as over and over, his generosity and his ability to create traveling families deepened my understanding of my own history and my own family and my place in it. I am ever grateful that he created something magical and invited me in. I am also grateful to Cemal Kökmen, now of blessed memory, and his son Selçuk, Aroyan’s assistants and drivers of our minibuses across Anatolia. They kept their arms around me. I made my first pilgrimage with Armen in 2007, with an Armenian Relief Society group, and fittingly, but surprisingly to me, almost all the conversations on this bus were in Armenian. However, most thankfully, Ralph Setian took every opportunity to sit next to me and interpret what Armen was saying, what others were saying, why we were stopping, and why, suddenly, everyone on the bus stood up to dance (we had entered Cilicia). Alice and Charles Gureghian made sure I was not lonely. The soul of this book is the stories that pilgrims shared with me at an intimate level. I wish I could name them all here, but just as this book does, let me begin with Mary Ann Kazanjian, who carried her blue folder to Yozgat. She took the time to explain why everything in it was important, and in the ensuing years, she and her husband, Ed, sent and discussed every photograph, document or detail that I asked for, and hosted me with their special warmth in their home. Priscilla and Paul DerAnanian continued to tell me their stories long after we returned to the United States, and even hosted me

Acknowledgments

and other pilgrims when I gave a talk for the Society for Armenian Studies in Boston in 2016; I began to wish we lived next door to each other. I still do. Ray Garabedian has always been ready to go into the details of his family’s history and to share his trip and family photographs, and he has also become a constant correspondent, keeping me updated on his take on current events in Armenian and Turkish affairs (on top of that, he sends any new news on Neanderthals, just to keep me sane). Zaven Donabedian’s stories about his Lidjetsi father and the life of Lidjetsis in Rhode Island and New York entertained me as we sat in the back of the bus, and led to his sending me a tape of his father and uncle singing Lidje songs in Kurdish; and he added his mother’s recipe for stuffed mussels (midye dolma) as a tip. Many pilgrims shared recipes for the foods that tasted like home—or did not—as they ate them in Turkish restaurants, followed by excited wrangling among themselves about why their own family recipe for a particular dish (always/never with cumin) was the most authentic. These remain for another discussion of home and memory. But when it came to the connection between home and music, it was Hachig Kazarian’s clarinet and the power of his music that sealed it. That this music has its own vocabulary of memory also became clearer and clearer as he began to share his vast knowledge of its history. I’m still listening. Steve Barsamian and I took a daylong taxi and ferry excursion from Malatya to his village of Chemishgezek (Chmshgadzak; T: Çemişgezek). At the end, we celebrated our excursion in a Malatya candy store, where we bought large amounts of fire-engine red “pomegranate döner” (with embedded pistachios). He later sent a private video of an oral history related by his and his cousin Bob’s uncle, opening a new window into his family’s story. And thanks to “Cousin” Bob Koroghlian and his wife, Ruth, I was included in a breath-taking balloon tour of Cappadocia. The entire Dulgarian family— Angele and Stephen Sr., their daughters, Sona Gevorkian and Satenig Ghazarian, and their son Stephen Jr. (their son Deran was not on this trip, alas) included me in their family visit to one house and in the dead-ended search for another, the plaintiveness of their task always lightened by their sense of humor, banter and wit, which they kept up in spite of the way their pasts had been lost. What touched me most was that so many pilgrims gave me their trust. How could they know that their histories, their photographs, their secrets, their reactions and opinions in such a fraught and hypersensitive landscape

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would be treated with respect and care? I want to think that they understood that the more I heard, the more committed I became to making their truths permeate my book. With an archive as large as the one displayed here, clearly, I received more experiences and memories from pilgrims I did not travel with than from those whose pilgrimages I shared. I connected with many of the former by phone and email, and even visits. Nancy Agabian was the first, and she spent time contextualizing her barely fictitious, extremely candid, and thoroughly delightful novel about her pilgrimage, Me as Her Again, with a perspective possible only in a literary encounter. I met Muriel Mirak-Weissbach at a Middle East and Islamic Studies conference, which led to ongoing emails from her home in Germany. She provided the details of her parents’ life stories, shared her books and articles, read my renditions of her story—and carefully corrected my errors. I am also grateful to Joyce Bivin, writing from Israel about meeting lost family near Kars and how she reacted and how she nurtured that relationship. To this category of supporters, I also add (alphabetically and in a listing that is apologetically incomplete) Gregory Aftandilian, Anny Bakalian, Ankene Boyrazian, Robert Deranian, Seta Hagopian, Joe Harb, Ani Hovannisian, Dikran Khanjian, Zaven Khanjian, Stephen Kurkjian, Luisa Magzanian, Roxanne Makasdjian, Paul Maranian, Armen Marsoobian, Vahe Meghrouni, Zarouhi Sarkisian, Elyse Semerjian, and Mary Terzian. There are more. A very special supporter was Bishop Chouljian, of blessed memory, who answered my letters by virtually blessing my project with his experiences. Perhaps the most constant member of what felt like a group of pen pals was Hourig Toukhanian Jacobs, may her memory be a blessing. We never met, but forged a sweet friendship as, one by one, she sent me her newly minted, rich and charming pilgrimage vignettes and the family stories they evoked. It was a thrilling year, and she is missed. In fact, the most extensive interactions came after the pilgrimages, mostly by e-mail, and it was these that provided the context for what I had observed and what the pilgrim had experienced. I consistently counted on Sebouh Baghdoyan to give background interpretations of the many political contexts that influenced what we were seeing: Dashnaks, Hunchaks, Ramgavars! Treaties and broken treaties. I frantically tried to write down everything he said as we sat on the bus, but fortunately he is still helping me by mail from Vienna. I also counted heavily, repeatedly, and right from the beginning, on Deacon

Acknowledgments

Charles Hardy to help me understand the symbolic and liturgical meanings of many of the pilgrims’ actions. We met several times in Racine and then in Chicago, where Melissa Bilal and I went to meet his aunt Helen, the Rose of Karatsor. Deacon Hardy generously widened my perspective and answered my many questions, sometimes about prayers, sometimes about candles. The assistance rendered by this “SOS group” also included George Aghjayan’s generosity in helping me, as he has with countless others, to untangle and clarify historical Armenia’s complicated and often erased map. Here too, belongs the Aintabtsi/Gaziantepli Murad Uçaner, not a pilgrim but a Turkish architectural historian who taught himself Armenian so that he could help Armenian houses in Aintab survive to tell their stories of what Aintab has lost. He shared those stories with me. Except for Murad, then, you might think that this book was an inside job. But it was not. In the academic year 2013‒14, I became a Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, which allowed me, finally, to read through all the material I had acquired, translate and transcribe notes and videos, and spend time trying to make sense of it; and where the institute’s director, Seth Garfield, helpfully engaged with my work, and the senior program coordinator, Courtney Meador, fed us vegan delicacies. In Austin, I met two graduate students who became my assistants and translators, both of whom dealt with mountains of texts while I was transcribing my notes: Mine Tafolar helped with an overflow of materials in Turkish, especially the videos with villagers speaking in dialects that went beyond my own grasp. She also translated songs, including those sung by children in the villages at Armen’s request. These she could position in Turkish culture, and like the recipes I collected from pilgrims, are worthy of a second book. Lisa Gulesserian took on the many Armenian books, articles and song sheets that I asked her to comb through, and was then inspired to find many more. She then translated the relevant parts for me. Because I am not an Armenian speaker, she carefully went through the materials with me, word-by-word so we could be as exact as possible, and tease out nuances. She is the one who translated tapes, videos, and especially parts of the essays in Armenian that pilgrims had written for Armen Aroyan’s collection, including lengthy poems, and also ran down esoteric details that unlocked secrets. Only a fraction of what was translated by Lisa and Mine was used here, but every iota of it was critical to what I came to understand. Both Lisa and Mine made a deep

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commitment to the project—following up on the authors we read, the places that they were hearing about, and the events alluded to—and they felt its pathos keenly. Another translator, serendipitously met on the web, was Suat Baran, who kindly and enthusiastically translated the Kurdish I was hearing on Zaven’s tapes. In addition to the IHS, other institutions have supported my work. San Francisco State University twice offered leave without pay, which allowed me to accept the IHS offer during one year and to be a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago for another. My colleagues at MESA (the Middle East Studies Association), OTSA (the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association) and SAS (the Society for Armenian Studies) commented as my ideas developed. Marc Mamagonian welcomed me to the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) library, and the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul and the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey at the London School of Economics underwrote papers in 2016 and 2017, respectively. As I slowly began to write, wonderful readers stepped up to read. Leslie Harris, who as a co-Fellow at IHS saw my work grow, lovingly but critically read iterations up until printing, as did Melissa Bilal, an ethnomusicologist, colleague and friend who made what felt like a minefield into a melody with advice on authenticating and deepening my treatment of the uses of village music. As early as 2012, she had already stepped in to make certain that Michaelle Davis could take her mother and daughter to Kharpert so that her mother could once again speak “Kharpertsi” Armenian. Melissa, along with my friend and colleague Dzovinar Derderian, read long passages and also worked to ensure that at least most of my Armenian references were correct and that their transliterations were in Western rather than Eastern Armenian, as appropriate to the people in this book. Hachig Kazarian helped with my chapters on music from a different perspective, and Harry Kezelian added details that I would have missed. Most of all, my husband, Fred Donner, was beside me through the entire effort, from the first paper to the last keyword. His readings kept me focused, and his knowledge and wordsmanship helped me clarify the unclear; it was he who coined the term “assembled memory.” Moreover, he never balked when he discovered that on marrying me, he had married not only a universe of Armenians but also a woman whose project was like a secret lover whom she often ran off with right after dinner. He loved me through it and I love him back.

Acknowledgments

Other helpful readers were Amy Mills, who had already sharpened my thinking about the importance of space as a critical lens, and also Mihran Aroian, Orit Bashkin, Mary Scott, Heghnar Watenpaugh, and my wonderful ­sister-in-law, Ann Bertram, who read from the very beginning to encourage my ideas and spruce up my syntax. Two special readers were Lynn Derderian and Flora Keshgegian, with whom I had traveled in 2015. Lynn read every chapter, many at very different stages; she enthusiastically supported my insights but at the same time helpfully identified what was unclear and inconsistent—the best type of reader! Flora, as a pastor and a writer on spirituality, gave support to the direction I was taking. But the final buck-stops-here editor was Kate Wahl of Stanford University Press. Her support for my project was unflagging over at least six years. This included focused readings and perceptive suggestions. When I entered the long homestretch in 2020, she guided me toward a contract and, along with assistant editor Caroline McKusick (whose own work was on Diyarbakir), attended to clarifying my scope and dealing with nuts, bolts and images. I hope that I am not required to write another book to keep them as friends. The long rolling credits of the production crew must include Elspeth Mac­ Hattie for sensitive copyediting interventions; Erin Ivy and Alan Bradshaw with Susan Karani for page design and details, and the indexer, Lisa Rivero. Here I also want to thank the many friends whose interest in my project was a constant: Vera Paschke, Jean Davison, Donna Endlich, Deborah Loft, Foster Foreman, Judy Fraschella, Paul Young, Flossie Lewis, Michael Esposito and Andrea Dehne, Paul and Micki Luckey, Tory Griffith and Peter Haberfeld, Jane Brenner, and more, of course. I apologize for not naming all of you. I also thank Ayfer Tuzcu Ünsal, who spoke to me about Armen’s early trips, which she helped to choreograph. Out of respect for their safety, I do not name my many Turkish friends who stood by me and gave me their respect, whether they agreed with me or not. My family members deserve medals in patience: my husband, Fred Donner, mentioned above but worth a second mention; my daughters, Alanya and Rumeli Snyder, who always spared me as I worked, especially from the staging of and preparations for our battery of family gatherings for Shabbos, Pesach and Succos; and Rumeli’s partner, Cyrus Comiskey, a fabulous cook, who pitched in with the cooking. Alanya’s husband, Michael Jones, gets a special thank-you (below). My brother, Neal Bertram, and his wife, Ann; her

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sister and brother-in-law, Laurie and Ed Firestone; my aunt Terry (Ro) Keith; and my three grandsons, Selim, Naveed (who helped edit my “Proofs”!) and Sandriz, were true cheerleaders, as were my daughters’ wonderful stepmother, Yvonne Garcia, and their step-brother, Danny, and his wife, H. Behind me always was the memory of my parents, Manya and Barry Bertram. H o w I t R e a l l y Ca m e T o g e t h e r

There are two people of whom I can truly say, “without them this book would not have been written.” A breakthrough for me was when I realized that I was seeing the pilgrims’ actions as lines of poetry that they were writing with their bodies. This insight began to dawn when the poet Michael Jones (my daughter Alanya’s husband) introduced me to Rilke’s “Headless Torso of Apollo,” for a humanities class I was teaching. He helped me see that the genius of Rilke’s poem is not just that he conveyed how what he felt ended in a personal epiphany but also that he made what was happening to him happen to us. Moreover, Michael’s discussions with me about my ideas as I was developing them for this book provided epiphanies of their own, leading me to the idea of the pilgrim as poet. In the end and on the whole, this book, this enterprise and all its related activities were animated and kept alive by Denise Spellberg, who mentored me through it. This began in 2013 while I was a Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies. From then on, she read and discussed my work with her unequaled perceptiveness and intellectual generosity. Beginning with dinners in Austin, and continuing by email and phone, she read, she re-read, and she provided both pointed commentary and the courage to continue with my perspectives on the spiritual, the soulful and the poetic. She believed in their authenticity and reduced any tentativeness I was feeling with convincing arguments about how these views offered something new to scholarly thinking. But above all else, her own deep humanity kept reminding me of how the pilgrims’ own humanity survived, even in the face of unspeakable histories. This insistent reminder comes from her own beautiful soul. For all of this, and for her enduring friendship, I have dedicated this book to her.

Notes

N o t e o n La n g u a g e , T r a n s l i t e r a t i o n , a n d P l a c e - Na m e s

1. Adapted from Vicini, “Note on Transliteration and Turkish Pronunciation.” 2. For a good explanation of this problem, see Arslan, “So Where in Armenia Was Your Family From?” Introduction

1. Although the exact nature of the events discussed here and, in particular, the role of the Ottoman government in them remains disputed by the Republic of Turkey that replaced that government, the scholarly community in general, including a new generation of Turkish scholars, finds the genocidal character of those events to be irrefutable. Of the many sources, see especially Suny, Göçek, and Naimark, Question of Genocide; and Göçek, Denial of Violence, 422. Among other important works are Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity; Üngör, Making of Modern Turkey; and Kezer, Building Modern Turkey. 2. But see Christine Philliou, who brings in oppositional voices, especially in regard to the period between 1919 and 1922, the critical period of change from empire to nation. She cautions against treating “the Ottomans,” or even “the Ottomans at the end of the Empire,” as a usable phrase. Philliou, Turkey: A Past against History. 3. Osky’s brother used the Frenchified spelling of “Mourad,” preferred by Armenians to the more Turkish Murad. Its importance amplified as it was given as his son’s middle name. 4. My research suggests that, as individuals, Ottoman Armenians in the diaspora often felt these villages represented their true homeland; yet their early limited travel 237

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opportunities meant they could hope to visit only larger cities and communal sites. In 1967, for example, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) promoted perhaps the earliest organized “Heritage Tour” from America. The itinerary included major cities with Armenian importance, such as Jerusalem, but also many sites in Turkey, including towns that once had substantial Armenian populations and institutions, such as Gaziantep, Marash, and Malatya. The tour’s highlights were to be the ruins of the Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar Island in Lake Van; a view of Mount Ararat, the sacred mountain where Noah’s Ark is said to have landed; the ruins of Ani, the 10th- to 11th-century capital of the medieval Armenian Baghratid kingdom; and the beautiful and impressively large Surp Giragos (St. Cyriacus) Church in Diyarbakir. Thank you to Marc Mamigonian for this information. 5. A good overview of his journeys is given in Adar and Bakalian, “Interview with Anny Bakalian.” 6. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 1994; all quotations from Osky are from this video. 7. For pilgrimages of Ottoman Armenians from Armenia, see Korkmaz, “Our Sacred Native Land.” 8. Bohjalian, “Going Home Again.” 9. See Balakian, Burning Tigris, 36, referencing Pears, Life of Abdul Hamid, 228. 10. Bertram, “Dinner in the Homeland”; and Bertram, “Role and Realm of Music.” 11. Kricorian, “Name of This Place.” Cha p t e r 1

1. Mary Ann does not have title deeds. She bases her supposition on Armen Aroyan’s understanding that this house was locally known as “the Arslanian House” and is in a formerly Armenian neighborhood. Now officially named the Nizamoğlu Konağı (Nizamoğlu Mansion), the house was restored and made a museum after being donated to the Ministry of Culture by the Nizamoğlu family. Although the museum information states that it was built in 1871, the original owner and builder is not made clear. 2. Husserl, as discussed and quoted in Birinde, “Moving Images of Home.” 3. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 15. Cha p t e r 2

1. A. Y. Mirak, My Life, 28. 2. Mirak-Weissbach, Wall of Fire, 21.

Notes to CHAPTERS 2 AND 3

3. Mirak-Weissbach, Wall of Fire, 59. 4. Mirak-Weissbach, Wall of Fire, 21–22. 5. For Sabreen’s story, see Mirak-Weissbach, Wall of Fire, 134–43. 6. Ritter and Sivaslian, Kiliç Artiklari. 7. Ekmekcioglu, “Politics of Inclusion,” 17, 22. 8. Mirak-Weissbach, Wall of Fire, 8. 9. By 2009, four years before her pilgrimage to Dzak, Muriel had published most of her parents’ memoirs in Through the Wall of Fire. In 2014, Muriel’s brother, Robert, published a book that included his parents’ histories (he had by that time traveled with Muriel on her 2011 pilgrimage). See Mirak, Genocide Survivors. 10. For examples and a discussion of Mother Armenia and other personifications of Armenia, see Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey”; Cook, Women and War, 29; and Armenian Museum of America, “Object Show and Tell: Mother Armenia.” 11. Armen Aroyan documented this ongoing destruction from the time of his earliest pilgrimages. See also George Aghjayan and Khatchig Mouradian’s work: for example, Aghjayan, “Of Ruins.” 12. Khatcherian, Yergir 2: A Journey. 13. Nişanyan, in Yeradları, maps eight İnköys, and two Dzaks, and suggests that for one or two, the “İn” of İnköy was originally Inn from the Armenian word for “nine,” referring to nine churches. 14. Mirak-Weissbach, “Stones.” 15. Babha, “The World and the Home,”144. 16. Mirak-Weissbach, “Stones.” 17. Muriel, personal communication with the author, 2012. 18. Altınay discusses this and, citing Atnur, writes that by the end of 1922, almost all of the retrieved children had been escorted out of Turkey. Altınay, “Gendered Silences”; and Atnur, Ermeni Kadınlar, 31. 19. Wardî, Memorial Candles, 27–28. 20. Gregory Aftandilian, personal communication with the author, 2014. Also see Aftandilian, “Offspring of Ottoman Armenian Survivors.” 21. Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale. Thank you to Hourig Attarian at the American University of Armenia, who, by using it as her signature quote, brought this remark to my attention. Cha p t e r 3

1. Carl was using a map of Husenig that had been redrawn by Charles Sarkisian and reproduced in Ketshian’s memoir In the Shadow of the Fortress. The original map of the Armenian section of Husenig was drawn by Garo Partoian and B. Goulkhasian

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(aka “Goolkasian,” Priscilla’s grandfather’s brother; Priscilla uses the redrawn map when she searches for her ancestral house in Husenig, in Chapter 5). 2. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 2002. All quotations from Carl in this chapter come from this video. 3. There are many stories by survivors who witnessed their father’s decapitation. Nancy Kay’s maternal grandmother also saw that happen to her parents (but during the Hamidian massacres) in front of their house in Husenig. And see Aftandilian, “Offspring of Ottoman Armenian Survivors.” 4. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (1980 translation), 140. 5. Moughalian, Life and Art of David Ohannessian, 15. 6. LaCapra, “Writing History, Writing Trauma.” 7. Temelkuran, Turkish-Armenian Divide, 233. 8. Sonentz-Papazian, “Letter to Hovsep.” Thank you to Dalita Hacyan for suggesting this poem through the listserv Reconcile This. 9. Barbara B., personal conversation with the author, 2014. 10. Toroyan, “Our House Was Demolished.” 11. Toroyan, “Our House Was Demolished,”162–63. Bracketed words are the interviewer’s. 12. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey.” 13. Vazken Davidian, personal correspondence with the author, April 2014. 14. Akçam and Kurt, “Raising a Virtual Wall around Its Borders like a Fortress.” 15. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,” 117. The Armenian Review was founded in 1948 by the Dashnak party. 16. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,” 118. 17. Eliade, Sacred and Profane. 18. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie and Poetics of Space, both of which suggest that creative daydreams, or reveries, fuse subject and object, that is, they fuse the person and the world being engaged. See Chapter 9. 19. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,”118. 20. This use of the term “eternal return” is not to be confused with Nietzsche’s often identically translated phrase that refers to the repetitive nature of all events in the cosmos, which replay themselves over and over into eternity. 21. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,” 118. 22. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,” 119. 23. Kushikian, “One Month in Turkey.” 24. Kushikian, “One Month in Turkey,” 118. 25. Kushikian, “One Month in Turkey,” 123. 26. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 8.

Notes to CHAPTERS 3 AND 4

27. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (1992 translation), 26. 28. Kushikian, “One Month in Turkey,” 123. Cha p t e r 4

1. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings [in Armenian]. This text was translated for me by Lisa Gulesserian. All quotations from Gavar/Kavar are from this translation. Although this author’s name is catalogued using the Eastern Armenian “G” (Gavar), he himself, a native of Agn, would no doubt have pronounced it Kavar, as it would be in Western Armenian. This history is honored here. 2. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 467. 3. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 270. 4. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 270. 5. Kavar sometimes refers to these as “ghaributyun songs,” songs of the lonely exile who feels himself or herself to be in a foreign land. They have also been referred to as “Eğin Havaları,” meaning “Agn Airs” or “Eğin Airs.” Thank you to Melissa Bilal and also to Harry Kezelian for their help with this and other details in this chapter. 6. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 274. 7. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 274. “Eğin Viran Olmuş” was sung in Turkish but translated by Kavar into Armenian for his book. See Kezelian, “Agn Is in Ruins.” 8. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 265. 9  Grung, usdi gu kas? Dzaray em tzaynit, Grung, mer ashkharhen khabrig me chunis? ................................... Intz badaskhan chdvir, yelar knatsir, Grung, mer ashkharhen kna, heratsir. Gomidas, Collected Works [in Armenian], 101–04. The most detailed study of the genealogy of this medieval poem/song can be found in Nazaryan, Grung Song and Its Story/History [in Armenian]. 10. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 444. 11. For the means by which melodies open a mental space or realm of consciousness that offers a new experience of “homeland,” see Bertram, “Role and Realm of Music.” 12. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 472. 13. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 432. 14. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 484 (emphasis added).

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15. For the use of songs to express mourning by genocide survivors see Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey,” 122, 129, 149. 16. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 472. 17. Kavar no doubt refers here to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the nationalist changes that Ataturk imposed or set in motion. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 260. 18. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 260. For a similar listing of remembered houses of Antep and an example of the house-focused dream state, see Küçükyan, 100 Hours in Antep [in Armenian]. Translated into Turkish by Murad Uçaner, “100 Saat Antep’te”; unpublished translation generously shared with me by the translator. 19. Kavar often uses the term Anduni to describe these bantukhd songs. In a postgenocide world, where every survivor was a type of bantukhd, all songs of longing began to be considered part of the Anduni genre, a term once reserved for Armenian songs of a specific meter. Perhaps this term seemed appropriate to Kavar because it is made up of An (without) and dun (house or home) and means homeless. On Andunis and Agn, see Kezelian, “Agn Is in Ruins.” 20. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 5. 21. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 468. 22. Surmelian, A Collection of Poems, 156–58. 23. Sevag, “We Are Few.” Translator of this English version unknown. For more  ­information about Sevag, see the Wikipedia entry for “Paruyr Szag.” [In Armenian.] 24. A 1950 article in the Armenian-American literary journal Nor Kir attests that Surmelian’s Joyous Light poems were known worldwide. Wikipedia, “Leon Surmelian.” 25. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 438. 26. Aharonyan, “Surmalui Zhoghovrtagan Yerker,” quoted in Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey,” 324. 27. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 256. 28. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 30. 29. See especially, Kevorkian, Complete History, 509. 30. Akuni, Crime of the Ages, 33–34, cited in Moughalian, Life and Art of David Ohannessian. 31. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 210. 32. Following searches, tortures and disappearances of both the Armenian and Syriac Christian population of Mardin, which had begun in the middle of May, Aliza’s father had been offered an escape by a “noble hearted Muslim Arab,” but he

Notes to CHAPTERS 4 AND 5

had stayed with his family, certain that things could not get worse. But on June 7, 1915, Mardin was surrounded and the roundups, executions and deportations began. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 43. 33. Aliza called them Turkish soldiers. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 43. Kevorkian suggests that they were probably the Çerkez (Circassians) under Dr. Mehmed Reshid (Reşit), a Committee of Union and Progress founder and later Governor of Diyarbakir. They would “proceed to arrest all males between 12 and 70, a total of 470 people. On 11 June, at dawn, these 470 men were taken . . . and put to death.” Kevorkian, Complete History, 366. 34. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 46. 35. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 21. 36. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 210. 37. Sebuh Chuljyan, personal correspondence with the author, March 2012. 38. Chuljyan, personal correspondence with the author, March 2012. 39. Chuljyan, personal correspondence with the author, March 2012 (emphasis added). 40. Gavar, On the Road of Old Longings, 267. 41. Harb, Torn between Two Cultures, 210. Cha p t e r 5

1. Hourig spent a year and a half writing a memoir of her 2010 pilgrimage. Her daughter Cathy was her reader, but so was I. Quotations from Hourig are from this yet to be published treasure, unless otherwise cited. 2. Hourig, personal correspondence with the author. 3. Other pilgrims had similar reactions to this view: for example, Carolann Najarian, “Our Trip to Historic Armenia,” 2005, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 4. Peter Balakian chronicled these types of interactions with his grandmother, Nafina, in his poetic Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir: for example, “The inability of sleep to give solace is clear in Nafina’s answer to her daughter as they escaped to Aleppo: I asked Mama why nobody ever slept, and she said: ‘If we go to sleep the ceiling will open and dead bodies will fall from the clouds,’” 191. For more on Nafina, see, especially, Balakian’s first chapter, and Chapter 10 of this volume. 5. Nancy A. wrote a semi-autobiographical novel that included an account of her pilgrimage with Armen Aroyan, changing the names but not the feelings. “Agnes” stands for the aunt she traveled with. See Agabian, Me as Her Again, 155. 6. Diler, “Interview with Nancy Kricorian.” 7. James Thurber gives memorable examples of metonymy in his short story “Here Lies Miss Groby,” as he remembers learning about the idea of the “Container

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for the thing contained” and wonders whether you could flip the concept to use the “Thing contained for the container.” Thurber, My World, 169. 8. Ayık, Liceli Doktor [in Turkish]. Pelin’s father, Vartkes Ergun Ayık, was the chairman of the executive board of Saint Giragos Armenian Church Charitable Foundation, which led the restoration of Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakir. See Chapter 21. 9. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 27. 10. Priscilla, personal correspondence with the author, 2014. 11. Bordoian, “My Great Grandmother.” 12. James, Essays in Psychology, 158, 160 (emphasis added). 13. Baladouni, “Through History with Love.” Cha p t e r 6

1. Sarajian, Silent Generation, 253. 2. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia.” September 1992. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions and quotations from Anooshavan’s experience are from this video. 3. Kurkjian, “Roots of Sorrow.” 4. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 1992. Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions and quotations from Vahe’s experience in Munjusun are from this video; Armenian dialogue translated by Lisa Gulesserian. 5. Derdarian, Vergeen. And see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “Politics of Inclusion,” showing how the norms of marriageability changed to accommodate rescued women: “As early as 1916, Hairenik (Fatherland) a daily of Boston, announced ‘An Armenian man should not reject a woman who has been abducted since she is an innocent victim.’ ” Also: “Even the tattoos that many of the rescued bore on their faces and hands (an Arab and Kurdish custom) did not necessarily leave them un-marriageable.” In fact, they represented the honor of the nation. 6. Derdarian, Vergeen, 111. 7. Torosyan, “Being an Armenian.” 8. “The sacred place is a place apart, separated from the profane world. It communicates shared symbolic meanings and provides a place where God or gods are worshiped and rituals enacted. Examples range from a simple clearing in the forest to complex architectural setting[s].” Barrie, Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in Architecture, 52–53. 9. See Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance; and also see Chadwick, review of Verbal Art as Performance, especially the blog post comments by Unknown.

Notes to CHAPTERS 6, 7, AND 8

10. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 90, 95. 11. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 2006; Armenian dialogue translated by Lisa Gulesserian. Cha p t e r 7

1. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 2000. 2. Riggs, Personal Experiences in Harpoot. 3. Gunaysu, “Bitlis Armenians.” 4. This attitude is not universal. See, for example, Robertson, “Lynching Memorial,” which notes the “[h]undreds of jars of soil from the sites of documented lynchings, collected by families of victims or community volunteers” that are on display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 5. Gultekin, “Pilgrimage in Anatolia and Armenia.” 6. Baladouni, “Through History with Love.” 7. Jack Bournazian, “Ancestral Ghosts,” May‒June 1994, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 8. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 2000. 9. Boghossian, History of the Village of Perkenik. Thank you to Maggie Blanck for making this work available to researchers: see Maggie Land Blanck, “The History of the Village of Perkenik (Pakradunik),” History of Perkinik, Sivas, Turkey, http://www. maggieblanck.com/Azarian/PirkinikJT/PrknkHistory.html. 10. Eliade, Comparative Religion, 153. Cha p t e r 8

1. Tahmazian, “Visit to Gürün.” 2. Rollwagen, Anthropological Filmmaking, 342. 3. Der Yeghiayan, The Presence of the Past, 36. 4. Nayiri Karjian, “A Journey, a Story,” June 2008, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. This essay is based on a sermon Nayiri gave June 1, 2008, in Houston, Texas. 5. Nancy Kay, personal correspondence with the author. 6. Bertram, “Dinner in the Homeland.” 7. Toroyan, “Our House Was Demolished,” 153–65. 8.  Van Anısı [Van Memory] Nice dağlar aştım geldim Van’a Hasretim anamdan babamdan yana İçtim suyunu kana kana

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Canım Van derdin Dünyada Van Ahirette iman Cemal Kökmen, “Van Ani Anısı”; used with permission from the author. “Dünyada Van, ahirette iman” is a well-known saying, especially popular in Van. A similar saying is “Bu dünyada Van, öbür dünyada cennet”: “Van [is] in this world, [just as] Paradise [is] in the next world,” which is closer to what is thought to be the Armenian origin of this saying: “Yergnki vra trakhd, yergri vra Van,” meaning, “[ Just as] Paradise is in Heaven, Van is on the earth.” See Houshamadyan, “Van.” 9. Angay, “Hallaç.” Like many foods, much music, and a great deal of vocabulary, this translated poem by a Turkish author shows the intimacy found in a shared Ottoman culture. 10. Sossi, personal conversation with the author, 2012. 11. Sylvia remembered learning how it was done in Lidje: “the quilt would be turned inside out and put on a sheet . . . it was a double sheet . . . like a bag . . . like a duvet cover. They’d put [the wool] in. And then we’d have to turn it. And then you’d sew it. And you had to make sure it was even, so it wouldn’t move around or it would all go to one corner. I have it in my attic.” Also see Charkoudian, “Quilt, Armenian Style,” as an illustration of memories from Marash. 12. Game and Metcalfe, “My Corner of the World.” Also see Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 13–16. 13. Proust, In Search of Lost Time. 14. Cameron and Gatewood, “Seeking Numinous Experiences in the Unremembered Past,” 55–57. Cha p t e r 9

1. Alidz Agbabian, “Tserks karin ge tnem” [I Put My Hand on Stone,] May 2006, translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian; in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 2. Founded with the assistance of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), composed of Presbyterian and Congregational missionaries. 3. Additional lines in this stanza show how this sentiment is situated in Alidz’s yearning to make this pilgrimage, as she was raised by someone from the generation “that grew up/With the idea that we should go back to this land./The vision of the land, the homeland/was, from my childhood, inscribed on my soul”; translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian (emphasis added). 4. Alidz Jebejian Agbabian, “My Ear to the Earth, May 2007, translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian; in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 5. “Vor ke ktnem anor bahadzn u eseliknere.” Agbabian, “My Ear to the Earth.”

Notes to CHAPTERS 9 AND 10

6. Tootikian, “Armenian Evangelical Church.” 7. Agbabian, “My Ear to the Earth.” 8. Agbabian, “My Ear to the Earth.” 9. Pals, Eight Theories, 165. 10. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 1980, 157. 11. Benjamin and Tiedemann, Arcades Project, 462. 12. The sense of immediacy and the sense of being moved are the themes of Jones, Moved. 13. Festekjian, “David Kherdian” (emphasis added). 14. Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, 154 (emphasis added). J. Winson, as discussed in Patrick Christian (History, Memory & Conflict, 6), suggests that communion has the integrative ability of a dream “to synthesize experiences past with present and anticipated future during unconscious states of cognition.” 15. Lorne Shirinian, “David Kherdian and the Ethno-Autobiographical Impulse: Rediscovering the Past,” Melus 22, no. 4 (1997): 77–89 at 83; includes commentary on the poem. 16. “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, 67 (emphasis added). Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. The pivotal insights on “Apollo” grew from a discussion with the poet Michael Jones. Thank you Mikej. 17. Berge Bulbulian, “Fresno Rancher and Wife Visit Turkey and Find No Armenian Signs,” June 1993, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 18. Markarian, Liturgy-Sound of Stones (emphasis added). 19. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 6. Cha p t e r 1 0

1. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia.” May. 2002. 2. The descriptions that follow come from my observations on this trip in 2015, followed by many conversations with Lynn. 3. Women and children captured or taken in by Beduins were often tattooed as a sign of ownership (in Beduin communities, all women were tattooed). See Chapter 6 and also Jinks, “Marks Hard to Erase.” 4. The story and its context came out when Lynn’s cousin Peter Balakian discovered the detailed and damning claim that Nafina filed against Turkey after she emigrated to the United States. Her family’s wealth, how it had been taken, and how the

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members of the family had died were itemized in the cold language of the courts that left her current family chilled. In sad and angry astonishment, Peter uncovered and then wrote about this beloved grandmother’s stories and their context in Black Dog of Fate, so by the time Lynn arrived in Diyarbakir the family stories—and some names—had been partially regained. 5. Otto, Idea of the Holy, chap. 4. 6. Jones, Reinstating Mystery, 196–97. 7. Otto, Idea of the Holy, chap. 4. 8. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 27. 9. Photographs have been discussed as important in the transmission and construction of what Hirsch calls postmemory. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory; also see Sontag, On Photography; and Barthes, Reflections on Photography. 10. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory, 39. 11. Balakian, Black Dog of Fate, 183. 12. Lynn had often heard her own mother look out at her garden and say, “If that horrible thing had not happened to our family, I would not have this.” 13. Arax, personal conversation with the author, 2015. Also see Balakian, Black Dog of Fate, 189: “She never wanted to leave this country. She said, ‘I’m safe here. This is the only place I’m safe.’” Many pilgrims report hearing this sentiment from their parents and grandparents. Azarig, standing in his grandmother’s village of Khoshmat (T: Çakurkaş) in 1998, told his favorite grandmother story: “We had told her, people joking with her, that they are going to give us Hayastan [Armenia, which she would have called her Ottoman homeland] back. They’ll give Khoshmat back, and you can go back. And her expression to that was, ‘If you brought Khoshmat right next to my foot, I wouldn’t put my foot on it.’ To which she then added, ‘I’m in a country that I can pull a chain and the light goes on.’ ” Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 1996. 14. OrthodoxWiki, “Votive Offerings,” quoting Teske, “Votive Offerings.” 15. MJM, “14 Days in Diyarbakir.” 16. Akkum, “Kurdish Leaders Apologize for 1915.”

17. For the history of this embrace, see Chapter 21. 18. Marsoobian, Fragments, 194. Cha p t e r 1 1

1. DiCanio, “Nubar Alexanian,” 22. 2. Alexanian, Finding Armenia. Originally titled Scars of Silence, this film was also called Journey to Armenia before receiving its current title, as given here. 3. Alexanian, “Finding Armenia.” See the Introduction to this book for various terms that pilgrims use for their homeland.

Notes to CHAPTERS 11 AND 12

4. Alexanian, Finding Armenia. 5. Alexanian, Finding Armenia. 6. Krikorian and Taylor, “Christmas Celebration for Armenian Orphans,” quoting Herman Norton Barnum, “Sketch of the Harpoot Station, Eastern Turkey,” The Missionary Herald 88 (April 1892): 14447. 7. Barnum, Necrology, 325. 8. Adjemian, “Hamidian Massacres.” 9. Der Matossian, “Bloodless Revolution to Bloody Counterrevolution.” 10. Yessayan, In the Ruins. 11. Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” 114. 12. Varjabedian, “Poetics of History and Memory,” quoting Claveloux, “The Naming”; and also citing Artinian, The Genocide in Me. 13. Alexanian and Arguedas, Stones in the Road. 14. DiCanio, “Nubar Alexanian,” 21. 15. Alexanian, Finding Armenia. 16. William Saroyan, “Madness in the Family,” in Madness in the Family, edited by Leo Hamalian, 1–4 (New York: New Directions, 1990), 2. 17. Deranian and Deranian, Village of Hussenig. 18. Blackwell, Armenian Poems. 19. Surmelian, “Saying for Planting a Tree”; translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. Cha p t e r 1 2

1. Austin, “Ritual and Grief.” 2. Another daughter had died of diphtheria before the genocide. 3. Zoryan Institute, “The Armenian Oral History Project.” 4. According to Azniv Ibranosian, a Yozgat Armenian survivor who gave evidence at the 1919 “trials,” the gendarmes told the Armenians to report to Vehbi Bey,” who then arrested 472 notables in Yozgat’s marketplace. Kevorkian, Complete History, 509. 5. Possibly Karahacılı Köyü/ Çekerek. For this and information on the deportations from Yozgat, see Kevorkian, Complete History, 510; and Dadrian, “Military Tribunal’s Prosecution,” 33. 6. For a similar process of systematic gathering of women and children in Diyarbakir, with options of conversion, rape, or being sold into slavery or massacred, see Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction, 147. 7. Under the “Abandoned Property” laws, which journalist Hrant Dink called “the scariest, most horrid issue of Turkey,” the “properties of all Armenians who did not return within the specified period went to the Turkish state treasury.” Göçek,

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Denial of Violence, 422, quoting an interview with Hrant Dink; also see Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction. 8. Several pilgrims spoke of this as unspeakable shame. For example, Sato Moughalian wrote of her own father’s albeit very short-lived forced conversion in his unsuccessful attempt to escape deportation in 1916—a family story that her mother found “too painful to acknowledge.” Assembling the family history in the late 1990s, “she [still] could not assimilate[this] into her text.” Moughalian, Life and Art of David Ohannessian, “Postlude: The Return,” 3.

9. Forced marriage or concubinage among Armenian genocide survivors has often been epitomized by women with tattoos. Vergeen’s husband (Chapter 6) considered her tattoos evidence of her heroism. But most tattooed survivors considered them too degrading to talk about, leaving their descendants confused. It would take the third generation to interrogate their meaning. See Khardalian, Grandma’s Tattoos. 10. Paremsema had been forced into a “marriage” with an officer with bloodied hands. Her niece, Armenouhie, had been returned, but whether abused or not is unclear, as no one seems to have spoken about how she was treated. But Paremsema must also have feared for everyone’s life. Survivors in Yozgat held little hope. Raymond Kevorkian, in “Extermination of Ottoman Armenians,” lists, among many such atrocities: “1916; February, Yozgat (province of Ankara): Agah Bey, the mutessarif of Yozgat, has between 1,300 and 1,500 women and children questioned and executed. They had been serving as slaves in local Turkish households.” On how Armenian girls could be sold, see Leylegian, “Her Name Was Sarah.” 11. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory: (1992 translation), 26. 12. The identity of the man who saved the family might be deduced, as the family may well have left during or after the Yozgat war-crimes trials of 1917 or 1919. Avedis remembered that his stepfather was in jail at one point, and that he brought him meals that Paremsema had cooked. He also, bitterly, remembers that his “father” was let out after a few months. We know his name was Mehmed. Kevorkian’s Complete History, with its discussion of these trials, is pertinent, as well as Dadrian, “Military Tribunal’s Prosecution,” 92. 13. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxxvi. Cha p t e r 1 3

1. As Richard Hovannisian’s daughter, Ani had an ingrained knowledge of her ancestral villages as well as the larger Western Armenian story. As Ani’s nephew had written of Richard (his grandfather), not only was he “part of the invention of a discipline of Armenian history . . . but the Armenian diaspora was united in him.” Hovannisian, Family of Shadows, 90.

Notes to Chapter 13

2. Hovannisian, “Uncovering Traces.” 3. Vartiter Kotcholosian Hovannisian, “To the Old Country/Homeland,” July 1995 [in Armenian], in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks, translated by Lisa Gulesserian. 4. Balakian, “Raphael Lemkin” (emphasis added). 5. For example, “We soldier on through the recurring scenes of abandonment and destruction, visiting Kharpert, Palu, Hussenig, Pazmashen, Tadem, Parchanj, Morenik, Khoshmat, Sakrat, Gezin, Uzunova, Havav—and several other towns and villages. Almost every Armenian ruin we visit bears the scars of intentional destruction and desecration” (Mouradian, “Scribbles in a Hand”). For maps, see Aghjayan, Maps of Armenian Inhabited Villages; and Aghjayan, “Of Ruins.” 6. Dissard, “The Armenian Heritage of Arapgir.” 7. The map is included in Hovannisian and Kotcholosian, Dzitogh [in Armenian]. 8. Ani H., conversations and personal correspondence with the author, 2013 and 2014, in which she describes her trips to Dzitogh and the making of her shrine. All Ani’s comments about her visits to Dzitogh are from these conversations and correspondence. 9. Also see Hovannisian, Family of Shadows. 10. Hovannisian and Kotcholosian, Dzitogh. 11. Ani, a broadcast journalist, would go on to find what seemed missing. She also directed and produced The Hidden Map, a documentary about what she had found. Her partner in this project was the Scottish scholar and documentary photographer, Steven Sim, whom she fortuitously met on her second trip. See Sim, “Deserted Armenian City of Ani.” 12. Hovannisian, “Uncovering Traces.” 13. Another and equally angry pilgrim, Seda, who had traveled to Dzitogh in 1995 (along with Aroyan and Ani’s mother) reported on one of these villages, which she referred to as Ardzati: “The only access to Ardzati is through Tsitogh, once home to about 3,000 Armenians and a few Turkish families. Upon our arrival in Ardzati, the mayor and many residents approached us and inquired whether we were tourists and where we were from. When they learned we were from the United States, they told us that they liked all tourists except Armenians because the Armenians had killed Turks in Ardzati.” Seda Sedoian, “Homeward Bound,” July 1995, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 14. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 11. 15. Darpasean, Erzurum (Garin), 38, 39‒41. 16. Raffi Khatchadourian, in “A Century of Silence,” addresses how places are changed by the appearance of the pilgrims, and how that may be the pilgrim’s goal: “We were hoping to transform our destination, to employ our presence as witnesses, even if a century too late, to raise it out of officially imposed obscurity.” Also see Hovannisian, Family of Shadows.

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17. Hovannisian, Family of Shadows. 18. Pals, Eight Theories, 165, describing Eliade’s “concept of the sacred.” Cha p t e r 1 4

1. Not to be confused with Agn (T: Eğin, now Kemaliye). 2. Thank you to Zaven and Dikran Khanjian for filling in the details of their Aghen history. And see Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine? [in Armenian], chap. 5, 93; all quotations from this book have been translated by Lisa Gulesserian. 3. Akçam and Kurt, “Raising a Virtual Wall around Its Borders like a Fortress.” 4. Khanjian, “Is This House Yours or Mine?” From a chapter of the book with the same title as the book, as reproduced in part in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 5. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, chap. 7. 6. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine? 7. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, 94. 8. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 2006; dialogue translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. 9. Moranian, “American Missionary Relief.” 10. For a discussion of the development and range of the confiscation of Armen­ ian properties, see Der Matossian, “The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’”; and Üngör, Confiscation and Destruction. 11. Morack, The Dowry of the State? The Politics of Abandoned Property and the Population Exchange, 113. Ellinor Morack notes that Çağlar Keyder first used the term “the dowry of the new state” to denote the fortune amassed from the Christian population (Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian). Keyder, “Consequences of the Exchange of Populations for Turkey,” 45. 12. This was not uncommon for returnees. The poet Moushegh Ishkhan and his family, returning to Sivri Hisar after the genocide, find themselves living in a “meager house. Their splendid, two-story residence is now inhabited by a Turkish military doctor.” Babayan, “Remembering Moushegh Ishkhan.” 13. In 1927, Turkey intensified laws that made it impossible for former Ottoman Armenians to be accepted as Turkish citizens: for example, by excluding those who had not participated in the “War of Independence.” In 1928, all those who had lost their citizenship were expelled. Der Matossian, “The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire.” 14. Dikran Khanjian, personal conversation with the author, May 2014. 15. Antoon, “Sargon Boulus.” 16. Akçam, “The Houses of the Ones Who Hide Armenians.” 17. Dikran Khanjian, personal conversation with the author, 2014.

Notes to CHAPTERS 14 AND 15

18. Khanjian, “Is This House Yours or Mine?” From the chapter reproduced in part in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 19. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, chap. 7. 20. Kehetian, Giants of the Earth. 21. Mary Terzian, “The Call of the Land,” 2002, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 22. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, 100. 23. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, 100. 24. Surmelian, translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. 25. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 2006. 26. Khanjian, Is This House Yours or Mine?, 107. 27. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 2006. Cha p t e r 1 5

1. “Mardigi Yerke” [The Warrior’s Song] was written by Ashot Satian (or Satyan) and was dedicated to warriors of the Hayrenagan medz baderazm (Great Patriotic War), 1941–1945, who fought with Russia on the side of the Allies in WW2, but the words rang true here. Translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. Heard on Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), Homecoming (video). 2. Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), Homecoming. 3. That is, their bodies are buried in the soil and their souls are flowering, and thus calling for us. 4. Translated by Melissa Bilal. Also see Bilal, “Lost Lullaby,” 3. 5. Chichyan, “Songs Written During the Struggle.” 6. Lusine Şahrikyan explains that “Kele Lao” [Come on My Child], was written by a survivor to express “her deep longing for her home and her wish to go back to find a remedy for her sorrow. She called her son to get up and walk with her to Van, Moush, and Sasun, where the stones cried after deported Armenians.” Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey,” 42. 7. Şener, “Interview with Hasmik Harutyunyan.” 8. Şener, “Interview with Hasmik Harutyunyan.” 9. Written by the (Eastern) Armenian composer and poet-musician-bard (gusan) Gusan Sheram; English lyrics provided by Charles Hardy, who kindly translated his father’s rendition for me. Interestingly, other translations suggest that the nightingale was torn away from its rose. See “Gna Bibul” [transliterated in Eastern Armenian], in Armenian Music.

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10. I make the assumption that “Kna Plpul” also refers to this devastating loss because of the timing and because Gusan Sheram had dedicated the song “Like an Eagle” to the resistance leader Antranik, in 1904. Antranik, a hero of Sasun, had fought along with others, including Murad of Sepasdia (Osky’s uncle, mentioned in the Introduction, and for whom Govduntsis named their Rhode Island marching band) (Chapter 16). “After the massacres in Sasun, the people sang of a new dawn, as if they refused to believe that a whole nation could be slaughtered. . . . And ultimately, we have the curse of the poet, placed upon future generations that dare forget the state-sponsored crimes committed against their ancestors.” Houshamadyan, “Songs of Lamentation.” “According to estimates, from 3,000 to 8,000 people were killed and 45 villages destroyed. To hide traces of genocide from European observers, the Wāli (Governor) of Bitlis gave orders to cut corpses into pieces and throw them into the Tigris.” Wikipedia, “1904 Sasun Uprising,” citing “Correspondence [letters and reports of diplomats and other officials] on events in Sasun. May 22, 1904//Sassoun et les atrocités hamidiennes, interpellation. Les atrocités. Rapport officiel. Genéve, 1904, p. 27–32.” 11. Hairenik [Fatherland] was published in Boston. Later, the Hairenik Weekly became the Armenian Weekly; also see Aghjayan, “The Search for Family.” 12. Charles H., personal communication with the author, 2012. And see Hardy, “Heghnar Kherdian Paloian.” 13. Babkenian, “Cuba, China, Korea, Hawaii and the Armenian Genocide.” 14. Like “Grung,” “Ganche Grung” is a medieval song of being far from home and longing for it. See Mnatsaganyan, Armenian Medieval Folk Songs [in Armenian]. “Ganche Grung” is different from but related to “Grung,” and has many variants; one of which was popularized by Gomidas Vartabed. The Armenian lyrics are from Gomidas, Collected Works [in Armenian], 50–53. The translation here is by Melissa Bilal. 15. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 1997. 16. Haikaz Grigorian, “Personal Reflections,” May 1997,” in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 17. Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey,” 102. 18. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 19. Bilal, “Armenian Lullaby in Turkey,” 97. On Gomidas and the collection of and making of typologies for Armenian music as part of contemporary needs for building collective identities and claims of identity, see Alajaji, Music and the Armenian Diaspora. 20. For the role and meaning of bantukhd in the national awakening, see Derder­ ian, “The Pandukhts of Constantinople (1850s‒1870s).”

Notes to CHAPTERS 15 AND 16

21. Raffi [Hakob Melik-Hakobian], Gharip Mshetsi [The “Far From Home/ Lonely Stranger” from Moush]. 22. Gharip Mshetsi excerpt in English, from Tatoyan, “Migrant Workers, Emigration and Homecomings.” 23. There are many variants of this song. One melody was arranged and popularized by Gomidas under the title “Le Le Yaman,” but not with these lyrics, although the lyrics given here, with their mention of Lake Van, are also very common. It is a love song. This excerpt is a translation by Melissa Bilal of the Armenian lyrics in Chirak, Armenian Songbook, 438. 24. Nagoski, “How Could Such Beauty Be Left Behind?” 25. Saroyan, “To the Voice of Shah-Mouradian.” Cha p t e r 1 6

1. Hachig Kazarian’s generosity in sharing his personal and vast understanding of this music and this era made this chapter possible. He is currently preparing, with the support of a Gulbenkian Foundation grant, an annotated archive of this music, along with the history of the rhythms and modalities of Western Armenian music and how they became a distinctively Armenian-American phenomenon. 2. Topouzian, “Armenian Music in Detroit.” 3. Zaven D., personal communication with the author, 2016. I appreciate the many and ongoing conversations I have had with Zaven since I traveled with him on two of his [at least] six pilgrimages (in 2009 and 2012). Also see H. Derderian, “Hachig Kazarian and John Berberian.” 4. Günay, “Onnik Dinkjian”; Günay and Burcu, Garod. 5. Mary Terzian, “A Spiritual Journey for Hachig Kazarian,” in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 6. Quotations from Hachig not otherwise cited are from Hachig’s ongoing and much appreciated personal conversations with the author that began with the pilgrimage they shared in 2009, one of his several trips. 7. John, Diasporic Consciousness, 2. 8. Terzian, “Spiritual Journey for Hachig Kazarian.” 9. O’Rourke, Artists as Cartographers, 25. 10. Louis, personal conversation with the author, 2012. 11. Asbarez staff, “One Doctor’s Call in Armenia.” 12. Topouzian, “Armenian Music in Detroit”; also see Kzirian, “The Oud: Armenian Music as a Means of Identity.” 13. Miller, Review of To What Strange Place. 14. Bob Koroghlian, personal communication with the author.

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15. Jacobs, “Memoir/Journal 2010 Pilgrimage.” 16. Günay, Garod. 17. Vosbikian, “Welcome to Hoachland.” 18. Gavoor, “Hokehankist” [in English]. 19. Heghnar Watenpaugh, personal conversation with the author, 2018. 20. Topouzian, “Armenian Music in Detroit.” 21. Bertram, “Role and Realm of Music.” 22. Borcherdt, “Armenian Folk Songs and Dances,” 12. 23. “Zungalo,” based on a wedding song from Palu, had become a popular dance tune in the Armenian-American community, with lyrics sung by the New England singer Eddie Arvanigian, who can be heard on some of Hachig’s albums. 24. Benedict Anderson’s productive idea is that nationalism is supported by communities of people who have not met but who feel (and whose lives are) connected by shared views from a shared print culture. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 25. Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia.” September 1998. 26. For a discussion of the production of “homeland-centered and diaspora-­ centered paradigms of diasporic belongings,” see Sahakyan, “Between Host-Countries and Homeland.” 27. The close, even moral association among Lebanese Armenians—as well as among others in the diaspora—is explored in terms of a Soviet call for “repatriation” to “their Armenian homeland” in Pattie, “Repatriation.” 28. Lucille Derderian Hamparian, “Recollections and Reflections,” September 2011, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 29. Surmelian, “Dunis Hishadage” [Memory of My House], translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. Cha p t e r 1 7

1. Aram has also explained how he is another memorial candle (see Chapters 2 and 16): “When my time came to see the world, I was given the names of my father’s two younger brothers who perished in 1915, Aram and Hagop (Hagop—the equivalent of Jacob—being converted to Jack, when my turn came to go to school). It was only many years later that I learned from my brother that our father had a third sibling, a sister, Maryam, who also was slaughtered by the Turks.” Aram Kevorkian, “Chunnkoush,” September 2002, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 2. Erçetin, “Perception of Armenian People;” Akçam, Empire to Republic; Hoffman, “Armenians in Turkey.” 3. Ankene, personal conversation with the author, 2013.

Notes to Chapter 17

4. Goldberg, “‘Acting-out’ and ‘Working-through’ Trauma”; also see LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 70ff. 5. LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 717. 6. Carolann Najarian, “Our Trip to Historic Armenia,” 2005, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 7. A reference to the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad, by means of which German interests hoped to establish their own port in the Persian Gulf; in 1915, it reached beyond Diyarbakir. 8. Priscilla Derananian, personal correspondence with the author, 2014. 9. Jack Bournazian, “Ancestral Ghosts,” May‒June 1994, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 10. Kevorkian, Critical History of the Armenians in Chunkoush [in Armenian], 93 (pp. 93–101 deal with the genocide in Chunkush); quoted and discussed by Mourad­ ian, “Alchemy Near the Chasm of Death.” 11. Ray Garabedian, “That Mysterious Place Called Armenia,” June 2009, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 12. On narrative erasure see Ulgen, “Sabiha Gökçen’s 80-Year-Old Secret.” 13. Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence.” 14. Der Yeghiayan, The Presence of the Past, see the section “Evereg-Fenesse,” 28. Talaat Pasha was assassinated by Soghomon Tehlirian in Berlin in 1921, but the Turkish state had his body returned for an honor burial in 1943. And see Figure 28. 15. Bedrosyan, “Real Turkish Heroes of 1915.” 16. There is no doubt that killing fields of Armenians are undiscovered or unacknowledged. Nusaybin, however, was not an Armenian settlement, but was inhabited by Syriac Christians, also victims in 1915. (The town also had some Kurdish Jews.) See Nişanyan, “Nişanyan Yeradları: Nusaybin.” In the case of the Kars monument near Ani, the existence of Turkish victims of Armenian reprisals may be accurate but nevertheless misleading without the context of the genocide and the history of Kars in 1918. 17. Ulgen, “Sabiha Gökçen’s 80-Year-Old Secret,” 66. For massacres in Nusaybin see Üngör. A Reign of Terror, 75. For an informed discussion that includes pilgrims, see the comments section for Sassounian, “Genocide Is the Right Word,” online. 18. Ghazarian, “Sevan Nisanyan.” Jailed in 2014, Nişanyan escaped to Greece in 2017. 19. Amos Khasigian, “Unforgettable Vistas: An Imperishable Legacy,” 1997, in Aro­yan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 20. Sarafian, “Hacking History I.” 21. Watenpaugh, Missing Pages, Prologue.

257

258

Notes to CHAPTERS 17, 18, AND 19

22. Robert Hewsen, “Weeping for Ararat,” June 1998, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 23. Recent research pegs the number of Armenian churches in Turkey before 1915 at around 2,300. The number of Armenian schools before 1915 is estimated at nearly 700. Most were in the eastern half of the country. Istanbul itself lost at least 30 schools. See Bedrosyan, “Searching for Lost Armenian Churches”; and Järvik, “Armenian Sites of Istanbul,” Grande flânerie, March 31, 2019. https://grandeflanerie. com/portfolio/armenianistanbul/. 24. Balakian, “Raphael Lemkin,” 82; also see Watenpaugh, “Preserving the Medieval City of Ani.” 25. Kricorian, “Pilgrimage as/or Resistance,” 109. 26. On the revolutionary movement, see Miller, “Back to the Homeland.” 27. Paros Yerkaran [Pharos Records Songbook], 7; translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian. 28. Ani H., personal correspondence with the author, 2014. Cha p t e r 1 8

1. Goldberg, “‘Acting-out’ and ‘Working-through’ Trauma.” 2. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 69–73. 3. Bertram, “Dinner in the Homeland.” 4. Carolann Najarian, “Our Trip to Historic Armenia,” 2005, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 5. Tölölyan, “Beyond the Homeland,” 35. 6. Magzanian et al., Recipes of Musa Dagh, 15. Tölölyan says that although this effort always fails, “in Armenian there is a specific term, azkabahbanoum, nation-­ preservation, for the effort to sustain national identity in exile.” Tölölyan, “Beyond the Homeland,” 34. It seems plausible that Luisa used this latter term at home with her Armenian-speaking parents. 7. For host-land belonging and Armenian identity in the late 20th century, see Bakalian, Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian. 8. Olaveson, “Collective Effervescence.” 9. Goldberg, “‘Acting-out’ and ‘Working-through’ Trauma.” Cha p t e r 1 9

1. Aroyan, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” September 1993, in Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection. 2. Armen Aroyan, “How It All Began: A Providential Chain of Events,” 2012, in Aroyan, “The Pilgrim Speaks.”

Notes to CHAPTERS 19 AND 20

3. Eng and Kazanjian, “Introduction.” 4 Unsal, “Jibintsi Satenik.” 5. Aroyan, “How It All Began”; and Unsal, “Jibintsi Satenik.” 6. Aroyan, “How It All Began.” 7. Janet Samuelian, “Aroyan Confronts Turkey’s Historical Amnesia,” n.d., in Aro­ yan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 8. Norsigian, “Chasing Ghosts.” 9. Zaven D. personal conversation with the author, 2018. Also see Sylvia Momjian Iskenderian, “Nuri—The Light from Jibin Is No More,” 2006, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 10. For a breakdown of Armenians still living in Anatolia—for example, in Kayseri, Malatya, and Arapgir—through the 1950s and into the 1970s, and the difficulty of establishing the statistics of that demographic, see Suciyan, Armenians in Modern Turkey. 11. Dikran Khanjian, personal communication with the author, 2014. 12. Paul M., personal correspondence with the author, 2012. 13. Michaelle, personal correspondence with the author, 2014. 14. Two years after this German-Jewish writer published his novel, Hitler acceded to Turkey’s request that the book be banned; the same year, 1935, the US State Department, under Turkish pressure, forced MGM to drop its plans to make a movie of the book. See Üngör, “Lost in Commemoration,” 153. 15. For demographic details and political history, see Asbarez staff, “Vakef of Musa Dagh.” 16. Hovannisian, “Uncovering Traces.” 17. Amos and Meuse, “Silent about 1915 Slaughter.” 18. Elmas, “Sao Paulo’dan Urfa’ya Bir Eve Dönüş Hikâyesi” [From San Paulo to Urfa: A Homecoming Story]. 19. Charles Jamgotchian, “Horsana Aka Dikmencik” [My Tour of Turkey], July 2007, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 20. Alidz Agbabian, “Tserks karin ge tnem” [I Put My Hand on Stone], May 2006, translated from the Armenian by Lisa Gulesserian, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. Cha p t e r 2 0

1. Saroyan, “Bitlis,” 107–8.

2. Agabian, Me as Her Again; and see Chapter 5 in this volume. 3. Agabian, Me as Her Again, 144. 4. Agabian, Me as Her Again, 144–45. 5. Agabian, Me as Her Again, 157.

259

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Notes to Chapter 20

6. Agabian, Me as Her Again, 158. 7. Araxie’s husband, Charles Hardy, who was also on that pilgrimage, generously shared the details of Araxie’s story with me in personal conversation and correspondence. Some of her story was also published in Setian, Humanity in the Midst of Inhumanity, 128–30. Charles also gave me a copy of the video taken on that trip: Aroyan, Armen Aroyan Collection, “Video: Pilgrimage to Western Armenia,” May 2005. 8. Armenian villagers spoke their local Armenian dialect at home, but spoke Turkish in Kayseri, both to Turks and to Armenians, as speaking Armenian in Kayseri was illegal. “Gesi Bağları” is still a popular Turkish song. 9. Translated from the Turkish by Mine Tafolar. Gesi bağlarında dolanıyorum. Yitirdim yarimi aman bulamıyorum. Yarim sağlığına güveniyorum. Gel otur yanıma, Hallerimi söyleyim. Halimden bilmiyen Ben o yari neyleyim. 10. The official Turkish word is tehcir (displacement), a strategically benign term decided on by the Ottoman government for their legally enforced deportations. Sürgün was well-chosen by Aroyan. however, as it is also a direct translation of the term used by Armenians, aksor, meaning “exile” or “banishment.” 11. For the risks involved, see Akçam, “The Houses of the Ones Who Hide Armenians.” 12. Among many articles on “Righteous Muslims,” see Shirinian, “Turks Who Saved Armenians.” 13. Joyce B. made two trips with Aroyan, one in 1999 and another, perhaps Aroyan’s final and geographically limited trip, in 2016. She preferred not to use her cousin’s name here “to prevent any possible problems with Turks who still hate Armenians.” Joyce, personal correspondence with the author, 2016. 14. Carolann Najarian, “Our Trip to Historic Armenia,” 2005, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 15. Lucille Derderian Hamparian, “Recollections and Reflections,” September 2011, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 16. Aghjayan, “Key to the Homeland,” writes: “We simply cannot know, with any reasonable accuracy, the number of Armenians in Turkey, much less those that are “hidden” or Islamized.” For estimates that run from the thousands to the millions, see WikiVisually, “Hidden Armenians.”

Notes to CHAPTERS 20 AND 21

17. Simonian, “History and Identity among the Hemshin; Arkun, “Review of The Hemshin.” 18. At the end of the 19th century, at least, some communities seemed to defy the modern ethnic categories of analysis (i.e., “Kurd” vs. “Armenian”). According to the British traveler H.F.B. Lynch, in 1901, “Strange indeed are the anomalies which are presented in these little-known districts of Turkish Kurdistan. On the southern fringe of Sasun live a tribe called the Baliki or Beleke, speaking a mixed language of Arabic, Kurdish and Armenian. Their religion cannot be classed as either Christian or Mohammedan nor even as that professed by the Kizilbashes. When they make an oath it is in the name of a church or monastery. But they possess neither churches nor mosques.” Lynch, Armenia, Travels, 89. 19. Hagopian, “Armenians of Sassoun after the Genocide.” 20. Hagopian, “Armenians of Sassoun after the Genocide.” 21. Ceren Özgül notes: “My informants expressed resentment at many of these descriptions, especially the ‘crypto’ designation because it masks hatred of individuals with Armenian roots who lived as Muslims. The term ‘hidden Armenians,’ according to their accounts, is also highly problematic since it suggests that they are cowards or traitors who have, in their own terms, ‘something to hide.’ ‘Muslim Armenians’ looks less problematic, but it carries the danger of normalizing their precarious position vis-à-vis both the Turkish Muslim majority and the Armenian minority. They are accepted as neither ‘Armenians’ nor ‘Muslims.’ I use ‘descendants of forcibly Islamized Armenians’ because I believe it emphasizes their parents’ or grandparents’ initial conversion to Islam as a forced event.” For these terminologies and groupings, see, Özgül, “Legally Armenian.” 22. Çetin, Anneannem; Çetin, My Grandmother. 23. Altınay, “Gendered Silences.” 24. Altınay, “Silenced Grandparents;” Altınay and Türkyilmaz, “Unraveling Layers;” Altınay, “Gendered Silences.” 25. Baş, The Little Girl. 26. Philliou, “Politics of Knowledge,” 296. 27. Altınay, “Gendered Silences,” quoting Disch, “More Truth Than Fact.” Cha p t e r 2 1

1. Jones, “Turkey: Armenian Church Catalyst for Change in Kurdish Region.” 2. Mortada, “His Long-Hidden Armenian Identity.” 3. Arango, “Hidden Armenians.” 4. Mortada, “His Long-Hidden Armenian Identity.” 5. Çelik, “Kurdish Collective Memory”; also see De Waal, Great Catastrophe.

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Notes to Chapter 21

6. Arango, “Hidden Armenians.” 7. For internal Kurdish discussions of participation in the Hamidian massacres,  ­including thoughts on its immorality, see Işık, “Kurdish and Armenian Relations.” 8. For full discussions, see Bedrosyan, “Dersim”; and Üngör, Making of Modern Turkey. 9. Hampartzoum, “Two Months in the Interior of Turkey,”116. 10. Zarakolu, “Dünyada Van.” 11. Watts, Activists in Office, 52–55. 12. Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence.” 13. These writings were later to become his “comprehensive 544-page book about the Armenian Genocide, its historical background, its mechanism, and its ­aftermath—the Turkification policies in the Republican period up to the present day.” Maraşlı, “Armenian National Democratic Movement” [in Turkish]; also see Gunaysu, “Kurdish MP Challenges Turkish Parliament.” 14. Serxwebun, Nr. 4 (April 1982): 12, quoted in Sarian, “The Kurds and the Armenian Genocide.” 15. Çelik, “My Grandmother’s Tales Are the Truth Itself ” [in Turkish]. 16. Çelik, “My Grandmother’s Tales Are the Truth Itself.” Writing about Kurdish imprisonment, Callimanopulos comments that “the most frequent legal justification for these arrests are Articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish penal codes that ‘protect the economic institutions and social foundations of the nation’ and prescribe five to fifteen years of imprisonment for those ‘seeking to destroy the political and legal order of the state.’ Callimanopulos, “Kurdish Repression.” 17. Kevorkian, “Extermination of Ottoman Armenians.” 18. As Watts stresses, not all “pro-Kurdish actors” belong to “challenger parties.” Watts, Activists in Office, 12–13. 19. Ayata, “Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Process.” 20. Ayata, “Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Process.” 21. Çelik, “Kurdish Collective Memory” (emphasis added). 22. Öztürk, “Socio-Spatial Practices of the Pro-Kurdish Municipalities.” 23. Gülay Türkmen, while doing research for her book Under the Banner of Islam: Turks, Kurds, and the Limits of Religious Unity, spoke with Kurdish inhabitants of Diyarbakir’s Sur neighborhood between 2012 and 2013. They told her that many descendants of Ottoman Armenians had come to look for their ancestors’ houses in the neighborhood. “My interviewees told me that they first acted unfriendly towards these Armenians because they were worried that they would claim their houses back. ‘However, after we understood that they are here only to look and not get back the

Notes to Chapter 21

houses we invited them in and had tea and meals together’ they said.” Gülay Türkmen, personal correspondence with the author, 2021. 24. A rather ominous name, as the çete (pl: çeteler) were the “bands,” usually Kurdish, hired by the government or military to carry out most of the killings in the east. 25. For other stories from Kulp as part of a change in Kurdish historiography, see Çelik, “Kurdish Collective Memory.” 26. “Hovhannisyan and Hovsepyan, “View from Within.” 27. De Waal, Great Catastrophe, 236. 28. Ayata, “Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Process.” 29. Öztürk, “Socio-Spatial Practices of the Pro-Kurdish Municipalities.” 30. Vartivarian, “Pilgrimage to the Depths of History,” 12 (emphasis added); also see Armenian Weekly staff, “This City Is Yours as Much as It Is Mine.” 31. Över, “Armenian Akhtamar Church, the Turkish State and National Identity.” 32. Flora, journal entry, May 27, 2015. Kindly shared by Flora Keshgegian. 33. Güneş, “Almost the Only Armenian Left in Diyarbakır.” 34. Krikor Pidedjian, “Hayasdan Yergir Trakhdavayr” [Armenia, Land of Paradise], June 1998, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 35. Lucille Derderian Hamparian, “Recollections and Reflections,” September 2011, in Aroyan, The Pilgrim Speaks. 36. MJM, “14 Days in Diyarbakir.” 37. Celik, “Homicide to Memorycide.” 38. “Identity Awakening of Islamized Armenians in Diyarbakir.” Interview with Gafur Türkay. 39. Zaman, “Turkey’s Top Kurdish Politician.” 40. Shakarian, “Interview with Ara Sarafian”; also see Lubbock, “Walking in the Shadow of Genocide.” 41. Karanian,” Family Roots in Western Armenia” 42. For his story, see Aghjayan, “You Have Found Your Family.” 43. Aghjayan, “You Have Found Your Family”; and George Aghjayan, personal correspondence with the author, 2021, in which this story was brought up to date. 44. Information compiled from Arango, “Hidden Armenians”; and De Waal, Great Catastrophe. 45. Many who know of or suspect their Armenian ancestry are also using DNA testing. For some examples, see Hovhannisyan and Hovsepyan, “View from Within.” 46. Tastekin, “Turkish Genealogy Database.” 47. Fisk, “Erdogan Has Released the Genealogy of Thousands of Turks.”

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Notes to Chapter 21 AND CONCLUSION

48. “Erdoğan Ally Calls on Gov’t to Make S-400s Operational in Response to Biden’s Armenian Genocide Recognition.” DuvaR.English, April 27, 2021. https:// www.duvarenglish.com/erdogan-ally-calls-on-govt-to-make-s-400s-operational-in​ -response-to-bidens-armenian-genocide-recognition-news-57255. 49. Balyan, “Longing for Surp Giragos.” Conclusion

1. Eliade, Sacred and Profane. 2. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xv. 3. Schermer, Spirit and Psyche, 135. 4. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (1992 translation), 26. 5. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxiii. 6. I look forward to more work and interpretations by Ayşenur Korkmaz, Anny Bakalian and Margaret Manoogian, for example. 7. Excerpt from Gregory Djanikian, “What I Can Tell You,” in Djanikian, So I Will Till the Ground, 80‒81; reproduced with permission from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Djanikian wrote me that this collection, his fifth book of poems, “deals with the Armenian Genocide, my boyhood in Alexandria, Egypt (where I was born), my immigration to the United States, and my life lived in the U.S. under the shadow of that cataclysm. It is dedicated to my grandfather, Kevork Kayarian, who managed to escape Turkey from Kharpert (though most of his family died) and begin his new life as a lawyer in Alexandria.”

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abandoned Property Laws, 138, 249n7, 252n11 acting out, 167, 181 Adana massacres (1909), 41, 93, 114 Aftandilian, Gregory, 33 Afyon (Afyonkarahisar), 66, 66 Agabian, Nancy (Istanos), 59, 198–99, 219, 243n5 Agbabian, Alidz Jebejian (Hasanbeyli), 77, 92, 95, 139–40, 197, 246n2 agency, pilgrims taking, 68, 111, 223–24, 226 Aghen, 134–40, 147 Aghjayan, George (Chunkush, Sakrat), 10, 128, 218 Agn, 26–28, 32, 46–52 Aharonyan, Avedis, 52 Aintab/Antep (T: Gaziantep), 84, 167; Aintabsi-Anteptsi, 181, 238; Antep, 242n18. See also Gaziantep AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi

[ Justice and Development Party]), 219 Aleppo, 10, 44, 69, 70, 102, 113, 134, 137, 169–71, 191 Alexanian, Abby (Husenig), 112–13, 115–18, 116, 119, 171 Alexanian, Nubar (Husenig), 112–18, 113, 146 Alma, Zarouhi, and Vahan (sibling pilgrims; Khorsana), 79–80, 86 Altınay, Ayse Gül, 207, 239n18 Amasya, 48–50, 52, 195 Ani (“city of 1,000 churches”), 174–75, 193; name changed to Anı by Turks, 175; on Sarkis’ calendar, 193, 215 Anie (Afyon), 66 Ani H. See Hovannisian Kevorkian, Ani Anooshavan (Keghi), 68–70, 72–74 anti-monuments and anti-memorials, 171–76, 187 Antranik, 254n10 285

286

Index

Arapgir, 132, 192–94 Arkni, 44 Armenian Apostolic Church, 8, 65–66, 68, 80, 92 Armenian diaspora, 214–19; countries of, 3–4; exilic practices, 184–85; networks, 180; poetic anthem of, 51; recovery of homeland wholeness, 180–86; repatriation, 215; role of homeland music in, 147–49, 152–54, 160–63; restoration of Surp Giragos Church-Cathedral, 109, 214. See also compatriotic societies; host-land Armenian genocide (1915), 1–3; Blind Nuri on denial, 192; centennial commemoration, 216; death marches, 2–3; denial of, 3–4, 22, 109­–10, 131, 139, 167, 210–11; end of, 3; Kurdish, especially PKK’s, recognition of, 173, 211–12; saved by Muslims from, 26, 30, 32, 53, 122–24, 218, 202–3; start of, 53; sürgün (exile), 216; Turkish apology campaign for, 213; United States as refuge for survivors of, 1; United States’ recognition of, 219 Armenian language, Eastern: music, 253n9; spoken and written language, 9, 153 Armenian language, Western: education classes, 215; identity and, 50, 112; music, 154, 164–65; pilgrims cautioned against speaking, 4; prohibition on speaking, 191, 260n8; spoken language, 9, 191, 196, 205. See also Hemshin “Armenianness”: Armenians not a single body, 180; no single “Armenian”

responses, 166; struggle to identify with, 112, 198–99 “The Armenian Oral History Project” (Zoryan Institute), 122–23 Armenian Relief network, 150 Armenian Relief Society, 176, 230 Armenian resistance movements, 167–68, 175–77, 204, 210–11, 216, 225, 254n10 Armenian Review, 42, 44 Aroyan, Armen, 190–92, 215, 220; Armen Aroyan Collection (University of Southern California Institute of Armenian Studies), 7; confronting physical cultural loss, 128; family history of, 4; group pilgrimages led by, 4–7, 15–17, 23, 24, 178–83, 179, 185–86; homeland village of Jibin, 18, 190; interventions toward wholeness, 178–86; leading of hymns in antimemorials, 174–75 Arpi, 40–41, 85 Arslanian House (Yozgat), 15–21, 18, 238n1 assembled memory and assembling of memory, 7–8, 20–21, 29–31, 35, 52, 68, 90, 119, 126, 224; museums as assembled memory, 20–21 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 169–70, 170, 242n17 Avedis (cousins’ uncle from Yozgat), 120, 122–27, 196, 250n12 Ayata, Bilgin, 212 Ayık, Pelin (Lidje), 60–62 Bachelard, Gaston, 22, 43, 97, 100, 222, 224 Baghdoyan, Sebouh (Hoghe), 81, 232

Index

Baghin, 41–42, 44 Bahçeli, Devlet, 219 Baladouni, Vahé, 61–62, 70–74, 75, 78 Balakian, Nafina (Diyarbakir), 102, 103, 104–5, 107–9, 128, 174, 243n4, 247–48n4 Balakian, Peter (Diyarbakir), 104–10, 128, 174, 243n4, 247–48n4 Balkan Wars, 31–32 Balyan, Varduhi (Diyarbakir), 219 bantukhd (sojourner or temporary émigré), 44, 70, 114, 159; definition of, 41; as literary character, 152–54 bantukhd songs, 47–50, 149, 152–54, 160, 242n19. See also songs Barbara B. (Husenig), 39 Barbara P. (Arapgir), 194 Baronian, John (Kesserig), 33 Barsamian, Steven (Steve), 119–20, 122, 123, 125, 126–27, 133, 182, 231 Baş, Berke (Ordu), 206 Baydemir, Osman (Diyarbakir), 212, 214–16 Beirut (Beirutsis), 44, 92, 164–65, 191, 200–203 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 96 Bhabha, Homi, 29 Bilal, Melissa, 194, 233, 234, 239n10, 241n5, 242n15 Bitlis, 76, 78, 117, 198; Ottoman Vilayet, 8 Bitlis (Saroyan), 198 Bivin, Joyce (Karakala/Kars), 28, 204, 260n13 Black Dog of Fate (Balakian), 104, 243n4, 247–48n4 blessings, 67–68, 131, 139–41, 147 “Blind Nuri” (Nuri Güngören; Jibin), 189–92, 195

Bohjalian, Chris, 7 Bordoian, Brittany (Kharpert), 61– 62, 84 Bostancı, Yervant (Diyarbakir), 215 Boulos, Sargon, 137 Bournazian, Jack (Dzak), 78, 170 Boyrazian, Ankene (Marash), 84, 167 cairns, 131, 132. See also shrines Can, Serdar, 211 candles, 65–66, 105–6, 108; memorial candles, 33–35, 159, 256n1; Yahrzeit candles, 33 Catholic Church, 68, 80 Çelik, Adnan, 217 Çete, Fatmanur (Kulp/Diyarbakir), 213 Çetin, Fethiye, 206–7, 211 Christmas, 53, 93 Chuljyan, Sebuh (Malatya), 54–55 Chunkush, 77–78, 110, 166–67, 171, 217– 18. See also Dudan Claveloux, Eileen, 115 coins, gold, 53, 54, 137–38, 138 communion, pilgrim ritual of: definition of, 82, 88–89; full communion, 86–90; partial communion, 83–85; rituals of, 67, 68, 82–90, 91–100; shared moments as, 86, 88 compatriotic societies (hayrenagtsagan miutiunner), 160–62, 174; compatriotic bonds, 224, 225 conversion to Islam: conversion of the “Left Behind,” 30, 190–91, 213; family who converted, 44, 198–200, 203–5; refusal/shame, 123–24, 132. See also Hemshin; Islamized Armenians critical storytelling, 207 Crypto Armenians, 205–6

287

288

Index

Davis, Michaelle (Kharpert), 194–95 Demirbaş, Abdullah (Diyarbakir), 212–13, 217 Demircian, Abdullah (Armen; Diyarbakir), 208, 213, 218 Demirjian, Avedis (Vakef), 196 Demirtaş, Selahattin (Diyarbakir), 217 denial of Armenian genocide. See Armenian genocide DerAnanian, Paul (Husenig), 161, 177 DerAnanian, Priscilla (Husenig), 60–62, 168–69 Deranian, Hagop Martin (The Village of Hussenig), 118 Deranian, Marderos (The Village of Hussenig), 118 Derderian, Lynn (Diyarbakir), 102–10, 115–16, 126, 127, 133, 247–48n4, 248n12 Derderian Hamparian, Lucille (Yegheki), 164–65, 204–5, 216 Der Yeghiayan, Garbis (Khulakiugh), 84, 168, 173 diaspora. See Armenian diaspora Diken, Seymus (Diyarbakir), 108 Dink, Hrant, 4–5, 213, 249–50n7 Dinkjian, Ara (Diyarbakir), 156 Dinkjian, Onnik (Diyarbakir), 156, 158 Disch, Lisa, 207 Dissard, Laurent, 128–29 Diyarbakir, 60–61, 102–11, 109, 156, 157– 58, 161, 170, 173, 210–16; as de-facto Kurdish capital, 213; Dikranagerd, Dikranagerdtsi, 17; mural of Atatürk’s shadow, 170. See also Surp Giragos Church-Cathedral Djanikian, Gregory, “What I Can Tell You,” x, 227, 264n7

Djiknavorian Hardy, Araxie (Efkere), 69, 200–204, 260n7 DNA testing, use of, 217–18, 263n45 Donabedian, Zaven (Lidje), 122, 125, 156–58, 161, 183, 192 Dudan (gorge of Chunkush), 77, 171 Dulgarian family (Sis, Goteh): Angele, 31, 162; Satenig (Ghazarian), 32, 33; Sona (Gevorkian), 33, 34, 35; Stephen, 31–33, 162; Stephen Jr., 33 Dzak, 24–27, 29–30 Dzitogh, 129–32 Easter, 52–53, 61 Eliade, Mircea, 38, 42–43, 48, 61, 81, 131–32, 133, 222–23 embody/embodiment: actions as embodying feelings, memory or knowledge, 82, 96, 97, 157; ritual as embodied poetry, 223; things as embodying something other than themselves, 77, 81, 115 Eng, David, 189–90 erasure/destruction: of Armenian presence, 3, 24, 28–30, 40, 46–47, 49, 54, 60, 125–26, 149, 174, 189, 192, 196, 210, 216, 253n11, 254n10; of heritage Armenians’ identity, 206, 219; of Kurdish life, 217 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 219, 264n48 Erzinga (Yerznga; Erzincan), 155, 169, 173 eternal return, 43, 240n20 ethnography/ethnographic methodology, 12, 25, 221 Evangelical Christianity, Armenian, 68, 92–93, 174–75, 193 Evereg-Fenesse, 173

Index

ex-votos, 67–68, 119, 126–27. See also votives fedayi (resistance fighters and their songs), 176–77, 225 food: baklava, 52; choereg (a rich bread, often braided), 129, 163–64, 196; as communion, 86–87; as hostlandhomeland connection, 183–84; kleecha (pastry), 52–53; kufta (meatballs), 47; kufta (meatballs), Agn, 86; kufta (meatballs), Kharpert, 166–67; lokhum (Turkish delight), 52; surum (bread soaked in yogurtgarlic sauce), 183–84; yakhnili kufta (filled meatballs in soup), Aintab, 166–67; yemlik (wild herb), 86 Fresno, California, 59, 78, 97, 117, 129, 157, 171, 172 Gamakh bridge, 173 Garabedian, Ray (Chunkush), 75, 171, 172, 217 Garcia Márquez, Gabriel, 35 Gavoor, Mark, 161 gâvur (“infidel”), 55, 125, 209 Gaziantep, 84, 233, 237–38n4. See also Aintab/Antep genocide. See Armenian genocide (1915) ghaributyun songs, 241n5 Glendale, California, 157, 180 Gomidas Institute, 173, 217 Govdun, 1–4, 44–45, 77, 86, 158–61, 254n10 Grigorian, Haikaz (Pakan/Van), 150–52 Gyumri (Republic of Armenia), 79–80 Hagopian, Michael J., 171 Hagopian, Sofia, 205–6

Hairenik (Armenian Review), 150, 160, 244, 254 Halbwachs, Maurice, 38, 39–40, 45, 223 Hamidian massacres (1894–96), 41, 77, 113–14, 162, 176–77, 194, 205, 210, 240n3 Harb, Aliza (Viranshehir), 52–55, 242– 43n32, 243n33 Hardy, Charles (Khulakiugh), 147–50, 155, 185–86, 260n7 Harutyunyan, Hasmik (Moush), 146–47 Hasanbeyli, 92–95, 139 Havav, 206, 217–18 hayrenagtsagan miutiunner (compatriotic unions), 160–62. See also compatriotic societies HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi [Peoples’ Democratic Party]), 210, 217, 219 Hemshin, 205 heritage Armenians, 206 Hewsen, Robert (Kayseri), 174 Hoghe, 81, 218 homeland (Ottoman Eastern Anatolia), 5, 8–11, 224; as home-town, village, or house, 5, 7–8, 147–48, 161–62, 180, 185, 224–25; names for, 9–10, 80, 182; music as, 160–63, 166, 185–86; Republic of Armenia versus, 8–9, 164; songs of longing for, 145–54; yergir, 9–10, 80–81, 161–63, 182 host-land: homeland affective merging or double presence of, 127, 157–58, 171, 179–80, 182–86, 225, 258n7; music as, 160–63, 166; as place to preserve homeland culture, 184; restorative value of, 178–88

289

290

Index

house: as spiritual center of sacred, 222 -23; perceived as homeland, 147–48, 161–62, 180, 185, 224–25 house-place: bantukhd songs and, 48; family orchards and, 93, 147; houseworld and, 59–60; memory-stories and, 29–30, 56–62 house-world, 48, 59–60, 62, 66, 70, 74–76, 80–81, 223–25 Hovakim, Babi (Dzitogh), 129–30, 131, 133 Hovannisian, Richard (Pazmashen, Kesserig), 129–31, 132, 250n1 Hovannisian Kevorkian, Ani (Dzitogh, Pazmashen, Ordu), 29, 128–34, 250n1; The Hidden Map, 251n11; shrine made by, 129–33, 132 Husenig, 37–39, 61–62, 101, 115, 116, 117–18, 139, 181, 239–40n1 Hüseyin (owner of Zaven K.’s house in Aghen), 138–41 Istanbul, 2, 3, 4, 7, 17, 26, 32, 41, 51, 53, 92, 109, 118, 125, 128, 152–53, 170, 196, 200–202, 205, 213–15, 227, 258n23 invisibility, 114, 128–33, 206 invocations, 67, 68, 70–74, 101 Iraq, 25–26, 136 Islam, conversion to. See conversion to Islam Islamized Armenians, 205–6, 261n21. See also My Grandmother (Çetin) Istanos, 59–60, 198–200, 219 isyancılar (rebels), 174 Jacobs, Hourig Toukhanian (Kharpert), 56–60, 125, 160–61, 243n1 James, William, 62

Jamgotchian, Charles (Husenig), 197 Jibin, 4, 189, 190–91 John, Catherine, 157 Jones, Michael (Mikej), 236, 247n12, 261n16 Joyous Light (Surmelian), 51–52, 242n24 Kahkejian, Annie, 10 Karakala, 28, 204 Karjian, Nayiri, 84, 86 kavar (“provinces”), 152 Kavar, Mr. (Agn), 46–52, 55; on bantukhd songs, 47–50; on ghaributyun songs, 242n5; on hope and despair, 50–52; offers pet songbird to driver, 52; use of the term Anduni for bantukhd songs, 50, 154, 242n19 Kazanjian, David, 189–90 Kazanjian, Edward (Tarsus, Yeghike/ Kharpert), 17, 22 Kazanjian, Mary Ann (Kharpert, Yozgat), 15–22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 126, 238n1; family house, 16–21; painting of Yozgat by Uncle Vahan (Berberian, Mary Ann’s great uncle), 15–17, 16, 19–21; “Panama Hat Picture,” 19–20, 20. See also Vahan, Uncle Kazarian, Hachig (Ankugh), 155–63, 185–86, 255n1 Kef music, 162–63, 165 Keghi, 68–69, 73–74 Kehetian, Mitch (in Sogkom), 138 Keledjian, Hagop, 28 Keshgegian, Flora (Arapgir), 215, 219 Kesserig, 33 Kevorkian, Aram (Chunkush), 166, 256n1

Index

keys: house keys, 33, 34, 35; cardboard keys to cities (for pilgrims), 216 Kezlarian, Nancy (“Nancy Kay” Husenig; Sivas, Tadem, Tokat), 98, 229, 240n3, 300 khachkars (cross-stones), 115, 118–19, 148 Khanjian, Dikran (Zaven K.’s brother; Aghen), 134, 137 Khanjian, Laura (Zaven K.’s sister; Aghen), 134, 137–38, 192–93 Khanjian, Zaven (Aghen), 74, 134–41, 145–47 Kharpert, 6, 36, 56, 189, 194, 204–5, 264n7; American Missionary Compound, 57; Euphrates College, 56, 57, 114; Mamuret-ulAziz (Ottoman Vilayet), 8; Surp Hagop (Saint Jacob) Armenian Church, 57 Khasigian, Amos (Moush), 174 Khatchadourian, Raffi (Diyarbakir), 251n16 Khatcherian, Hrair Hawk, 28–29 Kherdian, David (Adana), 96, 97–98, 99 Khorsana, 79–80, 86, 197 Khulavank/Khulakiugh, 147–52, 155 Kılıç Artıkları (“remains of the sword”), 26, 29. See also “the Left Behind” killing fields, 171–73, 174, 257n16; Gamakh bridge, 173; “Kelesh” (outside Yozgat), 123 Kızılırmak River, 16 Kökmen, Cemal ( Jemal), 68, 71, 76, 156, 168, 178, 202, 215–16; poetry of, 85, 246n8 Kökmen, Selçuk, 102, 178, 215–16 Koroghlian, Bob (Lidje, Yozgat), 87, 119–20, 125–27, 133, 160

Koundakjian, Hagop (Hasanbeyli), 93–95 Koundakjian, Maryam (Hasanbeyli), 93–95, 167–68 Kurds/Kurdish people of Turkey: Armenian children “left behind” in care of Kurdish families, 42, 177, 208–9; culture, 9; erasure of Kurdish life, 217; fear of, 167; genocide commemoration organized by, 173; homeland music and, 155–58, 198; identity, 45, 74, 156, 205, 207, 208–9; Kurdish awakening, 209–19; Kurdish wedding, 155; Kurdish writers, 108, 109; Kurdlandia, 110; politics, 5, 108–9, 208–19, 227; restoration of Surp Giragos Church-Cathedral, 109, 214. See also Kökmen, Cemal ( Jemal) Kushigian, Bedros (Govdun), 44–45, 77, 190 Kütahya, 39 LaCapra, Dominick, 167, 181; acting out, 167, 181; working through, 181–82, 185 Laura G. Havav, 217–18, 219 Lebanon, 3, 44, 191, 193, 195 “the Left Behind,” 168–69, 217–18; rocks representing souls left behind, 77 Lidje, 60–61, 157–58, 160–61, 166–67, 208 The Little Girl Who Came in from the Cold (Baş), 206 Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Eng and Kazanjian), 189–90 Luys Zvart (Joyous Light; Surmelian), 51–52, 242n24

291

292

Index

Magzanian, Alberta (Bitias), 85, 91–92 Malatya, 54–55, 86–87, 163–64, 192, 196 map, historical Armenian (Bertram), ix, x maps and mapping (discussed): homeland-host-land as map overlay, 180–85, 225; music as way to “map” village into homeland, 147–48, 163; paintings as, 16; using hand-drawn or old maps, 37, 61, 116 Mardick (Kharpert, Pazmashen, Veri Tagh), 76–77, 83–84, 91–92 Margaret (Chunkush), 77–78, 173 Markarian, Herand M. (Shoushants), 99–100, 113 Marsoobian, Armen (Marsovan), 110 mass graves, 77, 171, 173–74 memorial candles, 33–35, 159, 256n1 memorials and memorialization, 132; anti-monuments and anti-­ memorials, 171–76; museum installations, 21, 174; pilgrims as, 171 memory: assembling of, 7–8, 20–21, 29–31, 35, 68, 90, 119, 224; music and, 42–55; profane memory, 45, 52–55, 91–92, 223; sacred space identified by, 42–43; sources for descendant pilgrims, 58–59; as things carried, 21–23 memory-reverie, 41–47, 92, 100, 151, 158, 222–23; definition of, 43; as eternal return, 43; as spiritual return, 43–45, 48, 51–52, 54, 74. See also reverie memory-stories: assembling of, 7–8, 20–21, 29–31, 35, 68, 90, 119, 224; as autobiographical, 58–59, 221, 225; clues within, 10; concept of, 30–31,

221; constructed meaning through, 21–22; definition of, 7–8; from Dzak, 24–27; emplacing, 18–19; house keys as, 33, 34, 35; house-place and, 29–30, 56–62; material objects as, 15–21; as music, 147, 149, 150, 221; photographs as, 31, 37, 101; placing in a lost village, 29–30; registers of consciousness and, 92–93, 157, 222–23; shift in, 22, 35 MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi [Nationalist Movement Party]), 219 Middle East Relief Society, 26 Mirak-Weissbach, Muriel, 22–26, 28–29, 43; Through the Wall of Fire, 25, 27, 239n9 Miranshahian, Sarkisk (Arapgir), 192–94, 193 “Mother Armenia Mourning Her Losses”: as sign of genocide in Muriel’s childhood, 27; painting by Keledjian, 28 Moughalian, Sato (Kütahya), 39, 250n8 Mouradian, Khatchig, 10, 128 Moush, 146–47, 152–55, 177, 204 Munjusun, 70–71, 74 Murad of Sepasdia (Uncle Murad), 2, 4, 16, 18, 158, 254n10 Musa Dagh, 85, 185, 195–96 museum houses (Yozgat), 17–18, 18, as assembled memory, 21, 126, 238n1 music: diaspora/Kef music, 162–63, 165; Govduntsi music, 158; Lidgetsi Lidjetsi music, 157–58, as shared ties, 155–7; Vanetsi music, 157. See also songs musical instruments: clarinet, 155–56,

Index

158–60; oud, 48–49, 50, 80, 156, 158, 160 My Grandmother (Çetin), 206–7, 211 mythical landscape, 29 Nagoski, Ian, 160 Najarian, Carolann (Sheykh-haji, Arapgir), 168, 183, 204 Najarian, Louis (Govdun), 158–59, 161 names and naming: Armenian -ian or -yan ending (“from the family of ”), 190; changing family name, 71, 209 “Nannies,” as surrogate grandmothers, 26–27 nationalism, 2–3, 163, 169–70, 176–77, 184, 209–10, 212, 219, 225; songs of national awakening, 152, 163 Nemir, Kawa, 109–10, 215 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 240n20 Nişanyan, Sevan, 173–74 nostalgia, 45, 46–47, 127 Nuri (“Blind Nuri”), 189–92, 195; songs, 190. O’Brien, Tim, 21 Öcalan, Abdullah, 210, 212 orphanages: in Aleppo, 105; in Greece, 150; in Istanbul, 26; in Khulavank, 149–50 Osky (Govdun), 1–4, 10, 78, 86, 158–59, 237n3 Palestinians: displaced, 25; images of children, 27; keys of lost houses cherished by, 33 Paloian, Heghnar Kherdian (Charles Hardy’s aunt). See Rose of Karator

Panosian, Zabelle, 154 Pasha, Enver, 53 Pasha, Talaat, 169, 173, 257n14 passports, 102, 103, 208 Pazmashen, 76, 76–77, 177, 185 perpetrators: descendants of, 11, 217; imagined by pilgrims, 167; memorials to, 173. See also Pasha, Enver; Pasha, Talaat Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19, 59, 89, 119, 184 Philliou, Christine, 207, 237n2 photographs and photography: as documents of Armen Aroyan, 128, 135; as memory-stories, 31, 37, 101; as votives, 101–10, 103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116 pilgrimages: study of, 5–8; tourism versus, 38; use of the term, 1. See also eternal return; spiritual return pilgrims, “descendant”: autobiographical use of memory-stories, 7, 41, 58–59; defined, 58; finding/not finding houses, 59, 66; generational distance from homeland, 81, 89; memory sources for, 58–59; remembering parents and grandparents, 39, 59, 73; rootedness in homeland, 80, 95. See also rituals of pilgrimage pilgrims, “native”: auto-biographical memory, 46–50, 67; defined, 7; use of memory, 7, 41–2; use of memory to define the sacred, 42– 46 pilgrims as poets. See poets and poetry Pirkinik, 80 PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan [Kurdistan Workers Party]), 210, 211, 212

293

294

Index

poets and poetry: Armenian experience communicated through, 39, 51–53; pilgrims as poets and pilgrims’ actions as poetry, 86, 95–96, 99–100, 110, 223; poetic encounters as poetic imagination, 21, 22, 97; poetic encounters as poetic reverie, 97; poetic encounters with the sacred, 91–100. See also Agbabian, Alidz Jebejian; Balakian, Peter (Diyarbakir); Boulos, Sargon; Djanikian, Gregory, “What Can I Tell You”; Jones, Michael (Mikej); Kherdian, David (Adana); Kökmen, Cemal ( Jemal); Markarian, Herand M.; Nemir, Kawa; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Sevag, Baruyr (Paruyr Sevak); Sonentz-Papazian, Tatul; Surmelian, Leon (Levon) Zaven; Tourian, Bedros prayers: as artifacts, 193; in anti-­ memorials, 174–76, 175; collecting earth as, 81; in collective sites of memory and churches, 65–67, 78, 105–6, 132–33, 174–76; liturgical prayers, 66–67, 70, 72; miracle stories and, 24–25; in poetry, 140, 141; as rituals, 66–67, 70, 72; votives representing, 132–33 the profane, 38–41, 45; invocations and, 68–74; memory, 45, 52–55, 91–92, 223; poetic encounter with the sacred, 91–100; rage and, 52–54; as repellent, 38–39, 41. See also sacred Proust, Marcel, 88–90 Providence, Rhode Island, 3, 59, 157, 158–59, 159, 182, 184 proxy houses, 8, 47, 60, 62, 85, 93, 102,

107, 108, 221; museum house as, 35, 126 Racine, Wisconsin, 149–50, 157, 186, 202 Raffi, 152–53 rage, 52–55, 92, 133, 139, 167; realms of consciousness, 92, 133, 233. See also registers and realms of consciousness; reverie registers and realms of consciousness: defined, 22, 43; emplacement and, 110–11; flooded by memories, 157; full communion, 87–88; invocations, 70, 72–73; memory-stories, 92–93, 157, 222–23; music and memories of music, 49, 147–48, 153–54, 157; place-related, 59, 62, 74, 92–93, 106, 136, 222–23; traveling between two registers, 73. See also reverie relics, 75–81, 82, 87; collections, 8, 42, 67, 75–81; definition of, 80; earth and stones as, 76–81, 97; as sacred, 65–66, 70–74, 75–77, 80–81, 84 relatives: finding, 42, 44, 199, 200, 200–204, 218; Heritage Armenians finding Armenian relatives, 218; searching for, 169. See also DNA Republic of Armenia, 8–9, 40–41, 54, 112, 139, 164, 225 Republic of Armenia, Soviet Socialist, 3, 8, 51, 79, 176 Republic of Turkey, 3, 195, 209, 237n1 resistance. See Armenian resistance movements reverie: active and alert reveries, 49, 74, 95, 130; altered consciousness compared with, 72–73; boundaries and distance of, 74, 130, 225; communion

Index

and, 88–89; memory-reverie, 43–47, 92, 100, 151, 158, 222–23; memoryreveries as spiritual returns, 43–45, 48, 51–52, 54, 74; music-induced reveries, 47–49; for native versus descendant pilgrims, 58; poetic reverie, 97; profane memory and, 45, 52–55, 91–92, 223; rituals and, 88–89, 95. See also Bachelard, Gaston Riggs, Henry Harrison “Harry,” 77, 173 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 98–100; “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” 98, 223 rituals of pilgrimage: as agency, 68; asking for blessings, 67–68, 131, 139–41, 147; collecting relics, 8, 42, 67, 75–81; communion, 67, 68, 82–90, 91–100; formal or conventional rituals, 65–67; gathering earth and stones, 76–81, 97; immediacy of, 99–100; inconclusive outcome of, 101–11; as interactive, 68; invocations, 67, 68–74, 101; shrines, 67, 68, 101, 129– 33, 132. See also ex-votives; poets and poetry; votives Rose of Karatsor (Heghnar Kherdian Paloian), 147–50 Sabreen (Iraqi child), 25–26 the sacred, 37–45; break in homogeneity of quotidian space, 42; irresistible attraction of, 38; memories/ memory stories as eruptions of the sacred, 42–43; music and, 46–55; non-sacred, 38; poetic encounter with the profane, 91–100; signs and symbols of, 60–62 Sacred and Profane (Eliade), 38. See also Eliade, Mircea

Sarafian, Ara, 173, 174, 217 Sarkis of Arapgir. See Miranshahian, Sarkis Saroyan, William (Bitlis), 75–76, 78, 154, 198 Sasun, 146–47, 149, 176–77, 254n10, 261n18 Satenig G. See Dulgarian family Sedoian, Seda, 251n13 Sepasdia (Sivas), 44, 50, 80, 83, 87, 88, 145, 155, 158, 229. See also Murad of Sepastia (Uncle Murad) Sevag, Baruyr (Paruyr Sevak), 50–51 Severian of Sivas, Saint, 80 Shabinkarahisar, 167–68 Shah-Mouradian, Armenag (Moush), 154 shame, 124–25 Shgharshik, Republic of Armenia, 40–41 shrines, 67, 68, 101, 129–33, 132 signs and symbols: confirming the sacred, 60–62; defined, 60–61; invocations and, 70, 72, 74; reassembling memory and, 20. See also spirits, pilgrims communing with Sis (near Şebinkarahisar), 31–35, 34, 162 Sona G. See Dulgarian family Sonentz-Papazian, Tatul, 39 songs: Agn songs, 47; bantukhd songs, 47–50, 149, 152–54, 160, 242n19; communal songs, 146–54, 223; “Crane” (Grung), 48; “Dle Yaman” (Alas), 153; “Eğin Viran Olmuş” 47, 241n7; fedayi (resistance) songs, 176–77, 225; “Ganche Grung” (Sing, Crane!), 151–52, 254n14; “Germer Fsdan Hekudz i” (She Has Worn a Red Dress), 196; “Gesi Bağları” (The

295

296

Index

songs (continued) Orchards of Gesi), 200, 260nn8–9; ghaributyun songs, 241n5; “Im Vortin Sokhag” (My Son, Sokhag), 163–64; “Kele Lao,” 145–47, 253n6; Khulavank/ Khulakiugh songs, 147–55, 155; “Kna Plpul” (Depart, Nightingale), 148–49, 150, 254n10; Lidje songs, 157–58; “Like an Eagle,” 254; longing, songs of, 47–50, 145– 54; “Mardigi Yerke” (The Warrior’s Song), 145, 253n1; patriotic songs, 56–58, 176–77; sacred songs, 95; Sepasdia songs, 145, 155, 161; songs of national awakening, 152; “Verkerov Li” (Full of Wounds), 177 space and spatial awareness: affective space, 56, 127, 226; eternal return and centrality of space, 43; exilic practices and space of belongings, 184–85; non-spiritual space, 223; poetic space, 100, 106; profane space, 38, 39–40, 70, 77–78, 223; register of consciousness and, 73–74; religious and spiritual, 38, 131–32; sacred space identified by memory, 42–43; space of loss, 38; space of spiritual return, 82; spatial memory, 67, 206, 226; spatial relations, 222–26; statecontrolled space, 175–76; travel in binary space, 39–40, 223, 225. See also house-place; house-world Spellberg, Denise, 236 spirits, pilgrims communing with, 86–89, 92–95, 185; when breaking bread and eating, 86, 88, 99; in cemeteries, 60–61; during interactive rituals, 69, 71–72; when gathering

earth and stones, 2, 61–62, 77–78, 82, 199–200; hokevor achkerov (“spiritual eyes”), 74; precariousness of, 117–18. See also signs and symbols spiritual returns, 43–45, 48, 51–52, 54, 59, 70, 73–74, 82, 97, 105 Stephen D (Sis, Goteh). See Dulgarian family Sulukh, 204 Surmelian, Leon (Levon) Zaven, 50–51, 118, 140–41, 165, 242n24 Surp Asdvadzadzin (Holy Mother of God): Church in Arapgir, 192; Church in Chungush, 77–78; Church in Vakef, 196 Surp Giragos Church-Cathedral, 102, 105–9, 115, 208–9, 214, 214–19, 227, 237–38n4 Surp Hagop (Saint Jacob) Church (Kharpert), 57 Surp Hatch (Holy Cross) cemetery (Üsküdar/Istanbul), 118 Surp Khach (Holy Cross Church; Lake Van’s island of Aghtamar), 175, 175, 215 Tateoss of Sis, 31–32, 32, 33, 34 Tehlirian, Soghomon, 169, 257n14 “The Things They Carried” (O’Brien), 21 Through the Wall of Fire (MirakWeissbach), 25, 27, 239n9 Thurber, James, 243–44n7 title deeds, 68, 238n1 Tölölyan, Khachig, 184, 258n6 Tourian, Bedros, 118 To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman American Diaspora (album), 160

Index

trauma: acting out, 167, 181; secondary witnesses, 167; trauma-scape, 167– 70, 176–77, 225; traumatic fear of travel to Turkey, 128, 178; traumatic silences, 27, 59, 104, 114–18; working through, 181–82, 185 travel restrictions, 4, 44, 46, 134 Turner, Victor, 185 Uçaner, Murad (Aintab/Gaziantep), 233, 237 Vahan, Uncle (Vahan Berberian; Mary Ann’s great uncle): family of, 19–20; journey from Yozgat for United States, 17–18; occupation, 21; oral history and papers, 17–18; “Panama Hat Picture,” 19–20, 20; “View of Yozgat” (painting), 15–17, 16, 19–21 Vahe M. (Munjusun), 70–78 Vakef, 195–97 Van, 8, 59, 76–77, 85, 99, 146, 147, 151, 155–57, 173–76, 204 Vartabed, Gomidas, 152–54, 163, 165 Vasilian, Hampartzoum, 41–45, 190, 210 Viranshehir, 52–54 Vosbikian, John, 161 votives, 52, 67–68, 132–33; names as, 104–8, 110; photographs as, 101–10,

103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116; of restoration, 112–18; rituals of deferment, 101–11; rituals of restoration, 112–18. See also ex-votos Watenpaugh, Heghnar, 162, 174, 235 Watertown, Massachusetts, 26, 27, 157 “We Are Few But We Are Called Armenians” (Sevag), 51 Werfel, Franz, 195 World War I, 3, 125, 150 World War II, 32, 159 “working through,” 181–82, 185 yergir (“homeland”), 9–10, 80–81, 161–62, 182 yergir bakanel (“worship”), 80 Yerznga, 155, 169, 173 Yozgat, 4, 15–21, 87, 119–27; Hotel Çamlik (Pinetree Hotel), 15, 17; market square, 120, 121, 123, 126, 127; Nizamoğlu Konağı (Nizamoğlu Mansion), 17–21, 18, 238n1; “View of Yozgat” (painting by Uncle Vahan Berberian), 15–17, 16, 19–21. See also Arslanian House Zeytun, 84, 173–74, 176–77 Zoryan Institute, 122–23

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Wor lding the Middle E a st

Emily Gottreich and Daniel Zoughbie, editors This series investigates the “worlding” of the Middle East and the ever-changing, ever-becoming dynamism of the region. It seeks to capture the ways in which the region is reimagined and unmade through flows of world capital, power, and ideas. Spanning the modern period to the present, Worlding the Middle East showcases critical and innovative books that develop new ways of thinking about the region and the wider world. Susan Gilson Miller, Years of Glory: Nelly Benatar and the Pursuit of Justice in Wartime North Africa 2021 Amélie Le Renard, Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and ­Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai 2021

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