Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey 9781350987951, 9781786733719

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AVE D I S H A D J I A N

SECRET NATION The Hidden Armenians of Turkey

Avedis Hadjian is a journalist and writer based in Venice. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde Diplomatique, and on Bloomberg News, among other international news outlets. His work as a correspondent has taken him to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, China, the Caucasus, Turkey, and Latin America. He was educated in Buenos Aires and Cambridge.

“A fascinating and valuable piece of work. Based on a very large number of encounters and interviews with people in Turkey, it gradually builds a kind of group portrait of the Armenian community in Turkey. This community has indeed been a ‘hidden nation’ for almost a century in the sense that almost all surviving Armenians in Turkey have converted to Islam and been submerged into the larger Turkish or Kurdish Muslim communities. Yet, to a surprising extent, a consciousness of being Armenian has survived—even among people who have no Armenian and have now been Muslims for the best part of a century. The records of the fieldwork in the form of descriptions of encounters and conversations are fascinating … the account is well written, very lively and fluid.” Erik J. Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies, University of Leiden and author of Turkey: A Modern History (I.B.Tauris, 2017) “Avedis Hadjian’s work on the descendants of Armenians still living in the eastern provinces of Turkey or established in Istanbul crosses history and memory. The author invites us to dive into a multiple world where memory is much more alive than one could have imagined. Those Turkish citizens who often want to forget their families’ pasts escape the stigma attached to their infamous origins and hide themselves to form a ‘secret nation.’ In other words, they do not give themselves up easily. This requires establishing a climate of trust. The author, a remarkable polyglot, who even managed to assimilate the Hamshen dialect, was thus gradually able to establish a strong link with his interlocutors. Those who want to understand what mass violence has engendered in Turkish society must read this book—which is indisputably the most accomplished investigation—an image of a world tortured from within by its memory.” Raymond H. Kevorkian, Honorary Director of Research, University Paris 8 and author of The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (I.B.Tauris, 2013)

“In a courageous, daring journey of discovery and recovery, the journalist Avedis Hadjian moved for years through eastern Turkey to seek out the ‘remnants of the sword,’ those whose ancestors had survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915, who in most cases converted to Islam, and were wary but willing to speak of their family’s experience. Eastern Anatolia is the contested geography where historic Armenia meets a present and future Kurdistan while both remain firmly under the gaze of the Turks. Hadjian’s vivid and varied portraits reveal layers of tragic loss and survival that testify to the perseverance and resilience of ordinary, extraordinary people.” Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (2015)

“Time opened a window and light transpersed one of the darkest secrets of the Middle East: that of the surviving Armenians left behind after the mass deportations and massacres, continuing to live over their historic land, living in a state of denial. The window of time has closed since, with Turkish politics hardening again, devouring more of its children. Yet, it left behind voices of survivors in the form of oral histories collected in various forms. Among them Avedis Hadjian’s remarkable book Secret Nation is the most complete narrative on the life and fate of Islamized Armenians.” Vicken Cheterian, author of Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide (2015)

“The Armenian Genocide of 1915–16 has one great untold story. This is that there may be as many as two million Islamicized Armenians living in Turkey, whose grandparents and great-grandparents survived the death marches and massacres and were incorporated into Kurdish and Turkish families, often by force. To uncover the secrets and tell this story requires great perseverance, erudition and great sensitivity. This is what Avedis Hadjian has done in this remarkable, vivid and quite eccentric book. His research is impressive and the stories he tells extraordinary and moving.” Thomas de Waal, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Europe “Deeply reported, and written with empathy and erudition, Secret Nation will prove to be an enduring work of journalism on the subject of ethnic slaughter and its long aftermath. Based on relentless travel across the Turkish countryside, the book examines a people who, for more than a century, have carried with them a liminal, quasi-clandestine heritage shaped by the legacy of the Armenian Genocide, and its official state denial. Avedis Hadjian moves through Anatolia’s wounded landscape like a storyteller from the novels of W. G. Sebald, weighted by history, and compelled to excavate the connective tissue between present and past, trauma and acceptance.” Raffi Khatchadourian, staff writer at the New Yorker

SECRET NATION The Hidden Armenians of Turkey

AVE D I S H A D J I A N

This publication was made possible by a generous grant from the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2018 Avedis Hadjian The right of Avedis Hadjian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN: 978 1 78831 199 1 eISBN: 978 1 78672 371 0 ePDF: 978 1 78673 371 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Text design, typesetting and eBook by BBR Design, Sheffield

For my father and for Kirkor Menaf

The harsh iron age was last. Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted into this age of baser natures: truth, shame and honor vanished; in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery, violence and pernicious desires. Ovid, The Metamorphoses Kılıç artıkları “The leftovers of the sword,” a Turkish expression employed to describe Armenian survivors of the Genocide who stayed on in the ancestral lands, especially women married off to Muslim men and forcibly converted to Islam.

Contents List of Illustrations 

Acknowledgments 

A Note on Names and Spelling  A Note on the Bibliography 

Introduction: A Lost Map on the Tramway in Istanbul  I.

SASUN

II.

COMMAGENE

III.

DIKRANAGERD

4.

Siirt

1.

2.

3. 5.

Sasun

Commagene

1

13

103

196

Mush

Bitlis

V.

GARIN

9.

Hınıs

11.

xviii

Dikranagerd II

7.

10.

xvi

141

DARON

8.

xii

Dikranagerd I

IV.

6.

xi

190

207 227

Erzurum

243

Bayazet

259

Sarıkamış, Kars and Ani

250 265

Secret Nation

VI.

SEPASDIA AND ASIA MINOR

13.

Ankara 

12.

14. 15.

16. 17.

Sepasdia 

281

Cæsaria 

298

286

Amasia and Gümüşhacıköy 

301

Kastamonu 

308

Yozgat 

314

VII. KHARPERT

18. 19.

Argat 

323

Dersim 

331

VIII. VAN

20.

Van 

IX.

CILICIA

23.

Urfa 

21.

22. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

359

Tatvan and Surp 

368

Cilicia 

373

Marash 

382

374

Kilis 

385

Adana 

387

Antap 

394

Musa Ler 

399

X.

THE BLACK SEA AND HAMSHEN

30.

Poshas 

29. 31.

32.

Hamshen I 

413

Horoms 

455

433

Hamshen II 

464

Notes 

543

Index 

557

Further Reading 

555

Plates 

571 x

List of Illustrations Maps Turkey and the Western Armenian provinces of Cilicia, Commagene and Hamshen

xx

Hamshen villages in the western Black Sea region*

xx

Cilicia

xxi

Western Armenia (east of Kharpert) and Republic of Armenia

xxii

Hamshen villages in the eastern Black Sea region*

xxii

*  Based on cartography prepared and copyrighted by Hagop Hachikian, in The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey, ed. Hovann H. Simonian (London and New York, 2007)

Plates 1.

The residents of an Armenian village in Sasun (possibly Pışut), in 1973 (© Shiraz)

571

2. Pilgrims climbing Mt. Maruta in July 2011 (author’s collection)

572

3. Baydzar Teyzé with her husband Sarkis Boğosyan at home in the grounds of Maryam Ana Assyrian Church in Dikranagerd (Diyarbakır), in December 2013 (author’s collection)

573

4. Tea harvest in the Hamshen village of Garci (author’s collection)

574

xi

Acknowledgments Family, friends, colleagues, and strangers made this book possible. Over the four years of travel and reading that went into the writing of this book, only their selfless help carried me to the conclusion. Whatever there is of worth in these pages is largely their merit. The inevitable pitfalls and faults are solely mine. In New York, Ardash Chilingirian took hours away from family and work in the early stages of this project, providing incisive insight into the life of Armenians in Turkey as well as developments in Turkish politics and society, while also helping me in the translation of telephone and online interviews and surveys. Arpi Cankar gave me thoughtful tips on getting in touch with Hamshentsis and hidden Armenians at a time when they were still apprehensive about communicating with Diaspora Armenians; the connections she shared with me were fundamental in starting the work; inadvertently, she rekindled this book’s idea, dormant since 1984, by inviting me to the New York premier of Sonbahar (Autumn) by Hamshentsi filmmaker Özcan Alper. Aris Sevag reviewed early drafts of the project, providing me with guidance that earned my growing appreciation as the work progressed; along with his wife Asdghig, Aris opened the doors to their home and their vast library, which they turned into a second home for me. Yelena Ambartsumian reviewed a very early advance, making suggestions that improved the writing. Vartan Matiossian came to my rescue more often than I can count, with precious bibliographical guidance. Herand Markarian, as then chairman for the New York branch of Hamazkayin Cultural Association, encouraged me to go ahead with the project by inviting me to make a presentation on the Hamshen Armenians, which later became the seed for the book project. For their help and advice, I also thank: Cristina Aby-Azar; Roupen Barsoumian; Ara Caprielian; Steve Degirmenjian; Bedross Der Matossian; Debra Ferman; Linda Ganjian; Rita Giragosian; Alan Huffman; Abner Katzman; Kirk Kazazian; Shant Madjarian; Armine Minassian; Alberto Riva; Ivan Rothkegel; Berjouhy Yesayan; and Liza Yesayan. In Fort Lauderdale, special gratitude goes to Victor Aimi, who has helped hone many of the ideas that shaped this book and whose family has always made their home also mine. In Los Angeles, Liana Aghajanian published an advance in her Ianyan online magazine, magnifying the project’s exposure. It was picked up in the xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Turkish press, leading many Armenians and their descendants in Turkey to contact me. A conversation with Alina Aghajanian, Liana’s sister, was key to developing a fundamental premise in this book. Edvard Sargsyan, also of Los Angeles, shared contact information on Islamicized Armenians, which was even more precious in the early stages of this work. In Washington, an interview with me by Haykaram Nahapetyan, the correspondent for Armenian H1 Television, aired in Armenia, leading to new contacts and information on the Islamicized Armenians. Prof. Bert Vaux, of Cambridge, UK, shared his expertise on the Hamshetsnak and Lomavren dialects, as did Prof. Patrick Taylor, of Mardin, Turkey. Sargon Donabed, in Providence, Rhode Island, and Nicholas al-Jeloo, in Melbourne, kindly put at my disposal their encyclopedic know­ledge of Assyrians, their history and churches. To Hovann Simonian, of Lausanne, I owe the DNA tests that confirmed many hunches. More importantly, his seminal work on the Hamshen Armenians and our conversations were a source of inspiration for me. Seda Altuğ and Hasan Eken, in Istanbul, helped me with the translation of a song in the Kurmancî dialect of Sasun. Also in Istanbul, Lerna Yanık clarified questions on Turkish expressions. The invitation by the Hrant Dink Foundation to the conference on Islamicized Armenians at Boğaziçi University in 2013 was a major boost for this project. George Aghjayan, of Boston, discussed at length in our correspondence the complications linked to the demographics of Armenians and their descendants, Islamicized or otherwise, in the geography of the Genocide. In Yerevan, Sergey Vardanyan, with his pioneering research on the Hamshen Armenians, lent his selfless support. Sofya Akobyan volunteered her profound know­ledge on the Islamicized and hidden Armenians, especially in the region of Sasun. Meline Anumian, whose kind help I had come to appreciate after we first met in Dersim in 2011, built on her generosity in our later encounters in Yerevan. Diaspora Minister Hranush Hakobyan, Lusine Abrahamyan, Araks Kasyan, Harout Ekmanian, Salpi Ghazarian, and Sako Arian contributed to publicizing my work, with exposure that opened the doors to new contacts amid the Islamicized Armenians. In Kiev, my deepest gratitude goes to the late primate of the Armenian Church, Archbishop Grigoris Bunyatyan, who shared with me his memories from the early times he had heard about the existence of villages of Armenians in the historical lands. To him I owed the first news about them in 1982, at a time when he was posted to Buenos Aires, and the coincidence of meeting him again in 2014 in Kiev brought the story full circle, shortly before his untimely passing the following year, amid the strains of serving his flock at a time of fratricidal war in Ukraine. xiii

Secret Nation

In Paris, I thank Prof. Yervant Bared Manuk, who shared his expertise on the history of conversion to Islam among Armenians since the Arab occupation of Armenia through the Hamidian period and the Genocide. I also thank Raymond Kévorkian for responding to my query on Sheik Said’s role during the Genocide in Hınıs. His monumental history of the Armenian Genocide was the main primary source for this book’s historical background, as I also cite in the bibliographical notes. In Buenos Aires, Archbishop Kissag Mouradian and Adrián Lomlomdjian provided unwavering support for this project, as did Aram Barceghian, Elida Bustos, Diana Dergarabedian, Federico Helman, Canan Kaya, Sergio Nahabetian, and Francisco Seminario. In Venice, Samuel Baghdassarian was family rather than friend in his unsparing support for this project, enriched with his know­ ledge of the Mekhitarist historiographical tradition. Prof. Alberto Peratoner shed light on the nuances of national identity and how it interacts with culture and religion, especially in the case of Armenians and their Church, with his unique capacity to analyze history through the lens of multiple disciplines and fields of know­ledge. The course on Islam and the Middle East by Prof. Maria Pia Pedani at Ca’ Foscari University was crucial to understand Ottoman perspectives on history. Prof. Giampiero Bellingeri helped me interpret a verse from Nâzım Hikmet’s Human Landscapes from my Country. The sense of guilt for the funding that went into this book will dissipate only slowly, in the know­ledge that it could have been devoted to more urgent and worthy causes. I can only hope that the result will not disappoint the people who invested in this project. At the Armenian General Benevolent Union, in New York, the unreserved support I found from Anita Anserian, Carol Aslanian, and Artoun Hamalian was as vital as it was humbling. The same goes for Stepan and Garo Arslanian, in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, for their immediate and munificent response. In New Jersey, Zaven Khanjian and the Armenian Missionary Association of America offered their generous help, as did Maggie Mangassarian-Goschin and the Ararat-Eskijian Museum in Los Angeles. To all of them I shall always remain grateful. At I.B.Tauris, I cannot thank Lizzy Collier enough. She made this project possible. I also express my gratitude to Sara Magness for her help in the production phase. A writer’s best friend is a good copy-editor: Chris Reed excelled at it with his thoroughness. In no small measure, this book was completed thanks to Doris Melkonian, of Los Angeles. Her support was pivotal in the writing phase, and my gratitude to her defeats my powers of expression. Likewise, this acknowledgment here does not convey the depth of appreciation to the Mekhitarist Congregation, which extended its prolonged hospitality for the writing of this book, completed at xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

St. Lazarus Monastery and the Moorat-Raphaël Armenian College, by the kind permission of then Fr. Abbot Yeghya Kilaghbian. At St. Lazarus, Fr. Vahan Ohanian shared his know­ledge and resources on issues ranging from etymology to history and theology of the Armenian Church, as did Fr. Mesrob Lahian, especially illuminating coincidences and differences on the understanding of God in Christianity and Islam. Fr. Hamazasp Keshishian patiently assisted me in my bibliographical queries. In Venice and Istanbul, Archbishop Boghos Levon Zekiyan, primate of the Diocese of the Armenian Catholic Church in Turkey and pontifical delegate for the Mekhitarist Congregation, offered theological perspectives on martyrdom and Genocide, and the dilemma of forcibly Islamicized Armenians and their descendants. Yet the people I owe the biggest debt of gratitude go unmentioned here. They are the protagonists of this book, and most are named by pseudonyms. The Armenians of Turkey and their descendants populate these pages, which are an acknowledgment to them and their existence, against almost all odds. Along the way, mentors in my career and earnest supporters of this project passed away: Narciso Binayán Carmona, Aris Sevag, and Roupen Barsoumian. So did my first teacher, my father, whose example and ideals still guide me, foremost among them the love for books and words, and the humility to listen and learn. May this book serve as recognition to them, in loving memory. This long list cannot be complete without a mention of my mother, to whom I owe everything from stories about the Dikranagerd Armenians to digging up the roots of obscure words from Arabic; my siblings Araz, Alina, Ari, Alex, and Ania Karen; and Miriam, my life companion. Their patience and faith in this work got me through to the end.

xv

A Note on Names and Spelling A hybrid convention has been adopted for the spelling of names in this book. Armenian geographical and proper names, such as Khach or Mush, are spelled as commonly used in English publications. Most Western Armenian names have been transliterated according to the Western Armenian pronunciation or the usual rendering in the Latin alphabet by the Armenians of Turkey: thus, we write Hrant, for example, rather than Hrand, as it would be in Eastern Armenian. In the interest of easier reading, we have avoided the HübschmannMeillet transliteration system, preferred in academia. Again, guidance has been idiosyncratic: some names, including Dashnaktsutyun, have been spelled according to the most common usage in the literature published in English. The phonetic chart below, based on the Turkish alphabet, has been adopted for Turkish, Kurdish, and Zaza names, as well as less common Armenian ones, including Ardanuş, spelled thus instead of Ardanush. Â â C c Ç ç Ğ ğ I ı İ i, Î î Ö ö Ô ô Ş ş Ü ü Û û Xx

/a:/ /dʒ/ /tʃ/ /ɣ/1 /ɯ/ /i/, /iː/ /ø/ /ɔ/ /ʃ/ /y/ /u:/ /x ~ χ/

faint and longer “a” as in parry “j” as in joke “ch” as in chimpanzee as the guttural “r” in Renée in French or the “gh” in Baghdad “e” as in open “ee” as in seen “u” as in turn “o” as in bone “sh” as in shine “u” as in cube long “u” as in the French ou “kh” or a strong “h” as the “j” in José in Spanish or the “ch” in Aachen in German

The titles of the ten parts broadly correspond to historical Armenian provinces, except Commagene, an ancient Hellenistic kingdom, and the Black Sea and Hamshen, which has never existed as such as an administrative unit. The criterion, however, has also been idiosyncratic, as the cities and districts of individual chapters do not necessarily correspond to past or present xvi

A NOTE ON NAMES AND SPELLING

administrative units, but rather to the book’s structure and the narrative flow. Thus, Ankara, Yozgat, and Amasia have not been part of the province of Sepasdia. Also, Urfa (the ancient Edessa) was just outside the borders of Cilicia. Most importantly, there is not necessarily a correspondence between the demographic importance of the Armenian population (Islamicized, “hidden,” or otherwise) of any given district or province and the length of each chapter. This means that the length of the Sasun chapter, for example, does not necessarily indicate that there are more Armenians there than, say, Dersim, to which a much shorter chapter is devoted. This simply shows that it was possible to gather more stories from one place than another, and should only be seen as a limitation on the part of this author. Most administrative units, from villages to provinces, are quoted by their historical names but the official Turkish name is also employed. Hence, we have used Garin, the Armenian name for the historical province, instead of Erzurum, but the official geographical nomenclature is always quoted to avoid confusion. The same applies, for example, to Diyarbakır, which we have chosen to call Dikranagerd, even though the case here is more contentious, for reasons explained in the relevant pages. Still, the names are also used alternately, making clear that both the Armenian and the Turkish ones designate the same district. Most subjects who were alive at the time of writing are named by a pseudonym. This is indicated in italics at the first mention (Yusuf, hereafter Yusuf, for example). The same guidance applies to some villages that have been disguised under fictional names to help protect the anonymity of interviewees. Even persons who had agreed to be quoted by their real names are mentioned here by pseudonyms. The reasons are twofold: consistency, and an additional precaution, out of concern for their safety, to limit exposure of the story subjects to the swings of Turkish politics, the fickleness of which may affect disproportionately minority members, especially members of a group—such as the descendants of Armenian converts in the geography of the Genocide—that only a few years ago were still reluctant to disclose their ancestry. Most likely the current deterioration of the situation in Turkey will dissuade some from revealing their origins, if they ever considered it. Others may find it safe to revert to their former, “hidden” condition, as much as that can be feasible. Pseudonyms have also been used for figures who are publicly known and have spoken for the record for other publications or are quoted in other books on this subject. There are a number of exceptions. Most deceased persons are mentioned by their real names, but only in a very few cases are last names provided. High officials and historical figures are also quoted by their real names. This should not deter historians or interested experts from making their requests to this author should they need to establish contact with any of the persons mentioned in this book. In addition, some proper names—especially among the Hamshentsis— were preserved due to their linguistic curiosity as well as their beauty. xvii

A Note on the Bibliography The story of the hidden or Islamicized Armenians of Turkey has been the subject of a number of books released in the last few years, including Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian’s The Remains of the Sword, first published in French in 2012. The book is also available in Turkish. Fethiye Çetin’s memoir, My Grandmother, remains the groundbreaking work on the topic. The book tells the story of her grandmother Hıranuş, a 1915 orphan, and through her she introduces us to the lives of survivors and their descendants who stayed in the historical lands. When it came out in 2004, Genocide testimonies in Turkey could expose authors to danger, the mildest of which was prosecution. Yet the slim volume encouraged others to come forth with their family stories and make the first dents in a century of denial. The bibliography used in the writing of this book is quoted in the relevant passages. The three books listed below were the primary sources for reconstructing the historical background. Raymond Kévorkian’s The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, first published in French in 2006, remains to date the most comprehensive work on the topic. An English translation has been available since 2011. James R. Russell’s Zoroastrianism in Armenia is a vastly richer book than its title and size suggest. A fundamental study of the pre-Christian era, this 1988 publication is delightful to read and provides insights into everything from obscure passages in the Sasuntsi Davit (Davit of Sasun) epic to the Arab occupation of Armenia. Fr. Ghevont Alishan’s Յուշիկք հայրենեաց հայոց (Memories of the Armenian Homeland) is a classic volume on Armenian history. First published in 1869, it is a book of reference for pre-Genocide Armenia. It is even more valuable for two other features: the arrangement of its contents by thematic relevance rather than chronological order; and the perspective of a monk writing from St. Lazarus island in Venice during a seminal period, when Western Armenia was still alive even if deprived of statehood. Even though his book is about the past, Alishan’s pen, in exquisite classical Armenian, is brimming with the joyous and impatient prose of someone who saw in the ancient civilization a harbinger of a new dawn. At the time, the xviii

A NOTE ON THE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armenian Renaissance movement, or Zartonk, was starting to take shape in Constantinople, in no small measure the fruit of the Mekhitarist Congregation’s labors. It was killed in its infancy: the architects of the enlightenment of Armenian life and letters were rounded up on April 24, 1915. That day, the nation was decapitated. But Alishan was writing almost half a century earlier. It was also decades before the first massacres under Sultan Abdül Hamid II began to impact the psyche of Armenians, instilling in them a fear of complete annihilation. The Genocide embedded that fear in the nation, and it still informs it. Readers interested in learning more about these topics are invited to consult the “Further Reading” section at the end of the book.

xix

Rejig 23 february 2018 Left-hand frame size: 117mm x 181mm Font: Myriad Pro Rig 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Correct 19 march/4 april 2018 Ma Map 1 Turkey the xWestern of Cilicia, Font: Myriadprovinces Pro Rejig 23Commagene february 2018 and Hamshen Left-hand frame size:and 117mm 181mm Armenian Right-hand fram IB TAURIS 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Correct 19 march/4 april 2018 Map 1 Map 1 HAMSHEN Secret Nation B U LGAR IA

B TAURIS AMSHEN ecret Nation

B

BU LG A R I A

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k

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e

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l

TUR K EY

EC

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T U R K EY

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RE

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1

Istanbul

1 Kastamonu Adapazarı

Gümüşhacıköy

A

Gümüşhacıköy

Adapazarı

Amasia Ankara Ankara

Yozgat Yozgat

Sepasdia (Sivas)

T U

T

U R

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ES E Cæsaria (Kayseri) Y

Cæsaria

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(Kayseri)

2

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C

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CYPRUS B l a c k B l a c k

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S e a

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Karapelit Hemşin Paralı (Köyü) Kovukpelit Lahana Yenice Karapelit Açmabşı Karatavuk Ortaköy Kovukpelit KestanepınarıLahana Aktaş 0 5 10Açmabşı km Kestanepınarı Aktaş 0 2 4 6 miles

Paralı Ortaköy 0 0

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CYPRUS

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Rejig 23 february 2018 Right-hand frame size: 117mm x 181mm Font: Myriad Pro 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Correct19 march/4 april 2018 018 Map 1 Rejig 23 february 2018 ary 2018 Right-hand frame size: 117mm x 181mm Font: Myriad Pro 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Correct19 march/4 april 2018 arch/4 april 2018 Map 1 0 100 200 300 km

S

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50 0

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ARME NIA

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I

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Kars Ani ARME NIA Sarıkamış Hınıs R I N Amasia A G Garin ) Bayazet Sarıkamış (Erzurum) r u m Hınıs (Doğubeyazıt) A u A R I N I z Sepasdia r E G ( ) Bayazet D Garin (Sivas) S (Doğubeyazıt) (Erzurum) r u m u Yozgat P A Sepasdia I A s) z r E a ( Dersim D S (Tunceli) E ( S i v (Sivas) RON IR AN A s) S A Mush P R D a ER P A Dersim B TatvanO N Van E ( SKi vH uret-ul-HzT (Tunceli) IR AN iz) I A R Mush A N am S (M A R P E RSasun N D Surp VB Tatvan Van K Hmuret-ul-HzTiS A S U Bitlis I z) a A N Cæsaria Sasun E (M SığertS US NBitlis Surp V N (Kayseri) E Diyarbakır A S (Siirt) AG a rA N A MM bNa kE G E Sığert S Adıyaman CO E Diyarbakır R ır) (Siirt) Da A N AG Marash M rb AG I L AC O M Adıyaman C akı E R I r) D MarashUrfa Qamıșli I AntapL A

Amasia Gümüşhacıköy

2

100

300 km

G E O R G I A

köy

E ria eri) K

50

200 200 miles

G E O R G I A

a

EN SH M HA

zgat

100 150

100

(Rojava)

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Qamıșli (Rojava)

I R A Q I R A Q

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2 T

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Y

Zeytun Surp Sarkis

(Kozan)

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Mersin

Cilicia

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Frame size: 116mm x 181mm 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Map 2 Rejig 23 february 2018 Correct 19 march 2018 1st Proof 05 february 2018 Correct 04 april 2018 Rejig 23 february 2018 Correct 19 march 2018 Correct 04 Armenia april 2018 (east of Western 0

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Çançağan (Çamurlu) Makrial Veyi Sarp (Kemalpaşa) Köprücü Sumcuma (Kâzimiye) e a Xelu ked (Üçkardeş) Çançağan Xetselon (Dereiçi) (Çamurlu) Makrial (Karaosmaniye) (Kemalpaşa) Köprücü Manastır e a Xelu ked Xigoba (Yeşilköy) Xetselon (Başoba)(Dereiçi) (Karaosmaniye) Zurpici Zaluna Manastır (Yoldere) Hopa (Koyuncular) Xigoba Mamanat (Yeşilköy) Ardala Çavuşlu (Başoba) Tsurxinci (Demirciler) (Eşmekaya) (Çifteköprü) Zurpici Vayi Ardala Zaluna Garci (Hendek) (Yoldere) (Çimenli) Hopa Borçka (Koyuncular) (Balıkköy) Zendit ÇıxalaMamanat Ardala Dzağrina Çavuşlu (Düzköy) Tsurxinci (Demirciler) Ançyoğ (Pınarlı)(Eşmekaya) (Güneşli) Vayi Ardala (Çifteköprü) (Hendek) (Çimenli) TGarci U RDzağrina K E Çıxala Y Borçka Zendit (Balıkköy) (Düzköy) (Güneşli) Ançyoğ (Pınarlı) (Üçkardeş)

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Introduction

A Lost Map on the Tramway in Istanbul “Who are you? This is Turkey. Do you know what Turkey is?” a man asked me, his thick glasses magnifying the fear in his eyes. He was an Armenian from Anatolia now living in Istanbul. I was at a teahouse in the Kurtuluş district of Istanbul, where Armenian men originally from Sepasdia, Sinop, Kastamonu, and other provinces in the interior usually gathered, trying to interview them. And he was right. I didn’t know what Turkey was. But Turkey, and many Armenians themselves, didn’t know who he was either. For a while, I had believed him and his friends to be Poshas, members of a secretive branch of the Roma nation that had settled on the Armenian plateau around the tenth century and still spoke a dialect based on Armenian. But I was wrong to take the moniker at face value, for “Posha” had also been used by Istanbul Armenians as one of the pejoratives for their Anatolian kin when the latter’s migration to the former imperial capital had intensified in the 1960s. With most people in Turkey unaware of its Gypsy origin, the Anatolian Armenians were still known by some as Poshas. For a century, the descendants of the survivors of the 1915 Genocide who stayed behind in Eastern Anatolia after forcibly converting to Islam kept their identity secret. Some still do. There are devout Muslims among them; others are Alevis, and a few secretly remain Christian, especially in the area of Sasun, where there are still mountain villages with secret Armenian populations. Yet many are agnostics or atheists. All the religious and ideological currents to be found in Turkey are represented among this group, called “secret Armenians” or “hidden Armenians,” even though some find the name offensive. No one knows whether the hidden Armenians are in the thousands or a few million. Part of the problem stems from the difficulty of defining who is a secret Armenian. Some refuse to be called Armenian, even though they admit their parents or grandparents were so, but sometimes, often against their own will, they are still considered Armenian by other Turks or Kurds. Some are known to be Armenian to their neighbors and don’t hide it, while others keep it even 1

Secret Nation

from their own children, some of whom find out from other kids, who taunt them for being Armenian. Then there is the question of descendants of mixed marriages, and that vast majority of grandchildren of Armenian grandmothers, women kidnapped or forcibly married off during the Genocide. Yet identity is a variable state, as many migrants know, some even changing countries more than once, others converting to a different religion. A conversation with a microbiologist on an unrelated topic in the summer of 2014 in Yerevan offered me a clue. As identity is not an immutable quality, it could be thought of as a state that can be defined along an imaginary spectrum. It may change over a lifetime, and it possibly will in many cases. We do not pretend to measure it in any manner: that would be as futile as it would be ridiculous, when not offensive. At most perhaps we can venture that people with a number of characteristics—have Armenian ancestry; consider themselves Armenian; live in their ancestral hometowns; or are in a way connected to a larger Armenian group (be that a family, clan, or community organization)—are far removed from those who only recognize a distant ancestor and do not see themselves as part of the community or nation. As my first trip in search of secret Armenians was drawing to a close in the summer of 2011, I experienced an incident that shed new light on the characters that play out the drama of Turkey every day, a reminder that we are all actors trapped in the plot of history, playing roles most of us have not chosen. I was heading to Istanbul Airport, where my flight to New York awaited me. I took the tram at Çemberlitaş station, near Sultanahmet, and got off at Lâleli Station to transfer to the metro train that would take me to the airport. After a ten-minute walk, I learned that I had disembarked at the wrong station. Then, trying not to panic, I also realized that I had left a one-meter tube on the tram, wrapped up in an old newspaper, containing valuable and potentially troublesome material: a map of Tunceli, a rebellious province, with the name “TÜRKİYE” torn off. Inside the tube, I had also placed compromising notes written in Turkish of an interview with an Alevi activist. But what I really agonized over was what I had rolled inside the map: four precious, autographed photos by the Armenian-Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler. I debated whether I should try to get back the tube. I knew that, should anyone unwrap the map, the contents could cause me trouble with the police. I was also aware of how slim the chances were of recovering an item lost in the mass transit system of a city of 13 million people. Although the Alevi activist had torn the name of Turkey from the map, fragments of the E in “TÜRKİYE” were still visible at the bottom, looking like the stripes of a tattered flag. The name of Tunceli had been angrily crossed out in thick black Sharpie, and above it the activist had written “Dersim,” the province’s old name. “Dersim is not Turkey,” the activist said. 2

INTRODUCTION

In Turkey, “Dersim” and “1938” are mentioned in the same breath, the way people elsewhere speak of the Olympic Games. The year 1938 saw a massacre by Turkish military forces sent to suppress an uprising. Although the then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had recently apologized for the massacre, calling it “the biggest tragedy in our history,” the name “Dersim” still had subversive resonances. Any Turkish police officer looking at the defaced map would have no difficulty getting the point. And it would easily pass for an “insult to the Turkish nation,” as defined in Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, punishable by up to three years in prison. But that was small beer compared with what the notes revealed. During an interview conducted in a building facing the Turkish military base in Dersim, this activist had told me, as recorded in the notes: You are Armenian. This land has been waiting for you. Come and claim back your land. Get a gun and go to the mountains to fight. If your wife doesn’t join you, we’ll get you one of our women, and she’ll fight alongside you.

Dersim probably had a high concentration of secret Armenians, a topic that obsessed journalist Hrant Dink, who claimed that there are about 2 million of them in Turkey. And, in a way, Dersim and secret Armenians are connected to Dink’s murder. In an article published in his newspaper Agos, Dink claimed that Sabiha Gökçen, the first female combat pilot in both Turkey and the world, and Atatürk’s adoptive daughter, was an Armenian orphan from the 1915 genocide, Hatun Sebilciyan. If Dink was right, she was a secret Armenian. Gökçen is considered a Turkish hero, in no small part due to her role in suppressing the Dersim uprising in 1938, strafing rebel positions at close range. Dink was murdered in the furious aftermath that followed his story on Gökçen’s alleged Armenian origin and the tragic irony of an Armenian genocide orphan, with the identity of a Turk, taking part in a massacre of Alevi only two decades after the Genocide. Back at the tram station in Istanbul, I went to see the stationmaster to report the lost map. A polite, solemn young man, he spoke with a thick Eastern Anatolian accent, his ks turning into khs. After taking my report, the stationmaster invited me for tea. Someone dropped by to greet him. The stationmaster’s friend wanted to know where I was from. “Argentina,” I replied, but he wasn’t buying any of it and kept pressing me about my origins. Why did I speak Turkish? Why did I look “almost like a Turk?” I insisted that I was Argentine. “Yes, of course, I’m Japanese,” he said with a sour smile. “You loved Turkey, didn’t you?” he asked me and walked away without waiting for my reply. As I watched him leave, I remembered that a 3

Secret Nation

few months earlier, Argentina had received unflattering coverage in the Turkish press over formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Many Turks were aware of Argentina’s sizable Armenian community. A few minutes later, a young man, in sunglasses and a black T-shirt and trousers, flashed a police badge and passed through the turnstile. He reminded me of a similarly dressed plainclothes agent who had given me trouble in Dersim, after I walked out of the building where the activist had given me the map. But this undercover officer did not approach me. Then, the telephone rang inside the supervisor’s booth. “They found the map,” he said stoically, staring at me through his dark sunglasses. “It will be here in fifteen minutes.” I began to steel myself for a trip to the police station. Indeed, the tram pulled over fifteen minutes later. The driver quickly stepped outside and handed the tube with the map to the stationmaster. The stationmaster walked up to me, shook my hand, and wished me a safe trip home, “wherever that is,” he said. He returned the tube with the map to me unopened, still rolled up in the old Hürriyet newspaper, a photograph of Prime Minister Erdoğan sporting an angry expression and wagging his finger at God knows what.     

Turkey appeared to be set on the course of democratization, and it appeared that many in the country relished the new freedoms, as taboo after taboo was toppled in the press, in academia, and among people in the street. The Armenian Genocide, the Dersim massacre of 1938, and other topics that could have resulted in a trip to the police station if discussed in the wrong way in public, were now openly debated. But people with older memories knew better, and this springlike atmosphere did not fool them. Indeed, it was not the first time that Turkey had lurched toward democracy. On August 29, 1908, a month after the Young Turk Revolution, Mihrdat Noradoungian published an article, “The price of freedom,” in Puzantion, an Armenian newspaper in Constantinople. It was a moment of hope in the Ottoman Empire and the end of the brutalities that had marked the reign of Sultan Abdül Hamid II: The change that took place a month ago had the biggest peculiar advantage, which the entire world views with bewilderment, and that is the lack of blood and uproar […] Though during 15 years a lot of blood has been spilled, there was the fear of greater bloodshed which did not happen. One should know that this [bloodshed] has become a natural law and that natural laws are unavoidable. Whatever did not happen in the beginning could still happen. Whatever the

4

INTRODUCTION revolution did not do, the counterrevolution will be able to do […] New freedom is always fragile. Let us be careful […] We repeat that we need to be careful from shouting “Armenian” or to talk about an independent Armenia […] The majority of the nation is in agreement that reforming the condition of the Armenians of Turkey is dependent on the reform of Turkey.1

The predicament of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was not benign. Yet it was a polity where they had a place, albeit a deteriorating one as violence in the Armenian provinces grew worse following the dissolution by imperial fiat of the Kurdish emirates and the power struggles amid Kurdish tribes to fill the vacuum, and their land grab and wealth appropriation at the expense of Armenians. Moreover, they were an integral part of the economy, if increasingly resented by the Muslim majority that lagged behind both in wealth and education. The Young Turk Revolution began the exclusion process of Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities, a process that culminated in the Genocide and its direct outcome, Atatürk’s “Turkey for the Turks.” Yet Turkey has remained an empire in all but name, in terms of both a geography appropriated from other nations for the benefit of a dominant people, descended of conquerors arrived from elsewhere, and a state that has consistently excluded throughout its history its indigenous peoples, now reduced to token communities, from any position of power or public office. With Armenians and Greeks exterminated and their remnants mostly deported, Kurds have been revolting against the Turkish state for almost a century now. Junior partners of the Ottoman sultans since the mid-seventeenth century, Kurds did not rebel against Atatürk’s secular state project until 1925, when the fear of losing their privileges as Muslim citizens fueled the first Kurdish uprising. Even if the sources of Kurdish irredentism have undergone a fundamental transformation since then, from Islamic orthodoxy to revolutionary socialism, the response by the Turkish state has been consistent: massive firepower and the threat of unleashing it to preserve its territorial integrity. Turkey has proved extremely sensitive to any perceived threat to its state and territory, even if unfounded. Armenians in 1915 were not pursuing independence from the Ottoman Empire. The main nationalist party, the Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), was allied with the Committee of Union and Progress in the 1908 revolution, following through with a conciliatory policy of moderate demands for reforms in the Armenian provinces to protect the lives and properties of Armenians. Yet as former Turkish president Süleyman Demirel has observed, the fear that the country is permanently “on the brink”—of conspiracies that will tear it apart, or of a civil war that can break out at any moment—pervades the Turkish 5

Secret Nation

establishment, including the military. These anxieties and the centrifugal tendencies in Anatolia help explain the “deep state,” an alleged power structure that is said to be engrained in the armed forces, the ruling elites, and law enforcement. It also serves as justification for repression by the state. Since its birth, the Turkish state has inflicted and withstood consistent and often high levels, often extreme, of violence. The state has proved resilient to it. It may even be argued that it needs it to feed the military and repressive foundations that underpin the Turkish state. This can be observed in the man-made topography of the country while traveling in Anatolia, passing by military bases that extend for miles, with the distinctive black-on-red signs of a soldier wearing a helmet and holding an assault rifle. Sometimes these bases are separated by only a short distance. Deep inland, these fortified outposts are not against any external enemy. Unlike the citadels and fortresses from antiquity and the Middle Ages that dot the land, the contemporary ones do not protect it from invaders, but assert the power of the state, by the state and for the state, but not necessarily for the people. These bases are potentially or actually against the people. Now that Turkey has descended again into a spiral of violence, it becomes clear why so many hidden or Islamicized Armenians smiled in silence or acknowledged with perfunctory courtesy the laudatory comments made by foreign visitors, including myself, about the new freedoms that seemed to be emerging in Turkey. Even if unconfessed for the awkwardness implicit in it, the absence of violence was making them uneasy, as it did for Armenians and others in 1908, as Noradoungian noted in his premonitory article. It could not last then, and it did not. It could not last a century later, and it did not either. The longer the uneventful days, the worse the backlash: it was a fear always proved right in Turkish history. Even if past behavior can never be an infallible predictor of the future, it does serve as guidance, especially as this pendular pattern has been consistently observed in Turkey at least since the advent of Sultan Abdül Hamid II in 1876. People who were on the land knew better. An Islamicized Armenian in Mush grew agitated when I scolded a noisy child in the street, whose screams outside the office where we were having the interview made our conversation impossible. “Why do you fear a kid?” I had asked, angrier at the misbehaving boy than at the interviewee, who smiled sarcastically: “Don’t you know this people?” It was a call, one of several that I encountered and not always heeded, for humility and respect for the locals. That was how they had made it through a century of unacknowledged genocide that had obliterated their kin, on the land where they still lived.     

6

INTRODUCTION

To this date, most Armenians tend to adhere to a narrow definition of their national identity. As in Ottoman times, many would still agree that it is hard to think of a person as one of their own if he or she is not a member, at least nominally, of the Armenian Church, or at least professes the Christian faith regardless of denomination. While challenged by growing agnosticism or religious indifference mostly in the West, this traditional concept of nationality prevails both in Armenia and the Diaspora. And now secret Armenians, many of whom by now have genuinely converted to Islam and are solely Turkish speakers, come to blur even further what was until very recently a clear notion of what made an Armenian, in which denial and rejection of Islam and the Turk plays a big part. That has been changing. Secret Armenians, as well as the Hamshentsis, are being embraced by Armenians from elsewhere, their contacts facilitated by social networks on the internet. Some are driven by a zeal that is almost evangelical in nature, sincerely believing in the need to save their kin, those that have stayed behind in their ancestral lands, from oblivion. This is regardless of whether these secret Armenians see it in their own best interest to engage on these terms. Others, however, approached this newly found group with curiosity—​a curiosity reciprocated among the Anatolian Armenians, especially the youth. Perhaps the real motivations behind this newly found enthusiasm for the hidden Armenians among Diasporans go beyond curiosity or rejoicing at finding lost relatives and fellow countrymen in a land where they were thought long gone. In the grand scheme of things, 100 years is the blinking of a star. Yet on a human scale, it spans four generations, and in a few decades the fifth one after the 1915 genocide will start taking over the reins of an Armenian Diaspora that has grown old and is beginning to wear out on several fronts. These include churches with declining attendance (in line with general trends in the West), schools with falling enrollment, and the dying Western Armenian language (originally spoken in the Ottoman Empire) which Unesco now officially considers endangered and may very well be extinct for all practical purposes by the end of this century. In this scenario of decline and loss, the sudden discovery of Armenians who somehow escaped extermination in 1915 and stayed behind in their historical lands offered an unexpected jolt of life. There were still Armenians in Mush, Sasun, and Van: all hope was not yet lost. Half a century ago nobody paid too much attention to the Anatolian Armenians, even though they were known to exist. Visits by Armenians from Syria, Lebanon, or other places to relatives who had stayed behind in places such as Bingöl, Sivas, or Diyarbakır—some having converted to Islam—were not uncommon in the 1960s. And there were known cases of lost Armenians 7

Secret Nation

who left these ancestral lands to join the Diaspora, which at the time was barely beginning to stand on its feet after the devastation wreaked by the Genocide. Sosi Kazanjian, who was staying at the Armenian Relief Society’s orphanage in Aleppo in the 1960s, still remembers that, at the time, an Armenian woman had abandoned her Muslim husband in Diyarbakır and, along with her son, had come there to seek refuge and help. The boy, who was nine or ten, only spoke Turkish. His name, Kenan, was changed to the Armenian one Khoren. But mother and son did not blend in, and after a year or two they went back to their home in Diyarbakır. At the time, nobody thought of them as special people or paid them too much attention in terms of rescuing or saving them as lost Armenians, other than providing the help available to anyone else, regardless of whether they came from historical lands. Moreover, it was not uncommon in the Diaspora to differentiate between the kibar (elegant) Istanbul Armenians and those who came from the “provinces,” without pausing for a moment to reflect that these provinces were in fact the lost territories so sung and dreamed about in Armenian lore and political discourse. One night at our family home in 1982, the Armenian Church Prelate in Argentina at the time, Monsignor Grigoris Bunyatyan, said there were still “secret Armenians” in the mountains of Sasun and Mush. That was the first time I had heard about them, but even at my young age I was inclined to take the information with a pinch of salt and disregard it as probably wishful thinking. In 1984, at the Buenos Aires apartment of Argentine-Armenian journalist Narciso Binayán Carmona, a man of encyclopedic know­ledge and an almost insane hoarder of books (he had a library of 40,000 volumes in all kinds of languages and genres that went from history and philosophy to medicine and bad pulp fiction), I took out a little book from the shelf, Les Musulmans Oubliés (The Forgotten Muslims), an introductory guide by Alexandre Bennigsen to the Islamic nations of the then-mysterious Soviet Union. For some reason, my eyes stopped on the name “Hemchin ou Hamchen” (or some other variation in the French spelling). “That’s interesting,” I thought, believing it might be related to hamseen or khamseen, the Arabic word for “50” and also the name of a famous desert wind. To my astonishment, I saw they were referred to as “Armenian Muslims.” Was that not an oxymoron? It was a shocking discovery. When asked about this, my father vaguely said they were Turkified Armenians, and that was pretty much all I knew about them until 2009, when I saw the Hamshen filmmaker Özcan Alper, from the Turkish province of Artvin, and his movie Sonbahar at New York’s Lincoln Center, in which some Hamshetsnak, an Armenian dialect, is spoken. While most Western Armenian speakers would have serious difficulties understanding the dialect, some words were possible to make out, including 8

INTRODUCTION

“vordağ eyir vorti” (“where were you my child”). During a Q&A session following the screening, Özcan addressed a question by a viewer as to why the Hamshentsis had escaped the 1915 massacres. By not denying the Genocide, and explaining that they had been spared because they were Muslim, but also because they were in a very remote mountain area with difficult access, he was making a statement in itself. As the event closed, I approached Özcan to congratulate him in Armenian, to which he replied something in Hamshetsnak, which sounded such a fantastically archaic, remote Armenian as if it came from the longest night of times. Only one word I understood, ağpar, a conversational variant of “brother” in Armenian. That was all I needed to get started in the quest for the hidden and lost Armenians in this part of the world that used to be their homeland. This book was written during a time frame in which Turkey appeared to be muddling through toward greater freedom and opportunity. The humbler voices of locals, especially in villages of the historical Armenian provinces, cautioned me not to take it all at face value. They would often repeat the words of the scared man at the Kurtuluş teahouse: “This is Turkey.” But back then, the Turkey for the Turks which Atatürk intended to create appeared to be shedding its old, brittle hide. The people were keen to rediscover themselves after decades of self-denial and rule by fear. It was fortunate that I wrote then. Diyarbakır, which had become the biggest center of an Armenian community that was being born anew, with converts grouped around the restored Surp Giragos Church, has turned into a war zone under the autocratic government of President Erdoğan who, motivated by electoral concerns, chose a path of confrontation with the Kurds. Moreover, the Turkish state confiscated the church, aborting the renaissance of an Armenian community mostly composed of the descendants of Islamicized Genocide survivors and a few who had chosen to convert (or reconvert, depending on how it is seen) to the Armenian Church. The Islamic State and other militant groups have claimed responsibility for several terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Ankara, and elsewhere since 2015. In the renewed climate of violence, this undertaking would have been much more difficult, and parts of it impossible: some of the districts I visited are now off limits, and the people interviewed would probably take more precautions or refuse to speak for this project. This book is a testimony for a little pilgrim I saw as we were climbing Mt. Maruta in Sasun, who recoiled in fear when she realized a stranger had seen the big red-and-pink Armenian cross embroidered on her bag, flipping it over to the blank side and refusing to have her photo taken. This book tells her story and those of her kin all over Turkey. In good measure, this initiative became possible in that window of opportunity in which prospects for democracy looked auspicious, especially for the younger generations whose 9

Secret Nation

freedom and imagination are fueled by the omniscient internet, who are seeing the world, and who are slowly and painfully coming to terms with the common, but tragically unequal, history of Turks and Armenians. In an initial version, this introduction finished with the following line: “There is nothing you need to fear, little Sasun girl. You are not alone.” These fine-sounding words are, at best, nothing else if not irresponsible. It may have been fear, that natural and accurate mechanism for vigilance, that carried her and her ancestors so far. Yet the last sentence is still true. Little Sasun girl, you are not alone.

10

Part I

Sasun

One

Sasun One lone boat holds life in suspension as it navigates a submerged world. A rock then scuttles Noah’s Ark in the waters that have covered the mountains of Sasun: it is the tip of Mt. Maruta, and it refuses to let go of the vessel. But the mountain finally relents. “Go Noah, go, to my big brother Ararat!” the Maruta says. “And the snake descended to the bottom of the Ark and coiled into a spiral to plug the hole in the hull, allowing Noah’s passage to Masis,” said Sose, calling Mt. Ararat by its other Armenian name. Little puffs of steam were coming out of her faded lips as she hurried back home one winter evening. Her words were sometimes lost in the clanging transit of the tramway and the blast of horns in the chaotic traffic outside Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Absorbed by her own tale, she did not notice the begging of a woman who approached us in the white and yellow lights of cars and shop windows, saying she was a refugee from Aleppo. The near wreck of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Maruta is omitted in the Book of Genesis. So is the act of redemption by the snake. It is forgotten to all but Sose and the Armenians of Sasun, a land of mountains and legends locked in the Eastern Taurus range, one of the oldest Armenian regions in what is now Turkey’s south-east. Inaccessible, Sasun was always hard to conquer: it fell to the Assyrians in the seventh century bc, but periodically erupted into rebellion. The Sasuntsis are bound by the memory of their shepherds, who drive their flocks along unmapped paths, and of Davit of Sasun: they have passed on the epic about their Herculean hero and his lineage since the ninth century, in the nearly extinct art of oral storytelling. That evening, Sose told me there was still a very old man, who did not read or write in Armenian but could recite some verses, and that he was probably the last one. Yet she responded with evasive excuses to my pleas to see him sing the poem, the Odyssey of Sasun, for it has Homeric importance in the Armenian mythos.1 On a historical level, the epic portrays the resistance to Arab rule, especially a rebellion in ad 851–2. Yet several narratives are woven into the poem, which 13

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transcends Armenian history and has drawn from Indo-European myths. Davit—the hero of the third cycle—dominates the story, which has come to be known by his name: so popular is he that Soviet Armenia celebrated the legend’s millennium in 1939 and 20 years later erected an equestrian statue to him in basalt and bronze, his sword drawn and his horse rearing high, outside Yerevan’s railway station. Night had covered with silence the sloping streets of Samatya, the Istanbul district that Armenians first settled in the late fifteenth century, shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. In the 1960s, driven by tense relations with Kurds and Arabs, most Sasuntsi survivors of the Genocide and their children started to migrate to the most populous city in Turkey, concentrating in this neighborhood of dense construction and winding alleys, the home of Sose and her family, too. A dozen men and women were seated on two long couches set in an L in a sparsely furnished living room, with bare walls and a display cabinet containing books, photos of deceased family members, and one cross. It was the apartment of a neighbor of Sose, a Sasun Armenian who had just lost her husband. But other than the black most people were wearing, the atmosphere was not one of mourning. Except for Sose and the widow, the other women—Sose’s mother and her two aunts, in their late 60s—had their heads covered in scarves with flower motifs, tied into “ahoy matey” knots, two large folds hanging loose at the end, like a whale’s tail. They had gathered for a hokejash, a memorial dinner for Oshin, a more intimate gathering than the luncheons offered in the church hall after the funeral, which attracted hundreds of guests, mostly relatives from the extended clans and friends. In 1949, at a time when most Armenians in Sasun were cut off from the outside world, not even venturing out to Istanbul, Oshin had trekked for two weeks all the way down to Aleppo in search of family members they had not heard from after the Genocide. He found his paternal uncle, Hagop Saroukhanian, who remembered that his father—Garabed, Oshin’s grandfather—had died in 1915, but was not sure if it was in the massacres or just before, of natural causes. There were two or three conversations going on at the same time in Western Armenian and the Sasun dialect of Armenian; occasionally Turkish surfaced as well, and then it vanished. The woman wearing the scarf with the wildest reds and greens was speaking more softly, in a Sasun Armenian heavily influenced by Arabic locutions and inflexions: Varte had married an Armenian in the Arabic-speaking part of Sasun and had moved out of the Kurdish majority area, where her sisters had stayed and whose vernacular sounded purer. She was sitting in the middle of the couch and had the poise of an abbess, because of either gravitas or shyness. 14

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At one point, the various dialogues converged into a discussion about Davit of Sasun. I asked them if they knew his stories. “He flew on his winged horse / From the fortress of Sasun to the sun,” offered Sose’s mother in one rhymed verse. “They believe that it really happened,” Sose told me later. “If Jesus’ miracles are true, so are Davit’s,” she added with a hint of irony, a mark of the Sasuntsis’ sense of humor: bards poked fun at the foibles of churchmen, who reviled them for reciting legends that retained a strong component of paganism.2 Davit’s horseback flight in fleeting verse through the living room opened the floor to a polyphony of female voices on marriages and relatives of family and friends. Oshin’s widow made a comment about him, triggering laughter among the women. In less than five minutes, epic had broken down into its lesser relation—gossip—and they were talking in fast-paced dialect about someone called Vanik, a friend of the deceased man remembered that night. “He descends from Davit,” Sose mentioned. It was clear why they believed him to have ruled Sasun and flown to the sun: they knew his progeny, some of whom were their neighbors. The poem was the testimony to Davit’s feats, in the same way that the Gospels told the story of God’s miracles. Scholars, especially in the early twentieth century, struggled to match the hero to known historical figures. Even if he were inspired by one single character—such as Davit Bagratuny, the prince who led a rebellion against the Arabs in the ninth century—the intricate composition of the narrative and its ambiguities would still make Sasuntsi Davit no less legendary than Ulysses.3 Yet the legend had taken on a life of its own: five Sasun clans, most of them currently based in Istanbul, traced their origin to Davit, and their claim was recognized by the other Sasuntsis. The hero of the epic had become the ancestor of people who lived in apartments a few blocks down the street. Vanik’s grandmother had passed on to him a list of requirements an eligible girl had to meet, but he remembered just two: she had to be tall and of Davit’s clan. “That is not common among Sasuntsis,” Sose said. “Then I realized he might be one of them.” He was the man who knew by heart parts of the epic. Vanik and Oshin were childhood friends from the village of Gusked, in Sasun. As conscripts, both served in one of the brigades Turkey sent to South Korea in 1950–3, as part of the United Nations effort against the communist North: Oshin’s widow showed us the display case of a folded Turkish flag he was awarded in recognition of his war veteran status. “The war was practically over when they got there and they were bored, so they spent their time eating, drinking, and playing tavlo,” she said, in reference to a popular game very similar to backgammon. She repeated for my benefit the anecdote that amused the women: “But Vanik got mad when he found out he had been eating pork meat.” And all in the room laughed again, louder this time. 15

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Why would that matter? I asked, although I suspected the answer as I spoke. Not only had he converted, but he also hated Armenians, one of them said. He was one, I observed, and how could he be Muslim and not use an Islamic name? He had one, they replied, but nobody used it and they were not sure what it was. Everybody called him by his Armenian name, but he no longer was one. “He is a dacik, a dacik,” said Varte, the Arabized dialect speaker, in the Sasun style of repeating the last words, and using an Armenian conversational term to designate a Muslim—also used frequently, and indistinctly, for Turks and Kurds, sometimes with pejorative intention. They no longer saw themselves as Armenian, Sose explained. She had mixed feelings about the Armenians who sought to embrace the Islamicized ones as their kin, and she probably spoke for not a few Armenians who are grouped around the Apostolic Church and smaller Christian denominations, including Catholics and Evangelicals. “We are not going to change quickly on this,” she said, presumably voicing the feelings of many Sasuntsis who did not abandon their faith. “Those dönmes [‘converts,’ in Turkish] say they are going to paradise, where they will be seven floors above us, but they are despised on both sides: by the Armenians, because they abandoned their Church, and by the Muslims, for the same reason.” She tried to deter me one more time from seeing Vanik. “He really dislikes Armenians: he has said he would not give his daughters to Armenians or take theirs.” He was also very sick, on the brink of death, but this only fueled my urgency further. After finally agreeing to arrange a visit, she warned me: “Vanik is only Armenian in your imagination; when they convert to Islam, they cease to be Armenian; he is a dacik now.” A couple of evenings later, we were ringing the bell of his street-level apartment in Samatya. Vanik was an Islamicized Armenian, one of thousands or perhaps a few million in Turkey. They have come to be known as hidden Armenians, having cloaked themselves in the guise of Islam out of fear for their lives. If identity is seen as a range along a spectrum rather than a static quality, Armenians, as one of the most scattered nations in the world, would be found in almost the entire universe of possibilities: those from Armenia; those from the Diaspora; those from one country who migrated to another, by which Lebanese Armenians became American Armenians when they moved from Beirut to Los Angeles; and in Turkey, there were the Muslim Armenians, growing numbers of whom were now reclaiming their place under the Armenian sun. Descended from those who converted under different degrees of coercion after the Genocide, they were caught in a no-man’s-land in the politics of identity in the country, not convincingly Islamic in the eyes of the original Muslim populations— Turks and Kurds, mostly—and non-Armenian after abandoning the Church, in accordance with the Ottoman conception of millet (nationality) that still 16

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dominated the mentality if not the law in Turkey, by which religion and national identity were paired: hence Christians were Armenian or Greek, Muslims were Turks or Kurds, and vice versa. This view had only begun to change in the last decade, with ethnicity beginning to play a more prominent role. With an effort that perhaps was less excruciating for him to feel than for us to watch, Vanik lifted his emaciated head, with a wax candle pallor. A brown wool hat was pulled so far down that it almost entirely covered his large ears. He was lying beneath layers of blankets in a bed right by the entrance to the apartment, along the foyer wall. But he struggled to sit upright, and he could hardly garner the energy to take the one or two steps that would take him past the front door. Sose asked him about Korea. For a brief moment, her mellifluous speech brightened up the dimly lit room. “There was day and there was night, like here,” he said in a feeble, raspy voice, the ghost of a smile drawing on his lips, acknowledging Sose’s jocular spirit. His eyes appeared enormous in the wizened face, with its large forehead, and the protruding cheekbones and chin—they reminded me of the Goya painting, Two Old Men Eating, but without the glitter of madness in the eyes; it was one of the Spanish artist’s Black Paintings in the 1820s, the last of his oeuvre at a time of fear for his own sanity and dismay for a world the Napoleonic wars had turned upside down. Vanik and Sose were speaking in the Sasun dialect of Armenian, his voice coming from a faraway place, the last gusts of a tired wind, in a language that he may not have used for years or maybe decades. He was pulling up the words one by one from a deep, forgotten well. And yet, as his black pupils were orbiting around the room—invariably failing to make eye contact—there was something un-Armenian and elusive about him: it was certainly not the language, nor his features. Hatice, Vanik’s daughter, welcomed us with Black Sea tea in tulip-shaped glasses, the first round in the endless servings that flowed from domed teapots across rooms and tables at all times all over Turkey. As we were sipping the introductory glasses and exchanging small pleasantries, Sose asked Hatice how she felt about being descended from Davit. “We have so many relatives I have never seen,” Hatice apologized. Sose had begun to tell her who he had been, but the epic origins of her lineage did not have enough holding power on Hatice’s attention. She excused herself into the adjoining living room and sat on the couch, her forearms folded in her lap. “Recite for us the Davit of Sasun,” pleaded Sose with Vanik. “Oh yavrum, I have forgotten,” he said, calling her “my cub,” a term of endearment in Turkish. But it took him less than two minutes to agree: Davit Bozika egav dünya Bozika kalesinik …

17

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Suddenly a barrage of noise filled the room, drowning his feeble voice. It was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the ever-angry Turkish leader, blaring about something or someone that had upset him, and then hurried newsmen came on the air with dissonance and urgency. We asked Hatice to turn the TV off, and she complied with incurious docility after we explained why. She returned to the sleeping bird posture, her head leaning to one side, occasionally lifting her eyes to look at a wall or at us with a blank expression. Vanik resumed in his thread of a voice the epic he had learned from his mother in the dialect of Sasun: Or dzoreyin gane kı trrer ur dzin, U kı nıster vor erti, vor trru … When he came to the valley on his horse he was flying And he rode it to go flying …

Some words died down before our ears captured them, like snowflakes that melted before hitting the ground. It could be a metaphor for the poem’s progression, which sees the enfeeblement of the four generations of Daredevils of Sasun, or the decline from godly power to human fallibility. Vanik was married off to another descendant of Davit, picked for him by the çoço (“grandmother” in the vernacular). She had first sent a scouting party, including Vanik’s father and uncle, for the ağçikdes, the search for a suitable girl, expressed by the Armenian word that means “girl-seeing” in a literal translation. “So they went to ask for a girl for me … my çoço had said she had to be from Davit’s family,” Vanik said. “Toğ çi peren” (“Do not bring her”), Çoço Zore had instructed her sons, if she was not of the right blood. By then, the family had been Muslim for about a decade, having converted during what the Sasuntsis call in Turkish the İkinci Ferman (Second Deportation) in 1938. Vanik was ten at the time. The Birinci Ferman (First Deportation) had been in 1915. Ferman designates an Ottoman imperial edict, but Sasuntsis now only employ it to indicate the Genocide—from “the edict of the Armenians” (Fermana Fîlla in Kurdish)—and their banishment after the Sasun uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s.4 For Armenians outside Turkey, the clock had stopped in 1915. Until the mid-2000s, most of the Diaspora did not know that there were Armenians left in the ancient provinces of the Ottoman Empire—the conquered territories of Western Armenia and Cilicia. The terrified Armenians that remained would still be subject to daily humiliations, killings, deportations, and armed attacks by 18

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the Turkish army and irregular formations, both Turkish and Kurdish, until at least the late 1980s in some parts of the country’s interior. For these Armenians, genocide by other means continued for another century. Its more insidious form required neither iron nor blood. It had already started with the massacres of 1915, and even before. Islamicization spread on fear, a disease agent that every Armenian in Turkey has hosted for centuries. Forcible conversion was the second stage of the extermination: after the destruction of the body came the violation of the soul. Conversion by different degrees of coercion was the fate of an indeterminate number of Armenians, perhaps most of them, who somehow remained in the ancestral lands after the Genocide; by the early 1980s, the last Christian Armenians still left in Eastern Anatolia—mostly in Diyarbakır—had already moved to Istanbul or overseas. It is very difficult to determine how many, as there is no publicly available demographic data. The 1935 census in Turkey offered a breakdown by nationality and religion: in the entire vilayet of Mush—which at the time included Sasun—there were 247 people whose mother tongue was Armenian, of whom nine were Muslim (including four women). They represented 1.8 percent of the province’s population of 143,899. One hundred percent of them were reported as illiterate and a high proportion of the men, 40 percent, had no known profession. Only one of the 81 men who worked was in business or a professional; the rest were farmers. These numbers are merely a reference, as probably a much higher number of Armenians were simply afraid to disclose their origins to census officials. Travelers reported that there were still hundreds of Armenian speakers in the city of Mush as late as the 1950s. The census does not say how many Armenians there were in Sasun. “I was born,” was Vanik’s comment about his family’s epic. His gaunt face had probably long lost the capacity to show emotions, but there was a note of tension in his voice when Sose asked him if his father had witnessed the massacres of 1915. “How would I know? How would I know?” The question made nervous a man who conveyed awareness about his impending passing. Sose, who knew his family’s history well and only wanted Vanik to speak for the record, turned to me and nodded: his father was a Genocide survivor. Vanik had converted at a young age against the will of his family, the women had said at the apartment in Samatya. That was wrong: his father had converted during the Second Deportation, like hundreds of Sasuntsis who wrote “Islam” in the IDs they were issued after being cautioned by Turkish clerks processing their transfer to a concentration camp in Kütahya: “The officials told us we would have fewer problems if we became Muslim.” Many Sasuntsis who survived the First Deportation—the Genocide—as Christians succumbed to Islamicization in the Second Deportation of 1938. 19

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When the Turkish government exiled the family to Kütahya along with other Armenians and Kurds from Sasun, Vanik’s two older brothers, for reasons he did not know, stayed behind in a village called Gotortsir. While they were away, both had converted to Islam—Vanik did not know if it was willingly or forcibly. Local Kurds later murdered one of his brothers, he said, after accusing him of injuring a Kurdish woman. He named the villages his family lorded over: “Gusked, Gusketa, Ardgunk, Karde, Ongik, Gotortsir … These were all ours, and then the Kurds came … they came there and they butchered us,” he said, now opening up about the atrocities, his spent voice and eyes betraying no feelings.5 On days of madağ, Armenians’ sacrificial offering, Vanik’s family had to open the gates of the Surp Asdvadzadzin shrine at the top of Mt. Maruta, an honor they had earned by donating the egg yolk and the milk that went into the binding mix—also usually composed of lime mortar and broken stones— employed in the construction of the sanctuary in the twelfth century. “Our family built the church,” he added, to clarify that they had done more than contributing building materials, probably among the most expensive items given the vast quantities needed. He had only gone twice to Maruta, “uxdi,” he said, using the Armenian word for “pilgrimage,” which usually implies a Christian journey and destination. The first time was when his son fell ill, moving Vanik to climb the 3,000 meters to light candles amid the ruins of the mountaintop shrine, which was eventually followed by the boy’s recovery. He always carried in his pocket a little pouch of earth from the Sasuntsi holy mountain for its curative powers. The custom originated in a legend: a seer had told a man that he was going to die of a scorpion’s bite that night. In his search for a safe place, the man climbed to the top of Mt. Maruta, where he sat on a rock outside the entrance to Surp Asdvadzadzin, trying to stay alert against any approaching scorpion. But fear failed to keep him awake and he dozed off, his head resting on the knob of his cane. The scorpion came, crawled up the cane and stung the man on the forehead, killing him. The next morning, the shepherds, who had seen him going up the mountain, wondered where that strange man would be. In their conversation during the search, the shepherds found out they had all had the same dream the night before, in which the man, with his forehead on the knob, said that he was going to die of the scorpion’s sting, but whoever used the dust beneath his feet would be protected against its poison. Sasun conscripts used to take a handful of earth from the Surp Asdvadzadzin shrine before going away to serve. After they returned to Turkey, Vanik learned that a fellow conscript still deployed in Korea was dying of a scorpion sting. The doctors had given up on him but, inexplicably for the physicians, the young soldier had healed after they had rubbed the earth from Maruta on his forehead. 20

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The pilgrimage to Maruta and the customs had survived his conversion and so had, in Vanik’s case, something as fundamental as religion, or maybe more: his name. He was still known by his Armenian name to everybody except Turkish bureaucracy. Most other converts have forsaken their birth names after taking on Muslim ones. It might sound like the smallest of concerns. Losing a name was not the worst thing to happen to him and other Armenians in Turkey. It was intangible, whereas life is fundamentally a material experience—the very first condition is for the body to be alive. The choice is not hard to make if it is between a word and life, even if that word defines us and is our reflex response to the question of who we are. “In the name of the rose is the rose / And the entire Nile runs in the word Nile.”6 And yet, in the forced Islamicization of Armenians, the core of their consciousness was violated by the replacement of their names with ones that invariably exalted the violator’s creed, for the conversion of Armenians after 1915 inevitably involved explicit or potential violence. Even those who abandoned the Church under no immediate duress belonged to a people that was terrorized and came close to complete annihilation. Where Nazism sought to dehumanize Holocaust victims by erasing their names and giving them numbers at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the Islamicization of Armenians was the vehicle par excellence to de-Armenize them: they became non-Armenian non-Christians, for even after three generations Turkish or Kurdish neighbors still knew them as dönmes (converts). Vanik and his family, along with hundreds of thousands of Armenians, gave up their identity and assumed that of their perpetrators, who had persecuted them as gâvur, the Turkish word for “infidel” that is still current in conversation in the eastern part of the country. There is a disconnect, often overlooked, between the brain of the Genocide—the Young Turks’ regime—and the obedient hands that executed it so frantically that “there was Armenian blood under the nails of all of them,” in the description of a Turkish woman quoted by writer Zabel Yesayan in Amid the Ruins, her account of the 1909 massacre at Adana,7 the prelude and precursor of the great extermination that would come six years later. Turkism, Pan-Turanism and the proto-fascist ideology of the Committee of Union and Progress that planned the Genocide would have been incomprehensible to most people in Anatolia, but appeals for religious solidarity and incitement against the infidels would garner immediate response. “We must be clear that the organizers of this first wave of nation building, after 1908 and especially after 1913, were aware of their Turkishness and acted as Turkish nationalists,” writes Taner Akçam in reference to the Unionist regime’s plan to turn the Ottoman Empire into a modern nation state. 21

Secret Nation However, it is very difficult to assert that this was the case for the broad masses. They understood themselves mostly as Muslims and acted according to that understanding, especially against the non-Muslim population of Anatolia. Their ethnicities, beyond their religious identity, were not very important.8

The willing executioners of Armenians in towns and villages of Anatolia were receptive to the fatwas, Islamic edicts issued by imams in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, who were hardly versed in anything outside the crudest Manichean notions gleaned from the Qur’an. They promised paradise to the killers of a certain number of Armenians, usually seven, according to stories the Muslim residents heard from their grandparents in the villages where massacres took place. It goes unspoken that the sacrificial offerings came with the earthly reward of the infidels’ possessions: but their appropriation was possibly assumed in the imagination of victimizers to be halal (permissible), an added incentive for the butchering. In a more inoffensive context, the point may be illustrated in an exchange between a guard and a detainee just brought into an Istanbul jail in 1925, who complained that they kept him handcuffed inside the cell: “Shut up, wretch! You enjoyed every delight for seven days in paradise, can’t you stay tied in hell for seven minutes?” responded the guard, irritated. “I haven’t killed anyone: ‘Eating the money of someone who doesn’t enjoy it is halal,’ the prophet has said.”9

The prisoner was an underworld celebrity, Kurdish Ali, ringleader of a gang of thieves and pickpockets that plied the streets of Galata, Pera, and other quarters of Istanbul. He had stolen 7,500 gold liras from the safe box of a merchant and had been feasting on the booty for a week with twelve houris (virgins) until the police had caught up with him in his hideout. On a graver note, despite the draconian punishments prescribed in Islamic law for thieves—their hand is to be amputated—there were places and occasions in Ottoman life when stealing appeared to be sanctioned in collective behavior, especially when it was targeted at non-Muslims: “In the Ottoman Empire, massacres always began in the market, since the attackers were tempted by the goods that they could loot there.”10 These ravages, often by mountain tribes in the East, also affected sedentary Kurds, in addition to Armenians, Assyrians, and other minorities. After the massacres of Armenians in 1895, a Young Turk leader—in opposition to Sultan Abdül Hamid II and in exile in Paris at the time—sought to explain it. The massacres, he said, “flew in the face of the traditions of Islamicism and the precepts of the Koran.” But then he added: “If Christians are the preferred targets of looting, the reason is that they enjoy greater wealth and material comfort than the Muslims and that, either out of fear or suspicion of the victor, they generally keep their doors shut.”11 22

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At a stopover on my way to Sasun, a bus driver had gone out of his way to get me a good seat and had called relatives in town to welcome me: he belonged to an aşiret (tribe) based in Kozluk and one of his grandmothers was Armenian. “Seventy percent of people in Sasun are good, I would say, but be careful with the other thirty,” he advised me. “There are bad people.” As I assumed he was counseling me to be street-smart, I asked if thieves were a problem. “No, no!” he gave me a surprised look. “Ama şerefli hırsız da var” (“But there are also honorable thieves”), he said. He bared his teeth in a loud laugh, only after I celebrated what I assumed to be a joke. In Sasun, some imams promised paradise in exchange for as little as three Armenian lives. “But the Sasuntsis spoke of a man who had to kill 100 Christians but he was short of one,” Sose said, as Vanik listened absentmindedly. “So he killed a dog to round up the total; and the hoca had said, ‘Now you will go to Heaven.’” The dog is considered an unclean animal in Islam.12 Vanik paused for a moment. His heavy breathing revealed a heart that was beating too fast, strained by his walk through the quarries of memory. He was very tired but he had warmed up to Sose’s doting attention. The old man seemed to be enjoying the rapport she had created, like a granddaughter eager to hear stories long lost to a world that has moved on to more urgent matters. “Was there Islamiyet at the time of Davit?” Sose queried with faux naïveté, using the Turkish word for Ummah (community of Muslims). The conversation had been held in Sasun Armenian up to that moment; Vanik switched to Turkish to answer, his large black eyes wandering away from Sose toward the nowhere surrounding us: “At the time of Davit there was Armenia.”     

“All these mountains were Armenian,” said Haro, with an unjaded capacity for awe at the world he had seen every day since his birth 30 years ago. His face, defined by an aquiline nose, was tanned, and the hair golden. We were at the intersection of Sasun and the sky, by a cliff. The surrounding summits mirrored each other in free variations beyond the horizon, past clouds and floating patches of mist. The Eastern Taurus range spread below us, dimming into a copper sunset over Voskedzar, a two-house village a short walk down from Şağlamor, one of the tallest peaks. “They are still Armenian,” I responded. “Now …” he said, briefly turning to me mystified. He stared ahead with somber eyes, in silence. His eyes focused on a flickering spot on the opposite summit, in the unmeasurable distance between mountains. It was a bonfire, the only life on an esplanade of bare rock. “Maybe a shepherd lit it,” Haro said, intrigued at the tall flames that danced to the wind in solitude. 23

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The Hoca, a Kurdish teacher, had taught Haro in elementary school and he had brought me to Voskedzar after two hours of laborious driving on potholeridden mountain roads that wound along unguarded abysses, infested with stones and rocks, with not a few boulders blocking the way. The Hoca, his younger brother Sahavet, and I arrived while outside the house a young woman in a headscarf was piling on a counter bread that she pulled out of the tonir (clay oven). They were baking it to welcome me, the Hoca told me. The woman handed me a large loaf. It was supple and warm, with air trapped in its pocket, feeling like a breathing creature in the late autumn afternoon, when the first intimations of dusk were coloring Sasun. The girl wore a brown wool jacket brooched with an elaborate bronze and silver clasp, perhaps a survivor from an unraveled cape or other noble attire; the headscarf of big fuchsia gladioli was knotted into two leaves, large and superimposed. We entered an inner court with a dark shed in the back. A man with a large head sat on a low bench, welding farming tools, the round eyeglasses of his mask reflecting the sparks touched off by the contact between the scarred metal and the torch. He stopped his work, and walked up to the Hoca in big steps. After hugging his visitor, whom he surpassed by a head, he bowed slightly and engaged the Hoca’s eyes, shaking both his hands to their reciprocal greetings of “Selâmün aleyküm,” the standard salute among Muslims. The welcoming continued with the big man’s proclamation of the greatness of Allah and his messenger the Prophet, glory be upon them for all that is good in life and inşallah so was everything for everyone who was dear to the Hoca and, Allah willing, all of them were in good health. He then squeezed Sahavet’s hands in a tight, briefer handshake as he was already included in the little prayer of a welcome for his older brother, meant for every member of the Hoca’s clan, one of the biggest and most powerful Kurdish ones in Sasun. “Imal es?” (“How are you?”) he asked me in Sasun dialect, assuming me to be the Armenian guest they had been told to expect. But his Armenian traveled only so far, or so he pretended, for when I responded in kind he reverted to Turkish, which remained the common conversation language for the rest of the day, with brief asides in Kurmancî (Kurdish) between the Hoca and his brother, as well as some instances of the local Arabic dialect among the hosts. Originally from Voskedzar, the man with the big head had been living in Istanbul since the late 1990s and only came to visit his cousins here in the summer. The unfurnished living room was at the end of a wide and long corridor. A round polished steel tray with its bottom facing out hung on the wall, like a late medieval Flemish mirror. The homeowner was sitting on a little bench at the edge of the rug. The television was on, airing business news, with stock prices blinking at the bottom of the screen. 24

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Soon, the Aynabey family’s Arab neighbor called in, a congenial young man who greeted everyone warmly. Silence ensued. There was a smile for no reason on everybody’s face, except the Hoca’s and the neighbor’s: Kurds and Arabs were now the lords of these naked mountains, where enclaves of woods and green plots indicated Armenian villages or their ghosts. Agriculture was almost their exclusive domain; traditionally, Kurds and Arabs lived off shepherding and animal husbandry. Sasun was so thickly forested in the past that the Armenians of the neighboring city of Mush called it Dzmag, “place that gets little sun,” or “humid mountainous area.” It must have been so exuberant still when Armenia fell under Arab rule in the seventh century that the Sasuntsis paid their tributes in trees, which the Caliphate employed for shipbuilding. For millennia, these mountains were covered in deciduous and conifer woods, but botanical data is inconclusive about their demise: a conjunction of natural and man-made causes was suspected. If not an explanation, it is at least an educated guess that the expansive wanderings of shepherds came at the woods’ expense, as they had to give way to goats, the preferred livestock in the area, after they degraded pastures and prevented their renewal by grazing roots and flowers. Agriculture suffered further in the anarchy precipitated by the abolition of the Kurdish emirates of the Ottoman Empire—the last one was violently disbanded in 1847—as tribes fought each other to assert themselves, by means that included brutalities against Armenians. Then came the Sasun massacres of 1894, and the rest. The forests were long gone by then. There is a correspondence between the felling of trees and martyrdom. They both involve violence against the defenseless, which may be one interpretation of Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of St. Peter Martyr. The 1507 painting by the Venetian artist depicts the thirteenth-century murder of the Catholic inquisitor by mercenaries in the pay of Cathar heretics. In the foreground of Bellini’s work, henchman Carino of Balsamo is stooping over Peter, stabbing him, while to the right of the frame the priest’s companion, friar Dominic, is trying to flee an assassin raising a dagger. The viewer’s attention will soon shift to the woods in the background, where two loggers are hacking at trees with axes, while other countrymen appear busy with other pastoral distractions, perhaps hunting as well. Yet one distinctive feature is the indifference of the peasants, who don’t turn around to see the carnage happening a few feet from them, and the lumberjacks cutting down the trees act as a visual echo of the martyrdom of the churchmen.13 It was a historically unrelated, yet eerie prefiguration of the fate of Sasun, where the despoiling of the trees heralded the slaughter. The family of Mustafa in Voskedzar, his son Haro, and the cousin from Istanbul, acknowledged the family’s Armenian origin. They even had relatives 25

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in Armenia. But they were now Muslim. Nobody forced them to convert, they said, and they no longer considered themselves Armenian. Not only their fathers but also their wives were blood relations of Armenian origin, which was completely irrelevant, they said. “Insan insandır” (“Man is man”), a courtesy that often explained away uncomfortable questions and answers in Turkey. “We don’t have the money to go anywhere else,” said Haro to explain why they were still here, far away from everyone and everything, an hour’s difficult drive away from the nearest mosque, marrying into their own family and, other than the lone Arab, only Armenians. The family left for Istanbul during the “terror years” of the Kurdish uprising in the 1990s but had been forced back to make a living out of their soil. And since their return, they also took part in the pilgrimage to Mt. Maruta, a tradition of the Sasun Armenians on the day of the Feast of the Transfiguration. The Church assimilated into its calendar the pagan celebration of Vartavar, or the Festival of the Roses, when Armenians would decorate with those flowers the temple of the goddess Asdghig, and would engage in carnivalesque water games. From pre-Christian times through Islamicization, the feast has now transcended faiths, and Kurds and Arabs join the Sasuntsis, mostly converts but also Armenian Apostolics, at the shrine of Surp Asdvadzadzin. The Aynabeys offered a goat kid as madağ (sacrifice). But it was a local custom. It had nothing to do with Christianity or Armenians, in their view. And they married Armenians, they still used fragments of the dialect, they lived in a village that has been Armenian forever as far as anyone knows, and in everything but name they had still lived like Armenians for ages, more than most do anywhere in the world. Like those creatures that withdraw into secret places and develop nocturnal habits when competition for food with fiercer rivals forces them out of daylight, some of the surviving remnants of Armenians in Sasun were displaced to heights that cannot be climbed further, with the cloak of Islam affording them some protection. In a somewhat hesitant vernacular, Mustafa recited his genealogy in the Eastern style, beginning with his own name, “Mustafa, the son of Hasan …” But he was interrupted. “Sako!” Haro cut him off, identifying his grandfather by his Armenian, pre-Islamic name. A little taken aback, Mustafa repeated, “Sako,” softly. He then went on: “Sako, son of Hove; Hove, son of Marde.” All they knew ended there, Haro said. “Marde lived 150 years ago.” He was from Tağvetsor, and his son Hove was from there too. It was only with Sako, Haro’s paternal grandfather, that they came to Voskedzar some 70 years before, in the late 1940s, which was about the time they believed they became Muslim, even though Haro mentioned that it may have happened “after 1915,” which he just mentioned by the date and not the name of the event. “Nothing remained in Tağvetsor, and the state brought us here.” Their resettlement and 26

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their conversion matched the dates, and the pattern of Islamicization, of the Second Deportation and the wholesale destruction of Armenian villages that had somehow survived through 1915. Tağvetsor, one of the hardest-hit villages in the massacres of 1894, still had a population of eight Armenian households just before the Genocide, but must have been much larger as it still had a church in 1914. Haro’s comment now indicated that the village had been razed in the 1930s in the clashes between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish army. It is a strategy that Turkey continues to employ to this day. The conversation momentarily froze when I asked what they knew about their family at the time of the soykırım—the Turkish word for “genocide.” The lips of the big-headed man congealed in a stunned grimace. Finally, Haro said that his grandfather Sako may have survived a massacre but that they did not know anything about it. He lived to the age of 105, was married to Maryam, whose name changed to Gülamir after conversion, and they became members of the Marde aşiret (tribe). Haro’s wife, and cousin, came in with a tray of bread, fruits, and honey, light as water yet so richly nuanced in flavors that it belied its humble provenance from the little wild flowers they did not know the name for, ones that grew closer to the sky than most. “Ays ağçiye xorotiy’e” (“This girl is pretty”), Haro said in Sasun Armenian: a variation on a quote, unbeknownst to him, of Davit’s poem, “Ağçig mi urne şad xorodig g’eğni,” the second verse in Srvandztiants’ transcription; it talked about the caliph of Baghdad and said, “He had a girl who was very pretty.” It was one of the few complete sentences Haro could put together in the language of Sasun. He stepped out to the field and stood on the rim of his land, confined by a precipice. Only he had stayed in Sasun out of ten siblings from some “small and broken tribes, remnants of former races, [which] still survive in isolated and mountainous districts.”14 And from this vantage point, Haro surveyed the extinct part of Armenia. In his mountain range of a backyard, outside the room where 1,000 years of conflict were by necessity packed into feigned insouciance, the air was crisp and cooling. The sun had begun its descent behind the crests, its dying light bathing in hues of red the surface of rocks and returning the gorges to darkness. His two-year-old only child came over, shyly watching the stranger who took pictures as his father made him wave at the camera. His name was Arda, a popular name among the Armenians of Turkey. And we climbed through the terraced fields, where Haro picked up a turnip and held it like a trophy, a feat of farming above 2,000 meters in the little island of fertility they had carved out of the stone. The fire was still burning on the opposite crest. Night was taking under its mantle all things in Sasun when two sheep, then another three, and soon a herd emerged from nowhere up a mountain wall, driven by a petite girl, the match in semblance and beauty to Haro’s wife and, 27

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to the untrained eye, only distinguishable from her by the different colors of her outfit and headscarf. She drove the animals into a pen encased by the waking stars. And like a fledgling butterfly, she fled with a shy giggle when I went after her with the camera, the winged tail of her purple headscarf flying merrily as she ran into a conical stone kitchen that resembled a tall igloo: she was cornered and, laughing amid gasps, still tried to escape until Haro came by and asked his sister-in-law, and cousin, to let me photograph her. Voskedzar had nothing but primary things: the sun and the other stars, the rain and the endless snow of winter, sheep and goats, and men and women that bake their own bread on a land that yields fruit and honey, amid an ocean of mountains. And it had winds, and a bonfire that burned into the night, alone in its secret on the barren peak. There was only earth, water, air, and fire, and the life they beget when they come together in sequences and measures that are a mystery to all but one. Most of the visible patrimony of the Aynabey family was this and little else, which might qualify as poverty in economic terms. “If the Scriptures are rightly understood, it was in Armenia that Paradise was placed,” Lord Byron had written in a fragment found among his papers, intended, Thomas Moore believed, as a preface to his Armenian Grammar. “But with the disappearance of Paradise itself may be dated almost the unhappiness of the country … and the pachas of Turkey have alike desolated the region where God created man in his own image.”15 Byron learned the language at the St. Lazarus Monastery in Venice. An anonymous French chronicler wrote in 1816 “of an Armenian Papa who is occupied in composing a very curious work, to ascertain the precise situation of the Garden of Eden.”16 That was Fr. Haroutioun Avgerian, the abbot of the Mekhitarist Congregation and translator into Armenian of Milton’s Paradise Lost. And, two centuries later, I had found it: Eden was here. But other than the Armenians’ little plots and groves, Sasun had lost its pardez, the Persian word for “garden,” which preserved identical meaning and very similar pronunciation in Armenian, whereas it derived into “paradise” in the Romance languages. Paradise without paradise, it was a place in denial of itself, a land and people that were Armenian, and were not. The Hoca had to leave but told me that I could stay if I so wished. My gratitude came with silent remorse, for I was starting to resent him, attributing the discomfort of our hosts to his presence. We the Armenians would be able to speak freely at last. But when I accepted with alacrity, the hosts became uncomfortable; Haro was looking down in silence; his father said that space was tight, but should the Hoca and his brother stay too, they could surely figure something out to accommodate the three of us, impervious to the contradiction of what he was proposing, or perhaps it was a deliberate cue. Worn down by their sense of intimidation and fear, I marched with rancorous resignation to 28

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the Hoca’s pickup truck. On the way out, I asked Mustafa about the polished tray on the wall, which distorted his reflection like a funhouse mirror. “It’s supposed to reflect curses back onto the ill-wisher,” he said, and from a new angle I saw Haro’s face encircled in it, swelling and shrinking on the uneven surface. “The women of the house do these things.” Right after leaving Voskedzar, I got the Hoca to promise that he would take me back to the village. A few days later, he telephoned me. “They say you are a good man but they don’t want you to return.” There was no point in asking why, because he did not know. But shortly afterwards I bumped into Haro’s Arab neighbor amid the crowd of mustachioed men idling in the streets of Sasun, the district’s main town. I only recognized him when he invited me to return to Voskedzar. “Call Haro,” he told me, and gave me his cell phone number, insisting that I should come by again. “How did you get my phone number?” asked Haro in lieu of greeting, with an angry voice. “No, you cannot come again … if you have any questions, ask now over the phone.” The conversation ended abruptly. Then out of the blue, twenty minutes later Haro turned up with the Hoca at the hostel where I was staying in Sasun. We hugged like old friends. He seemed to be at ease, the same man he was with his little son, contemplating the mountains in his backyard. He was dressed sharply, in a gray wool coat and a white shirt, off to business in Batman, the biggest city in the area. When we sat, however, his face had suddenly taken on a stern look. “Ask,” he said, the key word to abort conversations. The Hoca watched me intently as I remained silent. Haro ignored a couple of perfunctory questions I asked, and instead recited his script, with strange eloquence: their grandparents had willingly converted to Islam; they were happy living as Muslims—he again made clear that they had not converted by force—and they had amicable relations with their Arab and Kurdish neighbors, who did not disturb them. They acknowledged they were of Armenian descent but now they were Muslim: “We are no longer Armenian.” Something in my expression must have changed, because he turned his face away, as if in shame. The Hoca said he would take a short walk, but Haro refused to let him go, at which point he also added that I was unwelcome to visit Voskedzar again—at most, I could come with the Hoca, but I should check with them first. The Hoca was a man of few words and intense yet inscrutable eyes. He had brought me to visit a number of Islamicized Armenians. Beneath the obsequiousness and displays of religious piety we encountered in a couple of households, one could divine nervousness, so I suspected that he was inadvertently causing these reactions as a well-connected Kurd in the area. True as that may have been, I had also started to notice that he realized the dynamics at play and, in a discreet manner, was trying to help me circumvent them by 29

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removing himself from the scene a little after the introductions. But it was the others, especially in Voskedzar, who wanted him to stay on, perhaps to deter an impression that they, Sasun Armenians, especially the Islamicized ones, were conferring (or worse, as it were, in a country where conspiracy theories are more readily believed than newspapers) with a Diaspora Armenian. Haro bid goodbye with a nod and walked off to the town square jammed with dolmuş, the collective taxis of old, now reincarnated as white minibuses that invariably sported decals that invoked divine protection for traffic or cast a curse, commonly “Maşaallah” (“As God wills it,” but mostly used as an expression of joy) or the occasional “Kötü gözler kör olsun” (“May evil eyes become blind”). The Hoca, chain-smoking as he always did in his waking hours, explained why the Voskedzar Armenians were loath to meet me, or any other Armenian. Muslims from neighboring villages kept their prying eyes on them after some Armenian relatives had visited some years ago from Istanbul, dug up gold buried by their grandparents, and left. “Sizinkiler” (“Yours”), the Hoca said, by which he meant “your people, Armenians, not Kurds or other Muslims.” But why had they asked me to stay overnight only to take it back right after? “They had not; I had proposed it on my own, and they thought I was staying too,” the Hoca said. The Voskedzar Armenians’ Islamic faith provided them with some protection, but they were known to their neighbors by their race, or as dubious converts at best. That came loaded with fables of hidden treasures, instigating greed that could become dangerous or deadly. They therefore saw the Hoca as a shield. Why would otherwise an Armenian travel all the way from America up hours of mountain passes that cut too close to death to visit an Armenian family at the end of the world, at least an hour away from the nearest outpost of civilization? Locals would find any justification that omitted gold unconvincing or incredible. “There’s someone you should meet,” he said. Having initially suspected him of being a police informant or someone whose presence dried up the free talk, I was beginning to appreciate the recommendations from Armenian friends in Istanbul and Armenia to have the Hoca as a guide in Sasun. “You can trust him with blind eyes,” Sose had told me. The Hoca and I walked down the steep street toward the square of Sasun, a town of around 11,000 residents, where people, an overwhelming majority of them men, idled the day away sitting on tiny low stools at tea parlors, amid the jumble of buildings that rose or fell into disrepair according to the fortunes of their owners, sometimes relying on unlicensed contractors or their own hands to lay the bricks. Sasun had been renamed somewhat confusingly “Sason,” and reconstructed—or rather refounded—in the late 1920s, as the army suppressed a Kurdish rebellion against the secular and Turkish nationalist regime of Mustafa Kemal. (He would become Atatürk only in 1934, when Parliament bestowed on 30

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him this surname, which means “Father of the Turks,” and forbade anyone else in the country from adopting it.) Not a day went by without one or two men approaching me to ask if I was the writer who had come from America in search of Armenians, and then inviting me for tea to tell me that their grandmothers were Armenian (Hatun or Hasmik or some other Armenian name); some converted, and some, in the telling of their grandchildren, were allowed by their Kurdish or Arab husbands to remain Christian. They were never sure how they practiced but some ventured that they secretly prayed or lit a candle. And, of course, they would make the pilgrimage to Mt. Maruta. The numbers of the grandchildren in the Sasun area were so vast, and the memories so short—almost no story, fragments from broken lives that were impossible to reconstruct—that it had statistical importance where it lacked narrative value. A few were aspiring gold diggers of the coarsest sort, so parvenu that figuring out they were after treasure maps would take at most a few minutes. But most others appeared genuine, with inklings of silenced stories: they may have stayed untold because they involved close ancestors, as not a few of these grandmothers had been kidnapped or brutalized into marriage. The Hoca made a turn to the right just before the mosque and walked down a small alley to an unfinished building, where two young men were cutting wooden planks with an electric chainsaw, its grinding noise canceling out all sounds and voices. A short and thick man with thin mustachios and a square jaw approached us in unfriendly hurry, his arms akimbo and his chest out. He locked eyes with the Hoca, deliberately projecting hatred. His lips sealed, he barely nodded to acknowledge his visitor’s “Selam.” Unblinking, he stood there until the Hoca walked out with a resigned smile. The man was still agitated, breathing rapidly and his chest swelling in muted fury. With the Hoca gone, he turned to me and asked me who I was and what I wanted. “Are you Armenian?” I asked with some trepidation. “No,” he responded. “Dönme” (“Converted”) he added a second later and paused. His anger was dying down, and he awaited my reaction in silence. And when he found empathy, his story started to trickle out, in short sentences and sometimes in monosyllables, when not in gestures—he preferred not to say what he could wink. “Yes, my grandfather was Armenian, and yes, my father was converted by force,” Zeki said. Would he return—if that was the right term—to the Armenian Church? “No,” and he made a sweeping movement with his hand, back and forth to its same position: “Once this, then that, then this again? Impossible.” Throughout the conversation, he grappled with the uncertain notion of identity, calling himself or someone else Armenian only to say in the next sentence that they were no longer Armenian because they had become Muslim. 31

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“They butchered everyone,” he said. “They took the beautiful women.” Whom did he mean by “them”? “This man you came with, they did it.” So, Kurds? Muslims? He did not elaborate. “Them,” he repeated. I remember my grandfather. He was Armenian. Hagop. He didn’t speak. I remember him, not very well, vaguely. My father became Muslim. His name was Mego. He was forced to become a Muslim. There was nothing he could do about it: he was forced to. We have a lot of Christian relatives in Armenia but we can’t understand each other. They speak Armenian, and we speak Turkish and Kurdish. I wish I knew one thing in Armenian. I don’t even know one word. In our village, Cermak, there are still four or five Armenian households. There are no Armenians left now. They have all become Muslim. There are Armenians in the Maratuğ area.17 They are openly Armenian. Arabs too massacred Armenians in Sasun. There is the Şigo aşiret in the Gomk area. They didn’t. There is also the Yurlusti village at the base of Mt. Maratuğ. That aşiret is still there. They were normal: they didn’t kill many. But all the other Arabs massacred Armenians. Arabs of every aşiret: Buxoram, Şerlo, Derxane, Kendo, Bedri, Şukriye. These tribes are still around. We know them. It’s difficult to live with them, but what can be done? Of course it’s difficult. Because they know that we know. They know, of course they know, they still talk about it. They took the Armenians’ lands, houses, women. They call us “dayi.”18 In our village, there were many Armenians. Many were converts. Many sold their properties and left for Istanbul and other places. There were 45 members in our family but only my grandfather survived the Genocide, and two or three relatives, who went to Armenia. All the other ones were massacred. We were from the Manuki aşiret. Go to Yerevan and ask for the Manuki aşiret. Everybody knows them. We made oral medications. Everybody knows us. My wife is of Armenian origin. We don’t get women from the others. We don’t let them among us. We become uncomfortable. We don’t take women from them. We don’t like them. If they come once or twice we become uncomfortable. We cannot talk freely. My children are married to Armenians. We don’t mingle with the others. I’m Muslim. We love Armenians. I’m happy you came to see me. I am Armenian, of course, how will I not say it. Here in Sasun there are no Christian feasts. When I go to Istanbul I take part in them. I also went to the Diyarbakır church:19 I lit four candles. We love the Armenian Church. I am not becoming Christian again. We became Muslim. I can’t be “once this, once that, once this, once that.” It can’t be. I don’t want to. But I go to Church. Blood is thicker than water. We don’t know the language. But make no mistake: we know the religion, we don’t get it wrong. We are three brothers. I have six sisters.20 Two of my sisters married non-Armenians, and the other four married Armenians. My brothers married Armenians. We live both here in the city of Sasun and our village, Cermak. Davit of Sasun’s castle is not far. A little farther there is Pertank. That’s the Armenian name of the village. It is the village of Kevork Chavush.21 He was from our mountains. We are fellow countrymen.

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SASUN Whenever they see money, something becoming better, they come after it. They take it. They don’t work for it. It’s just like 1915. They are lazy. Don’t talk too much. Don’t trust everybody. Don’t mention gold. Don’t say Zeki said this. There are bad people here. Just for gold they would kill you and go. They cut you into pieces for gold. It happens. Be careful. Do not mention gold. Don’t talk with everybody. There is no risk with me, but don’t talk to everyone. Don’t bring these issues up with others. There are nasty people. These people are bad. Don’t talk too much with them. It is dangerous. Everybody knows who the Armenians are in Sasun. Wherever there is one Armenian, everybody knows. Kurds will kidnap Armenian girls. We don’t give our girls easily but they take them by force. It happens everywhere in Turkey. I am past the middle of my life. We don’t have a life here: we are not comfortable. There are fights between Armenians and the others in Sasun.     

At any given time, everywhere on the planet, animate beings are competing for what appears to be an indeterminate, and seemingly endless, yet finite amount of life. It applies to all species, even ours that has become emancipated from the others. We all make the transit to death as newcomers follow in our steps. In the epic of the Daredevils of Sasun, Davit condemns his child Mher to spend childless immortality in a cave. Childlessness is the price of eternal life, for the world cannot accommodate immortals. Mortality is a key to evolution. Yet we are mostly unaware of the conflicts that surround us, starting from bacteria that compete for space and kill each other within our breathing body. And while only humans seem to stray into wanton cruelty, some traits appear to exist across species. One is the aggression of majorities against minorities, even among insects. The Solenopsis juliæ, of the Diplorhoptrum subgenus, is a thief ant, endemic to the Republic of Armenia, which raids the colonies of neighboring minority ants to steal their brood for foraging: that is, it eats them. It builds long and narrow galleries to the nests of its prey, whose adult specimens are larger than the S. juliæ: the victims are unable to run after the thieves through the smaller diameter tunnels after they make off with the pupae. The Myrmoxenus ravouxi, a slave-maker ant found from western Europe through Eastern Anatolia, uses deception to enslave: the queen ant disguises herself with a scent that matches that of the targeted colony, commonly of Temnothorax unifasciatus ants, which allows her to enter their nest undetected. Once inside, the M. ravouxi queen slowly throttles the natal queen to death. The slave-makers then invade the T. unifasciatus colony, killing the adults and taking over their pupae, which grow up to work for their masters, with tasks that include rearing the slave-makers’ brood and defending their nests. Slavemaker ants and their slaves are often of related species.22 33

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Argint, a village reconstructed by orphans, was one of the last pockets of Armenians left in Sasun after the Genocide. Before the 1894 massacre in Sasun, Argint had a population of 75 households, which by 1914 had fallen to 45. Only one family survived extermination in 1915. But in the 1950s, when the village had grown again to around 40 Armenian households, their fight for survival was resumed against Kurdish neighbors: they were coveting what was left of the Armenians’ lands and women. Some of the attackers were converted children of Armenian mothers, often married against their will to Muslim men. Nobody but the two enemy parties was aware of the war of Argint: it was fought by unimportant tribes in a remote place, and the body count was low. Yet the men of Argint took up arms to defend themselves in a war that had few casualties but that lasted for three decades. Unbeknownst to the outside Armenians and most of Turkey, there were still armed clashes between Kurds and Armenians through the early 1980s in Sasun. The campaign to uproot the remaining pockets of Armenians in their historical provinces stretched for another seven decades after 1915, a continuation of the Genocide by other means, almost casual and unplanned—a low-intensity cleansing as there were very few Armenians left anyway, with one murder one month and the kidnapping of a woman another month, in the laid-back pace of a small town. But the goal was the same: purge the land of the Armenians. Seto began to tell me the story of the battles of Argint on Mt. Maruta during the pilgrimage of 2011. The sun reigned absolute, and was punishing me. It was the day of Vartavar, the Festival of the Roses. That year, it had coincided with Ramadan, the month of fasting in Islam. Most pilgrims were Muslim and hidden Armenians, but at least one Christian was with us, a 73-year-old man who had not brought water out of respect for the Islamic custom, with a superhuman capacity to climb the mountain without sweating or losing his composure on an ascent through steep slopes of rolling stones; more than once my false steps sent them cascading down in avalanches. “The Kurds kidnapped her and kept her, but one of them, too, went down in the shoot-out,” said Seto as the heights and slopes were beginning to rock around me, sunstruck and thirsty. “But there is much more, we would need hours and hours,” he added, while I felt that I might pass out at any moment. He was accompanied by another Sasuntsi, in his mid-40s and also settled in Istanbul, who had been born to an Islamicized family: he wanted to return to the Church and be baptized with the name of Aram. But he said Turkish courts were making his application difficult, as he showed me supporting documents from the Civil Registry that testified to his Armenian lineage. Seto and Aram continued their ascent toward the ruins of the Surp Asdvadzadzin shrine—there were only a few walls left standing, the size of a little cabin. I leaned against a boulder for another few minutes but when I tried 34

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to resume my walk, two Arab teenagers hurried toward me looking alarmed, the first hint that I must have looked the way I felt. As I drank from the two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola filled with water, they refused to take the 5 lira note I handed out. “Haramdır, olmaz,” they said: “It’s forbidden, it’s not possible,” using the religious word for something that is not right—but I finally managed to sink the brown bill with the crumpling face of Atatürk into the pocket of one of them. When the water obtained from the Arabs restored me to my full senses I realized that I did not have Seto’s contact details, and mightily regretted losing for good the story of the battles of Argint. But then I met him again at a conference on Islamicized Armenians at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in November 2013. Seto was with Sose at the table outside. He was holding back on the entire story. And a few weeks later we coincided in Diyarbakır, at the Hasan Paşa Han, a sixteenth-century caravanserai along the Silk Road. A Diaspora Armenian visitor who was with us that night asked Seto if his wife was Sasuntsi, too. “No, she is Turkish,” he said. There was a silence for two seconds that weighed like a tombstone. One day he had caught her crying, reading about the massacres, he said. Yet once again, I could not make him talk about his hometown in Sasun. It took him almost another year to finally sit down, at a café on Istiklal Street in Istanbul, and tell the story of Argint and its conflicts. “We could talk for hours and hours,” he repeated what he had said three years before on Mt. Maruta. But he finally relented, and released the tale, sometimes with minimalist precision, that he had jealously guarded. It was a rare account of life in an Armenian village in the historical lands after 1915, including names of fighters and their victims, and their short biographies too. Before 1915, Argint was an Armenian village with some Kurdish population, who called it Herend, as they still do. The original name in Armenian is Arkhunt. Its Armenian population was exterminated; first exiled, and then killed. But one family was spared: the Demircis—the ironsmiths—as their surname indicates in Turkish. They were initially exiled too, but they were under the protection of the area’s Kurdish strongman, Xelile Mısto, the chieftain of the related Çelikan and Bekran aşirets (tribes). Xelile Mısto didn’t want the Demircis to leave. The area’s Kurds needed them: they built the tools, the knives, and the weapons. The head of the group of çetes (bandits) which had come to massacre the Armenians said, “I will kill these ones too,” but Xelile Mısto challenged him to murder the Demircis: “If you are so smart to murder them, I’ll show you.” And the bandit—a Turk or a Circassian—backed off and released them. Xelile Mısto first brought the 15 members of the Demirci household to a village called Gredara, and he then moved them to the hamlet of Dalek. There, in a wood, Kevo Demirci settled with his wife, children, and other relatives, and built a small foundry. He 35

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turned in any money he made to the Kurds of the Çelikan aşiret, under whose protection he and his family were. At some point between 1920 and 1923, after the massacres of Armenians had ceased, Kevo obtained permission from the Çelikans’ aşiret reis (tribe chieftain) to return to Argint. And almost right away, Kevo started scouring Sasun for any Armenians left, searching randomly on foot or heeding clues and rumors. One by one, he gathered the Armenians he found—the orphans, the sick, the Islamicized ones—in Argint. He took them all to his hometown, and they formed the village anew. Argint was reborn again as an Armenian village, with most survivors coming from Berm. “My father is from Berm,” Seto said. Until 1915, Berm had a population of 1,050 Armenians.23 After the Genocide, I’ve sent news everywhere, asked everywhere, written to everyone, and I’ve only found 69 people who are descended of Armenians from Berm. Out of those who went to Armenia, those who stayed in Turkey, and those who went to Syria, only 69 people have Berm registered as the hometown of their ancestors. It was a very powerful village and my great-grandfather was its chief in 1915: Reis Tano, or Taniel. There were 47 people in our family: all but nine were murdered. Five went to Armenia, one went to Syria, and three stayed in Turkey. Of these three people, one was my father, one my grandmother, and the other one was a female relative. My father was seven at the time of the Genocide. He was born in 1908. They came to Argint in the early 1920s, with my father working there to sustain his mother. His name was Haik, my grandmother’s name was Eva—in Kurdish they called her Hawe—and their female relative was Xemlo, who was the daughter of Davo, or Davit, one of my great-uncles. Xemlo married an Armenian in the village. Kevo gathered every Armenian: married, unmarried, orphans. My father married one of Kevo Demirci’s nieces. Until the mid-1960s, there was even a man in Argint who remembered the Russo–Turkish war of 1877. They said he was 130 years old.

The long-lived man had witnessed a seminal conflict: its settlement with the Treaty of Berlin a year later triggered fears among the Muslims in the Ottoman Empire—among the Kurds more than any other group, as those with the most to lose—that European intervention at the behest of Christian minorities would be at the expense of the privileged status of Muslims. The anti-Armenian sentiment, which had already led to a massacre in Sasun in 1894, intensified and would explode with the atrocities of the 1890s under Sultan Abdül Hamid II. Kevo Demirci ruled Argint until his death in 1948. His son Isa took the helm. In 1952, half of the village sold their land to Kurds. Until then, there were two Kurdish families in the village, but they were very passive. There were two converted Armenian families, Islamicized during the Genocide, whom Kevo had brought to Argint: they remained Muslim. But they gave their daughters to other Armenian families and took Armenian brides as well. 36

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A few years after the new Kurdish owners of the lands came in 1952, problems started. “They reasoned, ‘These are Armenians; if we want, everything is ours’; that’s how it is,” Seto said, to indicate that it was possible to get away with crime against Armenians in Anatolia at the time, and generally in Turkey: But these Kurds did not kill Armenians in the massacres of 1915. They took lands and Armenian women, they plundered the Armenians, and stole the animals, but they didn’t kill a single Armenian. Not these newcomers. They were the Mala Hıseyni Hıse. That was their aşiret. They took women, animals, and things. But they did not kill during the Genocide.

When they started to cause trouble in the mid-1950s, the Armenians fought against them, man to man and with their bare hands. But in 1963, the Kurds started to attack the Armenians with firearms. We stopped our conversation at the Istanbul café: a short, thumping sound, repeated a few seconds later amid a roar, came from the street. Seto took his glasses off to wipe his eyes, which had become moist and red; soon mine were stinging too, and we were both sneezing and coughing. The waiters took us to the café’s second floor along with the other patrons. The police had fired tear gas at a protest outside the Galatasaray Lyceum, about half a mile away from us. We had had the infelicitous idea of picking the lyceum as our meeting point at a time when a vast crowd of demonstrators from Kurdish and leftist organizations was congregating to protest against Turkey’s passivity towards the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, accusing the country of supporting the extremist group. At the time ISIS was besieging Kobane, a mostly Kurdish populated town in northern Syria also known as Arapınar, which had been a transit station in 1915 for Armenian deportees, some of whom had settled and lived there well into the early 1970s. The screams that could be heard from Istiklal Street were drowned out by the loud music played over the sound system of the café, which had locked its doors as demonstrators, some with handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses, ran down the Istiklal Street in the general direction of the Galata Tower. Seto resumed the story. “The conflict started over water,” he said. Armenians and Kurds had agreed on a timetable with their respective turns to irrigate the crops, but in a few years the Kurds started to complain about the regime, in an area where advanced deforestation is aggravated by lack of rain. The Kurds would harass them by trying to destroy their crops or steal animals, but the Armenians fended them off. The bad blood, however, reached the point of no return when in May 1963 the Kurds used guns to attack, and killed Camil, the 33-year-old son of Mıgırdiç, one of the Islamicized Armenians, who had taken the name of Halit after his conversion. “A Kurd also died, shot by one Kurd who was with us,” Seto said: 37

Secret Nation We the Armenians did nothing. This Kurd had joined us before, asking for land to settle among us. Isa let him come, and this man bought the plot, and then fought for us. One of the others’ men and two of ours also got injured with gunshot wounds.

Camil’s father, Mıgırdiç, had been dead for more than 20 years when his son was killed. Seto did not know the circumstances of his conversion but he made an educated guess: he was a Genocide survivor. In a way, his story was similar to Kevo’s in Argint. A little after 1915, Mıgırdiç had started to gather all the Islamicized Armenians he could find—mostly orphans, women, and the elderly, as most young and adult men had been butchered—in Berm. But Mıgırdiç did not shy away from confrontation and never minced his words. “He was a very good man but also strong and severe,” Seto said. “Kevo was more cunning and soft-spoken.” In 1938, Kurdish attackers murdered Mıgırdiç and completely destroyed Berm, and its Armenian residents fled to Argint, where Kevo took them under his protection. After Camil got killed, the Argint Armenians’ leader, whom they called Keri Isa—the title means “uncle” in Armenian—decided to act: “This can’t be,” he said. “Let’s bid for peace with the Kurds.” The Kurds were ready too, saying they just wanted a quiet life. Delegates from both sides met after the shoot-out and exchanged solemn vows to end the conflict. A few days later, in June or July of 1963, Isa went to the city, Sasun, to buy gifts for the Kurds’ leader as a token of the Armenians’ goodwill. The Kurds, armed with guns and daggers, were waiting for him on the road as he returned to Argint. They had set up an ambush to kill him. “It was the same Kurds of the Mala Hıseyni Hıse aşiret,” Seto laughed with irony as he noticed I stopped taking notes in confusion, for it was the tribe the Armenians had just reached an agreement with: “They couldn’t defeat us fighting, so they harassed us.” The Kurds opened fire and injured one Armenian, 22-year-old Aram, as Isa and the others managed to escape. Aram, Isa’s cousin, was captured by the Kurds. “I know you are going to kill me, but I beg you just to leave me in one piece,” he told his captors as he lay on the floor. “A Kurd sank the dagger in his head and the brains spilled out and then they pierced his ribs, three times on each side of his body,” Seto said. The Mala Hıseyni Hıse aşiret fled Argint after the murder of Aram. The description of the attack was so detailed that it seemed a firsthand account. “We know what Aram had said because the Kurds came up to tell us that he had pleaded with them not to cut him up, but that they had anyway, and it was true: I saw his body,” Seto explained. “The one who shot him was bragging around: his name was Sabriye Ali; I don’t know the names of those who stabbed Aram, but the one who shot him was Sabriye Ali.” In the Kurds’ 38

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view, they had now evened the score, for in the first shooting in May they had lost their leader’s brother. The Argint Armenians set up a defense system, which remained in place for almost a quarter of a century. The village is on a relatively low plateau, between 500 and 600 meters, preceded by a vast plain at the foothills of a range that gradually rises in the back ridges, where construction sputters into isolated houses, some empty or abandoned now. It offers excellent visibility to its defenders, but this topographic advantage is undercut by its ease of access, unlike the impregnable villages in the mountains of eastern Sasun. Every night and in all seasons—including winters, which see heavy snowfall—four armed Argint men would patrol the perimeter of the village. But on days of heightened alert, every man who was 12 years and older would get his gun or other weapon and take part in the enhanced surveillance. There were three shifts from sunset to dawn. “We would dig in at secret trenches and lairs until sunrise, no matter what the weather was.” With the Kurds gone, there were only 40 households of Christian and Muslim Armenians left in Argint. The fighting was constant, and bad, for some two years until the latter part of 1965. Yet they had developed primitive but clandestine channels for gathering intelligence in the area. “Our main informants in the area were Islamicized Armenians, who sent us word that something was afoot on any given night,” Seto said. “There were Kurds who sympathized with us, too, but the news was usually brought to us secretly by Muslim Armenians; and on some of those nights, there would be an incursion that we were prepared to repel.” The attacks usually involved 15–20 men of the Mala Hıseyni Hıse tribe, who would infiltrate the village: “We defended ourselves, we did the best that we could, but we were few.” Sometimes the Kurds managed to burn the Armenians’ wheat and other crops, or kill some animals. They were not successful in harming people, but they were beginning to strangle Argint economically. “These çetes were armed with the best gun available there at the time, the Mauser: they would attack us and would look for us wherever they could, trying to kill us.” In 1964–5, the ring of Kurdish villages around Argint became the Armenians’ enemies. The tribes came together and surrounded the locality, camping on the plain at its foothills: We had received in our village the grandson of Xelile Mısto, the Kurdish ağa that had protected Kevo Demirci during the Genocide. His grandson had killed a man in his village, Deyika, and had fled with his family to seek refuge among us. We defended him. The story reverted. There was an Armenian woman from the village of Xındzorik in Sasun, who had come to our village and had married the grandson of a cousin of Isa’s. Her name was Hanım. Xelile Mısto’s grandson

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Secret Nation kidnapped her and took her to the home of the area’s sheik, the religious leader. I am almost sure Sheik Kasım lived in the village of Ğullık, but it could also have been Millik or Kulli Xane.

The sheik is the highest authority Kurds recognize in any given region, invested with religious and political authority. Xelile Mısto’s grandson with the captive woman would be assured of immunity there, as nobody would dare rescue her from the sheik’s estate without unleashing an assault by the Kurds. Isa wrote a letter and gave it to Khacho, the father of the murdered Aram. “Khacho, take this letter to the sheik,” instructed the chief of Argint. In his letter, Isa said: “My Sheik, we are Armenian: we are harmless. Send this woman back. The husband of this woman is here; he is a poor man, too. This is unseemly of you, who are the rulers of this entire land. Send back this poor man’s wife; take her from this man, Xelile Mısto’s grandson, and return her to her husband and her village.” Upon arrival at the sheik’s hometown Khacho was told that he was not home, so he took the letter to Pelke, a nearby village, and gave it to a man called Ahmet Ezro. “This is Isa’s letter for Sheik Kasım, but he is not home,” Khacho told Ahmet. “Please give it to the sheik today or tomorrow.” A Kurdish ağa (chieftain) in Pelke learned that Isa’s letter was in Ahmet Ezro’s possession and asked for it, saying that he would take it to the sheik. Ahmet had to defer to this ağa, Hama Aliye Matto, whose mother was Armenian. “But he was a Kurd: in Turkey you take the nationality of your father, and in any case he hated Armenians.” Hama Aliye Matto tore up that letter and wrote instead a screed in which Isa appeared to challenge the sheik to return Hanım to her Armenian husband, or else: “If not, you will see what will happen to you, your family and your fields, you son of an unworthy mother,” ended the rewritten message. Sheik Kasım read that letter and put the Kurds he led on war footing, saying that Isa, the son of Kevo and chief of the Armenians of Argint, had insulted him. “All the Kurds in the region got armed, and came to our village in the winter of 1964, in late February or early March,” Seto said. “All the Kurds in the area were our enemies now and laid siege to our village, sitting there, armed: they were going to kill us all.” The sheik entered the village with a delegation that included his guard as well as the Kurdish ağas from every tribe, with their respective entourages. The letter’s falsification was finally exposed to the sheik’s satisfaction. But it was too late. “Isa, I cannot stop these asses,” Sheik Kasım said. “He called his men ‘asses’ with them standing right there,” remembered Seto, who witnessed the 40

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gathering. “You have three choices,” the sheik told Isa. “You either leave Argint, you become Muslim, or you fight to the end.” Isa gathered the villagers to report on the meeting. There were three Muslim families—two of them Islamicized Armenians; the other a Kurdish family on friendly terms with the Armenians—and the rest were Christian. The villagers unanimously wanted to resist. “No, we will fight! We will fight to the end!” Seto recalled people saying at the assembly. “They were saying, ‘Let them kill us all, we will not change our religion,’ and that was the stance of everyone in Argint.” A two-month impasse ensued as the Armenians withheld their response to the sheik’s ultimatum. There were no incidents, but the Kurdish tribes still encircled the village in their tents. One day, four Argint Armenians were returning home from a visit to the village of Pelke. On the way back, they greeted a group of around 30 Kurds idling by the roadside. They did not respond to the salute. “We were already looking for you,” the Kurds said. “You insulted our sheik: how can we exchange selams with you?” These four Armenians ran for some six miles with the armed Kurds pursuing them. “After 1,000 difficulties they managed to come to the village,” Seto said. This was around April 1964. Isa again called an assembly. “People, we have to do something,” Isa told the villagers. “And we have nowhere to escape: we either become Muslim, or we will die.” After a long debate, the residents of Argint agreed to nominally convert, but they made it clear that it was just in name. “Nobody changed his religion,” he said. “We all remained Christian, and we did not even know how to do the namaz or say Islamic prayers, nor did we care to observe the ablutions or other rites we knew nothing about.” These developments were newsworthy enough that Hürriyet, a national circulation newspaper, ran an article on April 7, 1964, with the headline, “Everyone at one old Armenian village becomes Muslim.” The subhead below said that the church at the 30-household village had been turned into a mosque (in the body of the text it said it was a centuries-old church) and that all the male children had been circumcised in a ceremony. There was a quote from Isa that said, “We were intending to join the community of Islam for a long time.” And he credited Sheik Kasım Bado, describing him as a sage, for dispelling their doubts. The sheik had explained the virtues of Islam, and they “had liked it even more,” according to Isa, the name for Jesus in Turkish. A photo of Sheik Kasım, with a turban wrapped around his head and mounted on a white horse, illustrated the story. Some of the Kurds were satisfied and made their peace with the Armenians, now fellow Muslims. But the hostility of other tribes did not abate. They laid siege to Argint again, with fighting or skirmishes nearly every day and inflicting so much damage to the crops and livestock that famine began to 41

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threaten them, especially after the Kurds burned their wheat the very year in which they converted. “We didn’t have bread and we were starving,” Seto said. “Economically we were finished: we couldn’t leave to buy provisions.” The enemy aşirets, heavily armed by the standards of the time and place, had blocked all the roads. On May 15, 1965, the Argint Armenians fled under the cover of night in little groups, carrying what they could. A fight some weeks earlier had convinced them to abandon the village. One day in late March, some 15 Argintsis were heading to the city of Sasun to attend a trial related to the conflict with the Kurds. Travel at the time was done on foot, walking for hours on end. Night fell when they were in the neighborhood of Cermak, Zeki’s village. But they decided not stay at Zeki’s because he was Armenian and did not want to compromise him, so instead they found shelter at the home of Kurdish acquaintances. In the morning, as they were crossing a precarious suspension bridge on their way to court, a group of Kurds opened fire on them. “Our men had taken their wives and children,” Seto said. “Our people were unarmed because it was forbidden to carry weapons into court, and if police checked, they could run into trouble.” Some of the Argint Armenians fled toward Sasun and some others back to Cermak, but the Kurds captured one of them, a 35-year-old Muslim Armenian called Hüseyin: They tore him up into 100 pieces: his ears, his nose, like butchers. Hüseyin had been injured in the attack two years before, the one in which Aram had been murdered. He was a Muslim Armenian. His father’s name was Filip and his grandfather’s name was Manuk. And they just murdered him because he was with us. Religion didn’t matter: he was a Muslim. But they killed him because he was Armenian. After Hüseyin’s assassination we decided to get out of Argint. We set the date for May 15.

The death of a village woman on the night they had decided to escape en masse almost upended their plans. While one group barely managed to bury her, the other families were fleeing in the direction of Kulp to seek the protection of the Badıkan, a Kurdish aşiret: Isa had an in-law relationship with them as he had married a woman from the tribe after he was widowed from his first, Armenian wife in 1961. They went to a village called Reşika, where the grandfather of Isa’s current spouse lived. But they only offered temporary shelter to the Armenians: “We can defend you for a fortnight.” On May 30, the Armenians packed up again and scattered around villages in the Kulp area. Two Argint families went to the village of Danze, the two Muslim Armenian households resettled in Dalek, two stayed in Badıkan and 42

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the rest went to Diyarbakır. Seto’s family, along with Isa’s and his brother’s, as well as another four families, went to Fırke, which had been an Armenian settlement in the past. The Kurds had taken it over after 1915, but there were still two Muslim Armenian families. The village chief was Hama Aliye Ağa, whose clan was known to Seto’s: “Süleyman Ağa, Hama Aliye’s grandfather, had killed with his own knife the grandmother of Reis Tano, my own greatgreat-grandmother.” But Hama Aliye’s son, İzzet Ağa, was “not a bad person” and, as a regular visitor to Argint, had cordial relations with them. In the meantime, the chief of Argint, Isa Demirci, went to Istanbul and met with the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople in July 1965. Patriarch Shnorhk Kalustyan, a Genocide survivor himself, was a champion of the Armenians from the historical provinces and elsewhere in Anatolia; he kept close links with them, often below the radar, and managed to support them by stealth, at a time when Armenians still lived in fear even in Istanbul and dared not do much outside the confines of traditional community life. The situation was even worse in Turkey’s interior, where Armenians were exposed to the whims of the local Muslim majorities. Patriarch Shnorhk sent Isa to see Mıgırdiç Şellefyan, a former National Assembly deputy for the Adalet party of then prime minister Süleyman Demirel. Şellefyan, who had a good relationship with Demirel, told him the story of Argint. The village had presently been occupied by the Kurds, who had distributed the houses and the fields among themselves. Demirel dispatched troops with orders to oust the Kurds and enable the return of the Armenian population. The soldiers moved the Kurds to Gredara, just across from Argint, on the other side of the River Han Deresi: it was the place where Kevo Demirci and his family had first found a home after the Genocide. The first week of September 1965 the Armenians returned to Argint. Most families moved back to their old places and stayed until 1986. But some did not: I have only spoken about some of the big fights … Every year there would be about 20 clashes. There could be five in a month, and then a lull for another month. It was like that. But we were enemies … We didn’t have Kalashnikovs at the time. The shootings would be with Mausers and other ordinary guns. Our permanent concern was how we were going to defend ourselves. So we built a cannon; the Demircis were ironsmiths. It was an Ottoman type of cannon. A big cannon. And that’s why they were very scared of us. We had no choice. There is no photo of it. At the time we had no camera. Isa built the cannon with other family members, all ironsmiths, who had done the military service and had learned its workings.

Sasuntsi Armenians may have used one or more cannons as early as the nineteenth century against marauding Kurds. In the battle of Chay in 1894, 43

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in the early massacres of Sasun, the Kurds were said to have lost 2,200 men against 77 Armenians. The terrified Kurds had spread rumors about fantastic weapons that had been brought by “the infidels from Moscow,” a reference to Eastern Armenians from the Russian Empire (in what is now the Republic of Armenia). A slim volume published in Geneva quoted some of the hearsay on the weaponry: “They have huge cannons, and allegedly among Armenians there are dragon-like men, who have only one eye on their foreheads; they are invulnerable; and especially they have such harquebuses, that with the launching of one missile they illuminate mountain and valley.” Kurds in the region of Mush and Bitlis were also panicking about versions that plenty of Russian Armenians had arrived in air balloons.24 But the cannon only bought the Argint Armenians a precarious peace. The third period in the village’s life—after the Armenians’ return in 1965—was also fraught with conflict. Nonetheless, during interludes of calm, Kurds would come to visit with curiosity, because the life and housing were different than elsewhere in the area, more of a town than a village. In the same period, too, some of them began to settle among the Armenians, whose youth had started an exodus toward Istanbul, to further their education or seek a better life. Malik, a Muslim Armenian born in Argint, said nine people died in clashes between Armenians and Kurds between 1982 and 1986. “My grandfather Simo never talked about the massacres of 1915 and would get furious if anyone did,” Malik said. Like Kevo and Isa Demirci, Simo was an ironsmith and gunmaker, too. He and his wife, Lusin, were Genocide survivors and had been Islamicized during the massacres. “He did the namaz five times a day, and my grandmother would make the sign of the cross on the bread when kneading the dough.” They had two daughters and two sons, one of them Malik’s father, Gevro, who after Argint settled in the village of Bahamdan with his wife and children. “But we were expelled because we were Armenian,” he said. “Religion didn’t make a difference, we were already Muslim,” added Malik, who grew up to become an atheist. As he spoke he fiddled absentmindedly with his amber tespih (worry beads), even though he never lost the thread of his narrative, over coffee at the Hasan Paşa Han in Diyarbakır. Reborn twice, the epic of Argint was approaching its demise and, like a hero that outlived his glory, the village that had come together after the Genocide and had withstood armed assaults and siege, was dying of poverty and old age. Isa, the chief of Argint, would offer plots to the Kurds every time he ran out of money. “Every year he would sell land left and right,” Seto said. “And sooner or later after they came, rivalry would begin anew between us and them, always escalating.” But in the 1980s the village was low on its defenses, with all the young men in Istanbul, and only the elderly were left: “Kurds attacked them with sticks and stones.” 44

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Isa decided to sell the entire village to the Kurds and move all the Armenians to Istanbul, which, in one sense, Seto saw in a positive light. “None of those who were born after 1940 spoke Armenian, but those born after 1970 learned it at the schools of Istanbul, and so did their children.” A few months earlier I had visited Argint, or Herend, the Kurdish name everybody in the area used now. The minibus driver had forgotten to drop me off at the road leading off the Batman–Sasun highway, so he left me at a bus rest stop on a desolate stretch, paying for my tea and instructing the attendant, an old Kurdish man with hunched shoulders, to get me on my way to the village. “Herend!” the man exclaimed with astonishment, wondering aloud if I had relatives there but responding to his own question that it would be impossible, for reasons he did not explain. The stories I had heard about Kevo Demirci had piqued my curiosity, I told him—to both hint that I was Armenian, and see if I could get anything else out of him about the village. “But Kevo died perhaps 30 or 40 years ago,” he said with a smile, now surprising me with his benign incuriosity. “There are no Armenians left there,” he added, acknowledging my cue. A motorist who had stopped to buy water agreed to the attendant’s request, in Kurdish, to give me a ride to the Herend junction, some ten miles back down the highway. “Are you Muslim?” the driver, all smiles, greeted me by way of introduction while he offered cigarettes, one of which he took and lit as we sped down the empty highway. “Christian,” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” was his reflex response, meaning the opposite. “I’m Armenian,” I added for good measure, silently grateful that he had lowered the windows, as the cabin had filled with smoke and a chlorine-like smell that came from the air conditioning at full blast, mixing with the plastic and leather odors of his new car. “Oh, so was my grandmother,” he said. “But she was Muslim,” he clarified right away, yet proffering the usual disclaimers that “man is man” and we are one and the same under the only God, and stressed the singularity lifting his index finger. It was a little dialectical ping-pong not uncommon in conversations with the more pious in Turkey, especially those who took some care not to potentially offend sensitive souls. It normally followed this sequence: a thesis that implicitly presumes, “Such and such religion is the only true one and you surely are one of us, because you seem a good person, have a long beard, etc.” When it turns out that the interlocutor is not of the same creed, the preceding statement is partially refuted by a proclamation of our common humanity in the eyes of the Creator, sometimes with backhanded comments that absolve one for being born in a different faith and declining the opportunity to join the better one; but the synthesis—in a tweak that would not pass Hegelian muster—usually brought back to square one, is what boils down to, “But, after all, this is the sole path.” Not unusually, it would end with the question of why one would not 45

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convert to such and such religion, so sublime and precious, a fact which those professing a different faith failed to appreciate in our imperfect state. Just before I got out of his car, he wrote down his name and number in Batman, saying he was an imam who could help should I ever run into trouble. Right then, a dolmuş was picking up some children at the bridgehead on the way to Herend. The van doubled as a school bus, and the driver and I were the only adults in it, with giggling kids asking for photos, some more loudly and others blushing a little, while the older girls were shying self-consciously away from the lens. They were the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of the Kurds that had fought for three generations against the Armenians of Argint. The bus drove up the road that wound around the plateau upon which the village was built, and dropped us off outside the school, where the principal, a solemn man in a black suit, waited for the students, the youngest of whom were swarming around him as he caressed their heads and asked them if they had enjoyed the trip. Herend used to be Armenian, he told me, as he led me into the school. It was a half-finished building, traversed by a dark corridor of concrete walls and empty rooms on both sides, which led to a vast esplanade at the edge of a cliff, perhaps some 500 meters high, overlooking the plains outside Argint. The village was a cluster of staggered houses on the hill’s ridges, and the buildings, none taller than two floors, were arranged in a precise and compact perimeter that suggested an imaginary fortification around it. There was a little square table in the middle of the school esplanade, with a young man on the right side, talking earnestly to an older one in a gray suit, who had his back to the school. They both looked askance at me with the worried air that seemed to dominate their dialogue, the young man turning his blue eyes inquisitively to the principal, who introduced me as an Armenian journalist from America. I was invited to sit by the Argint muhtar (village chief ), the older man in the gray suit and open-necked white shirt, while the principal went to fetch tea. The muhtar was not a talkative person and his stare was fixed ahead in a frown, as the sunlight had started to fade away in a pale sky. “To drink a cigarette,” or “sigara içmek,” as they say in Turkish, described the muhtar’s smoking, drawing in the nicotine with great thirst and letting out little clouds. The blue-eyed man asked me if I knew anything in Kurmancî, the most widely spoken variant of Kurdish in Turkey. “Biji Kürdistan” (“Long live Kurdistan”) was all I could muster, which he welcomed with a sad smile. “We thank you for ‘Biji Kürdistan,’ that’s kind of you.” His face returned to its preoccupied visage. “This country is going down in a war,” he said, in the cut-glass Turkish that came with schooling and that sounded a little out of place in the deep east. “Sooner or later, and we fear that.” The muhtar did not comment, 46

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smoking away his unspoken thoughts. They both had a distracted air and did not seem to care much about my questions about the Armenians. “I don’t think there’s any left,” the blue-eyed man said, and the muhtar made the local gesture for “No,” arching his eyebrows and tilting his head up and back, with a short tongue click. The principal brought tea and cookies but did not sit, returning 20 minutes later and offering to show me the old houses. But as we were leaving the school a little girl came running down from a steep street and held my hand, begging to be my guide to Isa Demirci’s farm and walk me around the village. The principal left me in her hands with a good laugh. “But how do you know about Isa Demirci? How old are you?” I asked her. She was nine: “My parents told me,” she said, walking me through the streets and houses where the protagonists of her tales had lived. Isa’s house was a two-floor construction, with living quarters above the stable: a wooden stair led to the door, but a young woman who introduced herself as a domestic said the homeowners were away. Other children had gathered around me, telling me the names of the previous Armenian owners of their homes. They were pulling me in their direction calling out, “Sir! Sir!” in Turkish: “Efendim! Efendim!” The principal came over to tell me that there was no bus out of the village, but that I could get a ride on a dumpster truck that was leaving shortly with a load of stone bricks. A little earlier, he had told me that the church had been reduced to a heap of stones and that there was nothing to see there, and I thought that it must have been the one that, according to the 1964 news report, had been turned into a mosque when the Argint Armenians had converted. Back in the café on Istiklal Street, Seto regretted that the gains in Armenian life and education in Istanbul had come at the expense of their ancestral lands, and he had made it known to Isa, the village chief and his uncle. “One day I told him, ‘Uncle, you saw it was a mistake; you brought in the Kurds in 1962 and saw how much trouble they gave us until 1965’; but Isa was constantly short of cash and would sell lands to them.” It makes me sad that we lost our village. All the Armenians are gone. There is only one Muslim Armenian left, and he is not leaving. They give him trouble, but he is not going anywhere. He is the grandson of one of those Armenians rescued by Kevo Demirci and brought to Argint. His name is Hame Demir. Kevo brought the Armenians and the Muslim Armenians. Isa brought the Kurds. Mıgırdiç gathered all the Muslim Armenians, and brought them to Berm. Then Mıgırdiç was murdered, Berm was destroyed, and all the Armenians of Berm came to Argint. They still bother Hame Demir, they tell him, “All your family has left, why don’t you leave as well.” But he is not. He is married to a Kurdish woman. Why do they give him trouble? Kurds are like that. If they know you have Armenian roots, they will give you trouble all the time. They have not changed.

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Secret Nation Perhaps they have changed 10 percent, and that’s nothing. I don’t believe they have changed. Those who are in politics think that they have, but if something happens tomorrow or the day after tomorrow they will start again with “these Armenians …”

And we went out into the acrid air that lingered on Istiklal Street, still rubbing our burning eyes as the tear gas dissipated and the demonstrators dispersed, with haggard faces and rolled-up banners under their arms.     

“Vaha՜ n … Vaha՜ n …” called out Selim, the Arab shepherd. The wind amplified the name and transported it across Mt. Sındor Kaya. The Armenian name, one of the last for an inhabitant of Sasun, flew over the ridges and abysses, multiplying. “Vaha՜ n … Vaha՜ n …,” repeated the mountains. The long Armenian accent ՜ is designed to denote a range of tones and emotions, from a long vowel to nostalgia, a punctuation mark that helps render the travels of the voice across the nation’s history and topography. Vahan was one of the last Christian Armenians left in Sasun. He was also one of the last persons in the entire region with an Armenian name. Even the very few in Eastern Anatolia who have remained affiliated with the Church have now equivocal names that could be Kurdish, Turkish, or Arabic. “Parev,” I had said the first time I saw Vahan, incredulous that someone still bore an Armenian name in Sasun. “Parin Asdoudzo!” came his astonished response. We were reenacting the transition of Armenia from Zoroastrianism to Christianity, as Armenians unconsciously do every time they greet each other: “Parev,” the standard Armenian salute, is the contraction of “Pari arev” (“Good sun”), and the traditional response, “Parin Asdoudzo,” means “The good of God.” Two thousand years of Armenian history were compressed into this briefest of exchanges in the barren geography of historical Armenia. But the dialogue in vernacular only went that far. Vahan understood some Armenian but he spoke these few words, and little else, other than Turkish and his mother tongue, the local dialect of Arabic. For most Diaspora Armenians, Sasun had only remained alive in the epic of Davit and the legends about his courage. From time to time, rumors circulated that there were still Armenians left in villages of the mountains, but most had two sources: Patriarch Shnorhk of Constantinople, and Shiraz, an Armenian photographer from Beirut. He had made a pioneering trip throughout the historical Armenian regions in Eastern Turkey in the early 1970s and found Armenians in Sasun who were unaware of history since the fourteenth century. “Please tell the king of Armenia and the Catholicos about us and show them 48

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our pictures,” the chieftain of Pışut, a village that remained entirely Armenian and Christian until the late 1970s, had asked of Shiraz. The muhtar, head of the Keshishian clan, was worried about the future of the village’s children. On the basis of common sense and the advice of Diaspora community leaders, Shiraz had decided not to publicize the details of his extra­ordinary discovery: there were 11 villages wholly inhabited by Armenians, he said, after traveling for weeks by foot all over Sasun, passing himself off as a Lebanese Arab photo­ grapher. Turkey could obliterate these remnants too, Armenian community leaders feared. Still, news of Shiraz’s journey traveled by word of mouth in the era before the internet: some in the Diaspora had heard that there were Armenians in Sasun trapped in a time warp, who did not know that the last Armenian kingdom had ceased to exist six centuries before, when the Mamluks had overrun Cilicia in 1375 and taken Levon V to Cairo. But by the time these stories reached people’s ears, they had a patina of legend, as Sasun was apt to create anyway.25 In 1914 Pışut still had nine households and had grown to around 15 by the time Shiraz visited: it remained entirely Armenian and Christian until the 1980s, when the residents decided to pack up and resettle in Istanbul after selling the village for $12,000, according to the recollections of the few Armenians now left in Sasun. From the late 1960s and early 1970s, some Istanbul Armenians knew about them but, in Turkey’s intimidating atmosphere, were too scared to discuss it openly, in what could be seen as seditious talk. But elitism played a role, too. Many Armenians from Istanbul and also the Diaspora would describe brethren coming from the ancient provinces of the Ottoman Empire as kavaratsi (provincial), not always with a mild overtone. “They call us Kurds,” a Sasuntsi woman in Istanbul told me, approaching me out of the blue and without any introduction after the presentation of Osman Köker’s book Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago at the Mekhitarian School in the neighborhood of Pangaltı.26 I did not know her, but she had recognized me from seeing me with other Sasuntsis at community gatherings in Istanbul. She spoke in Turkish with me, but she quoted in Armenian what they said about them: “Asonk hay chen” (“These ones are not Armenian”). Köker’s magnificent book is based on the collection of Ottoman-era postcards of Orlando Carlo Calumeno, a businessman in his 40s now based in Istanbul, who describes himself as having a Levantine background. His father is of Italian descent—they left Perugia in the sixteenth century, fleeing a blood feud—and through a peripatetic detour ended up in Izmir in the 1700s, and a few decades later moved to Istanbul. Calumeno’s mother is Armenian, and she read for him the first postcard he had bought at the age of 16, which happened to have Armenian writing on it: a woman from Istanbul wrote to her sister living in Bursa, telling her: “You are now also a mother. When you nurse, use 49

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the recipe for the pomade I wrote you about to prevent dryness and cracking.” And here, as attendees were inevitably drawn into the emotions aroused by photos of churches and streets that depicted the scale of the lost world, this Sasuntsi woman, a living remnant of those who overcame the catastrophe by holding on to their identity and land, the Armenians’ historical territories, felt out of place among her kin in Istanbul. I had just returned from a month in Sasun. Howani, one of those characters in Turkey who drifted in and out of sects and religions like smoke, had pointed to Vahan as he was walking under the noonday sun, a rusty sickle in his hand, on a road bereft of shade or life other than us. “He is Armenian and Christian,” he had whispered to me as we stood in the cemetery of Surbik, Howani’s hometown. “We are relatives.” A local Kurdish neighbor had told me that Howani had officially become a Muslim but secretly remained a Christian; another acquaintance from the city of Sasun told me that he had remained a Christian on his ID—which in Turkey shows religious affiliation—but that he pretended to have converted to Islam. Often dressed in black, from his leather jacket to his shoes, the first time I saw Howani he had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder in the main square of Sasun. He was lithe, with a feline physiognomy accentuated by protruding cheeks and a balding head, his thin lips partly hidden behind black mustachios. He was a member of the korucus, the rural guards the Turkish government armed and paid a monthly wage of some 2,000 liras (approximately the equivalent of $1,000 at the exchange rate then)—a good wage in a country where the median was 1,500 liras—to fight the Kurdish insurgency, a job mostly taken up by Arabs in Sasun, as Kurds’ sympathy ran high for the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kürdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party). A ceasefire had been holding for two years at the time, after guerrilla warfare that had started in the late 1980s. Howani spent the warm months in Surbik and returned to Istanbul in winter. We were examining the village’s Armenian cemetery, a haphazard collection of oddly shaped stones used as markers for graves. There was one very large cross in granite with the horizontal axis much shorter than the vertical beam, looking like arms amputated at the elbows. A kid came up to me with a child’s tooth, offering it to me as a souvenir. Every time it rained, some bones and teeth would surface if you scratched the earth a little, he said. There had been no tombstones after 1915, Howani said. They were afraid to use Armenian characters or Christian symbols in order to avoid unwanted attention from criminals and gold diggers. “You should ask Ibrahim,” Howani muttered about a common Sasuntsi acquaintance, when I observed that there were signs of desecration. But months later another Sasuntsi talked obliquely about Howani’s and his now deceased father Fermo’s frequent visits to the cemetery, where his grandfather was buried. He had been a priest in 50

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the Armenian Church but had converted to Islam three years after the Genocide. “There was a complaint about the digging up of Armenian tombs and the authorities were investigating,” Howani said. “We don’t know what the results are.” The sky was dimming when an old man, holding a shepherd’s cane, stopped by the cemetery, surrounded by a small cloud of sheep. He was a little taller than the children who came to hover around him, a St. Nicholas with no candies or gifts to hand out other than timid pats. One of the more restless kids would take his wool hat off then put it back on, little pranks he took in his stride with grandfatherly complicity. Ovte was Armenian, but had converted decades back, in the 1970s or maybe earlier, he could not tell. He had half-forgotten the language of Sasun, which he tried briefly to retrieve from the recesses of his memory but brought back only tiny fragments: “Anunı im Ovte e” (“My name is Ovte”) and little else, as he now only spoke the local Arabic and some basic Turkish. He was not sure about his age either, but he thought he was past 90. “Perhaps 92?” ventured Howani, whose hard stare of a soldier of fortune had softened. Why had he converted? I asked him. He shrugged, blushing a bit and looking down. “Just like that, no?” Howani helped him with a smile, like a teacher suggesting the right answer. “Öyle,” repeated Ovte in Turkish, with the voice of a shy schoolboy. He had never married and had no family left. His parents, Bedros and Hanım, had died a long time ago. Misak, his only brother, had remained a Christian and had moved to Soviet Armenia at some point in the 1960s. Ovte had not heard back from him since. As he tapped the earth with the cane and the animals grouped to resume the march, I noticed a resemblance to his sheep, especially their eyes, a curious likeness we sometimes observe between pets and their masters, but tend to dismiss as a product of our imagination or no more than a funny coincidence. The west was now ablaze in red as darker skies were closing in from above and the east. With one sheep leading the way, Ovte shuffled down the sloping road away from the afterglow, the rest of his huddling flock and a tiny dog in his trail, with their backs to the dying sun.     

Twilight was insinuating itself through a mesh of clouds when we got up to ascend the Sındor. Vahan let the goats and sheep out of the pen. They were going to precede us by an hour while we called at a neighbor’s in Gamar, a village in the Arab part of Sasun. The animals arranged themselves in single file behind a short-legged, bearded goat with Trotsky looks and ambitions. They knew the way to the higher pastures by heart; sometimes they were allowed 51

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to do the trip by themselves and, to the last animal, would return home before dark. But two of them would always take a detour. Every morning, a black goat with a white stripe on its snout, and its white accomplice of a smaller size, split from the herd as they were released for grazing. They would make a left turn on the earth ramp leading up to Vahan’s house, and eat seeds from the food bowl of the rooster, who would race up the little mound from the henhouse, furiously crowing and flapping his wings, but then look on in helpless silence as his bigger farm neighbors munched down his breakfast, until Vahan, or whoever in his family was going on the sheep walk, smacked the thieving goats on the legs, a lesson that would be forgotten on the morrow. The Seraps, in turn, had been forgotten by history. They were one of the last four Christian Armenian families in Sasun. Three of them were related and lived in contiguous houses in Gamar. The other Christian Armenian household was in the village of Ampetak. While most other Armenians left in the historical lands had succumbed to Islamicization, the Seraps owed their extra­ordinary condition to a resolve that centuries of brutalities had reinforced in them. But a random decision by Ottoman officers during the Genocide had played a part, too. The Turkish soldiers that came to Gamar in 1915 to organize the massacres and deportations seized Vahan’s grandmother’s house and turned it into their living quarters. The troops had her cook for them, which granted her de facto immunity on the eve of the catastrophe. “They ordered, ‘Do not touch this woman’ when the massacres started,” Vahan said. The three Christian Armenian families left in Gamar were the last holdouts, he said. But they were not the only ones in the village who had survived the Genocide: some had converted and others had left for Istanbul or cities in Europe, especially in the early 1980s. “Those who are now Muslim and live in the village below, were Armenian,” Vahan said in reference to the residents of Zovart, in accordance with the local custom of excluding them as Armenians after conversion. His father Kerop was the only one of 17 siblings to have remained in Sasun, and had done so because the house and the land were here. Next door to Vahan lived an uncle. He was ill, stretched out on his döşek, the rollup mattress filled with goat wool that is more common than the bed in the rural parts of Turkey’s south-east. He welcomed us with a feeble greeting as he watched his sons and nephews convert the walls from stone to cement, casting a dark pall over the room and rarefying the air. Cement was colder in winter and hotter in summer but they had to modernize the house, Vahan said. We left the cavernous room and took a dirt path that sloped smoothly uphill, past the house of Marto—Vahan’s cousin and head of the third Christian Armenian family in Gamar—and, through a tree-lined stretch carpeted with walnut shells, walked to the Arab neighborhood of the village. Three men 52

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stood outside a white house, two of them shouting their selams amid laughs of welcome when they saw Vahan approach. Two of them were brothers and at first sight resembled each other, but in that paradoxical way by which a general similarity served to highlight the differences between them: the younger, thinner and with more slanted eyes, was holding a shepherd’s cane and his clothes were worn out; the older brother was the spitting image of a Moorish hunter in a mosaic displayed in the archaeological museum in Cartagena, Spain, with round black eyes beneath arched eyebrows. His mustaches were carefully groomed and he was only a tie short of formal attire. He was leaving for Istanbul in a few minutes, where he lived most of the time. They both had easy smiles. A third man in a gray suit and white shirt towered above them, with cheerless black eyes sunk in deep sockets and a broad, straight nose. His face evoked that of a moai, an Easter Island monolith, rounded up in a neatly trimmed beard and a forehead that had grown bigger thanks to a receding hairline. There was a big black duffel bag next to him. “He has an Armenian streak,” one of the Arabs said about him. “Ama annem Ermeniydi,” the moai face said in a guttural monotone, qualifying: “But my mother was Armenian.” Vahan bid farewell to the Istanbul-bound Arab with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks, while his younger brother Selim released his herd, a black-andwhite column that started out in a hungry trot toward the crest. The animals only recognized the voice of their masters and briefly stopped at the approach of a stranger, until a howl by Selim commanded them to resume their march. On the opposite mountain, a shepherd was guiding his flock from a pass that ran above that used by the animals, throwing stones to the screams of “Hoh! Hoh!” at goats that deviated to munch at bushes away from their path. In her tour of Adana on a fact-finding mission after the massacres of Armenians in the province in 1909, Zabel Yesayan described a Turkish woman of “severe and male” demeanor, harshly spurring on an unruly herd of cows and oxen that refused to obey her as she tried to drive them through the ruins of an Armenian village. “How obvious it is that the animals are not familiar with their owner, we told each other,” Yesayan wrote.27 She left it to the reader to understand that the cattle had probably belonged to Armenians only a few days before the mobs—including many men wearing the white tunic that identified them as Muslims (to avoid friendly fire)—began the slaughter of Armenians. After a quick stop for tea, yogurt, and biscuit, Vahan split from us in search of a few stray sheep, a few of which seemed less disciplined than the goats (other than the thieving pair). A few minutes later, in a strange distortion of perspective, Vahan looked like a lizard climbing a massive wall, so distant appeared the peak in my eyes. But our Arab companion laughed, and said it was just around the corner, or so to speak on a mountain. 53

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The Arab pointed his shepherd’s cane at a rock, gray and flaky, with crystalline incrustations, a slablike elevation amid the scrub. It had a hole in it, no larger than a bucket’s mouth: a stream swashed from the heart of Mt. Sındor into the light and then resumed its blind race beneath layers of stone. It was cold and pure, Selim told me as he got down on his knees to scoop water a couple of times. “Allah knows,” he said with a shrug when I speculated about its source. It was an ordinary expression that was always on the tip of his tongue. “Allah, Allah!” he exclaimed when I tripped a couple of times on the unfamiliar terrain, and also when we saw two bucks butting their heads on a very narrow pass. “Allah” was an interjection. But it was one of the names of God. And the whispering wind that was picking up from the west, the stream that perhaps was only an insinuation of other rivers that ran inside the mountain, and the silence only broken by our words or the cry of a bird, suggested the proximity of creation. The gathering storm that made the undergrowth tremble and paralyzed the animals for a moment announced a new beginning—rain extracted life from this soil, and the wild flowers and pastures amid the barren stones. Selim and I sat on the edge of a precipice that opened onto the Taurus range of the Armenian Highland, or Mountain World, the literal translation of Lerrnaşxarh,28 a single geological unity now parceled between Turkey, Iran, and Armenia with barbed wire. The crests were now graying, blending into the fog, and the rapidly gathering clouds took over the sky, blackening it and unleashing a downpour. We took shelter in the mouth of a cave. Its floor was littered with cigarette packets and butts, cans, and soft drink bottles. A white plastic cap from a big yogurt bucket, fixed to a stick, was jutting from the apex of the entrance arch. It intrigued me. The kids had done it, Selim said: they meant to represent a satellite dish. The wind cleared the skies and opened the clouds to a crepuscular sun, bringing up the smell of an earth verdant anew. Vahan had rejoined us; the shepherds spread the blanket for a meal of walnuts, kehke (a Middle Eastern type of cookie), tomatoes, lokum (known abroad as Turkish delight), bread with butter prepared with goat milk, and tea in a thermos. A shot rang, and then another two in quick succession, the sound bouncing on the face of mountains, and a brown bird soared into view and disappeared behind a ridge, flapping its wings in panic, while a group of scared sheep disbanded, running away from the sounds of gunfire. “They are shooting quail,” Vahan said. He had last used his rifle five years before to kill a wolf that was about to attack his sheep. Before that, he had lost five or six lambs to a hungry pack. Some 15 years ago, he said, they had eaten 60 sheep in the nearby village of Goğag, ruining the livelihood of a couple of households. 54

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Then, almost on cue, another two shots thundered in the blue sky. Some goats started to bleat and a goat kid started to cry—in a sound so poignantly similar to a human baby—as he walked in circles around us. He was five or six months old, the shepherds said. I had heard this lament for the first time a few years before. In 2011, a group of young pilgrims had flagged down our minibus as it wound up Mt. Maruta for the Feast of the Transfiguration. There were two very young women, perhaps barely out of puberty, who may have been sisters as they resembled each other very much; they were olive-skinned and wore headscarves. One held a baby, wrapped in a white wool blanket. The man appeared slightly older than the women, and had white skin, like the seven- or eight-year-old girl that came with them, with delicate features and sand-colored hair. They paid the driver with a goat kid; they kept another one for the sacrifice they would offer at the summit. Both animals, the size of little dogs, were tied to the rack on top of the vehicle, next to large sacks. Down the ravine by the road, the roofs of two houses were visible in the morning mist. It was their village. A heart-wrenching sound of a crying infant filled the cabin when the minibus resumed its journey. It was a mellow plea for succor, almost soothing with the notes of helplessness of a small creature. The woman with the baby had sat next to me, but the child was soundly asleep. Perplexed, I turned around to see if there was any other baby on board. It took me a while to realize that the weeping came from one of the little goats that would be offered to God. The animal of choice for sacrifice ought to be the lamb: “according to the word of the Lord, they are holy even without a priest’s blessing.” Goats were shunned as wayward animals that Christ had compared to sinners, “because they run here and there, go to dangerous places, they do not stay around the shepherd.”29 That was why when the Son of Man returned to the world, “he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left,” a prediction in Matthew that did not bode well for the crying goats trussed up on the van’s roof: their destiny was prefigured in the but of the verse on the second coming of Christ and the onset of the Last Judgment (let alone the connotation that the “left” had since biblical times). Yet goats, too, would be an acceptable offering on the altar, said Archbishop Malakia Ormanian, an early-twentieth-century patriarch of the Armenians of Constantinople, who found justification for it in Leviticus. Either way, they were doomed. Armenian clergymen would often rebut their critics from other churches in the Middle Ages, refuting that the madağ, the Armenian tradition of the sacrifice, was akin to the Jewish one of offering an animal’s life on the altar for the remission of a believer’s sins and those of his family. Nerses Shnorhali, a twelfth-century saint, said that Jesus had atoned once and for all for mankind: St. Gregory the Illuminator, the patron saint of the Armenian Church, had merely assimilated a pagan rite and turned it into an occasion for breaking bread 55

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with the hungry and the poor. And yet, Nerses wrote, the animal had to be choice and fat, “for the choice is pleasing to our eyes, like Isaac to Abraham,” a metaphor if not the exegesis for interpreting 1915, with Armenians as the slaughtered lamb of others who revered the same Creator but called Him by another name. For Paul had already brought into the Gospels the notion of sacrifice, the taking of innocent life to prove our faith in God, no longer the loving father Christ promised his followers, but the spiteful one of the twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire, or any time before that and after, anywhere in the world. And goats, favored by Sasun peasants for the rugged terrain, would be proxies for men and sheep at the butchers’ tables in the tents set up at the top of Mt. Maruta, the holy mountain of the Sasuntsis that mirrored the original one—believed to be Mt. Tabor—where Jesus had gone to pray with Peter, James, and John. As Jesus prayed, his Transfiguration had taken place: “His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light.” And a voice from heaven had said, “This is my son, the beloved.” The miracle, rendered in Vulgate as transfiguratus est, was described by Matthew and Mark as metemorphothe (metamorphosis).30 A worldly variation was taking place that summer of 2011, with Armenian converts to Islam celebrating a holiday that their ancient Church had assimilated from a pagan rite into a Christian feast which, in turn, derived from Jewish tradition. We all got out of the minibus when the road incline became too steep for the Ford’s struggling engine. The young family of pilgrims soon parted from us, going over the roadside to take a shortcut. The sand-haired girl was carrying a large tote bag that flipped over to reveal a large, embroidered Armenian cross, in red and pink. The man was walking ahead, with the goat kid in his hands. Up to that moment I had assumed them to be Muslim: “Is that a cross?” I asked them, running after them. “Yes, it’s a xaç,” the young woman who held the baby responded in English to the question I had asked in Turkish, but using the Armenian word for “cross” (similar to the Turkish one of haç). The little girl kept flipping the bag over to its blank side, with a scared smile, until the young woman told her to let me photograph it: “Are you Armenian?” I asked, again in Turkish. “We are Muslim,” she responded, again in English—most unusually in a region where women are often monolingual and only in dialects of Kurdish or Arabic—and walked away, until I lost sight of them in the fog ahead. She had not denied she was Armenian; people who were not, normally did.     

Two years later found me a few mountains away from the site where I had lost the pilgrims to the fog. As the two shepherds and I headed back home from Mt. Sındor, with the flocks descending past us on a track that ran roughly 56

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parallel to ours, Vahan had told me he could reach Mt. Maruta from Mt. Sındor in as little as two hours, through routes known only to locals. We bumped into the three hunters as the first houses of Gamar and their satellite dishes came into view below us. One of the young men was Vahan’s cousin, Akil, a Christian, one of the 15 children of Marto; the other two were Ismail, an Arab married to Akil’s sister, and an Arab friend from the village. They were athletic and dressed in fine country sports clothing, their shiny automatic rifles dangling on their shoulders as they came down, discussing in Arabic the game they had been hunting. There was some restraint in their salute to our party, a coldness that felt out of character here and generally elsewhere east of the Adriatic; but perhaps they were the better-off boys in these parts and were behaving accordingly, with Selim playing his part too, contemplating the group from some distance as if feeling inadequate. Akil had the sole iPhone in the village, the equivalent of the only house with a radio or TV set a couple of generations ago. He had organized the hunting trip as a distraction for his Arab brother-in-law, who was grieving the passing of his father a week ago. The village’s Armenian children had some Arab cousins from mixed marriages. I had first met them when Vahan came to pick me up from their school in Zovart, less than an hour by foot down the slope from Gamar, the first time I came to visit him. But the school’s vice principal, a man in his mid-20s whose grandmother was Armenian too, lavished on me all the hospitality he could garner in the tiny establishment, which we reached after walking through a narrow passage built in stone around a little pond. The principal, who looked as young as his colleague and was dressed as formally in a gray business suit and tie, was Turkish, from the western part of the country. For some reason, Turks used to stand out in a roomful of Kurds, whether it was because of Tatar or Balkanic features or because they were often a little apart from the rest. Life moved forward, the principal said, as the staff mobilized by the vice principal brought in teas and a tray of sweets. “You cannot advance if you keep looking back,” he added, as I got his drift. Indeed, I responded, but the past was another name for experience. “And you know it’s true,” I added, in tacit reference to the elephant in the very tiny office, made breathable by the open window and the hosts’ friendliness. Perhaps he had Armenian ancestors, too. “Perhaps you have Turkish ones,” he retorted in fluent English, uncommon in the interior. “Perhaps, but the Genocide would still be true.” The exchange stayed civil, in part because we had found common ground in our sense of irony, if not in our inherited history and acquired ideas. A few weeks later we bumped into each other as he was strolling along the main street of Sasun, a little forlorn at that desolate hour, and we had sat down for a tea. He had started reading about 1915 on the internet, but, in his reverence for Atatürk and the homeland he created, still struggled to find some justification in the Armenian defense of Van, or 57

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in Russian provocations. He needed some time abroad, he said, after he got married in a few months. The vice principal was watching us, with a curiosity curtailed by his ignorance of English. But when he heard “genocide” he finished his tea in one gulp, and proposed we go out for a tour of the school. He went classroom by classroom, calling the Armenian children by their names and asking them to come out, which they did with obedience and intrigue in their eyes, which only deepened when Vahan’s children saw their father standing with a stranger, but did not ask questions. The vice principal wanted to pose for a picture with Vahan, his children, and three other Armenian schoolboys, the children of Iskender, whom Vahan described as biraz dönme (a bit of a convert). “He was a Christian and then he became a Muslim,” he said of Iskender, who was a cousin. “Now he is nothing.” Rober, Vahan’s ten-year-old boy, spotless like a toy soldier in his uniform, greeted me with the self-assured formality of someone older by a few more years, a miniature version of his father in likeness and manners: “Good morning sir, how are you?” One evening after dinner, I listened to him speak with the same gentle confidence about the future. He wanted to become a policeman, a career choice that shocked me, an anomaly akin to a sheep in a wolf ’s skin. Nothing in my mind would have been more aberrant to an Armenian than wearing standard issue emblazoned with the Turkish white crescent on a red background. For him, however, these symbols were normal in the strictest sense of the word: an occurrence that conformed to a regular pattern in a country where Atatürk portraits and flags are ubiquitous, from the mirror of a cab to classrooms and hillsides, splashed with red and white paint in gigantic displays of patriotic fervor. But perhaps he might make a difference as an Armenian cop in Turkey, I was wondering when a reality check cut my thoughts short. “Olmaz,” his father said: “Impossible.” His son looked up to him, with an inquiring smile. “We are Armenian,” Vahan reminded his son. There was an unwritten rule in Turkey by which Christians and other non-Muslims did not serve in uniform, a customary continuation of the formal Ottoman prohibition of their right to ride horses or bear arms. The reasons for it did not go beyond educated guesses, for nothing in the law prevented any Turkish citizen from enrolling in the army or police. But it came with the blind acceptance that custom garners. In 2013, a clue came to light that confirmed the suspicions: since 1923, when the Lausanne Treaty had come into force, Turkey’s Civil Registry had been using secret codes to mark the origin of its minorities, using 1 for persons of Greek ancestry; 2, for Armenians; 3, for Jews; 4, for Assyrians; and 5, for other non-Muslims. It had all been exposed when an Islamicized Armenian woman, who had returned to the Church and tried to enroll her child at an Armenian school, received a notification from a government agency 58

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that she could only do so if her “confidential ancestry code” was number 2, as Muslim children are prevented by Turkish law from attending the schools of Christian minorities. This meant that even if people changed their name and religion, the state would keep track of their origin, preventing non-Muslims from climbing through the echelons of power. It was one more clandestine mechanism to keep Turkey for the Turks. There were many other occupations more thrilling than policeman, I told Rober. Why didn’t he give it a thought? “Aviator!” he exclaimed, excited at the possibilities. “I think you can’t,” said the father. “For sure, you can’t join the Turkish Air Force.” How about a commercial pilot? I suggested. “I don’t think he can work for Turkish Airlines because it’s a state company, but I don’t know about the other airlines,” Vahan said. It had given me pause, again, for it felt as if we were on the opposite sides of the same mirror. Twentiethcentury technology realized the myth of punishment from the sky, the appeal of Davit’s flying stallion or the winged horse Pegasus from which Chimæra, the fire-breathing monster, had been slain in Greek mythology: “The air opened paths along which death and terror could be carried far behind the lines of the actual armies,” wrote Churchill in 1928 before he was proved right in the ensuing years.31 Two Diaspora men I had met in different times and places, both unlike in age and outlook, had fantasized in their childhood about becoming pilots in order to exact revenge on Turkey, even though they had come to reject violence as adults, with one even withdrawing to a monastery. The other, who had become a journalist, described a notebook from third grade with a drawing of bomber aircraft flying over snowcapped mountains with the Turkish flag on one peak. And the monk had introduced himself at a gathering in Europe in 1996 by saying that he was now a very different man than what he wanted to be in elementary school. “You see me now in this black priestly cassock, but when I was little I wanted to fly a fighter jet over Turkey,” he said, opening his hands palms down and moving them in a gesture that suggested pressing something flat. The Istanbul Armenians sharing my table went pale: at that time they dreaded spying and retribution from the Turkish government, and were not the more vocal community they became after the assassination of Hrant Dink. The most common question that a stranger asks a kid had revealed an aspect of some larger pattern, for Rober was only the first of many children of Islamicized and hidden Armenians I would encounter, who dreamed of a career in the Turkish police or the army in the same way that elsewhere their peers fantasized about becoming astronauts or sports stars. Inevitably, I would be conflicted by this choice, coming from Armenians who were now fully aware of their history and were no less aggrieved than the rest of us, and often much more so, as they had endured for a century the struggles of conversion and life in fear of the unpunished perpetrating state. 59

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Berivan, a businesswoman in Diyarbakır who had worked as an elementary school teacher in Kurdish areas in the 1990s, had also been surprised to observe this phenomenon—Kurdish children who wanted to become Turkish policemen or soldiers at a time of large-scale conflict and repression by the Turkish state against the Kurdish separatist movement—and had investigated by asking the kids, “Why?” Like children who dream of becoming doctors to help gravely ill family members, “they wanted to be police officers to protect their families.” One after the other, she said, “all of them gave me the same answer, and that was the first reason they wanted to wear a police uniform and carry a gun.” There were Armenians who bore arms in Sasun: Howani, with the Kalashnikov as a village guard; and Akil, with a hunting rifle, were only two. But individuals with guns were no bigger a menace than lone wolves. Power in Turkey, as the kids sensed, came with the uniform.     

The two quails that Akil had shot were roasting over a slow fire a day later, while Marto and his son smoked by a pear tree that was at least 100 years old, one of the oldest in the village and the sole survivor from a bad period of illegal logging some 50 years ago. Quails were a delicacy, more coveted now that they had become uncommon. And only a decade ago the sighting of eagles was not an extra­ordinary event either, Marto and Vahan said, and not a most welcome one as they swooped down to ensnare lambs or goat kids. Eagles had flown off with the last of their prey about that time in the early 2000s and had not returned: they had almost vanished after shepherds started to lace with poison the carcasses of animals mauled by wolves. This had also turned the latter into a rarity rather than a threat. At that time, Marto had come face-to-face with a bear in a forest clearing, and had scared it away by shooting in the air. Bears were now mostly confined to their shrinking habitat in the woods, on one side of the mountain. The world was becoming a smaller place. Bears and wolves had their lairs in the depths of caverns, like the one where we had sat out the storm. Marto wanted to know its location. His grandmother, Çoço Nune, had hidden his uncle, an infant at the time, in one in 1915: “But it was another cave, near a spring.” The Arabs of Gamar had provided for his care during the massacres. Locals still called it Kafle Manug (Manug’s Cave). Çoço Nune picked him up a week later and, along with her older son Kevork, escaped through the high passes. Along the way, a soldier had spotted her and asked her if she was Armenian—they believed he had opened fire. In any case, he missed, because a couple of days later she reached an unknown village where a stranger, about whom they knew nothing, harbored her for months or even years until 60

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attacks against Armenians had abated. Manug had died of a disease some years later, perhaps in the early 1920s, still a child. “There is a legend about one cave from the time of the massacres,” Vahan said. “I don’t know if it’s true but we heard it from our grandparents.” Der Hagop, a churchman from the village of Badırmut also known as Der Hayo, or the Garmir Yerets Vartabed (Red Priest), was doing a tour of Sasun in 1914. During a pause in the Armenian village of Gusked, he rested his head on his cane’s handle and had a vision. “There will be a ferman,” the priest had said, using the Turkish word for Ottoman edict that Sasuntsis used as a synonym for exile or deportation. “Something bad is going to happen to the Armenians.” One year later, with the Genocide under way, a Muslim peasant called Genco found a shriveled man in a cave in Badırmut, drinking milk from the goats. Genco recognized him as Der Hayo and gave him away to the Ottoman troops. At dawn the next day, the Kurds made Der Hayo stand on the edge of a cliff, his hands and feet tied. From his tent in the distance, their commander—a Kurdish ağa from the Hamidiye Cavalry—heard the shots of the firing squad, but the soldiers did not return. He sent another two soldiers to look into it: he heard shots, but they did not come back either. The commander walked to the ravine to see what was the matter: he found Der Hayo standing, his hands and feet bound, but no trace of the soldiers. He discharged his Mauser at the Red Priest but no bullet hit him: “Der Hayo then went up in a ball of fire that consumed him and sucked in the Kurdish commander, leaving not even their ashes behind.” Vahan had heard this story from his mother, whose own mother had met the priest. “They didn’t find any blood or body parts,” Vahan said. Years after surviving the massacres in Badırmut, the priest’s sister settled in Armenia, where she told the story. “Der Hayo had said that the family of his murderer would wither away.” And thus the seven children of Tello, the Kurdish ağa who had taken the last shot at the priest, all died on the same day, and to date his house in Badırmut lies in ruins overrun by weeds. But in Gamar, the village’s Muslims had not killed Armenians, according to Vahan. Some had sheltered them in their homes and barns, concealing them in produce sacks. Xaço, Vahan’s maternal grandfather, stayed behind with Arab neighbors—Selim, Feto, Hamdo, Yusuf, and Sevdo—all of the same clan which he did not name. They took over his family’s properties in 1915, when Xaço’s parents were murdered, and one brother, Setrak, was marched off along with a cousin in the caravans deported to Aleppo. The cousin died of starvation on the road, while Setrak ended up in Armenia. They could not answer how or why Xaço stayed in Sasun. To the best of their know­ledge, it was chance, just as the case had been with Çoço Nune. Xaço became a farmhand for his protectors on his own family’s estate, part of which the Arabs later returned to him, along with one house, while they 61

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preserved the other house they had appropriated as well as most of the lands. He then married an Armenian survivor of the massacres, but she was later kidnapped by Muslims. Xaço wed yet another Armenian, with whom he had six girls—one was Vahan’s mother, and another one, Marto’s—and two boys. Two of his daughters were later Islamicized, one by way of marriage. Muslims had begun to settle in Gamar 500 years ago, the Armenians said. “Like those who came from Basra,” Vahan said, in reference to the city in southern Iraq, the birthplace of Sinbad the Sailor and the ancestral hometown of neighbors we had visited a few days earlier: a father and his teenage son were unloading bales of hay from their pickup truck. Tall and fair-skinned, with green eyes that were not rare among Arabs and Kurds in these parts, the man was severe in an unassuming manner, but hospitable. His older brother was inside the house, sitting in the far left corner of a white plush sofa, beneath Islamic devotional imagery. As fair as his younger brother, he wore a brown Islamic skullcap. He was an imam, his younger brother said in a bass voice that came somewhat muffled from beneath his mustaches, as the elder nodded gently, his tight lips lightly curved up in a smile that could pass for a smirk. Their forebears had come in the 1600s from Basra, was all they knew. At the time the port on the Shatt al-Arab, as well as Baghdad and Mosul in modern Iraq, would be disputed among Ottomans, Persians, and Arab tribes. While there is a record of a major Arab migration from Basra during a civil war in the late seventeenth century, most Arabs in Sasun were thought to have come in 1258, when Basra had been completely destroyed by the Mongols. The imam was pleased that my surname was Hadjian. The stem of my last name was indeed hajji, the Arabic word for “pilgrim.” But I explained that my great-grandfather had earned the title after making the pilgrimage to the Armenian monastery of Bethlehem in the late nineteenth century. When had my ancestors, he inquired in a reedy voice, “left Turkey,” a large map of the country hanging behind me. On the opposite wall, a poster of religious motifs included a tall genealogical tree with the names of the Prophet’s lineage written in Muhaqqaq calligraphy at the end of red flowers and stylized leaves. Next to it, there were other pictorial efforts of Islamic aniconism. There was also a photo of the Kaaba at night, partially hidden by a green disc, the size of a saucer, with a golden inscription embossed on it: the writing was the Āyat al-Kursī, or the Throne Verse from the Qur’an, a religious decoration item commonly found in Muslim homes in Turkey: God, there is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows what lies before them and what is after them, and they comprehend not anything of His

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The question about my family “leaving Turkey” did not seem phrased to offend, but had struck the wrong chord. “They were marched off to Syria in the Genocide of 1915,” I said. “From Cilicia.” The imam remained unfazed, a Gioconda smile on his clean-shaven face; his teenage nephew, who had been fiddling with his cell phone up to that moment, looked up. “But the Turks say it was the Armenians who committed a genocide against them,” he hissed, as I regretted this turn of conversation in the presence of Vahan, hoping not to upset too badly the balance of neighborliness and good luck that had got his family this far after centuries of war and annihilation. “So, whom should we believe?” the imam wondered rhetorically. With little tea left in our glasses, Vahan and I thanked them for their welcome before overstaying it. We had cleaned the quails to the bones when Marto’s Arab neighbor called in, a man who very much resembled the imam’s younger brother, albeit smaller, from the green eyes to his groomed Zorro mustaches, thin and slightly curved. His arched eyebrows gave him an inquisitive air. “He is a bad Muslim,” Marto teased, which I took literally to mean a hint at certain liberties, including alcohol, which I missed throughout the month I spent in Sasun except for one night. But contrary to expectations, no wine or rakı was forthcoming. Mutasim wasn’t sure when his ancestors had come from Basra nor did he care too much—it could have been 200 years or 1,000 years; it would not change anything for him. “Were there already Armenians in Sasun when the Arabs arrived?” Marto wondered with lighthearted irony but the guest didn’t get it, for Mutasim was shaking his head in disagreement. However, he then very subtly began to nod in agreement, paying more attention to the conversation when the record was set straight by a guest, in a somewhat humorless interjection, about the Armenians in Sasun being aboriginal, possibly since the late Bronze Age. Population migrations and mingling in the Armenian Highland had ceased around 1200 bc amid some catastrophic event that led to the collapse of the eastern Mediterranean civilizations, when the Armenian people developed in the isolation of these mountains.32 But Mutasim’s insouciance then turned to curiosity when the conversation shifted to the origin of the Kurds. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Where have they come from?” and then paused briefly for effect. “They fell from heaven!” he said with undertones that were discernible even for a stranger, with an unmistakable cue for the locals, whom I joined in Pavlovian laughter. Not such a long time ago, Armenians feared the Kurds, the hosts said after Mutasim had left. More than ten years before, Vahan had walked with his father Kerop to a Kurdish village to buy or sell animals but thought it safer not to reveal they were Armenian. Even then, though, Vahan’s father recalled, at 63

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worst they would get angry looks but would not encounter aggression. “Now nobody cares about anything anymore.” There were no signs of mistrust between the Muslim majority of Gamar and the three Christian households, their undisturbed presence a sign of coexistence. But there were silent hints that some topics were best left unspoken. Marto had given a daughter to a village Arab, Ismail, whom we had seen in the quail-hunting party. Marto did not seem to mind that she had converted, and had had her name changed to a Muslim one. Something was amiss, for that did not behoove a man who had adamantly remained a Christian, and who had married off all his other 14 children to Armenians but for the youngest—Akil, who had shot our quails—who was still a bachelor. But he was not inclined to talk about it as we walked to the edge of the elevated plot where his house stood, abutting a verdant mesa some 10 meters below: his horse (an animal forbidden to Armenians and other non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire) was grazing on the emerald pasture in splendid indifference under the gilding light of autumn, its roan hair set against the mountains’ spectrum of browns. A little farther, a cow fed her avid calf, immutable as Marto and Vahan passed by them ahead of me. But the animals raised their heads in alarm when I approached. There was a lot of catching up to do, Marto had suggested in good humor when asked about the very large number of his offspring, not too unusual in Eastern Anatolia. Love as a rationale for marriage was a novelty that had arrived in the villages only in recent years. Vahan, the youngest of ten siblings and now in his mid-30s with five children, had been introduced to his wife and wed her at the age of 17, or maybe younger. Hence, if things had been done the traditional way, with Ismail’s family requesting the girl’s hand from the father, Marto would have had little choice but to consent. Rejection could have created bad blood with the suitor’s tribe, and the Arab majority in the village, and that would have made for a very disparate correlation of forces. Or it could have exposed the girl to kidnapping, still a common occurrence in Turkey and especially its interior. Ismail’s mother was Armenian too, and so was his paternal grandmother. In spite of being three-quarters Armenian, local custom made him an Arab, as nationality was patrilineal. Sultan Abdül Hamid II’s mother may herself have been of Armenian descent, according to some muddled stories that have not been substantiated, an impression perhaps prompted by his features including a prominent aquiline nose (there may have been an Armenian woman called Verjin). These versions are dismissed by Turks saying they were concocted by enemies to discredit the sultan, who first systematized the extermination of Armenians in the 1890s.33 But even if any Armenian ancestry of Abdül Hamid was proved, it would probably contribute to challenging the relevance of bloodline rather than asserting it. 64

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Regardless of mothers or grandmothers, the ancestors of some people in Sasun had killed Armenians a century ago. The surviving Armenians left on these lands knew which families or tribes took part in the massacres, some of whom were their neighbors: they even remembered the names of assassins and their victims. On the uphill slope behind Vahan’s house were the secluded ruins of a home. Nature had long begun to claim it for herself, creeping over it with moss and weeds, grass coating where its floors had been, and plants sprouting within its roofless walls. Years of snow and rain had not erased the large, graying strokes, traces of flames that licked these walls in a bonfire perhaps, or on one malignant day. There was a dark story behind it, which Marto only alluded to in half-sentences, mentioning the murder of its Armenian owner by the Arab man who had then taken his property in the massacres of 1915. But the usurper’s progeny had later “reconciled” with the Gamar Armenians, and had moved out of Sasun. “We know each other,” Marto said, meaning who did what to whom during the Genocide. But he left the names unspoken. Then he made a comment that seemed the last link in a chain of ideas he had been silently contemplating: “Armenians are being pushed up to the summit.” He was agreeing with Darwin about mountains being the last refuge of broken tribes. But grievances that dated back to 1915 were not the sole preserve of Armenians. Resentment between at least two groups of Sasun Muslims over one episode during the Genocide also appears to have simmered until the recent past, in the still existing tradition of blood feuds among tribes. In the tradition of the Muslim tribes in the land, the aşiret chief passed on the story of pending grievances to his successors, until the offense was redressed. One person now based in Istanbul relayed to me what little is known about this case. A tribe in one village in the area of Gusked spared the lives of their Armenian neighbors in exchange for gold and goods: this tribe also wanted their cut of the booty from one caravan of Armenian deportees that was being marched across their territory. But the Armenians’ escorts—bandits from a different Kurdish tribe—refused to share the spoils, including the women. This enmity, started over the right to plunder the Armenians, had apparently lasted until the early 1980s. But if these events unfolded as described, it would appear that in at least one case, prior to the butchering and the killing treks, the looting of the Armenians was a gradual and methodical affair, as they still appeared to have carried some valuables with them in the early stages of the deportation. There are occasional anecdotes of Bedouins selling bread or water for their worth in gold to starving Armenians as they entered Syria.34 Some people I asked in Sasun about this enmity between the Muslim tribes over the spoils of the Armenians conjectured it may have involved the 65

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Şigo aşiret. The Şigo aşiret generally enjoyed a good reputation among the Armenians I spoke with in Sasun, who noted that some families of Armenian origin had joined the tribe after 1915. But in 1911 Simon Zavarian, an Armenian political leader and cofounder of the Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), was urging that the Şigo be disarmed for their continuing attacks on the Armenians.35     

Howani had come to Vahan’s unexpectedly. With his back to the eastern window, his long shadow was projected into the center of the room by the tall sun of noon. Vahan’s father had hidden his eyes behind the brim of his hat, pulled down near his nose, and Vahan was only vaulted from stillness when the unannounced guest pushed his praise of Turkey beyond the boundaries of acceptable patriotism, claiming there were no acts of forced conversion anymore. Not one to be denied the last word, the village guard, in his usual black but with no Kalashnikov, paraded the example of his sister, whom he called by her Armenian name even though she had adopted an Islamic one after marrying a Muslim and moving to Istanbul. “But now this Muslim girl attends church,” he continued, beaming. Many Armenians who were Muslim in Sasun would revert to the Church in Istanbul. But not all. During church ceremonies for family or friends, converted Sasuntsi men would wait outside the church in their skullcaps—a few in the white ones of the hajji. I had previously seen men in these caps at Oshin’s funeral, conveying their condolences outside the church and not attending the religious service with their Christian kin. “They say things about me, don’t they,” Howani addressed me. “Like what?” I retorted, not admitting to the cryptic rumors I had heard outside Sasun. “Many believe I’m a Muslim,” he said, his unblinking gaze on me. And he pulled out his ID that showed him as Christian. Here was a fellow, unsettling when armed and in the company of like men, seeking acceptance. He would have made a fine Magian conspirator in another age and place. And yet, he suffered from the epidemic of fear that has spread unchecked for six centuries among Armenians in Turkey. Vahan, Marto, and their families had a different mettle to cope with it. For in the end, Howani’s remedy for fear was to arouse greater fear. He was or wanted to be a frightening man because he was scared, the nervous gambler who had a chip on every number, for very often the losing ones in Turkey were marked with death for the Armenians. From the window behind him, you could see far in the distance the ruins of Gomk, a ninth-century monastery, which according to local lore was said to have had 365 cells, one for each day of the year. Two Kurdish friends had taken me to see it. Like the shell of an antediluvian giant, it was a broken skeleton that hinted at its former grandeur. The 66

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nave was standing, and so was the narthex, the covered entrance to the church, if only at half the height it must have had originally, as time and gold diggers had added layers of dust to its lunar landscape, dotted by huge craters dug out by the aspiring thieves. A blackened apse was at the eastern end of the complex: light came in from a hole left by a toppled cross. The altars had disappeared. An intact guilloche—an ornament of interlaced bands—climbed the column of a blind arcade, like an ivy of uniform size and design. The arches supported each other firmly, converging on the cupola, as if they were in arms in a circular dance. Some columns had been decapitated and their capitals were scattered by the entrance, among large stones of smooth surface gathered into a large pile. Squarish Armenian letters had been scratched on a slab to the right of the gate connecting the narthex and the nave, perhaps old graffiti or remnants of a defaced inscription. But outside, the little cells had long begun their return to dust, where the church had come from, “raised … from the earth stone by stone.”36 A short tree at the edge of the plateau had bowed west to the wind, a lonely black goat lingering about it. When we came out we saw two men approaching us, one holding a long, thick white cane on his shoulder with a plastic bag tied to its end; his brush mustache fell like a thick curtain over his lips. The other man was in black, with a red umbrella in his hand. They were immediately identifiable as Kurds; the three of us recognized them instantly, with animal accuracy. Seeing them from afar, my Kurdish friends called out to them in Kurmancî. It was not very clear who they were. But they came to find out what we were up, perhaps to see if we were gold diggers. The cameras two of us carried were apparently enough to clear any suspicions. Vahan had never been to Gomk. It was still visible under the lazy sunset far in the distance from his home’s window, as we talked cross-legged on the rugs during the last supper of the day. After dinner, Vahan’s wife Dalar and the children had joined us for some TV time. The three generations would normally eat together. But in the presence of guests, etiquette demanded that they have dinner separately with Vahan’s mother, while Vahan, Kerop, and I were served in the main room from the şofra—the large round tray laid on the carpet where dishes were arranged. Even in this, as Christians, they were unlike some conservative Muslim Armenian households in the Western Armenian provinces, where men and women used separate quarters permanently and did not mingle. Presently on the screen a Kurdish rebel wearing a keffiyeh, the black-andwhite checkered headgear common in the Middle East (and first introduced to a wider audience by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the 1960s) is pointing a gun at a Turkish soldier lying injured on the ground in a forest, trying to make him recite, “I, a coward who serves in the Turkish army ….” But the injured Turkish soldier keeps answering back, with a menacing bass voice and a livid 67

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face, “I, a soldier of the heroic Turkish army ….” This goes on for a number of times, the Kurd never getting around to pulling the trigger. Previously, the guerrillas had executed four elderly Kurdish men, dressed in shiny, colorful garb that parodied rural costumes, looking more like badly aged kids in a school play: a summary trial had found them guilty of assimilation, or Turkification. But then the Kurdish fighter has a change of heart. The commander of his brigade, headquartered in a strangely luminous and cozy cave, has a female militant shot for one spurious motive or another. Our hero has an epiphany after the killing of his secret love—there were insinuations at something bigger which, alas, we were never meant to find out—realizing he has been fighting the wrong war. Tragedy adds to tragedy, as the good Kurd is shot when he helps the Turkish soldier escape. We next see the Turkish soldier sobbing loudly at the Kurdish guerrilla’s funeral, the casket covered in a Turkish flag, being consoled by the dead man’s much more restrained father. “But he was my brother!” the soldier screams amid inconsolable weeping as he hugs the stoic old man, who is trying in vain to calm him down. The Seraps were either too tired to understand my very alien sense of humor or had better things to think about, so I did not persist in my probing about their impressions of the drama. Then Dalar addressed her mother-in-law in a strange language that most certainly was not Turkish but seemed neither Arabic nor Kurdish. It sounded less guttural than the Arabic spoken in the village. After paying attention, I began to make out the words and a grammar closer to classical Armenian. She was speaking a variant of Sasun Armenian that appeared influenced by Kurmancî and some local Arabic as well as Turkish. The two women were discussing house chores in the dialect of the Davit epic, a millennium after the murder of the hero. Dalar and her mother-in-law were the only two persons left in Sasun who still regularly talked to each other in the oldest surviving language of the land. And they were discussing the two things that perpetuate life—food and children. My first attempts to talk in Armenian with Dalar got the same perplexed looks that had rewarded my efforts to involve them in a critique of Turkish TV at that late hour, after their long day on the farm. But then, first in little spurts, communication began to flow, in one of the oldest dialects of Armenian and its latest incarnation, the Western variant, almost mortally wounded a century ago when it was still in the bloom of infancy.37 She seemed surprised at her own unknown capacity to understand a strange language, which she tended to translate aloud into Sasun speech. “Where did I come to be?” was how she rendered the question about her birthplace. “Eğa Arpi,” she responded right away. In a literal translation, she was saying, “I came to be in the sun,” one of the meanings of arpi in classical Armenian. Now used 68

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as a female name, Arpi was an Armenian mountain village about two hours from Bitlis, in the Greater Sasun, and not far from the River Aradzani where the epic placed Davit’s murder. Dalar’s was the last family to keep Armenian as its mother tongue in Sasun. All the other Armenian families only spoke the dialects of local majorities—whether it was Arabic, Kurmancî, or Zazaki. They also knew some Turkish, which often older people, but also young ones with incomplete schooling, spoke poorly or not at all: “Menk hayeren cğlan. Başxa arabi; ohdağ sorvutsa. Arabi çen kina. Kırmanci kinank yev başxa zazaca” (“We speak Armenian. Also Arabic; I learned it here. I didn’t know Arabic. We know Kurmancî and also Zazaki”), Dalar had told me. An accidental polyglot, none of the four languages she spoke would have got her much farther than the western basin of the Euphrates three decades ago, before the Turkish war against the PKK rebels in the 1980s provoked mass migrations of Kurds toward Istanbul, Ankara, and other large cities. She had not listed Turkish among the tongues she spoke, even though she must have had at least some basic know­ledge to watch the soap operas and dramas on TV every night. Dalar’s had also been the last Armenian household in their hometown. “Arpi was beautiful,” she said. “But we lived in fear.” She was married off to Vahan and settled in Gamar, while the rest of her family left for Istanbul in the mid-1990s after one of the five sisters was kidnapped by Kurdish neighbors. At the time, their brother was away on military service and their parents were out of town. The men came at night and grabbed her. “My sister could not escape,” recalled Dalar, almost murmuring to herself, cuddled up on a cushion, with her back against the wall. She was looking down, her gaze lost in a pattern of the thick rug, with figures of animals and men that are reproduced on looms all over the land century after century, even if their symbolism is now only vaguely understood, if not lost or forgotten completely, like the crosses Islamicized Armenian women draw on the dough just because they had seen their mothers do it, without knowing anything else about it. Dalar suppressed displays of emotion. Her face was framed in a red scarf that concealed her hair, and her eyes could be more of a wall than a window. She was usually unsmiling, but now there was the rich melancholy of a still life about her, enhanced by the amber color of the background. The five sisters had met once several years later in Istanbul, when the abducted one—Islamicized after her forced marriage—had managed to make the secret trip, after traveling for almost a day and a half by bus. In more than 20 years, the kidnapped sister had not borne children to her captor. The question of imams sanctioning weddings with kidnapped women, especially non-Muslims who first had to be converted (presumably against their will), has never been fully elucidated, and does not appear to be a matter of interest in Islamic scholarship. A Sasuntsi living in Istanbul had explained to me that “once the honor of a woman is taken, by local custom she belongs 69

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to the man,” aware that the dishonor is on the attacker yet unprepared to be more explicit. Sose had once said that, in the past, just by seeing the kidnapped woman’s hair by removing her headscarf, assailants could claim her as their own. In ancient tradition, Armenian women in Sasun would let their hair grow for life. “They would only cut it in protest against God if disgrace befell husbands or sons, but not daughters, as they would become somebody else’s woman in marriage.” An Armenian woman entered every home in Sasun during the Genocide, as Marto told it the night we discussed the disappearing quails and eagles. As beauty courted violence, the rarer it became: “They killed an entire family, but if there was a pretty woman, they would keep her.” Armenian women were also coveted by Muslim families that already had others as brides, and had found them to be agreeable. “Howani’s sister was kidnapped too,” Vahan said. Howani had praised his Muslim brother-in-law for allowing his sister to attend church, but had omitted to say how the marriage had been consummated. Kidnappers targeted women of all races and religions in Turkey, yet attraction for the rara avis spurred extinction, that unique capacity of humans, as most animal life would have ceased long ago if all predators had perfected their success rate as comprehensively as men have. No sheep would be left for the wolf and the food chain would be broken. Herodotus had mused about this principle, notwithstanding an erroneous notion on the concept of lions (but, like Aristotle, being right on hares): It would seem that the wisdom of divine Providence (as is but reasonable) has made all creatures prolific that are timid and fit to eat, that they be not minished from off the earth by being eaten up, whereas but few young are born to creatures cruel and baneful. The hare is so prolific, for that it is the prey of every beast and bird and man; alone of all creatures it conceives in pregnancy […] But whereas this is so with the hare, the lioness, a very strong and bold beast, bears offspring but once in her life, and then but one cub.38

And thus in Sasun, from the trees to the Armenian women, the more desired they were, the sooner they disappeared. “The oldest walnut tree in this village is probably 40 years old,” Marto had said in the shade of his centenarian pear tree, in a bond that dated to his earliest memories and that developed between the men who planted them or grew up with them, the tree of know­ledge of good and evil, as it was born before 1915, becoming the tree of life, which it gives without taking that of others, the fundamental incapacity that defines animal life. In past decades, loggers had decimated the population of the oldest walnut trees that he estimated were two or three centuries old. “Some of these are at 70

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most 25 years old,” Marto said as we strolled in the woods that surrounded his plantation. In the language of dreams in Sasun, loose teeth meant death—and so it did in real life, as in the little one found by the child in the cemetery at Surbik—and bad omens were signified by fallen walnuts, which dotted Marto’s land, rattling in harmony with the rustle of the first dead leaves of autumn, in the potential that everything has for its opposite, like night for day. And for the last two centuries, calm has been the prelude to the storm in Turkey. Perhaps that explained why the remaining Armenians in Gamar and elsewhere in Sasun were not as enthralled by the air of change in the country and an unprecedented openness to deal with its history. Visitors in Istanbul were very much impressed, but in the provinces of the interior Armenians still felt fear, like Dalar and Haro in his home at the farthest end of the mountain in Voskedzar; or distrusted their neighbors, like Zeki of Cermak and Seto of Argint, because history confirmed what experience and instinct taught them. “You never know how or where you will be tomorrow in Turkey,” Seto had said. Reform in Turkey has begotten violence in a pendular pattern that can be observed since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The “improvements and reforms” accorded to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire instead ushered in the era of systematic massacres that started in Sasun in 1894. And in the Republic era there were 20 Kurdish rebellions (often a misnomer for unprovoked Turkish army offensives to assert the authority of the central government or pave the way to demographic engineering), there have been four military coups since 1960, and the PKK rebellion in the mid-1980s escalated into a war that resulted in the destruction or evacuation of more than 3,000 Kurdish villages in Eastern Anatolia, in the same geography of the Genocide. A ceasefire had mostly held since 2009 but Armenians in Sasun were uneasy. The longer the peace, the more forceful the backlash could be. And throughout the decades, Islamicization had continued apace, especially in the Anatolian interior. Vahan spoke of the strange case of a Kurdish woman who had toured the region in the guise of a mystic half a century ago. Her name was Sheik Fatma and she arrived from the neighboring city of Batman or nearby in the 1950s. She traveled around Sasun preaching among the Armenians, urging them to convert to Islam. Locals thought she was a sage, believing her when she said that Christians were condemned to burn in hell upon death. Some became Muslim during her conversion tour through the villages; some a little after that. Sheik Fatma had paid a visit to both of Vahan’s grandfathers and an uncle, who laughed her out of their homes. Marto’s father saw her out too, without laughing. In her calls at the homes of Christians, she said that Armenians were persecuting Muslims in Turkey, which instilled fear in the Sasuntsis, who had little to no information about the outside world. Nothing else is known about her, other than that she appeared to have been 71

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a lone preacher. She may have taken upon herself the mission of rescuing the lost souls of infidels, even though her equivocations deprived her of any saving grace, and not for being more of a buffoon than a priestess was she harmless. It is not known how many people she managed to convert to Islam and, hence, into non-Armenians. “Kurt eğin” (“They became Kurds”), said Vahan’s father when talking about those converts, as well as others in a village he called Derxaş or Derxaç near Mush in the Greater Sasun, that succumbed to Sheik Fatma’s charms. But some of the Islamicized persons, too, considered that by converting they had assimilated not only into the Ummah (community of faith in Islam), but also into the dominant Muslim nationality in their hometowns, whether that be Kurds, Turks, or Arabs. The entire village of Zovart were Armenians that had been Arabized by way of conversion. The first Islamicized Armenian I met, in 2011, was a man of Sasuntsi descent born and raised in Istanbul. He still had very close ties with his Christian relatives, who had introduced me to him, but he did not consider himself Armenian. His grandparents had decided to become Muslims and Turks, and he was happy to live with it. And while some Islamicized Armenian clans still tended to endogamy, mixed marriages have inevitably become the norm, further accelerating assimilation. Islamic proselytism, even in its nonviolent variant (albeit not necessarily free from coercion) does seem to be a derivation from the doctrine of holy war. Conversion, a tacit sixth pillar of faith, is underpinned by the notion of dawa— the call to convert to Islam or submit to it. According to the twelfth-century Islamic jurist Ibn Rushd, known by the Latinized spelling of Averroes, the primary aim of jihad was spreading peace by imposing Islam. Non-Muslims would be free to keep their own religion, on the assumption that they would see “the error of their ways and convert to Islam.”39 Still, while experts might be busy parsing Arabic words, theological ambiguities did not impede vigorous campaigns of Islamicization in Turkey in the last century. Paradoxically, despite its anti-religious bias, Atatürk’s republic admitted no diversity, favored assimilation, and promoted discrimination, in custom when not always in law, against those who were not Muslim. Turkification contributed to Islamicization, helped by the stigma associated with the Armenian identity.40 During the interview, Vahan said that Muslim preachers came to see his paternal grandfather again in 1994, a little before his death. He reacted as he had four decades earlier to Sheik Fatma’s entreaties, but this time in terms he used privately. They went to see Marto too, who was usually too busy with farmwork to entertain traveling salesmen and turned them away, true to his father’s example in the 1950s. He had a religion and did not need another one, he told them. The little red light went off, indicating the end of the recording of Sheik Fatma’s story. Unprompted, Vahan’s father shook his head. “There is no justice 72

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for us in this country.” He did not explain what train of thought had triggered his comment. He did not need to. That night, my last in Gamar, Vahan’s father took off his hat: I had not noticed that he wore it permanently. And to the squeals of his wife and daughter-​in-law, he pointed to a deep, perfectly round depression, like a mark left by a projectile, in the middle of his forehead. “Was it the Turks?” I asked dumbfounded, while trying to figure out what kind of evil could have caused that. All laughed in unison, including the senior Serap: as a little boy he had climbed a tree to pick grapes and had fallen, hitting his forehead on a stone. That very morning, Vahan had gathered grapes, filling a bucket while precariously clinging to a branch, almost two floors high. “Don’t worry,” Marto had told me, with sarcasm that I only understood that evening. “He knows what he is doing.”     

Ground fog regrouped behind us as we walked out of Vahan’s home with the first song of the birds, down the trail flanked by walnut trees and onto a dirt road, all the way up to a bend by a crag. On the mountain that rose opposite us, goats and sheep snaked up in single file followed by their shepherd, whose geeing and hawing faintly reached our higher plane across the precipice. The herd climbed like a column of ants through vertiginous slopes, or so they appeared in the serrated distance. Everything was near and far at the same time in these mountains, so tightly locked within themselves that in a straight line of vision sometimes they appeared within walking distance, but not a few were alone, parted by unbridgeable abysses. Mutasim was there in black, from leather shoes to leather jacket, matching the color of his assault rifle. He was a korucu, too, a village guard on Turkey’s pay: so that explained his funny comment on the celestial origin of the Kurds. He was not kidding, even if he goofed for the camera, the Zorro mustaches tipping up with his grin while he held up the gun like a trophy, the crescent silhouette of the Kalashnikov’s magazine cutting against the mountains, gold and copper under the rising sun. Next to him was the man with the monolith face, unsmiling, in the same outfit and pose as the first time. A large black duffel bag lay again at his feet, and he wore a gray suit and white shirt open at the neck, like most other Arabs in the minibus that arrived after a short wait. Vahan, now alone on the edge of the cliff, waved to me as the dolmuş started the journey to the city of Sasun. On our descent along the winding road, I caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he climbed back up the looming mountain to return home, one of the last Armenians left in Sasun in the millennium that had elapsed since Davit first waged war on the “fire worshippers,” as the 73

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epic alludes to the Arab invaders.41 The main characters, from Davit to the Armenians in 1915, were murdered on stage in much earlier acts and the legend has long drawn to a close, but the curtain has not fallen. Exeunt omnes, minus Vahan, Dalar, Marto, Haro, Zeki, Howani, and the other Armenians who live in the mountains of Sasun. The vehicle resounded with Turkish music and chatter in Arabic, the loudest from a balding red-haired man with a copious mustache who was sitting up front with the driver and constantly looking back for Mutasim’s approval for whatever he was saying, which may not have been all that serious as Mutasim was only rewarding him with a half-hearted smile and muttered words. But Mutasim’s comments received louder appreciation from the minibus passengers. The redhead was looking back again and had started to speak with a mischievous twinkle in eyes that were seeking Mutasim’s, but he turned around shocked and faced ahead, as the vehicle fell into complete silence. The driver switched off the radio. Mutasim had half-closed his eyes as if in a trance and, lightly bowing his head, had opened his hands palms up, whispering something in a softer Arabic than their dialect. It was the Fajr, the dawn prayer, the first of the daily five: Glory be to Allah, praise be to Allah, there is no God but Allah, Allah is most great: there is no power and no might except with Allah.

All the passengers but two clutched AK-47s in an upright position between their knees as they prayed, and Mutasim’s muzzle was just beneath his forehead as he kept droning on the scriptures, with the rest humming the lines in choir, punctuated at intervals with slightly louder invocations of the greatness of God. Only then did I realize that most of them were korucus going down to the city to be deployed elsewhere in Sasun. None of the jokes told by Mutasim or about him—about the Kurds; his pirouette with the gun for the photo; Marto’s sarcastic comment that he was a bad Muslim—were meant to be jokes. And as the Hoca had once hinted as we listened to revolutionary Kurdish songs in his car, the Arabs of Sasun—and south-east Anatolia generally—were committed with guns and conviction against a Kurdish state. The tensions have not ever surfaced but there is potential for mistrust, or worse, between two nationalities that coexist without much visible hostility, other than snide remarks in passing. The Arab factor is almost completely ignored in most reports and reviews. Yet should the Kurdish conflict flare up again, districts with sizable Arab populations, such as Sasun or Mardin, could become pro-Turkey pockets of resistance, well armed and well fed by the central government. The minibus dropped us all at Sasun’s main square and the korucus walked into a congested tearoom full of swirling smoke and men playing tavlo and cards. It was Friday before noon prayers, the most important in the Islamic 74

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week. Akil, Marto’s son, was there, too taken aback by a losing hand to mumble more than a confused greeting. A table apart was his brother-in-law and quailhunting partner, Ismail, drinking tea and fiddling with his cell phone while he killed time until the yodeling cry of “Allahu akbar …” by the imam in his ezzan, the call to prayers that came through the crackling loudspeaker. The rolling dices fell dead and bad losers stopped slamming the tavlo chips against the wooden cases. The tables emptied and games were left unfinished, next to cigarette butts twisted in acrylic ashtrays. All the men were hurrying off to the mosque across the street, a hangar-sized green box. Its looming minaret was white and tiled, decorated with a slanted stripe that rose in a spiral, like a brown serpent wrapped around a tree. “I’m going to the namaz,” Ismail said, as he stood up. And the young Arab man, three of whose grandparents were Armenian, excused himself, docile as an Eloi responding to the siren.     

Several people had made intriguing mentions of an Armenian teacher in the city of Sasun who worked in the Turkish public school system. She had telephoned me when the Hoca was maneuvering in pitch darkness on a mountain to get back onto the road to town. Alma expressed concern about my whereabouts and warned me to be careful. We agreed to meet in the city. The Hoca, his brother, and I had just left the home of the fourth Christian Armenian family in Sasun, in the village of Ampetak, and the high beams of his pickup truck caught four goats which, perched on a cliff, turned their heads toward the light. An enormous crescent had risen over the mountaintop; they were so close to each other that, were the horizon a flat surface, the peak would grate the moon, which had a rust color that faded with the progression of the night. The whole Ampetak family spoke Sasun Armenian fluently, including an elderly woman and her adult daughter who had both converted to Islam in recent years. One of their ancestors, Çobo Xazar, a great storyteller and a man versed in the old legends, had raised a dozen Armenian orphans of the Genocide, and had thus repopulated the village. Yet over the decades, Ampetak emptied of Armenians by way of Islamicization and migration to Istanbul or abroad. But until a few decades ago, even the Muslim Armenians of Ampetak would keep a vial of myurron, the holy oils of the Armenian Church, to anoint with the sign of the cross their newborn and, most especially, their dying kin. That, however, was of no significance for those who remained Christian. A family who had moved from this village to Istanbul was much afflicted by their daughter’s marriage to “a Kurd” (as they called her Muslim Armenian husband) and hence her conversion: “The myurron has been wiped off her forehead.” 75

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One of the last Armenian women in the village had been kidnapped by Kurds, a cousin said, unsure of when the events took place but she estimated it to have been around the late 1970s. She was a young wife at the time, married to an Armenian man, and had a little son, left behind to be raised by her parents. Her forced marriage took place the very day of her abduction. “You have to repeat whatever the hoca says,” her captors told her in reference to the imam, whom they called by the honorific title of “master.” Prior to the wedding, the cleric had to perform her conversion rite. She refused to recite the Shahada (testimony), the one sentence that turns someone into a Muslim and that is the most important of the five pillars of Islam: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” It was surely not the time for the finer points of exegesis, for if in Surah 2:256 the Qur’an proclaims that there shall be “no compulsion in religion,” the next verse says nonbelievers shall become “the inmates of Hell fire, their eternal abode.” In doubt, the wise imam probably thought it the lesser evil to give away a married Christian mother to her captor as a Muslim bride. They told her she had now become a Kurd. The night of her kidnapping, conversion, and marriage, she was unable to sleep. With the first light of sun she ran outside, her captor’s father coming after her, alarmed that she would flee. She was examining her arms and hands. “What are you looking for?” the man asked, puzzled. “You were wrong!” she turned back to tell him. “You lied to me: I haven’t become a Kurd,” she said. The man laughed. “They call a Kurd, a Kurd: if he died the sun would not rise.” She still lived in Sasun, at her captor’s home not far from Ampetak, her relative told me. A few days after my visit to Ampetak, a young Kurdish man in a long black overcoat had approached me in the evening while I was waiting for Alma at the cafeteria of the Teachers’ House in Sasun. The Öğretmen Evi, a public residence for teachers, is found in every city and town in Turkey: schooling is one of the mainstays of Atatürk’s regime, and teachers—well paid by Turkish standards at 2,000 liras per month (or what at the time was equivalent to $1,000)—would be posted to different cities as they were rotated in the initial part of their careers, the first four years usually being assigned to rural or remote outposts. With shyness, the man asked for permission to sit at my table. He was an aspiring imam from Erzurum or Elazığ. “I am a Kurd, but that doesn’t matter,” he said in a somewhat nervous introduction: “I am a Muslim.” He squinted or looked furtively at me. This habit was unsettling and, in his oversize coat, it gave him a pigeon-like countenance. “Are you from the Diaspora?” he asked. The answer proved a hurdle much more difficult to overcome than it seemed. For, once I said that I was, he wanted to know why the Diaspora hated Turkey and what they expected from the country: an apology or the lands? Through a conversation that grew 76

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contentious, it became clear that he did not think the extermination of the Armenians was a genocide—he said that “Muslims died in the war, too,” more than once—but, more to the point, he had no idea what Diaspora meant, for he kept pressing for answers that no individual was in a position to provide without speaking collectively for the nation. How could I not know the answer if I was a “member” of the Diaspora? “Member” was the key word: I realized he thought the Diaspora was something like a masonic sect. Islamists in Turkey reviled Freemasons. The Hoca had joined us a few minutes earlier and even he, usually circumspect, let out a short laugh. It took some effort, including the Hoca’s intervention, to explain what Diaspora meant. How did he feel about Kurdish discontent in Turkey? I asked. Kurds and Turks were brothers in Islam, he replied, and inşallah those misunderstandings would soon be overcome, for nothing in history was black and white, as Armenians had massacred Muslims too in the Ottoman Empire, which, he said, mostly defended itself against internal aggression. But as his inquisitive mind agitated him, he kept on pressing, slowly but with no letup, about the massacres of Turks by Armenians in Erzurum in 1915, how I felt about Sarıkamış—a battle against Russia in the winter of 1914–15 when at least 60,000 Turkish soldiers died of cold, rather than in action: as that was unrelated to the Genocide or to Armenians generally, I was curious to see where it was all leading.42 He simply wanted to know how I felt about it “as a human being.” Not much differently, I guessed, from what he did about the massacred Armenians. But there was the issue of Armenian collaboration with Russia, he responded. At that point our table had attracted Mesut, a man of beady blue eyes, whom I had seen strutting around the city of Sasun in shiny suits and shoes, in the last cry of yesteryear’s fashion. He shook my hand, which he squeezed to a numb white, and was not letting go until the Hoca told him it was not funny anymore, for my protests did not count. Without seeking permission, he sat down and listened to our animated conversation, perhaps with scorn, even though this could have been a false impression caused by his garb and grooming, which made him look pompous. His grandparents were Chaldeans (Catholic Assyrians) but had been Islamicized. The aspiring imam had now veered the talk to the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, proof in his eyes of continuing collaboration with Russia. Cooperation with Turkey or its allies did not seem a very promising prospect for Armenia, I told him. That night I had a deadline for an article, and the monotonous harping got the better of me. The two Teachers’ House waiters were of Armenian descent—they were Islamicized—but knew nearly nothing about their ancestors other than their origin; one of them would gibe at his colleague for his father’s two pilgrimages to Mecca: “Two! Why would anyone go through that twice?” he used to say with loud laughter, but 77

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the other one took it in good humor. From the corner of my eye I now saw both of them looking on with concern, as the young man and I exchanged high words. “Leave my table!” I ordered him and his companion. “Not you, Hoca,” I told him, but he accompanied the others regardless, gesturing to me that he was not offended. “It’s for the other two,” I said, seeing with no displeasure how the young man and Mesut, his sneer gone, had stood up like soldiers called to attention and walked away to another table, where the three sat, the Hoca speaking to them in hushed tones and throwing glances in my direction. In a very unscientific observation that cannot be supported with anything but very slim evidence, I had noted that in the former Soviet Union as well as Turkey a shout could go a long way, unquestioned and respected, especially if it came from an unexpected quarter (but I steered clear of testing the limits of this experiment too far). Before heading home, the Hoca approached me to advise me to take it easy. But the other two continued their litany, audible from my table. “He’s lying, isn’t he?” the young man was saying to Mesut, who nodded in approval. “And didn’t they massacre the Azeris at Khojaly?” They were discussing a February 1992 battle in the Karabakh conflict that left at least 161 Azerbaijani civilians dead, which Azerbaijan has called a massacre and a genocide by Armenian forces. I walked up to their table and inquired what I was lying about. Was it the Genocide? “You are too blunt,” the young man said without raising his voice. “We want to talk, but it’s very difficult with you.” Out of the blue, Fahdi, the hostel’s lanky concierge, showed up. Livid, and at the top of his voice, he told them to stop nagging: “He is a guest, leave him in peace!” Enraged, he mentioned something about the Genocide that I did not register, shocked at seeing him in this state. Normally placid and soft-spoken, Fahdi was hospitable in an understated manner, but with a commitment most other people would reserve for family and close friends. So out of character was his reaction that the others in the cafeteria stood in astonished silence. Positively miserable, Mesut and his friend buttoned up their coats and left, all eyes on them. At the front desk, Fahdi was still atypically somber and pale with anger when I thanked him. Not thinking it timely to beg him repeat what he had mentioned about the Genocide, I still wondered if he had perhaps Armenian ancestors. “No, I’m an Arab,” he responded. Atatürk’s address to the youth was displayed on a red-and-white mural in the hostel’s lobby, with a golden mask of the republic’s founder at the center: O Turkish Youth! Your first duty is to preserve and defend forever Turkish independence and the Turkish Republic […]

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SASUN It may come to pass that, by violence and ruse, all the fortresses of your beloved fatherland will be occupied, all its shipyards captured, all its armies dispersed, and every part of the country invaded […] You will find the power you need in the blood in your veins.

Most extra­ordinarily, Fahdi remembered me by name from my first stay at the hostel more than two years before, when I had checked in for a few minutes at 4:30 am, only to leave hurriedly two hours later to ascend Mt. Maruta. Yet I did recall very well the red-and-gold exuberance of a personality cult, and a sleep-​ deprived receptionist standing there as part of it, even if he had not chosen the history he was born into. It was Fahdi, with whom I was not acquainted at the time, amid the displays of Atatürk’s paranoia and the call of patriotism by the republic’s founder from October 1927, when he was still baying for blood. Immersion in this iconography was inevitable in Turkey, for if in the Soviet Union the apotheosis ended with Stalin’s death, it long survived and grew more vibrant in the state of Atatürk after his passing. His name, pictures, statues, quotes, and even the most forgettable of his phrases are in every crevice in Turkey. Erdoğan’s Islamist regime, with its ambivalent attitudes toward the republic’s founder for his hostility to religion, in 2013 suppressed the oath that since the mid-1930s all schoolchildren had to recite every morning. To the chagrin of many of them and their parents, it ended by proclaiming: “How happy is the one who says, ‘I am a Turk!’”     

When I sat down with Alma a little after the argument with the future mullah and his friend, I was surprised to see she was a Hamshentsi friend I had first contacted on a social networking website. But the conversation on the phone had been so smooth that I had not realized she was not speaking modern Western Armenian but one of its oldest dialects. With large green eyes and uncovered blond hair, she stood out in her Italian-style clothes and keen sense of humor amid the more subdued and conservative fashions in the city of Sasun. The Hamshentsis, whose villages are concentrated in the mountains around Hopa along the Black Sea coast in the farthest north-east, near the Georgian border, still speak a very distinct branch of Western Armenian called Hamshetsnak, which they brought with them when they left their original lands near Oshakan in what is now the Republic of Armenia, after a failed revolt against Arab rule around ad 774–5. The language mostly fossilized around that time. But they started to convert to Islam in the seventeenth century, and so their nationality is a very contentious issue among themselves and among other Armenians. Some Hamshentsis call themselves Turks whereas others 79

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have begun to embrace their Armenian roots. But given the choice, not a few among them would tend to define themselves first by their communal identity as Hamshentsi (or Hemşinli, in Turkish). To have one call herself an Armenian, and in Turkey, was a first to my know­ledge, and a bold one in the deep interior. Was she not afraid? “Never.” Everybody called her the Armenian teacher, I told her. “Did the police tell you that?” was her reaction, with some unease. She laughed when I said that it was only the townsfolk. Nobody in the city of Sasun understood what Hamshen or Hemşinli was, Alma said. Only six years earlier she had learned about the origins of the Hamshentsis; so she began to say she was Armenian, a category everybody in Sasun could recognize. Before being posted here she did not even know the name of Sasun: “O Armenian teacher,” I teased her, “how unbecoming of you, like a pilgrim who has never heard of Jerusalem.” But cities rise and fall. By the third century the Roman prefect of Cæsarea Maritima, near modern-day Haifa, had asked “Where is that?” when a Christian prisoner brought before him had called Jerusalem his hometown. Most people in Turkey would be hard pressed to know what or where Sasun is, often confusing it with Samsun, on the Black Sea. Alma lived with her little son, and was separated. My man made me suffer a lot. He beat me up constantly. And I beat him back very, very, very much: not only once or twice. I was kidnapped when I was 17; I did not love him, and was forced to marry him. I did not want to. After I finished high school, my man kidnapped me, damn him. He was Hamshentsi. In those five years, I did not read a book and did not watch a movie. It is only now that I’m reading. And I’m a leftist and he was a fascist. My uncle rescued me and I escaped, but I would still get calls from my man, who threatened to kill me.

A group of patrons approached us, curious about the language we were speaking. Kurds protected and loved Armenians, one said, and another one added that Arabs too. One said his family was from Marash; that was the hometown of ancestors on my mother’s side, I told him. Another had a grandfather from Aleppo, my birthplace. Someone asked me what people in America think of Turkey. “Tell him they love it,” Alma told me in Hamshetsnak. When the men were gone, she wondered how the Hamshentsis had become Armenian. It was the other way around, I said: they were originally Armenian and their identity had transformed over time while they had kept the language. But ancient migrations from Central Asia and Khorasan constitute the core of the national genesis myth in Turkey and, like many in the country, Alma too had to grapple with the notion that Armenians had not come from elsewhere but were an indigenous people, and as such so were the Hamshentsis. 80

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But after four centuries of Islamicization, she innately saw Armenians as outsiders: “I got very happy when I found that we were of Armenian origin; I love you, Armenians, very much.” It was still something different, not entirely her own. She said she did not care about races: whether Armenian, Kurd, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Jewish—every people. “For example, I like Kurds,” she added and examined my face. “I like the Turks,” she said, with some hesitation as she sought cues in my eyes. Aren’t there good and bad people in every nation? The Georgians, the Laz … What matters to me is the person. But when I found out I was Armenian I said, “I knew I wasn’t a Turk.” I read Armenians are hard-working, brave, intelligent. Did you see my photo in a parachute? I’m crazy … They asked me here if Hamshentsis are Muslim. Yes, we are, I said, but we were forced to become Muslim. Maybe my mind is Christian, I told them.

When a few years ago restoration works began in the Giardino della Minerva, the botanical garden in Salerno that dates back to the twelfth century, exotic plants, buried centuries ago by forgotten hands, bloomed wildly under the sun of southern Italy after the dormant earth was stirred; so too the Armenian roots that their ancient dialect had kept latent in the Hamshentsis had started to blossom in Alma. And it had come to happen in Sasun, where it all began: in the epic, the lineage of Davit also started with the coerced marriage of an Armenian woman to a prince of the fire worshippers. Every story begins with a woman.     

Silva was the last Christian Armenian woman to be kidnapped in Sasun around 2010. Her abduction failed, but it convinced her family to leave their village— set deep in a mountain with tortuous access—and settle in Istanbul. She was now in the room with her sisters and the interviewee but, even in the safety of their apartment in Istanbul’s European section, there was still an air of fear about her, the alertness of a gazelle, with her long eyelashes and big eyes. Large pupils can be a mark of innocence: it is how the eyes of prey in the animal world are shaped, as they give them panoramic view against predators.43 Sasuntsis used to say that one of the main reasons Armenians left Sasun was the fear of kidnappings of their women. Not only did they abduct young women, but also married ones. Under a pseudonym, Silva agreed to talk. I’m still in shock. It’s not going easily. I’m not really talking about it. Even my doctor thinks it’s not good for me to talk.

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Secret Nation We were acquaintances with the kidnappers. We were not from the same village but they came to visit us. They stayed at home for one or two nights and called my dad “Uncle” and my mom “Aunt,” as one of them is a relative. After the kidnapping we have no longer been in touch. But before that they used to tell my father: “You will give us one of your girls.” My father always answered, “Impossible.” I never liked them and, well before my abduction, I had told my father that their visits were making me nervous. Whenever I saw them I would take a different road. They had come as guests one night and didn’t talk, but before leaving, outside the home, they told my father, “We came to ask you for your daughter.” I heard it. My father responded, “It’s absolutely impossible.” They wanted me for the grandson of my aunt, my mother’s sister. He was asking my father for me. My father told them it was impossible. “My daughter is not little anymore,” he said. “Even if I told her something she will not listen: she has made up her mind.” After that, they left and we didn’t hear back from them, so we thought that they had given up. Four months later, I had taken the animals to graze up the mountain and I saw a man in the distance, hiding behind rocks further up the slope, and I asked my friend if she knew him, but she didn’t. I thought he was by himself, just watching where we were going. We spread our blanket and sat down for lunch, and I saw that man again in the distance and recognized him. It was Selhattin, the brother of the man that wanted me. He came up to me and asked if my father was home. “Yes,” I told him. He said they had lost their horse and asked us if we had seen it. He pretended he was going to tell his friends we hadn’t seen the horse. But he was reporting that my father was home, and that I was alone with my female friends, one of them a little child. Someone from our village must have tipped them off, as their village is far. Otherwise how would they know I had left at that moment for the mountain? Half an hour later, I heard one of them calling out, “Camil, Camil, the horse is not here.” It was code for “her father is not here.” They asked if my father was home because he was old, so he would not be able to make it on time to come this far up on the mountain and save me. Selhattin was approaching. I didn’t see that two men were hiding. Then I saw someone coming from below, asking again if my father was home. At that moment I understood something was up. A third man appeared, who held my friend, and another one the child that had joined us, while Selhattin held me. I cried, I begged. There were a few friends of mine idling about downhill. They heard me and ran to the village to inform them. A woman had come out with her children to collect beets and I saw her. I knew exactly where she was, so I screamed in her direction, asking them to come and rescue me. She wasn’t very near, but the voice goes a long way in the mountain and can be heard from afar, because the wind carries it as well. So she heard me and was coming to rescue me. She was with her daughters. This woman, too, was a kidnapped

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SASUN Armenian; she had been forcibly married and converted. She was kidnapped by true Muslims, not Islamicized Armenians. She was probably 45–50 years old. As she was climbing up toward us she cursed the men, telling them to leave me. “Don’t meddle!” the men screamed back and threw a stone at her head. The woman passed out when she was hit. My kidnappers thought she had died. The trial later against these men was for the attack on the woman, not for my kidnapping. If she had not been taken to a doctor soon, she would have died. She was first taken to a hospital in Batman, and then to Diyarbakır. They kept dragging me by my hair. When I saw that I wouldn’t be able to escape I decided to walk on my own before hurting myself more. My knees were badly wounded. They took me toward the crest of the mountain, an hour and a half ’s walk from where we were, but I really don’t know how long it took us to get there during my capture. I don’t remember. I had only passed by that part before. It was in a high section of the mountain, too far above the village. They weren’t fearing my relatives but they were nervous because they thought they had killed the woman, and that made them nervous. But they weren’t scared of my family: my parents were old and weak. They were not expecting trouble from them. We spent the night at the summit in the open air, because they didn’t dare come down after the attack on the woman. I don’t know if it was cold. It was April. It must have been cold but I didn’t feel it. Toward dawn they took me to a cave near their village, not far from ours but nearer to Pirşenk. During my captivity they were talking to me but what could I say. I don’t remember what they were speaking or telling me. But in the morning, around 9:00, the soldiers came and detained them, and they freed me after my father had reported my abduction. They handcuffed them. Of course I loved seeing them arrested. Until that day we weren’t expecting anything like that to happen in our village. We weren’t expecting this from them. They were Sasun Arabs. My kidnappers were arrested but then their family came, spoke with my father, said this and that, and persuaded him to withdraw the charges. Daciks are not reliable. Very few among them are.

Silva was using the generic dacik that Armenians use generally for Muslims, especially those of Turkey. A family friend had come for tea: “This is like the story of Gülizar, only shorter and with a happy ending.” She was talking about an Armenian girl kidnapped in the 1880s in the Greater Sasun, whose case made headlines in newspapers around the world. She was said to be the most beautiful of the granddaughters of Miro, chief of the Armenian village of Khars. Gülizar would usually be the center of attention at weddings and feasts, with her singing and dancing. Musa Beg, a Kurdish tribal chieftain, had noticed. He surrounded Miro’s home with 150 men one night and made off with the girl, who was 14 years old at the time. As Musa already had four wives, he gave her away as a bride to his brother Cezahir. But 83

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Gülizar’s family and the Armenian community put pressure on the authorities to free her from her captors. They had been dismayed to find out who her abductors were: Musa marauded the Armenian villages with his men, and had earned a reputation for cruelty—he had once ambushed an Armenian named Ohan and had tortured him with hot irons and left him to die on the road. The sultan finally intervened, and Gülizar was released after a trial in which she identified herself as a Christian, saying she had been abducted. The former British prime minister William Gladstone brought Gülizar’s kidnapping to international attention in an article for the Daily News, reprinted by several newspapers around the world, in which he described her ordeal in detail: Ghiulisar remained alone in the hands of the ruffians, begging of them to let her go; but they beat her forward, sometimes dragging her by the hair. After a while she was no longer able to walk and fell on the snow. After passing a river in this state they gave her some clothes, and continued on their road to Zenghachbar, where there is a kind of lodge belonging to Moussa Bey. Here they passed the night, and the girl was violated by Moussa Bey for the first time.44

Musa Beg had been arrested, but all charges against him were dismissed in December 1889: he was from a family of seyyids, a title given to men recognized as descendants of the Prophet. He went on to become a commander in the Hamidiye Regiments, a Kurdish cavalry force created by Sultan Abdül Hamid II that took the lead in the depredations against Armenians in 1894 in Sasun and the later massacres. Even if the Hamidiye had been officially disbanded, they participated in the Genocide under the name of “Tribal Regiments”: in 1915, Musa Beg attacked a village in the area of Mush and murdered the mayor of another one, along with his family, all of whom he burned alive in a barn.45 One of Silva’s sisters had been married to an Armenian convert to Islam, the son of Garo, from a village near theirs in Sasun, a man who seemed to be in permanent fast, they said. During his military service, he had a dream in which he entered a church. “I am now a Christian,” he declared himself to his peers in the barracks when he woke up. The son of Garo had died more than a decade ago, leaving behind a young wife who was expecting their first child. His Muslim friends came to give him an Islamic funeral and bury him in a Muslim cemetery. The widow turned them back: “You know he had become a Christian,” she told them. She registered their daughter, Mari, as a Christian in her ID. Mari now attends an Armenian school in Istanbul and is fluent in the language her parents and aunts could not learn in their hometowns of historical Armenia. These last Christians of Sasun did not know their prayers. Once a year, they would light candles and say silent pleas in the ruins of the Mt. Maruta shrine. 84

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After the Genocide, some Sasuntsis had forgotten the meaning of the cross, Sose had told me. They made its sign on the bread they kneaded or when they prepared ağtan, a clotted yogurt prepared with goat’s milk and fat, as they had learned from their elders. But it was a symbol about which they didn’t think any more than we do about the shape of letters. They only found out when they arrived in Istanbul.     

The first cross Çoço Siro saw was a tombstone brought from Aleppo when she was seven or eight years old, in the early 1940s. It was one of her last childhood memories of Badırmut, the Sasun village where she was born. And on every January 6, the Armenian Christmas, they would walk in silence to the nearest creek and everyone in the family threw a handful of earth in it. Then they drew the sign of the cross in the water. Father Isa, a priest who came from Mardin and may have been Assyrian, called from time to time at the homes of Christians in the villages of Sasun. He handed out crosses that Islamicized Armenians and Kurds took, too. “It was halal,” Çoço Siro said, using the Arabic word that indicates something “permissible” under Islam. Regardless of religion, everyone used these crosses against illnesses: “There was no doctor.” She did not remember when these pastoral visits ceased, but by the time Çoço Siro moved out of Sasun in the 1960s they had not seen one in years. When I saw her walk into the Istanbul apartment of other Sasuntsis for the interview, I recognized her from the first time we had met in 2011 in the courtyard of the Cathedral of Surp Maryam Asdvadzadzin outside the Patriarchate in the Kumkapı neighborhood of Istanbul. Churchgoers had referred me to her as the oldest among them, a small woman with rosy cheeks and blue eyes, squeezed into a thick jacket and a headscarf. Something in my first question then had set her back. “It wasn’t just the Turks,” she had responded, a little startled. “The Arabs and the Kurds did it.” Inadvertently, she had brought up a very wicked issue: that of the executors of the Genocide. While Kurdish participation in the Genocide features in the relevant literature, the Arabs’ involvement is much less discussed. The first Armenian communities of survivors were established in Syria and Lebanon, then still Ottoman provinces, and have lived undisturbed there in the century that ensued, enduring no worse than the majority population the turmoil and civil wars in both countries. Turkish negationists, and even Kurds who are sympathetic to Armenians, often mention participation by attackers of other nationalities, with the obvious or tacit intent of watering down their own role. 85

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Not only did some Arab tribes of Sasun butcher Armenians, as Zeki and other Sasuntsis recalled by naming the implicated tribes, but also Armenian women and children were sold by Bedouins in slave markets in Arab lands. Bedouins had also been entrusted with liquidating Armenian deportees deeper in the Syrian desert. But Çoço Siro did not mention all this. She had an uncertain idea about World War I and was probably ignorant of anything about World War II, which had ended by the time she may have been 10 or 11. With hints from the girls in the Istanbul apartment, she indicated with an interjection that she understood which conflicts we were talking about: At the time they rounded up all the Armenians, the Russians came, planted a cross on the mountain and attacked the Turks, and the Turks attacked them. But then the Russians split into two, and started fighting each other, and that’s why Turkey won.

Thus she rendered the Genocide; World War I; the Caucasus Campaign of 1917–18, involving Russian, Turkish, and Armenian troops and volunteers; the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–21 between Bolsheviks and White Russians; and then Atatürk’s victory that led to the founding of the republic. Her mention of a cross on the mountain may be a poetical reference, incorporated into local lore, to indicate the arrival of a Christian army into Ottoman lands. And this was her description of World War II: When the world war started soldiers came to our village and opened fire. They made war for ten years. People fled to Syria. But then Sasun was liberated again and they returned […] During storms and intense rains, the rivers would sometimes bring up soldiers’ bones, their blankets and their guns […] to this day […] In the village of Asi, Turkish soldiers stayed at a home and tried to abuse the young wife, and that’s how the fighting started there. Then the villagers of Xerzan joined their neighbors. They attacked the troops and the latter responded.

In other words, she had assimilated the world wars to the Sasuntsis’ First Deportation—the Genocide—and the Second Deportation. Information on the 1925–37 “Sason uprisings” (as they are known in Turkish historiography) is patchy, but there were two periods: the first rebellion had tapered off by the early 1930s, and the second—possibly the bloodier—started in the spring of 1935. And in her conflated description, Çoço Siro had got right a major factor in the escalation, if not the actual cause of the second rebellion: a soldier who tried to abuse a woman. 86

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A Turkish gendarme, a member of a tax-collecting party, attempted to molest the young bride of a Kurdish ağa, Teteri Bedik, in the village of Harbak, in a region of Sasun known to locals as Xerzan, and the site where the first rebellion had started in 1925. Even though it is not an officially demarcated geographical unit, Xerzan was a feudal outpost ruled by Kurdish chieftains, who often warred among themselves and resisted central authority. Draft-dodging and tax evasion were rampant, too. This tax-collecting delegation had indeed first visited the village of Asi, as Çoço Siro mentioned, but the incident took place at their second stop in Harbak. According to witnesses—including former general Cemal Madanoğlu, who was a Jandarma (gendarmerie) lieutenant in Sasun at the time—when the bride screamed, Bedik and all the local men that had gone into hiding (as they were avoiding conscription) came out and opened fire on the visitors. The villagers killed the district governor and the other officials. The offending soldier managed to flee and reported to the central government that “a rebellion has broken out,” without saying anything about his disastrous attempt at dalliance with the wife of a tribal leader. This was how the “rebellion” started, Madanoğlu said in his memoirs.46 Vanik, Sose, and the çoços (grandmothers) had heard from their elders about a minimal Armenian participation in the rebellion: an Armenian called Sırxo (possibly a variant of the Armenian name Sargis or Sergo) fought with the Kurdish rebels, but was caught in the neighboring province of Şırnak in 1938 and locked up in the prison of Kütahya “for many years.” Another two Armenians were captured in the village of Pirşenk: Vartan and Ferman, who handed their firearms to Sose’s father. A young boy at the time, he heard voices calling him from behind the thickets one night, and these rebels asked him to take their guns and hide them. Both men were apprehended soon after, with their clothes in tatters after crawling through thorny bushes, and were executed in short order. The Turkish army packed the population of entire villages of Sasun into trains and sent them to internal exile in Western Anatolia in 1938. The renewed Turkish onslaught—this time targeting Kurds—was particularly devastating for the Sasun Armenians who had survived the Genocide and their descendants, as most were permanently uprooted and converted to Islam. While it is likely that these statistics may exist in Turkey’s official record—even if they were reliable—the available figures do not offer a breakdown by nationality or religion.47 One of the villages in Xerzan was Gusked, which had remained a pocket of Christian Armenians after the Genocide. Along with Kurdish and Arab deportees, the Armenians from this village were sent to western provinces of Anatolia, mostly Kütahya. The evening before my meeting with Çoço Siro, two other Sasuntsi çoços had shared their recollections from the time of the Second 87

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Deportation. They were both from Gusked. One of them, Çoço Maral, was only a small child at the time, but she still recalled it vividly at the time of the interview in 2013: Two Armenian women and three Muslim ones were killed by soldiers in the 1938 deportation. Kurds were also ransacking Armenians. There were riots and looting. My mother was running, holding me in her arms. But a Turkish soldier shot her, injuring her in the knee. We fell. I think I was four years old at the time. My mother was left behind; I don’t know why. Maybe she hit her head and died, but I don’t know. I think they left her there because she was badly injured and could not be saved.

Çoço Maral’s face looked very white under the single bulb burning in her Istanbul apartment, as she evoked with detachment her childhood memories. “But the soldier shot your mother on purpose, right?” Sose asked. No, I saw him weeping, rivers of tears were streaming down his cheeks: it was clear he got it wrong. The soldier had mistaken her for a looter, but when he saw who she was and that she was a holding a little girl, he started to cry. I remember this Turkish soldier, weeping all along, as he took me up in his arms and brought me to a hospital in Kozluk.

Sose’s grandmother was shot by a Turkish soldier during those same incidents in Gusked. Her body was left unburied for a week and swelled as the troops did not allow anyone to approach her or the other dead, even though the cemetery was 100 meters away. They had to bury her where she fell. The soldier who killed Çoço Maral’s mother may have felt sincere remorse, but it does not follow that the shooting was a random event or a mistake. Accounts from the time indicate that indiscriminate repression was not only tolerated, but also ordered by superior officers. One such soldier, Dursun Çakıroğlu, who participated in a Turkish army offensive in the Ararat region in the 1930s, recalled an attack on a valley of the Zillan village, mostly inhabited by women, children, and the elderly. Their commander, Deli Kemal Paşa, ordered: “Fire at will!” Çakıroğlu described the attack to a Kurdish journalist, Ahmet Kahraman: We shot randomly. The valley turned into doomsday. Wailing, moaning, crying, escape, screaming […] For four hours we swept the place with rifles and machine guns. There was no resistance. They were women and children. No gunfight erupted […] When the sounds and twitches died down we entered the tents. Corpses everywhere […] Children, women, and elderly had clung on to each other, dropped everywhere and died.

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The official tally was 600 dead, but Çakıroğlu believed that more people had perished in the attack. The only 20 or 30 survivors were executed. Some of his comrades stole money and gold from the dead, and then they set their tents on fire.48 Çoço Maral’s family was sent away to Kütahya for ten years. That was when they learned Turkish. Until then, they spoke Arabic and some Armenian. But unlike other Armenian families, hers did not convert to Islam in the camp where they were resettled. They were with Muslims: “When Arabs and Kurds fought, they would call each other ‘infidel,’ but we didn’t meddle with them, nor did the authorities … Had we stayed in Gusked, we would have died in the fighting.” Her older sister found work in a hospital in Kütahya. On a visit Çoço Maral paid her one day, she saw the second president of Turkey, İsmet Inönü, who was touring the premises. Years later, Çoço Maral’s sister ran away with a Kurdish man and converted to Islam. She changed her name to Fatma and died in Adana. Her children and grandchildren to this day do not know she was Armenian. Both sisters maintained some telephone contact, but never saw each other afterwards. Her brother, who was two years old during their deportation to Kütahya, went to a school run by a mullah. When their exile ended around 1948, he didn’t want to return to their village with his family. They brought him against his will to Gusked twice—he was 12 at the time—and both times he escaped back to Kütahya, the last time for good. Shortly afterwards he converted to Islam and married a Muslim woman. One day he came to visit his sister in Istanbul. He died without telling his children and grandchildren that he was Armenian. That evening we had also visited Çoço Maral’s friend from Gusked, Takug, the other Sasuntsi çoço. She was the opposite of Çoço Maral in almost every sense: passionate, with a muscular build, and two black moons of eyes that stared out defiantly. Her face, crowned by a flamboyant headscarf tied loosely in a ponytail, had the prominent features of an Assyrian sculpture, also evoked in the thick curls of her hair. Bedecked in gold bracelets, she sat on a brown leather chair, next to a curio cabinet filled with family photos, baptism and marriage memorabilia, and one image of a European Jesus, in a brightly lit apartment. She was too little to remember their deportation to Kütahya. Other than a vague recollection of hunger and destruction by the time of the Second Deportation, she recalled the story of a bandit from Gusked called Tayfun, who had made a name for himself in Sasun during the Genocide: he used a large stick to kill Armenians so as not to soil his khanjar (dagger) with the blood of infidels, whose bodies he then threw in the River Kedir, which “had turned red in 1915.” According to a story passed on by Takug’s family, one pregnant Armenian woman cursed him, wishing him to die in the same manner he was 89

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murdering her. Tayfun’s wife killed him some years later and dumped his corpse in the Kedir. But Takug had firsthand recollections from the time they had settled back in Gusked after returning from ten years in exile. A Kurdish clan was harassing her family to take her as a bride, but she and her parents resisted. The last time, they came to engage her by force. They beat her father so badly that he fell to the ground. Takug ran toward the aggressors with an ax, screaming curses at them, but she was restrained by her family: they agreed to betroth her to one of the aggressors, if only to be left in peace. She clenched her teeth after evoking the image of her father lying on the ground: “I wished I had hacked them to pieces right then and there.” A few months later she fled her captors and married her current husband, with whom she later settled in Istanbul. But two of her sisters were also kidnapped by Kurds and were converted to Islam; one of them, she said grimly, had apparently consented to marry her abductor.     

The conversation about the world wars had refreshed Çoço Siro’s memory: during the repression in 1938 in Badırmut, Armenian and Kurdish families were hiding in a cave for three days as the troops combed the mountains in search of rebels. A mother accidentally smothered her hungry baby to death when she tried to suppress the weeping so as not to alert the scouring parties of soldiers. With uncertainty, she said people mentioned that there had also been aerial bombing at the time. As the fighting raged in Sasun, Çoço Siro and her family were exiled along with other Sasuntsis to Diyarbakır in 1938, where her younger brother was born. But they left the city two years later after an attempt to kidnap her mother: “An old Kurdish woman asked my mother to bring her water from a well, and when my mother went to fetch it, she tried to kidnap her for her already married son.” They returned to Badırmut, the birthplace of her father, Melkon. He was four years old when his mother, Rehan, was found hiding in a cave with other Armenians in 1915. The executioners grabbed her to throw her in the River Kedir and she dragged two soldiers with her to their deaths. Her murder was recalled by survivors who stayed in Sasun: Those who saw Rehan would tell that she screamed, “I’ll take two of yours!” At least two, they say. She was very strong; maybe she grabbed another two to drown in the river, and I hope it may have been six.

A little earlier, Melkon had been orphaned of his father. He had died of typhus. The girls in the room nodded with bleak familiarity, two of them whispering “because of hunger.” 90

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After the Genocide, Çoço Siro’s father was raised by a Kurdish ağa near Badırmut called Ose, and his wife, Zeynep. They never made any imposition on Melkon regarding nationality or faith. Around 1925, Ose brought Melkon an Armenian bride from the village of Zovart, in the foothills below Gamar, with a population now composed of Arabized Armenians, and where Vahan’s children went to school. One of the women in the Istanbul apartment said her parents, too, had been matched by her father’s Kurdish protector, who traveled around the villages of Sasun, asking, “Is there an Armenian woman for my Armenian?” Melkon named his first daughter Kınkuş, after the wife of a priest49 from Badırmut whose murder he had witnessed in 1915. But after Melkon’s second child, Ose told him to set up his own home. “Asets, Ellí kená vor ku hoğun” (“He said, ‘Get up and go to your land’”), said Çoço Siro in the ancient dialect. The phrase had a strange poetic effect: it had come out with an unintended iambic pentameter, with the last word—hoğun, a genitive declension of “land”—that rhymed with “Sasun.” This poetic meter, an alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, mimics the rhythm of the heartbeat, and has been used in English to lasting memory: “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.”50 But Çoço Siro did not speak Armenian at home: the household language at Melkon’s was Arabic. She learned her Armenian from an old woman called Make, in Gamar, where she had moved from Badırmut after being betrothed. Families spent the summer months in the high mountain pastures. Çoço Siro said her first words in Armenian in the early 1940s in the cave where I had taken shelter from the storm a few weeks before, the one with the mock satellite dish that children had stuck at the entrance. And she remembered the first tombstone cross because it had been one of her last childhood memories from her hometown before trekking across the mountains to her new life as an engaged married woman. “They don’t believe me when I tell the story now, but I was eight years old when I went as a bride from Badırmut to Gamar.” She was raised by her mother-in-law until she came of age to be the wife of Rafi, 20 years her senior. “No, no! I had never seen him before!” she exclaimed in response to my question. The room with the young Sasuntsi women erupted in laughter. She was laughing, too: “I only saw him when I entered the house.” Her smile waning, she added: “There weren’t that many Armenians left at the time: that’s why when they found Armenians they married them off.” According to custom, after the first fortnight or month the child brides were allowed to return to their family homes for a couple of weeks. In a village in Sasun in the early 1980s, one 12-year-old girl had been wed to an Armenian boy about the same age but after her visit to her parents she refused to return to the house of her husband-to-be (as the marriage was not really consummated 91

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until years later). “I’m not going back,” she said. “Send my brother instead; it’s his turn now.” Çoço Siro was not sure how old she was. Armenian parents used to inscribe their daughters in the Civil Registry with earlier dates of birth to marry them off younger, especially in the post-Genocide years when there were very few Armenian men left, and thus fend off potential kidnappings before puberty, which in Islam is generally agreed as the moment when a girl can be deemed marriageable. Conversely, the boys were registered with a younger age so they would actually be older by the time of conscription, and hence be in better shape to tolerate its hardships. Only when they moved to Istanbul did Çoço Siro and other Sasuntsis have access to regular medical attention. Until then, they used the crosses distributed by the visiting priests to cure illnesses and children suffering from a condition they called the “full moon disease,” which in Armenian was called nurpur or tuğ, and hame in the Sasun Arabic. During the three days of maximum lunar splendor, some children would suffer from tremors or seizures, with symptoms that also included fever and red rashes. In the village of Pirşenk, they hung a black veil on the window during the full moon: they believed that its peculiar light concentrated power, which the shroud would absorb. Then, they covered the children with the veil and rubbed the sign of the cross on the forehead, the lips, the heart, the hands, and all the other parts of the body that are anointed in baptism. The Kurds did it too. But the Sasuntsis believed the power of the cross came from the myurron (chrism) of the Armenian Church, which represents the Holy Spirit. And even Islamicized Armenian Sasuntsi families rubbed it on the forehead of dying relatives. They were imitating the women who had done it on the body of Christ, whose name, from the Greek khristos, means “the anointed,” a translation from the Hebrew mashiah (messiah). In his 1701 translation of a Latin exegesis on the Book of Revelation, Fr. Petros of Tiflis saw in the holy oils an invulnerable shield: the rider of the black horse symbolized the Roman general Titus, destroyer of the Second Temple in ad 70, who was advised not to ruin the oil and wine, an indirect reference to the chrism. “Indeed,” the exegete said, “when general Titus was about to attack Jerusalem, God moved the hearts of the Christians to abandon Jerusalem, and they left and were saved from massacre.” When Çoço Siro was little, there were still some families that had preserved myrrh from before the Genocide. In a most primitive empirical interpretation—in which the relation of cause and effect is not supported by theory or science—their survival testified to the power of the myurron. But the Sasuntsis’ magical thinking went only so far. Should those remedies not work, the Armenians of Badırmut would have taken the patient to the 92

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nearest hospital: “We had to carry the sick person on our backs by foot for seven or eight hours to a city like Sasun or Batman.” And yet, proximity to modern hospitals many years later in Istanbul did not save one of Çoço Siro’s sons from lung cancer: “Kınats,” she said: “He left.” One of her daughters, Yasemin, had left too: she lived in Sasun as a convert to Islam. Not only her religion, but her national identity had changed by way of conversion too: “She says she’s now a Kurd, but I love her all the same.” Her husband was an Armenian who had become a Muslim at 16, shortly before his marriage to Yasemin in 1990. They lived in Zovart, the village of the Islamicized Armenians. “They were young and they didn’t know what they were doing,” Çoço Siro said, as the penultimate call for prayers from the minarets’ loudspeakers resounded in the crepuscular city and the room. There were many things she herself did not know in her youth. For example, that there was a city called Istanbul: How would we know where Istanbul is, where Sasun is, even? We didn’t leave home. We would be lost if we did: the police, the soldiers […] We feared a lot: they gathered conscripts by force. My brother-in-law hid for years not to go to the military service but one day in the mid-1930s the soldiers came and took him, and he died three months later. He died of fear […] We don’t know how he died, where he died, where he is. What did we fear? That we were Armenian; that we would be massacred again. We lived in fear. And we had just had ten years of war.

Nobody in Gamar had ever heard of Istanbul. Then Çoço Siro’s brother went to Mardin to work with Assyrians, and in 1961 he traveled to Istanbul. He had told them that you would see more people in the streets there than in the whole of Sasun. But something more extra­ordinary were the thousands of Armenians in the city who spoke the language, and had churches and schools. “Had we known that Istanbul existed, why would have we stayed in Gamar?”     

“When I wake up every morning I wish the entire world was Armenian,” Azat said. “But then I look out of my window, and I see Istanbul.” He added as an afterthought: “All nations are worthy of compassion, but I love Armenians the most.” The living room was spacious and sparely furnished, with three generations sitting on couches and chairs around a square carpet. Azat was the head of one of the five clans that claim descent from Davit. When we were looking for their apartment building in the old neighborhood, not far from the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople in Kumkapı, we bumped into his daughter-​ in-law, statuesque and in red, a matching headscarf over her topknot hairdo. 93

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Their brides had to be tall, I remembered. She was an Islamicized Armenian, too. Azat’s son remained silent throughout the interview, with a dour expression. His grandchildren were less reserved, even though the friends of one were mostly Turkish nationalists, including some of Armenian descent, who he said would liberally use the profanity “Ermeni tohumu” (“of Armenian seeds”), an insult of current usage in Turkey. In the campaign for the 2014 presidential elections, then prime minister Erdoğan may have alluded to it when he said, “I’ve been called even uglier things, I beg your pardon: they said I’m Armenian.” It was also a wink to the nationalist and Islamist core of his power base. Ove, Azat’s grandfather, was the reis (mayor) of Hazzo, the city later named Kozluk. Of his children, only Azat’s father, Mardo, survived the Genocide by hiding beneath a rock while his sister and two brothers were being killed: “Christians didn’t help each other in the Ottoman Empire; that’s why we were massacred.” As was customary in the area, Mardo was a draft dodger but one day, overcome by fear, he went to the Civil Registry and became a Muslim, changing his name to Miheddin. Yet even after conversion, Mardo had his lineage confirmed in the record books of births, marriages, and deaths by the muhtar of Kağkig—just beneath Davit’s fortress in Bozika—where Azat was born in 1935. Azat grew up hearing the saga of his epic ancestor told in Kurdish, his mother tongue, even though he could understand some Armenian: Davit’s chain-mail armor protected him from the arrows. That was his secret. His aide asked him how he protected himself, and Davit told him that he was vulnerable when he took it off. When Davit was bathing in the River Murat in Mush, he was treacherously murdered. Çavraş, Davit’s wife, was inconsolable. “Don’t cry, you can marry his brother, Veke,” her mother told her. But Çavraş threw herself from the fortress of Bozika, her body was torn into pieces, and her two breasts became a stream.

Kağkig had sustained heavy losses during the Hamidian massacres, and its population had fallen from 12 households in 1894 to only two in 1914. And even if they were disowned by the Armenians after conversion, Azat’s family continued to observe old rites. On their pilgrimages to Mt. Maruta, they would throw a ball down the slope, so disease and other evils would roll away with it. “And we would put the cross in a bucket of water for one week, and we would tell our fortune according to the drawing the cross made on the water when we took it out.” When the numbers of Armenians began to dwindle even more dramatically in Sasun, especially after the Second Deportation of 1938, they started to 94

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marry with other Islamicized relatives. Their Kurdish and Arab neighbors never accepted them as true Muslims, and knew them by the pejorative dönme: “They wouldn’t give us their daughters to marry, but neither would we give them our women.” Christian Armenians, for their part, no longer considered them their kin: “They became Kurds,” they would say about the converts. Azat and his family moved to Istanbul in the early 1990s, when the fighting between the Turkish army and the PKK guerrillas got worse: a bomb fell on the house of his brother, still in Sasun: “They took advantage of the turmoil to attack Armenians,” he said, without identifying culprits. “These are bad people, bad.” Azat’s wife had not spoken until that moment, sitting with a fixed expression next to her husband, her head wrapped in a tight cream-colored hijab. “They are full of hatred,” she said in a burst of grief and frustration that caught me by surprise. I had taken her garb and demeanor as a sign of rigid religious convictions or displeasure, stressed by her furrowed brow, in contrast with the exuberant and almost theatrical storytelling of her husband, a man of confident oratory. She was a little girl when her family was resettled in Kütahya during the Second Deportation. Her black eyes compensated with their intensity the emotions restrained elsewhere. Their language was Kurdish, and so were their songs, Azat said: “Kurdish music cannot be deleted from our ears.” It was an expression to mean attachment, he said, even if it was against your will. He knew a song, a Kurmancî lament, dedicated to the Armenian fedayi Kevork Chavush, a leader in the Sasun resistance from the 1890s until his death in 1907, during the period of Hamidian violence. He was perhaps the second most-admired son of the land after Davit. And just like the hero of the epic, legend had it that Kevork Chavush was endowed with prowess from an early age. In his adolescence, he had earned a reputation for perfect marksmanship. “If the beads of your rosary were made of lead, I could use them to exact many revenges,” Chavush had told the abbot of the Arakelots Monastery in Mush, where his father had taken him to continue his studies. The irony of it was inevitable: a verse in the most popular Armenian song that exalted the memory of Kevork Chavush, along with his fellow revolutionaries General Andranik and Serop Aghpyur, said: “The Armenian who renounces his nation and becomes a foreigner / Will not deserve the Armenians’ tears on the day of his death.” In the song, the word “foreigner”—aylazg in Armenian— is a euphemism for Muslim. Yet here was a convert, one of those who would not merit Armenians’ tears, who wanted to celebrate Chavush in Kurdish, a language of the aylazg that the fedayi leader had fought. As a boy, Azat had learned the other Kurdish song dedicated to Kevork Chavush from an Armenian called Miso. “I’ve never sung it since I left Sasun 95

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more than 20 years ago,” he said with some hesitation. But he finally cleared his voice with a swig of tea: De lêxi, lêxi, lo birano, bi hew, re lêxi way, Deşta Kita wez lo birano, ser kişla wê gelî, Bi ma derket de lo birano, çen heb sofîyê wa, De lêxi, lêxi, lo birano, duşmanê me zirr mela û şêxin, Kevork Paşa sûndxarane lo birano, sê car surmelî way, Kevork Paşa sûndxarane lo birano, sê car surmelî way, Elim dikim ku dînê hezar dînê Muhemed yek biqele yek bimîne. De lêxi, lêxi, lo birano, bi hew re lêxin way, De lêxi, lêxi, lo birano, bi hew re lêxin way. Come on, beat it, beat it, brothers, beat it altogether Hey brothers in the Plain of Kita, at the barracks in the valley, Some fanatics got away from us. Come on, beat it, beat it brothers, our enemy are only mullahs and sheiks, Kevork Paşa swore three times on a rifle, brothers, Kevork Paşa swore three times on a rifle, brothers, I get up and toast 1,000 Muhammadans, and leave one. Come on, beat it, beat it brothers, beat it altogether, Come on, beat it, beat it brothers, beat it altogether.51

His wife’s eyes had welled up, and a tear was rolling down her face of stone.     

Back in Samatya, as Vanik was reciting the Davit, I was trying to get a sense of how he related to his Armenian origin. It felt absurd, if not unkind as well, toward a man who was near his last breath and devoting the little energy left in him to rescuing, for my sake, a poem from his childhood memory more than 80 years ago. And yet, despite his recitation of the epic of Sasun in the vernacular, 96

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something felt equivocal, but it took me a while to surmise why, with hesitation and a conflicted conscience. It was not his Islamic faith nor the Turkish language he preferred to speak outside the interpretation of the poem. It is uncertain, and impossible to prove, but I had a hunch after studying his face and focusing on his eyes. The lessons of the last century have made us loath to extend the dubious readings of physiognomy much beyond an individual and projecting them onto peoples. Mark Mazower, the author of Salonica, City of Ghosts, has pointed out that past travelers “did not feel twenty-first century inhibitions at generalizing about national type and character, physical and mental […] Physiognomy and physical beauty […] were not the properties of individuals; they revealed the attributes of the race.” John Foster Fraser, a British writer that Mazower quotes, visited Salonica in the early 1900s: The population is hotch-potch. When you get above the poorer class, garb alone is no aid to decide nationality. Everybody speaks Greek and most know Turkish. But you have to note the features, the eye, the walk, the general manner, to decide whether this man be a Turk, a Greek, an Armenian, a Bulgarian, or a Jew. The shifty eye tells the Armenian, the swagger of demeanour proclaims the Greek, the quiet alertness reveals the Jew.52

The Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadaré had observed the same habit in the Soviet Union as a student in Moscow from 1956 to 1960: I noticed more than once that ordinary Soviet citizens were much given to comparing foreigners from other socialist countries to the natives of their own sixteen republics … if you had a curved nose they would think you had a Georgian look; if you had sad eyes, you must be Armenian.53

But despite his guarded contempt, even Kadaré hinted at a link between eyes and history—with a subtle insinuation of the Genocide—in his novel The Great Winter, in which he reenacts a conversation between the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha and Soviet Armenian statesman Anastas Mikoyan, just before Albania broke ranks with the Soviet Union in 1960: “But you must know as well as I do, that the destiny of some small nations, by the very reason of the tragic trials they have suffered, has taken on such a dimension and weight that you cannot turn the pages of their existence as if they were an album’s. I am sure that you above all, comrade Mikoyan, you must understand this well.” The eyes of Mikoyan, the sad eyes of an Armenian, were fixed for a moment on some point.54

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Indeed, while traveling in Georgia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the last months of its existence in 1991, I would be able to tell Armenians from others, only seldom erring: they may have been particular types of Armenians, but Armenian they were.55 As Kadaré and his Soviet comrades used to say, the telltale signs were often what we would call “sad eyes,” withdrawn, with an intense look of concern. Or they had expressions that were in the range of distress, if emotions were to be defined as a continuum, in the same way that we can confidently say the sea is blue, even if the color is ever mutating under the changing light. And the eye has an aquatic quality, not only for the retina but for the dialogue between what lies beneath and the exterior, or our thoughts and the world, the organ of instant reflection. It is the most immediate of our senses; what we see “travels at the speed of light,” as the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has noted: Eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment that remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it. The hostility of the environment grows proportionately to the length of your presence in it, and I am speaking not of old age only. In short, the eye is looking for safety. That explains the eye’s appetite for beauty […] For beauty is solace, since beauty is safe. It doesn’t threaten you with murder or make you sick […] When the eye fails to find beauty—alias solace—it commands the body to create it, or failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness. In the first instance it relies on human genius; in the second, it draws on one’s reservoir of humility.56

“Virtue in ugliness” is perhaps what Armenians have been seeing in their martyrdom in what is now called Turkey, still a land of fear. And I was striving to see if there was that fickle conjunction of ocular tissue and emotions, which Armenian physiognomy so often projected and allowed a British traveler in Salonica or an Albanian writer in Moscow to recognize them by. I was searching for those signs in the eyes of Vanik, realizing with shame the pettiness and futility of my pursuit, comparable to that of those monkeys in an Eastern parable who were trying to grab the reflection of the moon on the lake. Vanik recited laboriously in the tongue of Sasun one of the last verses from his family’s version of the Davit epic: Դաւիթ Պոզիքա էկաւ տիւնեայ Պոզիքա քալէսին էկաւ, Պատմած ունին Տիարպաքիրցիք Օր ձորէյին գանէ կը թռէր ուր ձին Ու կը նստէր որ էրթի, որ թռու Որ փճացնի կռուէ որդիք … Դաւիթու Ռումք կանչեցին

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SASUN Ասեցին թէ գայ Մուշ: Գնաց Մուշ ու Ռումք սպաննեցին Չաւրաշ վեր էլաց որ էրթին, Քուրմանճացին ասեց, Մի գնի, մի գնի, Դաւիթ հոշ մըր Արփին խոչէ: Ասեց Դաւիթ մեռաւ Արփիին մէջ: Ասեց, Արփիին մէջ ես կը կարգուիմ Էլաւ գնաց Պոզիքա քալէսի Սառեցուր հոգին, կպաւ թի, Էղաւ քար, Ճոթ մա կ’երթայ աղբուր որ չիչէղին լիք ա …

Davit came to the world in Bozika, He was born in the Bozika fortress, say the Diyarbakırtsis When he came to the valley he flew on his horse, And he rode it to go, to fly, To destroy the fighting armies … The Rûm summoned Davit They told him to come to Mush. He went to Mush and the Rûm slayed him. Çavraş stood up to go, The Kurmancî said, “Don’t go, don’t go, the good Davit died in Arpi.” He said Davit died in Arpi. He said, I will get married in Arpi. She went to the Bozika fortress, She threw herself, her body touched down it turned into stone, A piece went to a fountain full of flowers …

The quartz clock in the living room and the automatic watches on our wrists were adding and deducting time in silence as Vanik was reciting the death of Davit. No ticking mechanism marked the countdown paced by Hatice, immobile on the couch in the adjoining living room a world away, her blank eyes wandering from nothing to nothing, fleetingly resting on her father as he was mumbling a poem that he remembered from a religion ago, an epic that had been passed on for 1,000 years until that cold December of 2013, when it was told for the last time by the last Sasuntsi who had learned it by heart from his mother, 80 years before, in a camp for deportees in Kütahya. The last verse he said for us that night was about the death of Davit, murdered treacherously by “the Rûm,” the name Byzantines were given by Arabs and Seljuks, and perhaps a rare reference here to Sultana Tzimisces or 99

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Sultana Chimishkik, Davit’s lover: in different versions of the epic, he was killed by her or by the daughter they had in common.57 Vanik believed that Davit died in the River Murat: its Armenian name is Aradzani, and it is where St. Gregory the Illuminator baptized King Tiridates and the Armenian people, making it the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion in 301. Born an Armenian into the clan of Davit, the hero of the Odyssey of Sasun, Vanik parted a Muslim from this side of life in the winter of Istanbul. He died in his bed by the front door of his apartment in the neighborhood of Samatya a month later.

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Part II

Commagene

Two

Commagene Minas and his brother Garabed were walking by the Euphrates, downstream from the Aradzani, a millennium after Sasuntsi Davit’s assassination by his lover or the daughter they had in common. It was now the spring of 1915 and the boys, the sole survivors of a family that Zaza bandits had just massacred, were searching for a place to hide in their province, Adıyaman, in south-east Turkey. Minas at the time was 16, the older sibling by six years. They were near the fortress of Arsameia, in the ancient territory of Commagene, a mysterious kingdom that ceased to exist in ad 72, a land of bald mountains and olive trees that struggle with a sun that takes away the life it gives. At a bend of the river, they bumped into three Turkish soldiers, who pulled their bayonets on them: “You have to strangle each other, and we will let the winner live; but if you refuse to play, we will kill both of you.” Each brother was trying to sacrifice himself, screaming to the other: “You do it!” or something to that effect. Minas prevailed. He threw the corpse of his brother in the Euphrates, which at that stretch still flowed in force: further up, a mountain of corpses had stopped the waters. The Turkish soldiers honored their promise after the game was over, and Minas ran away, maddened. Around the same time, some 100 kilometers to the west, Kurdish çetes were tossing Armenians from the Severan Bridge, built by the Romans in the second century of our era. One of the women survived, cushioned by the pile of bodies. She was there for days, perhaps more than a week, and crawled out of the mountain of the dead, to whom she owed her life in more than one sense: she lived on their flesh. Siranush, daughter of the head of the clan of Barsum, was a cousin of Minas and Garabed. Most of their clan was butchered in the Genocide, either in their hometown of Olbiş or pushed off this bridge, which spans the Chabinas Creek with a single arch at a height of 20 meters. Barsum committed suicide. A century later, the Riflemaker was telling us the stories of his ancestors beneath the moonless sky of Gerger, without adjectives and no discernible 103

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variations in tone, as if describing a mechanical process. He was the only gunsmith in Gerger, across the river from the fortress of Arsameia, and some survivors of Barsum’s clan had made this town their home. We were drinking the night away with endless rounds of tea on the balcony, facing south, in the direction of the Euphrates: it ran invisibly outside the town, beyond the promontory on top of which the Riflemaker had built his house. The local Christians called this location Gâvur Sokağı (Infidel Street) in mock self-deprecation. They gave that name to the entire street, but it was only at the uphill end of it that three Christian Armenian families lived in contiguous homes. According to the Chronicles of Anonymous of Edessa (c.1234), an unknown Assyrian priest, Alduş (a previous name for Gerger) was not an Assyrian village and it “may have been Armenian.” To the Edessan we owe what may be the first record of Turkish violence against Gerger around 1114. In a chapter titled, “On the crimes committed by the Turk Balak in the country of Gerger,” the Assyrian chronicler wrote: At the time Gerger was ruled by an Armenian called Mikael, son of Costantin, a vainglorious adolescent […] Balak, a Turkish ruler of a nearby country, would constantly advise Mikael to refrain from committing evil deeds and prevent his bandits from harassing merchants and travelers. Balak one day lost his patience and gathered a force of Turcomans to attack Gerger. They crossed the Euphrates in one hour and camped in the mountains. That night their encampment was covered in snow and they were not seen. The Lord was angry at the country’s residents. Whoever happened to come upon their tents was killed or taken prisoner. Then they descended on the city, destroying it completely, burning homes and villages, and committed great crimes.1

We were joined on the balcony by the Riflemaker’s granddaughter and his daughter-in-law. The fratricide of Minas and the anthropophagy of Siranush were still being exorcized 100 years later by the act of narration, by letting them out into the immensity of the night. But the stars were distant and cold, shedding neither warmth nor light, complicit with the world. The young women spoke in awe of Siranush, in hushed voices confined to one end of the balcony. One had her nose neatly bandaged and swollen eyes, the immediate signs of plastic surgery. Someone was quietly trying to suppress her sobbing, while the Riflemaker’s wife went inside to bring out more tea, and one of the host’s younger grandsons, with a higher pitch than the others, benignly if implausibly recast the story of the brothers with Garabed strangling himself to spare Minas the crime and his life. But the monophony of the men’s bass—in the flat tones of standard Turkish speech—ruled the aural space, while the whispers of the women underlined the gravity of the stories, recited in the torpor of the Mesopotamian summer. The only Muslim cousin present, Ferit, did not speak. 104

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Darkness enhanced everything that was perceptible to the senses—the sounds and the silences; the orange glow of the cigarettes; the smoke that swirled up like a vanishing genie; the high beams of a stray car that flickered for an instant, revealing the contours of the teardrop tea glasses. In the inert workings of the cosmos and its suns that burned and died over millions of years, these minuscule memories of people long gone were as significant as a raindrop over the sea, on this planet of sentient creatures beholden to an aging star. The stories were short: five or ten minutes, about the time it takes to strangle a ten-year-old boy or for a bandit to push a young woman off a bridge. Yet with nothing to block it, pain expanded under the old sky of Commagene. Ferit had introduced me to the branch of his family that had remained Christian, or had converted back to it after Islamicization in the post-Genocide years. His parents, and most of Barsum’s clan that had remained in Adıyaman, had become Muslim; some were ges-ges—“half and half,” in Armenian— observing the rites of Islam in their hometowns but joining the Armenian Church whenever in Istanbul. After being decimated in 1915, fertility and endogamy—as is customary among Muslims and, especially after the Genocide, among Islamicized or even Christian Armenians in Eastern Anatolia—had enlarged the clan to more than 1,000 members, scattered all over Turkey as well as Germany, with a strong presence not only in their home bases of Adıyaman and Urfa, but also in Istanbul and Hatay. There was at least one village that was entirely populated by them. Their family tree was so complicated that disentangling the connecting branches was sometimes an impossible endeavor, as a family member insisted after convincing me of the futility of trying to figure out relationships among cousins, who could also be spouses and other concurring categories of kinship. Persuading this person to act as a contact with the rest of the clan took months. Despite the clan’s size and power, self-preservation made them refractory toward strangers, especially in their strongholds where everybody else knew them for Armenians, regardless of religion, and hence exposed them to the prying eyes of Turkish officials and neighbors. While I waited for the call from my contact to learn if I could visit the Armenians of Gerger, the owner of the Great Iskender Hotel of Adıyaman, the eponymous capital of the province, was pressuring a Chinese guest in the lobby to accept mandarins he had brought from his summerhouse. Yet the Far East tourist was declining the offer. “O Çin” (“He is Chinese”) the hotelier told me, pointing to the exotic visitor with his left thumb. “Go to the Chinese and tell him they are good,” he instructed an employee to again insist with the bag of mandarins, speculating, somewhat puzzled, that he had probably never seen the fruits before. Other than the name of his hotel—an Anglo-Turkish rendering of “Alexander the Great”—this city of 200,000 had no memory of the region’s 105

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Hellenistic past in its wide avenues and tidy streets, not lacking in blandness yet built in good taste. Other projects of urban development in Turkey were little more than a casual arrangement of identical concrete blocks of four or five floors, sometimes painted in bright colors, like the hurried afterthoughts of a Soviet planner. The phone call from my contact came, telling me that a cousin would be waiting for me: all I had to do was take the minibus to Gerger. To my question of how they would recognize me the response was a sarcastic laugh, the meaning of which I only understood at the Adıyaman bus terminal: “Whom do you have in Gerger?” An affable old man replicated the dolmuş driver’s curiosity, inquiring, “Who is sending you?” This is how in Turkey they commonly ask about the person recommending you to family or friends. The minibus shadowed the Euphrates for a while and then made a left turn onto the road leading up to town. It pulled off suddenly, shortly after the first houses: an olive-skinned man who resembled my youngest brother Alex, with a slender face and big black eyes, leaned in and recognized me in a second. Ferit was wearing formal gray trousers and an Italian-style purple check shirt, with an elegance that made him stand out in this town. This land had seen Italian fashions millennia earlier, in like colors too. Cicero, the orator, who was the Roman proconsul of Cilicia in the first century bc and had visited King Antiochus of Commagene in this vicinity, had mocked the sovereign at leisure for requesting that his purple-rimmed toga be renewed: the Roman Senate had bestowed it on Antiochus as a mark of distinction for an ally. In a letter to his brother in 54 bc, Cicero described his entertainment at royal expense, with some witticisms obscured by the passage of time: I poked fun at the king comically enough, not merely twisting that little town of his in the Bridge of Euphrates out of his grip but raising a storm of laughter by my jibes at the purple-bordered gown he got during Cæsar’s consulship […] I cut so many jokes at this inglorious monarch’s expense that he was totally exploded.2

Beneath Cicero’s contempt there was mistrust for the Eastern statesman, whose mannerisms displeased the austere Roman. But he had deeper reasons for his reservations. Antiochus, as the ruler of a small kingdom carved from the fragments of the Seleucid Empire, was a practitioner of the politics of dissimulation, juggling the conflicting interests of the more powerful rival states and empires that surrounded it—Parthian, Persian, Roman, Armenian— by claiming descent from the Armenian Orontid dynasty and the Persian Achæmenid lineage of King Darius on his father’s side, while he traced his maternal lineage to Alexander the Great. 106

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To further secure his legitimacy, both internal and external, to his royal title Antiochus added the epithet of philoromaios philhellen (“friend of the Romans” and “friend of the Greeks”). He further consolidated his grip on the population with a syncretic religion of Greco-Persian deities, expressed in the composite name of the supreme god called Zeus Oromasdes. Commagene was inhabited by Armenians, Greeks, Persians, and Syro-Hittites. It is not known if there ever existed a Commagenian genos or ethnicity, but the kingdom claimed for its rulers and population dual Greek and Persian descent, yet a distinct identity. The balancing act implicit in this crowded ancestry was dictated by necessity: the king of Commagene controlled a crossing of the Euphrates favored by the Parthians when they moved west. Yet he required Roman support for emancipation from the Armenian king Tigranes II, also known as Emperor Tigranes the Great, and to collect the lucrative tolls from the river traffic. And for all Cicero’s misgivings, Antiochus proved a reliable ally of Rome when in ad 51 he warned in insistent letters that a large Parthian army was traversing the Euphrates on its way to invade Syria, then a Roman province. In Antiochus and Commagene, today’s Islamicized and hidden Armenians of Adıyaman had an early precursor of a protean identity. So did the clan of Barsum, with its vast geographical, religious, and ideological ramifications into a wide spectrum of ethnicities, religions, and ideologies. The Riflemaker invited me into the dining room to show me a handmade rifle in mahogany, embellished with decorative silver mounts, including a highly ornate bolt that looked like the horn of a ram. It was displayed on a stand before an oblong mirror, flanked by photos of granddaughters, behind a tray full of fuchsia and orange petals and a sugar bowl made in silver filigree. Across the corridor, a door opened into the living room. Its walls were given over to devotional iconography. An Assyrian budded cross hung over the doorframe, with three discs at each end: they symbolized the Trinity, but each circle was also said to represent an apostle, while the buds signified the rebirth of the Savior. It could have passed for an Armenian cross to the untrained eye, except for the crucified Christ. He is usually missing from Armenian crosses, for they represent the resurrection. There was a photographic portrait of Archbishop Mor Gregorius Melke Ürek of Adıyaman on a wooden throne, his overgrown, gray beard falling freely on his cassock: he was looking straight at the viewer, holding the priestly staff of the shepherd and wearing a black koubono, the dome-shaped episcopal hat of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch that vaguely resembled the bulbous cupola of a Russian church. Near the Archbishop’s picture but lower despite the higher rank, a photo of the youthful Patriarchal Vicar, Metropolitan Bishop Mor Filiksinos Yusuf Çetin, leaned against the wall, sharing the top of a tall bookcase with a tin 107

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Dalmatian dog. He had been pictured from a high and angled perspective, looking to the East, also crowned with the koubono. The Metropolitan was sitting on a wooden seat presided by a budded cross, similar to the one he also held in his right hand; in the other he had a golden crosier, the staff crowned with a bicephalous dragon, the two heads facing each other: they were a symbol of the visible enemies of the Church. A cross stood above them in the middle, the emblem of the bishop’s authority and his power to fight evil as he led the flock. On the last wall, a Western-style reproduction, similar to those shown in the liturgical bulletins of Catholic churches in Europe, showed a blond Jesus in a white tunic walking through a wheat field. The Apostles followed him amid shoulder-high plants, their likenesses resembling a liberal interpretation of those of Leonardo’s Last Supper: one of them wore a tall red hat, with a thick, white rim. The Armenians of Adıyaman illustrated the classic paradigm of the onion: peeling it to the end leaves you with nothing, for it is the aggregate of layers that makes the whole. The Riflemaker and his extended family were Armenian, by ethnicity and self-identification; Assyrian Orthodox Christians or Sunni Muslims, by religious denomination; Zazaki speakers, by their mother tongue; and Turkish, by citizenship. The kaleidoscopic impermanence and complications were nothing new: their many guises mirrored those of the other Armenians in the province, descendants of those who had once become Commagenian two millennia earlier, before turning Armenian again, only to mimetize or assimilate, in varying degrees, into the Assyrian, Kurdish, or Turkish communities after 1915. The survivors, that is: in Adıyaman, Genocide executors tried to enforce the extermination to literally the last Armenian. We walked out onto the balcony again. The younger cousin, the one with the high-pitched voice, resumed the stories where we had left them. The husband and rescuer of Siranush was Mehmet Nurî, a Kurd of the Mirdêsî aşiret. In 1926, he was executed along with his brother, Şükrü Ağa, for their participation in the Sheik Said rebellion against the Turkish republic the year before. This Kurdish uprising was led by officers of the Hamidiye Cavalry, the first to systematically massacre Armenians on behalf of the Ottoman government from the 1890s onwards, and among the main executors of the Genocide. This should make the Mirdêsîs suspect, yet their name does not appear among the Kurdish tribes known to have butchered Armenians. They claimed to be on friendly terms with the clan of Barsum, and indeed their arrest and later execution in Diyarbakır was caused by internecine feuds and betrayal by one of their relatives, partly on account of their cordial relationships with the Armenians. 108

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The night before he was scheduled to be hanged with Mehmet Nurî, Şükrü Ağa wrote his will and left to his nephew the duty of avenging him against the family traitor: Just kill Bedir Ağa, so that people see that no blood from the family of Heyder Ağa remains in place. Know this well; if you kill someone else of them, you too will die by the hand of someone you don’t know. If you torture him to death, you too will die by torture. Face him with courage. Call him out before you strike him. Kill him the same way you want to die. Know that I will not rest in peace in my grave until I have been avenged. After you have killed Bedir Ağa, climb to the crest of a mountain and shout in the direction of Diyarbakır, “Uncle, I have avenged you.” Only then I will sleep in peace.

After three years of looking for the right moment to fulfill his duty, Şükrü Ağa’s nephew, Osman Sebrî, killed Bedir Ağa in 1929. They bumped into each other on a road in Urfa, in the vicinity of the Euphrates. Bedir Ağa was riding with three other horsemen and, when he greeted him, Osman responded: “We do not greet each other, defend yourself like a man! I am going to kill you.” Bedir Ağa’s hand went for his gun but Osman Sebrî shot faster, and galloped away, toward Siverek. As his uncle had demanded from him in his testament, he climbed a hill and shouted in the direction of Diyarbakır: “Uncle, today I avenged you! I carried out the first revenge, and the last one I leave to Holy God.” Family legend had it that Mehmet Nurî had requested Siranush’s hand years before the massacres, but Barsum had turned him down for being Muslim. Siranush went on to marry an Armenian who was murdered in 1915. She only agreed to marry Mehmet Nurî when he accepted her condition that he saved six boys and six girls from the clan of Barsum (other accounts indicate that it was seven boys and two girls). When there was nobody around, Siranush used to speak in Armenian to her first child from her Kurdish husband. “Nurî, Nurî,” she would address her son, “my name is not Hanım; I am Siranush.” “I would see her weep and I would weep too, but I didn’t know why,” her son, also called Mehmet Nurî, would recall almost nine decades later. And she would take him out to the fields, where she talked by herself in a strange language the boy did not understand. Only much later would he learn that it was Armenian. “She spoke loudly to the flowers, the mountains, and the sky, only God knows what she was saying.” All these stories had already been published in the Turkish press, the younger cousin said. Yet these versions had been sanitized: there was no mention in them of how Siranush had survived on anthropophagy. As for Minas—the Riflemaker continued, in his discourse without pathos— after the death of his brother he had returned to Olbiş, his birthplace, to find 109

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only the walls still standing: it had been ransacked. Before the deportations, there were 400 Armenian families in the town. Now there were only daciks (Muslims). A neighbor must have reported him as an Armenian fugitive, for a party of Ottoman soldiers came after him. He fled to Nefsi Gerger, beneath the fortress of Arsameia, across the Euphrates from Gerger proper. A Muslim man gave him refuge, but the gendarmerie was tipped off. They searched house by house in Nefsi Gerger, at the time a village of 70 homes, for the Armenian fugitive. His protector had hidden him in a large sandbag, like those employed against floods in this riverside location. The gendarmes saw it and wanted to inspect it too, but the homeowner, at considerable risk to himself, did not allow them to. The ordeal of Minas, a teenager left alone in the world and persecuted by army squads—like the one that forced him to kill his brother—might beggar belief. Yet in late 1915, the Ministry of the Interior led by Talât Paşa—one of the architects of the Genocide, together with Enver Paşa and Cemal Paşa of the Young Turks’ government—had ordered the deportation of even the handful of Armenians that remained. A telegram sent on December 12, 1915 to the governor of Malatya, with jurisdiction over Gerger, proves this: “In accordance with the last orders received, not a single local [Armenian] has been kept here. Similarly, not a single person come from elsewhere has been allowed to remain.”3     

Before going to the Riflemaker’s home, Ferit had taken me to his family’s store. Four policemen were milling by the entrance. Inside, there were another two, shopping. There were also two young men with short hair, speaking in hushed tones and occasionally throwing glances in my direction as they idled. They were not even pretending to be browsing, so I assumed them to be undercover agents, who pullulate all over Turkey: undistinguishable from any civilian, they could be spotted when fleetingly displaying their badge to board public transport. By the surprised reaction of Ferit’s father and his two older brothers inside the store, it was clear he had not told them anything about me. If unfailing in their hospitality, it was also clear, by the questions they did not ask, that they had understood that I was Armenian and that they would not talk about the issues that brought me here. Ferit ran home to change clothes, he said, as the two brothers helped me to a huge serving of tava, a local dish, a strongly spiced casserole of eggplant, ground lamb meat, tomatoes, peppers, and garlic, with ingredients and juices that almost melt into each other yet retain their own shapes and colors, while the flavors simultaneously blend and break down on the palate, lingering in a layered aftertaste. The two brothers and I discussed 110

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New York, America, Obama, some soccer, and the weather. But we stuck to a tacit understanding that strangers are often able to reach. With the two young men idling by, unthreatening yet within earshot, I did not mind very much that we did not discuss what brought me to Gerger. When Ferit came back, the two men I thought to be plainclothes policemen got in the car too. T-shirts with strange or incomplete sentences in English were fashionable at the time in Turkey: Ferit’s said “Problem Solved,” while mine had the outline of an oil tanker with gigantic chimneys and an absurd slogan (“High Gear,” or something of the sort). We were leaving town for a picnic in the hills. As the three of them spoke platitudes, I kept silent wondering why would Ferit, a mathematician with the placid nature of a lake, be friends with Turkish agents, but on thinking about his profession I saw some rationale to the legend on his shirt, stamped in large and bold Helvetica typeface, and assumed he knew many things I did not. We pulled over at the end of a dust road and walked up the slope to sit by a grill, on which Ferit put the domed double teapot to heat. In a valley below, a village of tidy homes in pastel colors was laid out like needlework on a green carpet, a minaret standing tall amid the trees. This was Venk. As the name resembled vank, the Armenian word for “monastery,” I asked if there were any nearby: there were the ruins of Mart Maryam, an Assyrian one, Ferit said. There had also been an Armenian church in the lower part of the village but he did not know the name. It had collapsed: treasure hunters and children had dug so far that the walls had given in; then people may have carted the bricks away for their homes or other construction work. These were the more advanced stages of the century-long Genocide: memory was desecrated and erased in the presence of Armenians that had been converted into something else. A man in a white tunic and the white cap of a hajji rode past us on a mule, turning briefly toward us, smiling: he had a long white beard and no mustachio, a mark of the most observant Muslims in fulfillment of the Prophet’s command to “do the opposite of what the pagans do: keep the beards and trim the mustaches short”; the barrel of a rifle stuck out from the saddlebag behind his sandaled foot. A young woman in a flowery headscarf came after him, side-saddle with her back to us on a bay horse, like that of the riders behind her, a man and a boy. Last was an old woman in a dark gown and a white veil that revealed only her eyes, holding in one hand the leash of her dappled gray horse, its saddle draped with a small kilim rug. A slim man with leonine hair had approached the water fountain next to the grill: he was from Venk, “an Armenian, and Christian, too,” Ferit whispered. They greeted each other with some detachment, like old acquaintances that are not very close; he did not seem to know our two other companions, whom he acknowledged with just a nod. The man enjoyed smoking more than 111

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talking, but he listened on as Ferit described what I was writing about. Yet with reluctance, in between cigarettes, the village chief let it be known that he was Assyrian. Ferit and I gently nudged him through turns of conversation to admit that he was indeed Armenian, but a member of the Assyrian Orthodox Church. He concluded that he was only part Armenian on his father’s side as the speech trailed off with the little gray clouds he exhaled. I teased him about his nebulous meanderings through ancient civilizations to just say who he was. He took it in good stride with a laugh, but he added: “Your people forget what happened to Hrant.” We did not, I responded to his allusion to the murder of journalist Hrant Dink. It had been his assassination that had provoked the Turks into finally acknowledging the truth. “Yes, ‘We are all Armenian! We are all Hrant!’” he commented, in reference to the slogans on the banners held by the crowds that took to the streets of Istanbul after the murder. “And it is your people, too,” I said, teasing him for his reluctance to own up to Armenian nationality. “Fine: it is my people too,” he agreed. “But how many people came out? One hundred thousand? Let’s say 1 million, for the sake of argument, or let’s even say 2 million: there are another 70 million people in this country, and we have to live with them, too.” Dink’s death had become a watershed in Armenian–Turkish relations, the individual tragedy moving both sides to heal a collective and most unequal trauma. But the readings were different: Diaspora Armenians, long secluded from any contact with Turks, were still powerfully impressed by the displays of solidarity from a people that had long been demonized. Yet most Armenians I encountered in Turkey, already acquainted with the many strands of Turkish society including those who sympathized with them, focused on the murder, and their suspicions of government collusion. For them, the message was unequivocal: Armenians will be taken out if they raise their voices too much. In passing, as he was prone to make his points, the Assyrian Armenian mentioned the pictures of Hrant Dink’s assassin, Ogün Samast, with a policeman and a gendarme proudly flanking him. Samast held a Turkish flag while another flag, framed, hung higher behind, with a signed quotation from Atatürk on it: “Vatan toprağı kutsaldır, kaderine terk edilemez” (“The soil of the homeland is sacred, it cannot be abandoned to its fate”). Some of the photos showed the date they were taken: January 21, 2007, two days after Samast gunned down the editor of the Agos newspaper. The pictures lent credence to the view that Dink’s murder was the work of what in Turkey is known as the derin devleti (deep state), a secret network of officials, military officers, policemen, and accomplices from the criminal underworld who operate like a parallel government, organizing conspiracies and pulling the strings of power, with the aim of preserving the Kemalist 112

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establishment, or whatever Atatürk’s muddled legacy of populism and nationalism had become: since the then Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit coined the term in 1974, much ink has been shed over the precise nature of this secret society, and whether it is an organic entity or if it is just a generic name for ad hoc power groups that come together at particular instances.4 The Assyrian Armenian dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and stamped it out with his foot, bid me an unenthusiastic farewell, and descended the hill toward Venk, now bejeweled in the waking silver and gold streetlamps. He was walking away exposed, having shed his skins—Turkish, Islamic, Assyrian, Christian—taking with him his convictions and misgivings, unchanged or otherwise, and the drum he had come to fill: the towns of Adıyaman along the Euphrates suffered from a water shortage, which in the summer became more acute. Assyrians … Their name had never ceased to sound fantastically archaic, anchored in history lessons in the 1970s at the Armenian school in Buenos Aires about their empire and their enmity with Armenians. It was still strange to see them for what they were now—a Christian minority, even smaller than the much diminished Armenian people. In myth, Hayk had become the founding patriarch of the Armenian nation after defeating in a battle north of Lake Van the Assyrian giant Bel, who had tried to persuade him into submission: “Why have you gone into those freezing climes? Come near me and I shall give you lands under me.” In a different time, Senekerim, “the evil king of Assyria,” his royal epithet in Armenian school texts, had destroyed Babylon in 689 bc: The city and its houses—foundations and walls, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and the outer-wall, temples, and gods, temple-towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I razed and dumped them into the Arahtu canal. Through the midst of that city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water, and the very foundation thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood. That in days to come, the site of that city, and its temples and gods, might not be remembered, I completely blotted it out with floods of water, and made it like a meadow […] After I had destroyed Babylon, had smashed the gods thereof, and had struck down its people with the sword—that the ground of that city might be carried off, I removed its ground and had it carried to the Euphrates […] Its dirt reached unto Dilmun, the Dilmunites saw it, and terror of the fear of Assur fell upon them […] To quiet the heart of Assur, my lord, that peoples should bow in submission by his exalted might, I removed the dust of Babylon for presents to be sent to the most distant peoples.5

Historical records tend to gravitate toward military might, a bias Assyrians resented, as well as what an American-Assyrian historian has called “biblical misrepresentations.” They obscured a civilization that vastly exceeds its 113

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contributions to warfare, with translations of Greek classics in the early centuries of the Christian era and the School of Nisibis, possibly the first university in the world, founded in the fourth century by the Assyrian Church. A chance encounter in Istanbul a few months earlier in the old neighborhood of Kumkapı, the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, had revealed for me the existence of the Assyrian Armenians of Adıyaman. That day two policemen sped past me on motocross bikes, one almost skidding badly down the narrow cobbled street before swerving to a theatrical stop outside a garment store, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered. The very agitated shopkeeper was shouting curses in a Turkish inflected with the heavy accents of the southern Caucasus—perhaps Georgia or Abkhazia— as his hook nose bled. A robbery had apparently taken place: in the babel of Eastern languages around me, two women were probably speaking in Amharic or Eritrean, but I also picked up a dialogue in Eastern Armenian, and then I heard Western Armenian, addressed to me: a friend I had made a couple of years earlier had recognized me. “I am going to the Church of the Fishes,” he said. Intrigued, I accompanied him, surprised that I had never heard of such an odd church in Istanbul, as the name had evoked for me Abraham’s Fishpond in Urfa, one of my grandmother’s most vivid childhood memories before being sent off to the desert in 1915. The church was closed. As with many Armenian churches in Istanbul, it was hidden behind a wall and a metallic gate. Yet piqued, I had returned on Sunday, this time led by a young girl in a headscarf—she may not have been older than 12—who walked me gingerly through the maze of Kumkapı to the now open entrance, and inexplicably darted away as if in fear. There were no fish pools. But Surp Harutyun Church had been frequented by the Armenian fishermen of Kumkapı, migrants from the Anatolian interior and their descendants. Under the gilded and rose semidome of the apse, there hung a silver vessel in the shape of a fish, probably a censer made after that early Christian symbol. Its referents dated back to the pre-Christian era when the fish was associated with fertility and life. Perhaps it was also a nod to its early parishioners, who used to mutter a prayer here every morning before sailing into the Sea of Marmara, past a stretch of Byzantine wall that still runs by the edge of Kumkapı, in that very biblical trade of theirs, for several of Jesus’ apostles were fishermen. By the third century, the fish was “a symbol that was understood by all Christians everywhere.”6 Surp Harutyun, a baroque church erected in 1855, was still popular among the last wave of Armenians to have moved to Istanbul from the historical provinces, most of whom spoke imperfect or no Armenian: the celebrating priest was concluding a lively homily in Turkish on Marian love, unusually stressing some passages with a smile, teaching rather than preaching. 114

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Among the attendees I recognized Aram, the Sasuntsi pilgrim that two years ago at the top of Mt. Maruta had shown me his petitions declined by Turkish courts to have his religion changed back to Christian, as well as to formalize the name by which he was known to family and friends. His request had been approved shortly after his peregrination, upon which he had joined this flock. Near Aram at the meal offered after Mass there sat a man in his mid-40s. Of white skin and blue eyes, he was in his Sunday best. Initial small talk was uninspired, but when he mentioned he was originally from Adıyaman, something stirred beneath the still surface of an uneventful conversation. The province was exotic, and not only for the strange names it has continuously had up to the present one, which roughly translates as “place with a bad (but also terrific) name,” and for which there are a number of legends all worthy of little attention. More importantly, it was rare to encounter Adıyaman Armenians in the Diaspora communities formed in the aftermath of the Genocide.7 Not only were there Turkified or Kurdified Armenians in the province; there were also Assyrianized Armenians that had later converted to Islam. The man with the blue eyes, Nazaret, had been born a Muslim, growing up believing himself a Turk, until his parents told him they were Islamicized Assyrians. By his early teenage years, they were attending the Assyrian Orthodox Church of Adıyaman. It was only years later that he had found out they were of Armenian origin: most Assyrians in Adıyaman are, but some did not know it. And Assyrian churchmen contributed to the confusion by dismissing their roots, Nazaret added: “They told us we were not Armenian.” No differences were as acutely felt as those between fellow men, which was perhaps the gist of the Persian saying, “They hate each other like cousins.” That was very far from describing relations between Armenians and Assyrians, the oldest national Christian churches. Armenia became the first Christian state in the world in AD 301 but, according to legend, King Abgar of Edessa (modern-day Urfa) embraced the new faith the year of the Crucifixion, following the evangelical mission of the apostles Thomas, Thaddeus, and Bartholomew. An Armenian dynast, Abgar ruled a population that was Assyrian or Syriacspeaking, hence Assyrians say they were the first people in the world to become Christian in ad 33. Upon hearing of Jesus’ healing powers, the monarch, said to be suffering from elephantiasis and looking for a cure, had invited him to reside in Edessa: “I have a small, but beautiful city, which I offer you to partake with me.” Abgar’s messengers brought the letter to Jerusalem in ad 30: Jesus testified much joy at the contents of Abgar’s letter, and he directed the Apostle Thomas to write a reply to it, dictated from our Lord’s own mouth. In this letter our Saviour says, “When I shall rise to my glory, I will send you one

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Among Armenians, the most widespread legend of rivalry with the Assyrians is a story of unrequited love that dates back to the pagan era. Spurned by the Armenian king Ara the Beautiful, Queen Samiramis had sent the Assyrian armies to invade Armenia and capture the monarch alive. But Ara had died in the battle. The Assyrian gods, commanded by Samiramis to lick his wounds and bring him back to life, had failed.9 Usually endogamic, Armenians and Assyrians do marry each other, especially in Islamic countries, as members of sister churches. Yet the killing of Ara by Samiramis’ soldiers could still cause resentment until only recently. A woman with an Armenian father and an Assyrian mother remembered a wedding party of a mixed couple gone awry in Tehran in 1978. A scuffle broke out between guests of both communities over some flaming triviality, but bad names for the Assyrian queen and taunts about the Armenian king also flew in the mix of insults and punches the parties exchanged.     

“Fear is always with us,” Ferit said. He was translating the spirit of the man from Venk. “Whether we want it or not,” fear followed them like a shadow. “Yahu,” he said, using a common interjection in Turkish, sometimes used in frustration. “I am a Kurd: I was born and raised a Kurd and a Muslim, but it’s not that I had a choice; and yet they call us Armenian, and they still keep an eye on us.” Something in his pauses and his expression conveyed a sense that these were not things that he, the mathematician, was most naturally inclined to discuss openly. Armenians were seen as gâvur even into the fourth generation following conversion to Islam, he said: the family store had competition 20 yards away but all the local policemen were their regular customers. “They tell us that they trust us better, that we are honest, and that we offer better service and merchandise.” And yet if they could, Ferit added, the policemen, as with everyone else in town, would rather not buy from the Armenians. The Riflemaker had said as much: his clients came to him only because there was no other gunsmith in town. A few years before, a well-connected friend had told Ferit that a newly posted police chief had inquired with Ankara why there were so many Armenians in Gerger. Ferit’s Christian cousins reckoned that half the residents were of Armenian origin, even though they initially did not understand what I meant when I asked how many Armenians there were. “Only four families,” the young cousin had responded on the Riflemaker’s balcony, as they did not 116

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count the Islamicized. The state kept records of conversion: as it is a formal process, it does leave a paper trail in a country where religious affiliation has official import. But if the information Ferit had been privy to was accurate, it meant not only that officials knew if people were of Armenian descent—even if the memory of it had been lost to the subjects themselves—but that it was demographic information they monitored. It may have been another instance of the secret codes for minorities that the Turkish state kept in its records.10 The sun was parting, taking with him what was his, but also the sounds. The silence of the mountains descended on us, as life withdrew from the falling night. A merry flock without its shepherd trotted downhill, in a long queue that disappeared behind the square building of a mosque. Yet some goats would linger on by the sharp edge of a cliff in brief contemplation before rejoining the descending throng. Theirs were the last sounds before the loudspeakers of the mosques below broke in fuzzily with the ezzan, the name of Allah and his exaltation replicating in false echo, caused by the seconds of difference in the call for prayers. Yet if silence amounted to void, natura abhorret a vacuo. One of Ferit’s friends I thought to be policemen, the one with a thin mustache who vaguely resembled the actor Hakan Eratik, spoke of a gold digger he knew. This acquaintance, originally from Erzurum, claimed to be well versed in the cartography of buried hoards in Western Armenia: “He loathes Armenians, and once I told him, ‘You hate them so much but you leave no stone unturned looking for their treasures,’ but he just stayed silent.” The Erzurum man deliberately sought to offend him, he said. “Why would he do that and why would you be offended?” I asked with sincere surprise. “Because he knows I have Armenian friends.” Even if I withheld judgment on the depth of his sincerity, he did not sound like a policeman. He was a teacher, like his olive-skinned friend, who was Kurdish. He himself was of Azeri ethnicity, and hailed from Kars, a major Armenian city before the Genocide, in what is now Turkey’s north-east. It could not have escaped any of them that his Azeri ethnicity and Turkish nationality by themselves placed him in two enemy camps against Armenians. Yet by our silence on the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—where a two-decade truce was briefly broken in April 2016—we were implicitly agreeing to keep the conversation cordial. It was also futile, for our stance on the conflict would have very little impact on its resolution. Nothing we said or left unspoken would change its course. And yet, such reasoning would cause all conversation on contentious topics to cease and make the world a poorer place, for we are unaware of how the threads of public opinion come together to determine or shift policy. In the circumstances, it still seemed right not to disturb the pastoral quiet, for we were born what we were born and he was proving an agreeable fellow. 117

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And this premise that I kept to myself moved me to wonder aloud why it should matter what our origin was, unchosen by us and only by God for believers or by chance for the rest: “We all come from apes.” The Kurdish teacher turned alarmed to his Azeri colleague: his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, as he looked at me with consternation. “Why then are not monkeys turning into men?” he asked calmly in this unlikely conversation so removed in time and place from Scopes’ Tennessee. It would be a disservice to him and science for me to discuss evolution, I admitted, but I conjectured that such a transformation would not happen in the span of a few generations: a chimpanzee grandfather was unlikely to have a grandchild that walked erect, I commented, not without some spontaneous sarcasm that I tried to dilute, ashamed of my malice as I spoke. “This much I am more or less confident to say,” I told him: Much has been built on Darwin since The Descent of Man. One of the most interesting theories I have read on human evolution has been proposed by Ian Tattersall. He’s a British anthropologist, but he is now the director of the Museum of Natural History in New York. Tattersall says that the evolution of hominids and prehistoric men was not strictly sequential. They coexisted for a while. In other words, there were still Neanderthals when Cro-Magnons started spreading from Africa some 40,000 years ago and if our current patterns of collective behavior are anything to go by, then we can see how the precursor of Homo sapiens sapiens disposed of his competition. Differences among the kin are the sharpest, so our common ancestors probably exterminated the lesser hominids.11

The Azeri teacher’s eyes had now turned sad. Still speaking softly, he asked me for the names I had mentioned: “I will read them.” It was clear he had been hurt in his Islamic beliefs on Creation, which the Kurdish friend’s uneasy demeanor confirmed as Ferit watched it all with a knowing smile. The Azeri kept his gentle manner. Not to stretch the point, I refrained from querying him on Darwin, as I had been left with the unsettling impression that he was not familiar with his name. A visit once to a fourth-grade class in a rural school in the Asiatic mainland of Turkey had felt like a trip down a time tunnel, where Kurdish children (a handful with Armenian great-grandmothers) did calli­ graphy exercises, giggling as they enthusiastically showed me the long As they had written in beautiful italic script in a classroom presided over by the portrait of Atatürk, the white man from Salonica, his blue eyes looking away at a distant horizon. That evening I was Ferit’s guest at his family’s home in Gerger, a two-floor construction with two wings embracing an inner court. An inconspicuous wall separated it from the street. As we entered, a young woman of slim build was shuffling across the courtyard to the women’s quarters to the right. In a feeble light of uncertain source, perhaps a streetlamp, I was able to discern her swarthy 118

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complexion when she turned to steal a fleeting glance at me, and the tail of her silk headscarf drew a bright trace in her wake before she vanished behind a door. That was all I saw of the women in Ferit’s family. She had just left dinner in the men’s quarters; the şofra (large tray) was filled with bread, yogurt, and at least four dishes. Ferit’s two older brothers, exhausted after working all day at the store, waited for us. We sat around the şofra and, with little ceremony and less talk, we broke bread and scooped up heaps of food onto our separate plates and wolfed it down, a quick affair, like an unbecoming necessity, with eyes down and, when strictly necessary to speak, doing it briefly and not much above a whisper. Not only in religion, but also in habitat and mores Ferit and his Christian cousins on Infidel Street had parted ways. The Riflemaker’s wife, his daughters, or female in-laws had joined us in our talk, and had greeted me with handshakes or kisses on both cheeks. The interiors were furnished in the Western style, with cabinets, tables, and chairs in good taste, without the bloating excesses of Eastern renderings of European decor. The men’s quarters at Ferit’s were instead in rigorous Islamic style, devoid of almost everything other than a number of pillows and fat rugs that covered it from wall to wall, heavy in burgundy and brown tonalities that lent it the coziness of a caravanserai. When we finished dinner, the eldest brother placed the tray outside the door with a short clang, also intended as a signal, for there came the muffled sounds of padding slippers approaching the room—perhaps the same woman I had seen before. Ferit said his goodbyes, as he would leave very early in the morning for a conference in Elazığ. The döşeks stuffed with goat’s hair were rolled open, and lights went out.     

Under the white sun of noon, in a lot without shadows, a self-important man in black mustachios and matching suit stood at some distance from an unhappy Fiat. His lips, bent downwards under the weight of the mustachios, conveyed bitterness, confirmed by his harping overtones as, between cigarette puffs, he spoke with a mechanic. Two parallel rows of identical mechanic shops opened onto a paved square. In this unremarkable place, the car stood almost unnoticed. It was an advanced-stage exemplar of a local invention: the first wheel rolled for the first time 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, not too far to the south from the auto upholstery store I was visiting. Toros, a 27-year-old Armenian I had met a few weeks earlier in Hatay, near the Syrian border, had a service contract to maintain the car fleet run by the municipality of Kahta, an ancient city of Commagene and now a town of 60,000 residents. It is a lodging stopover lined with hotels on the road to 119

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Mt. Nemrud, its pointed peak ringed with the enormous heads of GrecoPersian gods and King Antiochus. In the first century bc the self-styled “friend of the Romans, friend of the Greeks” built this hierothesion for his syncretic religion, an open-air sanctuary like that of the ancient Persians, who were loath to entomb their deities within roofed walls. The style is pseudo-Hellenistic, apparently the interpretation of Persian and Armenian motifs by the Greek artisans employed by Antiochus to construct his kingdom’s likeness and image. The inscriptions are in Asiatic Greek, embellished with rhetorical flourishes. “A park of stones,” as an Adıyaman Armenian friend had once described Mt. Nemrud. In the magnificent strangeness of the enormous heads of divinities, one bust felt oddly familiar: it was that of the sovereign, with the tall Armenian tiara he wore in the style of Tigranes the Great, the Armenian emperor whose vassal Antiochus had been until he was emancipated with Roman support. The effigy of Tigranes, who pushed Armenia’s borders to their largest extent, figures prominently in textbooks, reproduced from coins that show his portrait in profile under the towering crown. I was taking a look at a reproduction of the royal head—a popular souvenir—at the store near the summit, but then I saw both shopkeepers, who looked like brothers, examining a chrome handgun: “OK, OK, no problem,” they said in tourist English when they noticed my alarm. “OK,” I reciprocated but still departed back to the safety of the petrified gods. In the past, the heads had been attached to bodies sitting on thrones now disappeared, possibly smashed by unknown hands in a campaign against the “antigods,” as the pagan idols were called in Armenian: çasdvadz. A legend recalled by monk Ghevont Alishan, a historian of the Mekhitarist Congregation, has echoes of God’s ire: “Locals refer that Nemrud had wanted to build a palace atop the summit and that revengeful lightning destroyed it and sunk it into abysses opened in the mountain.”12 There is a direct correlation with the damnation of Babel. The builder of the tower undone by the confusion of languages was a great-grandson of Noah and his name was Nemrud. In Armenian tradition, Nemrud was Bel, the Assyrian giant defeated by Hayk. Antiochus’ monumental legacy, this park of stones and the high reliefs showing him clasping hands with the gods, were part of the Commagenian king’s careful choreography to preserve the independence of his small kingdom at the intersection of the Persian and Roman empires. It equated to the Lenin statues that littered the Soviet republics, such as Armenia, in loyalty to Russia, first among equals. “We had to build 70 statues of Lenin in order to erect one for Mesrop Mashtots,” Vardges Petrosyan, an Armenian writer cherished by the communist regime, had told me in 1991, the year the country became independent from the collapsing Soviet Union, exaggerating the memorial correlations between the Bolshevik revolutionary and Mashtots, the monk who created the Armenian alphabet in ad 405. 120

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“Հայաստան,” or “Hayasdan.” That was “Armenia” in Armenian, the script that Toros had on his red, blue, and orange plastic bracelet. He could not read it, but proclaimed it loudly not only on his wrist, but also at the modern office he had set up in his shop’s mezzanine. A remote-controlled blind, with a muralsized image of Mt. Ararat printed on it, descended over the window. On a long shelf, a collection of empty whiskey bottles was arranged in neat order, like schoolboys of yore aligned from shortest to tallest: there was a number of single malt labels but my eyes rested on a favorite, Jack Daniel’s Old Number 7. This second flashback to Tennessee in Adıyaman in the span of just a few days was remarkable, if only because it had brought back a personal memory. In 2000, I had just settled in Atlanta for work, and proximity to the Lynchburg distillery had tempted me to do a day trip with a fellow journalist and Jack Daniel’s aficionado to the home of the bittersweet bourbon. Lured in no small measure by the whiskey-maker’s black-and-white ads of laid-back people playing chess by old casks, we hit the road in an old Cadillac for the three-hour drive. There was a number of antiques stores around a small square selling all sorts of empty Jack Daniel’s bottles of all ages and labels, which we found curious if mildly macabre in their lifeless sadness. We sat down for lunch, and our curiosity grew exponentially when the waitress told us that they had no Old Number 7 nor any other sort of Jack at the diner, right across from the distillery. “Beer should be all right,” I suggested. “No,” she shook her head, a little embarrassed. “We only have soda or lemonade: Lynchburg is a dry county.” But on Toros’ shelf, this formation of empty whiskey bottles also had an implicit significance, if perhaps also unintended. Along with the Armenian tricolor and the Ararat mural, it had its place in this small corner of subversion in Turkey, especially in the era of Erdoğan, of alcohol spurned and denounced as anti-Islamic. It spoke not only of Toros’ place but also his religion for the past ten years: he had been baptized a Christian at 16 a decade ago. Like the other Armenians of Adıyaman I had met, he was well read and articulate, and his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and groomed goatee accentuated this impression. “When I was ten, my classmates signed up for a course of Qur’anic lessons with the imam, an after-school activity,” he said. “Just because my friends were going I enrolled, too, so I grabbed the big Qur’an we had at home and got ready to leave.” Baffled, his father asked him where he was headed: “You do nothing of the sort, that’s not for you.” Toros did not make much of it at the time, even though his father was an observant Muslim who did the namaz, the Islamic prayer with recitations and prostrations. But by the time he was 12, those same classmates began to taunt him with the epithet of dönme, not a word he knew. His mother told him it meant “convert,” and that “a very long time ago” they were Armenian but had become Muslim. 121

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“She did not tell me anything else: no massacres, no Genocide; just that, that we were originally Armenian.” Then he remembered his father’s prohibition to attend Qur’anic classes. Later, upon deeper soul-searching, he also understood why he felt different than his classmates, and never Muslim. He realized he had never set foot in a mosque. Like most people in Turkey who learned later in life about their Armenian origin, he wondered where Armenians came from, as migration had a central place in the Turkish narrative. But most of all, he kept wondering why Armenians were so hated, a question that still dogged him. Three years later, secretly from his family, he attended mass at the Assyrian church in Adıyaman and the liturgy captivated him, creating a sense of communion that induced him to be baptized at 16, also without telling his family. The secret came out after he finished school, when he was working in Istanbul: “If you return home I will kill you,” an older brother told Toros on the telephone; he had found out about Toros’ conversion by chance after filing some paperwork at the Civil Registry office in Adıyaman. Toros had to move out in a matter of hours from his sister’s apartment in Istanbul into that of a friend, who hosted him for a year and gave him work. “I knew it could happen, that I could get killed for this: I really feared for my life.” Toros is the only Christian of his clan of more than 350 members (unrelated to that of Barsum in Gerger). He was only reconciled with his family three years later, but by tacit agreement they never discuss religion. Yet he has dug up a little more about the family’s Islamicization. The first to convert in the clan was his great-grandfather, Bedros, in the early 1960s, late in his life. Toros’ uncles remembered that their father, the son of Bedros, had taken them for their baptism at the Adıyaman Assyrian church. But after Bedros’ conversion the rest of the family followed suit. A parishioner at Mor Petrus Mor Pavlus, the Assyrian church in the city of Adıyaman, Toros said that the Assyrians pressured him to become Assyrian and to marry an Assyrian woman. When he decided to get baptized, he received the application for change of religion from the Assyrian Church. “Why do you say you are Armenian if you are coming to an Assyrian Church?” they asked him. “I tell them that I am Armenian, because I am Armenian, what do you want me to say?” The extra­ordinary vitality implicit in this tale of the two oldest peoples of this land still engaged in competition, millennia and a shared Genocide later, may have escaped him: in 1915, Turks and Kurds exterminated more than 750,000 Assyrians, or two-thirds of their population in the Ottoman Empire, with the survivors deported and scattered around the globe. In the common history of the Armenian and Assyrian Christians that goes back to the second century, and has gone through the whole gamut of relations in the Christian era, the presence of the sister church in Adıyaman allowed its Armenian members to preserve their religion, if not their denomination. 122

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Toros’ clan was originally from Şamşat, the ancient capital of Commagene. Turkey flooded the city in 1989 under the Atatürk Dam, a rare instance of deeds becoming metaphors for a country built on the obliteration of history. Until their Islamicization, the clan’s families were fair game for Muslim neighbors who attacked and burned their homes to drive them out, in a land grab by tried and tested methods. Conversion improved their lot a little, at least as far as their security and the safety of their real estate was concerned, but earned them the stigma of dönme, in addition to the time-honored one of gâvur. If the hidden Armenians’ experience in Turkey is anything go by, it may take more than three generations for a family to rid itself of the title of “infidel.” “When we go out to a tea garden with my other Armenian friends, four or five people all in all but not more, the police always come—always—and they sit around, at a nearby table; they are sometimes plainclothes,” he said. Kahta is a small city and everybody knows everybody. If it all sometimes sounded paranoid, and we have to allow for misleading impressions, I took as the litmus test Ferit’s story about the police chief inquiring in Ankara about the high number of Armenians in Gerger: a mathematician uninvolved in any kind of partisanship, he did not hide his Armenian roots yet considered himself Kurdish, and was the only one in his family to cultivate a close relationship with his Christian cousins, while himself remaining Muslim with no apparent inclination to join the Church. Well liked by everybody and on good terms with the local police thanks to his family’s store, he had no reason to suffer from persecution complex, and he did not: he knew for a fact that they were under surveillance. Taken at face value, the police watch on the Armenians of Adıyaman pointed to acute insecurity on the part of the authorities. They distrusted the remnants of a terrorized minority as much, perhaps, as the latter feared them. The state knew the numbers of Islamicized Armenians—not only by the secret number codes, but also from readily available Civil Registry documents like the one that exposed Toros’ conversion to his unsuspecting brother during a routine errand. Outside the Turkish government, nobody can know for sure how many Islamicized Armenians there are, but the conduct of the Adıyaman police may be an indication of population size: surely the police would not bother with three or four Christian families that fit in a living room, or their merchant cousins who were Muslim. But even allowing that half the population of Gerger may be of Armenian descent, thinking that 1,500 Islamicized farmers and merchants can pose a threat to Turkey says a lot more about the authorities’ paranoia than it does about these tiny minorities’ capacity for subversion. Toros’ business cards were framed in the red, blue, and orange of the Armenian flag. “They would not recognize it in 1,000 years,” he laughed. Until the year before, two large Armenian flags on metallic poles had flanked the entrance to his store, a move that would send shivers down the spine of an 123

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Istanbul Armenian, let alone one from Anatolia. “Nobody knew what it was,” he said. “Nobody cared, and I just took them down when the colors faded.” National colors were not the most serious problem, however. “I usually have colleagues from the neighboring shops over for lunch,” he said. “We share a large tray of tava, and then take a small break for tea and cigarettes.” On one such cigarette break, they were discussing the violence in Syria: I told them, “If your imam declares jihad and orders you to kill infidels, or Turkey falls into turmoil, you would surely come and knife me.” We were smoking by the garage entrance after food I had offered. We are all more or less the same age and get along. You would expect your friends to tell you, “No, how can you think that? We would do no such thing,” or things like that. But no: they stayed silent, they looked down or away, but not in shame or embarrassment. They just finished smoking, and returned to work. None of them was shocked; my supposition angered none of them. I don’t know that they would, but I don’t know that they would not, either. None of them said, “No, we would not do such a thing.”

This was not a portrait of evil but rather of a liquid morality or lack thereof, like water taking the shape of its course or stopping before hard edges. Theirs was perhaps a variation on the state of the soul of Turkish servicemen observed a century earlier by Lawrence of Arabia, disinhibited by the dictates of our time and conscience against seeing in the particular a projection of the whole: The conscripts took their fate unquestioningly: resignedly, after the custom of Turkish peasantry. They were like sheep, neutrals without vice or virtue. Left alone, they did nothing, or perhaps sat dully on the ground. Ordered to be kind, and without haste they were as good friends and generous enemies as might be found. Ordered to outrage their fathers or disembowel their mothers, they did it as calmly as they did nothing, or did well.13

All this to Toros meant that he needed to go. He dreamed about settling in Armenia but thought that doing business there could be daunting. “My wife has to be Armenian,” he had resolved. “One hundred percent Armenian.” Then he sounded out Germany or Canada as possible new horizons for him. Australia or anywhere else might work just as well. Turkey, he said, was no place for Armenians; it was a ticking bomb, just like it always was.     

An Adıyaman friend from the clan of Barsum, V., had introduced me to Toros only a few weeks earlier, at the Feast of the Holy Mother of God in Vakıf, the last village left in Turkey with an entirely Armenian population, in the shadow 124

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of the storied mountain of Musa Ler. The religious festivity, followed by partying into the night, was especially popular with the pockets of Armenians that remained in the Anatolian interior, who converged at this site a short drive from the Mediterranean. V. had taken me along to breakfast at Adriana’s, a Greek Orthodox friend in Samandağ, the district capital, a few bus stops down from Vakıf. Adriana’s home was a hive of female activity, with three generations of women running around, entering and leaving the porch in an odd disparity of garments from jeans and T-shirts to silk dresses and elaborate makeup, while a few men were paralyzed by confusion, including Adriana’s brother, who was getting married in a couple of hours as we feasted at leisure on the bountiful breakfast table laid out by Adriana’s mother, splendidly unconcerned about the wedding as she tended to her hospitality duties toward V. They described themselves as Arabized Greeks whereas neighbors, including some Armenians at Vakıf, thought of them as Hellenized Arabs or Syriacs. Yet the Antiochian Greeks were perhaps best described as Levantines, an indigenous people that had assimilated passing civilizations into their singular identity. No vestige of Greek remained in their speech, which was Arabic and so were their songs, to the tunes an accordionist squeezed out of the swelling and folding bellows as he led an exultant procession of guests to the church past Adriana’s home. The musician and the revelers marched along a path that cut through a thick grove of orange trees that could stand comparison with those of Botticelli, or were just an unassuming instance of perfection in the geometry of Nature. As the morning conversation turned from food to languages to politics to hometowns, among other urgent matters prior to the noon wedding, between cigarettes and coffees Adriana remembered an anecdote she thought worth sharing with V. In 2009 she was working in the town of Besni, in Adıyaman; during a transaction at the bank the cashier mixed up their IDs and gave hers to the other customer she was serving: they realized the error and exchanged them back. Yet when Adriana was leaving the bank, the other customer approached her and told her that she had seen on her ID that she was Christian. “Mine shows I am a Muslim, but I am a Christian, too,” the other customer said. “I am Armenian.” They exchanged pleasantries and bid each other farewell. Yet from the particulars described by Adriana, V. recognized the other customer; they turned out to be cousins from the clan of Barsum. Now married into the clan, this cousin led a mostly uneventful life in Adıyaman. In 1991, this cousin, Asya, studied accounting at the University of Urfa, but she often visited her family in Antap, where her father was a branch manager for T. C. Ziraat Bankası, a state bank. V. did not know if Asya was ever involved with the PKK, but she was friends with students who were members of the 125

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Kurdish rebel movement, and one of them came to visit her, or to hide at the family home in Antap: Asya’s 15-year-old brother, the only one at home, opened the door to this female militant. Asya and her father arrived ten minutes later, from a visit to friends; another ten minutes later, the police came knocking on the door. The PKK woman drew her handgun—nobody knows who shot first when the door opened but she fell dead, and Asya, her brother, and their father were arrested and brought to the Emniyet Müdürlüğü (Security Directorate) in Antap. While her father was being interrogated in the presence of the directorate chief, an officer walked in with an important piece of information. The police had just been told that the detainees were Armenian: the family suspects a neighbor gave them away. “Why did you not wipe them out?” blurted out the chief. “He was Ramazan Akyürek,” V. said. Akyürek, whose surname translates as “White Heart,” was arrested in February 2015 for his role in the plot to murder Hrant Dink. A former head of the country’s National Police Intelligence, in 2007 he was the police chief of Trabzon, or Trebizonda by its Greek name, the hometown of Dink’s assassin, Ogün Samast, and has been charged with criminal association, abuse of power, and tampering with evidence. Rare cases like this one, in which the usually apolitical Armenians appeared to be implicated with Kurdish rebels, were like finding the holy grail for Turkish conspiracy theorists, who saw in them the confirmation of their long-running suspicions that the PKK uprising had been orchestrated by hidden Armenians. A widespread myth is that the bodies of many PKK combatants had been found to be uncircumcised, which was therefore deemed sufficient demonstration that they were Armenian, even though no proof has ever been produced to substantiate these claims other than public denunciations by the police and loyalist Kurds. The journalist Mustafa Akyol found out that in a Kurdish village of korucus, the rural guards on Turkey’s pay, PKK militants were indiscriminately referred to as “sünnetsizler” (“uncircumcised ones”) or “gâvurlar” (“unbelievers”), synonyms for “Armenian.”14 Yet the entangled branches of the clan of Barsum had grown so wide and apart that it encompassed almost the entire spectrum of political allegiances in Turkey, including the extremes. Tovmas, a younger member of one of the families, had told me a vague story of conflict in 1988 between the residents of a village entirely inhabited by the clan, and far-right militants aided by the Turkish army, with the curious element that the attackers included at least one clan member too. Two relatives of the clan of Barsum separately told me that the fighting was simply started by Kurdish tenants who had decided to stop paying for the plots they were renting, in a bid to appropriate the Armenians’ lands as in the bad old days. As nobody had witnessed the clashes they were not able to describe them, but one of them knew of gunfights on the surrounding hillsides 126

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for weeks. The residents of this village, C., had told their relatives that it was not a good time for me to visit in the summer of 2014, because it was very hot. In Tovmas’ account, however, the clashes, which had lasted on and off for a month, had been a proxy for the war between the Turkish state and the PKK, which in his account had come to support the villagers in their resistance and had been able to repel the attack. Some members of the clan of Barsum in the village were Christian, affiliated with the Assyrian Orthodox Church, and a few were Muslim, even though the latter were only nominally so: “They do the Islamic rites in the village, but when they visited Istanbul they attended mass at the Armenian church.” One of the defenders of the village was Zia, also a clan member, who went down three years later fighting for the PKK in the province of Mardin. On the attackers’ side there were extreme right-wing militants, including some that later joined the far-right and Islamist group called Hizbullah. One of them was a member of the clan of Barsum, who was still serving a prison sentence at the time of writing after Hizbullah fell out with the government. To call Hizbullah “Turkish” would be misnomer: a product of Kurdish Islamist student movements in the 1970s, it developed into an armed group in the early 1990s, but suffered from an identity crisis as it sought to reconcile Kurdish nationalist aspirations with fraternal relations with the Turks as brothers in Islam. These contradictions were overcome thanks to its enmity with the PKK, which in turn led Hizbullah to do Turkey’s bidding. This Sunni group is little known outside Turkey and often mistaken for the homonymous Shiʿi militant group of southern Lebanon: they share the name that in Arabic means “Party of God” but are in rival camps within Islam. It was not only left-wing Kurds who suspected Hizbullah of being the brainchild of the Turkish “deep state” in its offensive against Kurdish separatists. But the many heads of the racist hydra do not always bark in accord. For concerned Kemalists, as standard-bearers of Atatürk’s secular state, the Islamistinclined Hizbullah was a smokescreen for hidden Armenians and Assyrians: hence there are blog posts that identify the group’s leader Hüseyin Velioğlu as the grandchild of an Assyrian or Armenian grandmother called Suse; or that the grandfather, Astur, and grandmother, Kute, of Mahsum Barut, head of the military wing of Hizbullah, were Armenian. Whether this is internet drivel or true information is less relevant than the causality of evil associated with an Armenian or an Assyrian origin, even if it is only one grandmother, whose story we do not know.     

“Barbar,” Arsen said. “Barbarians,” he repeated. It was a noun not an adjective, something he avoided in his speech, a trait I had also observed among his other 127

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relatives of the clan of Barsum. Arsen had displayed a photograph of his grandfather on the coffee table, by the bouquet of pink and blue roses that burst out from a large vase into two separate and almost equal hemispheres. On a taller table behind it, a punch of red roses shot up copiously from a narrow vase and stood dominant over that end of the room, flanked by two easy chairs, with Arsen in one and his cousin Yeprem in the other. From the height of the wall, the portrait of Archbishop Mor Gregorius Melke in his red cassock presided over the home: red in the vestments of the Assyrian clergy represents the martyrdom of Christ. The primate of the Assyrian Church of Adıyaman was on a throne crowned by a trefoil cross, with an aura worked into the blurred background of the photo. Red was the minority color yet the one that ruled the majority of the weaker ones, in a room where beige paint and the pastel shades of summer clothing prevailed. The worn picture of Arsen’s grandfather, Ali Amca, also had a grainy background, with red stains over a hazy, pale green, like a poppy field, perhaps the image of an artistic backdrop like those displayed in the photo studios of old. Ali Amca was wearing a brown square skullcap atop his large forehead and had a long beard of tidy grooming. But his eyebrows were autumnal, and his eyes had shrunken into opaque pearls of an uncertain gray under heavy eyelids, ready to fall. The photo had been taken shortly before his death. While Yeprem retold the story of Ali Amca—or Minas—that I had heard for the first time at the Riflemaker’s home, Arsen looked on with the concentration of a surgeon from behind his wire-rimmed eyeglasses. At every silence, he said “Barbar,” the one-man choir with a one-word chorus line to the tragedy of his grandfather. Ali Amca, or Uncle Ali, was the name by which Minas was known as family patriarch after his marriage with Sultana Maraam, an Armenian woman from the village of Peşvar, near Gerger, with whom he had five children. Life may last a blink to most of us, but to Ali Amca the minutes it took him to strangle his brother ticked for eight decades until his death on March 1, 1995: he would revisit the bend of the river in his waking hours and dreams, his grandson said. And the Euphrates that ran near his home left him, Cain against his will, with no escape from himself. In 1991, a neighbor on his deathbed had sent for Ali Amca. Atonement in Islam may determine fate in the afterlife, which is why Muslims seek forgiveness prior to death, asking of their kin and neighbors that they will have no claims against them in the court of God, with a formula rendered as “hakkımı helal et” in Turkish, an idiom that can be approximately translated as “give me your blessing.” It had a residue of pre-Islamic beliefs among the Turkic hordes that swept across the Armenian kingdoms and other countries in Asia Minor, for whom fate after death was determined by the way we died, and not the manner 128

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in which we had lived: demise in dishonor could unmake the salvation earned in a life of integrity. In the 1980s, the dying man had stolen from Ali Amca a pair of silver tongs and a large metallic pot that was the only vessel from which he drank, the sole object left from his childhood before the Genocide. Ali Amca had not spoken to him again after the theft: “I will never look at your face again.” Neighbors would borrow Ali Amca’s large pot during the kerge zamanı, or vintage time in early autumn, when the peasants of Adıyaman, Urfa, and other parts of Turkey prepared the pekmez, a syrup made with the must of grapes. “Give me your blessing,” begged Ömer Sağlık, a nephew of the man that had saved Ali Amca during the Genocide. “Give me back what is mine, and I will give you my blessing,” Ali Amca had responded. In his death throes, the neighbor refused while he screamed in pain as cancer ate up the last of his life, in the presence not only of Ali Amca and his son, Arsen’s father Celal, but also the dying man’s wife and children. “Then you do not have my blessing,” Ali Amca told the man, whose agony ended minutes after he chose impunity over redemption. “He gave up his life at that moment,” Arsen said. Ömer’s family knows and acknowledges that these items belong to Ali Amca, and keep them in a large hemp sack known to Celal and Arsen, yet the former do not offer to return them and the latter do not demand them: “We have moved on,” Arsen said. The point, which I was missing until explained, was that the entitlement of Muslim majorities in Anatolia against Armenians persisted through the 1990s: anything of Armenian ownership, be it silverware, women, or lives, was seen as spoils, and its taking was sanctioned in custom if not in theory, on the assumption that they were unbelievers, regardless of their conversion. Celal, the third son of Ali Amca, had led his family’s return to Christianity. Oddly, this happened by way of a mosque he built: he raised funds for its construction among his clan and neighbors, also converted Armenians, right outside their home. It came be known in Gerger as Gâvurların Cami (Infidels’ Mosque). Other Muslims did not worship there. We roared with laughter at the kettles calling the pots black, especially at the thought that quite a few of these deriders, more papist than the Pope, were themselves of Armenian origin. “So, am I an infidel?” said the exasperated Celal one day a decade ago, during an argument with a local. “Well, I am,” he said, in the retelling of Arsen, as his father had suffered a stroke a few years ago and spoke with great difficulty. Celal registered as a Christian that same week at the Civil Registry and became affiliated with the Assyrian Church, taking his family along with him and coming clean, as in the intimacy of their home they had never ceased to consider themselves Armenian, and hence Christian. 129

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Celal made up for his speech impairment with a wide and innocent smile, and eyes of onyx intensity that lit up with his high spirits. His son Arsen was classic Barsum in features and character traits, but Celal was different, as his mother was from another clan. Frowned upon in the West and discouraged by the Armenian Church, inbreeding within the clan appeared to have honed bearing and mind—bibliophilia ran strong among them and the majority of their youth had pursued university degrees—but also a penchant for irony, usually subtle but also mordant when called for. Fecund intermarriage after the Genocide had developed a physical subtype among these Anatolian Armenians, with straight noses, angular faces that narrowed from a broad forehead to a sharp chin, and almond-shaped eyes, closer to the Assyrian ones of the Lamassu statues, the winged creatures with the body of an eagle and the crowned head of a man, more oval than the round Byzantine ones of medieval miniatures but with more pronounced curves than the slanted Far East ones. Yet a streak of ocular complaints seemed to have been passed down the generations as well; Ali Amca’s aqueous eyes in the photo perhaps revealed signs of cataracts or more likely trachoma, which in the early twentieth century ravaged south-east Turkey, with an incidence of 70 percent in the population. So bad was it in Adıyaman that at the time the province was known as “the country of the blind.” Even within the first decades after the Genocide, there were instances of Armenians recognizing others’ original hometowns by their looks. The political prisoner Kevork Halajian, in his fascinating account of the life of Armenians in post-Genocide Anatolia—even more of a feat as he compiled it while in detention for three years in the central prison in Sivas—recognized in the face of a guard the features of an Armenian family from Erzincan: Halit stood guard holding the gun and did not allow me to move freely. Every time my eyes met Halit’s severe gaze, I would see before me the radiant face of Kurken Efendi Lazian, one of the noted personalities of Erzincan, and it was that resemblance that compelled me to embark on this adventure […] I had doubts about the Armenian-hating Turk’s identity.

Halit was, indeed, from Erzincan; he had been born in an Armenian village called Gülüce that had been repopulated by Muslims after the massacres. The prison guard was a Genocide orphan adopted by a Muslim family that had told him that the gâvurs had killed his parents. At the risk of his life, Halajian had persuaded Halit, who abhorred Armenians, to look into the history of his village; through acquaintances he had found out he was Armenian, as Halajian had suspected, and had decided to escape to Syria. “If I stay here, every minute I will think about killing a dog,” Halit had said, using a derogatory term for Turks in current usage in conversational Turkish.15 130

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Regional subtypes can still be recognized a century after the Genocide, if the word of this writer can be taken for it, and only for the sake of sharing the anecdote, with no further claim: while shopping in the Diamond District of New York in 2011, I correctly guessed that a woman tending her family’s jewelry stand had her origins in Zeytun; her thick setting with wide hips, short stature, and aquiline face and nose, with somewhat hooded eyes set back in the socket, resembled that of other women from Zeytun I knew, including relatives on my mother’s side, a large clan which this woman knew but was unrelated to. Still, the showcase prize goes to an Armenian merchant I had encountered by chance at the store of his Palestinian in-laws in Santiago, Chile, in 2012. Originally from Aleppo, he took a glance at me as we sipped coffee on low stools of Moorish style, and had told me within ten minutes of meeting: “You must be half from Kilis and half from Urfa,” identifying correctly my paternal origins, if not my mother’s side. My paternal grandfather, Avedis, was from Kilis, and his wife, Azniv, from Hromkla, in the province of Urfa.     

Arsen was going to drive us to Nefsi Gerger to complete the story of Ali Amca. We were to meet the grandson of the man who had opened his home to Minas, later Ali Amca, as he sought refuge from the Ottoman butchers. “They are Turks,” Arsen had told me about the family of his grandfather’s savior. I waited with Yeprem outside the vacant Infidels’ Mosque for Arsen to bring the car, a customized Tofaş sedan, the Turkish version of the Fiat 131, olive green with tinted windows and lowered to reptile proximity to the ground, like a street racer. Arsen walked into the home and came out with a rifle that he loaded in the trunk: I asked him if his uncle, the Riflemaker, had made it, intending the elliptical question as an indirect expression of concern. “This one is automatic,” Arsen said with an enigmatic smile, in a scene and script that I could not make much of, unlike perhaps Tarantino, whose Pulp Fiction I had thought overrated until then. On the passenger side, my eyes were glued to the mirror: the overtaking cars and the passed landscape merged on its surface, a curious space where the past coexisted with the future. I steeled myself for the rest of the plot when a police patrol showed up suddenly in the rear view, but then passed us in a few seconds. Nefsi Gerger, the current incarnation of Arsameia on the Euphrates, was now a village of some two dozen homes in the shadow of the Commagenian fortress that guarded the river crossing. Parthian soldiers had traversed it two millennia ago on their march to Syria; and a kingdom that’s now part of Turkey had advised Rome, its ally and Western hegemon, about the enemy troop movements, but the Romans harbored doubts about their oriental vassal, 131

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suspecting Antiochus of double-dealing them. East of the Mediterranean, history had a way of feeling very old and eventful, if not at its most original. Loran bey almost jumped from his low stool upon seeing Arsen, embracing him with joy multiplied by the surprise he expressed in a bold, singing voice, tempered by notes of melancholy that so often seeped through speech in villages of south-east Turkey. His white hair was neatly combed and his brush mustachios carefully trimmed, as hair grooming is paramount for men throughout Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, and not entirely unrelated to Qur’anic prescriptions. He had blue eyes, one with a slightly dilated iris that hinted at incipient ocular damage. We did not speak about his professional background or education, yet his poise and speech, refined in an understated manner, suggested a richer experience than that of a farmer. His home was right beneath the fort, built on a cliff of almost vertical walls that induced vertigo seen from below its height of some 200 meters. It may have been a citadel, and before that a shrine built by the Armenian king Arsames in the third century bc to the goddess Argandene, an otherwise unknown local deity. The town’s population had swelled with a large Armenian migration in the eleventh century of the Christian era, but had contracted into a village at the foot of the castle after the Mamluk conquest in the fourteenth century. It had remained in that diminished state since. As Loran bey ushered us in, I stood in shock: he had sat on the sedir, the wide Turkish banquettes with kilim cushions, right below a framed portrait of Apo, the nom de guerre of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, in military green shirt and his looks youthful, the hair and mustachios still coal black. It was a phenomenal sight in itself, but in the house of an ethnically Turkish family it stretched belief. This was subversion of the first order, even in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of Turkey at the time. His family was Kurdish, Loran bey said: “But this was a Turkish village; Abdül Hamid brought in a few members of the Hamidiye Cavalry here in the 1890s as village korucus.” Over time, in an odd case of reverse assimilation, the majority Turks in the village had Kurdified and become speakers of Zazaki, the locally spoken language. “Back then, they were already moving korucus around, doing demographic engineering, imagine!” He was comparing them to the modern korucus, or village guards, who fought the PKK. “There are Turks in this village that are more nationalist Kurds than the Kurds themselves!” They were Kurdish, he repeated. But he did not care, for he could have been Armenian or Jewish or Turkish or any nationality, for man is man, and it was as a socialist that he supported Öcalan and his project to turn Turkey into a decentralized democratic confederation, the latest stage in the evolution of Öcalan’s thought, as he had concluded that it was a brutal waste of lives and 132

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time to forge a separate homeland for the Kurds in Turkey, of uncertain borders that would have to be drawn with a lot of blood. PKK supporters displayed remarkable discipline in proclaiming their conviction about this plan, modest in its utopia, yet it would take a few minutes of talk in confidence and a couple of revolutionary songs to exclaim in my presence, “Biji Kürdistan!” (“Long live Kurdistan!”), while we deferred for an uncertain future a talk on the overlaps of the maps they imagined with the Western Armenian provinces. This reminded me somewhat of Furex, a patron at the bistro in the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux that Orwell frequented in interwar Paris: “a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk.”16 As encounters with Kurds were usually fueled with no other stimulants but tea, tobacco, and music, the political conversion was a jolly affair, and they shed the drabness of socialism for the nationalism of flags and frontiers in jovial spirit if the company was good, not forgetting altogether the bits about the brotherhood of peoples. Not Loran bey, however. His discourse was consistent, and was as unaffected as his conviction. In the same plain language, he told us the story of how Minas had met his grandfather, Ramazan Ağa Sağlık, the chief of Nefsi Gerger. “There were so many corpses on the Euphrates that the river had stopped flowing,” said Loran bey, raising his hand in a gesture to indicate tall piles. “You could not see the river,” the elders remembered. Ramazan Ağa was returning with a small caravan of merchants from Urfa when he encountered Minas near Hilvan, on the eastern side of the Euphrates: he was probably coming from Olbiş, where he had run after his brother’s death. But as the extermination squads were still roaming the country to kill all Armenian males over the age of 16, he had escaped again. Loran bey did not know if his grandfather and Arsen’s were acquaintances from the past: “The ağa of Hilvan wanted Minas to stay in his dominion but he chose to come to Nefsi Gerger with my grandfather, who raised him alongside his other children.” But the gendarmerie got wind of Minas’ presence at Ramazan Ağa’s home. They probed produce sacks with their bayonets but there was one leather sandbag the homeowner did not allow them to approach. A standoff must have ensued, the details of which have been lost. In the end, the soldiers left emptyhanded as Minas was hidden inside that sack. One day in late 1915, while Ramazan Ağa was in the oven room, his younger brother Hüseyin, Minas, and a neighbor waited for lunch inside the house. “Hüseyin, give me this child so I can cut him up at Kuba,” said the visitor, Sileyman, of the Rehim tribe. He was speaking in Zazaki. “There was still a fatwa that promised paradise to Muslims who killed three Armenians,” Loran bey said. Kuba, the valley that he envisioned as the sacrifice site, was nearby. 133

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Minas had just arrived among them and at the time did not speak Zazaki. But he understood what was afoot and ran out to see Ramazan Ağa: “My grandfather dropped the şofra on the floor when Minas told him.” Ramazan Ağa confronted his visitor. “You are eating shit,” responded Sileyman, a regional idiom that indicates a bad decision. “I did once,” Ramazan agreed. “I allowed a shit-eating man into my house, now how would I allow myself to hand this boy to that man?” Ramazan Ağa expelled Sileyman: “He was threatening my grandfather, ‘I am a strong man, how come you don’t let me,’ but after that Ali stayed with us,” said Loran, referring to Minas by the new name in his second life. Loran bey’s father was also called Ramazan, in memory of his father, who died before his birth: a neighbor murdered Ramazan Ağa in a bad argument. “It happened, he was a sorry fellow who lived a few houses down, God knows what they were fighting about,” said Loran bey. “He was not a bad man; he just lost his head in a moment of rage,” Loran bey said about his grandfather’s assassin: “We have forgiven and forgotten.” Not only poverty, but also the cycles of deaths unleashed by blood feuds had pushed families out of Nefsi Gerger and brought down the number of households from 75 to 27 now. “People have been killed over a missing chicken, and neighbors would alert the police: ‘You have to do something, they are going to kill each other!’ but the police would say there was nothing they could do until something happened.” The reason, he said, was not negligence; it had to do with the foundations of Turkey itself, and it explained why Armenians were still afraid, even after forcible Islamicization. “This country needs violence,” Loran bey said. “Otherwise, the justification for a massive army and police force would fall apart, and so would Turkey and the Turkish state with it.” Hatred fueled it all. “All that blood feeds the Turkish tanks and gunships.” Weapons inspired fear, and fear held Turkey together. Whether his eloquence was natural or acquired outside the confines of this village, it showed how far the political education of Kurds had come since the PKK appeared on the scene in 1984. Socialist by conviction as he had identified himself, at no point in the conversation did he stray into the dogma-laden tirades of other leftists in Turkey’s polarized political camps: not once did he whip the dead word of doctrine in support of his ideas. If he had read Marx, he was not showing it or boasting about it, as those who have willingly undergone the ordeal are apt to; Loran bey instead had distilled ideology into a worldview that had a place for everybody, just as they were and who they were, built on our common humanity beneath the accidents of our birth and thoughts. This theory has circulated for at least one era and maybe more, proclaimed today by billions and the great religions. And yet it still sounded revolutionary anywhere, and especially at that very moment of 2014 in this land of metamorphosis, a 134

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speck of Commagene and extinct civilizations of sculpted gods coming alive at the foot of a fortress that had outlived its purpose, a body that had survived the soul. It was still a misleading first impression, for the soul was still alive, but nobody listened. Loran bey walked us to the gâvur çeşmesi (infidels’ water fountain). They believed it had been built in the 1700s. Two girls, the spitting image of each other if unlike in age and height, were filling two buckets, and turned their worried black eyes, large and round as their curls, to the strangers in our group. Somewhat reassured by our local companion, the older smiled for the camera, but the younger broke into shy weeping and a yodeling lamentation in Zazaki, mellow and soothing as a goat kid’s, and she scurried away from Loran bey’s hugging arms and embraced her sister amid our chorus of laughter. “They have of your blood in them,” he told Arsen, Yeprem, and I, as we saw them walking away, holding hands tightly and bent sideways under the weight of the buckets. “Their great-grandmother was Armenian.” The ethnicity of an ancestor of these little girls four generations back was still remembered by him, a man of a principled family that had passed the test of Genocide on the right side. Others would remember, too, and it was hard to decide whether in Turkey that was a good thing as opposed to silence, the embryo of oblivion. We made a brief detour through Olbiş, the historical stronghold of the clan of Barsum. The rump of a church, with two surviving fragments of walls the height of a fence, was a hole on the ground. The village looked only marginally better than the published descriptions of the devastated Anatolian interior in the 1920s, after Armenians had been extirpated: poverty was not to be seen in people’s dignified appearance, but the smiles of a few men that welcomed us opened into a red cave of gum line, with the loose ruins of some teeth. A couple of black goats moved away from a trough at the approach of a scrawny horse: the white fur, its gloss long gone, wrapped the arches of its rib cage. The trough was outside the mosque, which was shaded by trees. A coffin with only one pole remaining lay at the far end of the green wall of the arched entrance, looking unusable: in Islamic funerals, coffins are carried by pall bearers to the grave, where the dead are deposited wrapped in the kafan, a white shroud. Amid the despondency of a century, another water fountain built by the Armenians in the 1800s rose intact from a depression—an arched portico the size of a church entrance at the end of a descending slope, beneath which water flowed through a much smaller arch. A woman was washing just-sheared lamb wool in washbowls. Four young girls were filling water into plastic drums and loading them into saddle cases attached to their donkey. The girls looked about the same age but two had their heads covered, indicating that they had reached puberty. As curious children ogled Arsen’s car, the imam walked up to us, shyly, 135

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a soft-spoken hunchback. Olbiş used to be an Armenian village, with none left: “A fatwa said that if you killed seven Armenians you would go to heaven.” On the way back to Gerger we stopped at Arsen’s olive plantation, a grove of young trees arranged in even rows and at arm’s length from each other. It was the largest plot of Western Armenian land owned by a Christian Armenian that I had seen until that moment, a small plateau defined by a cliff that overlooked the Euphrates. The river snaked through heath and barren land that crept into the patches of vegetation, short and bent into tortured shapes but verdant in the fight of their lives against the elements. Then we hit the road again. Arsen pointed to a valley on my right. It was Demir Kapı, or Iron Gate, which locals knew by the name of Kuba: “It was there that Sileyman, of the Rehim tribe, wanted to sacrifice Ali Amca for the fatwa.” We drove back to Yeprem’s home on Infidel Street, and a little later Arsen continued on to his place, some ten minutes away, outside the Infidels’ Mosque.     

“In the West you chat during meals, and linger on and on, and fill the glasses anew and go on talking.” Yeprem’s father, Yusuf, ambushed me with his comment, for I thought I disguised with competence my discomfort then, and every time I had lunch or supper in the Eastern style of silent eating. It was a raw act, lacking in the introspection that readings from the Gospels and sacred art induced in the refectory of a monastery. Yusuf ’s little irony was welcome to break the crudeness of an animal act, its joy limited to the palate, which did not appear to bother anybody but myself. One such animated dinner à la européenne at relatives in Istanbul in 1975 had proved memorable for Yusuf, who was visiting with his father and was 18 at the time. His cousin had turned on a fantastic device he had not seen before: a video player. “That’s how rich they were,” he said of the appliance that only the very wealthy had at the time in Turkey, the same year that Sony had introduced the Betamax. What he saw on the screen was as exceptional. It showed a priest in black cassock and tunic, covered in the veghar, a cowl, dome-shaped and pointed, covered in a black flannel tunic that falls to the eyebrows and then to the waistline, a vestment piece of the celibate orders in the Armenian Church introduced in the eleventh century to symbolize denial of all things worldly. “Why are you watching these gâvurs, cousin?” Her response was as astonished: “These are not infidels; they are Armenian, too.” It was the beginning of a schism within Yusuf ’s family. His father had hidden from his children that they were of Armenian origin, so when Yusuf made the revelation to his seven other siblings after their return to Gerger, his father was enraged to such a murderous pitch that Yusuf fled home for two 136

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days. “I was convinced he was going to kill me.” Seventeen years after that trip of discovery, he was baptized at Mor Petrus Mor Pavlus, the Assyrian Orthodox Church of Adıyaman. In 1992 he also married Ezcan, a fellow Armenian of Assyrian confession from their clan. Half of Yusuf ’s brothers and sisters are married to Muslims of Armenian descent and the other half to Armenian Christians: “Four and four.” His contacts with the family that remained Muslim are sporadic or nonexistent, in a drama of conversion and reconversion from Apostolic Armenian to Islam to Orthodox Assyrian that runs through the different branches of the clan. An employee of the Gerger Fire Department, Yusuf ’s responsibilities included distributing water in the fire truck in the drought-stricken town at the edge of the Euphrates enlarged by the Atatürk Dam. The paradoxes and irony of a fireman distributing water as opposed to putting out fires in a city by a river, prompted a conversation on water as an illness agent or perhaps a vehicle of divine ire, as he hinted in obscure undertones with talk of “the massacre disease,” as the elders called it in its Kurdish name of “nexaşiya katle,” which killed off Kurds in droves in the years after the Genocide. “It was just typhus,” said Ezcan with her back to us as she washed the dishes, dispelling the ghosts of godly damnation that Yusuf and I were conjuring at the table. She left me with a sensation that was very similar to déjà vu through her remarkable resemblance to a dear friend of mine and a cousin of hers from the clan of Barsum, in a degree of kinship too close and afar to explain with one word. “They were dying of typhus, these were days of massacre and famine; people were dying every day,” she said without turning from the basin. The Euphrates had turned on Gerger in the past. In 1163 the city was flooded, and the monks at the Mor Barsuma Monastery climbed to the higher parts of their mill. They had a wine cask that did not spill, and even the mill’s lamp, which floated on the water, did not blow out. But the flood caused a big epidemic: One Turk came to the village of Alios in the confines of Gerger and said, “Find out who is the first one to have died of this epidemic.” They inquired and learned it, opened his grave and saw that, after four months, he had not yet decomposed. His eyes were open, and so was his mouth, a span and four inches. The part of the shroud that covered his head and chest was worn, and the sides of his face looked as if cut with a razor. The Turk closed his mouth and stuck a large nail into it. Nobody died after that day. That year there was also an epidemic at Severek. More than one thousand people died from October to March. The population of four Kurdish villages in the county perished with their women and children. People would be ill for only two days and died.17

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That night I spread the döşek on the rooftop—a custom in the rainless summers of Mesopotamia—beneath the sky that spread over these mountains and persevering trees, which Siranush had addressed in her secret excursions to speak alone and cry out in Armenian to her little Kurdish son, to the rocks and to the woods, telling stories that are now lost to us. It was only in the small villages of historical Armenia that I had begun to learn the profiles of constellations, for the nocturnal lights of big cities dull the cosmos to a scattering of solitary stars. Yet as poor testament to my self-teaching of astronomy, I was unable to find the belt that would betray the outline of Orion, named Hayk in the Armenian tradition after the mythical founder of the eponymous nation, for Armenians refer to themselves by the name of Hai, and he is so identified in the Armenian translation of the Bible: “Can you bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Hayk?”18 Man cannot tether the constellations: that verse from the Book of Job poses by way of a rhetorical question our inability to dictate the movement of the stars or determine the good seasons and those of misfortune, while the righteous Job is put through ordeals as the result of a bet between Satan and God to test his faith. Night revealed in its splendor our powerless condition: “Nor do the stars appear and disappear without a schedule,” as Grigor Narekatsi, a tenth-century Armenian mystic, said in the Book of Sorrow.19 But in 1916, a youthful member of the Armenian volunteer forces that fought back the Turks had returned tormented from the ephemeral liberation of Western Armenia as the Genocide was underway, and proposed at the end of a long narrative poem, “to put out, and kindle the extinguished stars.” In his “Dantesque legend,” Yeghishe Charents endowed men with the divine mission, if not the power, to keep “the delirium of the universe forever alive.”20 I could only identify the belt of Orion, or Hayk. But he disappeared in the summer that brought in Scorpio, as the two constellations had persisted in missing each other since men invented mythology. And before I closed my eyes in awe of the Commagenian night and of the exception called life—an interval of sentient existence amid the inanimate infinite—I thought all this was a blink in the lifespan of a dimming star. But what a heavy blink, as if our eyelids were made of bronze.

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Part III

Dikranagerd

Three

Dikranagerd I Agop Serkis pointed the torch at the steps, tall and uneven, but would raise it at the sharp end of each flight, the large stone bricks emerging dark and portentous in the amber gloom. The staircase was only wide enough to accommodate one person. We came out onto the rooftop of Surp Giragos Church while the last of day was departing in a sky the color of wine, the backdrop to the jagged skyline of Diyarbakır. Electric lights were beginning to reveal the city’s entrails, the meandering streets of the old quarters enclosed within the black basalt of the Roman walls. A prevalence of orange colors came through unveiled and curtained windows, or the flickering blue and gray beams of television sets in darkened rooms. Gâvur Mahallesi (the Infidels Quarter) was exposed in its misery and glory, a maze of decrepit mansions and old houses become slums. The writer Mıgırdiç Margosyan, a native of Dikranagerd—the Armenian name for Diyarbakır—had catapulted the neighborhood of his childhood into national fame with his eponymous book, a trilingual collection of stories that brought back to life in Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish his memoirs from the last era of the Christian Armenian community in the city, which had completely vanished by 1985. The rooftop of Surp Giragos commanded views of Mar Petyun, the Chaldean church, dwarfed by the Hacı Hamit mosque right behind. The sharp edges of the Dört Ayaklı (Four-Legged) square minaret could be made out in the dusk. I thought I discerned the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque); or more likely it was the Kurşunlu Mosque, converted from the Armenian church of Surp Toros in 1518. But when I turned to check with Agop he was gone, leaving me alone in the company of minarets and bell towers beneath Hayk (Orion) and the other waking constellations. Yet a star, perched low outside the city walls, dominated the horizon with steady radiance. In my uncertain reading of celestial bodies, I assumed it was Venus. It felt appropriate that it should be, if only for the musical mood the scene conveyed: “Venus, the Bringer of Peace,” the second movement in Holst’s symphony The Planets, conjures up the soothing effect of 141

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a sea moving in gentle waves, opening with a serene horn call that woodwinds answer, followed by counterpoints of ascending chords of oboes and descending ones of flutes in a mellow adagio. The melody corresponded to that moment of quiet in Diyarbakır under the pristine night of winter of 2013, with 4,000 years of history and religions built into the cityscape of spires and domes that rose amid the roofs, staggered and flat, of old Armenian houses. Apartment buildings, scattered randomly or grouped in clusters, loomed bright and ugly in the distance. Shrouded in darkness, the Tigris drew its course to the east of Surp Giragos, feeding civilizations and the rest along her path, before dying in the Persian Gulf. Agop, the church porter, had not changed much since the last time I had seen him in the summer of 2011, except perhaps his forehead that had grown bigger with the receding hairline. He made up with his mustachio, copious and black. His wife was Kurdish and Muslim, but he only felt the urge to convert to Christianity after getting married in 1986: “It is the true religion.” Armenians no longer felt fear: “Among the Kurds in the east we are freer, and the living is easy.” Yet at home he was alone, with none of his five children willing to abandon Islam for their father’s faith. “We are assimilating,” Agop had commented when we had first met amid the unfinished construction. The approach of a red-haired man had stifled our conversation. By his looks, I had assumed him to be a Turk, but Agop had read my eyes and gestured with a subtle tilt of his head that I ought not to worry: just within minutes of meeting, a rapport of codes and winks had been established naturally, just like those that exist between friends of a lifetime. The redhead was an architect working on the restoration of Surp Giragos, then only months away from completion. A Laz, an Islamicized Mingrelian from Turkey’s Black Sea coast, he had lived ten years in France leading the renovation project of a monastery: “Is there any place free from assimilation?” A cultured man and agreeable talker, he had a somewhat blasé stance on the matter, which peoples with no fear of extinction can afford, and the conversation weakened into abstractions on globalization and how the world was losing its way. Of Agop’s ten siblings, only two were married to converted Armenians. There were 270 people of Armenian origin in Lice, his hometown, but only two families admitted it openly. Until the 1990s there were secret Christians, but then a few had sought to convert or return officially to the Church as fear began to wane. He had 25 friends who had become Christian in Silvan, Kulp, and Lice, major towns in the Diyarbakır area. Converted Armenians had kept in touch with each other since the Genocide, he said, but mixed marriages had become the norm a long time ago. A group of Americans was lingering about, one with a professional camera: a filmmaker from New York was working on a documentary about Henry 142

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Morgenthau, the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who had denounced the massacres of 1915. The filmmaker was assisted by Mr. Barsamian, a guide from Los Angeles who had pioneered visits to the historical lands since the late 1980s, when for most Diaspora Armenians visiting Turkey was still a taboo. As we exchanged travel anecdotes with Mr. Barsamian, I mentioned the crazy little experiment I had done in Istanbul of stopping Armenian-looking people in the street under false pretexts such as asking for directions to a sight or store, asking them in passing if they had Armenian ancestors: “Out of five, perhaps two would say they did,” I said. “These ancestors were always women, weren’t they?” he guessed, correctly. “Mothers transmit the Armenian culture,” I remarked, but Mr. Barsamian shook his head: “No, no, it’s not that: they kidnapped the women during the Genocide; they killed the men.” That was intimately linked to the history of the Armenians of Diyarbakır. In his memoirs, Tovmas Mgrdichian, British vice-consul to Diyarbakır, referred to an extra­ordinary meeting convened in late June 1915 by the Committee of Union and Progress at the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque). Local Muslim notables were to determine the fate of the province’s 150,000 Armenians. It would be the decisive phase: the arrest and murder of prominent individuals and smaller groups had begun months earlier. Mufti Ibrahim and parliamentary deputy Pirincizâde Feyzi were in attendance. One issue on the agenda was discussed at length: “Should every Armenian man and woman, young, old and infant without exception be massacred? Is this allowed by the sharia of Muhammad’s Qur’an? Or should children and women be spared?”1 Mufti Ibrahim, endowed with the religious authority to issue fatwas (edicts), was the only one of the opinion that “children younger than 12 should be spared to be Islamicized, and the beautiful women and girls should be taken into the harems, to embellish the Kurdish race.” Yet after three days of deliberation, the assembly voted for “the collective extermination of the Armenians, with the exception of the choicest women.” Attendees swore on the Qur’an to execute the decision.2 On my first visit to Surp Giragos in the summer of 2011, restoration work was still in progress, prior to consecration in October of that year. Two years later, the church, said to be the largest in the Middle East and probably built in the sixteenth century, had become the gathering point of the nascent Armenian community of Diyarbakır, or rather its rebirth. But this was an arguable concept, for what was coalescing around Surp Giragos was unknown in recorded Armenian history: Islamicized Armenians and a handful of Christian ones were organizing themselves around a church. They were a growing circle of family and friends of descendants of Genocide survivors, forced into Islam, even though some had decided to convert or return to the Armenian Apostolic denomination. 143

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So fundamental a pillar was the Church for the nation that it was now gathering the Islamicized descendants of Armenians. Even in the absence of a permanent pastor, the community of Dikranagerd, as the Armenians call the city, was the only one in the historical lands of Western Armenia that was slowly regrouping in a century, and only because they had found in the church their center and common ground, regardless of conversion and how irreversible some felt it was. Three years later, on the last Sunday of every month, more than 100 Muslim Armenians would gather there for breakfast, a lavish occasion in the custom of the land. One of the attendees in January 2014 wore the white skullcap of a hajji, an affable old man known to everybody: the Mecca pilgrim was the father of the Diyarbakır Armenians’ leader, Sevag, himself converted back to the Apostolic Church in 2010. Yet most of these Islamicized Armenians—among whom there were agnostics or atheists who had never set foot in a mosque—would first step into the church and light a candle on the sand trays that flanked the entrances. They would stand in reverence in front of the seven altars, which represented the seven sacraments, called xorhurt (mystery) in Armenian, the more so for the converts after three generations outside the faith. That winter’s night, Sevag had proposed I climb to the rooftop and admire the topography of sacred architecture in Diyarbakır. The three Abrahamic religions and their various denominations coincided within the city walls: Maryam Ana, the Assyrian Orthodox church, was too distant to be seen, and the synagogue, desecrated into a post office, was not visible, and I did not know where to look for Surp Sarkis, the Armenian Catholic church. The bulbous bell tower of Surp Giragos stood on four tall legs that encompassed two rows of single arches on each side. It was taller than that of Mar Petyun almost next door, which was as distinctive, with a rounded, mushroom-like head atop four pointed arches. The Chaldeans had erected it along with their church in 1602, a little after their schism from the Assyrian Church of the East in 1552 and their communion with Rome: they were renamed Chaldean then, even though they are completely unrelated to that long-extinct Babylonian people and are just Assyrians of Catholic affiliation. Albeit newer, the Armenian church’s bell tower was more storied: built in 1884, it had collapsed in a thunderstorm on Easter Eve in 1913. It was replaced the same year with a new one, crowned with a gold cross and a bell built by Zildjian, the family name of the cymbal-maker Avedis, founder of the eponymous company made famous in the twentieth century by the drummers of most rock bands. Since the time of Babel, towers have been associated with bad omens. In 1999, echoing the pun in the title of the 1970s British TV comedy Fawlty Towers, the 144

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investment banker Andrew Lawrence identified the “skyscraper curse.” There was a strange correlation, he observed, between the tallest buildings in the world and economic crises: the projects of the Singer Building and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York were started before the financial panic of 1907; the Empire State Building was finalized in 1931 as the Great Depression was underway, and the Petronas Towers in Malaysia opened their doors only two years before the Asian Financial Crisis.3 At a height of 29 meters, the new belfry of Surp Giragos did not compare to any of the projects named above. It attracted, however, a disproportionately larger damnation, and not mainly of an economic nature. The Ottomans shelled it into rubble on May 28, 1915, arguing that it was taller than the minarets, even though by then they needed no excuses to exert violence. The church vicar, Fr. Mgrdich Chlghadian, was made to watch the bell tower’s destruction, a harbinger of his own fate. Two days later, Fr. Chlghadian was taken to prison: his torturers pulled out his teeth, pierced his temples with red-hot irons, and gouged out his eyes.4 He was then paraded through the Muslim quarters of Diyarbakır, to the beating of tambourines by the sheiks and dervishes who led the procession “in an atmosphere of collective revelry.” The column marched on to the courtyard of the Great Mosque, where in the presence of government officials and religious authorities Fr. Chlghadian “was sprinkled with oil, a drop at a time, and then burned alive.” The next day, an American missionary, Dr. Floyd Smith, found the Armenian priest thrown in the stable of the Municipal Hospital, unrecognizable and moribund beneath a dirty blanket, but was unable to save him. The district governor had an attestation drawn up and signed by several doctors; it stated that the prelate had died of typhus.5 The Surp Giragos Church was rebuilt with the original, bulb-shaped belfry. In a three-paragraph report on a Turkish news website about the first peal of the new bell in 2012—the first time one had tolled in Diyarbakır in a century— there were as many references to its size: “It has not escaped attention that it is five meters taller than the minaret of the Four-Legged Mosque, which is 500 meters away.”6     

Diyarbakır had not seen so much snow for half a century and everybody was morose. It was to be my base in Western Armenia for the winter of 2013, yet my efforts to find a small apartment or room had proved fruitless. The carnage of a century ago against Armenians had confirmed Kurds as the unrivaled masters of what since 1915 had become the informal capital of the Turkish section of Kurdistan, and the habitats of nuclear families or lone professionals were alien 145

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to a population organized in clans and tribes, with households of ten or more children not being uncommon in the city proper. There was no market for floor plans smaller than four or five rooms, not unlike in size or appearance those of suburban homes in America, albeit conceived to accommodate at least twice as many dwellers. A friend had found me a basement spot with a skylight onto the street level of Dökmeciler Sokağı, in the city’s old quarter, and only a five-minute walk to Surp Giragos, but he took the offer back, saying he could not allow me into that manhole, damp and dark. The location near the church was fantastic, but in the middle of hell: it was the neighborhood of blacksmiths and tinsmiths, and he guessed that the din of banging metal and the screeching sound of knife sharpeners would drive me mad, if poisons or fumes did not claim my sanity sooner. But some of his comments in half-sentences indicated his real concern were the neighborhood’s residents: these fears were unfounded, as I would experience daily during my stay in Diyarbakır. In the time-honored tradition of Armenian travelers, exiles, and refugees, my first stop was therefore the church. This one, however, was extra­ordinary: it had been called back into new, and vigorous, existence. Agop Serkis had a new colleague as jamgoch (“beadle” in Armenian), a man of slim build and youthful smile, who in the span of a few months had garnered enough mastery of Armenian to conduct a basic dialogue. Vartan’s green eyes had an aquatic quality, reflecting the gray of winter; but they were also transparent, and deep wells of sadness. The first day I visited in the winter of 2013, there were also three other men; as I would learn in due course, they were churchgoers of sorts: all three were third-generation Islamicized Armenians; two—Garbed and Ertem—were atheists, in observance of Marxist convictions; Malik, the last one, attended mosque on celebrations such as the Bayram. Yet all three were regulars at Surp Giragos. A printer by profession, Garbed was working his cell phone seeking a place for me among the local Armenians. He called Udi Manug, an oud musician who had moved back into Dikranagerd, his birthplace, after almost a lifetime in Los Angeles, causing a sensation in the press and the public of Diyarbakır. The return of a local celebrity of Armenian origin from the United States was a symbolic, and powerful, vote of confidence in the city’s rebirth in the tradition of diversity that the local Kurdish government officials sought to promote. “Manug is living with his girlfriend,” Garbed said, a little embarrassed, but he finally got through to Sevag. Not an apartment, but he had an empty room in his office, an offer that I accepted right away. A weeklong stay at the hotel, unspectacular as it was, had eaten up the funds I had set aside for a whole month’s accommodation. Sevag would come and pick me up the following morning from the hotel within the city walls, in the vicinity of the Armenian 146

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Gate, the northern one. The gates were named after the direction their roads led to; after the Genocide it had been renamed Harput, as the territory known as Armenia inside the Ottoman Empire had ceased to exist. Garbed walked me from the church to his printing shop, with a floor coated with the dust of ages and cigarette ends squashed flat. The overlapping pages of Facebook, a Kurdish news site in Turkish, and the Skype window were open on the somewhat blurry screen of his old computer, a graininess that evoked the ghosting of old black-and-white TV sets. An offset printing press made by a German family firm occupied center stage, with external plastic veins that pumped red, blue, and yellow fluids into its body. Oddly, I felt a familiarity with the place. The smell—that most powerful of senses—of ink and tobacco took me back to the summers of my childhood at the Armenia newspaper in Buenos Aires, where I worked in the print room setting headlines with movable type on a composing stick. Time travel continued when a Lebanese-Armenian came onto the Skype screen from his office in Cyprus, even though he had mentioned some Bulgarian connection I did not understand. An old computer with an internet connection was helping a member of a fragmented Diaspora connect with those who had remained, Islamicized, in the ancestral motherland. This would have been a technological and psychological impossibility only 20 years earlier. But I decided to cut short my brief dialogue with the Lebanese-Armenian, who had asked me about my political convictions as soon as Garbed had introduced me onscreen to him. I had guessed his, a fossilized ideology that dated back to the Ottoman era. It was in bad need of an update, if it was not to be discarded wholesale and get its well-deserved retirement into the history books. I was impatient to get out and see other Armenians in Diyarbakır as they had a more complex understanding of their own identity than quite a few of us, the descendants of Genocide survivors, believed. There was no time to reenact dialogues with phantoms that already had a cozy life in our nostalgia, but were unwelcome in the present.     

A German guest joined me for my last breakfast in the low-ceilinged cafeteria at the hotel. Had he been a few centimeters taller, he would have had to walk with his head bowed. A freelance translator, he enjoyed the freedoms afforded by the internet to globe-trot year-round, but especially when the weather got nasty in Hamburg. Karim showed great interest when I told him I was born in Aleppo, which he intended to reach. “Surely with your inconspicuous looks you can make it for two miles into Syria,” I told him. “Hopefully, the worst that will happen is that mom and dad will have enough savings to ransom you, or else that you won’t suffer greatly,” I told him. Gallows humor was not something we had in common for his face had taken on a stern expression, and he muttered 147

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something along the lines that maybe I had been in journalism for such a long time that I had come to believe the gibberish we peddle to the gullible masses. The Ummah (community of Muslims) was undergoing something akin to the Protestant Reformation, he believed. Islam would emerge stronger from these trials and tribulations, he said. “Like Christianity did, right?” I commented, still in a vein he did not seem to appreciate. “But what are you?” he asked in surprise, thinking me a Shiʿa (and thus revealing on which side he stood in the Islamic divide). His father was German and his mother a Kosovo Albanian—and for a moment I found it incredible that a refugee from a war that to me had happened only yesterday had already spawned a child who was staking a claim to his share of the world. Karim at that moment appeared to be navigating sea changes that were too remote for me to grasp fully—he was a Muslim and did not have a sense of belonging in Germany. The Kurdish experiments in non-national democratic federalism intrigued him, and he wanted to visit Rojava (the Kurdish name for Qamışli) which, at least until war broke out in Syria in 2011, used to have a thriving Armenian community made up of Genocide survivors and descendants. Sevag had left his car idling and double-parked; he made me hurry up as he was trying to negotiate a better rate for my bill at the hotel reception. Only concern about a parking fine cut short the haggling on my behalf that he was conducting with the skill of a bazaar merchant. And then we plunged into the chaotic traffic of Diyarbakır, of buses and dolmuş cutting us off as they dueled among themselves for passengers along the northern wall. We made a right turn through the Urfa Gate and drove into the business district. “Remember the stadium,” he told me. It was the most prominent landmark near his office, which would be my winter home. The room inside the office opened into a ventilation shaft, across from the kitchen section of an apartment building. Sevag had stored accounting books of yellowing pages and boxes of leaflets and programs from past seminaries in his line of business. A dead Rolodex was forgotten in a corner of the amber-colored walls. Tones of brown ruled the room, including the sofa bed, the bookshelf and a rolled-up mat that turned out to be a prayer rug with the image of the Dome of the Rock woven into it. A leftover from Sevag’s Muslim past, I thought, even though he said he had never been of the practicing type. Brown were also the two sparrows, a male and a female, which would be perched every morning on the corrugated pipe of electrical wires on the building’s exterior, across the shaft. The couple welcomed dawn by chirping away even at that angle forgotten by the sun, in a space with no other view than the tall buildings that enclosed it in an asphyxiating perimeter. They enlivened it with their incomprehensible song, oblivious to what in our eyes would be ugliness or beauty. Sparrows, I had read once, after attaining maturity would move away from their nest and 148

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community, which sang in variations unique to them, or “dialects.” But when the birds paired up and moved into a new community on a different tree or habitat, they would adopt the melodic dialect of the new group. Sevag’s voice had a rich musicality, enhanced by the clarity of his diction and discourse, that of a priest who has honed it over years of homily, always lively yet never straying into the registers of anger or despair, regardless of an abundance of reasons for either or both. It may have been the key to his salesmanship, with an ability to get things done or have others do them for him, and that allowed him to manage the affairs of Surp Giragos with political savvy in the fickle environment of Turkey and its Kurdish areas. He was a cousin of the General Vicar of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, Archbishop Aram Ateshian. Diyarbakır had been Sevag’s home for more than 20 years, after he had come from his birthplace of Apka, a village near Kozluk, in Sasun. “We had an ambiguous relation with our Kurdish neighbors back in Sasun,” he said. “They were kind, but they would also put us down, calling us gâvur, belittling us … We were not scared of being Armenian, as everybody knew it anyway, but of course we didn’t talk about the Genocide … That we did fear.” Of 19 siblings, ten had survived. “We were poor, so if someone got ill and did not heal, they died: there was no doctor or hospital, there was nothing we could do.” His first wife, a Christian Armenian from Sasun and the mother of his three children, had also passed away. A common friend had once told me that a seer had come to Dikranagerd from Armenia. She had read the palms of three local Armenians, including Sevag’s, and had seen in him a dark soul. But as he did not speak Armenian and nobody wanted to translate for him, Sevag got anguished, this friend said: “He feared she had seen a cancer or some bad disease, so I finally told him that it was about his soul and that she had not said good things about his personality, but that he was not dying any time soon.” Only three children from his family had survived the Genocide, and that was all they knew about it: They killed every member of our family. That we know for sure. Nobody was left, other than these three young brothers, the oldest of whom was seven or eight. One left for Armenia and the other two remained in Turkey. The grandchildren of my great-uncle now live in Yerevan. The ones left in Turkey eventually became Muslim. They reminded each other that they were Armenian while the rest of their family had been obliterated, but we know nothing else of what they spoke or said, for they did not tell us anything else. One of them was my grandfather … We think they walked to a village near Kozluk looking for an uncle, but that’s just a supposition. What was their family name? We have no idea. We only know they were Armenian and from the village of Rabet, in Sasun. I still try to search, read, inquire everywhere that I can, but that’s still all we know. My father does

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His eyes had turned sad when he had said “ruhu” (Turkish for “spirit”), and in the depth of his gaze and the long cadence of the u, the word of Arabic origin came across as the closest sound to the whisper of a wind that came from the center of the Earth, blowing across a vast space and stirring the leaves of solitary trees. On researching its etymology I was astonished yet relieved to find that these were not the ravings of my mind alone: “The problem must have begun in the gray dawn of time, when someone made the bewildering discovery that the living breath which left the body of the dying man in the last deathrattle meant more than just air in motion,” Carl Jung had said in October 1926, in a lecture to the literary society of Augsburg. “It can scarcely be an accident onomatopoeic words like ruach, ruch, roho (Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili) mean ‘spirit’ no less clearly than the Greek πνεύμα [pneúma] and the Latin spiritus.”7 This spirit went deeper than his religious filiation, Sevag said: “For me it is a formality; what matters is that I know in my heart that I am Armenian, and I have had that awareness since my childhood.” He had registered as a Christian only in 2010, but one of his brothers had converted back to the Armenian Church many years earlier, after a gap of two generations. Sevag’s wife and his children had joined him in the Church. “But to me, whether Muslim or Christian, what matters is that we remain Armenian: I am now a Christian, but I am not a different person, or more Armenian, than when I was a Muslim.” My sister is a Muslim and she does the namaz every evening. This is the reality. She acknowledges she is Armenian, but she is also a practicing Muslim and good at that. The older one comes to church and is a Christian. I also have brothers and sisters that neither pray nor do the namaz, who neither come to church nor go to the mosque. They feel neither Kurds nor Turks. They are Armenian. Some are holding back from changing their religious affiliation on their ID because we live amid Muslims here, and it makes them uneasy to convert to the Armenian Church. Some Armenians still feel embarrassment, and some fear. Why? Because Armenians here are called bad people, infidels, unpleasant, bitter. There are Muslims who think and speak like that: in today’s Diyarbakır and in today’s Turkey. Still. I have relatives who do not speak to me because I became a Christian. Diyarbakır is full of Islamicized Armenians, so many that it is impossible to guess. But a majority of them do not acknowledge it. Some will say, “My grandfather was Armenian, I am Kurdish.”

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DIKRANAGERD I There are many who joined the Kurdish guerrillas, but they are already Kurdified. They did not join the PKK as Armenians. They see themselves as Kurds. Do you know Sakine Cansız?8 She was of Armenian origin; how would she not know? But she fought 40 years for the Kurds. Of course she knew, but she would not say it. Nothing is permanent. Only three years ago you would find only one or two Armenians in Diyarbakır. Today we have more than 100 who come to church every month. We have breakfast together, we talk, and socialize. Of this 100, 90 are Muslim. But they are Armenian. That’s why they come. Not all of them want to become Christian, or not yet at least. They have been Muslim for 100 years, do not forget that: it is not easy. But they own up to their identity. And if we have 100 coming to church, we have another million who do not. In all of Diyarbakır there are 3 million people; perhaps more than one-third, or 1 million, are Armenian. The Turkish state knows very well who is who. They know better than I do. Now, the first thing is that they acknowledge themselves as Armenian. Why is it that Armenians insist so much on their Christian faith? The Armenians became Christian in ad 301, isn’t that right? We were not Christian before. And we know that the Islamicized Armenians in Turkey did not convert for their own pleasure … They forgot their own religion, the Church, the language, the culture, and they are not baptized. But they are Armenian: they did not become Turks and they did not become Kurds … Even if some do not admit it now, an apple is an apple; it does not become a pear. My sister may do the namaz 100 times, but she remains an Armenian. And even if she did not, maybe one day her children will decide to embrace their Armenian identity. My own father is a Muslim, he went to the Hajj, and does the namaz, but I, one of his sons, changed my religion. He did not. He adheres to what he has learned: he is now 80 years old and will not change now. But he raised me as an Armenian, he made me aware of my identity … German TV came to interview him and the reporter asked him, “Sir, who are you?” And my father responded, “I am an Armenian.” The reporter then asked him if he attended church. “No, I am a Muslim,” my father responded, and said that he did not meddle with his children that converted to the Church. But he first identified himself as an Armenian. My father does not read and does not write, but he knows he is Armenian. I was born and raised in Western Armenia. Kurds say this is Kurdistan, but I tell them, “This is not Kurdistan; this is Armenia.” And whether you are born in Tokyo, New York, Yerevan, or Diyarbakır, if you are Armenian, you are Armenian.

It is likely that there are more Islamicized Armenians than Christian ones in Turkey today. What would become of a community overrun by Muslims? Would that not change the nature of Armenian identity? Sevag smiled, a man who probably would not have been completely out of place in fifteenthcentury Florence, with an enigmatic stare, behind eyeglasses that I always 151

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remembered to be dark but were not. He responded with a joke, or what I assumed to be one: An imam was once posted to a remote village. Within days of arriving, he was surprised that nobody was turning up for prayers, so he decided to go door to door asking why they were not coming to the mosque. The villagers were being insincere in their responses but when the imam pressed, they admitted: “Hoca, we do not come because we do not like to take our shoes off to pray.” The imam asked them if that was their only concern and they said it was: “Come to pray with your shoes on,” he told them. So everybody started going to the mosque, doing the namaz with their shoes on. It went on like this for years, until this imam was reassigned elsewhere. But his replacement was astonished to see the locals walking into the mosque with their shoes on. “What is this?” he asked, outraged. “You have to take your shoes off !” But the locals responded: “By Allah, our former imam said that in Islam it is like this.” The new imam went out to search for his predecessor and challenged him: “Hoca, did you tell them that they could pray with their shoes on?” The other imam explained that nobody was coming for prayers: “I got them into the mosque; if you are smart enough, now get them to take their shoes off.”

“We just got these Muslims to come to church,” Sevag said. “We can think about their shoes later.”     

“When I was little, I didn’t know that Armenians were a people,” she said. “I knew the word, ‘Armenian,’ but we used it as an insult, so that’s what I thought it was; a bad word, or a curse: I didn’t know it named a nation.” She also remembered that in the surrounding villages of Diyarbakır elders called misbehaving children “dığa,” which she thought to be a dialect term for “brat.” Only in adulthood did she learn it was Armenian for “boy.” Perwîn was one of the partners in the nonprofit cooperative society that operated Sülüklü Han, a 1683 caravanserai built in basalt in the old quarter, now turned into a café. It was a ten-minute walk to Surp Giragos Church. She owned the bookstore in the basement, which included an ample selection on Armenians, Assyrians, and other peoples, but she had coined something of a neologism in Turkish, “azaltılmış halklar,” or “minoritized peoples,” to indicate that they had been forcibly turned into minorities. In Dersim, where she had many relatives, the word for the daughter-in-law’s mother was “xınami,” another Armenian term that has entered into conversational language. “That’s how many Armenian female in-laws there were in Dersim,” Perwîn said. “They were all brides from the Genocide.” Once, at a family 152

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gathering when she was about 12, around 1980, the children were gossiping that the xınami of their host was Armenian. Mystified, she approached the elderly woman and asked her in Turkish: “Siz Ermeni misiniz?” (“Are you Armenian?”). “The woman just broke out into loud crying,” Perwîn remembered. “She was there just sobbing, not saying a word.” In the Diaspora, some grandchildren of Genocide survivors recalled their grandmothers weeping out of the blue, for no apparent reason. For those growing up in Istanbul or elsewhere in Turkey, where being Armenian was a big enough taboo—let alone speaking of 1915 even in the safety of their homes—it was not uncommon to be told by their parents as explanation enough: “Granny is old.” An Armenian from Istanbul who was now based in Maryland had once told me that as a child she grew up convinced that “grandmothers cried” as a normal thing, like babies do. My conversation with Perwîn had started with a good laugh about how Atatürk had explained away the singularity of the Kurds, calling them “Mountain Turks,” whose name he said derived from “kurt, kurt,” the crunching sound of walking on frozen snow. “There is a book, Dünya hepimize yeter (The World is Enough for All of Us) that says it clearly: in this land there are Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, Turks, Yezidis,” Perwîn said. It had been written by Sarkis Cherkezian, a carpenter and lifelong communist, born in a camel stud in the Syrian desert in 1916 to Genocide survivors. “Primacy and power are the problems.” She was soft-spoken. This comment was her gentle rebuttal of my calling into question national borders and a world parceled up into plots large and small, cut off from each other by barbed wire, border controls, and restrictions. Nation states survived, I posited, for lack of a better substitute, as in a world of free circulation of ideas and goods the checks and curbs on the movement of men were outdated. Her stare was hardening and so was, slightly, the tone of her comments, as the discourse shifted away from Lenin and Lennon into a questioning of the international polity of flags and frontiers. She was an idealist who seemed convinced of the democratic decentralization advanced by Apo in his discourse, but I felt that I was inadvertently calling her bluff. Kurds were aching for a nation state of their own, an independent one with their own emblems and borders, which they never had. For a second, I imagined Perwîn like a Medusa, with budding tentacles coming out of her head and then retreating in regret, ashamed of hostile thoughts. Notwithstanding my views, I conceded I could not imagine Armenia tearing down its own frontier markers in its present neighborhood any time soon. “We are all African, if it is true that we came from there,” I told her. Even though my comment was only intended to clear the air somewhat, she had a contribution to make to the idea. A recent article she had read confirmed it. 153

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Fourteen thousand years ago, waves of migrants came to Mesopotamia from Africa, Perwîn said. All men came from there: “This land is everybody’s, it does not belong to any particular group, because everybody passed from here, because they found prosperity here, everything.” Every people had passed through these territories, so everybody was everybody else’s relative. If we wanted to return to our origins, we had to go back to Africa. According to a joint American-British team of researchers, only 70,000 years ago we shared a common father. “We are all brothers,” she said. “Like Adam and Eve in the Bible,” I commented, as the powerful chords of a bağlama, a popular stringed instrument related to the lute family, filled the arched gallery where we were sharing a tea. “That’s symbolic, I don’t believe in that, but at the time there were few people, we had a common father,” she said. “Mankind was very small; one group came here from Africa: we are all the children of that group.” Perhaps one large part of that group stayed in Africa and died, she conjectured, as another group went on to America. “Mankind was very small, just think about it: the Ottoman Empire stretched for half the world at its apogee and its population was 35 million,” she added. “That’s very little.” Perhaps a very reduced group came, she imagined. A family: a father, brothers, children, and then another. But a parallel conversation between two young men who had joined us at the table was distracting me. I was picking up fragments of a story that was apparently, from what I could gather, related to Armenians living in a village near Diyarbakır in the 1920s. At that time in Anatolia, nobody would be punished for killing Armenians. It involved two Armenian women that had gone to visit a Kurdish neighbor, the grandfather of a certain Fatih: these visitors had soon fallen out with each other or their hosts for some reason. Below are the disjointed parts that I could rescue of this crime story, which do not make much sense except for the conclusion: Two women go to visit Fatih’s grandfather. But they start bickering. And he comes out: “What did I tell you? When you are someone else’s guest you do not fight.” The women argue with him, so he kills them with blows to their heads. He goes into the room, where his friend pleads, “I didn’t do anything! Just let me go!” But Fatih’s grandfather said, “I just killed the mother of your children, why should I let you get off ?” And he kills him with a blow to his head, too … Within 15–20 days, both women get married on the same day … After this incident they fight for three days and three nights, the friend who is fighting side by side with him, a Muslim, falls injured. Both die … Six months later, the government digs up their graves. They don’t understand. The Muslim’s corpse had decayed, nothing was left, but the Armenian’s was intact, like a martyr’s, his blood and face still fresh, as if ready to walk back into life. One was Muslim and the other one was Armenian. Nothing had happened to the Armenian. Martyrs

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DIKRANAGERD I don’t die, their soul doesn’t decay, their body doesn’t rot, they say. Even when her eyes had gone blind, every time I drove by that house with my grandmother in the car, she would tell me, “Son, they murdered my father here; the fighting was here; they fought for three days and three nights.” And her eyes no longer saw but she sensed the house.

Perwîn was still in Africa. “And we all came from them,” she giggled. “Not from Adam and Eve, but from an intelligent family.” We had just created a political party, we said: The Africans. “The Africans, yes! We want Africa back!” she concurred. And we agreed that Armenians and Kurds should join forces to reclaim our original continent. Conversations sometimes flowed at their easiest not necessarily among those who shared ideas, but among those who had a common sense of humor.     

Adil and Hamdi Akkaya had introduced me to Sülüklü Han in the summer of 2011. A mural-sized inscription carved in wood at the entrance offered a brief description of the former caravanserai, in Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Syriac. The Armenian, however, was Eastern, and the reformed Soviet spelling of 1923 had been used. Perwîn had put up the notice, she told me years later: “A policeman came over and pointed to the Armenian writing, asking me what it was: ‘Aramaic,’ I told him.” The Akkaya brothers had been my Diyarbakır point-persons during my first pilgrimage from Dersim to Mt. Maruta, and the leader of the Sasun Armenians’ fraternity had arranged my trip with paternal care, having me meet his Islamicized relatives for a bus change on the complicated itinerary. A few weeks later, in August of 2011, I met them again in Diyarbakır. It was a Sunday, and Adil, the older brother, was working at his law office on a last-minute case. Three young Kurds had been arrested trying to import heroin from Iran. Drug trafficking was a huge problem, Adil told me. Turkey was a major narcotics route into Europe from the East. There were also rumors that some of that money went into financing the Kurdish guerrilla operations, but then again, the Turkish government had an interest in sowing disinformation. Armenian on both sides, the Akkayas were fully integrated into Kurdish society and its central unit, the aşiret (tribe). Their mother’s family hailed from Bitlis and their father’s from Varto-Mush. Their paternal grandfather Sarkis Vartanian, who was known as “Serkis Ağa,” had 12 siblings, all of whom survived but scattered after the Genocide. Kurds beheaded their father, and they do not know what happened to their mother. Some of the siblings went to Malatya, and from there to Aleppo and on to America. Contacts have been lost. Sarkis, 155

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who was 12 in 1915, and one brother, Azad, were adopted by a Kurd, Hasan Arkan, who raised them within his family. The two Vartanian brothers were brought into the Salo tribe of Varto, and Islamicized. The Akkayas were 13 brothers and sisters, only two of whom were married to Muslim Armenians: the others were married to Kurds or Zazas. Hamdi was still a bachelor and thinking about leaving Turkey, at least temporarily, for Germany, where they had relatives. Adil was married to a Zaza woman. There were no more arranged marriages; he smiled when I suggested if that had been the case. “It was for love,” he said. “We now marry for love.” But, he said, “I am raising my children as Armenians: I am their father.” That I understood to mean an awareness of their identity, as there was no other vehicle to express it, other than becoming active within the community that was coalescing around Surp Giragos. That was more than Adil and his siblings could afford when they were little. Adil had known it since he was seven or eight years old. Kurdish kids would call them “fîlla” (“unbeliever” in Kurmancî). “I cried the first time they called me that,” Adil said. He ran to tell his parents, and they said that they were indeed Armenian but they had to be careful not to acknowledge it in public. “We had to say we were Muslim.” Yet the Kurds knew that their grandfather was Armenian. But most Islamicized Armenians in Diyarbakır did not want to return to the Christian faith, Adil ventured, also guessing that perhaps one-third of the local population was of Armenian descent, the same proportion Sevag reckoned: “Man is man, religion does not matter.” Perhaps it did, I thought to myself, which was why people did not usually convert or reconvert. I also imagined the disruptive effect that a return to the Armenian Church would have for a family like the Akkayas, integrated into the Kurdish tribal society and its hierarchies. Islamicized Armenians knew each other in Diyarbakır, but perhaps not as well as the state, according to Adil: “We are now Kurdish speakers but the state knows we are descended from converts.” Even when the descendants of converted Armenians eventually forgot down the generations about their origin, “the state knows.” He pulled from a drawer a document from the Civil Registry showing his family’s lineage: date of birth and death, civil status, name changes, and other data. Beneath his grandfather’s name a note said “mühtedi,” Ottoman Turkish for “convert.” The attitude of Kurds toward Armenians started to change with the PKK, Hamdi said. “They preached fraternity with Armenians, out of their Marxist convictions,” he explained, unaware of how improbably he was weaving his Armenian roots and socialist convictions into his Kurdish and Muslim identity. Hamdi thought Öcalan’s mother was of Armenian descent and that there were Armenian fighters in the PKK. These were rumors Armenians bragged about, 156

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was my riposte, but it was Turkish propaganda to discredit both Armenians and the Kurdish guerrilla. It was a myth, I told them. It was not, the brothers responded.     

A common friend introduced me to Z. in a forgettable building outside the northern wall of Diyarbakır, a few blocks away from the local headquarters of the Emniyet Müdürlüğü (Security Directorate). To the astonishment of my Armenian and Kurdish friends, I had once visited the Security Directorate to request a visa extension. During the repression of the Kurdish uprising in the 1980s and 1990s, it used to be a black hole for dissidents and others who had earned the state’s distrust or enmity. A military police officer, in helmet and bullet-proof vest, and an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, guarded its narrow entrance, while another guard scanned the street from behind a security cabin, slightly bigger than a shower booth. Past a number of Atatürk portraits, I walked into yet another office presided over by a different picture of Atatürk, this one in a gala tailcoat and looking up, as if in the opera. A police officer, polite yet wide-eyed in surprise, had taken my application. He was of dark complexion and black eyes. “But what are you doing in Diyarbakır?” he had asked in English, which was unusual in the police force, especially in the eastern provinces. “This is not a touristic place.” My interest in the Roman walls had not convinced him—a week was more than enough to see them, he thought. “Is the friend you are staying with Turkish?” he probed. I refused to give Sevag’s name and address, in no small part because I did not want to call him a Turk, or say who he was. “When you come to visit a friend you don’t repay him by reporting his name to the police,” I had said, which the officer took in good stride and with a big laugh. Not to play the unconvincing role of too dumb a tourist, I did hint that I was Armenian by telling him that my mother had ancestors from this city, and he seemed to acknowledge the cue with a smile, and did not push further. As I was getting ready to leave, a plump man with an unkempt appearance walked hurriedly in, a gun tucked into his jeans. Two attractive young women, fashionably dressed, with clear-colored eyes and of a Slavic look that would stand out in the streets of this city, were working on one side of the office, and I fancied them to be undercover agents. Two weeks later, the wait in the nondescript building made me a little nervous, as I kept thinking about the proximity of the Security Directorate. My friend walked out of the room after ushering in Z., a shaven man of average height and looks, who could blend in among the crowd in Diyarbakır or anywhere else in Turkey. As part of the agreement, Z. would not tell me his name, nor would I be allowed to take his photo. He had fought with the PKK for 13 years. 157

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He was Armenian, born in 1976 in a village near the city of Batman, but his grandparents’ hometown was Midyat, a historical city in the province of Mardin in the south-east. An ancient Hurrian center, it had been incorporated into the Assyrian Empire in the ninth century bc. Assyrians called it Tur Abdin. Before the Genocide, it had an Assyrian majority and a tiny Armenian population that was mostly Catholic, but also included a small Protestant congregation. “Of course I know about the Genocide,” he said. The young in his family did not know much about what had happened to their family. Only his grandfather, along with his brother and sister, were saved in 1915: Kurds killed his mother and father. At the time there was famine, too. They had been Christian and did not know when their grandfather had become Muslim, or if it was forcible. “There is the political dimension of 1915, because the interests of the Russians, the Ottomans, and the English concurred, and the Kurds lent themselves to it, and they massacred the Armenians: but they were the hands behind the massacres, not the mind.” I asked him if he remembered how he felt when he learned he was Armenian, but he answered something else: “I am only talking to you because our common friend told me, otherwise I would not be speaking with you, do you understand?” And then he responded, using the local formula of “taking to the mountains” to indicate joining the Kurdish guerrillas: They called us “fîlla” because we were Armenian … I learned this concept first, f îlla [unbeliever], long before I knew I was Armenian. That I found out later, but I remember the first time I heard fîlla: I was five or six years old, and I remember it since then. One day an old man came home as a guest … I was in my room, and he had an argument with my maternal grandfather and my father, and he called my father “fîllanın oğlunu” [infidel’s son]. And when we were children the other kids bullied us; my mother, too, was called “kurre fîlla” [unbeliever’s girl], and after growing up I learned I was Armenian. I was born and raised in Batman. I had no Armenian friends, and I had my cousins. My first language was Kurmancî. Perhaps because I grew up hearing my aunts and my father and his family talk about what they did to the Armenians, I took to the mountains. I snapped. It still angers me. Once a man asked me, “Son, why did you take to the mountains?” And I told him, “I am avenging my grandfather’s family.” It’s not the only reason, obviously, but it had an effect on me, too. It was also in rebellion against my father, because my father is in denial of his own origins. My wife is Kurdish and I look at man on his own merit, but I say I am Armenian and I do not deny my origins, and I have my feelings about it. And when I joined the PKK my first statement to them was that I am of Armenian origin. When I met Apo, Öcalan, in the mountains in the winter of 1995, I told him I joined the fight because I am Armenian: “Perhaps that’s the reason why I took to the mountains.” Apo is different: he listens to everyone, he is not a racist, he is a pioneer, but he is a

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DIKRANAGERD I simple man … Some say his mother is Turcoman and that his grandparents came from Iraq, but I have never heard he was of Armenian origin. In 1994, when I went to university to get a degree in electrical engineering, I learned that all these Kurdish cities were built by Armenians. Then I joined the PKK. I told them: “I come from an Armenian family and I don’t deny it.” At the time of the Assyrian king Sargon, Armenians and Kurds were brother nations, and have been so since then. The protectors of the Commagene empire were Kurds and Armenians. Kurds and Armenians have lived like brothers since then, until the 1915 massacre, and in the 1915 massacre it was on behalf of the political interests of the Turks that they acted the way they did. I have Armenian friends who say, “The Kurds massacred us.” There were the political interests of America and Britain behind it, and the result was the Armenian massacres.

There was no mention of Kurds in Commagene in the kingdom’s historical records. Yet it fitted in with the new nationalist narrative of Kurdish revolutionaries, which tended to describe Kurds as one of the aboriginal populations as well as to minimize, if not absolve, their participation in the Genocide by blaming it on outside powers and the Kurds’ naïveté. The elaborate cruelties on a massive scale, however, were not the making of ignorant hands, if only sophisticated in their debauchery: in Diyarbakır, “they hammered red-hot horseshoes with large nails on the bare feet of some, like Mihran Bastagian’s and his friends’ […] some had their limbs amputated, others’ thumbs were flattened with machines […] some were skinned (butcher Vaho and his friends) and their bodies were hung at the butcher’s shops, where their cuts were sold, and others were crucified (policeman Ohan and his friends).”9 The flayed goats at the butchers’ stands in the city’s food market, with their round eyes terrifyingly bulging out, would remind me of that passage in Mgrdichian’s memoirs. There was nothing simple-minded in that perversity, and none of that could be traced to Britain or the US. Indoctrinated as he was in the Marxism of the Kurdish revolutionaries, this man with no name was still, a century later, a fedayi like those that in the late nineteenth century had started to defend the Armenians from the brutalities inflicted by nomadic Kurdish tribes. He was the proof of what Sevag had told me: the Islamicized Armenians had lost the language, the religion, the culture, the memory, but just the awareness of their identity kept them going. At the same time, he confirmed what other former militants in the PKK said. There were very few Armenian fighters. One veteran Kurdish member of the PKK did not remember coming across one in a decade with the guerrillas. And the man from Midyat had met very few in 13 years: In my PKK battalion there was only one other Armenian from Midyat, called Kemal. He was my close friend, but I am no longer in touch with him … When

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Secret Nation they ask me what I am I say I am not a Kurd, I am Armenian, that’s my first response: I am Armenian, but I don’t know about religions or anything. I have plenty of Armenian friends. I went to the mountains not only for the Kurdish people but also Armenians, Assyrians, Turks, that’s what I like, it’s not only the Kurds. We fight to establish a state for every nation. Our common friend accuses me of only fighting for the Kurds, and I say I don’t: I do it for the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, and every other minority.

An Armenian himself, he no longer saw his own people as a native nation in its homeland. To him, they were a minority, timidly regrouping, only now, as a community. And I understood the historical dimension of what Perwîn had labeled in her bookstore as “nations turned into minorities.” In the mountains, the former guerrilla continued, there were Germans, Russians, Kazakhs, a bit like the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. We want a confederation for every nation. Our life was very difficult in the mountains. But I’ll tell you this: man adjusts to everything. Man is not aware of his own strength. We learned alone in the mountains: the settings, the experiences, the psychology, the friendships are very different. You need to live it, we cannot express ourselves: we lived many different things. We had a saying in the guerrilla: “Bazen vezirdin; bazen rezildir” [“Sometimes a vizier; sometimes a wretch”]. Sometimes you lived like a general, and sometimes you were hungry, and went about barefoot, you had no shoes. I saw many of my friends die. The first time a man sees combat he feels fear, and I did too. I have had to shoot, too: it was either him or me. It’s war, and war is that: it’s death. That’s the reality: only once was it face-to-face combat, and I shot him first. It was a soldier; he was tall.

Armenians called these lands Western Armenia, I told him. “That I don’t know,” he responded, somewhat curtly. “As long as Kurds and Armenians live like brothers they can coexist.” The third ezzan of the day issued from the city’s minarets, a five-minute wail calling for the afternoon prayers, the Asr, performed when the sun is bright or when “the shadow of something is twice its own length.” We want justice for the Genocide. Of course I took to the mountains to seek justice for 1915: that has its share, my feelings on that count. I believe Genocide recognition will come. But I returned to Diyarbakır because I got injured, and I got tired. I was in the mountains for 13 years. In the summer, the weather was nice, we had our military uniforms, not formal and not hierarchical; we ate rice. And in the winter it got difficult, we stayed wherever we were, and we concentrated on our education. I met other Armenians in the villages; also Assyrians. In the vicinity of Metin, in Iraq, there were Armenians; they had villages. In Zakho, we were friends with

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DIKRANAGERD I an Armenian family. I met many. We talked about their problems: theirs were economic. We had an Armenian friend in Turkey who used to work with my wife. She was from the Ağrı area, and had a map of her grandfather’s that showed treasure he had buried at the foot of Mt. Ararat, but I didn’t go to dig it up. Once we entered an Assyrian village in Iraq, and were seated having tea: a boy walked up to me. The child was six years old, and his mother was young, perhaps 25 years old. Then I asked the boy, “Who was the Assyrian’s biggest emperor?” The boy did not answer. He went inside the school’s classroom and said, “Our greatest emperor was Asurbanipal.” I was impressed, do you know why? Because on these lands we do not know who our ancestors were. Nothing … I regret nothing. I am a PKK member, but I am not a Kurdish nationalist … Turks since the 1920s have been pursuing a twofold campaign against the Kurds, with weapons and with assimilation policies, and against Armenians as well. Both sides are hitting each other, but at some point there has to be a solution. War and peace never separate from each other. Each has the potential for the other. The time for borders is over. But the four parts of Kurdistan will have to come together in a confederation out of their own will. But saying this is the Armenians’ land, this is the Kurds’, and that the Turks’ is over. The world of national borders is coming to an end. On religion, I say I am neither a Muslim nor a Christian, I believe in the freedom of religion. For me, man, regardless of religion, language, or race, is man. There are virtuous Christians and there are those who are bad people. There are Muslims who are bad as hell, and there are those who are good people. That is why I don’t go to mosque or church. But I feel closer to the Church, I find it warmer, perhaps because it has been oppressed and attacked so many times. I am more loving of it. In Iraq, I went to an Armenian church in a village near Zakho, to a friend’s wedding, and that was the only time I have been to any house of worship. On their own, Armenians and Kurds live together like brothers. I returned from the mountains in 2006. My wife is a former guerrilla. We met in the mountains in 1999. We got married in Iraq, at a little gathering with friends: it was not a religious ceremony. She is 100 percent Kurdish.

The interview with the PKK Armenian was over. He had spoken in haste, with no signs of emotion or pauses for reflection. He had never been to Surp Giragos, even though he knew where it was. We could take the 20-minute walk there, I suggested, but he turned it down. But he had not finished his story, for he decided to take a look back to his childhood, by telling a story relayed by his father, the self-denying Armenian that moved him to rebel. It was the only moment when I noticed an effort to fight back raw feelings that had the power to overcome him: 161

Secret Nation Back in our village in Batman, my father said the imam used to gather the neighbors to pelt our house with stones, because we were Armenian. So there would be days when 40 people, led by the imam, were throwing rocks at our home.     

His mother used to remember an Armenian priest who was being marched off in the extermination caravans of 1915 telling his Kurdish neighbors: “We are the breakfast; you will be the lunch.” Abdullah Demirbaş, the mayor of Diyarbakır-Sur, the city’s ancient perimeter, grew up in Gâvur Mahallesi (the Infidels Quarter), the old Armenian neighborhood now settled by Kurds who migrated from villages, especially after Turkey launched all-out war against the PKK in the 1990s. “When I was little on my first day at school my teacher slapped me across my face because I only spoke Kurdish: I didn’t know one word of Turkish.” I had followed the advice of a friend from Diyarbakır, now based in New York, and had introduced myself at the city hall as an Armenian journalist from New York. It took me five minutes to be received by the mayor, who had just arrived from Germany. We spoke for an hour and a half. This was 2011, and spring was in the air, and so were hopes for a renovation in Turkey, breaking its pendular pattern of reform and violence that had defined the country after the Crimean War of 1853–6. The key to solving Turkey’s problems was decentralization, Demirbaş said. He was working to promote languages and local rights. “Not only for Kurds, but also for Armenians, Assyrians, and all other minorities,” he said. “The state has tied too many things into its centralized nature: we need to evolve toward a multicultural, multilingual state.” Kurds did not want a separate state: “We want freedom in a democratic Turkey.” He wanted to make Diyarbakır a multicultural city again. Demirbaş blamed the state for destroying peace among communities. Diversity, he said, was a garden: the more flowers of different kinds it had, the richer it was. “We can be different but we can live together.” In Diyarbakır, he had given Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic, and Assyrian official language status to be used alongside Turkish. He had also ordered publications in Hebrew. Under his administration they had published works by the Armenian author Mıgırdiç Margosyan as well as an Assyrian writer, Naum Fadik Palak, and a Kurd, Ahmed Arif. All three were born in Diyarbakır. In Armenian, he had also published “A Drop of Honey,” a short story by Hovhannes Toumanian. At the time of the interview he was facing 27 lawsuits for charges that could send him to prison for a combined 232 years. His youngest son had run to the mountains and joined the PKK at the age of 16 in 2009—he last had seen him on December 24 of that year—and he had not seen him again in the two years since. 162

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The Turkish state used the Kurdish people against Armenians, Yezidis, Assyrians, and even against other Kurds. “We have learned,” he said. And he mentioned his plan to rename the city’s old quarter Dikran-Amed, in recognition of the Armenian name. Eventually he made the project public but nothing had come out of it. He felt he was being persecuted in Turkey because, as they say, “The head of the snake has to be crushed when it’s small.” His experiments with democratic multiculturalism were a dangerous precedent for the principle of “Turkey for the Turks,” of foundational import for the Republic. “Many feel that my head has to be beaten now,” with the goal of decimating diversity. In 2005, a demographic survey was conducted in Diyarbakır. It involved 8,970 families, a total of 70,000 people, for a survey of the language used at home. A majority, 72 percent, spoke Kurdish at home; Turkish was the mother tongue for 24 percent; 1 percent spoke Arabic; and the remaining 3 percent was split among Chaldean, Assyrian, Armenian, and other minority languages. According to this survey, 30 families at the time had identified themselves as Assyrian, five as Armenian, and one as Yezidi. There were also four Jews, even though he was not sure if these individuals were members of the same family. Still, some 300 families have come forth as Armenian after that. Another interesting piece of information was that there were two villages of Turkish Alevis. We had to believe in our ideas, he said. We could sacrifice our bread and our water but we could not sacrifice our ideas. “Just imagine what kind of world we would live in if Socrates and Galileo had recanted.” After leaving his office, Demirbaş’ assistant, a nephew, told me to be careful when going to the Surp Giragos: it was not a very safe neighborhood. “There are many street kids,” he said when I pressed him what he meant, but he would not be more explicit than that. The Akkaya brothers had also told me to be aware of my surroundings when going to the Infidels’ Quarter. “There can be unruly children … you’ll see when you go there,” and Hamdi, too, was hinting at something he appeared embarrassed to say. “Beware the Gypsy kids,” one street vendor just outside the Ulu Cami (Great Mosque), from whom I bought sweets on my way to the church, told me after the interview with Demirbaş. Nothing ever happened the dozens of times I visited Surp Giragos, other than cheerful little children playing soccer or with kittens, posing with wide smiles for photos, except sometimes for one or two very little girls, who would be too shy and hide behind their mothers’ long skirts. Only once did a group of teenagers run after me angrily when I took a picture of them smoking, but left me alone when I told them, a bit too loudly, to mind their own business.     

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As a child, Aynur used to play with other children in the ruins of Surp Giragos Church. “We did not know what it was,” she had told me in our first conversations. Her family had moved from Mizak, their village in the province of Diyarbakır, and had settled in the old Armenian quarter. Vartan, the beadle of Surp Giragos, had come to Sevag’s office for some documentation to run church errands. His eyes rested on Aynur, the young office assistant. She cut a delicate figure, dressed in simple but exquisite Islamic fashion, with a black skirt and a matching sweater. The silk shawls over the hijab cap, always in a plain color and very often red or blue, made her stand out. The headscarf rose slightly toward the back of the head and sloped down to the neck, like Nefertiti’s crown cap: the effect, seen in the headdress of many young women in Turkey, was caused by their long hair, tied up in a ponytail, hidden beneath. Yet Vartan did not admire Aynur. “You are Armenian,” he told her. He had recognized her from the village of Mizak, in the vicinity of his hometown of Lice. Her family was indeed of Armenian origin, she admitted. She had seen me speaking with Sevag about my book project, which I had also discussed briefly with her, but she had not said anything. Flabbergasted as I was, I was even more surprised that not even Sevag knew it, despite employing her for the last two years. He, however, acknowledged it with phlegm—“Oh, is that so?”—and continued his conversation over tea with Vartan about church affairs. With initial reluctance, Aynur agreed to speak with me. She had just turned 23 and was planning on getting married in a few months. Outside of Diyarbakır, she had spent three years at university in Urfa, and she had been once to Ankara, a city she had found chaotic. In no hurry to see Istanbul, she was impatient to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. “I cannot afford it now because of my wedding, but I will not wait for old age to do the Hajj; I will do it in my youth, inşallah.” Her voice was diaphanous, yet some of her thoughts, wrapped in the velvet of her soothing whisper, would have sounded much different from other, sullen lips. “When I was little, my family mentioned that we were of Armenian origin but they would not enter into details about how or where we came from. My mother and my father did not know. They only knew that in the past Armenian fugitives came into our village and afterwards they converted to Islam, whether our grandfather or grandmother, we do not know. Nothing else. We only know this. Perhaps our elders knew but did not speak. My paternal grandparents are dead and my maternal grandfather never leaves the village. Maybe he came to Diyarbakır once to visit a sick relative, and perhaps one other time, but that was it.” Mizak, some two hours by car from Diyarbakır, used to be an Armenian village in the past, “in the time of our elders, but afterwards they obviously became Muslim.” 164

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Everybody was related to each other in Mizak: “Only our clan and its branches are Armenian. The other families do not know their origin. Nobody does. There are more than 50 homes in Mizak. More than 20, perhaps 22, are families of Armenian origin, all related to us, because our clan is the biggest there. There are no aşirets or tribes in the Kurdish style. We are just a big family.” “Do you know how you became Muslim?” “How did I become Muslim? I was born a Muslim. In my family, I think an Armenian woman married a Muslim man and that’s how we became Muslim. But we are not Muslim on both sides. My father’s grandmother was Armenian and Islamicization came by way of marriage. I don’t know anything about Armenians in Turkey.” “How about 1915?” “Ah yes, they call it genocide? Armenians of course call it a genocide. That’s how she became a Muslim. At the time of what you call the genocide she fled and sought refuge in our village, and married a Muslim man.” “Don’t you think it was a genocide?” “It may have been, but how much of it is true and how much a lie, I don’t know. There was something like that. But if it was one-sided or reciprocal, that I don’t know, but they talk about that.” “Do you feel anything that links you to Armenians?” “I never mingled with Armenians. I have never been involved with them.” “Would you call yourself Armenian?” “I don’t know. I feel Muslim myself.” “It is possible to be both Armenian and Muslim.” “Is it? I only say that I am of Armenian origin, because I am Muslim.” “There are atheist Armenians but they are Armenian.” “I don’t know.” “When you were little, was ‘Armenian’ used as a bad word in school?” “No, never. I’ve never heard anything bad about Armenians. I studied at Haran university, in Urfa, so it was safe there to say that I was of Armenian origin. My fiancé is Muslim proper on both sides, both his mother and father. He is a Zaza, a relative of ours from Mizak. He is not a stranger. He is a distant relative. His elders were hocas. I love my religion, very, very much.” “What do you feel about Christians and Armenians in Turkey?” “In Turkey it is possible to live with a different religion. Coexistence is good, that everybody can talk about his own religion and practice it.” “There are problems between Christians and Muslims.” “But that is more related to politics, isn’t it? I think Christians and Muslims can talk and be friends. It’s not a religious problem. It’s politics.” “How would you feel about your religion if you learned that you are Muslim because of forced conversion?” 165

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“I want to read about 1915, find out whose rights were violated. Forced conversions? I had never heard about that. We just know we are of Armenian origin: only my father, my mother, sometimes my older brother says we are of Armenian origin, but that’s it. I don’t know anything about that. On my mother’s side I don’t know, we don’t know. She says, ‘My grandfather died but I don’t know where he came from, how he came here.’ They may have been converted by force, but I really don’t know.” “Did you feel fear when you were little about your Armenian origin?” “No, everybody knew and I said it at school or university, I never hid it. In Urfa I was in a district that was Kurdish so nobody bothered me. I have two older sisters and two brothers, I am the youngest. My older brother knows a little more, because he remembers my grandparents, so he spoke with them and he knows a few things. Armenians were mistreated; he said that.” Aynur wanted to know what I felt about Muslims of Armenian origin. She was also curious about Muslims who were forcibly converted and wondered how they felt toward Islam. But the conversation was cut short when her boss, Sevag’s daughter, came over with work. She had not spoken about the forced disappearance of people in her hometown. Some locals, including at least one member of her clan in Mizak, had last been seen in the company of policemen or gendarmes, including Mehmet Can Ayşin, a peasant and imam. The father of nine had not been heard from since May 8, 1994, during the repression years of the Kurdish uprising.     

“My father was born in 1910, so he was five,” Vartan said. “They killed his three brothers and his parents before his eyes, and he was left wandering, alone in the bazaar: an honorable Muslim family took him in and hid him. When he grew up they also gave him one of their women and converted him.” His father, Husep (a dialectal form of Hovsep, or Joseph in Armenian), had changed his name to Abdullah. Probably by mistake, he was conscripted twice, once under the Armenian name, then under the Turkish one. “I learned after I was 25 that I was Armenian.” Vartan had found out after returning from military service in Northern Cyprus. “Until then I thought I was a Kurd.” The Muslim family that had raised Husep called him “f îlla,” they told Vartan at the time. “My father did not say a word about it to protect us.” Uncelebrated in Diyarbakır, New Year had dawned amid a thick fog. It had found Vartan, the church beadle, badly sick. As he knew my hangouts, he would drop by for a talk, often in the literary café, a mezzanine above a bookstore run by an Islamicized Armenian in the commercial district, where he came after church for a tea or, more often, a 166

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Danish beer. He also left at the bookstore the newly received copies of Agos. But on that glacial day, I first met him in the church, briefly, where I hibernated around the stove with him and Agop Serkis as we watched some banality on Turkish TV with the police officer—even though I had not expressed concern, they told me that he was a Kurd to reassure me, deployed by the municipality for protection. There had been some minor incidents in the past, including stonethrowing, and I had once seen offensive graffiti on an adjacent wall. Vartan later joined me at Sülüklü Han, which had become one of my writing dens, as I was drawn to the conversations with Perwîn that flowed like a deep river, the charm of its gallery of basalt, and the black cat that climbed onto the table to inspect my notebooks and computer screen. The cafés were usually his last stop after church before heading back home. With some urgency, Vartan told me he was planning a trip to Armenia in the spring. As Diaspora Armenians used to do, he also idealized Armenia. Born and raised in Western Armenia, he was not a Diasporan. Yet despite being more indigenous than others in the land, he now belonged to a people that had shrunk to a minority and, as such, could only behave like a community. In Armenia, he would become a citizen and begin a new life. His wife did not accept his Armenian identity. But did she not know he was Armenian prior to getting married? “Biraz,” he said in Turkish: “A little.” I was not sure what it meant to “know a little” that he was Armenian. He was also distressed about his sons and daughters, making some sad comments in Armenian, of which he had a basic command, all the more remarkable because he had studied late in life and then only for a brief time. His four children rejected the Armenian identity: They say, “We are already Muslim,” but my youngest one is a sensitive girl: she has been learning Armenian words, she likes it, and her name is Miro. They are Muslim Kurds. We speak Kurdish at home. They consider themselves Kurds … Of course I would like them to feel Armenian. I feel alone and cold.

Their mother also opposed her husband’s and children’s baptism. She would tell her husband to quit his work at the church. “Taking money from the Church is haram, she tells me,” he said, using the Islamic word for something sinful or forbidden: “My wife is the granddaughter of the family that raised my father, the daughter of an uncle of mine.” This was also proof that the paternalism which supposedly ruled identity in Turkey admitted exceptions, especially when it pertained to less stigmatized groups. Sose, my Sasuntsi friend in Istanbul, had told me as much, advising me not to believe the theory to the letter. “Most will choose what expediency 167

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dictates,” she said. “When they are living among Kurds, they will say they are Kurds: it doesn’t matter if their father is Armenian.” Theirs had not been a marriage for love, Vartan said. His mother, who was Kurdish, had arranged his wedding with a Kurdish girl from the family they were friends with. Vartan’s mother had not loved his father either, like a double curse prefigured by Tolstoy in the opening line of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He wiped off the sweat from his brow, and complained of his headache as he lit another cigarette: “Marriage is like a prison sentence.” He laughed, his eyes bloodshot after downing half a pint of beer in one go. Life in Armenia, which he was planning on, might not be easy, I told him. Why would I think, he retorted, that life in Diyarbakır was easier? His home had become alien, or he had become a stranger to them. Heavily congested, he was now looking down at the table. His marine eyes had welled up. It was the cigarette, he said. Winter felt endless: Is it possible to be both Muslim and Armenian? It’s impossible, but this is the reality, unfortunately. To be Armenian you need to be Christian, but my religion is Islam. I don’t like the mosque; I haven’t liked the mosque since I was little. I have been three times for the bayram feast when I was a child, and have not been back to a mosque since. I am a leftist and I don’t like religions, but I like the Church. It gives me peace, I find everything there, I find my friends there, I find relatives there, we relate there. I don’t like Islam. We are five brothers and the oldest does the namaz, goes to mosque every Friday, but we all acknowledge we are Armenian. He knows the history very well, too. But for him Armenian is an ethnicity. Religion is different. He is 72 years old and lives in Bursa, where he receives cancer treatment. And he knows which Kurd took which property from our family after the Genocide; that I don’t know. I know these Kurds, but growing up in Lice I didn’t know they had grabbed our properties. In 1975 there were still three Armenian households in Lice: the families of Dikran Duman, Ares, and Ayo, but two left after the earthquake of that year. The last left a little later, when they tried to kidnap their daughter, who was beautiful. They moved to the Netherlands. I knew about the Genocide from the time of my youth; that things happened. That I knew. But when I learned I was Armenian it affected me deeply. I cried inside myself: only my father was saved from our entire family. He didn’t tell us one word about it to put us out of harm’s way. He feared very much. He saw his mother, father, and three brothers murdered. He was protected by my maternal grandfather, Mehmet Kızılkaya. My paternal grandfather’s name was Dono and my grandmother’s Hanım Demirciyan. Two of my uncles were called Davit and Artin, but I don’t know the name of the third one.

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DIKRANAGERD I I learned about my origins at the time of the PKK war. I never felt fear. As Lice is small everybody knows each other. There are still many families in Lice that do not admit their Armenian origin, and try to pass themselves for Kurds. Everybody knows they are Armenian.     

The week before Christmas Perwîn introduced me to an Armenian woman at Sülüklü Han. There was an intensity in the face of Zuhal that reminded me of Mary in the icon of the Tokalı Church of Göreme in Cappadocia, holding the Christ Child tightly close to her, aware that her son was doomed. But unlike the Madonna, Zuhal’s eyes engaged the viewer’s like those of a Bulgarian princess in the Middle Ages, whose stare in a blinking contest with her father, the king, had so disturbed the monarch’s guards that they had wanted to intervene against his daughter. Her ancestors were survivors from Erzurum who had made it as far as Diyarbakır in 1915 and had found refuge. Her facial type and other characteristics—the black eyes, almond-shaped and big; the copious black hair; her darker skin—corresponded to the physiognomy that three generations later everywhere in the world, and notwithstanding mixtures with other groups (including Armenians from elsewhere), had survived among descendants of Armenians from Erzurum, the ancient Garin. Zuhal took me along to visit Damla and her husband Ümit, an engineer with a Turkish father and Georgian mother, specialized in the architectonic heritage of Turkey. A government consultant for the restoration and preservation of historical monuments, he was a man of voluminous build and humor that expanded with his boisterous laugh, which boomed out from under his big mustachios with their traces of red hair. By virtue of his wife, a considerable part of his social life was spent amid Armenians and Assyrians, Islamicized or otherwise, for Damla was registered as a Muslim but was a practicing Christian, and as such she was to be found frequently at Surp Giragos or at Maryam Ana, the Assyrian church. “There are angels.” Zuhal was reading Ümit’s Turkish coffee cup: she was unsure of its interpretation but she did not seem to like the signs. It was a strange coincidence, Ümit said. During a commission at Mardin a few months earlier, he had noticed angels and a crucified Christ on the minaret of the Şehidiye Cami (Martyrs’ Mosque) built in the thirteenth century. “Of course,” he said, “Armenians and Christians were the architects and masons; Turks didn’t have time: they were going from one battlefront to the other; that’s how the Christians sneaked their prophet onto the minaret,” he said with his big laugh. “People from all over have come to Turkey and fought: we came and won; and 169

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we told the Christians, ‘You stay here: build the mosques, the caravanserais, the churches,’ while the Turks went to defend the country’s borders, conquer other peoples, and occupy other countries.” Turks were the rulers and soldiers; Armenians the masons and craftsmen. Regardless of the accuracy of the statement, it illustrated, in passing, the imperial logic with which an educated layman in Turkey saw land appropriation from Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians, and how he interpreted the country’s history. It was also the justification for the military means, the ultimate remedy—yet very often the first—to any real or perceived challenge to the Turkish state, whether it be the existence of Christian minorities, exterminated but for a token presence; the Kurds’ demands, chronically made with violence and met with more of it; or a tendency for the repression of dissent even under constitutional rule: if the experiences of dozens of leftists I met were anything to go by, incarceration rates in the country had to be very high, for the vast majority of them had served time in prison—sometimes for more than a decade—even if they had committed no other crime than being members of Marxist groups. Turkey was still an empire in all but name, in the strictest sense of the world: one centralized state with a dominant nation that ruled over other peoples on territories conquered from them. Turkish rule was still contested in discourse by its original populations and, in Eastern Anatolia, by arms, in the periodic Kurdish rebellions. Since Atatürk, Turkey was trying to fit into the narrow framework of a nation state: but it could not, due to the centrifugal tendencies of the Kurds, an indeterminate number yet easily 30 percent of the 80 million of the country’s population. Turkey had not found any other remedy for surviving these demands other than suppressing them by force, and by the violence it has unleashed on other nationalities that it has perceived as a threat or have contested the unity or nature of the state. Ümit attended the commemorations of the Armenian Genocide by the budding community of Diyarbakır, and also honored the memory of Hrant Dink on the anniversaries of his murder. In his mind, there was obviously no conflict between the homages he paid and his views of Turkish nationhood, a consequence of which were these crimes. If he was aware of the contradictions, the routines of life glossed them over. On Christmas Eve, Ümit gave me a little silver crucifix as a gift. As he was an expert, I wondered if he could give me a rough estimate for restoring the Gomk monastery in Sasun. Very preliminarily, looking at the photos, he told me it would cost at least $3 million. That evening he was peeved by the news. Turkey at the time was riven by a corruption scandal that implicated Erdoğan’s family. The government accused Fetullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric living in the US, of orchestrating the scandal 170

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by mobilizing his followers in the police and the “deep state.” Ümit expressed support for Erdoğan by omission, comparing Gülen, who was holed up in a compound in Pennsylvania, to Hassan al Sabbah. “A traitor,” Ümit said. “Turkey is full of traitors.” Sabbah, the leader of an uprising against the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, was the founder of the Hashashin sect, a group of Islamic militants that were narcotized with hashish to murder political opponents. He commanded the rebellion from the fortress of Alamut, in the Albruz mountains of Persia, which he apparently only left twice in his life. Introduced to a wider audience by Marco Polo as the “Old Man of the Mountain,” he survived in the word “assassin,” a cognate of the militia’s name.10 A week later we were driving through the polar landscape of Diyarbakır as a confused motorist from torrid Urfa slowed us more than the snow, exasperating Ümit, at the wheel of a powerful SUV. The brake lights of the small car from Urfa shone through the heavy snow flakes that blanketed the road. We were headed to Zuhal’s home. She had moved far from the city center, she confided to me later, after one of her brothers had threatened her for taking on the unbecoming job of a teacher, rather than remaining at home to raise her children. “He put a gun to my head,” she said. Erzurum was the original hometown of many Armenians in Diyarbakır, one of the later stops in the death march routes, but Zuhal’s family had a special claim to fame. Her great-grandmother Sare, she said, was the woman who had inspired Sarı Gelin, the most popular Armenian song in Turkey, where the Turkish version (rather than an accurate translation of the Armenian lyrics) is better known. The origin of the song is the object of much dispute, but it is acknowledged as an Armenian song. Sare was a beautiful 15-year-old, the only sister of six brothers in the city of Hınıs, formerly a major Armenian center in the province of Erzurum. “One day, Sare had gone to the market in Garin,” Zuhal called Erzurum by its Armenian name, “and she caught the eye of the money changer’s son.” But her family was opposed to the courtship of the young man, who would wait for her every night and day outside her home. Shortly after, Sare fell gravely ill. At the time, people in Garin started talking about a lovesick man singing a forlorn tune that would become Sari Ağçig in Armenian and Sarı Gelin in Turkish. Finally, her family consented to her marriage. By 1915, they had two girls and four boys. Her husband was conscripted and murdered with the Armenians drafted into the labor battalions. Sare lost her boys in the convoys from Hınıs: the six-year-old one died of hunger at the beginning of the deportation. Two others, of eight and ten years old, disappeared. Further down the road, Sare was injured when trying to defend herself from an attempted rape: her attacker drove a dagger, a hancar, into her chest that went through the hand of her two-year-old daughter, Azniv, which cushioned the impact.

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Zuhal brought up ASALA, the Armenian militant organization that attacked Turkish targets in the 1970s and 1980s. They were taking revenge for the Genocide, she thought, saying aloud what others still whispered in Turkey: not long before, I had been stunned to hear one Turk credit ASALA with bringing back from oblivion the memory of 1915, which had been erased amid the Turkish population, except for old people. And she raised a toast to “Ata …,” but she substituted the suffix following “Ata” (father) with a different word, in allusion to the Republic’s founder. She had five brothers, one of whom had died fighting for the PKK in 2000, in what the family thought was a chemical attack by the Turkish army. Another one was still in the mountains with the Kurdish rebels. Of the other three, one was married to a Kurdish woman, while the other two had taken two Islamicized Armenian sisters for wives, Nazli and Jalenur, their distant cousins on their mother’s side. The sisters’ family had bought back the lands that were taken from them during the Genocide in the village of Norşen, in the province of Mush, where many family members were killed. Some were rounded up and brought to a cave on Fîlla Tepe (Infidels Hill), where they were slaughtered. Jalenur remembered their old last name, Hagopian, and their great-grandfather, Soğo, and his brother, Sarkis amca, telling stories of the Genocide and their old last name. There were several other villages with Islamicized Armenians in Mush, the other sister, Nazli, said: Gortaqum, Orginos, Golosik, Muşuni, Muşk, Mışuş, and Mikragom. In Norşen, Kurds and Arabs still called the Islamicized Armenians fîlla to this day. After the Genocide, they had brought in Turcomans from Bulgaria to be resettled in Norşen but they couldn’t adjust, so they sold their properties and they were all gone by 1918. The Turkish government brought in Arabs from Sasun to take their place, but some Armenians returned as well, albeit already converted. Among those who returned was their grandfather, Hacifaykı, whose Armenian name the family had forgotten. He had bought back the old family house and an additional plot. Hacifaykı, together with his father Soğo and his uncle Sarkis, had escaped the massacres in 1915 by fleeing to a nearby village where they had worked for a Kurdish ağa as shepherds. There, Hacifaykı had met his wife, an Islamicized Armenian girl called Aslıxan. Dilhan, the brother to whom Zuhal was the closest, had proposed that I visit an Armenian cousin’s widow to see if we could find anything of value in her trove of old photographs and books, as her husband had been a man of 172

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intellectual curiosity and the author of a thin volume that weaved memoirs and socialist ideology. The visit had not yielded much, except Dilhan’s surprise in finding out the widow’s displeasure when he had described her as a Turk. “I am not a Turk: I am Macedonian.” Dilhan, a little taken aback, asked her if she was a Muslim born in Turkey. “So are you,” came her swift riposte. “But you say you are a Kurd because your father is a Kurd, and your mother is Armenian,” she said after sitting mostly silent while we browsed old papers amid furniture with a style and wear that pointed to the 1970s. Her parents had been relocated in Turkey from a village called Vranovça in Macedonia, not happily for them, during the population exchanges that followed World War I, and they did not speak Turkish. They would be pestered by a slogan they loathed. “Vatandaş, Türkçe konuş!” (“Compatriot, speak Turkish!”). They had first settled in Izmir, on the Aegean coast, and then somehow had ended up in Diyarbakır. Dilhan gave me his telephone number as we were leaving the Macedonian woman’s home. “Our aşiret is one of the biggest in Diyarbakır,” he said, referring to the Mandel, the Kurdish tribe on his father’s side. He said it comprised more than 1,000 households in the city. Zuhal had also promised me the tribe’s support. Should I have any problem in Turkey—and he repeated it, “any problem”—I ought to call him.     

Nesim Yazar was one of the church regulars. He was the grandchild of Simo, a blacksmith who after the Genocide had moved to Hazro, where a Kurdish strongman called Camil Paşa had taken him under his protection. At the time he became a Muslim. He then settled in Kulp, where he got married and had two boys and two girls, all of whom would eventually marry other Islamicized Armenians. Someone called Tumo taught him the art of gunmaking. Simo never spoke about the massacres and got upset if anyone did. Nesim remembered him doing the namaz, the Muslim prayers. His father, Selahattin, did the prostrations too. “But I don’t believe in God,” said Nesim, with the choked laugh of a smoker. “I neither go to church nor to mosque.” His was not atheism, that of the uncomplicated Marxism of Garbed, the typographer: Nesim’s seemed to be a different order of the soul. Still, he would go to Surp Giragos at least once a week, I observed. “I am Armenian,” he responded. “Where else would I go to meet other Armenians?” Then Nesim got married and went to the village of Argint in Sasun, the one that had fought off the Kurds for decades. He lived in Argint, where he married the daughter of an Armenian gunmaker in the village, from 1982 to 173

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1987. Christian and Muslim Armenians lived side by side and intermarried without any discrimination. And then he mentioned the last battle of Argint that Seto, my informant, had omitted to tell me. In 1987, a Kurdish aşiret, the Bekira Mahmutka, attacked the village, and killed at least six people. He and his wife moved to Kulp. The Kurdish attackers didn’t care that there were Muslims in Argint, too. “Muslim or not, they were Armenian,” Nesim said. “Religion does not make any difference.” And he made some sarcastic yet obscure joke that I missed about wives, and was at a loss to make a connection to the murder story he had just told, except that it was not in praise of marriage. A friend of his, Gevro, was expelled along with his family in 1985 from the village of Baham because he was Armenian, even though he had been born a Muslim, the son of a converted man. “Islam doesn’t make a difference: being Armenian in Turkey is impossibly difficult,” and he coughed or laughed, and lit another cigarette. And he elaborated on his answer to the remark that he went to the Surp Giragos Church: “I just go there to visit, I don’t pray.” He had the tired eyes and the decadent elegance of gamblers of expensive tastes, those who played for high stakes that you encounter in the wee hours in the cafeterias of casinos, the bitter pleasure of those aware that life ended alike for all, no matter how good or bad had been our bets. On Christmas Eve, Sevag introduced me to a visitor in his office: a tall man, dressed in a tailor-made suit and an olive-green cashmere coat with a matching beret. Sevag said I was a journalist and a writer. The visitor asked me what I was writing about. “The Anatolia Armenians,” I said. “Which regions?” he wanted to know. “The historical Armenian provinces,” I said. “Western Armenia,” he responded with half a smile. “Oh, you know we call it that,” I said. Before, he had said that this area was called Kurdistan. “Van, Garin, Kharpert, Pağeş, Sepasdia, and Dikranagerd,” he listed the vilayets by their Armenian name, including the one for Bitlis—Pağeş—which was little used even among Armenians. He had smiled widely when he called Diyarbakır by its Armenian name. “I am a history teacher,” he said. And he then said he was of Armenian origin. It was clear he was attached to his roots. “I am of Armenian origin,” he said. “But what am I now? I am neither a Kurd, nor a Turk, nor an Armenian.” It was almost an adolescent statement for the simplicity in which a complex issue was cast, coming from a man of his age and his learning. Yet the sense of dislocation was clear. Born, raised, and living on his own ancestral lands, he found himself displaced. Only later would I find out that he was Nesim’s older brother. Even though I had never met them before, the Yazars seemed familiar, in a strange way that I attributed, without much conviction, to their resemblance to people I knew. 174

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He arched his eyebrows and looked down at his Oxfords, tightly tied and polished to a fault, incredibly free of the slush that was everywhere those days in Diyarbakır. Sevag tried to dispel the air of gravity, saying Emin bey had a fine sense of irony: “He is as Armenian as any of us.” His head bowed down, holding his cashmere beret, Emin bey was smiling, a little embarrassed listening to other Armenians acknowledge him as one of their own. Emin’s wife was Turkish. He was a subscriber to Agos, which he used to teach himself Armenian. It showed in the literary Armenian words he was prone to use; from his questions you could tell it was the written language, that of the solitary reader, with an unusual know­ledge, if a little uncertain, of inflections from classical Armenian that had some residual, formal use in the modern language and were only found nowadays in the increasingly rare Western Armenian prose. “It’s Church Armenian,” remarked Sevag’s daughter, who ran the day-to-day work at the office. “Krapar,” Emin bey said, using the Armenian word for classical Armenian. When I asked for his contact information, he wrote his name in Armenian with the care of a student who is taking a test, spelling out the large and rounded cursive of the new learner, a handwriting fresh and hopeful, unslanted by almost seven decades of life. Nesim, his younger brother, had become a nihilist. Emin bey, the history teacher, was still seeking, teaching himself Armenian well past his retirement age, reading laboriously the Armenian page of Agos in a home and a city where he had nobody to speak the language with. Now hardly on speaking terms, they were born to the same parents in that house where, as Emin bey said, “there was something crooked, something that did not feel right, but I could not tell what it was.” Many years later the brothers would learn they were Armenian. They were from Silvan, near the site of the real Dikranagerd, built by Medzn Dikran, or Tigranes the Great—the name by which King Tigranes II is known among Armenians—under whose rule in the first century bc Armenia attained its greatest extension, stretching across the Armenian plateau and beyond, from the Caspian to the Black Sea. But Diyarbakır was not founded by the Armenian “king of kings”; it owed its eponymous name to a much earlier Dikran, from the Orontid dynasty, who was believed to have erected the first fortification of Diyarbakır around 560–535 bc.     

Emin bey and I met again at Sülüklü Han. He came for the interview and agreed to be photographed and recorded on condition that his photo and his real name were not used for publication. He was upset that I was late, and it took me some persuading on the phone to please reschedule the meeting for 175

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half an hour later. As initially agreed, he had come at nine sharp that freezing morning. Stately dressed, even for an informal conversation on a winter weekend, he had taken to Diyarbakır’s slushy streets in his Sunday best. We were the only patrons at the caravanserai. “I am not a Kurd, nor a Turk, nor an Armenian,” was his opening statement, again. Then he added, “I was raised as a Muslim Kurd.” Nobody knew how many people like him there were in the country, he said. It was difficult to define them, too. Would the children of mixed marriages count? And those who only had one Armenian grandmother? Perhaps there were up to 2 million descendants of converted Armenians, he conjectured, but it was as good a guess as any. “Time is required to process what all this means and its implications.” On both sides, he said, meaning Armenians and Turks. The derin devleti (deep state) did not want democracy in the country. People in Turkey still lived in fear. “I used to feel fear, but during my time teaching nobody ever approached me to tell me anything, let alone harass me, for being Armenian.” At the time, he said, it was even more dangerous. By the time he was 30 he had stopped believing in religions. “But I still believe in God.” His brothers and sisters thought like him on religion, he said. Turkey was going to recognize the Genocide when it became a fully democratic state and acknowledged all its minorities. “There is still no place for Armenians in Turkey,” he believed. “Only when the country changes, there may be, but only now has the country begun to change.” Then he inverted the proposition with which he had commenced the conversation: he felt close to the three identities he could lay a claim on: Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish. At the same time, he did not feel any patriotism for Turkey: “That is a straitjacket, and only now are we coming out of it.” But he also spoke about the limits of Kurdish–Armenian friendship. “Only a small group of Kurds feels close to Armenians,” Emin bey said. “Most do not.”     

After I concluded the interview with Emin bey, I took the short walk down Dökmeciler Sokağı, the welders’ street, silent and deserted on Sunday morning, to meet his uncle, Ertem, at Surp Giragos. An Islamicized Armenian, Ertem was an atheist who had never set foot in a mosque despite being registered as a Muslim. Without being sure why, he had visited Surp Giragos every Sunday for the last 20 years, even when the roof had collapsed and the church had been to all intents and purposes abandoned, a place where kids like Aynur would go to play hide-and-seek, and stray cats had made a home for themselves. There was a 30-year gap between Ertem and his oldest sister, the mother of Emin 176

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and Nesim Yazar. This made Ertem, also a teacher, younger than Emin bey, his nephew, by more than 20 years. Ertem’s Kurdish wife had an Armenian grandmother, Gilen Xaço, from Kulp. At the time of the Genocide, Gilen Xaço fled to the mountains of Kulp with her two sisters and brother, who was nine. A Kurdish woman saw them, and told the men of her family, “These Armenians are wealthy, they keep gold in their belts.” The young boy indeed had gold coins hidden inside his belt, which the Kurdish men stole after killing him. Sinan was at Surp Giragos that day, too. The grandson of Islamicized Armenians, he had been married to a very observant Muslim woman for 22 years. Approximately a month prior to the Christmas celebration of 2013, his wife had mentioned in passing that her grandfather’s name was Garo. “Garo?” Sinan had asked her, stunned. “But do you know where that name comes from?” She did: “From Garabed.” Sinan had not yet succeeded in bringing out from her why she had not told him about her Armenian origin, knowing that he was Armenian and that he embraced his identity: “I thought my wife was Kurdish.” She had also told him they were Armenians from the village of Eremli. I continued the conversation with Ertem at his home. Once he had met Aram Tigran, an Armenian singer revered by Kurds. Aram Tigran was an idol in Dikranagerd, his family’s hometown. His image was woven into tapestries the size of prayer rugs and sold like souvenirs, along with those of other local idols, including Kurdish rebel leader Sheik Said, and international ones such as Che Guevara, which hung at the entrance to stores in the Gâvur Mahalle. “Why don’t you compose Armenian music?” Ertem had asked Aram Tigran during their meeting in Diyarbakır. “He got upset and pulled out a fat notebook with more than 400 songs in Armenian.” He sang in the Armenian dialect of Diyarbakır, now only spoken by a few families in the Diaspora, mostly in the US and Syria. Aram Tigran was perhaps a prophet in his own land but not for his own people, as he never gained among Armenians the adoring following he had among Kurds, and his Armenian repertory remained mostly unknown. Ertem sometimes watched singing or quiz shows on TV. When an Armenian song—Sarı Gelin was a popular one—or an Armenian name or word came up, participants would often remark: “We had very good Armenian neighbors.” Of course, Ertem said. What else could Armenians be? In Turkey, they could not be anything but good. And yet, if he lived in Armenia, he would not be a nationalist. Averse to inward-looking communities, he felt Istanbul Armenians, the bolsahays, looked down on their Dikranagerd kin. Then he repeated a phrase that I would hear all over Turkey, and not only from Armenians of any condition: “There is fear.” It was diffuse, like the air. Three years ago, at the presentation of Şeyhmus Diken’s book on Diyarbakır Armenians, the writer Mıgırdiç Margosyan had asked if there were any other 177

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Armenians in the room. Ertem raised his hand first, and he was alone for a moment. Then he saw another three hands hesitantly going up. Ertem’s father, Alexander, was known as Fıllıt Goşgar (Infidel Cobbler), his religious and national identity typified in Kurdish, and his trade in Armenian, a dialectal variant of goşgagar. Decades ago, his father did not hide his identity, but in the more democratic Turkey of today Ertem still did, even from his own neighbors. We had been joined by Udi Manug, the oud musician who had returned to his hometown from Los Angeles. “If you raise your voice they will shut you up.” Udi Manug spoke out of personal experience. “Twenty years ago I had a fistfight with locals because they called me ‘gâvur,’ because I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. A visitor who had come to see me in Diyarbakır that winter had noticed in the streets many young men with crooked noses and deviated septa, which she had interpreted as a sign of conflict resolution. At the time, growing numbers of Diaspora Armenians were flocking to the historical lands and the press was full of stories of Islamicized Armenians from Diyarbakır coming forth to reclaim their identity. There was a general impression that Turkey was changing, but Udi Manug saw through it. “I don’t believe these people have changed: Armenians will never be left in peace in Turkey.” Pour la galerie, his homecoming had been lauded in the local and Turkish press as proof that a new era was dawning in Diyarbakır: an Armenian son of the city had left the comforts of American life to return to his birthplace. Not everybody was pleased, he laughed. “Turkish fascists,” as he described them, had left comments below an interview published online by a major Turkish news site: “Filthy Armenian, why did you come back?”; “Go back to LA.” But the truth was that Udi Manug had returned for Talar, a woman of mixed Armenian and Kurdish ancestry, with whom he had fallen madly in love. He was now distraught over their breakup. Lovesick as he was, he was now also missing the easy living in California. After that I entered a bookstore not far from the Assyrian church to look for a Diyarbakır map. The man, with a long beard and Islamic skullcap, asked me why I wanted a map of the city. “What are you looking for?” he asked with a knowing smile. I did not understand. It would take me some time to learn that maps in Turkey, especially in the historical Armenian provinces, were often meant as code for a chart of Armenians’ gold. He had thought I was Muslim because of the length of my beard. It was yet another instance, and not the last, that I encountered a religious reading of facial hair. The length of my beard would prompt some in Eastern Anatolia to enthusiastically ask me if I was a Muslim. 178

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When he was disappointed to hear that I was a Christian, he invited me to read the Qur’an. “Islam is a more perfect religion than Christianity.”     

“Three years ago there was no one who said ‘We are Armenian,’ but look now: nobody is scared anymore,” Sevag told me the following day. But he also spoke of those who suffer from the fanaticism of the converts. Some members of Hizbullah, the group of Islamist extremists in Turkey unrelated to the homonymous Shiʿi militia in Lebanon, were of Armenian descent. “They were more fanatical than Muslims,” Sevag said, meaning those who were not descended from converts and unintentionally revealing, like most others, that he did not consider them proper Muslims. “Everybody knew they were Armenian.” I was surveying the Armenians of Diyarbakır with Sevag. He described one close friend, actively involved in the community, as a “chameleon” by virtue of the multiplicity of her heritage, that allowed her to claim ancestry according to whatever quarter or house, whether residential or of worship, she entered: “She is Armenian with the Armenians, an Assyrian with the Assyrians, a Turk with the Turks, and a Kurd with the Kurds.” The Yazar brothers were barely on speaking terms, he said. Emin, the history teacher, was “a great man.” Nesim was “a bit more of a complex character.” Sevag did not want to delve too much into details but he tried to deter me from meeting Nesim, whom I was going to see a few hours later. Always courteous, even Nesim’s most serious comments would be marked by a laugh or smile that would throw you off. He saw everything through the lens of sarcasm. That evening, Nesim was expecting me at the office of another friend or relative of his, Raşit, a Kurdish man with an Islamicized Armenian grandmother on his father’s side. It was a real estate or import–export office, very posh and large, heavy on wood furniture and panels, with plush Italianstyle chairs, all in good taste yet just short of tackiness. The building was adjacent to a large box of a mall outside the city center. Nesim was wearing a navy blue pinstripe suit, always holding his amber tisbeh, the beads men in the East fiddle with. His were of the finest type. Raşit ordered shish kebab dishes. The food came like a succulent jolt into sociability, which the polar cold of Diyarbakır had numbed in me. A friend of Raşit was in the office too: he was fully in black, wearing his leather jacket indoors. He was curious to know how many countries I had been to. He had not done military service so he could not get a passport, he said. “He is condemned to staying in Turkey,” joked Raşit. “Or Kurdistan,” I said, to which they laughed hard. Then Raşit’s secretary walked in with the coffees, a relative luxury in Turkey, at least twice as expensive as tea. Her appearance was 179

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very striking, in high heels and tight clothes, and the scene felt more like Las Vegas than Diyarbakır. When she was serving coffee, she engaged Raşit’s eyes for a fraction of a second, which he acknowledged with a minimal nod, and then she said she was off for the day. Raşit made some noises about brotherhood with Armenians, but it was clear he was busy with his work. For reasons I was unaware of, Nesim was especially keen that I heard his friend’s story, which he insisted was worth recording, so I accepted Raşit’s invitation to dinner with his family a few weeks later. His wife was unlike his secretary in beauty and demeanor, refined in her understatement yet in Western-style clothes. Only occasionally would she intervene in the conversation. She was his relative, per the custom of land and tribe. Their oldest son, who was 12, spoke fluent English, remarkably for a child of his age in Turkey, where even many professionals were not proficient in it in Istanbul, let alone in the south-east. He wanted to become a doctor. They introduced me as a writer who was collecting stories for book. As we were waiting for the food, Raşit asked, with half a smile, if I would take him with me to America, with a tone that indicated that it was half-serious rather than half-joking. Not joking, his wife said, “There is no life in Turkey.” But, I said, this was not Turkey: this was Kurdistan now, right? The little quip did not work as well as it had at Raşit’s office; they smiled a bit nervously and Raşit, who had celebrated the same comment with a booming laugh a few weeks ago, now avoided eye contact. The 12-year-old asked me if I liked McDonald’s and Burger King. Then he wanted to know if it was true that in America they ate pork. He wanted to know if I had ever tried it. “It’s excellent,” I said, and I explained to him that there was a delicious cold cut, a variant of ham, that I liked a lot. The best ones were made in Spain, where it was known as jamón serrano, and Italy, where they called it prosciutto. He made a gagging gesture and sound to indicate his disgust. “I am a Christian,” I told him. He swung his head round to the right, in search of his father’s eyes. Raşit’s face had frozen into that smile-like rictus he had displayed when I had mentioned the name of Kurdistan. The child felt cheated: “But you said he is a relative of ours!” he reproached his father. Now it was my turn to look with surprise in his embarrassed father’s direction. “And he eats pig meat,” the boy complained, sulking, to confirm his shocked nausea. It was too much for his mother, who told him that every nation and faith had different customs. I asked the child if he knew that most of the people in these lands, including Diyarbakır, used to be Armenian, and Christian. He pretended not to hear. I had asked him if he knew that his great-grandmother was Armenian, like me. Raşit mumbled that indeed, his grandmother was Armenian. “I am Muslim,” 180

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the boy said hurriedly as he continued playing with his younger brother, who at seven was still enjoying without other distractions the thrill of rolling his friction toy car with some difficulty on the rug, making the noises of “Vrraam, vrraam!” in the spacious living room. His older brother had learned fast the ways of the land, but was now shuffling around heavily in oversize slippers modeled after the Garfield cartoon cat. Every time I pronounced conversational expressions in Turkish that had Islamic etymology but were mostly employed for daily banalities—such as vallah or inşallah, used to indicate gratitude or hope, words that atheist friends in Turkey deterred me from saying in their presence—he would exclaim in Turkish, “He said vallah! He said inşallah!” turning his bespectacled face toward me, with the malicious gaze that children do not disguise. While I was not bothered in the least, his parents’ discomfort was revealing, probably because his surprise stemmed from hearing the name of his god from the lips of an Armenian. And Armenian, for schoolchildren in Turkey, is very seldom used to denote or connote good things. Every time he exclaimed that I said “Allah!” his weary mother—her head uncovered—would tell her son that God was one. From the embarrassed hushing he invited from his parents, unamused and upset, it was clear that the boy had strong Islamic convictions, perhaps as strong as his command of English. Raşit wolfed down his food, the cacophony of chewing filling the silence across the table. It was, in a backhanded way, a manner of complimenting the cooking, which was tasty if uninspired. Smiling a little tensely, Raşit asked what I thought of his son’s English. It was really very good, especially for someone his age, and he was able to conduct relatively complex conversations. So, he finally asked, was there something I could do to perhaps find him a place for higher education in the US, when the time came? Would I know organizations that awarded scholarships for people of Armenian descent? It was obvious that my eyes were not as eloquent as his child’s, for the patina that comes with age, sociability, and weariness must have disguised my ungraceful amazement. He must have interpreted my silent smile as a positive answer. Raşit called me a few more times to inquire about it, always with urgency in his voice, and he did not relent even after I had forgotten about him and wondered who was that insistent voice, which once induced me to tour every store and stand of the bazaar in Diyarbakır and speak with every shopkeeper, tailor, and antiquarian that I knew had Armenian ancestors. Then I remembered who he was and I tried to make the most of it: I was curious about his grandmother’s story and how she had met her Muslim husband, and had converted to Islam. Raşit did not know much about it, except that it had been “for love.”     

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Not that this ignorance was too uncommon: there were so many grandchildren of Armenian women in Turkey, especially among the Kurds, so at some point you stopped counting, especially as memories had been wiped out. That was the case, too, with Rahman bey, Sevag’s father, who now spent old age in a congested neighborhood in the modern section of Diyarbakır, after a lifetime in his hometown of Çermik. He was four when he lost his father, Ibrahim, an Islamicized Genocide survivor, who knew very little about the family’s history except that they were Armenian. His father’s family was thrown from a bridge in Batman in 1915 and only he and a brother had survived. Sevag had told me that the children had wandered off in the area, looking for an uncle or other relatives, but did not know anything else. Rahman bey’s mother, Hızna, daughter of Sarkis son of Xaço, was from the village of Şedırki, near Kozluk. She was Armenian too and spoke the language. Her two brothers had survived and moved to the northern Syrian city of Qamışli, which the Kurds called Rojava. At the time of my visit, it was besieged by the Islamic State and Kurds had started a media campaign in Turkey: “Rojava’da katliam var” (“There is a massacre in Rojava”). The life of Islamicized Armenians was undisturbed, Rahman bey said. He had once visited his relatives in Syria. His uncle was sending a gold Armenian cross, “the size of my palm,” for his sister, Rahman’s mother. “But I was afraid to bring it into Turkey, so I brought clothes instead for her.” Back in the day, his relatives also gave him $2,000. “Our family lived for three years with that money.” His children, he said, were free to choose their religion. “I am Muslim, that is what I know well: but I know well, as our elders did and told me, that 60,000 Armenians were forced to convert.” Regardless of merit, the figure was interesting, for it reflected what was being told among converted Armenians in Anatolia in the 1930s. “I love the Armenian Church, and I go to Surp Giragos, and I ask questions to God: about the past, about the Armenians’ fate,” he said. “But I have not seen the Genocide.” The last phrase caused me to wonder what he meant. There were no more Armenians in Diyarbakır, he said, reverting to the Ottoman use of the word to indicate both the nationality and the Christian faith. He obviously, instinctively perhaps, omitted those who had returned to the Christian church from Islam, including his own son, Sevag, who was sitting next to him. “I no longer have Armenian friends in Diyarbakır,” he said. “There are only Kurds left.”     

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Baydzar Teyzé and her husband, Sarkis Boğosyan, were the last Christian Armenians left in Diyarbakır. They were the last two who belonged to the old community, the one that had miraculously survived in some guise until the early 1980s and then had vanished because of migration and attrition. Lack of means had stranded the childless couple in the city. They had lived at a home in the grounds of the Maryam Ana Assyrian Church, since a winter storm in 1990 that had caused the roof of Surp Giragos to collapse. Baydzar was too sick to attend the Christmas service that had gathered most of the five or six remaining Assyrian families as well as a few Armenians, including her husband Sarkis and her sister, who was visiting from Malatya. There would be no liturgy at Surp Giragos due to lack of a priest. The congregation at Maryam Ana’s Christmas mass was comprised mostly of women who had covered their heads with loose shawls. A tall bonfire made of thorn bushes burned at the sanctuary of the church, which the officiating priest and the altar boys and girls circled, singing a mellow, monophonic hymn. Sunlight and shadows created a living chiaroscuro that swept the church in a westward progression, from the altar toward the gate. Rebuilt several times, Maryam Ana had been erected on the site of what had been a Zoroastrian temple in the first century bc. It was said to have been turned into a church in the third century, which made it one of the oldest churches in the world. Next to the bell tower, and taller than it, rose its distinctive gable, a facade in brick, with the outline of a stepped pyramid that evoked a ziggurat. Sarkis Boğosyan had been nominally registered as a Muslim but everybody in his family was a practicing Christian. In 2002, he formalized it by registering as a Christian on his ID as well. His wife, instead, had been born in a Kızılbaş village, Kadı Köy. Ostensibly followers of Ali, the cousin of Prophet Muhammad, the Kızılbaş were an Alevi group, a heterodox confession that did not call for observance of the five pillars of Islam. “Nobody in her family had to change their religion,” Sarkis said. The Alevis, however, changed the Armenians’ names on purpose to disguise their identities: Baydzar Teyzé’s father was Dono but they called him Halo; her uncle was Artin but they called him Hamo; her other uncle was Yervant but they called him Meyvan. “They remained Christian under the Kızılbaş,” Sarkis said. “But Sunni Muslims killed Armenians wherever they found them.” His father and his two brothers had been taken under the protection of Ali Ağa, the Kurdish chieftain in a village in Silvan, who had inscribed them as Muslims in the Civil Registry to spare them from death. His family’s had been a bureaucratic conversion, but they had remained practicing Christians. Baydzar was the last person left in the town who spoke the Armenian dialect of Dikranagerd: 183

Secret Nation Քիչ մը գիտեմ ամա մենք հայ չի խըպրինք քի, մենք գիղէ մընծեր ենք … Չեմ գիտնամ ես … Իմ պապան ալ Տօնապետ էր, Գատի Գէոյէն Ալեւիներու գէոյէն … էն խըտըր հայերէն չեմ գիտնայ: Էկանք քաղաք, ամմոներ գացին, Իսթանպուլ գացին: Մարդ չի մնաց քի որ սորվինք … Գիղ մենծեր ենք, էն ատեն աղէտ էր … Մինակ մենք հայ էինք …

I know a little but we don’t speak Armenian, we grew up in the village … I don’t know … My father was Donabed, from Kadı Köy, the Alevis’ village … I don’t know that much Armenian. We came to the city, the uncles left, they went to Istanbul. There was nobody left for us to learn from … We grew up in the village, it was the time of the catastrophe … We were the only Armenians …

Beloved in the city, Baydzar Teyzé received a stream of visitors, such as the two young women who came to see her while I was there. One was a Kurdish photographer, whom I would encounter a few more times on newsworthy occasions, and the other was a Turkish teacher from Kayseri. “Asonk dacik en, hay çen” (“They are Muslims, they are not Armenian”), Baydzar Teyzé told me. The Kurdish girl looked askance at me, perhaps having understood dacik, a somewhat pejorative word in conversational Armenian to designate Muslims. Baydzar Teyzé was in bed under thick blankets and she had barely been able to prop herself up to speak to us. Her sister was next to the window, brewing tea on an ancient stove, as the cat looked out of the window into the garden, a red rose in bloom rising from the mound of snow. Sarkis was sitting with his hands in his lap. “She was born in 1927 and I was born in 1930, and we married young,” he said, waving at the photos hanging on the wall, including a few from his military service. “We stayed because it is our hometown, we could not go anywhere else: it was not in our hands.” Poverty had kept them in Diyarbakır. “We are the last Armenians in Diyarbakır,” Sarkis said. “There are many converts.” Baydzar Teyzé died in June 2014 at the age of 87, two months after her church wedding at Surp Giragos. It was her last wish. Sarkis passed away in January 2016.     

On Christmas night at Sülüklü Han I engaged in conversation two young Kurdish men from the region of Ararat. They gave me the telephone number of an Islamicized Armenian in the area. The grandmother of one of them was a converted Armenian, too. But they said they themselves did not use cell phones, did not have email or social network accounts, and had decided to spend some winter time in Diyarbakır far from home, which they called Ağrı. 184

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Earlier in the day, a journalist had taken me for a tour of Kurdish media in the city, including a stop at a female news service, run by six or eight young women from a lively newsroom in one of the towers at the outer edges of the city. The conversations had included the ritual references to democratic decentralization and a confederal structure with equal representation for nations, but as I was walking around the open-plan office I noticed a decorative plate with a picture of Mt. Ararat, the mountain Armenians viewed as the supreme symbol of their nation. On the plate, Ararat bore its Turkish and Kurdish name, Ağrı Dağı, and was encircled in a ribbon of red, yellow, and green. It was the flag of Kurdistan. These were not the colors of the democratic confederation that Kurdish militants and progressives alike said they sought. A journalist looked up as she saw me examining the shelf. “Armenians call it Ararat,” I told her, as she continued typing away, her mind elsewhere. The editor in chief, a 28-year-old woman from Van, where her grandparents had moved from northern Iran, had told me she would have preferred to have this talk in Kurdish. “It would have been nice in Armenian, too, since you come from Van,” I responded. The journalist that brought me there smiled, but she did not. Their news service was filling a gap for a society undergoing a radical transformation, from the conservative ways of a tribal society to a progressive one. Women, for themselves and their children, were instrumental in this emancipation until they attained equal status to that of men, the woman from Van said. Our first stop had been Azadiye Welat, where I had been introduced to a grim-faced journalist from Qamışli (Rojava), a Syrian city with a large Armenian community, at least until the present Syrian war. This reporter did not disguise his hostility. It may have been related to the arithmetics of community loyalties and enmities in wartime Syria, with most Armenians seen as supporters of the government of Bashar Assad. Yet that guess was surely wrong, as I had met a very pleasant group of Kurdish journalists from Rojava a few days earlier, and the English speakers in the delegation—none spoke Turkish—had told me that Armenians in the city were allied with the Kurds. Dimo was the head of a Diyarbakır journalists’ association, housed in a former Armenian residence in the old quarter, built around a square inner court. Prior to the tour of Kurdish news organizations he had planned for me, Dimo had taken me for a coffee at a large Kurdish bookstore. One of its lateral windows was decorated with poster-size pictures of Kurdish men of letters, including nationalist poet Cegerxwîn and Osman Sebrî, nephew of Mehmet Nurî, the Kurdish husband of Siranush in Adıyaman and avenger of his uncles.11 Dimo was talking about Öcalan’s newest ideas on democratic decentralization as a remedy for the inadequacies of the modern nation state, in a world where information and goods travel more freely than men. Yet the proximity of 185

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a man was distracting him. With a round face and curly red hair that was more common among the Laz and Georgians on the Black Sea coast, this person was a rare sight in Diyarbakır. But that was not the reason for his concern: the man, in a gray raincoat, was right beside us browsing school textbooks for longer than seemed usual. I had seen him throwing a sideways glance at us as he leafed through a compilation of Mathematics exercises. We moved to a different table, with the poetry shelf behind us. A few minutes later, the gray raincoat man came to linger over poems. He held in his hands Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from my Country), the prison writings of the celebrated Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, who had died in exile in Moscow in 1963. Hikmet’s portrait, the head slightly tilted back, was reproduced manifold on the cover. The 1940s book, perhaps his masterpiece, was a novel in verse about Turkey’s transition from Islamic empire to Atatürk’s secularism: “Hay Allahım,” dedim kendi kendime “öldüreceksen beni böyle öldüreydin elimde silâh diz çökmüş, yüzüm gâvura karşı …” “Alas, my Lord,” I said to myself “If you are going to kill me It should be so, With gun in my hand on my knee, facing the infidel …”

“Who is this man?” Dimo asked the two girls tending the bookstore’s café, not raising his voice but loud enough to be heard. The man in the gray raincoat got the message and walked out into the winter of Diyarbakır. It was amusing how cartoon-like it was: a man in a gray raincoat eavesdropping. The police could not possibly be so clumsy. Yet by the accidents of free association of ideas I had figured where Nesim and Emin bey, the Yazar brothers, so different and so alike, were familiar from. They were Dostoyevskian sketches, seeking their place in that space of moral suspension defined by God at one end of the spectrum of faith, and nothing at the other. In the summer of 2006, I had met a former CIA operative in Miami, a veteran Soviet hand with a shared admiration for Dostoyevsky. 186

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Yet the former intelligence agent had shamed me into reading The Brothers Karamazov. That drab December of snow on a Russian scale and the characters I had met in Diyarbakır had brought me back to Alyosha and Ivan, and their real-life variations I had encountered, “those exceedingly deep wells, but only at some points of the human soul,” as Marcel Proust had found in the cast of the Russian writer’s book.12     

On December 31, 2013, I was walking down to the old quarter but some five blocks from the Urfa Gate I saw a couple of police patrols and a cell phone store cordoned off, with a crowd gathered outside. It was around eight in the morning and faces looked numb from the cold. Thieves? I asked. No, a young man shook his head, but he did not explain further: “Something very sad,” he said, sending forth clouds of steam. A woman asked too, and another man said there had been a suicide. When I got to Sülüklü Han on Dökmeciler Sokağı, the dark alley was silent. At that time on a weekday morning, sparks would be flying amid the din of clangs that came from the little stands. A group of welders and bazaar merchants had surrounded a little white kitten on his back, agitating its feet rapidly and meowing loudly. It was still early and there were only a few blacksmiths warming up to a slow start, the knives hanging unsheathed top down on displays. I squatted down to play with the little cat but he was pushing back frantically, with his eyes closed. One of the blacksmiths, with white hair and black mustaches, looked sad. “Can çıkır, soğuktan can çıkır,” he said. “His life is going away, his life is going away because of the cold,” was the literal translation. Other blacksmiths had left their work and stood around the kitten as it squirmed and fought to stay on. Inexplicably, I walked away and so did the others, and I still wonder why none of us picked up the little animal, new to the world, and tried to save it. That day at the caravanserai, Perwîn introduced me to her sister-in-law (calling her xınami, an Armenian word for “in-law”) from Dersim, whose grandmother was Armenian. There were also two young women with their children. One was a Christian from Iskenderun, the Levantine part of Turkey, near the Syrian border, and her complexion confirmed the geography of her origin. Ana and her family thought they were Greek, until recently when they were contacted by a Chuljian family that had found a common relative, their grandfather from Sis, now called Kozan in Turkish, the old seat of the Armenian Catholicate of Cilicia. Ana’s family had forgotten about that grandfather. Her friend, Selin, was brimming with vitality and joie de vivre that manifested itself in everything from her carefree speech to the free flow of her hair and her 187

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sea-deep eyes. Her family had recently begun to suspect they were of Armenian origin, too. Most unusually, the person leading the efforts to find out was her father, a ranking officer in the Turkish army: I double-checked if that was so; indeed, she said, her father was excited, and was looking forward to finding what he believed were his lost Armenian relatives. I did not want to spoil the moment by expressing my doubts about a Turkish officer embracing any trace of Armenian past, which could compromise his military career in a country where racism is tacitly institutionalized. Selin told me she had written the lyrics for a song dedicated to Hrant Dink, inspired by his final column, nine days before being shot dead on January 19, 2007. “I feel just like a pigeon … Just like it, I am in a constant state of keeping my eyes out, looking left and right, in front of me and behind me.”13 Selin’s friend Metin would compose the music to the lyrics. She asked me to translate it into Armenian: Pigeon The white pigeon was shot down He saw the persecution of his people, he saw massacre The baby came and returned soon back to the ground You could not reap your dream My little Armenian girl Did you perchance forget the atrocities? They broke my knees, you lying pigeon! This is my mother, and this is my brother There is no past in my memory, I told the pigeon I told you so, but the sky collapsed over my head Pigeons fell on my lap I recognized them all: my uncle, my mother, my brother The memories from the distant town Came to sit next to the pigeon. Return to your sleep, mother I will be adopted, I will be taken as a bride But an unspoken poem weighs down in my chest Don’t tell me to shut up They do not sacrifice pigeons anymore.

Metin’s grandmother on his father’s side was Armenian. She remembered family members murdered inside a bread kiln. In Hani, a district of Diyarbakır, they would throw babies up into the air to practice marksmanship, Selin said. Diyarbakır was built by Armenians, Mevlüt, Selin’s husband, said. He was one of the partners in the cooperative that ran Sülüklü Han. Himself a Kurd, he said, “Kurds have been a bad nation: I don’t know Armenians who are bad 188

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people.” It was yet another example of the proverbial “good Armenian neighbor” Ertem had spoken about. “But who can say that they don’t know bad people who are Kurdish?” “What happened here was our fault,” Mevlüt said, and he surveyed the topography of the old quarter. Diyarbakır’s post office, on the street leading to the Surp Giragos Church, was previously a synagogue. The Chaldean church, the Assyrian church, the mosque with the four-legged minaret, were all in the same neighborhood, the three monotheistic religions together, thanks to the Armenians, he said. Everybody did well. “Do you know any other place where so many religions coexisted so close together?” he asked me. “We have eaten the same bread and the same food and heard the same stories since childhood; we died together and we will rise again together.” Mevlüt was thinking about renovating a home and returning it to an Armenian as symbolic compensation. It was not enough for Kurds to apologize for what they did: they must compensate, he said. Eastern Anatolia had sunk into misery after the Armenians’ extinction. For a renewal, they had to return. One hundred and twenty years ago, there were four major routes in Anatolia, two of which originated in Diyarbakır thanks to the wealth of Armenians. He said Kurds had learned from their own mistakes to become good people. “Man is man’s wolf,” he quoted from Hobbes’ Leviathan. Greed was the source of evil. “The head of a man with a full belly does not work,” Mevlüt said. “Conversely, the hungry man’s belly is permanently functioning.”

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Siirt Perwîn had found the passage in the memoirs of Mesud Barzani that I had been looking for since an imam had read it to me in Siirt, the Turkish name for the Armenian province of Sığert. I had been invited to this corner of south-east Anatolia by a Muslim Armenian I had met at the conference on the Islamicized Armenians in Istanbul. It had been my first stop prior to returning to Diyarbakır. Siirt, the capital of the eponymous province near the Iraqi border, was thriving on the booming trade fueled by the oil of the Kurdish autonomous republic led by Barzani in northern Iraq at the time, or, as it was being called in this household and elsewhere among Kurds, “Southern Kurdistan.” “See how beautiful was the brotherhood between Kurds and Armenians,” the imam, son and father of imams, had told me in his spacious apartment one floor up from my host’s, as a Kurdish channel beaming from Erbil, the capital of Southern Kurdistan, droned on, with images of peshmergas, the Kurdish fighters, theatrically donned in keffiyehs in ample folds and sporting mustachios with groomed twirls. In the passage read by the imam, a man had recognized Mustafa Barzani at a hospital in Washington in 1978, catching Mesud, Mustafa’s son, by surprise. The stranger was a grandson of General Andranik, a leader in the Armenian liberation movement who later went into exile in the US and died in California, honored with the title of “General of the Armenians.” In his memoirs, Mesud employed this anecdote to introduce a brief reference to the help provided by Sheik Ahmed Barzani, his uncle, to General Andranik. Barzani said 14 peshmergas died in the operation but his men safely escorted Andranik’s forces all the way down to Syria.1 “Was that not noble of the Barzanis?” the imam wondered. It was indeed noble of the Barzani family. Perwîn, however, remembered this passage of the memoir for something else: when passing through the territories controlled by Kurdish chiefs and tribes inside Turkey, Barzani’s peshmergas had to claim that they were headed to “crush the Armenians,” only then being 190

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granted passage by the Anatolian Kurds, who at the time were still cleansing the remnants of Genocide survivors from the lands they were appropriating. It was less flattering than the partial quote the imam had read for me in Siirt. Vahid, the Muslim Armenian that had flown me to the province, wanted me to meet his uncle Azmi, the oldest person in his family, who remembered shreds of stories from 1915. Azmi lived in Eruh, a half-hour drive from Siirt. One early morning in November 2013 we set out from Siirt. Vahid’s younger brother Behzat, an economist in his early 30s and about to get married to a svelte Kurdish woman with emerald eyes, was doing the driving, alternating at the wheel with his cousin Ensar, the son of Azmi. Vahid’s young boy, a 13-year-old amateur photographer, was busy capturing moments of the fast-moving scenery. A little after we crossed the provincial border into Şırnak. Behzat pointed to the mountains on our left, the southern chain of the Taurus system. “Noah’s Ark passed from here,” he said, and I mentally drew the peripatetic trajectory it had followed to Mt. Ararat by way of Sasun, where, in legend, the scuttling incident would have taken place prior to its passage from Şırnak. “And somewhere down there,” he said tilting his head to the hills on the right, “is the lost tomb of Alexander the Great.” As we entered Eruh, I saw a man crawling rapidly by the square. A clock tower that looked like an obelisk stood at the center of the square. The man was crawling on his knees, reinforced with thick leather patches, and his hands were fitted into slippers. He stopped outside a store and turned his eyes to the sun as it emerged feebly through shifting banks of clouds. In the spring of 1996, I had seen a quadruped man in the center of Trebizonda who ran errands for local merchants. Nicholas Humphrey, an expert at Cambridge University who had studied these cases of a condition known as ataxia, said in private correspondence that the Eruh man was different than the one in Trebizonda, who moved on his hands (also fitted in slippers) and feet. In his message, Humphrey said that he supposed “the primary reason for his quadripedalism may be […] a problem in maintaining balance on two feet.” This seemingly unremarkable phrase indicated a stance on interpretation, for Uner Tan, from Çukurova University in Adana, saw it as a case of “backward evolution” that shed light on the beginnings of the transition of Homo sapiens to bipedalism, whereas Humphrey and others attributed it to congenital brain impairment and learning conditioned by this limitation. On the road to his father’s home, Ensar slowed down the car to show pieces from Armenian churches or tombstones lining the walls of a school and the perimeter surrounding a lot. There were crosses and ornaments broken in half, and one Armenian symbol of eternity, with clove-like crescent spokes arranged around an axis, a leftover from pagan times that used to be at the bottom of khachkars (stone crosses). If the convexity of the spokes was oriented to the left, 191

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it signified the repetition of the past; to the right, it symbolized the immortality of life. On one, “Նա Զօր” (“Na Zor”) had survived (on its own, it would mean “He Powerful,” but it was a fragment from a larger inscription). On the steps outside a beauty parlor, there was an upside-down stone with the letters “ZAR” with “1884” underneath, with a trefoil Armenian cross cut off at the arms and missing the lower beam. If whole, this inverted cross would be a token for St. Peter, or for distress, but not for the indifferent woman who stepped on it upon coming out of the shop. “When we were little, we were not allowed to go to the Sıçan Deresi,” recalled Azmi, using the Turkish name for the gorge where Armenians had been pushed to their deaths. “But they spoke at home about it, with a lot of fear and in whispers, and about the çetes wishing them a safe trip before throwing the men into the abyss.” They had brought Hamidiye cavalrymen from Urfa, Bursa, and Malatya for the extermination work. His own father did not know where he came from or how he had survived, but his mother’s family came from Bitlis, according to what his grandmother used to say. “Hagop” was the name of one of his great-great-grandfathers. “When I grew up I went with friends to the gorge.” Azmi was almost 80 years old but his voice trembled: “This must have been in the late 1940s and there were still bones; they had thinned, but there were plenty, and I saw them.” Some Armenians from Eruh took refuge in the village of Kurs, but his father and sisters took refuge in a cave. “One of my father’s sisters was forcibly married off,” he said. “The other married in Eruh.” He also knew that an uncle had studied at the school of the local church, Surp Hovhannes. It stood as a heap of rubble, which Ensar accompanied me to inspect. Amid the pile of stones there were the half-melted remains of beeswax candles, like those employed in Armenian churches. Ensar was nominally Muslim but never told me anything about his religious affiliation; his two younger sisters had hinted that they considered themselves Christian, even though they had been raised as Muslims and their mother, Azmi’s wife, was Kurdish. One of the girls had visited Surp Giragos in Diyarbakır and had had her photo taken at the church, lighting a candle. Evening dinner was at the home of Iskender, a Kurdish man who had been Vahid’s classmate. He was married to a Christian Armenian woman, thereafter converted, who was related to my Sasuntsi friend Sose. The Kurd did not disguise his political sympathies: “Everyone after they turn 17, or some even after 15, joins the PKK around here.” The Kurdistan Workers’ Party had “changed the rules of the game.” It had been thanks to the guerrillas that intercommunal relations had changed: “The Armenians are the lords of this land, the PKK said.” And the Kurds had listened, for it was a line I would hear verbatim all 192

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over Turkey from PKK followers and other Kurds. It may have been perfectly motivated by ideological reasons. But the thawing of Kurdish feelings toward the Armenians may have had a tactical, or strategic, reason, even if it was too little, too late. With the elimination of the Armenians, they had been left alone to face the Turks in the historical Armenian lands that they claimed as Kurdistan. An anecdote might illustrate the point: the war on the eastern front had concluded in 1918 with the Armenian forces beaten back, but the Kurdish colonel Khalid Beg Cibran was inside the campaign tent in a somber mood while everyone else in his regiment was celebrating. Khalid Beg, a Hamidiye commander, had relentlessly fought the Armenians, as well as Kurdish rivals, since the early 1890s. But Mehdi, the brother of Sheik Said—who seven years later would gain prominence as the leader of the first Kurdish uprising against the nascent Turkish Republic—was surprised to find him gloomy. It was, after all, a day for joy for the Hamidiye Cavalry, as the last Armenians had been evicted from Western Armenia, or Eastern Anatolia. On the day of the final victory over the Armenians, when everyone else was merrymaking, Khalid Beg looked very sad and sat brooding silently in his tent. Mehdi sat down with him and inquired what was the reason of Khalid’s black mood. After some insisting, the colonel told Mehdi the thought that had entered his mind and did not leave him at rest: “This day we have whetted the sword that will one day cut our own throats!”2

Khalid Beg had begun to think about the aftermath too late, when there were no Armenians left. His prediction proved accurate for only seven years later, in 1925, would see the beginning of Kurdish rebellions against Turkey that the PKK has extended into the twenty-first century and escalated into an existential conflict for the country. Iskender’s wife, Zaruhi, was a Sasun Armenian whose family lost 45 members in the Genocide. “Most of the survivors in my family went to Armenia,” she said, and she telephoned her mother in Istanbul because she wanted to remember their ransom price. In the meantime, she had brought out her old notebooks from her childhood at an Armenian school in Istanbul. She spoke and wrote Armenian fluently, perhaps the only person in the entire province who still could. As I looked on confused, she put her mother on loudspeaker. “Our family had been kidnapped by a Kurdish aşiret; they had other Armenian families as well but, instead of killing them, had decided to sell them and an Armenian organization bought them,” the woman said, but could not remember neither the name of the Kurdish captors nor of the Armenian group that had rescued them. 193

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She did, however, remember the price: “Individual Armenians were sold for one Turkish gold lira but the price for an entire family was five Turkish gold liras.” There had been similar initiatives in the aftermath of the extermination, with ransom paid usually for orphans and women, more commonly in the hands of Bedouins in northern Syria. An Armenian fedayi leader, Sepasdatsi Murad, had set up a group with a similar mission during the brief liberation of Erzincan in 1916 by Armenian forces, with the motto, “Meg Hay, Meg Vosgi” (“One Armenian, One Gold Coin”).     

Mehmet Esen was sitting cross-legged in a corner of his mud and brick hut in the village of Êrs, its soil covered in rugs and kilims, colorful and thick, some overlapping; the window ledges were covered in thick and ornate tapestries. We had come to see him at his home, a 15-minute drive from Eruh, for at the age of 125 he claimed at the time and as a member of the Hamidiye Cavalry, he had witnessed the Armenian Genocide from the side of the perpetrator. That extra­ ordinary age would make him one of the oldest men in the world, which was all the more remarkable for his vigorous bearing. Notwithstanding the wrinkles and wear of a century and a quarter of life, Esen was good of eyesight and hearing. He also cultivated his appearance and poise, to judge from his tidy military-type uniform, the carefully wrapped turban, and his white beard, long but groomed. The Hamidiye Regiments, Kurdish cavalry formations created by Sultan Abdül Hamid II in 1890, became the main instrument of state terror against Armenians when massacres became systematic. When World War I broke out, 400 men from Esen’s tribe, the Botan, joined the Hamidiye en masse, including Esen himself, who would have been 27 then. “Kurds at the time of the Genocide did not want to kill Armenians,” he told us. Azmi and Ensar spoke in Kurdish with him—Esen did not speak Turkish— and they translated for me. “If they really wanted to, the people called Armenian would have disappeared: some we were ordered to kill, some we were told to spare, and others we deported.” He said he had witnessed massacres but did not describe them, except to say that “the government brought brigands from elsewhere, dishonorable people, because the locals protected the Armenians: they hid them beneath mattresses and in caves, and later sent them on the road to Zakho.” In 1915, he had been deployed with the Hamidiye to Bitlis to fight the Russians and had participated in the Ottoman army’s siege of Van at the outbreak of the Armenian resistance. “More than 18,000 Armenians were up in arms, under Aram Pasha,” he said, referring to Aram Manoukian, the 194

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Dashnaktsutyun party leader who organized the defense of the city. “Van and the surroundings were Armenian, every village there was Armenian.” The Russians sent 8,000 men with Aram, he said. “Every village Aram Pasha entered, he would tell the Kurds that they were brothers with the Armenians, that they would not be harmed, and that Armenians would protect them and their villages, that they would live together.” The other Armenian leaders were “Serop and Tuman,” he said, in reference to the legendary fedayis, Serop Aghpyur and Nigol Tuman, the nom de guerre that Kurds themselves had given to Nigoghos Ter Hovannisian in awe of his fighting prowess, duman (in its correct rendering) meaning “storm.” “Of course I remember Tuman very well.” Mehmet Esen spoke with respect for his adversaries of yore, as the soldier who recognized the nobility of his enemy, even though there was little to be said in praise of the Hamidiye Cavalry, which were grouped or regrouped in all but name for the Genocide following their formal disbandment in 1908, but were still active as late as 1918 against the forces of the nascent republic of Armenia.3 There was one problem, as exposed in the Turkish press: Esen’s birth record showed that he was born on May 24, 1329 in the old Rumi calendar, corresponding to June 6, 1913 in today’s Gregorian calendar. Unless it was a case of inaccurate records, as was very common in the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Esen would have made a very precocious soldier by the time of World War I.

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Five

Dikranagerd II We gathered for dinner on Armenian Christmas Eve on January 5 at Sevag’s large apartment in a new residential complex. There were his wife, his daughter, Ertem, his wife, and their children—his daughter, a Literature student, and his young son—as well as Udi Manug, still lovesick. Those first weeks of 2014, Armenians talked a lot about the statement by Besse Hozat, a female commander in the PKK and considered the number two within the group, that Armenians and Greeks, as well as Fetullah Gülen, had “parallel states” in Turkey that were “obstructing” the country’s democratization. Sevag was dumbfounded. He had met her once in the mountains of Dersim, even though he did not disclose the nature of the meeting. “Parallel state! What is she talking about? We are barely beginning to dare say we are Armenian, and how many Armenians, or Greeks, are left in Turkey anyway?” And then he reflected: “They are trying to butter up the Turks.” At the time, the PKK and the Turkish government had a truce in place, and they appeared to be making progress. But he did not think this was merely tactical: “This must have been in the back of their minds all this time,” he mused. It was ironic, he said, because he believed that Besse Hozat’s mother was of Armenian origin, one of those who converted to Alevism in Dersim. Udi Manug said his great-grandparents were massacred. Their son, Khachadur, survived in Diyarbakır, where he fell in love with an Armenian girl he married. As they were talking about their parents one day, it turned out they were both the children of Dikran and Arşaluys. They were brother and sister, who had been separated for a decade after the Genocide, said Udi, holding back tears. But we all knew he was also crying for Talar. Nobody around the table asked whether the siblings stayed together as spouses afterwards. Unrequited love now also colored how Udi Manug saw his birthplace. It was hard for him to overcome distrust the newcomers did not see, as guests rather than residents. Yet that morning a very little example had alerted me to what he was probably hinting at. A young Kurdish baker had given me a complimentary 196

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portion of kadaif, a syrupy desert, refusing to accept payment from an overseas visitor. Another patron, in his 60s and with a worried expression, was smoking his concerns away, cross-legged, and looking at an excavation site right across the street from the pastry shop, near the Great Mosque. The smoker, a man with sucked-in cheeks and thick mustachios, turned his unhappy face to me. He must not have believed that I was from New York, or Buenos Aires, for he asked me if I had already been to the Armenian church, a ten-minute walk from there. I still pretended I did not know what he was talking about, even if I was aware that they were not buying that I was not Armenian. “You know,” the smoker said, “20 years ago or so I still hated Armenians.” The baker, visibly taken aback, told him something in Kurdish. “But it’s the truth,” the man continued in Turkish, still smoking and looking out at the street. “It annoyed me that they worked, and had money, and these big houses,” he muttered, his eyes absentmindedly on the excavation site. “But Mustafa ağa, how can you say that,” gently teased the shop owner, who was as uncomfortable as I was surprised at this textbook example of what we in the Diaspora had come to believe were simplistic, and unfair, clichés. “Now it’s different, I no longer feel that way …” continued the man, pensively. “But I envied them, I never understood how they could become so rich …” And he was talking about the post-Genocide, frightened and impoverished Armenians, who had even left the church to crumble to a roofless ruin. Ertem had watched Aris Nalcı’s program Gamurç (“Bridge,” in Armenian) and had seen Giro Manoyan, a leader of the Dashnaktsutyun, talking about the Islamicized Armenians and stating, as a blanket principle, “Whoever considers himself Armenian is Armenian, and the religion does not matter.” There were Christians of Armenian origin who do not consider themselves Armenian, Ertem said. By the same token, why would a Muslim not consider himself Armenian? Sevag was smiling a little sarcastically: “The Dashnaktsutyun, the Young Turks’ partners …” The Armenian party had been allied with the Committee of Union and Progress until a short time before the Genocide, still holding onto the view that it would be safer to keep the channels of dialogue open and be cooperative with the Ottoman government. “We never learn,” he added, the conclusion to a train of thought he did not disclose: “At the time of the Genocide there were 2½ million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and 2 million Kurds.” A different conversation at the table distracted me, but I only caught the tail end: “Three daciks massacred 100 Armenians …” We were drinking Ertem’s homemade wine, which he had learned to prepare from his father and for which he used the Boğazkere grape, traditionally cultivated by Armenians. And then 197

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I caught another phrase in the parallel conversation: “Maybe they just want to protect the holiness of God, but in the end they revere Him because He absolves men.”     

The community organized a party to celebrate New Year and Armenian Christmas in a large restaurant owned by an Islamicized Armenian on the outskirts of Diyarbakır, with almost 80 guests in attendance. It had taken the sight of an enthusiastic group for Udi Manug to interpret to the vibrant sound of his oud some Armenian revolutionary songs, replete with subversive lines when sung in Turkey, but the lyrics of which only he and I could understand in the restaurant, also attended by further 100 patrons who were not part of the Armenian party. As the unspoken tradition of not dancing to revolutionary music was ignored locally, the floor was soon overrun by Armenians and Kurds dancing the horons, the circular dances in which men and women hold hands and rhythmically move the upper body as they advance with sideways steps. The scene lent itself to excellent photographs, an opportunity I did not miss. Two Kurdish women, in Western-style party dress, complained that they did not want to be photographed, so I trained my camera only on the Armenian crowd, now weaving into a new horon, and on separate dances between some couples and smaller groups. Almost an hour later, two men approached Sevag and Ertem to ask who I was: they were the husbands of the two Kurdish women who were upset about the photos. Ertem gestured that everything was fine but I saw the men kept talking with them, politely and without raising their voices, but clearly making some points. Sevag, who had walked away, returned and made now what looked like a more forceful riposte, for it persuaded the men to drop whatever quibble they were still pressing. One of them came toward me and shook my hand, telling me, “No problem,” which he repeated. What I had found interesting was how slow the buildup had been from the original complaint by the women to the explanations the men demanded from us. As this was a typical situation for rapid escalation, especially given the sensitivity of any conduct deemed abusive of somebody else’s woman, this delayed response was curious. They must have noticed that I was a foreigner, so they were probably taking stock of an unknown factor prior to reacting. It would not be only time that I would find this unusual suppression of impulsiveness in circumstances that, among locals, could have unfolded quickly, and violently. A Diyarbakır journalist of Assyrian origin, Ana, wanted to interview Udi Manug and me, so we went to an office on the upper floor of the restaurant complex. Inside the office, five men were playing poker on a round table covered with green baize. Except for one smaller man with an angular fox face beneath 198

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a black and curly mop of hair, the others looked very much alike, with big, square-jawed heads and well-trimmed mustachios. Perhaps they were brothers or relatives, I thought. All wore black suits and matching dark shirts, with the jackets on. Nobody was watching the soccer match on the large flat-screen TV but they did not turn down the volume even when the journalist began to record the interview. One of the men, with his back to us, kept turning around to watch us as Ana asked Udi why he had returned to Diyarbakır and what I believed about the new openness in Turkey to discuss its past. Udi was smiling. The heating had been cranked up to almost sauna temperatures but I felt that was not the only, or main, reason why we were sweating. Aware of the stares on us even if we feigned otherwise, we kept our responses within the perfunctory limits of what is tolerable in a public space in Turkey. Now the man with his back to us had left his hand of unturned cards on the table and was following, intently and unsmiling, our conversation, which we conducted with hushed tones so as not to break the unholy silence of the men and the sports anchor’s loud voice. Ana would hold her recording device very close to our lips as we spoke. I raised my camera to take a photo of the gamblers, and the man with the fox face pulled himself back from the frame with a screeching sound of his chair. The other men laughed. We stood up as Ana had finished her interview. The man who had been watching us stood up as well. “We have now become Kurds, but we are all Armenian, too,” he told us, smiling. And he hugged me. The other ones said almost in unison, with grave voices, that common hoarse, smoker’s voice of men in Turkey, “We are all Armenian, except for one of us.”     

Zuhal’s little daughter kept calling me. The first few times I thought Zuhal was in trouble and I got alarmed, wondering if I should call the police, but in Diyarbakır that was a mixed proposition at best. Then I figured it was her youngest daughter, who was around ten years old and appeared to have some acute form of autism. She had the features of a fragile and scared creature. I had seen her on that Siberian night when we had gone to her home for dinner. When I had tried to greet her after she approached me she scurried away, silently looking at us from a distance. After we had sat for dinner, she remained glued to the computer, playing an electronic game, moving from one level to the next, obliterating monsters and evil characters in masks, spraying machine-gun fire left and right, in a setting that looked like an American shopping mall. Not once did any sound come out of her to celebrate the joy of victory or frustration over defeat. But on the phone she would howl, noises that never formed any meaningful sound. 199

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Then one day Zuhal called me to apologize for the phone calls, but we ended up agreeing to walk around the Infidels Quarter to examine and photograph doors. She had mystified me by mentioning that Armenians’ homes in the Gâvur Mahallesi bore a red number plate, whereas those of Muslims was blue. She had noticed it as a child with her grandparents one Sunday, when they were headed to Surp Giragos, and had asked them why there were two different colors. It would not have been the worst thing Armenians would have been subjected to in Turkey, but it would have been so blatant nowadays that I had decided to check with historian Osman Köker. His response, however, was not forthcoming. As I waited for Zuhal to turn up, I decided to see for myself. The doors were closed: most were metallic, and many were painted blue, but there were also some that were yellow and many black ones, like the massive gates of the city. Had they been closed, it would have taken the charge of a stampeding army on the back of elephants to pry them open. From a street, I saw a stretch of the wall where the Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus had fought in the fourth century of our era: And presently a shout was raised, and as the enemy rushed forward all at once, they were met by a dense shower of missiles from the walls; and as may be conjectured, none were hurled in vain, falling as they did among so dense a crowd. For while so many evils surrounded us, we fought as I have said before, with the hope, not of procuring safety, but of dying bravely; and from dawn to eventide the battle was evenly balanced, both fighting with more ferocity than method, and there arose the shouts of men striking and falling, so that from the eagerness of both parties there was scarcely anyone who did not give or receive wounds.1

I saw a little kitten that crawled almost blindly beneath a fishmonger’s cart on the street that led down to Surp Giragos. An old Kurdish man was walking by leaning on a cane, wearing his şalvar, the baggy trousers that were an exaggerated interpretation of the British Army’s riding trousers and that somehow had become the uniform of the Kurds. His head was covered in a keffiyeh, an accessory taken from the Arabs. There was the proof, I thought fleetingly, that our evolution was still incomplete, that in the first year or so of our life, when we barely crawled, we still carried on the traits from a past when we did not walk upright. As I was photographing, one of the doors opened. “Çek, çek!” a little boy told me with a toothy smile: “Shoot, shoot!” The house was built around a square inner court. In the middle there was a shallow pool, full of snow. An engraving on the stone edge showed 1901, the date split with a chalice in the middle. The little boy, whom I thought younger, 200

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was 11 and his name was Emin. He was articulate and vivacious. It was an old Armenian house, he told me, and they were renting it. His younger sister came into the courtyard, four-year-old Elif, who was pleased to pose for the camera unlike the older women in the house. Emin’s father, Utku—who had not turned 30 yet—and grandfather, Melikşah, asked me inside for a tea around the heater, a century-old stove with a flue that connected it to the upper floors. At any given time, there were at least ten people from three generations in the blue room, the vast majority of them women, only the very young of whom were not wearing a headscarf. Sitting on the carpet, the house lady was smoking as she marinated ground meat and rice in tomato paste and lemon juice mixed with garlic; piles of vine leaves were waiting next to her to be rolled into dolmas. Most of the teenage girls were smoking too. They were originally Arabs from Mardin but the last member of their family who spoke Arabic had been Melikşah’s father. The house, he said, had been confiscated from Armenians that were “expelled during the war” and was employed by the Ottoman Army for commanders’ lodgings. There was no inscription in Armenian in the house, other than the date and the chalice. That made it obvious the owners were Armenian, Utku said: Muslims did not make wine. Probably the pool was used for crushing grapes. The house’s number plate was red, as Christians’ would be, according to Zuhal, so it was now a matter of gathering enough samples to see if there was a pattern. Hunger brought me back to the Hasan Paşa Han. Three of us were sitting at separate tables far apart at a teahouse in the caravanserai. Wrapped up in a thick wool scarf, an eagle-nosed man smiled, looking out of the foggy window: “On a day like this, our elders would make xlorig.” It was some kind of meatballs. He insisted the word was Kurdish, even when I said that xlorig sounded very much like a dialectal variation of glorig, which meant “little round thing” in Armenian. But he was not listening, and was explaining how it was made. And he said that he knew very little Kurdish, anyway. “We are becoming assimilated,” Bülent said. His mother tongue was Turkish. “My grandfather used to say that Armenians are better than us,” he said. “He had once sold a kerosene lamp on credit to an Armenian man; those were tough times after the war,” he said, probably referring to World War I. In the meantime, his grandfather had been conscripted into the army in Mersin and had forgotten all about it. Upon his return to Diyarbakır three years later, he had set up a street stand to sell lemons. The Armenian man had approached him, surprised: “Where were you Abdurrahman? We’ve been looking for you all this time, and we loved the lamp.” And he paid him. “Armenians are honest fellows, my grandfather said.” 201

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Bülent’s family was from Mıstan, a village in Bingöl. They were partly Armenian on his paternal side—he was not sure in what measure or what part—a certainty their elders said they carried for a long time until at some point it faded into the distant memory, that instant when uncorroborated know­ledge became a myth. His father was Zaza and his mother was a Kurmancî-speaking Kurd from Diyarbakır. Zuhal came to the Hasan Paşa Han with her 15-year-old daughter, Amine, shy yet articulate. “Kurdish,” she responded, when asked how would she identify herself, either in terms of nationality or religion. She blushed: “But I love Armenians,” she said with a guilty smile. “Both Kurds and Armenians, I love them very much.” On July 10, 1991, Zuhal had been at the massacre of the Mardin Gate, one of the main gates of the Diyarbakır fortress, a 15-minute walk from where we were. Thousands of people had gathered for the funeral of human rights activist Vedat Aydın, who had been murdered by Turkish counterinsurgency officers in an extrajudicial operation. Tanks had suddenly blocked the Mardin Gate and soldiers deployed on the upper part of the Roman wall started opening fire on the signal of three shots from a handgun. The tanks stood at the gate, trapping people on a narrow stretch of land between the fortification and a 5-meter deep ravine with orchards below. “I remember people jumping or falling into the gorge and then a gunship emerged from nowhere, firing at close range,” Zuhal said. When had Zuhal’s family become Muslim, I wanted to know. “They never did,” she said. “Only one person on my Armenian side of the family has converted to Islam.” How about her? I was now confused. She did not speak for a minute, and mother and daughter were exchanging glances. Her father was a Kurd, she said after a minute. That did not answer my question, so I pressed on. She was a Christian, she said, and her husband knew it and approved of it, even though he was a Sunni Kurd. But nobody else in her family knew. She had only shared it with very few friends. One of them had previously hinted at some secret Christians amid the Islamicized Armenians but this person had not given names. This common friend had insinuated that improved relations between Armenians and Kurds should not mislead anyone into thinking that there was latitude to do whatever one felt: all clans and villages were hospitable but not all were equally tolerant. Renouncing Islam might come at a dear price. And yet, a few minutes after proclaiming her Kurdishness with a sincerity that mortified her, Zuhal’s daughter acknowledged with a nod that she was a Christian, too: a Kurdish secret Christian. But she looked shocked and had paled, looking around at the cavernous room of the Han where we were having tea while it snowed outside. 202

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“The God of the Muslims is terrifying: he is vindictive and you fear he will dump you in hell or burn you inside your house,” Zuhal said. “But you love the God of the Bible.” Like the early era when the Gospel started to find its way into Mesopotamia, Christianity was returning as an almost secret sect, and mostly of women, as it was also at the onset of the spread of the faith. We left to start our tour of the doors and gates. Zuhal was convinced that there had been a system in place to identify Armenians’ homes in Diyarbakır. At the time she had pointed out this anomaly, her grandfather had said: “The red one is Abraham’s,” referring to an Armenian acquaintance. Looking around the block they had identified a pattern back then, some 30 years ago. Osman Köker had finally responded to my question, casting doubt on this. The government changed the coloring from time to time, which led to those differences in plate color when issuing new batches. For good measure, he had sent me a photo of a door in Istanbul, with a plethora of plates of the most diverse styles in red and blue, a collection of the same number in all the types that had been produced over decades. In the old quarter of Diyarbakır, some plates were indeed blue and others were red. There were many arrows painted in red on walls, pointing down. In a few instances, number plates in both colors coexisted: “It must indicate that an Armenian had lived here but a Muslim has taken over his place.” We were to the east of the imposing tower of Ulu Beden, a majestic giant with a huge belly standing over the colorful slums below. The Artuqqid dynasty of Seljuk Turks had built it during its brief rule over Diyarbakır. And as Zuhal and her daughter walked briskly on the snows of Diyarbakır, in the enthusiastic chase of our newfound ghosts, women with their heads covered passed us by in the graying light of winter, some spying us from beneath turbans and scarves. A group of boys were playing with plastic guns near a low portico, its metal door ajar. “PKK” read one graffiti in thick white brushstrokes on a brown wall. In an empty lot surrounded by the ruins of an unrecognizable building, different hands had painted “Amed,” “Tofan,” and “Zaza 21.” As Amine or Zuhal screamed every time they detected a plate of the right color that indicated, in our imagination on that gelid day, the presence of an Armenian, I remembered my grandmother’s readings of Exodus. It was her favorite book of the Bible, and she loved to tell stories from it to my sister and I on uneventful evenings after school. With her inextinguishable capacity for surprise, my grandmother Azniv, a Genocide survivor, spoke of the Hebrews that had made a mark with the blood of a lamb on their door, to be passed over by the slaying angel. The planet I had thought to be Venus had appeared on the lower horizon outside the Roman walls, announcing nightfall. But it was Jupiter, at its brightest above the Mardin Gate, the supreme Roman deity returning home. 203

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It was cold and I was hungry, and I knew all this was based on a false premise. Even if the color marks had corresponded to any truth, this was pointless: there were no Armenians left behind these doors. A sense of delayed foreboding descended upon me on that desolate day of gray sky and snow, darkening beneath footsteps and uncollected piles of garbage. We were revisiting the roads of a passover of death in the futile hope of finding any sign of Armenian life behind any of those doors: a word, a memory, the know­ledge of what they are or were. Yet I tried to keep up with the vigorous mother and daughter who were still searching for what I knew we would not find, within this maze of a fortress that has seen 1,000 armies, vanquished or victors yet all gone, as the present ones shall too. As we passed more walls painted “Kurdistan” and “Apo” and “PKK,” I still trudged through the snow, like a Quixote arrived 100 years late into a war that was not his anymore, and a wrong land, where monsters had been not windmills but men, made in the image and likeness of a God we are told we share.

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Part IV

Daron

Six

Bitlis Bitlis was built on a high plateau, squeezed against the fortress that towered over the old quarter from a central promontory. The streets sloped up toward the massive construction and then skirted it, like snakes circling a giant. Vertigo was enhanced by the low houses and shops beneath the citadel, which tinged the Ottoman city with the darkness of its volcanic rocks and shadows. The atmosphere would grow more mysterious and oppressive as the sun declined into a horizon blocked by the mountains. “I am late now,” the man said, with the red and swollen eyes of an insomniac. “I should have left a long time ago: if we are exposed here we’re finished.” And he looked at me again, unsmiling for the pictures he had allowed me to take, as long as I did not publish them. “Now it’s late; we should have left a long time ago: we are finished here.” He was a ges-ges (half and half ), as Armenians of this type have been called at least since the nineteenth century. A Muslim in Bitlis, he attended Armenian Church in Istanbul. “That religion is truer,” he said. “We converted to Islam but we are still Christian.” A Kurdish contact from Erzurum had warned me to beware of the Bitlis Armenians. “They are bad: there are many Turkish fascists among them.” Of the Armenians I met here, only one young man’s professed convictions placed him too far to the right of the local political spectrum, and not even that was accurate: rather than Turkish extreme nationalism, the views he espoused were a combination of Islamist conservatism and Kurdish tribalism that were peculiar to Bitlis. The city was unique in understated ways. The almost absolute, extra­ordinary absence of Atatürk pictures was made up by the profusion of those of Said Nursî, an Islamic theologian and Kurdish leader, an active militant in the Young Turk movement and close friend of some of the masterminds of the Genocide. Yet I found no information directly implicating him in the massacres of Armenians. 207

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Even in this young man’s case, however, recording the conversation may have induced in him a self-awareness that he lacked the first time we spoke. The day before we sat down for the interview, he drove me to the home of the American-Armenian writer William Saroyan’s grandparents. That day he was just a young man thrilled to hear that there was curiosity about Armenians still living in the historical lands. This did not mean that there were not Turkish nationalists among Bitlislis of Armenian descent. I just did not meet them, or they must have ceased to consider themselves Armenian, unless it was an attitude induced by fear.     

Hazar Saatçi was the first Armenian I met in Bitlis: “Are you Hai?” This merchant, in his later 40s, had used the endonym, “Armenian” in Armenian, that had become the code among the hidden or Islamicized ones when talking among their kin. A Kurdish acquaintance had walked me to his store, in a prime location near the fortress. Getting to him had taken months of effort, and an improbably circuitous route. Bitlis lacked the charged atmosphere of Erzurum, where a search for Armenians could entail danger. Where Erzurum was unthinkable for such ventures, Bitlis was impenetrable. There was something opaque about it, an impression reinforced by the gloomy cityscape and the taciturn faces, in streets that felt deserted and with almost no women in sight. With considerable difficulty, I had managed to obtain the contact information of two descendants of Armenian converts. Yet an Ankara friend who had found those numbers for me thought it a poor investment of my time: he could not vouch for them, and their stance might preclude any meaningful conversation. At worst, it might trigger their paranoia about being exposed as Armenian, a ruinous affair for them within their milieu as well as a risk for me. An unpleasant experience in the nearby town of Mutki in 2011 had made me wary of Bitlis and its environs. The last Armenian Christian in the area lived in the village of Niç: I had met Nahabed in Sasun on the Mt. Maruta pilgrimage a few weeks before. He had insisted that I should visit him. Well past the age of 70, he lived most of the time in his village. In winter he withdrew to Istanbul. One of his friends in Mutki could help for my transportation to Niç, some 25 kilometers away yet almost two hours by car, nestled in a valley at an altitude of perhaps 2,000 meters. As soon as I had got to Mutki, taken by a Bitlis cabdriver who had guessed my nationality and pestered me about treasure maps, three men had walked up to me in the empty street, at a brisk pace that had struck me as unfriendly. The tallest one, who looked like the ringleader, was in a lilac galabeya and an Islamic skullcap. 208

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Apparently they had left mosque sooner than the rest that Friday. I walked away from them and, as recommended by Nahabed, went into the stationery store to ask for the owner’s help in getting me a car to Niç. The young man that manned the shop reacted with alarm when I asked for Ahmet: “Who are you?” Minutes after he telephoned his father, a much taller version of himself, with the same prominent hawk nose and stretched nostrils, arrived hurriedly: “He asked about you as soon as he stepped in,” the concerned son told him. The explanation that our common friend Nahabed had recommended me to him did not break the ice. It got worse when I proposed to interview him, as Nahabed had told me he was Armenian—“tartsug,” or “convert” in local parlance. Ahmet’s lips were now pressed tightly together beneath his thin mustaches as he shook his head slowly, watching me fixedly. He could not arrange for transportation, and I had to leave his shop as he was closing. The three men that approached me when I first arrived in town had been lingering outside the store, but now there was also a respectable crowd of two dozen people outside—presumably those that had now also left the mosque. The man in the galabeya was repeatedly asking the usual questions about treasure maps, in slovenly speech that he and his growing cohort found funny on that slow summer day of Ramadan, of starving people with overactive minds. It soon escalated into an argument, with three or four of them blindly firing off angry questions, not really expecting answers, and boos from some in the crowd, including the man in the galabeya who started pushing and shoving. Things got agitated and loud enough to attract a police patrol car that sped toward the crowd with siren wailing and lights flashing, and pulled over in front of us. A young, very short officer got out of the car and walked directly toward me, asking for my passport. He leafed through it perfunctorily, without examining any page, and turned it over to a man in a black leather jacket and untidy aspect, who apparently knew what to look for in it. Enraged, I tried to snatch it back: “Who are you, give me my passport!” but he was not letting go while the policeman looked on with sheepish passivity. The man then produced a police badge from his leather jacket. “I work for the state,” he said with a smile of rotting teeth. It was always the “state,” held sacred and supreme, not the “government,” a difference the layman in Turkey understood better than people elsewhere. As he still held my passport, I asked loudly what they intended to do and that I would speak with my consulate. He finally returned my passport and smiled again, displaying the rows of yellow and brown ruins. But it had been the first lesson, which I would not learn, that some villages in Turkey might be off limits by custom, if not by law. Uninvited strangers would attract attention, occasionally hostile. So it was with some misgiving that I would telephone these two men of Armenian descent in Bitlis. The first one I called, Muttalib, agreed to meet with unusual alacrity, to the point of offering to pick me up from my hotel. He 209

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turned up there the following morning, most elegantly attired, welcoming me in the formulaic manner with which one starts a business meeting. He had been taken aback, I noticed in a flicker, by seeing me in worn jeans and a faded vest, carrying a camera. Our common Ankara acquaintance, a master of the lure, had got Muttalib to agree to meet me by telling him about “a friend from New York.” A jeweler and purveyor of the fine Bitlis honey, Muttalib thought I had come to discuss possible export deals. He had an uncanny resemblance to the stationery store owner in Mutki, with a long face and hook nose, a pencil-thin mustache drawn above the lips. Over a breakfast of avşur, a spiced local soup with meat, he listened about my project with disappointment rather than discomfort, masked behind a courteous demeanor. It was clear, however, that he had already scanned my outward signs for purchasing power, with unhappy conclusions. Armenians had left a long time ago, but “not because they made their life difficult here.” Business was bad in Bitlis. The population of the city had fallen from 400,000 to 48,000, he said. There was a general impression of dramatic demographic contraction: others in the city said there were only 33,000 inhabitants left. Yet the numbers did not match the official census figures.1 “Many of ours have left, too,” Muttalib added, preempting any question about his origin by identifying himself as a Muslim, a Kurd, anything he had in mind but Armenian. His was one of the biggest and wealthiest families in the city, their surname prominently displayed on several store signs in the commercial hub around the fort. As far as my project was concerned, he was a dead end. The second connection from my Ankara friend, Ceben, had moved to Antalya and he advised me to call his friend Mutlu, an official at Eren University, with an impressive campus outside the city, built by the Bitlis family that owned one of the largest holdings in Turkey. “When I was little I had Armenian friends but they have all left, for Istanbul and Europe I suppose,” Mutlu told me after a warm welcome, with the customary tea and pastries in his white and undecorated office. “The last Armenian must have left Bitlis around 1990, and his name was Yervant.” Naturally—he seemed a little mystified when I doublechecked—he was talking about Christians. A man who had extended to me the generosity that was customary in the land, only then did he understand what I was searching for and he started working the telephones. “Bitlis is now an impoverished city,” he said between calls. “Every intelligent and capable person has abandoned it and only narrow-minded people are left.” He wanted to leave, too, probably for Ankara, while he was young. A man he summoned to his office turned out to have false leads, but as he was leaving a second one stomped in, panting, only sitting down to scribble the name of a cousin who owned a shop outside the city’s Great Mosque, before hurrying out while mumbling an apology. 210

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“There are none left,” repeated the hurried man’s cousin when I found him in his store by the mosque. All Armenians had become Muslim and had assimilated. “These are precisely the ones I want to speak with,” I replied. “Very well,” he said with inoffensive sarcasm, and we walked into a large store. And there he introduced me to Hazar as “sizinkilerden” (“one of yours” in Turkish). Stunned for a moment, Hazar started telephoning family and friends who, discreetly, paraded through the shop for tea and talk. As the store was large enough and socializing among merchants was common enough in Turkey, our conversation went unnoticed by clients and other visitors, something Hazar prized. Armenians were known locally as Müslimin, he had told me within minutes of meeting. It was one of the pejorative terms employed among Kurds in certain areas of Turkey to refer to converted Armenians. Yet Hazar, a slim man with a wide forehead, was overjoyed at my visit, and had soon put me on the phone to a cousin who lived in Istanbul, whom he described as “Armenian proper,” to indicate a Christian and fluent speaker of the language, segregating himself with a poignancy he did not realize. He had left what he was doing and made me sit in one inconspicuous corner of the store. The family led an undisturbed life, Hazar said, but there was still hatred against Armenians. Despite my unease at the presence of the Kurdish merchant who had introduced us, Hazar said it did not matter that they had converted to Islam. They were still considered Armenian by the locals. One of his nephews had been named an assistant for the city mayor, from the Islamist Justice and Development Party that ruled Turkey, but one of the city hall officials had asked the mayor, “Why are there Armenians on the municipal staff ?” Bitlis Armenians still lived in fear and they refrained from contact among themselves, even though they knew each other. It was also possible that there were Armenians that the others did not know about. They still stayed in Bitlis, Hazar said, thanks to fellows like the young Turkish man that had introduced me to them. “But isn’t he a Kurd?” I asked in surprise, looking at the merchant too. “Well, yes, but Turkified, like our family,” Hazar said, with the other man agreeing effusively. The Kurd, or Turk, blamed the hatred against Armenians in Bitlis on the “dincis,” a pejorative term in Turkish to indicate religious conservatives, and on “racist Kurds,” of which there were “still many.” Hazar had to travel to Antap for business but he would leave me in the company of family members manning the store. “It’s now late,” his father lamented. He should have moved out of Bitlis a long time ago. Dismantling the store now and setting the clan on the road was an impossible enterprise. He was not afraid to say he was Armenian, even though his alarmed eyes scanning 211

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the store for strangers indicated otherwise, as did his question about how I had found them. “If we are exposed as Armenians we are finished.” A man with the savvy to turn around business in an unfavorable environment, he was unlikely to be easily cowed. Yet, much as I challenged myself not to let preconceptions interfere with my readings, I saw in him and his family different degrees of apprehension about their origin, and it showed in the eyes of the Saatçi patriarch, the hardened ones of those who eked a living out of commerce in a tricky place, a realm in which cash in hand was the sole value worthy of faith. Trust was hard-earned; if misplaced, it could cause ruin. For all that schooling in toughness, there was still an air of sadness about him, the awareness of being Armenian weighing down on him, perhaps reflected in his slumped shoulders. “In the villages, Armenians have become fascists out of fear, but can anyone escape his own real identity?” But he did not blame them, for he knew the circumstances in which they lived. Still lamenting that he had not left sooner, he was still considering it: “I may still move to Istanbul for good.” Of his nine children, two lived in Istanbul, one in Izmir, and the remainder were in Bitlis. Most had married relatives, Islamicized Armenians like them, but not Hazar: “I took one from the outside; my wife is Kurdish.” The family patriarch spoke Turkish with a heavy tongue and localisms that I occasionally found hard to understand, perhaps vestiges of Ottoman in the language. Another local Armenian later explained that in Bitlis a dialect of Ottoman Turkish was still spoken especially by older people, which included remnants of Armenian too, including the verb “apar,” the imperative of “bring,” which a cousin of them, who was studying Armenian, believed came from the Armenian verb “per.” The conversation ceased for a moment as we noticed a young man, with a very white face, lingering in the corner where we spoke, a part of the store with just a handful of goods to browse. Hazar’s younger brother, Gökalp, introduced him as an “Assyrian Armenian.” In Bitlis, Gökalp said, the Assyrians were considered Armenian as they were Christian too, at least in their origins, as the last Assyrian clan in Bitlis—that of this young man—had converted to Islam in 1915. But even after their conversion they were known as “Armenians,” which in Turkey is also used as a pejorative, and in their case it was definitely meant as such. A deputy prosecutor, his subordinates had complained to the district prosecutor behind his back, asking how could “an Armenian” have authority over them. The Assyrian said he had confronted them, telling the employees that he was a better Muslim and a better Turkish citizen than they were. His grandparents had been forcibly Islamicized, but things now were not much better: “The Kurds of Bitlis are still barbarians.” It had happened again when a 212

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new assistant at the prosecutor’s office had found out about his origin and had reported him as “an Armenian.” Only in the last ten years, he thought, things had begun to change in Turkey: Until the murder of Hrant Dink, nobody admitted history in this country. They are barbarians, by Allah they are still barbarians. It’s a barbaric society. It’s our fate, we came to the world in this geography … Now it is better, Bitlis was much worse 30 years ago, we did not even know about ourselves out of fear. We considered ourselves Armenian. We don’t know who we were before our grandparents. I have requested the records from the state and they say they are not available: they are lost. The Civil Registry in Mutki was destroyed. Now I don’t know if that was done by the state, or if it was an accident. I speak Kurmancî, Zazaki, and Turkish. My mother is Kurdish and my father is a Zazaki-speaking Assyrian. Ours is the last Assyrian clan left in Bitlis, and we tend to marry within our clan, but I took a Kurdish wife from Müşkünüz, a former Armenian village near Hizan. But we very rarely give or take women outside the clan.

This Assyrian, like Hazar, was not very shy about criticizing Kurds, but they felt more at ease among Turks or the “Turkified” Kurds. I wondered if the statement, “turned Turks like us,” was as spontaneous as it sounded or if it was calculated in the understanding that it was going into a book, notwithstanding the anonymity assured. Gökalp proposed that I visit William Saroyan’s family house, a 15-minute drive from their store, with an Armenian inscription on its outside wall, the photos of which he showed me on his cell phone. The cabdriver he called was a family friend and a member of the Kirbo aşiret: it was a rare instance of an Armenian family that had apparently converted to Islam in the nineteenth century and had organized itself like a Kurdish tribe, the primordial unit of society in the mountains of Bitlis. “We are Armenian too!” The young cabdriver, Hüseyin, had learned of their Armenian origin only a few years earlier. They had not told him about me when they called him to pick me up. Enthusiastic as he was, it was clear that there was no inherent contradiction between his Islamic religion and the ethnicity he acknowledged most naturally, without feeling compelled to hide it: “We became Muslim or they would have massacred us.” Saroyan had visited Bitlis in the 1960s, seeking a homeland that no longer existed, I pondered aloud. It had been his lifelong quest. Hüseyin, perhaps seeing in my discourse unintended analogies, was unambiguous: “Brother, we are now Muslim.” Then he must have sensed contradictions in his own speech: “One part of me feels what the other does not.” A square two-floor residence with grilles over the windows, Saroyan’s elders’ house was in an upper quarter, overlooking the city from a hill. The year the 213

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house was presumably built was carved on the cornice of a lateral wall: 1910, repeated in the Armenian alphabet notation on the other side of the house, facing the garden: ՌՋԺ. Yet the cornice of the central facade was ornamented with the Islamic year in Arabic numerals: ١٣٢٦, or year of the Hegira 1329, which corresponded to 1908 or January 1909 of the Christian era. “This was the home of William Saroyan’s grandparents, the Karaoğlanians, that’s what we have been told.” The middle-aged woman from the family that owned it said that, in the last ten years, I had been the second foreigner to see the house, where she and her mother still lived. Only in the summer of 2012 had some visitors told her that it was the home of Saroyan’s grandparents. She did not know this before, nor had she ever heard of the American-Armenian writer or his fame. Soldiers had lodged before, and had torn up the woodwork and the wood floors for heating. The winters in Bitlis were brutal. The most widespread explanation for its Armenian name, Pağeş, was a legend about a donkey that had died of freezing cold outside the city gates. If not very epic, it was at least supported by the etymology, for pağ eş meant “cold donkey.” The woman’s grandfather had bought the house from the state shortly before 1950. Her mother corrected her: it had passed into the family in 1910, but his daughter quickly cut her off as the old woman was trying to say something: “No, mother! It must have been after the Russian war in 1915.” After a failed attempt in the summer of that year, Russian forces largely consisting of Armenian volunteers had captured the city in a blizzard offensive in February 1916. They had only found 15 Armenian women—ten of whom were girls—out of a population that had once been one-third of the city. “Turkey has left us an Armenia without Armenians,” a Russian officer had commented.2 On our way out, the woman invited us to help ourselves to fruit from the garden: in addition to pear trees, there was one plum, which she called “salor” by the Armenian name, thinking it was local dialect; the Turkish name is “erik.” A cousin of Hüseyin would later tell me that Bitlis Armenians used to have two mulberry trees and two nutmeg trees in their gardens. The mulberry trees were for growing silkworms, a tradition dating back to the time when Bitlis was on the Silk Road: the Armenians exported silk carpets and fabrics from Bitlis to France and Italy. And the nutmeg trees were there because they bore fruit in 24 hours, he said, even in winter. When we returned to the store, there was an imam that was expecting me. Before heading to Antap, Hazar had especially recommended him to me and had arranged for his visit: “Are you at the mosque?” he had asked the imam over the telephone. “Come to the store: we have a guest.”     

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Only months earlier, the imam had lost his mother, a Genocide survivor who had taken with her untold stories. It was very unlikely that I would have been able to get anything out of her, as she never spoke about it. She would get terrified every time she saw a policeman or she walked past a police station. In his 60s and clean-shaven, the imam was wearing a navy blue jacket and tie as well as a hajji skullcap. He spoke with the precise grammar of a man who not only read, but also wrote regularly. The imam’s family came from Van, where they lived in the Aykesdanner (orchards quarter), and had settled in the village of Aspincer, in the Mutki area. “The village was ours: our family lived in the lower quarter and our relatives were in the upper,” he said. “At the time of the tehcir [“deportation,” in Turkish] of 80 members of our family, ten survived.” He and his family had been searching for relatives for years: We don’t know much; we search and search, but we find nothing: at the time there were Kurdish ağas who protected them out of friendship with the family. The ağas were from the village of Civar. Where would our people go? At the time, 1915–16, the Russians were near Mutki; they too were massacring, so nobody knows what happened. Where would they go? After that, two of those survivors settled in Bitlis and formed their households, and the other two in Aspincer. They lost track of the rest, who dispersed. Our older surname was Urğancıyan: our ancestors made ropes and looms. We have searched on the internet and have not found any relatives. In the Mutki area there were villages that still had Armenian residents: Niç, Arpi, Şenik, but they have all gone now to Istanbul.

There was only one Christian left in the area, Nahabed from Niç. Our visitor had become an imam 40 years ago: I went to a madrasa, I studied and studied, and I became an imam. My grandfather was Şahin Ağa, who was killed in the Genocide. Then my uncle Faris, whose older name was Ari and who raised my father—his younger brother— converted. Ari at the time of the Genocide was a seminarian, he was a well-read man, but he converted: there was no one left, nothing left, no church. So in the 1920s he converted. We lived in Aspincer until 1977. So for almost 100 years we lived together with the Kurds. But we had been living together for 300 years before that. We were five brothers and five sisters prior to the death of a sister, who passed away a short time ago at 67 years old. As we were poor, my father decided to move us to Bitlis. So even if we were not rich, at least we could make a living. My father spoke Armenian but my mother did not. She was little at the time of the Genocide. She was from Arpi. My father spoke Armenian with women who were married with Kurds, and also with the wife of my uncle, an Armenian too. Everybody knew my grandfather, Şahin Ağa: Armenians, Kurds, Turks. In Ottoman times, my grandfather lived in Tiflis for two years, from 1910 to 1912. Then he returned to the Ottoman Empire when the Balkan War broke out. He

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Secret Nation spoke Armenian, Russian, Kurdish, Arabic, Ottoman. He wrote such a beautiful Ottoman that he was invited by the vali to official meetings. I don’t speak one word of Armenian. Nothing. Our mother tongue was Zazaki. Ours was a Zaza village. We in the family also speak Kurdish and Turkish, and I also speak Arabic. We lived among Zazas. The ağas that protected us were also Zaza, and we still keep in touch with them. We remember. When they do evil to us, we remember it too, but we don’t do evil. We throw the evil up into thin air to make it disappear. The descendants of the people who massacred our family are still around. We know them. We know the descendants of the people who murdered our grandfather Şahin. We lived among them. I would see them every day. We would see a dishonorable man like the one who killed a man like Şahin every day. And yet, there was nothing we could do.

I asked his grandfather’s murderer’s name, but the imam balked: “He died.” Then he added: “There are his grandchildren.” But I pressed and he finally said it: “Divan.” And the surname? He hesitated for a second: “Erat; Divan Erat.” A man who spoke with the aplomb of the learned, he was incapable of bringing himself to express anger, and he lacked the vulgar vocabulary to express feelings in their rawness. Then he described how his grandfather had been murdered: A group of men came over demanding money, and we didn’t have any: they had been extorting us for years, so there was an argument and he pulled out a gun and shot him … My grandfather was on the road, traveling between villages … We the grandchildren knew it, but we never spoke about it. But many things like that happened. On the side of the Kurds, dishonorable, sinful people killed people for money, and there was no money anyway. My grandfather used it to buy lands, and he had already bought five or six villages. And we know that we owned these lands, too, but what can you do. We know everything. You in the Diaspora do not suffer pressure, but here we are exposed to a lot of pressure. A lot.

“Hoca, you know your origins, and you also know that Armenians are Christian,” I told him: “I apologize for this question but you know most converts were forcibly Islamicized.” How did he feel about it? “No, in our case, it was not forcible: there was nothing forcible about it.” It was the only moment in the conversation that his bearing, of natural authority, was upset for a moment. His voice rose slightly: If there was something forcible it was my father’s situation; he was 15 at the time, and he saw that it was not possible to live without a religion. And it was like this: my uncle Faris asked my father if he was going to get baptized, and my father said, “Brother, I’m becoming a Muslim,” and my uncle became a Muslim, too, so it was not forcible. Prior to that, during the deportations, it was forcible, if you didn’t they would kill you.

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And I saw him, in his hajji cap, and thought he was an inheritor of history, not a maker of one. It was a consequence of the Genocide that they had become a Muslim, I pointed out. “Yes, yes of course, perhaps if it did not happen we would not be today,” and his voice had returned to its steady tone, making me wonder what had been misinterpreted before: “Yes, yes, that’s true.” How did he feel about that? “Bad,” he said, shrugging, with the tone of saying the obvious: It was the price of survival. But now, whether you want it or not, things are this way. But how do you think that we have stayed Armenian after 100 years as Muslims, that 100 years after conversion we consider ourselves Armenian? We embrace our nation. Blood is thicker than water. When I did the conscription I was posted in Istanbul, and I was assigned as a guard to the Armenian church in Beyoğlu: I was there for 16 months. I also went to the Kumkapı church.

The imam’s father never said a word about the things he saw in the Genocide or in his childhood. He did not even say what his name was before the conversion. The imam was aware of what had happened and felt aggrieved by it: “I feel very bad about it,” he said. “It was not right, and it was not genuine,” he said, regarding his father’s conversion to Islam. But something else was weighing on his soul: he had a niece with pancreatic cancer, and wanted me to find out about one particular hospital in the US that specialized in this kind of cancer, according to their doctor in Bitlis. “She is a really young girl, please find out about the pancreas cancer treatment, she is an 18-year-old, a good student, but this pain from the pancreas cancer is affecting her state of mind.” Unlike so many people that I had met in Turkey, or even myself in my colloquial expressions, not even once upon revisiting my notes and recordings did I come across any mention of God in the interview with the imam. He had not pronounced the name of Allah a single time.     

I went with Hüseyin for a talk. He gave his consent to record the interview, but as soon as the device started to blink on the table his demeanor changed, appearing nervous and his speech becoming somewhat stilted. Unlike the day before, he was now unsmiling and seemed to be following a mental script. Then I told him, as I always did with interviewees, that I could simply take notes, but he repeated he was fine with the recording: We are scared to publicize that we are Armenian because our elders witnessed a massacre. We will not return to the Church. I don’t feel any fear, I don’t deny

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In case of war between Armenians and Turks, whose side would he take? “I take the side of the Muslims,” came the answer right away. To ask these questions was always an embarrassing exercise for me because, in addition to their simplistic dualism, the responses were usually predictable, yet occasionally they brought forth thoughts that otherwise would remain unspoken. As Arsen in Adıyaman had observed, even though they would be immediately dismissed by most people elsewhere or answered with formulaic courtesies, in Turkey they could yield interesting remarks. So I asked Hüseyin about his stance on the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It would be less taxing on the loyalties of a Turkish citizen than the Armenian–Turkish conflict: I take the side of Azerbaijan. They are Muslim. We live for our religion: we have learned that. If it came to that, I take the side of Azerbaijan. But, and this the Armenians know well, if all Muslims come together they can cause a lot of harm to the Armenians: Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Iraq. But there is no need for that. It’s better if there is peace. It would be fantastic. But if there is no peace … [he clasped his hands together as if to indicate the crushing of something]. Armenians are not a bellicose people; they like to use their head. But they become tools at the hands of the US and Israel.

“No, it’s that there is a war with Azerbaijan,” I responded. “But why is there a war with Azerbaijan? Because Armenia and the Armenians are trying to get the lands that are here back, isn’t that so? Bitlis is an Armenian region, so they want to get it back. Kurds want it too, and Turkey, too. I don’t want these lands to leave Turkey, because if this is taken by Armenia we will not have a peaceful life.” 218

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“These lands can become an independent Kurdistan: there are millions of Kurds,” I riposted. “But it’s not realistic that these lands will become Armenia’s any time soon.” “But those Kurds too are working against Turkey. But I am a citizen of Turkey. If they do anything against Turkey, I will take Turkey’s side and will defend it. Because if this is taken by the Kurds it will cease to be either Turks’ or Armenians’.” How did he feel that his religion had been forced on his ancestors during the annihilation of the Armenians? For a moment I had forgotten that another member of the Kirbo aşiret, well versed in his family’s history, had already told me the clan had converted before the Genocide, in the nineteenth century, but Hüseyin did not notice the oversight either.3 “And I say, praise be to Allah that we became Muslim, because Islam is the true religion. Muhammad was the last Prophet and he brought the last Book: Christianity is true, but Islam is truer.”     

Unassuming as he was, Necmettin was an avid reader with a wide range of interests, and was well versed in Armenian history and the Church. This was uncommon. Gökalp had told him to drop by the store as I had become intrigued by this Muslim Armenian tribe. Necmettin, he told me, was the person who knew most about the Kirbo aşiret. His curiosity had also led him to dabble in amateur journalism. There was already a rumor in the commercial quarter of Bitlis about a foreign journalist, Necmettin said when he entered the Saatçis’ store. Gökalp took it with light humor: “Every time an Armenian comes, locals start talking: did he come for the gold? Does he have the treasure maps? Is he a spy? Is he giving away Bibles?” Seven generations ago, or approximately 200 years ago, Necmettin said, an Armenian landlord in Siirt called Kiro ağa had converted to Islam and founded the tribe named after him, even though it was also known by variations, including the most common one, Kirbo, as well as Kirvo, Kirvan, Kıro, and Kırpo. Kiro, an unusual name, could be a dialectal form of Kevork (George), yet there was the intriguing coincidence with the Romani word kirvo (godfather). It had traveled into Romani from the Greek kyrios by way of Armenian, even though it has not survived in Armenian. Yet Necmettin made no mention of any family or tribe connection to Romas, nor to Poshas, the Armenian Gypsies. Necmettin’s grandfather’s name was Puşur, more common as a last name of Turks and Kurds but which was still consistent with his Islamic faith. Yet Puşur’s brothers’ names were definitely variations of Armenian ones: Gurgan 219

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was a form of Gurgen or Kurken; and Anto was short for Antranig or Andranik. It would have been very unusual that fourth-generation Muslims still bore Armenian names. More importantly, however, there were inconsistencies in the narrative. One of Puşur’s brothers was drafted into the army just before the 1915 massacres and disappeared. The youngest, Anto, found the protection of a wealthy Kurdish peasant and, according to Necmettin, was converted and changed his name to Mehmet. He stayed in Bitlis and never married. The other brother was Gurgan, who married an Islamicized Armenian, the sister of Necmettin’s maternal grandfather, with whom he had one son. In other words, these events would suggest that the aşiret converted after the Genocide. The tribe as a family and social structure is generally alien to Armenians and common to Kurds, even if there have been at least two Armenian Christian tribes elsewhere, in the province of Dersim. But if the information provided by Necmettin was accurate, how would the tribe have survived in such large numbers had it been Christian in 1915? “That is why our family remained big during the Genocide.” He reckoned it counted more than 2,000 members. The tribe had taken in around 15 Armenian orphans, saying they were relatives: “There were some 15 families that were thus protected by the Kirbo aşiret, on the understanding that they would convert to Islam.” The surname of the descendants of those protected children is Gökçen. During the massacres and pillaging in 1915, his grandfather Puşur and a brother killed three Kurds in circumstances unknown to Necmettin, but which indicated that even Islamicized Armenians were not completely shielded from violence. The Kirbos had to sell three stores which they rented out in Bitlis and a plot they had in Üsküdar, Istanbul, to pay blood money to the families of the men they killed. The unusual story did not correspond to the experience of other Armenians— usually deported, kidnapped, or massacred—which indeed suggested the family’s conversion predated the Genocide. Any Armenian who killed Kurds at that time would have no other option than fleeing to save his skin and would not have been given the choice of paying blood money, a common indemnity in Muslim countries. We went to a canteen for paça, a stew with goat’s feet and heads boiled over a slow fire, but I did not recognize the dish we were served, which Gökalp and Necmettin told me was the traditional Bitlis preparation; local cuisine was often at variance with the rest of Turkey. As we drove to the eatery by a stretch of an ancient wall, I had seen a large portrait of Said Nursî in tunic and turban, his eyes engaging the viewer’s. The ubiquity of this Muslim scholar’s images spoke of a popularity that Atatürk apparently did not enjoy, I wondered aloud. Both gave me the surprised looks of locals who had not remarked on a peculiarity 220

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only an outsider would notice: they were unable to explain it. “Perhaps it’s because of Atatürk’s stance against religion,” guessed Necmettin. Nursî, a Bitlisli, was one of the leading intellectuals of modern Islam, he added. Fetullah Gülen had been Nursî’s student and Erdoğan also followed his teachings. “I apologize, I have even been called Armenian,” I mocked Erdoğan’s statement during the election campaign, in which he dismissed rumors about his origins being anything but Turkish. Necmettin resented it: “He was apologizing for the insult implicit in the word, which is, ‘born of Armenian sperm,’ a common curse.” Although a promoter of an Islamic school of thought that was receptive to scientific and technological progress, even if it came from the Christian West, religion had not been Nursî’s only pursuit. He had joined the Committee of Union and Progress and took part in its Special Secret Organization, the branch that had planned and executed the Genocide.4 Yet I found no information implicating him directly in the extermination. He had also taken part in the Turkish defense of Bitlis during the Russian winter offensive of 1916, supported by the Armenian volunteer forces that were closing in on villages outside the city: At some point Nursî received news that bands of Armenians were attacking the village of İsparıt close to his native Nurs […] However, in exemplary fashion he collected together all the Armenian women and children from the surrounding area to save them from retaliatory action, which he stated was contrary to Shariah, and handed them over to Armenian forces. The Armenians were so impressed at this fine Islamic conduct that thereafter they themselves refrained from the barbaric slaughter of innocent civilians.5

We walked down to the caravanserai where Necmettin resumed work at his tailor’s shop on the third floor in the inner gallery built around the central courtyard, of lamps gone out and shadows that left little room for any feeling but gloom or sorrow. It was almost midnight. There was nobody else in the ancient han, other than a man having tea by the unlit entrance of gray stones, silently sharing his low table with a stooping old woman in a headscarf. She was one of the very few women I had encountered during my stay in the city, apart from the mother and daughter who lived at Saroyan’s house. Then I had seen two young women, one of them Hazar’s daughter or niece, who briefly sat behind the store’s till, and an employee at a bus company office. Other than that and the occasional pedestrian, Bitlis seemed a city of women in hiding. Puşur, Necmettin’s grandfather, had married a Christian Armenian, with whom he had two sons. After he took on a Zaza woman as a consort, the Armenian wife left with her two sons for Istanbul, where all trace of them was 221

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lost: “Polygamy is allowed in Islam but his Armenian wife did not accept it,” Necmettin said, without taking his eyes off the trouser hems he was stitching. The marriage to the Zaza woman was unhappy: Puşur did not love his second, Zaza wife, so he killed her, in order to bring back the Armenian wife, but she did not return or he did not find her. He married for a third time, this time to the cousin of his second wife, the one he had murdered. He had four sons and two daughters with the third wife.

Of this third union was born Melikşah, the father of Necmettin and his other 12 siblings. Melikşah did not admit the family’s Armenian origin: “We are Arabs.” Family circumstances had deprived Necmettin of the opportunity to further his education. “I had to take on this apprenticeship to make a living,” he said with a sad smile, while he put the finishing touches to orders that would be picked up in the morning. He hung the waiting jackets and trousers partially overlapping each other along the wall and rested the heavy scissors on the table, next to rolls of fabric and other sartorial tools, and he brought in the jacket display stand before closing the shop. As that would be my last night in Bitlis, he offered to let me stay in his office elsewhere in the han, where we walked along the dark balconies and corridor. A sign on the door announced the Bitlis Culture and Arts Center. When he switched on the lights, the first thing that came into sight were pictures of Atatürk: on a white horse in Çanakkale; the black-and-white photo in a dinner suit; looking down from the elongated end of the Turkish flag crescent. The pictures shared the walls with the Republic founder’s Ode to the Youth and the İstiklâl Marşı (Independence March), the country’s national anthem. There were more Kemalist mementos here in the little office than I had seen in the whole city. Mathematics and science manuals were piled on a desk, next to a notebook with a few lines scribbled in a child’s handwriting. By the looks of it, the office was a dershane (cram school), popular in Anatolia to supplement an official curriculum that many parents felt was out of step with the demands of modern life. The name on the door was somewhat misleading, giving the impression that he was moonlighting as a crammer instructor. Turkey had recently tightened the rules for the activities of dershanes, in a decision that was seen as related to Erdoğan’s conflict with Gülen, who controlled a large network of cram schools in the country. “They tell me, ‘You are Muslim but you are not a Kurd or a Turk, then what are you,’ and I tell them that I cannot be both an Armenian and a Kurd or a Turk,” Necmettin said. “No, no, no, I’m Armenian.” In addition to Turkish and 222

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Ottoman, he had learned classical Arabic at religious classes he took from the age of five. Necmettin said that he did not speak Kurdish: “I would first learn my mother tongue.” He meant Armenian, he said. But he then added: “Our ancestors were drawn to Islam and became Muslim, Ellhamdüllillah, praise be to Allah we became Muslim, but we are Armenian, and I say it everywhere.” The strictures of fasting put me in a very bad mood, I said in response to his question on the Easter traditions. It was, Necmettin noted, far more benign than the Ramadan, which he observed rigorously. I preferred God’s wrath and trusted His mercy for the violations of these bans, rather than observing them with very adverse social consequences. He had read in my reply an oblique rebuke of the Islamic restrictions. As the issue had come up, I did express my reservations about dogmas that subordinated individual freedom to collective ideology, and I wanted to hear his interpretation of the fatwas (religious edicts) issued by imams in 1915, calling for the killing of Armenians and rewarding them with promises of paradise. “They were used for politics, they lent themselves to politics, they were not observing the rules of Islam, in the same way that you ignore the Lent fast, they were not good Muslims,” was Necmettin’s backhanded response, still smarting from my irreverent comments on the religious logic, or lack thereof, of voluntary starvation. “The Qur’an says that if others are not harming you or your faith, you cannot cause them any harm: there is not a single mention that authorizes killing in the Qur’an, not a single one,” he said passionately. The Islamic State jihadis surely begged to disagree, I said, now deliberately provoking him to test his limits: “But ISIS is not Islamic, they are not!” he exclaimed, irked, the only instance in which he showed ire. And he recited in singing Arabic the Qur’an’s Throne Verse, Āyat al-Kursī: “God, there is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth …” Then he showed me a short video documentary he had prepared about Nahabed of Niç, the last Christian in the Bitlis area. In it, Nahabed spoke of his elders and had explained the old Armenian recipe for mortar, mixing egg yolk, milk, and ground stone. He then walked over to the local cemetery, a crowded plot of jagged rocks with no inscriptions or marks, and that only he or family members would be able to identify as tombstones. An unconvincing explanation for this custom, which I had observed among the pockets of Christians in Sasun, was that it deterred grave robbers. After the incident at Mutki three years earlier, a local minivan driver had agreed to take me to Niç. As I was still rattled it had taken me a while to trust this chauffeur, until I realized he was trying to put me in touch with local converted Armenians, all of whom refused to speak with me. The driver had told me that of the 400 households in Mutki, 40 were Islamicized Armenians. And 223

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while he observed the oruç (Ramadan fast), before snaking up the mountains toward Niç he stopped at a grocer’s to buy water and cookies for me. “The fast is good for your health, it’s not only for God,” the Zaza chauffeur told me. “We empty the tank of gas too, it’s good for the car,” he said, patting the dashboard. On the road up, he would show me oases of green nestled in secluded valleys or on remote plateaus and he would tell me, “These were Armenian villages.” So was Niç, more of a hamlet now than a village, rising from a compact wood behind plantations traversed by a creek. Out of respect for his neighbors, Nahabed observed the fast too, but inside the house he laid a şofra (large tray) on the rug, with honey, yogurt, nutmegs, and bread for me, as well as water and tea. His family had come over from Sasun, on the other side of the mountains to the west, some 500 years ago. As he had done for Necmettin, Nahabed had also recited the names of the seven previous generations of male ancestors: My name is Nahabed; my father’s name was Murat; Murat’s father’s name was Avak; Avak’s father’s, Tamur; Tamur’s father’s, Murat; Murat’s father’s, Kevo; Kevo’s father’s, Tato; Tato’s father’s, Papaz.

Nahabed spoke the Sasun dialect and only with great difficulty could he understand Western Armenian, even though I was able to follow his speech. There was another Armenian woman in Niç who did not speak it and had converted to Islam after marrying a local Zaza. Nahabed had received me in a business suit and a tie, the creases of his trousers immaculately ironed. Outside his groomed, white mustachio, his face was clean-shaven and his hair perfectly combed. Except for the jacket and the tie, he had worn formal trousers and dress shirt to climb Mt. Maruta beneath a murderous sun and without drinking a drop of water out of respect for Ramadan, even though Muslims allowed for exceptions to the fast in travel or extreme necessity. “My father was like a dictator, everybody feared him in all the villages around here,” Nahabed said with a wide sweep of his hand that encompassed the surrounding mountains, explaining how they had made it through 1915 by staying in their hometown. “Our family has lived in this house for 500 years,” rebuilding it several times in the same place. “Nobody dared touch a hair of my father’s head.” There had been fighting during the massacres, but Murat and his party had beaten the çetes back. On our way back, as we were trying to trail a golden eagle that was flying low before us, the driver warned me not to display my large camera too prominently. There was a military base in the distance but he feared they could see us taking photos, which was forbidden near military installations. It was then that I realized that we had seen at least three fortified garrisons in lost valleys amid mountains that were empty of people other than the small villages. Unlike the 224

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ancient castles that dotted this land to protect it from invaders, these modern fortresses were built to protect the state from its own people. Necmettin did not like to be called a convert, as an Istanbul Armenian he had met in Bitlis had once done, referring to him as a dönme. It was true that they had converted, but he disputed that it had been forced: “We were already Muslim a century before the Genocide.” They had stayed Armenian, he had responded to the Istanbul visitor, “and on our historical lands.” I ought to put myself in their shoes. “Would you live in Bitlis as a Christian?” he asked me, and appreciated my honest response. “The nearest church here is in Mardin and that is a Catholic one, and you are a Gregorian,” he said referring to the Armenian Church by a colloquial name, in reference to St. Gregory the Illuminator, its patron saint. “Christians and Muslims are brothers in faith as is written in the Book, but you could not live here as a Christian.”     

I paid one last visit to Hazar early in the morning before heading to Mush. He was already at the store, just arrived from the trip to Antap. He did not look as thrilled to see me as the first time. The Kurdish man who had introduced me, the one who was “Turkified” like them, had been spreading the news in the Bitlis business district about the Armenian arrived from America who was writing about the hidden Armenians and was the Saatçis’ guest. The Turkified Kurd had said that I knew “a lot of things.” What things, I asked intrigued? “Oh never mind, it’s hogwash,” he said. I felt I had blown their cover and apologized. “Never mind, that much we can handle.” I expressed my hope that we would one day meet in New York. “It’s impossible,” he said. That large store I saw, he said, only made enough to make ends meet. They could not even visit Istanbul with their entire family. All the brothers made their living from that store, and each had a family with three children. Previously, as we were walking to the store, I had asked Necmettin whose side he was on in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or should war break out between Armenia and Turkey. It was the purposefully childish question that I had asked his cousin a few days earlier. We were walking by a square and Necmettin had leaned on a ledge to think about it, and I stood there, calmly—it was a sunny day—observing people passing by. Not even for the sake of appearances, it was clear, would he respond with a platitude, and his honesty inspired in me a respect that I did not feel for the simplistic theoretical dilemma I had proposed. He was deep in thought, silent, surprised. He took several minutes to think about it. “War is against the principles of Islam,” he said. “But Azeris are Shiʿi, right?” He was a Sunni Muslim. Then, still pensive, peering into my eyes, he 225

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said: “But I still think I would take my people’s side,” in what I interpreted he meant Armenians, yet he did not elaborate. I still had not decided if there was something conceited about him or if he was a genuinely clean-hearted man, and sad, as he seemed to be. As if reading my mind, he told me his mother had died when he was still a teenager and that his family had fallen into a confused state, rudderless in her absence. He had been forced to cut short his professional dreams, which he did not detail, and learn the craft of tailoring to get immediate work. At the store, after telling me the story of the tell-all acquaintance, Hazar had decided: “I am going to speak openly and I am going to proclaim we are Armenian; the state knows we are Armenian and it is the state that is protecting us, were it not for the state we would be defenseless.” It could have been another statement for print, but I understood the dilemma and I was appalled at myself for exposing these men to risk. As Necmettin and the Saatçis were bidding me farewell, Gökalp walked out from behind the counter and picked up a bagful of merchandise that he put in my hand, without taking “No” for an answer, like families do when one of them sets out on a long trip.

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Mush “Aaayyy bro … Aaayyy bro … ay brother … my eyes should not see this day …” Half asleep at predawn, the passengers turned in alarm toward the wailing woman. She had just received a telephone call as the bus sped toward Mush through a topography that night had obscured except for the headlights of cars going in the opposite direction and the brightly lit rings of green neon around minarets, ghostly in the gleam. The woman’s male companion was trying to hush her, at first murmuring but then with impatience, switching from Turkish to Kurdish, as she kept sobbing. The bus barreled forth. Within minutes they got off outside a hospital, set back behind a long driveway. They were speaking in the loud and guttural accent of Mush. She kept lamenting with repetitions of “la՜ o, la՜ o,” a local Kurmancî vocative for men, also used in the Armenian dialects of Daron: “Hey boy … hey boy …” as Nahabed would call me, too, when we spoke in Niç. Three years earlier in Mush I had met Goryun, who was 45 years old and the last Armenian speaker left in the city and possibly the rest of the historical lands. As well as the regional dialect, he had excellent command of the standard language, yet with some strange inflections and values reminiscent of Eastern Armenian, the variant spoken in Iran and Armenia, on the other side of the Ararat. Initially I had attributed it to his frequent contact with visitors from Armenia, descendants of Genocide survivors from Mush for whom Goryun organized tours. Only years later would I realize he spoke a variant all but forgotten today, known as Central Armenian according to Ghevont Alishan, a monk and writer from the Mekhitarist Congregation of Venice.1 Goryun had learned Central Armenian from his grandfather, and perhaps he was unaware that he spoke a variant of Armenian the very existence of which had now been forgotten. According to one report, in the 1950s there were still about 100 Armenians in Mush who still spoke it as their mother tongue. A contact in California had told me that one of the best-known restaurants in Mush was owned by hidden Armenians, the Taşoğlus, whom I went 227

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to visit shortly upon my arrival in the summer of 2011. They were three men— two cousins in their late 60s and the son of one of them—disconcerted by the greeting that I had come on behalf of their “Los Angeles cousin.” One of them was wondering wide-eyed, “Which cousin?” and asking the other, “Do we have any cousin in America?” But the other one was telling him, “Yes, yes …” and winked at me, forgiving me for the white lie, while the younger one was observing me with distrust. Then the friendlier one approached me and whispered in my ear, “Siz de ‘Hai’ misiniz?” (“Are you Hai too?”) They passed themselves for Kurds, he said in the same quiet voice while he fiddled with a large amber bead tisbeh, and asked me to stay over for the iftar dinner, the breaking of the fast. Patrons were sitting around the tables, solemnly waiting for what seemed some kind of sign that escaped my attention, for I started to help myself from the appetizers and the bread that were already laid out. The younger Taşoğlu came running toward me with an embarrassed smile, advising me that I had to wait until the call from the minaret. They had sat a man across from me, whom the three Taşoğlus had welcomed with reverence and introduced me as a guest from America. “You must be Muslim,” my table neighbor told me, which I took to be a wisecrack over the Ramadan blunder I had just committed. It was not. Our fellow diner was the chief imam of the quarter’s mosque. Clean-shaven himself, he had interpreted my beard as a sign of my faith. Again my beard had been misread as anything but an aesthetic choice, instead of the religious symbolism some in Turkey saw. It had happened at an internet center in Istanbul, manned by a young man with the overgrown beard and the trimmed mustache of the more observant Muslims. On a second, more careful examination, he had guessed I was Armenian, saying my eyes were set close together. “You know,” he had told me, “the Armenians say there was a genocide but the state says there was not.” As I was not sure if it was a provocation, I only ventured that my grandmother was from Urfa and had seen the Genocide. “Of course there was one,” he had acknowledged, alluding to his first statement: “Elbet vardı.” It had opened my eyes to the transformation Turkey seemed to be undergoing, that a man in his 20s discussed openly in the presence of other customers something that only a few years earlier any person in his right mind would have dreaded to mention to a stranger. The imam at the restaurant in Mush insisted that I ought to visit the mosque, regretting that I was not a Muslim: “You have such a beautiful beard.” It was now turning awkward for me, but it was a respectful comment that corresponded to a parallel set of values. Thereafter the conversation took a predictable course regarding the unity and universality of God and the brotherhood of mankind, spoiled by politics and greed. Before standing up to leave, he again told me to come to pray at the mosque. 228

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Then the Taşoğlus led me to a long table around which a dozen men and women were talking in Armenian and Russian. They were descendants of Mush Armenians from Yerevan and Moscow, including a former police chief who had come with his father—the son of Genocide survivors—and his son. The group was presided over by a heavy-set man: it was Goryun. Hearing the chorus of unconcerned Armenian voices in the middle of Mush seemed unreal at the time, yet less so than Goryun’s fluent speech. A minibus would take them on a tour of the ancient Armenian quarter, earmarked for imminent demolition as part of an urban renewal plan for the area. It would wipe out the last vestiges of an Armenian presence in the city. Goryun pointed to some houses, identifying their last owners before 1915, surnames that the visitors were familiar with. The police chief ’s father, who was 88 and as stout as the oak his cane was made of, suddenly became enraged at the sight of a mosque pouring out a throng of men from the last prayer service. Furious at seeing his parents’ neighborhood overrun by the dominant people of the land, the old man began to wave his walking stick at the worshippers, mouthing foul thoughts. Yet the men in the street mistook his gesture for a greeting and waved hands and handkerchiefs, all smiles. The old man was now uttering curses against Lenin, with his son and grandson chiming in, outdoing each other in the verbal barrage that did not spare even the Russian revolutionary’s mausoleum in Red Square. Nobody on the minibus needed an explanation: all born and raised in Soviet Armenia, they understood the chain of thoughts that had taken the men’s imagination from the old Armenian quarter of Mush to the Kremlin, and had caused them to besmear the Russian revolutionary’s name. Mush had been captured by the Russian army in February 1916 yet, with the treaties of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and Kars in 1921, Lenin’s Russia then gave up the Armenian territories it had taken from the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Anatolia, which were mostly under the control of Armenian volunteer forces. There was still a core of some 350 Armenians in the city of Mush, at least nominally converted, that would get together on social occasions such as weddings, Goryun said. In 1915, only his grandfather Apkar and his brothers Aram and Kalusd survived out of 38 family members. The remaining 35 were thrown from the Meğraked Bridge, known in Turkish as Suluk Bridge, where another 114 people were murdered. At the head of that bridge the fedayi Kevork Chavush, a figure of legend in the Armenian revolutionary movement, had died from injuries sustained in clashes with combined Turkish-Kurdish forces on May 27, 1907. The children fled to the village of Semal, where they had sought the protection of a Kurdish friend of their family, but this man’s younger brother, upon seeing Apkar and his two brothers, ran toward them brandishing an 229

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ax, with which he killed Kalusd. Goryun’s grandfather and Aram ended up as farmhands, or slaves, of a Kurdish ağa. They were found by a jeweler uncle from Aleppo, who paid 120 gold pounds for their liberation. Yet the ağa did not release the boys, who escaped after throwing burning charcoal from the grill on their master, and fled in different directions, agreeing to meet by the black rock of the Mush fortress, above the city’s Armenian quarter. Aram mysteriously dropped out from the story Goryun was telling, but Apkar was still on the run. He found refuge at the home of a woman called Emine in the old quarter, introducing himself as “the son of Eva.” She took in her murdered friend’s son and along with her husband they decided to move to Hazro, in Diyarbakır, which was apparently safer to hide the boy. They stayed there at least a year before returning to Mush. His grandfather thought that Armenians as a nation had ceased to exist until a trip he made to Aleppo in the 1920s, where he found an uncle and a community of survivors, with functioning churches and schools. Despite his uncle’s insistence to stay in Aleppo, Goryun’s grandfather returned to Mush to get married to his Armenian girlfriend. If not as lethal as it had been a century earlier, Mush was still unsafe territory for Armenians. A few months before we met in the summer of 2011, Goryun’s brother had been engaged in a gunfight with their Kurdish neighbors in the family village outside the city. The trigger for the conflict had been a cross Goryun’s son had worn to school, which had angered his Kurdish classmate’s grandfather, and the argument had grown out of control. “And this happens with the ones we are on good terms with,” Goryun had muttered. He was out of the country at the time of the clash, in which apparently AK-47s were also used. Intermittent shooting had gone on for two days. Not only did it illustrate the limits of the improving relations between Armenians and Kurds, but the anecdote was yet another example of the limited control the state had or claimed in the mountain areas of eastern and southeastern Anatolia. Turkey seemed to have a higher tolerance than other countries for violence, as long as it did not subvert the political order. A Genocide survivor was still alive in the village of Dalvorig, Goryun had said, possibly one of the last ones left in the world. Oddly called Aram, a name Armenians exclusively used for men, this woman was believed to be 103 years old at the time, in the summer of 2011. “She is hard of hearing and now blind, but her mind is still sharp, and she remembers the names of all who fell to combats and massacres.” Yet to my endless anguish, Goryun would not let me travel to the area alone without a local accompanying me. At my hotel, an employee from a neighboring village to Dalvorig concurred: it would be dangerous. The area had become a stronghold of Armenian resistance in the late nineteenth century as 230

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the Ottoman government organized the first waves of systematic massacres against them. Kurdish rebels were now active in the area and so were their enemies, the korucus (village guards) on the payroll of the Turkish government. Still, I persuaded the hotel employee to seek a driver from his hometown that would take me to see Aram. But the chauffeur told him that she had died a few months earlier. To make up for it, Goryun arranged a car driven by a convert who called himself by an Armenian name and who would take me to speak with a Kurdish tribe chieftain. Even though there were some biographical inconsistencies, this man introduced himself as the grandson of another Armenian fedayi of fame, Serop Aghpyur, a leader of the resistance in the pre-Genocide era. We headed to the yayla (summit pastures) where the Kurd spent the summer in a tent. Mush spread at the mountain foot, beneath a thin layer of smog. If poor on information, the encounter with the Kurdish reis was interesting for his perspective on the massacres of 1915. “Ours did not cause harm to any of yours,” he told me. He was speaking of his aşiret, not about the Kurds. Short of giving the name of one large tribe that had taken part in the slaughter, he hinted that it was still influential. He may have been referring to the Kotan aşiret, who led the Mush chapter of the Young Turks at the time of the Genocide.2 Yet his frame of reference was not the Kurdish people, but the tribe. “That’s a village guard,” he added looking with contempt in the direction of a surveillance post less than a mile away from his tent. A korucu was surveying the city below or us perhaps, the sun occasionally reflecting on his binocular lenses. “I don’t like them.” The owner of the hotel where I was staying was an Islamicized Armenian, Goryun told me, one of those who hid his origin: being exposed could be bad for business, or worse. “I do not fear on my own land,” said Goryun, a bear of a man. “Perhaps in Ankara I would fear the police, but on my land, in Mush, I do not.” Another descendant of converts, a friend of Goryun, had converted a backroom in his store into a personal shrine, with a little Armenian cross and a portrait of the Virgin Mary, but he did not want his secret to be revealed because he did live in fear, even on his own land.     

We began the descent with early nightfall, as the hill was vanishing into shades of black. Darkness was broken by the lamp of a family of peasants, camping down the slope from the ruins of the Holy Mother of God, in the village of Suluca. Maryam Asdvadzadzin, its name in Armenian, was known to locals as Kızıl Tepe Manastır (Red Hill Monastery). Its bricks had a tonality that hovered between browns and reds, depending on the light and the beholder. 231

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The city of Mush was a sprawl of bright clusters in the distance, with flickers of life under a sky still poor in stars. Bedridden due to a bad flu, Goryun would not be able to see me: it had been three years since my first visit. I was at the restaurant where we had first met. The Taşoğlu cousin I had surprised with the greetings from his relative in California did not remember the story, and was headed to a funeral. Nearby, demolition of the ancient Armenian neighborhood was proceeding at a brisk pace. Construction workers prevented me from entering an Armenian church where they were performing the mutilations and amputations that would convert it into a mosque. A pungent smell of blood emanated from a corner down the winding street: a dozen goat heads were piled inside a plastic washbowl on the sidewalk outside a butcher’s shop, and a cloud of flies was dancing around them. It was the Islamic holiday of Kurban Bayramı, which celebrates Abraham’s willingness to immolate his son in obedience to God. Shepherds would parade their flocks through towns and cities in Anatolia. In the past, blood would wash over cobblestones and pavements as the animals would be sacrificed in the street. Banned for years now, the prohibition would occasionally be flouted in some smaller towns and villages, especially deeper into the east. Goryun telephoned me: he would send me fedayi Serop Aghpyur’s grandson to arrange my plans with him. We could not agree on an affordable fare for a trip to the empty land where the Surp Garabed Monastery had once stood, and it would only get more expensive for a drive through the villages of Islamicized Armenians. Two young Kurdish men had witnessed the conversation outside a park and told me they could arrange the visit for free with a friend. They invited me to join them for a late lunch with friends at a nearby restaurant. At the table there was Candan, a Kurdish girl, with a round face and sealike eyes, round and green, with a white cotton headscarf on her head, and Katharina, a German anthropologist whose name I knew from her work in academia. She was doing research on the Armenian quarter of Mush. Her case study was a roofless church that was privately owned, sold by the state as “abandoned real estate,” a common occurrence with Armenian properties, regardless of their sacred use or otherwise. The family that owned it had turned it into a storage area and a dump, full of craters dug up for gold that were now filled with plastic bottles and garbage. Its owners wanted to demolish it but the local government would not allow it, arguing that it was part of the cultural heritage. One of the Kurds, originally from Lice, near Diyarbakır, gave me a book by Öcalan, the PKK leader, its cover in the green, yellow, and red of the Kurdish flag: Kürt Sorunu ve Demokratik Ulus Çözümü (The Kurdish Question and the Democratic Nation Solution). Only a few years earlier it would have 232

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been unthinkable, but now Kurdish flags and pictures of Öcalan and fallen militants were commonplace in the east and no longer disturbed anyone. Still, a few weeks later I dumped it in the bin at a stop in Yozgat: military and police roadblocks were frequent in Eastern Anatolia, at the time mostly in search of drugs. Yet a bus driver had told me that the police had lingered too long on my luggage at one checkpoint, looking at every item one by one. That book could be compromising should the police find it. After lunch, the Kurdish men departed and the two women and I walked over to an office of the BDP, the Peace and Democracy Party that was considered the political arm of the PKK. Candan got a friend from the party’s office to drive us. Her friend obliged as we were both guests and he deferred to the hospitality rules of the land, but he was not very happy. Even if driving at well over the speed limit was the norm in Mush, his hurry or displeasure was probably adding another 30 kilometers per hour to the normal speeds, which made Katharina pale in the back seat and beg the man to little effect to slow down. The Kurdish girl also teased Katharina about her fear, which I secretly shared seeing the cars zooming us past. As we began the ascent I saw a rare, crested bird, the size of a foraging chicken, but I spotted browns and what I thought was a speck of red in the light of dusk. I told the driver to please pull over smoothly because I thought I had seen a hoopoe, and the man went into reverse so violently that not only did we scare the bird but also the girls, with Candan and Katharina screaming, “He said softly!” “Softly!” At least I could confirm that it was a hoopoe as it took flight with its prominent crown atop like an antenna, even if I could not capture its picture. Of the monastery, there were fragments of brown brick walls left, including a long wall with three surviving arches. A family had set up a tent near the ruins and were enjoying the last days of their yayla vacation, a summer break in the pastures. We passed by the tent and two women idling near it, one who looked to be in her later 50s and the other in her 20s. Katharina and Candan struck up a conversation with the adult woman, who asked them where we were from. “I am Armenian too,” the woman said, when Katharina introduced me. Her grandparents were Islamicized Genocide survivors. “We are Muslim, but we admit that we are of Armenian origin.” We were invited into the tent, carpeted with overlapping rugs, and sat around the gas lamp while we drank tea. “Of course, there was fear, we feared a lot,” she continued. “Many would hide it, but I have always said I am Armenian, even 40 years ago.” The woman only spoke Kurdish, and Candan translated for us. The woman was Armenian on both her father’s and mother’s side. Her daughter and son, 21-year-old twins, had joined us in the conversation, occasionally rendering their 233

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mother’s comments into Turkish. This woman’s husband, who was out driving the animals back into the pen, was also of Armenian origin, and a relative. The reasons for this custom, which not only the Islamicized Armenians in Anatolia but also the Christians copied from the Muslims, were twofold: with very few or no Armenians left in their villages after the Genocide, especially males, they started marrying cousins; the other reason why they had married relatives was to retain the properties within the family as both expanded. This helped them better resist the pressures that Muslim neighbors, especially Kurdish tribes, put on the Armenians, Islamicized or otherwise, to leave. “They were a family of 20 people, only two brothers were saved: one went to Yerevan and all trace of him was lost; the other one remained here,” the woman said of her grandfather. The brothers were the sons of Torkom. Her grandfather at the time was seven years old and the other brother was four, and she did not know his name, let alone how he had ended up in Armenia. The children fled the massacres together but at some point the siblings split. The older brother was taken on by a Kurdish ağa in the village of Civar, with whom he stayed on and converted, eventually doing the Mecca pilgrimage twice. The woman’s grandfather eventually moved to Kavar, a village in the province of Malatya, where he married a Kurdish woman. Katharina asked her why he had not taken an Armenian wife. “Because in Kavar there were no Armenian women left,” the woman responded. “In Kavar there were only Kurdish women left.” Yet after the Genocide, Civar by comparison was full of Armenian girls and women that had been married to Muslim men: “They would sometimes kill these women’s children and keep them as wives.” As Candan kept translating, she added: But I did not marry Kurds, I married into my nation, an Armenian. I never wanted to marry a Kurd, because of the massacres, so I married an Armenian. Because of the massacres. The Xian and Badıkan aşirets killed a lot of Armenians. We became Muslim but we are Armenian.

With a statement of this kind in the presence of strangers, two of them Kurds, including the BDP member who had driven us, it was clear that this woman was not intimidated into disingenuous discourse. Was not a faith imposed by terror an aberration to her? “We don’t know that Islam was forced on us: it was my grandfather’s choice.” The son said that in this geography he would acknowledge himself as a Muslim of Armenian origin, but in western Turkey he would say he was a Kurd. “From your point of view, would you identify first as Muslims or Armenian?” The boy answered that they were Muslim before Armenian, and his twin sister and mother agreed. 234

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Katharina had been helping me in the interview, but I noticed she was squirming as I tried to determine where they stood in the novel and puzzling intersection of Islamic faith and Armenian origin. These Armenians were trying to claim back their national identity without necessarily reverting to the Church. She may have been discomfited by the elementary nature of my inquiry into nationality and religion, constructs that anthropologists elucidated with nuances that escaped the layman’s eye. When I asked what they felt in terms of identity, for lack of a better formula, Katharina and the daughter started mocking me, buddying up as it were: “Haha, hoho, what do we feel?” They both started pinching themselves. “What do I feel?” said the girl with some scorn, taking her cue from the Western visitor amid us: “I feel human.” She pinched herself on the arm: “Oh, what comes out of here? Blood comes out of here!” Katharina was tagging along, with the short giggles—of vanity or insecurity—that a few decades earlier I had occasionally heard at the university in England where she was completing her degree. “Don’t be pedantic,” I told her, perhaps raising my voice a little more than I wanted, frustrated to see an interview with Armenian peasants on a mountain pasture in Mush derailed by behavior imported from classrooms and halls “made famous by other people,” as a fellow graduate had once put it. Or perhaps she was bringing the lessons of German history into this conversation. In any case, Katharina was taken aback, and the talk with the family was now spoiled. The Armenian woman had fallen silent, her face inscrutable in the shimmer of the lantern.     

“Anne … anne … anne! Aaanneee! Anne!” An Istanbul friend of mine who had grown up in the city in the 1970s hated the word, “Mom” in Turkish, because her mother would instruct her and her siblings that in the street she was no longer “Mama,” in Armenian, and that they should address her by the Turkish vocative. This child in Mush was screaming so loud, and it went on for 20 minutes, that it had become impossible to continue my conversation with the head of the Compatriotic Union of the Daron Armenians. The association had only come into being a few weeks earlier to represent a community that was deciding to emerge from a century of silence. The ancient name of this Armenian region was Daroni Aşxarh (“Country of Daron” in the classical language), but in the modern language aşxarh had come to mean “world.” The World of Daron. Diyadin looked up with concern when I got up and walked toward the entrance to ask the boy to be quiet. “He’s only a child,” he told me. “Leave him alone.” Yet it had become impossible to understand the words Diyadin was 235

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almost whispering beneath the curtain of his drooping mustachio, so I told the little boy in less than fatherly tones to calm down or go away. “Brother, this is a family neighborhood,” Diyadin said, so upset that he called off the interview. “That’s not how we get things done over here.” We ought to get going as he was busy with other chores, he said, without bothering to disguise that he was asking me to leave. I had not even raised my voice to the child. Only later did the reason for Diyadin’s overreaction dawn on me. Still, as I would learn from the interview, a trifle like that could end with unpredictable consequences. A mild reprimand to a Muslim’s little son by a Diaspora Armenian could escalate into an intercommunal feud, right outside the offices of a compatriotic union of Armenians that had just opened its doors after a century of fear and hiding in Mush. Diyadin now wanted me out of the office. It took him half an hour to soften a bit, and unannounced guests that put him in a better mood. We then continued the conversation, not before another warning about local rules of neighborliness. The three visitors were from the village of Yağnik, Armenians on their mother’s side, Diyadin said: “Half of Mush is Armenian on their mother’s side.” The visitors laughed, but Diyadin and I did not, for obviously our sensitivity to history was different. They were stocky and blonde, with very white faces and small noses. Tall and taciturn, Diyadin was one of the founders of the association. He had a fragmentary know­ledge of Armenian, like a book with tattered pages: he hesitantly spoke a variation of Sasun dialect, with words he fished one by one from blurry recollection. This instance of kindergarten politics was all the more poignant on account of his origins from a region that had put up resistance for centuries to waves of invaders. Now they did not even dare tell a child to behave, because he was a Muslim Kurd. “Nobody will make you feel it in the street if you stay quiet, but the state knows,” he had told me after he had finally relented. “There are secret codes in our Civil Registry records that tell the state who the Armenians are.” The Armenian community was mostly comprised of the descendants of the local women and children who survived the Genocide, as well as those who in the early 1940s had moved to Mush from Sasun, on the other side of the mountains, a larger migration driven by persistent violence by Kurdish tribes and dismal material conditions. My grandfather came from Sasun. He was blind: he lost his eyes in the massacres. His first wife was killed in the Genocide and he took on a second wife. He worked for an ağa of the Şigo aşiret. Some of ours survived beneath a pile of corpses and some because they were hidden by neighbors or, in the case of the women, because they were taken as wives or servants. Some have assimilated,

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MUSH after 100 years in Islam. Some are not converting back from Islam. They were forced into it, but are not returning to the Church. For example, ours lived in the village of Mongok, the nearest to Mush. We just stayed on; after a while, the pressure let up, but our elders suffered incredible violence and harassment for decades after the Genocide: it was incredible, very much. In the past, there were no computers, no internet, and we were alone and felt fear. Ten, 20 years ago, a lot of people did not say: we are Armenian, we are Hai. If they had, they would not have been able to stay.

His grandmother took him along when she went with her Armenian friends to pray at the Arakelots Monastery, which 50 years ago was still standing: it was blown up in 1960, but its ruins survive to this day. Diyadin was nine at the time. He had learned some Armenian during these trips, but he did not understand what these old Armenians were reciting. “We did not know how to pray,” he said. I went with my grandmother to church every Sunday to pray, but she had become a Muslim around 1935. She married my grandfather in the village of Ağpik and some time later they both converted. His name was Avedis and he became Ali, and my grandmother’s name was Nurhan and she became Nurheddin. That must have been around 1935. They spoke about the massacres, in murmurs, behind closed doors, or in the thick of a forest. At the time there were four Armenian households in our village: Sulul, Haci, Ömer, and Ferman. These were all people who had come from Sasun, and they spoke in Armenian. My father did too, until his death in 1986. We feared being Armenian but we were also locals, born and raised here, so they knew us: we were neighbors. I spoke some Armenian when I was little but then to integrate we learned Turkish and Kurdish, as there was no one to speak Armenian with. I learned some curses in Armenian, too, from my grandmother, who got upset when we asked her why she would pray.

The prayers he did not remember, but he “never forgot” the bad words. Fear was not in the past. “Most people of Armenian origin are too scared to own up to their identity in Mush,” he said. “At least one-third of the population is probably of Armenian descent, maybe there are up to 40,000 of them but they will not say it, also because they believe it is a religion, rather than a nationality.” It was the first time they had opened up in 100 years in Mush and people were “stunned” at their daring. “We receive threats on the internet: ‘You killed our grandparents, we know who you are,’ that sort of thing.” Yet he wished they had opened up 20 years ago. “There were many more Hai at the time in Mush,” he said. “For example, in our village 20 or 25 years ago there were at least 100 Armenians, but now everybody has packed up and left, and we are left alone here, the descendants of the survivors: we need schools; 237

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we need to learn the language.” The state did not want it. They had to work it out on their own, without the support from people or organizations that other communities could count on. In Istanbul there are compatriotic unions, churches, and schools, but this part of Turkey was different. “This is the East,” he said. “We saw massacres here.” They would dare acknowledge descent on the mother’s side, at most. “We are everybody’s grandmother but nobody’s grandfather,” he commented, with a sarcastic reflection on the paternalist society. “We all know their grandfathers too, but they won’t tell.” A man had walked in and had quietly sat near Diyadin, in silence until I asked for examples that justified these vague references to “fear” like weather or an illness of uncertain causes. What did they fear? “The Muslims,” said the new guest. Diyadin intervened at that point to say that he was neither an historian nor an imam, so he did not know anything about religion. Like the woman and her children at the yayla by the ruins of the monastery, he had no qualms about discussing the Genocide and calling it by its name as well as speaking openly about its Kurdish perpetrators. Islam, however, was where he drew the line. Religious conservatism was much stronger in Mush than Kurdish nationalism, as a Sasun Armenian would tell me later. And I remembered the gunfight over the crucifix that Goryun’s son had worn to school. “Are you Muslim?” I asked the new guest. “That question is irrelevant,” Diyadin responded for him. “We are all locals here, and everybody here is Muslim …” but then the new guest cut him off: “We are Muslim but we don’t practice and don’t know anything about religion.” One of the visitors from Yağnik, those of Armenian descent on their mother’s side, joined in: “Here in Turkey, the religion, the language, the race, do not matter: we are all people; Assyrians, Jews, Armenians, they have the freedom to practice their faith.” How did he relate to the Genocide, especially as a Kurd of an Armenian mother? “I didn’t see it,” was his only comment. Only unwillingness to create ill feelings, especially after the incident with the little boy, prevented me from asking further about his family history, including how his parents had met. With the expressiveness of a sphynx, Diyadin now had his stare fixed on the white wall across from him. “The nation comes first,” he said: For example, my brother is Muslim, but he is Armenian. He is both things. How can it be? That exists too. Now in the Diaspora they are saying all this is emerging after Hrant Dink, but my grandmother even before had remained a Christian, despite having converted. But nobody spoke about it, there were almost no Christians left with them, there was no priest. What would they do in these parts? We are in the East.

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This was the Middle East, he added. “We have to deal with fascists, religious zealots, dangerous people … we can get killed here.” These things were not known by Armenians abroad, he said. They had only seen the signs with which the crowds had taken to the streets of Istanbul after the murder of Hrant Dink. “We are all Armenian; we are all Hrant Dink.” But they had to remember, too, that Dink had been murdered in the first place. “In the East and the Middle East, democracy is not working,” he said. “History teaches it, it’s impossible.” Any stiffness had disappeared from his attitude and voice, now that his annoyance over my reaction to the child had subsided completely and all visitors had left, allowing him to venture into territory that he probably considered too fraught to discuss in their presence: You don’t know the people around here. That man before was saying that every race, language, and religion can live here, but you don’t see that in these parts. It’s religion when you wake up and religion when you go to bed, and that’s all that matters. Let me tell you something: I am a Christian. Not on my ID but I am a Christian. They are Kurds with an Armenian mother or grandmother; they have completely assimilated. We need to win over the progressive people. There are Kurds that apologize: those do exist; but there are 30 million Kurds in this country. The former are in a minority. Still, yes, they are closer to Armenians. I lived in Istanbul for 25 years, and I had plenty of Kurdish friends, but I didn’t make a single Turkish one. Not a single one in 25 years. But for the tribal Kurds, Christianity has finished in these lands, and they do not want to see it back. Only a few decades ago, the life of an Armenian was worth less than a dog’s or a chicken’s: they could get away with murder. They do not want us here.

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Part V

Garin

Eight

Erzurum The graffiti scratched on the wall of the altar was erratic, except for a few names and words: Մովսէս Բէյի այս գիր Ռուբէն կիսսցօտօ Իգ ԵԿի ես մարքար Առստաւմեաց ի գիւղն Խօմապերտրիրացու Չոր մն Ա Ռուսին ծեռնին ես պէտք է Աայասայ կէնիի էս ժամի մսօվ՝ ի 1917ի ի օկօստօսի Գէին Գրիգրօրի նեանց Գուղ ուզուլարցի եմ

Movses Peyi ays gir Ruben kisstsoto Ig YEKi yes markar Arrstavmyats i gyuğn Xomapertriratsu Çor mn A Rusin dzerrnin yes betk e Aayasay kenii es jami msov՝ I 1917i i okostosi Gein Grigrori nyants Guğ uzulartsi em

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Only the upper lines and the bottom ones made some sense, including the names of persons and villages and mention of “the Russian”—their forces had taken the city in their offensive of February 16, 1916. It would pass for gibberish were it not for the historical circumstances; the clarity of the Armenian characters, if not the words; and most fundamentally, a sense of urgency in the hurried inscription, to communicate something about the Armenians who were in this church that day of August (perhaps the third, as indicated by the third letter of the Armenian alphabet) in 1917, before the recapture of the city by the Ottomans, aided by the Kurds, on March 12, 1918. Carnage in these lands would continue for another three years after the Genocide. The barely intelligible lines inside Surp Minas Church, in the village of Gez just outside Erzurum, conveyed distress, perhaps because of the bullet holes visible at the entrance, a mark of an unknown incident from those eventful times in Garin, the Armenian city and province that Turks and Kurds call Erzurum. Or perhaps it was the poignancy of seeing one last Armenian inscription in a ruined church, profaned many times over by vandals, and its lunar surface that was typical in Turkey. The ghosts of some frescoes survived: a head in a halo with a hand giving a blessing; the contours of a dragon; the legs and hooves of a red horse. Profanities had been painted in red. The setting was as bleak: the church had become a stranger on its own land, surrounded by low concrete buildings, haphazard in their construction and style, or lack thereof. And Surp Minas was a dump frequented by flies that buzzed hungrily over piles of filth, as some vultures circled it in lazy flight in expectation of finding something worthwhile in a land that now yielded nothing but refuse. The noise of a car that screeched to a halt right outside the church broke the spell that the century-old graffiti had cast on me, as I tried to decipher the message left by a man, or a group of them—at least Movses, Rupen, and Grigor, the names listed there—in the last days of Western Armenia’s shortlived liberation. An initial feeling of alarm was confirmed when three men with threatening countenance ran inside the church, avoiding the gaping holes with the agility of lizards. They were obviously familiar with the terrain as they approached me near the altar without even looking down at the craters. “Who are you,” demanded the angriest-looking one, a blue-eyed young man with an angular face. He was pretending to be tough but was clearly the sidekick of the boss, who appeared to be the man they called “hoca,” perhaps a teacher or an imam, with the long beard with no mustachio typical of conservative Muslims, and wearing a green skullcap and a white, loose tunic called a kurta. The hoca’s mouth was half-open, showing his clenched, brown teeth. Number three was the largest of them, a plump, bell-shaped smiling man in his 20s, with small eyes lost under thick eyebrows and always looking down, as if he would return to the pleasant sleep from which he had been plucked by the two other would-be 244

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thugs. The blue-eyed one, whose eyes were so large or so unblinking that they seemed to miss the eyelids, shot out questions in Turkish which were met by my responses in English and Spanish. It frustrated them but also lowered their guard, and had them exchange glances of “this is not it.” He wanted to know what the graffiti said but their big friend, and the most inoffensive-looking one, translated into broken English as I continued my pretenses and said something about “Armenian.” So I asked him if he was Armenian because he really looked like one, “No, no, I’m an Arab,” and the show went on, with me asking if the scratched letters were Arabic. It must have been a not very convincing parody of a dumb tourist but the three soon lost interest, especially when I said, “Smile!” and took their photo, with the imam and the blue-eyed man covering their faces with their hands and unsmiling, even though the cleric’s angry grin of smoker’s teeth could pass for one. The Arab, however, albeit looking down at one of the craters, complied with a smile, but he had one already frozen on his somnolent face. They were soon out of the church, led by the second-in-command, who scurried away like a lizard through the narrow gate. It was obvious they thought I had come to retrieve my ancestors’ “golds”—“Ermenilerin altınları,” as they say in Turkish, in plural—and that I had been given away by my cabdriver, whom I found taking a nap in the car, with his bare feet sticking out of the driver-side window. “İçinde hiç bir şey yok mu?” he asked, surprised to see me back so soon: “Wasn’t there anything inside?” It was a ruined church, I muttered, feigning indifference. Probably plans had already been made with his accomplices in the brotherhood of treasure hunters and grave-diggers about splitting the proceeds; there were web pages where amateurs exchanged “information” on trove sites. There were some ruined houses near the church, too, left unrepaired, dying the slow death of buildings. Only one side of the ecosystem, that which lived off the labor of the builders of the land—the civilizers in the strictest sense of the word, for they had built this city—had survived, while the conquerors had not shaken off the habits of living off the treasures buried underground, the benefits of the right of might. For violence requires no justification or explanation, and had been extremely beneficial for the nation of the rulers, as it still was, even when the soil stirred with the sterile shovels of those who take without sowing had nothing else to yield. The vultures were perched atop the church when I left. Kirkor Menaf had warned me to be extra-vigilant in Erzurum, a city he knew well as a student there. He was usually a restrained person, who seldom used one word too many. But when I told him I was in Erzurum he discouraged me from seeking out Armenians and he refused to provide me with the contact details of those he knew, for he found it too risky. A devout Muslim and averse to discussing Turkish politics with me—perhaps because he felt we might not see eye to eye on that, as I suspected him of sympathizing with Erdoğan’s Justice 245

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and Development Party by virtue of its Islamist orientation—he had stunned me by labeling the city, which I knew he loved as a center of Islamic learning, as “a nest of fascists.” Kirkor Menaf was the first Islamicized Armenian I had known on a social network, and at the time he kept his nationality hidden from his classmates and colleagues. There were small hints of that, as well as the greed, which made it safer not to probe further. The driver of the first cab I had taken from the bus terminal to the city had seemed pleasant enough as to make me confide my Armenian identity. Were there Armenians in town? Yes, but he did not know anyone. Were they scared? “No, they simply do not say they are Armenian.” As we were driving we had been discussing my family’s last names. Only once did he take his eyes off the road, when I said my grandmother’s maiden name, “Kuyumjian,” the trade of her father, a kuyumcu (“jeweler” in Turkish). The driver asked me to repeat: “Kuyumjian or Koyunjian?” The second option, koyuncu (“sheep farmer”), was a safer choice that he offered, and I did not miss it. He took me to an old Armenian church, probably St. Mary’s, that had been turned into a mosque only in 1998.1 It had happened during a brief interlude of an Islamist government in Turkey, as the request had previously been turned down. But when mayor Muhyettin Aksak of the municipality of Yakutiye, where the desecrated church was, finally obtained the permission he organized a fund-raising campaign for the conversion work, which involved whitewashing frescoes of Christ and the Virgin Mary, as well as the demolition of the apse to redirect it toward the qibla, or the direction Muslims should face during prayers: “Bir taş da kibleye sen dönder” (“You too can turn a stone toward the qibla”), thus inviting his pious constituency to the edifying endeavor of defacing a church. To leave no doubts about the intentions that animated this fervently religious politician, it was then renamed Fetih Cami (Conquest Mosque), perhaps in view of the dogged red tape he had encountered in the Turkish bureaucracy in his efforts to appropriate it, after its legitimate owners had been sent on death marches a century earlier. We then surveyed the old Armenian quarter. Old houses with overhanging second floors were in such a state of disrepair that it suggested little work had been done on them since 1915. Two old men sitting in the shade of one, fiddling with their beads, stopped us. “Are you drinking water, son?” the smaller of the two asked me, with a stupefied expression as the other one looked on disapprovingly. “He’s a foreigner,” the cabdriver said. “He is a foreigner?” wondered the old man aloud, not judging my features alien enough. Ramadan had begun that day. The rigors of Islam were not evenly observed in Turkey, but east of Sepasdia, or Sivas, the number of uncovered female heads dwindled, while those of men crowned with the white cap of the Mecca pilgrim multiplied. In Erzurum, Turkish nationalism had developed a symbiosis with Islamist zeal as in Ottoman times, when both fed into each other and were one and the same, 246

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to the point that the identity of the local Kurdish population is drawn and diluted into this peculiar dynamic of a frontier territory. One day was enough to see hints of what Kirkor Menaf had warned. At the post office in the morning, the manager of the philately division had screamed at me in a rage, with the other customers that packed the office following the monologue with great curiosity: it all began because the first page in the stamps folder was an issue with the image of the Aghtamar Church in Van. “So you want churches?” I responded yes to that and the question that followed, if I was Christian. “Here there are churches but in Europe there are no mosques, and they kill Muslims.” He then launched into a furious tirade against Christians butchering Muslims in the West, whereas Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived “like brothers” in Turkey and he paraded loudly the example of his brother, who had “met” on an internet dating site a Catholic Philippine woman, whom he had decided to marry, and had brought her over to Erzurum, where she had abandoned her faith upon discovering the marvels of Islam through her new husband. The usually boring wait for the other customers was thus enlivened with an insight into the cyber romantic life of the philately division head’s brother, which perhaps most of them similarly found more interesting than the rest of his hateful political and religious rant, surely more familiar to their ears and minds, whereas the provenance of his sister-in-law must have prompted the people in the long line to wonder what was wrong with the beautiful women of Erzurum, this most traditional of cities where marrying into the tribe was still prized. It turned out this seller of stamps was mad about the terrorist attacks in Norway a few weeks earlier, in July 2011, in which an extremist had killed 77 people. Anders Behring Breivik had targeted a building outside the prime minister’s office and then a youth summer camp organized by the ruling party. He had aired anti-Muslim sentiments, even though none of his victims had any obvious Islamic connections. Understandably, an Armenian visiting from New York was a legitimate target in Erzurum for venting frustration and anger over a hate crime perpetrated in Scandinavia by a white supremacist. The postal worker’s face was still red with anger, but he now embarrassed himself by staring at me with bloodshot eyes and a smile he thought sadistic as he kept leafing through pages of stamps he suspected, rightly, that I would find offensive, including a great many of Atatürk in all colors and prices in cents; he was insisting that I took one worth 1 lira and 30 cents, but that was more than I would pay for the face of Turkey’s father; tanks rolling forth from a diffuse red light; a parade of Turkish troops; Turkish flags, straight and waving. Now that I had the satisfaction that I had been discovered as an Armenian, I bought one of Turkish fighter jets to appease the man a little and the Aghtamar Church stamp, as well as a number illustrated with local birds and a series of architectural landmarks of Van. Before leaving I confounded him by shaking his hand 247

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with a smile, telling him how pleasant it had been to exchange ideas with him, and for the first time he took his hating eyes off me. Evening entertainment was provided by the manager of a café, a fairly agreeable chap notwithstanding his loathing of Armenians. Still, he said that Erzurum was previously an Armenian city, but that they had “left” because of the “war.” Now their descendants came “by the busloads” to dig up their grandparents’ treasures. What would that be, I feigned interest. I pretended not to understand when he said “altınları.” He could not remember the English word for “gold” so I offered him my pocket dictionary. His eyes glued to the little thing, he went with monastic patience through every single word, printed in flea-sized fonts, from the first a, as I had tea. “Ha, altın işte!” he exclaimed two cups of tea later: “Gold!” All he needed was a metal detector, but they were very expensive in Turkey. How much did they cost in America? Possibly the teenage attendant at the internet café that I had visited previously had something similar in mind, for I had had to confront him when I saw his face reflected on the old monitor, standing behind me as I browsed websites devoted to the Surp Minas Church in Gez. The original Turkish word for “gold” was apparently something like ık, but it was a taboo by the time the first wave of Turkic hordes invaded Armenia in the eleventh century, and was taken to be called “yellow metal,” the etymology of altın. The last night in Erzurum was spent at the Eski Evler café, a restored old mansion with an enclosed courtyard, where I had been drawn by the sight of a peacock strutting about. But it had been the music coming from there that then led my steps in that direction. The singer of a small band of musicians with guitars and oud took the microphone to say that the following song was part of the city’s heritage left by the Armenians, “its former owners,” before offering a mellow rendition of Sarı Gelin, the Turkish version of the Armenian song Sari Ağçig. Very reluctantly, the vocalist agreed to have a talk after the concert. He was not Armenian, but the oud player was mockingly insisting that he was, the joke being that “Armenian” in Erzurum is synonym for an insult and the musician obviously thought it appropriate humor in the presence of one. A number of patrons had by now gathered around a table, including some in white kurtas and hajji caps, coming over to take a glance at “the Armenian,” as I heard the whispers circulating amid them. “Are you Muslim?” The question had come from a man whose garb and demeanor reminded me of the imam that had come with the other gold diggers to Surp Minas. Why would he think that? “Your beard.” Jesus too had a beard, I responded to everybody’s loud laughter except this man’s; he walked away unsmiling. It was a clear summer night and there was no threat in the air, yet it was all strange, with these musicians that I had thought at least were decent enough to recognize Armenian history. Yet they shared in the casual racism that could be an insult 248

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or a joke in Turkey. Still, feeble threads of humor, even if twisted, held together a friendly atmosphere in an environment that was otherwise hostile. The others looked on with disturbing curiosity, as people used to in far corners of the world in the past of rare travel, when they saw someone with different features or garments. None would distinguish me from them in my case, except a concept, and the world enclosed in it, which set us apart: Armenian. It had the feel of a swamp, neither water nor mud, fascinating and portentous, reminding me of a surreal scene from Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, in which a Serbian prince on his last day at a palace in Constantinople in 1689 is having a discussion with his valet, Nikon Sevast, and Masudi, an interpreter of others’ dreams who had just exposed Sevast as an incarnation of a demon in a flash of hatred. The metaphysical blended with the mundane in the conversation, in the same manner that irony and omens did: “Look at him, Sire. He has only one nostril in his nose. And he pisses with his tail, like all satans.”2 A debate on theology and the occult ensued in the novel, laced with a mention of war between Turks and Austrians, with the Serbian prince saying their house in Walachia “always had its own small witches, tiny satans, and vampires, with whom we supped.” Sevast, in turn, had admitted to be Satan: “As for the rest, Sire,” Sevast concluded, “you may, of course, turn me over to the Christian spiritual authorities and let the court for devils and witches deal with the matter. But, before you do so, allow me to ask you just one question. Do you believe that your church will exist and be able to pass judgment in three hundred years, as it does today?” “Of course I do,” replied Papas Avram. “Then prove it: exactly two hundred and ninety-three years from now, we will meet again, at this same time of year, for breakfast here in Constantinople, and then you will judge me just as you would today …” Papas Avram laughed, gave his consent, and killed another fly with the tip of his whip.3

In the fiction of Dictionary of the Khazars, that second rendezvous between the Serbian aristocrat and Satan took place in Istanbul in 1982. Two years earlier, on this side of reality, in his lecture at the Patriarchate of Jerusalem about the four types of Anatolian Armenians, Patriarch Shnorhk of Constantinople had spoken about “100 Islamicized families from Hınıs, in the province of Erzurum, that were waiting for the opportune moment to return to the Armenian Church.” It had been impossible to find a lead about them, so I had decided to grab the bull by the horns by venturing into this land. But it was not the right time to go around searching for them, let alone for anyone to reveal himself as an Islamicized Armenian. 249

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Hınıs Chance had it that I returned to Erzurum for Ramadan again three years later. Without asking, a local man grabbed my heavy bag from my hands and carried it for me as we walked by the Great Mosque and past the Twin Minarets Madrasa, with its conical dome eerily reminiscent of an Armenian church, built in 1271 and purported to be a magnificent example of Seljuk architecture.1 He placed the bags in the café where I would wait for a local contact who would take me to Hınıs, and he bid me farewell with a handshake and words of welcome with jovial spirit, which besides being kind was remarkable for someone whom I assumed to have been fasting since approximately three in the morning. Tempers could run short during Ramadan. A fist fight broke out among the idle waiters at the café until they were separated, more or less violently, by another colleague, even though there was a triumphant one that joined his buddies with a defiant smile, while the other one withdrew to a darker corner of the place, nearer to me, murmuring threats and curses to himself. The place was open for business only to take orders for pickup after the last ezzan of the day, toward eight in the evening, announced the breaking of the fast. It was cool inside, and at least the WiFi worked, but looking at the displayed sweets that were not for consumption till distant evening tested the mood of all but those with the strongest will. A fellow journalist I had contacted over a social network had agreed to receive me and help in my quest. Özkan was a Kurd. Near Christmas Day he had sent me a video of him playing Sarı Gelin on his guitar, with his daughters next to him. In one picture he appeared inside the ruins of an Armenian church, possibly Surp Asdvadzadzin. He had to come to Erzurum to pick up his sister and her son who arrived that day from Germany, where they lived. Then we drove for almost two hours to Hınıs, through the mountains that grew mysterious as darkness descended. There was still light when we drove past the Meğraked Bridge, or Suluk in Turkish, where Kevork Chavush had bled to death in 1907 and where 149 Armenians were thrown into their deaths in 1915, including the 38 relatives of Goryun of Mush. 250

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I joined the welcome for the daughter at the paternal home. As soon as we walked into the courtyard, I was flooded by a powerful sense of familiarity that I had not even felt at some Islamicized Armenians’ homes: it may have been the way the table was arranged and with dishes I was familiar with; the mostly silent father at the head; my contact’s mother when serving or bringing more food from the kitchen as unnoticeably as a breeze, who in her appearance and manners reminded me of my own grandmother. Then when I heard the sister arrived from Germany calling her son “Mihran,” I had no doubts. “Mihran! So you are Armenian?” “Kurds use it too,” responded Özkan, a little intrigued. Usually in a polo shirt, he was thin and his hair was wiry, with a look about him of the careless reporter, a profession he did not own up to. “I am an amateur reporter,” he would insist, even though he did his job with more than competence. It was election time in Turkey and Özkan was the campaign manager of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, in Hınıs. At the campaign office, he introduced me to Sheik Said’s great-grandson, the mayor of Hınıs, and great-great-granddaughter, in a full-body hijab but with her face uncovered. A seminal figure in the history of Kurdish nationalism, their ancestor had led a Kurdish rebellion in 1925, the first one against Atatürk’s Republic. Religion, however, had played a prominent role in the uprising, for Sheik Said and the other tribal chieftains were irked at Atatürk’s abolition of the Caliphate. With a nod from Özkan, who introduced Sheik Said as a champion of Armenians’ rights in the Ottoman era, both of his descendants said that he had opposed their extermination. Hınıs and its surrounding villages had a population of more than 21,000 Armenians before the Genocide. Most of them were liquidated by the 600–700 bandits recruited by the deportation committee headed by Sheik Said in 1915.2 Despite the new revisionist discourse, Sheik Said had been the head of the Hınıs branch of the Committee of Union and Progress, in charge of local work for the extermination and deportation of Armenians. The current mistrust and hostility that marks relations between Kurds and Turks is a relative novelty in history that dates back to Atatürk’s establishment of a secular state. The Turkish Republic did away, at least in theory, with Islamic laws and privileges on March 3, 1924. Until then, a compact had bound Kurds and Turks together as brothers in Islam since the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, in which the Kurdish amirs (princes) threw their support for the Sunni Ottomans against the Shiʿi Safavids of Persia. Kurds were granted autonomous rule and dominion over Armenians and other Christians in the territories of Eastern Anatolia, in addition to the privileges that Muslims enjoyed within the empire and which Sheik Said and his followers were loath to lose. Despite the oral revisionism practiced 100 years later for visitors, our hosts’ forefather was the 251

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last link in the five centuries of Kurdish–Turkish alliance. At the same time, Sheik Said was the first link in the emergence of modern Kurdish nationalism, born of the Islamic-inspired backlash of the tribes and their fears about the creation of an Armenian state in the historical provinces, which in a large measure had driven them to take part in the Genocide, as well as the windfall of the Armenians’ properties and wealth.3 Clearing the Western Armenian provinces and Cilicia of Armenians was the precondition for the sprawling territory of undefined borders that Kurds in Turkey today call Kurdistan. At the HDP office there was a young party leader, with the red eyes of the sleepless and the stoic expression of all those who fasted during Ramadan. His day had started at around three in the morning for breakfast and then he had headed to the mosque for the first prayer during the daylong fast, the oruç. It frustrated him that I took notes in an alphabet he could not read and he said so aloud, in my presence, to Özkan and the other party members sitting with us, for they should be careful about the things I wrote and that they could not read. It would not have made much difference had I written in Latin script in any language but Turkish. His hunger and thirst must have been acute on that summer day, but the resulting torpor, like sullen inebriation, with a permanent half-smile, was testing cordiality. “The Kurds massacred a lot of Armenians in 1915, no?” he asked, an unusual opening to break the ice. “Yes,” I responded, expecting the usual platitudes about brotherhood, ruined by politics and Machiavellian Turks. Instead, still with his half-smile, he sought out the other’s expressions, making me wonder what kind of reactions he was expecting from them. An Armenian traveler from Constantinople had passed through Hınıs in 1885. Manuel Mirakhorian had called it a city become a town of 300 homes, traversed by the River Aradzani. “In their idle hours residents fish well-sized fishes in the aforementioned river, and sometimes they send them as presents to each other,” he had written. “Their entire trade is with Garin, which is two-anda-half days’ or three days’ distance toward the north-west.”4 Travel times were indicated for foot march, which was customary for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the eastern vilayets, and even until the 1960s in places such as Sasun. We went to an iftar dinner, the breaking of the fast, organized by the HDP for the entire village of Xas. “Socialism would not earn us a single vote here, so our campaign acts in these lands have to be of this type,” Özkan explained about proselytism based on religion. Until the Genocide, Xas used to be the largest Armenian village on the plain of Mush, with 300 households and a minority of Muslims. It was so backward back in the day that, according to Mirakhorian, “they had a school that they almost didn’t.” The three Armenian quarters of the village each had a church—Surp Sdepannos, Surp Talita, and Surp Yerrortutyun—and were served by seven priests, “none of whom has admitted 252

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inspiration from the present century.” The women of the town had a propensity for the arts of divination, which the author found regrettable, reading news and the future in playing cards. But he acknowledged they had resource to little else, as they seldom heard from their husbands who had been migrating in great numbers to Constantinople to sustain their families back in their hometown.5 Özkan introduced me to a man with three Armenian grandparents, but he did not know anything about them other than that. “They did not tell and we did not ask them,” said the man, who had known two of them: a grandfather who had died in 1967 and his wife, who had passed a few years earlier. “As a child, I learned about my Armenian origin during fights with the other kids.” They called him “Ermeni pici” (“Armenian bastard”). Forty years ago in the village they still used ağçig (the Armenian word for “girl”) as a swearword. “We the Kurds,” said the man with three Armenian grandparents, “use ağçig as a curse, but that’s all I know.” The etymology takes us to ağiç, which in classical Armenian meant “virgin” and was used for the Holy Mother of God; in its fourth sense, it meant “goddess.” It had also its corrupted variations in meaning, such as the only one retained by the current occupants of the ancient Armenian lands, who use the word to describe loose women.6 Another local from Xas whose grandmother was Armenian chimed in with a story of an order he attributed to Atatürk: everybody who knew of remaining Armenians had to report them to the authorities or dispense with them, under penalty of imprisonment or worse. “A big ağa here knew an Armenian who had converted in 1915, whom he befriended and they would go hunting in the mountains together,” he said. “This Kurd felt fear that he knew this Armenian and had not reported him. On their next outing they went together to the mountain and did the namaz, but as soon as they finished the prayer the Kurd killed the convert.” Then the man from Xas added, “That’s how the life of our grandparents was … They feared a lot.” He also said that Atatürk had sowed discord between Armenians and Kurds. The man also disputed the legends that Sheik Said had protected Armenians: “It’s not true.” Now a little embarrassed, Özkan somehow qualified the support the Kurdish leader had given to Armenians: “He did not actually protect anyone; he could not, but he said that the deportations because of Armenians’ religion went against the principles of Islam.” The man from Xas rebuffed Özkan, mentioning an incident between his family and that of the sheik: “One of the sons of Sheik Said, Selahaddin Fırat, came to our village and became abusive with my grandmother, who told my grandfather: ‘He is insulting me,’ so my grandfather went to speak in defense of her honor, but they locked her up.” Had Selahaddin insulted her as a woman or as an Armenian, asked Özkan. “As an Armenian, man, as an Armenian,” he said. “They locked her up for being Armenian.” 253

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But then this man from Xas of uncertain loyalties asked me if the Armenians had territorial demands from the Kurds. I was saved by the bell: “It’s Aram Ararat,” Özkan said, looking at his ringing phone. Aram Ararat was “a Kurdish friend who uses an Armenian name.” The Kurd with the Armenian grandmother departed, his question about the overlapping territorial demands of Kurds and Armenians left unanswered. Then I felt shivers down my spine when I heard my name read over the loudspeakers and turned alarmed to Özkan, with my heart beating fast, who was speaking on the phone. I had seen unsmiling men in hajji white caps and found their sight as ominous as that of the police, especially in Turkey’s interior. Özkan signaled there was nothing to be alarmed about: my name was being read through the loudspeakers as one of the guests of honor. We drove back to Hınıs flanked by the darkening mountains, to the sound of the election jingles of Selahattin Demirtaş at full blast for two hours in the car. They came in four languages: Turkish, Kurmancî, Zazaki, and Armenian, as well as those targeting different voter groups, including one by a seductive female voice crooning the name of the HDP presidential candidate. The car was now hurtling through the pitch dark at lunatic speeds that I blamed on the musical torture, but we would surely arrive sooner than expected in Hınıs or somewhere else. The side windows in the back had been covered with posters of Demirtaş so I had no choice but to look through the windshield at the headlights of vehicles that approached us and flew us by in seconds. After we returned from Xas we sat down for a tea at a table in the street, outside a teahouse with its windows dressed in Demirtaş posters. Halk Kasabı (The People’s Butcher) was next to the teahouse. A goat skinned clean was hanging in the window, its red flesh and white fat showing through in the dead white of fluorescent illumination, its eyes frozen into terrified orbs. Outside the shop, bright and hygienic like a morgue, three men sat having tea on tiny low stools. Two of them were father and son, and they looked the part. Lots of passersby stopped to greet the father, some of them kissing his hand and all calling him by the honorific title of “Hoca,” for he had been a teacher. They were the butchers, and Armenian, but not approachable, the driver said. I asked Özkan for confirmation: “Is he a fascist?” He would not say so. “He’s a pragmatist.” In what sense? “He is not a good person.” But as I would like to talk to him, Özkan approached the man, and kissed his hand. Audibly enough for me, he said, “Hoca, a friend of mine is visiting from New York, he is of Armenian origin, and he is writing a book about the Armenians in Turkey.” The Armenian man and, a little more morosely, his son, turned to look, peering at me with small eyes from behind thick eyeglasses, both men versions of each other in youth and old age. 254

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The Kurdish driver, who had brought me back to life, had told me that the teacher-butcher was a converted Armenian, and for this little nugget I mentally forgave him for his criminal speed at the wheel. While Özkan was speaking with him, the driver told me that Özkan was Armenian too. “He told me he is Kurdish,” I responded. Maybe his grandmother was Armenian? No, no, he was Armenian on his father’s side. “Are you sure?” “One hundred percent: we all know each other in Hınıs.” I was stunned: Özkan had hosted me, introduced me to his parents, sisters, and children, yet there had been no hint of it except for a vague sensation of familiarity at the table, the unqualifiable composition of people and things, a certain arrangement and body language that we could recognize without being sure why. Perhaps it was how customs had traveled across time and space, as was the case with the household of the danuder, the Armenian paterfamilias, like so many I had seen. Now the other two HDP members were laughing. Özkan returned and told me to forget about the teacher-butcher, and the driver told Özkan to make up for it and give me more information “closer to home.” Özkan was game and tagged along laughing, and did not deny or confirm it. He did not utter one word. Initially I had attributed the air of mystery surrounding him to a personality trait, of a man who was an introvert. Yet I was now suspecting that it responded to a calculated decision. Nothing would have been more logical than denying he was of Armenian origin, if only for my sake. Why would he not refute it, after the joke was over, if it was indeed a joke? He could not, if his friends around the table knew the truth: it was the only explanation that I found mildly plausible, ruling out the others as even more unconvincing. And indeed, he did not refute it, after the joke and laughs had died down. A bearded man with black-and-white Beethoven hair, in a sleek beige suit, walked up to our table. After a somewhat ceremonious greeting he sat next to me. His two grandmothers were Armenian. He shook my hand without introducing himself. “Özkan told me you are writing about the hidden Armenians.” There was not much he knew, and I could probably guess why, he ventured: the fear, the reluctance to speak, and, he added a novel factor, the incuriosity of the Turks had rubbed off on them: “We have become like Turks.” They did not know and did not care. “My paternal grandmother married her Kurdish savior,” he said. “She never said one word: she had seen her three children murdered in the Genocide.” That was all he knew about her. Then he remembered an Armenian neighbor from the 1960s, called Avedis Komu. He also knew about a local Kurd called Mahmut Kale. All at the table nodded knowingly, even Özkan with an unusually somber expression. A few 255

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thought his name was Ahmed but they all finally agreed it was Mahmut. Özkan remembered him as a tall man with an overgrown beard. “When we were little, Mahmut Kale told us stories of how he had massacred Armenians,” the Beethoven-haired teacher said. “Don’t get me wrong, but he was not an evil man: he did what he thought was his duty; it was wartime.” The teacher did not mean the 1915 extermination but the Russo–Turkish war of 1915–17 right after the land had been cleared of Armenians, conflating events and dates. This equivocation, my notes say, upset me. But I had begged the teacher, who was brimming with nervous energy, to continue telling me the story of Mahmut Kale, his sobriquet of Kale being an honorific title that meant “Great.” Mahmut Kale told the children of Hınıs that he had slaughtered Armenians with his sword and that he had torn open the womb of a pregnant Armenian woman, killing both the unborn infant and the mother. The little ones also heard how he had pushed Armenian men, women, and children into the gorges of the mountains of Erzurum. “These cliffs were so high that we did not hear the sound of the bodies hitting the ground; so high, that we did not see the blood spilling out of the corpses,” he used to recount to the kids. “That’s the kind of people we are,” the teacher said, with rage slowly building up in him. Several times he refused to tell me his name despite assurances of anonymity. He would like to introduce me to the Armenian teacher-butcher who continued his conversation with his son, while the procession of Hınıs residents paid their respects. “But I do not dare to,” the teacher explained: “I would not want to have even one word with that Armenian who has turned into a Kurd, and a Kurd who has turned into a Turk, who is more fanatical than Turks, and more fascist than fascists, and if we go talk to him he will report us to the police.” That night at Özkan’s home I told him that I was acting on the premise that I would respect the anonymity of all, that I could be trusted. “But now I understand why I felt an instant familiarity when I stepped into the court of your paternal home, why it reminded me of my own home, and why your mother reminded me of my grandmother.” It was past two in the morning and he was updating the news website from his desk in his daughters’ room. His eyes, hooded under thick eyebrows and a large forehead, welled up. He cried in silence, without wiping his eyes, for a long five minutes of unspoken pain. And then he stood up and walked back to the computer to continue his work: “OK, we’ll talk.” An hour later we resumed the conversation, amid pink walls and the smiling characters from Disney on the shelves and sheets of his daughters’ room. They thought they were Kurds who had originally come from Iran, and his grandfather’s name was Esad. “I am a Kurd, and what our people did to yours is unforgivable.” His father’s sister was married to an Armenian but 256

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it would be impossible to make him talk. He too, like the Armenian teacher-​ butcher, was what Özkan called a “pragmatist.” This man did not admit that he was of Armenian origin. He also hinted that the man was on the right of Turkey’s politics, leaning toward the farther ends of Islamism and nationalism. To judge from the state of Özkan’s shoes, he had a very active social life. The shoes looked more like slippers with the heel counters so crumpled from taking them off and putting them on again, indicating he visited many houses. Everybody, including guests, takes their shoes off, for the floor of the home in Turkey is almost as sacred as that of a mosque, especially in the East. “People say all kinds of things about me, that I am Armenian, that I am Alevi, because I am a leftist and a tolerant man.” It seemed credible and I believed him. Then I woke up unconvinced. Seen in daylight, his modern apartment on the outskirts of the city was disconcerting in the syncretism of its sacred decor. The walls were shared by a framed surah in golden letters, such as those found in Sunni households, and a portrait of Ali, the most revered imam of the Alevis, but any icon of the socialism he professed was absent. It had the curated attention of a public office rather than a home, especially those that I had seen in Turkey, where family pictures crowded every possible shelf. Even a portrait of the poet Nâzım Hikmet or a quotation by him—a fixture in leftist homes in Turkey—was missing, too. There was that indefinable something that set Özkan apart from the rest of the Kurdish population of Hınıs, and that made him more familiar to me. He seemed to be hiding something, an impression that perhaps was reinforced by his eyes set back in deep sockets. Or perhaps it was his neutral style of conversation. Even for a political operative, there was a shroud of enigma about him. Then I remembered that on the white walls of his paternal house’s courtyard there had been a neatly painted hammer and sickle in red. It did not prove they were Armenian, yet in the eclectic syncretism of it all “there was something crooked,” as Emin bey had said of his family home in Diyarbakır, growing up without knowing they were Armenian. There did not seem to be any reason to refute he was Armenian. Yet an Istanbul friend whom I told about the Özkan enigma asked, without knowing him, if he was in politics. “Indeed, but he is in the HDP,” I said, which happened to be a party this friend was also a member of. “Then of course he will deny he is Armenian in a place like Erzurum.” Public know­ledge of his Armenian origin would ruin a politician’s career. This friend told me the case of a widely known politician with rumors swirling around his identity, to the point that at a reception Erdoğan’s wife had not been able to resist asking him about his memleket (hometown). It was a subtle code for nationality, as she knew perfectly well where in Turkey this politician was from. “Apologies, I am a Turk,” this politician had responded, parodying then prime minister Erdoğan’s denial that 257

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he was of Armenian origin, apologizing for it. The Erdoğans had celebrated the occurrence. But this politician had admitted to a tight circle of party members that he was indeed of Armenian origin. At breakfast, I met Özkan’s young wife, the single headscarf pulled back and tied loosely at the end, her forelocks free, like I had seen among Alevi women in Dersim and Armenian ones in Sasun. In her carefree conversation and manners, she missed the restraint that was more common among the Sunni women in the deep east of Turkey, especially in the presence of a male stranger. Özkan’s apartment, and the brief instances I had seen of his public life, had the trappings of disguise. Had something changed since the encouraging correspondence that had followed my first contact with him a year earlier? Surely we could get things done in Hınıs, he had said. Perhaps he was, indeed, a Kurd who loved Armenian church ruins, to judge from his photos inside them. Or perhaps camouflage was an outer crust of fear, our primeval feeling, our first sensation when we come into life, alerting us to the predators, actual or potential, surrounding us.

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Ten

Bayazet The two young men at Sülüklü Han in Diyarbakır who had no email address, no cell phones, and no Facebook accounts had given me the contact information of a tourist guide in Bayazet, whom they thought Armenian. It was how information collection worked for the remoter parts of Turkey, like bird-watchers exchanging reports of sightings of exemplars that might, or might not, be of a rare species. I would meet with Melih at Hotel Ararat, a lodge with the homely simplicity conjured up by rugs, the black tea poured in teardrop glasses, and the buzz of mountaineers talking in native or acquired English, in a babel of accents and melodies. A small Armenian flag, the only one I had seen in a public space in Turkey, was displayed on the top shelf of a cabinet at the back of the lobby, third from the left after the US and Slovakian flags. Bayazet, or Doğubeyazıt as it is called in Turkey, was barren and cold, a palette of pastels that often blurred into grays, like most of the geography along the frontier with Armenia. Jérôme, a French traveler with whom I had shared a couple of trips in the East, joined me for the interview with Melih, who indeed suspected he was of Armenian origin, even though he could not figure out who the two young men from Diyarbakır were. Melih’s hunch had been building over years of travel between the city and the mountains, guiding groups of climbers. “Right now, this is Kurdish territory,” he said, but he observed that the only common thing between the city and the mountain was the language: What I discovered is that the people who lived in the city of Bayazet looked different than those you met in the mountain villages: in physiognomy, traditions, and house life, families are completely different; in every sense, living style, clothing, complexion. For example, the food we have in Bayazet. There is this köfte, a type of meatball, you find in Yerevan and that now everybody here claims it’s Kurdish but it’s not. Its name is abdigör here. They made up a story that a cook prepared this köfte for the pasha, and his name was Abdi, and his wife said, “Look

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Secret Nation Abdi—Abdi gör, in Turkish—how tasty” and they call it abdigör. But I just say this to point out that everybody here now is trying to pass for a Kurd because this is Kurdistan. The city inhabitants of the older families are called vayizdi, which in Kurdish means “the people from Bayazet.” My family is vayizdi. Many vayizdis say they are Kurds, yet the Kurds say, “You are not of ours.” But we are not Turks either, or so say the Turcomans at Bayazet: “You are not of our people.” When I entered Armenia from Georgia, in my overland trip, I was overcome with expectation. But I was impressed with three aspects of life there: family relations, and how they treat each other; the homes, and the way they are arranged; and the food. Among Kurds it’s different: I cannot explain it, but it is different. In Yerevan, the household was tidier and neatly arranged; there were books at home and things to read; we vayizdis are exquisite with the food as Armenians are; like them, in our families we always try to put the choicest food on the table, eating different dishes every day. Among Kurds it’s not like that. The other thing was clothing: their style is different. In Yerevan, I saw men at work in a street, one of those side streets near Mashtots, and this group of workers looked like the men here do in Bayazet; the way they looked and talked, their accents; I can say 70 or 80 percent that my family is Armenian.

Melih and I had discussed the possibility of a DNA test, which he had welcomed, but as I was taking out the kits and the swabs, Jérôme and I exchanged glances that our interlocutor must have noticed: “If all I am saying is unconvincing I am still thinking why nobody accepts us, the vayizdis, as part of them: I don’t know what will happen if the fighting between Kurds and Turks arrives here, because I would say that even though many have left, still some 20 percent of the population here in Bayazet are people like me, vayizdis.” There was a slight mismatch between the intonation and the emphasis he intended, something we are exposed to when speaking a learned language, but anxiety was stirring beneath his fluent monotone in English. All over Anatolia, the war in Syria and the barbarity of the Islamic State were seen as portents awaiting Turkey. Should it fail to address the Kurdish demands, this could lead to the country’s breakup. At Noyan Tapan, one of the largest bookstores in Yerevan, Melih had bought a dictionary to learn Armenian, or at least some words: “When I left the store, an old lady walked up to me, and she said to me, ‘dığa jan,’ and I was completely shocked.” What would be shocking in “dear boy,” I asked him, suspecting the conversation was taking an erratic course. “Well, I was completely shocked because I always heard that from my grandfather.” Then it was likely, I agreed, that his grandfather was indeed Armenian. 260

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The metaphysical blended with the mundane in the conversation, in the same manner that irony and omens did: He was always saying this, “dığa jan,” and then I heard people using other words that rang a bell from my grandfather’s speech, but I had forgotten about it, yet they had a familiar ring, because my grandfather used these strange words all the time. Only when this old woman addressed me with it I finally remembered. I had been looking for the meaning of this word, “dığa jan.” I thought it was one word. My grandfather had an Islamic name, Mahmut. But there is a trick in town to tell those who are Kurds of older generations from those who are not. In Kurdish tradition, you have to recite the names of 15 generations of paternal lineage. Do you know how many centuries 15 forefathers add up to? But see, the people in the city of Bayazet cannot go farther than six or seven generations and then they stop. The most I’ve heard they can go back to is seven. I just know four. It always goes something like “Mahmut, Abdullah, Ahmet, Mehmet.” That’s the case with my family, too: but it is always the same common Muslim names with the vayizdis, and rarely going more than four generations back. This kind of thing makes me think. There was a time when we got angry, because as we were growing up the villagers, the Kurds, told us: “You don’t know where you are from.” We would ask the elders, and my father said we came from Konya but my uncle said we came from Izmir, and my grandfather said we came from Iran. This is my belief: after all these things I see, our families, our grandparents knew we were Armenian. I feel it. They were just too afraid to mention it. They were afraid that the kids would go out and repeat it, and that their lives would be destroyed. Because they spoke Turkish, Kurdish easily, they protected their families like this. They changed their religion to Islam and we saw they practiced it. But they didn’t even tell their children about their origin, and that’s why we don’t know who we are. The vayizdis of my grandfather’s generation were mostly merchants and artisans, but if they had any ranch they would keep cattle—cows—whereas Kurds herded goats and sheep, as they still do. Some people say the Genocide was ethnically or racially motivated, but I don’t believe that. It was religious. They exterminated the Armenians because they were Christian, because they were not Muslim. I heard this from old people in Bayazet, who were 70 or 80 years old, some 20 years ago. They told me that at the time the mullahs said that if you beheaded seven Armenians you would go to heaven. People were running to do this: they were so crazy that they went out of their way to kill Armenians, running in the streets with knives and axes.

He also remembered a word that sounded like tovarishch, or “comrade” in Russian. It was “the strange language” his uncle spoke, usually the second language of Armenians from the Republic, but only very rarely that of Kurds in 261

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this area. “My uncle and my father are blood brothers born of the same parents but they have different last names,” an anomaly he did not explain. This is the new Bayazet; the old city was somewhere near but it no longer exists. In my family the story goes that we have always lived in the city and that they had no problems, that the Kurds were in the mountain villages; that in the city there were Armenians, some Azeris, and very few Turcomans. The majority were Armenians in the center of old Bayazet. We still have a village called Noraşen, and we now have a village here called Zengezur, and they even put up the sign, and we know the people there are like me, like the vayizdis. Their lifestyle is urban. Here in the city they called a street Zengezur, too, after the BDP party won the elections, because Kurds also use that Armenian name. I do recognize the vayizdis just by looking at them in the street. Some may think that they are of Armenian origin. But most are assimilated. I can say that I am the only Christian in my family. I was baptized in Istanbul in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, an Evangelical denomination. I chose it. I read about the Bible, 15 years ago, when I was 22, I was trying to find my way, trying to find God: sometimes you are chosen by God and he sends the inspiration of the Holy Spirit your way. Sometimes, foreign people come here: it was hard to find these kinds of book here in Bayazet. You only find books of Islam and on Islam. So I asked them to send these books from overseas, or also from bigger cities like Istanbul or Antalya. I’ve met people from the churches, missionaries going around. I really read and I found out this is the truth. And I decided the Seventh Day Adventist Church because it was a lot easier to explain to my family. Because Christians eat pork, and the Seventh Day Adventists do not even eat meat. It’s not a requirement, but it’s Ellen White’s idea. I mostly keep it secret. Nobody knows here what my religion is. I keep it secret for my security. It’s not really something you want to proclaim from every window around here. My family now accepts it; at first they were really upset, but now they accept it. My older brother is atheist. Before that, he was a radical Islamist but then he changed completely: he met a Japanese woman, married her, and moved to Japan. I am happy for him, and for my family too, that he is gone, because he was a troublemaker. He was born after six years of marriage, so my family was very doting on him. Then I was born four years later. I am not in touch with him. We are four brothers. My youngest brother is 31 and has psychological problems, so I cannot really discuss religion or our family’s origins with him. The third brother is a free spirit, and embraces it all, a very liberal person, and we keep joking. We have a good rapport. Sometimes we joke, he calls me, “Hey my Armenian brother!” and we have a good laugh, because my father gets enraged when he hears me speculating about that. You know, in this town it’s a bad thing to be an Armenian or to say you are one. It’s a bad word.

“Even among Kurds?” I asked. 262

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“Among everybody, even among the Armenians who don’t know they are Armenian …” The future was bleak should his forebodings become prophetic, and self-fulfilling at that: If ISIS arrives here I will take my family to Yerevan. I am just hoping and praying that the border will open so I buy a home there. My wife is not a Christian: her father is from Kars, an Azeri and Turcoman mix, and the mother is a Kurd from Bayazet. She went mad when she found out I had become a Christian, but now she is in the middle ground, on her way to becoming one. I only told her six or seven years after I got baptized. I read the Bible to my family, I have books on the faith that she browses when she is bored, we sing hymns together with my two kids. My son is 12 and my daughter is ten. I know that when they grow up these teachings will leave a mark on them. I have not discussed our possible Armenian ancestry with them because we have this Turkish–Kurdish problem here, and I don’t want to embroil them in racial problems by telling them that they are Armenian. We need more time to explain this. Armenian here is still an insult but some things have begun to change a little. The young people don’t use that language and don’t bother either. But the older generation still do. It’s a kind of tradition. Here is less so. But if you go to the Turkish towns it’s worse. I guide a lot of groups on mountain climbing—to Ararat, and other mountains. We were climbing the Kaçkar Mountains on the Black Sea, I was guiding a group of 16 people from France, and we were talking in English. We finally reached the summit and the weather was so nice that some were coming with me, some were slower, and on our descent there was a lake at an altitude of 3,200 meters called Deniz Gölü. Before we got there, I told the people that this was easy and that they did not need me, and I would go to the camp to prepare soup and some food. When I got there, a group of Turkish climbers were having a meal and invited me over for a drink, and shared their food and snacks. There were six people, and one was really nice. There was a guy in the corner who asked me where I was from. A powerful feeling overcame me, I don’t why or where from, and I said, “I am from Ararat.” It had never happened to me before. That destroyed everything: the mood, the camaraderie. “Are you Armenian?” he asked me in a way that seemed like he was going to hit me. And I said, “I could be.” But you always need to use your brain very well. There is a reason why God gave it to you. And they are six and you are one, and you have a group of French people with you.

Jérôme, the Frenchman, interjected: “The French were 16, you could win the battle.” The guide smiled: I don’t think you understand. Then I laughed, and asked, “What’s the difference between Armenians and Turks?” The nice one among them was trying to calm everyone down, but the other one kept on being nasty, asking probing questions. These guys were from Ankara. I left my tea on the table and said that I had to

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Interesting and at times fascinating for the insights on the makeup of Bayazet’s population, including the intriguing vayizdis, the conversation with Melih had left me wondering about his origins. Some people, I had been warned in Turkey, would recount what they thought their interlocutor wanted to hear, not so much with the intention to lie as to please a guest. This seemed to be one such case. Jérôme, too, had been initially unconvinced but he sensed that Melih’s credibility had increased as the story had progressed, even if for me the highlight had been the dığa jan vocative, or “dear boy,” by which his grandfather had addressed him. But I had found the story about Ararat and the evil Turk too typically boilerplate to be taken at face value. The DNA test results were returned almost half a year later, showing Melih to be of Armenian origin.

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Eleven

Sarıkamış, Kars and Ani A friend in Ankara had introduced me to a former girlfriend, of free-flowing black hair and long eyelashes that softened her eyes. The couple were still on good terms, but among the reasons that had caused their breakup had been a trip to Mardin, the ancestral hometown of my friend’s family, where his obsession with the architecture of old Armenian houses had bored her to a sulk. An anthropologist, Ariya was interested in living, breathing people: “Stones don’t talk.” Stones spoke too, her then boyfriend had responded. They had had a more serious argument, too: “This may be Western Armenia,” she said, “but it is now Kurdistan.” It was so, her boyfriend had responded, because the Armenians had been exterminated. Should Kurds be obliterated Kurdistan would disappear, too. Without telling my friend, I too had embarked upon this project moved by a similar spirit to Ariya’s, searching for the living remnants of Armenians rather than sinking myself into the melancholy of contemplating ruins or pillaged property. A comment along these lines had once earned me a bitter rebuke from the editor of Agos, Sarkis Seropyan, whom I had approached in search of contacts in the Western Armenian provinces. Seropyan had begun to draw up a list of churches and historical sites, explaining to me the particulars of traditional Armenian construction, upon which he elaborated in loving minutiae, with verbal footnotes, as it were, referring me to bibliography or authors for each church or region. “No, I want to listen to the stories of people, I didn’t come for ruins and stones.” Infuriated, which he was apt to become when we talked, he had blushed and raised his voice—a sequence I had come to know well—as he pulled out his pocket book filled with little memos and cards that rained down onto his desk: the “stones” in Turkey often had more stories to tell than the people, but it took a fine soul and a sharp mind to listen to them, he had told me in his bass voice, with that mix of sarcasm and paternal frustration that I brought out in him every time we disagreed, after which he naturally lent me the support I had sought. 265

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Much to my regret, I had only limited time and fewer resources, and for my project I needed to engage in long conversations that most frequently yielded little or nothing. Yet the shreds of testimonies that I rescued I held in equivalent value to fragments of inscriptions. Ariya had one such little shred that I wanted to see if I could reconstruct. In the summer, her family used to camp in the pastures of Mt. Ararat. The first week of July they would play games that involved dousing each other with buckets of water. The family vacations in the yayla had tapered off in the mid-1960s and so had this custom, unknown to Turks and Kurds but a central part of the Armenian celebration of Vartavar, a pagan tradition that has survived into the second millennium of the Christian era. For indeed Ariya, with whom I met in Ankara, knew that her family had come over at least two centuries earlier from what is now the capital of Armenia. Most of her family was Kurdish, but they did not rule out a possible Armenian origin: they had migrated from Yerevan in the 1870s to the village of Alakilise, near Sarıkamış, in the province of Kars. The scant mentions of this village pertain to clashes during the Turkish–Armenian war of 1918: Turkish ultranationalists accused Armenians of massacres and looting. Part of Ariya’s family that had moved out of Kars were on the extreme right wing of Turkish politics. Alakilise had been founded by five of her ancestors, after they had migrated from Yerevan. The last name of one of the five founders was Kazanjian, a relative of Ariya on her mother’s side. In our conversation, she said that her grandmother used to say that Russians and Armenians had entered the village in the war, and that there had been “deaths.” She did not say with words what she was saying with her eyes, an oblique allusion to atrocities against the Muslims. Still, Ariya agreed to put me in touch with a cousin who still lived in Sarıkamış. At a turn of the bus on a crisp morning, Mt. Ararat rose like a vision to the left, over a wide and green plain, bathed in the glow of the nascent sun, in colors bright as lacquer. The apparition lasted seconds, soon blotted out behind the crags that flanked the road. The geography felt familiar to anybody who had been to the Republic of Armenia, just an hour’s drive away across the closed border. It had been blockaded by Turkey in solidarity with Azerbaijan over the conflict for the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.1 Autumn had just begun, but the feeble daylight and the cold of Sarıkamış suggested the onset of winter. Passersby were few and far between, wrapped up in coats. Modular apartment buildings were separated from each other by ground-level rows of shops, in pale greens and browns like withering vegetation, in wind-swept streets. For some reason, all frontier towns looked the same. A dozen schoolchildren marched past holding a huge unfurled Turkish flag, enlivening the scene with colors that would not warm up my heart. The precursor of the modern Turkish flag may have been a white banner drenched 266

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in blood that Sultan Murad I gave his men after the conquest of Adrianople in the fourteenth century. Ottomans had brought an end to erythrophobia—a fear of red—in Islam.2 Until then, red had mostly a negative value among Muslims, as it was associated with blood and the Christian Byzantine Empire, where only emperors had the right to wear red shoes: the cadaver of the final one, Constantine XI, was recognized outside a gate by his distinctive footwear when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.3 The standard-bearers were followed by the school band, with drums and winds, and dressed like American cheerleaders. They marched past the teahouse where I was waiting for my contact. There was WiFi in this place, but it was otherwise forgotten by modernity and traditional to the smallest detail of the yellowed Atatürk portrait and a stove that radiated its century-old heat, with a flue that ran through the ceiling and, presumably, into a chimney. For all the gloom built and painted into the walls and street plan of this city, people were sprightly and amicable even with Armenian visitors, not incurious yet without any of the aggressive inquisitiveness that was common in Erzurum. Ildir, Ariya’s cousin, was still late, so I stepped out to place a phone call. “Ildir bey?” I screamed on the phone because the signal was bad. “Yes?” came the answer from the device and a man that was walking up toward me, with a grin beneath his wraparound mustachios. A man of the friendliest disposition, he was dumbfounded to hear that they had Armenian ancestry. He had no idea about the Kazanjian branch, and much less about the water games on their camping outings, even though he confirmed that the family had ceased to summer in the yayla of Mt. Ararat around the 1960s. The family had scattered: some had moved to Ankara, Istanbul, or elsewhere, including a number that had settled in Germany. As by now I was inured to it, I ignored the mandatory question about treasure maps even if it was half-joking, and we soon hopped into his Niva jeep for a spin around town. We stopped before the skeleton of a Baltic-style building, a maze of interlocking arches surmounted with battlements: it was the brick shell of a railway warehouse left by the Russians. Then we went to an abandoned sanatorium that had been an imperial Russian resort, an austere one-floor construction, narrow and long like a train station. In the middle, over a staircase of low steps, the arched entrance looked like a church narthex. We had tea at the strange shack of an Azeri collector of antiques, who had spread rugs of all sizes inside the tiny place. Ancient daggers and agricultural implements crowded walls and ledges. The man thought I was from Armenia, an impression I did not correct as it was meant to be a short visit: “It’s a very poor country, isn’t it?” Nothing on display was for sale yet I inquired if he had any Armenian khanjar, the Eastern daggers, to add to my small collection. 267

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Those would be very hard to find, he suggested, short of saying impossible. As Christians, Armenians did not have the right to bear arms in the Ottoman Empire. For an instant, I fantasized that DNA testing could yet beget some insight into the stories of those daggers and yatağans, the curved swords with the initials of their owners engraved in Ottoman script on the sheath and a quote from the Qur’an on the blade. Ildir knew of Poshas or Boshas, the name for the Gypsies of Armenia, but was greatly surprised about my request. Poshas tended to be doubly secretive, because of ongoing racism against them as Gypsies and their Armenian connections, both of which they used to deny. They spoke a strange and now disappearing dialect called Lomavren. The only one in town, Ildir said, was a master saddlemaker, which confirmed to me that he probably was genuinely a Posha, as this craft tended to be their historical field of expertise. The man, in his late 60s, had the understated elegance and full cheeks that suggested a comfortable life. He greeted Ildir happily at his store, a low-ceilinged room with colorful interwoven belts hanging in its windows. His querying look changed to mute fear when I spoke a few words of Lomavren. He did not understand any of it and had no clue what I was mumbling. Ildir was smiling uncomfortably, without bringing himself to tell the saddlemaker that I had asked to meet a Posha, so I refrained from putting the question directly. “I am a Turk, and I only speak Turkish,” the man muttered in a scared voice. Nothing was farther than 15 minutes by car in Sarıkamış. We picked up Ildir’s father, a gregarious man in old-fashioned clothes yet stylish in their own way, with unusually harmonic combinations of brown, green, and blue. The man also sported large eyeglasses with thick black frames, like those that were popular in the 1960s and were now back in fashion. His looks reminded me of certain characters in Italian neorealist movies. After he greeted me with a voice that was as happy as it was nostalgic, he tried to round up an idea about Armenians, but he was unable to complete it after a couple of false starts, finally only contenting himself by evoking his dearest friend, who had left for Soviet Armenia around 1965 and whose trace he had since lost. “This place has not been the same since the Armenians went away, and we are so very sorry they have,” he said and he left it at that, as Ildir looked away. We stopped at the commercial camping site Ildir owned, a vast wooded plot with eucalyptus, where he had arranged a number of Armenian tombstones from the nineteenth century, mostly illegible because of wear. The largest slab was in limestone, and the writing on it had been carved in a crude manner, with a couple of bas-relief attempts at crosses. It was dated in the 1870s but the last figure was not intelligible enough to determine the exact year. Then we went to a wartime memorial, for that was this town’s claim to fame. As a battlefield on the Caucasian front in the fighting against the Russians in 268

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December 1914–January 1915, the Third Army lost 60,000 men to a murderous winter rather than fighting, as they were inadequately clothed and fed. Even Enver Paşa, the Third Army commander and one of the masterminds of the Genocide that would begin only months after this defeat, publicly acknowledged the brave conduct of the Ottoman Armenian soldiers in combat. One of them, Sergeant Major Hovhannes, had saved him from capture.4 True to form, however, Enver blamed the defeat on the desertion of Armenian conscripts (omitting to mention the much more numerous desertions of Turkish and Kurdish soldiers). In addition, two battalions of Armenian volunteers had fought alongside the Russians, which would become another excuse to carry out the extermination plan. None of the names inscribed on the marble that listed “a part of the 60,000” included those of the numerous Armenians fallen here for the Ottoman Empire. There was a statue of an injured soldier leaning on a comrade who is carrying him away, both looking down. Another more modern monument, by the entrance to the memorial, had been erected to a certain Mehmet. It was a life-size statue of a Turkish soldier in a beret, holding an assault rifle modeled after the G3 (a 1950s weapon) pointing to the sky, and two grenades hanging on his breast pockets. The soldier looked in the direction of a low hill, now turned into an open-air dump: at night, brown bears and their cubs came to forage amid the garbage. Before we dropped him off in town, Ildir’s father mentioned again his Armenian friend, “a good man,” stopping short of asking whether I could still find him. A shepherd then crossed the street followed by five or six large sheep covered in such an abundance of fleece that they were ripe for the shears. It is said that when the Visigoth chief Alaric laid siege to Rome in the fifth century, the Romans sent an embassy to him, bidding for peace. Otherwise, they warned, a large army would be unleashed on him. The barbarian had welcomed the threat: “Thick grass is more easily cut than thin.”     

The knife with the fold-up blade cost 25 Turkish liras and it had been made by Kars craftsmen, I was told at the hunting gear shop across from the Armenian Cathedral of Srpots Arakelots (Holy Apostles). A tenth-century historian had compared its circular dome to “the vault of heaven.” The church had been desecrated in the sixteenth century with its conversion to a mosque. It had been used as a Russian church after Kars was captured by the Russian Empire, but had then been turned into a mosque again when the city fell to the Turks in 1918, only to revert to an Armenian church a year later during the city’s brief liberation, until it was conquered again by the Turks in 1920. 269

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It was a glorious day to picnic in the park outside the cathedral and the stores displaying rows of the famous local cheese provided the excuse to buy one, along with a large loaf of bread. Murders of crows hovered patiently far above the canopy of trees. Kars was not as sad as Sarıkamış, in part thanks to the stately mansions and buildings from its rich Armenian past, and also to the merchants of the kaşar, a variant of Gruyère. The only local contact I had turned out to be a professional who had moved from Diyarbakır due to work. We were both curious to figure out who had initially put us in touch but were unable to, other than guessing that it must have been someone from his hometown, where I had spent a good part of the previous winter. His Armenian connection was his paternal grandmother, about whom all he knew was that she was a Genocide survivor and had married his grandfather, a Kurd and her protector according to him, thereafter converting to Islam. Our encounter was ill-timed, because he had a medical emergency. He picked me up in a great hurry as he drove through the streets of Kars in his SUV at the speed of a fire truck. A child, whom I assumed to be his son, had stretched out his broken leg on the back seat. The boy had been injured in a soccer match. The hospital was a complex of two tall and wide towers that loomed somberly over a narrow passage between them. Hospital personnel ran to pick up the boy with a gurney and we drove around to park and kill time at the café. Hasan told me that he was only the boy’s mentor. He participated in a tutoring program to help underprivileged children. Something in the wording hinted at an Islamic link in this initiative, even though at no moment did he bring up religion. His English was flawless: he had studied and worked for a number of years in the US which, he said, he did not miss, even though he did not rule out the possibility of returning, perhaps to Texas. As for Armenians, he was not a local and did not know any in town. He had no connection to Armenians nor did he feign any attachment to that quarter of his ancestry. Kurdish affairs interested him more intensely, yet there was a sort of ambiguity that even the apolitical in his hometown of Diyarbakır did not show: they were all fervently committed to the cause of Kurdistan. This, too, reinforced my impression that there was an Islamic background that bound him to Turks or Turkey. He was certainly not among the hard core of PKK sympathizers. We drove the boy back to his home. “Do not throw garbage into the street,” admonished Hasan, staring sternly at the young soccer player in the mirror, as the boy lowered the window after drinking up his can of Coke. The boy lived on the outskirts of Kars. His widowed mother thanked Hasan profusely in a singing voice at once merry and plaintive, insisting to no avail that we stayed on for tea and sweets. They lived in a small ground-floor apartment, with an unfinished 270

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floor and the walls painted in orange. Their furnishings were a motley collection of a cabinet, a TV set, and a few mismatched chairs, awkwardly waiting in a corner for their role and place, for the carpet and cushions suggested that the boy and his mother had their meals cross-legged from a şofra, as in the villages. Hasan had me over at his home for a dinner prepared by his wife, dressed in a secular style and her head uncovered. A calligraphic inscription of a surah stood out as the only framed ornament, and a Qur’an shared a modest shelf with some other books of a religious nature. That evening they were expecting a Ukrainian girl and her boyfriend, who had signed up for a weeklong stay as part of a couch-surfing community. I was as curious as the hosts to meet this couple, for I had returned only a few months before from a reporting mission in Ukraine, covering the secession of Crimea and the conflict with the pro-Russian separatists in the east. Yet whatever their other virtues, the graces of social life were not the forte of this young couple, who right upon arrival made themselves comfortable in their allotted space. Unfailing in their hospitality, per local customs, Hasan and his wife were disappointed with the backpackers for whom, plainly, the arrangement was a means of traveling on the cheap, and they did not make any pretense of behaving like guests in somebody else’s home. They could not have been more indifferent to the turmoil in their homeland, either. It would have been an opportunity to compare and contrast impressions of the still unfolding collapses of both the Ottoman and Russian empires. Both Turkey and Russia were ever-unraveling, like glaciers that shed blocks amid thunder, yet never fully coming apart, if at all. We went out for a walk, and on every block there would be an ancient mansion in gray stone or some work of masonry that Armenians had left behind, as Hasan, carrying his two-year-old boy on his shoulder, pointed out. While I was distracted examining a boarded-up old house, he had struck up conversation with two young men: in short order they were telling me about the gold buried in the Armenian cemeteries. Hasan listened on indifferently, and I resented his silence. Armenians, I said, usually buried their treasures in Muslim cemeteries because they knew the locals would not desecrate those. The young men were mystified by this unexpected novelty but it took them seconds to banter again about the Armenian tombs. “Don’t you have any sense of decency?” I finally spoke plain with them. “Would you dig up your grandparents’ remains to hunt for treasures?” They were astounded, assuming I had not understood: “But there really is gold in their graves.” There was no more time to waste in this company. Yet there was something Hasan wanted me to see: the family house of the Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, who lived there until 1915. It surprised me that he knew about him. “Yeghishe Charents is god, and Paruyr Sevak is his temple,” according to a saying that speaks to his stature in Armenian literature, with Sevak 271

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only second in veneration to the foremost Armenian writer of the twentieth century.5 Charents took part in the brief liberation of Western Armenia in late 1915, fighting alongside the Russian army against the Turks in the Caucasus Campaign. The traumatic experience pushed him to embrace the futurism of the Bolshevik Revolution: We looked back for the last time, There was nothing beckoning us, The past was lost, it had vanished without a trace Like a scream let out in a dream. Not a single sorrow was soaring with us, The bright morning had enchanted us.6

Wreckage had washed upon the shores of Utopia, and the new world had to be built with it. The streets of Kars grew darker as we drove on. We pulled over somewhere near the edge of town. The crows were gone in the barren dark, and silence blanketed this quarter. We stood outside the ruins of a house, of uneven stones and three window openings, bereft of frames and glass, yawning into a black void. The roof was partly collapsed. In the high beams of Hasan’s Toyota, the stones looked yellow. A single misspelled word painted on the wall advertised its sale, with a cell phone number written near it. At one point, the asking price had surged to €2 million: those who claimed its ownership had found out who the illustrious previous occupant had been. Shareen Anderson, a South African student at St. Petersburg, had fallen under the spell of the poet while writing her comparative study of Russian symbolists and their Armenian peer. In 2009, she had released a documentary, Charents: In Search of My Armenian Poet, which followed her and a team of Armenian experts as they make a circuitous road trip from Yerevan through Armenian villages in Georgia to Kars, where they had tentatively identified the house. In The Land of Nayri, a poem in prose and a tragedy cast in the language of satire, Charents elliptically described Kars as “an ancient city that resembled in everything all the other Nayirian old and new cities: it was small, not densely populated, decrepit and dusty; in contemporary language cities like that are called ‘backward provincial town.’”7 Yet as we stood in the freezing night amid this ruined place that may or may not have been the poet’s home, this part of Kars in the shadow of the invisible fortress still echoed the devastation Charents had witnessed. His volunteer battalion had penetrated Western Armenia in the immediate aftermath of the Genocide. He left his testimony in Dantesque Legend, his first masterpiece written in 1915 at the age of 18, which he dedicated to his “martyred friends Mihran Sargsyan, Stepan Ghazaryan, and Ashot Milionchyan, who fell in the field of Sulduz on December 25, 1915,” 272

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fighting the Kurdish and Turkish bandits and soldiers that months earlier had exterminated the Armenian population: And one day from the weary road Exhausted and weak, in need of rest We crossed the threshold of the Dead City Into the foggy streets of the Dead City … There was nobody in the Dead City. And the abandoned buildings in ruins, Like dark throngs that had visions of death Were looking at the sky with hollowed-out eyes.8     

On a Friday in 1033 the sun was obscured over Armenia, according to a chronicler who wrote neither the date nor the month, other than the Armenian year of ՆՁԲ (482). Nine centuries later, Fr. Ghevont Alishan of the Mekhitarist Congregation at St. Lazarus in Venice calculated that it must have been on June 29. Information made available by NASA confirms the date. It also shows that it was a total eclipse, with an obscuration of the solar disc of almost 98 percent. Panic swept through the land. Ancient Chaldeans had calculated the recurrence of eclipses, with a measure called saros, according to an eleventhcentury Byzantine lexicon. The saros was equivalent to 18 years, 11 days and eight hours. But to kings and laymen alike in Armenia, this eclipse was an omen: an earthquake destroyed Jerusalem—then under the Islamic rule of the Fatimids— in December 1033, confirming their worst fears. According to an Armenian chronicler of the eclipse, at about the same time: A stranger showed up in Armenia, who coming from the eastern districts marched west, from the northern shores of the Sea of Van to Erzincan, incessantly exclaiming, “Woe to me! Woe to me!” and the people would ask him, “Who are you? Whence do you come? Why do you say that?” but he did not give any other answer but the same lamentation. While some (whom the chronicler calls fools) considered the man a lunatic, “the wise said that woe will befall the entire country.”9

It made sense, for 1033 marked the millennium after the crucifixion of Christ, which for some was the real date of apocalypse prophesied in the Book of Revelation: And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the

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In his History, a chronicle of 72 years of life in Armenia beginning in 1001, Aristakes Lastivertsi said that people saw the eclipse as the sign of the Antichrist’s birth. Events had been unfolding accordingly. “Days of suffering came to us, and pains that knew no remedy found us … from the four sides, the sword to the East, murder to the West, fire to the North and to the South, death.”10 On June 1, 1019, Armenia had been attacked for the first time by barbarous hordes, of a savagery not seen before by its inhabitants. They initially called the invaders “the Nation of the Archers,” by virtue of their dexterity with the bow and arrow. These were the first Turkic tribes they faced, and their attacks against the kingdoms of Ani, Kars, and Vasburakan would grow bolder. Theirs were the last waves of westbound migrations from Central Asia and beyond that had begun six centuries earlier. Devastating climate change may have caused economic distress and famine, pushing nomadic people further west since the fourth century of the Christian era. A 40-year drought that began in the Far East in ad 338 drove the pastoral federation known as the Huns west of the River Don, with catastrophic consequences for the Roman Empire.11 The correspondence between calendar, Holy Scriptures, and Turkic invasions also proved fateful for the resolve of the Armenians against the barbarian hordes. An hour’s drive from Kars, Ani was a ghost town of medieval churches that had died standing. At its apogee in the twelfth century, it rivaled Constantinople in its population of 200,000 people and the splendor that made it known as “the city of one thousand and one churches.” A cabdriver would take me there that morning, on my last day in Kars. At the hotel in Kars, a voluminous man and his puny girlfriend had sat on the worn red carpet of the wooden stairs, chain-smoking with a vengeance the lost freedoms of their Western country. They, too, were waiting for the chauffeur that would drive us to Ani: in addition to a dozen churches, sections of the walls still stood. They had done a good job of protecting the city until the eleventh century, but internal political rifts had broken the residents’ morale. Ani succumbed to a combined assault of Seljuks and Byzantines, whose armies enveloped the fortress city in a pincer movement. Gilbert, a railway worker in Sydney, and his girlfriend Naomi were doing a slow tour of eastern Turkey, and had planned the trip with minute precision. Jérôme joined us: a well-read student from a town near Calais, he had accompanied me to interview Melih in Bayazet.12 From the thinning hair of his head 274

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to his shoes, our driver was in black. In the pidgin English that now binds the world, he entertained us with an acid sense of humor that we found neither offensive nor annoying at that early hour of the morning, when silence helps us ease into the unknown that awaits us. In a blink, we were speeding down the deserted highway out of Kars, until we saw a golden eagle perched on an electricity pole. The driver pulled over to let us take photos before the bird flew away. After a brief apparition, the sun had hidden behind a silver sky, and the chauffeur’s mood had begun to sour too at the sight—only with the greatest of effort, and trusting his word—of the barbed wire of the Turkish–Armenian border. Armenian-haters in Turkey hardly need any excuse to unleash diatribes, and this one was as good a pretext as any.13 The “1915 genocide of Muslims by Armenians,” in which the driver said he had lost his great-grandfather, gave way to ASALA, the acronym for the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a militant group that launched a terror campaign in the 1970s. I just looked out of the window at the distant border that ran persistently parallel to the road. At one stretch, a cluster of tanks became visible in the distance: these were Turkey’s ground forces just across from Armenia. It was yet another opportunity to lambaste Armenians as Russia’s lackeys, and berate them for the “genocide of Azerbaijanis” in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Do you want to take more eagle photos?” he asked me, looking at me in the mirror, having noticed the profusion of pictures I had taken of the first one. “There will be another on a pole on the left-hand side, a kilometer from here.” He knew where they all were. Indeed, there was another golden eagle that took flight as soon as we stopped, a yellow ribbon tied to its tarsus, probably tagged as part of a conservation program. We sat for a coffee at a large diner and hostel outside Ani. As we were sipping Turkish coffee, the driver, across from me, began to examine me more closely and asked me in Turkish where I was from. “We keep making genocide against this people and they are still around!” he exclaimed with a laugh, reciprocated with a stupid giggle by Naomi, to whom I turned disillusioned and saw that her blue eyes, understanding, were belying her lips. The driver did not look Turkish either, and so I told him. He was not. On his father’s side he was a Lezgin, and a Circassian on his mother’s side. Lezgins in the Caucasus generally had cordial relations with Armenians, I told him. “Not in Turkey,” he responded in Turkish. We entered into the ghost city by the Lion Gate, and walked south to the citadel right by the edge of the plateau overlooking the River Akhurian. Armenia was on the other side of the river, a stone’s throw away. For decades, travelers who would not visit Turkey contemplated the Ani ruins from the Armenian border, near the city of Gyumri. It has been noted that most churches 275

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in the fortified city have been built along the ridge, as if to make them deliberately visible across the river and beyond. Yet the field of vision is dominated by the cathedral built in 1001, a massive square that lost its cupola to the 1319 earthquake and the rest of its drum to another one in the nineteenth century. In its present shape, however, the basilica has acquired the majesty of an ancient temple, setting it even further apart from the other surviving churches and their conical tops that single them out as Armenian. The dome, introduced into Eastern Christian architecture in the sixth century with the Assyrian Cathedral of Edessa, was meant to symbolize heaven and the four sides of the world. Sunlight came through the narrow windows of the cathedral, tall slots that eventually became decorative but originally served defensive purposes, as ideal for bowmen’s vision while affording them protection. The round, gaping hole in the middle of the basilica had become an eye into the sky. The first time I had walked into its somber interior in the summer of 1996, I had scared a colony of bats sleeping daylight away in a secluded niche. The church became an echo chamber that magnified my cries and their shrills, and the drone of their flapping wings. The animals scattered away through the hole of the dome into the blue sky, like a cloud of large butterflies, terrified and black. Jérôme caught up with me as I continued toward Tigran Honents, a thirteenth-century church. As we examined the brightly colored yet damaged frescoes, with most of the vandalism directed at the faces of Jesus and the Virgin, apostles, and saints, he told me that he had realized I was Armenian in the car: “You became pale when the driver started insulting the Armenians.” What a miserable failure at restraint I had proved to be, I commented. “No, no, but your face paled,” he insisted, something I did not feel nor did I remember, yet I was struck by the symmetry of the whitewash that Turks had splashed on walls and frescoes to cover up offensive graffiti or damage, rather than restore the artwork. Gilbert and Naomi had been appalled, he told me: when we had stopped to photograph the second eagle, they had stepped aside to discuss it, and all three had guessed my nationality. We continued our walk through the ghost city. With its hexafoil floor plan, the Abughamrents Surp Krikor church, built in 1040, was a classic example of medieval Armenian architecture. Other than the graves that thieves had desecrated in its outer perimeter, and the whitewash treatment that had blanketed over its frescoes, the church stood firmly. It had been commissioned by the Pahlavuni family during the last years of Ani’s independence. According to an inscription in the church, among the donors was Prince Vahram Pahlavuni, one of the most prominent members of the aristocratic clan and a leader of the independentist faction of Ani, opposed by the pro-Byzantine 276

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Armenians. Prince Vahram died battling the Seljuk Turks in 1047, after which the city-state fell to the foreign conquerors. A large number of graffiti on the walls attested to an influx of visitors, mostly Armenian, since the nineteenth century, even though there was a long one in what appeared to be the highly stylized Arabic calligraphy of Ottoman Turkish. One dated July 13, 1903 had been signed at the top by Shmavon Altunyants and Karapet Polatyants, who identified themselves as “Garnetsi,” or from Garin, called Erzurum in Turkish. Its flawed orthography and lack of punctuation notwithstanding, the paragraph had a curious poetic ring to it: Մտքից չանցած յանտիպել յաջողցրէց բաղտը մեզ տեսանել գնում էնք տրտում թողնելով կայծեր հայերիս սրտին մնաս բարեաւ ախ տու անի քանթողի տունը քանտուի

It did not cross our minds we had the fortune to see you we part sad leaving thunders shall you remain blessed in Armenians’ hearts oh you Ani shall the home of who destroyed you be destroyed.

Sunshine shimmered into the church from the eastern window, like an inclined loom made of hazy threads of light. Then I stood paralyzed: Keghani, a friend from my youth that at that very moment should have been seven seas and an ocean away, was looking at me, with her large eyes shaped like upturned leaves. She had that smile that invited love at first sight. There was a dreamlike quality to the light she was bathed in, but I was stunned to recognize details I never thought I had registered, like the tiny chipped tip of a front tooth, and the blue of the ski jacket she wore on a school trip three decades ago. Something was wrong for sure, yet I did not want the vision to go away. “Why are you looking at me like that?” It was Naomi, as petite as my school friend, and she was smiling, too, to which I responded likewise. But I did not describe the transposition, illusory and beautiful, she had offered me. A few years ago, I had discussed an article with Keghani that said most optic nerves were connected to memory centers, so we associated the new things we saw to shapes we had already stored in our minds. And I still wonder to this day what little short in my mind had caused that vision of Keghani. She was born in Istanbul to Armenian parents from Sepasdia and Cæsaria. In the eleventh century, the Bagratuny kings had withdrawn from Ani to those provinces, 277

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followed by thousands of their people. They had ceded their crowns to the Byzantine sovereigns as the Turkish hordes pushed west. Perhaps an ancestor of hers had prayed at this church 1,000 years ago, before marauding Turks and Kurds rendered Ani uninhabitable, sending thousands of Armenians further west, including the ancestors of Keghani. She was the only Armenian I saw in the ghost town, an illusion that lasted less than ten seconds.

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Sepasdia and Asia Minor

Twelve

Sepasdia The assembly of vultures had gathered in a tight circle and leaned their small heads into its center, as if conferring or perhaps picking away at something, discreetly. They stood outside a mutilated church that was missing its front wall and most of the roof except for a surviving concavity at the back, which gave it the appearance of a screaming mouth. There was no sign of garbage in its immediate vicinity, but the roadside was littered with the usual waste, mostly cigarette butts and plastic bottles. The carrion birds lent the scene some dignity in their silence and folded wings, black and ample like cassocks. The ruins were on the other side of a two-way road. Traffic was not bad, but when I decided to cross to the other side and run up to the ruins a bus came barreling down, so I chose it to call it quits as time was short, anyway. This was the gateway to Sepasdia, almost a millennium after the Armenian kings had retreated here in the face of conspiracies and attacks by the court of the Byzantine Emperor Basil—himself of Armenian origin—and the advance of the Turkic hordes led by Alpaslan. A little later, however, the alliances had changed. At the Battle of Manazgerd in 1071, a combined Byzantine-Armenian army was defeated by Alpaslan, who thus sealed the fate of Armenians, Greeks, and generally Christendom in the East. The decline of the easternmost Armenian kingdoms had started some decades earlier: King Senekerim ceded his crown of Van to Emperor Basil in 1021, the year he withdrew into Sepasdia, once a provincial capital of Armenia, and now the kingdom’s, with another 100,000 Armenians who settled in their new lands. King Hovhannes-Smpad followed suit, willing his kingdom of Ani to the court of Constantinople after his death in 1045. His successor, King Gagik, settled with his entourage in Sepasdia, too. King Vananta of Kars did the same shortly afterwards. The cabdriver had agreed to stop for a minute outside the church ruins as we sped down into the city from the airport. Young and unfriendly, he had grumbled “Olmaz” with displeasure when told to drive me to Hotel Madımak: 281

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“Not possible.” As a green yatağan with a Qur’anic verse dangled from the mirror, I assumed he was allowing himself ideological license to object to his passenger’s destination. “It has shut down,” he added after some seconds of silence. For the hotel had been the scene of a fire started by an Islamist mob on July 2, 1993, shortly after Friday prayers. The Madımak was the site of an Alevi cultural festival attended by artists and intellectuals of that faith, including Aziz Nesin, a writer hated by Islamists for publishing excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, in an attempt to print a translation of the novel in Turkish. Nesin had been able to escape because the attackers did not recognize him, but 37 people died in the arson. The hotel was not far from the place I planned on visiting. Months before I left for Turkey, I had met by chance in New York a Sepasdatsi engraver, who had lovingly drawn the map of his hometown, describing each landmark he had not seen for more than 30 years with such jewel-like precision that I recognized them on my first walk. Yet before and after writing the directions, he had expressed surprise and concern that I would want to venture into the Anatolian interior, and especially his hometown, Sivas, as they call it in Turkish. “Do not talk to everyone and do not assume they have changed,” he told me. “They have not.” He did not mention the hotel attack, perhaps because among Armenians the threshold for alarm is, instinctively, violence on a different order of magnitude. The family was in the business of precision: his cousin had an optician’s shop on Dörtyol (Four Roads) in the center of Sepasdia. The store occupied a wing of a restored old building. But the shopkeeper was not the engraver’s cousin, who was out of town. He could ask his wife to come down and meet me. The employee made a phone call that began with a smile and a merry voice, then the face turned serious and he was responding in whispers. It turned out, after the phone call, that the wife and the entire family had gone to Istanbul too, for the entire week. The employee locked the store. There was another Armenian nearby he would take me to. I followed him for less than a block and walked into a narrow gallery, low ceilinged and dark, at the end of which there was a tiny store, with silverwork and silver jewelry in filigree lining the window. In the display inside, there was one compartment with some crosses in a discreet corner. The jeweler, mustachioed as every second man in Sepasdia, and Turkey as well, was wearing an open-necked shirt that revealed a thick chain in gold and the upper tip of a cross, and a thicker chain bracelet on his wrist. He was not disinclined to talk but he was nervous, his pupils bouncing left and right every time he spoke at intervals, for the little store in an inconspicuous gallery had a steady traffic of customers, exclusively women of a certain age. 282

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There were approximately ten Armenian families left in Sepasdia, with no venue where they could meet, and they would only get together in private homes on the occasion of baptisms, weddings, and funerals, as well as social occasions and some feasts such as Easter and New Year (Gağant, in Armenian). “The churches had been shut for years by the time I was born,” he said. “It’s not much better in America: I have relatives there, and they say they have a little chapel with sorry attendance.” He was the son of Suren, son of Antranig. His mother, from Tokat, was fully fluent in Armenian, reading and writing in it. Whenever in the course of the conversation I mentioned the Turkish word soykırım (genocide), he would turn back and from the tiniest of rooms would emerge a man in a pink shirt, also open-necked and with a thick gold chain, but of a different physiognomy, with long straight hair and a hooked nose and olive complexion. His familiarity was probably due to the tendency for flashy dress among quite a few jewelers I had seen on New York’s 47th Street and Calle Libertad in Buenos Aires, which sported large concentrations of Armenian craftsmen, including some born in Sepasdia. Until the 1980s, Sepasdia still fed the communities of Istanbul and the Diaspora as one of the last pockets of a Christian Armenian presence in Anatolia after 1915. The pink-shirted man looked more surprised than upset, but as I could not guess his nationality I switched to Armenian, which the silversmith said he did not speak, but he understood perfectly. I started to suspect that he did indeed speak it, for I deliberately began to use more complicated words yet the conversation did not falter for it; he belonged to the generation of Armenians who abstained from speaking the language in public. Just the previous December, as I was buying winter clothes at a store in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, the shopkeeper was struggling to communicate with two customers from Tajikistan. He would instinctively default to Armenian whenever Turkish proved insufficient. But when I tried to speak with him in Armenian he responded in Turkish, while still unconsciously insisting in his foreign language, Armenian, with the perplexed Tajiks. That had also been the first reaction of Ara Güler, one of the most prominent photographers in the world and known as the “Eye of Istanbul,” when I saw him walking hurriedly toward Ara’s Café, the latest incarnation of his father’s pharmacy right off Istiklal Street, outside the magnificent building of the Galatasaray Lyceum. Ara would come to the café in the afternoons after 2:30 pm, an informal audience hour for whoever wanted to drop by and exchange a few words with him. He had only agreed to speak with me in Armenian, which he spoke perfectly, after expressing some reluctance. We discussed some of his most famous photos, including the series on the Armenian fishermen of Kumkapı published in 1952 in the Armenian newspaper Jamanak. “Cartier-Bresson tagged 283

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along,” he said. Ara documented a vanishing generation, that of the Armenians who kept streaming into Istanbul from the Anatolian interior, including many from Sepasdia. The younger ones abandoned this trade. Now all the fishermen were Laz, a people from the Black Sea. Ara’s father was originally from Sepasdia’s Şabin-Karahisar district, and had settled in Istanbul as a child. A call came on Ara’s cell phone, which his chauffeur and assistant picked up: “It’s Bertolucci,” said the man, unflustered. The Italian moviemaker was after some old rolls of film, which Ara had his assistant fetch, but did not interrupt our conversation to speak with Bertolucci. Even though Ara insisted that he was a reporter rather than a photographer—“a photojournalist,” was the most he would agree, and added that he was the longest-serving correspondent for Time Life, with a 55-year career at the time of the interview in 2011—he owed his fame to his photos: Picasso had been his favorite subject for portraits, and Burma for landscapes. But he would never leave Istanbul, especially since he had developed a fear of flying the year before: “I love working in Bolis, because things happen here, people come and go, do things; I go to Paris, stay there for a month, and nothing happens.” His father had become a pharmacist in Istanbul, and a wealthy man, which Ara said had helped him in his career, enabling him to acquire the best gear of the time. However, a journalist had once infuriated him by suggesting that the quality of his photography was due to his equipment: “I asked the idiot if his writing would improve with a better computer.” Ara’s father came from a well-to-do family in Sepasdia: “When he turned six, his family sent him to boarding school in Bolis,” he said, again calling Istanbul by its short Armenian name. “That was 1915, and he had to stay for good.” Back in Sepasdia, the silversmith’s father and family had survived the extermination and managed to stay in the city after 1915 by paying large sums extorted by the local police and government. “The gold went by the sackful,” he said rubbing his index finger against his thumb. “We gave away an endless stream of Napoleons.” All the gold must have gone, such that only the silver was left. But he turned nervously to the booth behind, from where the pink-shirted man had emerged again. Now that I had switched to Armenian, when I used that language’s word for genocide, tseghasbanutyun, someone else popped up from behind the mirrored-glass door: this one was shorter and sported thick mustachios, with a shirt in thick gray and black stripes. He examined me quizzically before disappearing back into the booth. A large black-and-white photo was displayed at the top of the wall, showing the silversmith’s father and grandfather with three or four apprentices in a jewelry workshop. It was dated April 6, 1935. The apprentices were dacik, he said, using the Armenian word for “Turk” or “Muslim.” And then he said: “This is 284

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not too bad, either,” with a sweeping movement of his hand showing his tiny store. “It’s something,” he said, showing the remaining fraction of a much larger fortune. Transfer of wealth had been a central component of the Genocide. “All Armenians are Christian here,” he said with the tone of someone who responds to the obvious, a little irritated. The converts were no longer Armenian. And he bid me farewell in Armenian. A visit I had paid to a cem evi, an Alevi house of worship in the center of Sepasdia, was fruitless. From the outside it looked more like an inconspicuous theater hall, square and dull, rather than a temple. Not only did the two men I found at its entrance not allow me inside, but their initial expressions of suspicion turned to alarm when I told them about my quest of finding Armenians who had concealed their origins behind an Alevi identity. They told me that I should leave, because the site was closed for repairs. As I was heading out, I took a look at a mural on the back wall. Imam Ali was on the right, or east, looking west; and he was mirrored by Atatürk on the left, looking east. But their eyes did not meet. What was remarkable, however, was Imam Ali’s resemblance to Jesus Christ, for whom I had mistaken him to my astonishment. The scared porters told me who he was. And then I understood that portraits I had seen among the merchandise of street vendors were not meant to warm the hearts of Christians and loosen tourists’ strings. He was the supreme prophet of the Alevis, followed by twelve imams, as twelve are the apostles of Christ.

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Thirteen

Ankara We were at a trendy lounge in Ankara: two Alevis, three Armenians, and Nigoğos, an Alevi turned Catholic, originally from a Zaza district in the province of Sepasdia. He also stood out from the rest physically by virtue of his height, even though he shared the Armenians’ aquiline nose and fair complexion. All at the table were Turkish citizens, except for me, but none a Turk nor a Muslim. We would not have been out of place in the Ottoman plurality, not necessarily tantamount to tolerance.1 But within the many minorities he was part of, Nigoğos was a minority of one. He could only be defined by approximations: he was a Turkish citizen but not a Turk; and while a Catholic, he felt a strong affinity with the Armenian Church. Our common Armenian friends said “he does not know what he is, either,” when I had sought further biographical information on Nigoğos, and had lumped him with many Turks who wanted to find out about their origins. Atatürk’s nationalist project based on the French model—of a unitary state that equated citizenship with national identity—had created a brittle identity. Minorities fell through its cracks. The older generations, especially of persecuted groups, had kept silent on history or even their own identity, so as not to expose their progeny to the sufferings they had endured. But with the spread of information over the internet and social networks, the pretenses upon which Turkish identity was founded were falling apart, and it was common to find unafraid people seeking to learn about their own roots. The republic’s founder had found an ally in the Alevis, who supported his secularist project that would curtail Islam. Baydar, an Alevi and leftist, was a Kemalist, too. So was the radio station anchor whom Nigoğos had introduced me to the day before. Interested in my project, he had invited me to go on his show. Despite my strong reluctance I had finally agreed, especially as Nigoğos told me they were good friends. Yet their friendship had ended overnight, badly, when Nigoğos had a change of heart and told me that it would not be good for me to speak on a radio station 286

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and reveal myself as an Armenian journalist in Turkey looking for the hidden brethren: “It may be risky, and my friend is also a Kemalist.” That had been my initial assessment too, so I stayed put that evening (and left for a later date my queries about Nigoğos’ own tributes to Atatürk on social networks, which I attributed to his fine sense of irony). When I did not show up at the radio station that evening, the anchor telephoned me in a rage; I had the integrity to suggest that he spoke with Nigoğos. It was not my finest hour. Nigoğos later told me that they had called each other names and had a word or two about each other’s family as well. For all their certainties about their religious filiation and political orientation, Baydar and another Alevi friend, who had joined us at the lounge, were less sure about their own ethnic origin. The rule of thumb was that those who identified themselves as Alevis proper were of Turcoman ancestry; Baydar and his friend thought they belonged in this group. Before converting to the Catholic Church, Nigoğos was an Alevi of the Kızılbaş branch. The majority of the Kızılbaş of Zara, the district of Sepasdia he came from, were of Zaza ethnicity or Zazaki speakers. If it only were so simple: there was “the Zaza complication.” Being Zazas the Kızılbaş were generally considered to be of Kurdish origin in Turkey: indeed, even though linguists established as long ago as 1932 that the Zaza language, Zazaki, is not only non-Kurdish, but in fact a distinct language in its own right, related to the Gorani and Iranian Azeri dialects, most people in Turkey today still consider Zazaki to be a strange Kurdish dialect. This is further reinforced by the fact that Zazas who are Sunni Muslims may be more inclined to consider themselves Kurds. Many Kızılbaş, however, dispute this: they say the Zazas are not Kurds. As well as being backed by science, their attitude has historical roots: they remember the suffering inflicted on them by other Muslims, including their Sunni kin, as well as by Kurmancî Kurds and Turks in successive waves of rebellions since the early 1500s. Yet there are further exceptions to this, too: both Sunni and Alevi Zazas who are politically aligned with the PKK or the Kurdish revolutionary movement tend to embrace a Kurdish identity, regardless of what linguistics and ethnographic studies show. And to round off the Zaza complication, we should note here that this is an exoterm, or a name given to them by outsiders: Zazas call themselves Dimi and their language, Dimli. Indeed, “Zaza” was originally a word of pejorative connotation, which it has now lost.2 However, Zazas are still the butt of malicious jokes among Kurmancî Kurds, variants of which still circulated in the 1950s in the Armenian communities of Aleppo and Qamışli in Syria, transmitted by Genocide survivors. In my experience, even Sunni Zazas said they were Kurds 287

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without conviction, and only in response to my questions, whereas Kurmancî speakers too hesitated about considering Zazas a part of the Kurdish nation, and again, would only say it in response to a specific question. But Nigoğos was not like the rest of these people orphaned of their past. He had a fascinating claim to Armenian identity, albeit one requiring a few leaps of faith. He had asked me to call him by that Armenian pseudonym in this book. There was a reason for it that he would not disclose. He had been baptized a Catholic by a papal envoy of Irish descent who later went on to serve as nuncio to Madagascar. Nigoğos had divulged the reason for his conversion to our common Armenian friends, Karekin and Badrik, but would not share it with me. Prior to converting to Catholicism, Nigoğos was a Kızılbaş, or “redhead.” “They tie a red headband, for they say the Greeks’ king gifted a red crown to their leader.” Armenian writer Nazaret Daghavarian, who had traveled throughout the provinces of Sepasdia and Dersim in 1913 to familiarize himself with the followers of this faith, surmised that it could have been a token of goodwill from a Byzantine emperor.3 Yet according to another explanation, the name was given to them because of a different type of headdress: a red bonnet with twelve facets, of Iranian Safavid provenance. Some Alevis I spoke to in Turkey described themselves as Muslim, but most confided they were not, for they respected only one of the five pillars of Islam: the singularity of God. Because of their reverence for Imam Ali, they were called Shiʿa. That was inaccurate, at best: in addition to the five pillars, Shiʿa observed another four, including jihad (holy war) and the prevention of evil. In Turkey, Alevis have been persecuted by both Sunni Muslims and ultranationalists, and still face discrimination despite being the second-largest religious group in the country. The Alevi identity is religious, not ethnic. In particular, Nigoğos’ family never made any claim to ethnic identity. It all became clearer on the day of his baptism, at the age of 19. “I know why you are doing this,” his uncle had told him approvingly, outside the church on the day his nephew would become a Christian, to be anointed by the papal envoy. “You are returning to the religion of our ancestors.” Nigoğos did not understand: “I had no idea what he was talking about.” But their story went well past 1915. The family, his uncle told him, was descended of Paulicians, an Armenian Manichean sect that was persecuted by the Byzantine Empire and the Armenian Apostolic Church, which deemed them heretics. The Paulicians spread throughout Asia Minor around ad 650. In their creed, there was a deity of good and a deity of evil; God was good and reigned in the spiritual realm, but the world was under the command of the bad god of the 288

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Old Testament; the New Testament was their only true book, especially the word of Paul, the devotion to whom had earned the sect its name. They did not believe in the sanctity of the cross or of images, nor in the virginity of Mary. Paulicians appear to have spawned the Bogomil sect in Bulgaria, which later gained a large number of adepts in Bosnia.4 The Bosnian Bogomils eventually converted to Islam after the conquest of these territories by the Ottomans, which enabled them to attain positions of power. Today’s Muslims of BosniaHerzegovina are their descendants. Nigoğos’ family recalled none of that. But they had preserved the memory of being “Armenian Paulicians,” the only two words rescued from the very eventful last millennium. Unusually in Turkey, he told his grandmothers’ stories as a brief introduction to his family: his paternal grandmother had married twice, both times with men of Armenian origin; her second husband, Deli Huso (“Crazy Huso,” short for Hüseyin), had given refuge to two Armenian sisters during the Genocide. These women left three years later, in 1918, when they found a surviving uncle in Zara. His maternal grandmother, Sosun, had married three times, always with Kızılbaş fedayis, who had fought in a short-lived rebellion against the Turkish government in 1920. Her first two husbands died in combat. The third time, she married a relative from her clan, who was also called Sosun. In family lore, Nigoğos’ forefathers had converted from Paulicianism to Kızılbaş Alevism about 400 years ago. The dates could make sense: the first known mention of the “Kızılbaş” name dated back to the second half of the fifteenth century. And they were from Zara, a district of Sepasdia that used to have a strong Paulician presence and was a mere 100 kilometers from Divriği, formerly Tephrice, the fortified stronghold they had built in ad 850. An ascetic sect, Paulicians evolved into a martial society as a result of the violence they faced. They entrenched themselves in strongholds in the provinces of Sepasdia and Cæsaria, proving to be formidable fighters, and also opened a new front against the Byzantine army, which was already busy elsewhere repelling attacks by the Arabs: A more dangerous and consuming flame was kindled by the persecution of Theodora, and the revolt of Carbeas, a valiant Paulician, who commanded the guards of the generals of the East. His father had been impaled by the Catholic inquisitors; and religion, or at least nature, might justify his desertion and revenge. Five thousand of his brethren were united by the same motives; they renounced the allegiance of anti-Christian Rome; a Saracen emir introduced Carbeas to the caliph; and the commander of the faithful extended his scepter to the implacable enemy of the Greeks. In the mountains between Siwas and Trebizond he founded or fortified the city of Tephrice, which is still occupied by a fierce licentious people, and the neighboring hills were covered with the Paulician fugitives, who now reconciled the use of the Bible and the sword.5

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Thus Gibbon described the bastion where the Paulicians resisted the Byzantines from 850 until the fall of the city in 872 to the troops sent by Emperor Basil I. Yet even after they lost Tephrice, Paulicians in the eastern confines and Armenia remained a constant threat to the Byzantine Empire. The final mentions of the sect show them fighting in the First Crusade (1096–9) for the Islamic armies. By then, too, Byzantines and Armenians had begun to lose territories to the advancing Seljuk Turks, who some historians assume may have been welcomed as liberators by the persecuted Paulicians. All traces of the cult disappeared after the eleventh century, which invited speculation about their eventual conversion to the invading hordes’ Sufism, which eventually evolved into the present form of Kızılbaş Alevism. Christian traits detected in Alevism, one historian has noted, conformed to Paulician practice to “a striking degree,” including adult initiation, penance, and nocturnal private assembly.6 Western travelers had also noted the affinities of the Kızılbaş with Christians. In 1908, the British archaeologist and historian David George Hogarth, a companion of T. E. Lawrence, had observed that the Kızılbaş were “more in sympathy with the Armenian Christians than with the Osmanlis,” and that they were said to be “crypto-Christians of Armenian blood.”7 In those years of intense American and European missionary activity in Eastern Anatolia, many Kızılbaş had expressed interest in converting to Protestant Christianity: in 1881, two Kızılbaş villages had made an unsuccessful bid to the American mission to be recognized as Protestants. Ottoman official correspondence from 1893 documented the existence of “ignorant Muslims” among the Kızılbaş of Dersim who were inclined to embrace Protestantism. Another British traveler noted (erroneously describing them as Alevi Shiʿa): “There is more truth […] than is sometimes realised in the claim of Shia Turks, that less than the thickness of an onion skin separates them from Christians.”8 Already in the eighteenth century, a monk of the Mekhitarist Congregation had reported a direct link between the Kızılbaş and the Armenians. In 1773, Fr. Boghos Meherian had encountered the Kızılbaş on his travels through the region of Sepasdia, describing them as the converted Manicheans—enemies of the Kurds and friends of the Armenians. They were unlike any other religious group he knew, so the first time Fr. Meherian saw “the Manicheans,” he asked one of them what nation they belonged to. “We are Armenian and speak Armenian”, came the response.9 Their presence was strong in Tephrice, Zara, and elsewhere in the provinces, and they lived in isolated areas because of the persecution they had experienced in the past. “Armenian Easter is a holiday for them and they mark the Feast of the Ascension in the manner of the Armenians.” Interestingly, Fr. Meherian noted that this sect was also concentrated in Hınıs. I wondered if the ambiguities of nationality and religion that surrounded Özkan, my enigmatic host in Hınıs, could have much older roots.10 290

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Even though devotional decoration in his home was an exercise in syncretic balance—both Sunni and Alevi, yet neither, while he was apt to post on social networks pictures of Armenian churches and videos of Armenian songs, some rendered by himself on the guitar—he had never explained what his religion was. He said he was a Kurd, which today in Eastern Anatolia had become a less loaded blanket expression than saying Muslim, yet the other Kurds in town said he was Armenian. It could very well be that I was reading too much into it, but if my suppositions were correct about his ancestry—from Armenian Apostolic to Paulician to Kızılbaş to communist “Kurd,” if the hammer and sickle at his father’s home meant anything—he could be forgiven for the mystery surrounding him. He had been born into a millennium of disguise. Indeed, the enmity Fr. Meherian described between the Kızılbaş and the Sunni Kurds has continued into the twentieth century. So deep ran the hatred that the Alevi author Şerif Fırat dismissed the Kurds’ claims of singularity, saying they were all of Turkic origin: he attributed the development of a separate Kurdish identity to Ottoman policies of using the Kurds against non-Islamic minorities.11 The British archaeologist Theodore Bent suggested a non-Muslim origin for the Kızılbaş, in whose religion he saw “the survival of some heathen cult, perhaps … a half-formed or decayed form of Christianity.”12 In any case, such was the mark that the Paulicians had left in their ancient territory that Christians to this date were called Pavlükalar (Paulicians) in the dialect of Kurmancî spoken in Zara. Nigoğos hummed a few lines of a 1920s song from his hometown: Pavlükalar yandı, gel sen de dayan … Çifte çifte Pavlükalar dönerdi Şişeler kurulup, bade sunardı The Paulicians burned, you hang in there too … The Paulicians returned in pairs They arranged the bottles to offer love embodied in wine

The Paulicians mentioned here are the Armenians, and the first line may have a double historical meaning: for the actual sectarians defeated by the Byzantines on the very same land; and the massacred Armenians of 1915. The lyrics were from Koçgiri Ağıt, or Lament of Koçgiri, the former name of Zara. Koçgiri was the site of a bloody Kızılbaş uprising in November 1920, a few months after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, which established the conditions for the autonomy and eventual independence of Kurdistan. But Atatürk, at the head of the army, had already set out to prevent the further loss of Ottoman territories. By April 1921, the Koçgiri rebellion had been crushed. 291

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From 2003 to 2006, Nigoğos worked on the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipelines project to pump oil from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea to Turkey’s Mediterranean. As a graduate of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, he spoke fluent Russian as well as English, so he was hired as an interpreter at the stretch in Refahiye, in the Turkish province of Elazığ: “Every day in these three years, the workers that dug the ditches to lay the pipes would call the management to report they had found bones and buttons.” For a macabre instant, it sounded like proof of the Paulician tenet of the nonexistence of the afterlife. Refahiye had seen conflict during the 1920 rebellion. But more likely, those remains dated back to 1915. The extermination of Armenians in that district began on June 3 of that year: bandits surrounded three Armenian villages with a population of 1,570 and killed their inhabitants in situ.13 The Koçgiri rebellion also failed because the Sunni Kurds did not support it: they distrusted the Kızılbaş for their heterodox religion and supported Atatürk against the Kızılbaş rebels. But in 1925 the tables turned with the Sheik Said rebellion, when the Muslim Kurds rose up against Atatürk’s newly founded secular republic. The Kızılbaş had not forgotten, and forgave Atatürk for his repression of the Koçgiri rebellion, joining him in his battle against Sheik Said’s Kurdish Islamic movement. Through his abolition of the Islamic caliphate in 1924 and his war on Islamist Kurds, Atatürk earned the unshakable loyalty of the Kızılbaş. In this, Baydar, the lounge owner in a trendy district of Ankara, was like the other Alevis: a Kemalist. A fellow journalist and friend of mine was an Alevi, too. Her parents had fled Marash after a massacre of Alevis by the far-right group the Grey Wolves in December 1978 that left about 100 people dead. But I had never been able to understand how she could be a nationalist Turk, nor had she been able to explain it. “Nationalist or Kemalist?” asked Baydar when I told him about my puzzlement. Was that not the same? “Most Alevis revere Atatürk,” he shrugged. We bumped into the Kemalist radio anchor at the café that was our regular hangout in Ankara. He was still upset, and it showed in the angry grimace of his lips beneath his Nietzschean mustachio. “But I wasn’t going to discuss politics!” he berated Nigoğos rather than me. “I was going to ask him where his grandparents hailed from, if they cooked dolma, that sort of thing!” We patched things up and became friends again, until the following morning, when Nigoğos and the journalist fell out again. It was not only because I did not show up for the interview, Nigoğos assured me. “It’s for other disagreements,” he said, hinting at political discrepancies. It had nothing to do with Atatürk, however.     

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Profoundly pro-Soviet and now pro-Russian as second best, Donat was a Kemalist, too. If Turkey was headed for trouble, it was because the country had strayed from Atatürk’s path. Multifaceted and a man of many talents, Donat never seemed to have a permanent job. Yet for someone who in addition to Turkish spoke English, Russian, and Czech, as well as some Georgian and Armenian, who entertained himself, friends, and the public by playing jazz on his saxophone, there was something amiss in his lackadaisical attitude toward the necessities of life, for he did not seem to be wealthy. Yet it went beyond money, because someone of his capacity would naturally want to put it to good use. Not him. He seemed to lack the urge to work. The thought crossed my mind that he might be employed by the Turkish state, yet it was a pleasure to speak with him. Still, the sum of the parts did not make sense. Of mixed ancestry that included Macedonian and Cretan origins, he identified himself as a Chveneburi, an Islamicized Georgian minority that started settling in Turkey after the Russo–Turkish war of 1828. His father had studied at St. Georg’s School, an Austrian institution in Istanbul, and spoke perfect German. Donat had become an Orthodox Christian, but he kept his faith secret. Donat introduced me to an Armenian friend, Eren, who also avoided disclosing his origin outside the closest circle of friends. He was now afraid to be an Armenian in Turkey, even though he was an atheist and a comrade of Donat in a leftist party. Osman Köker had visited Eren’s mother’s village, Zir, outside Ankara, to see the ruins of the Armenian church. “The church floor was completely dug up … We heard a noise that scared us: two men had been following us,” Eren said. “You came for the gold, didn’t you?” these men had asked. And they proposed a scheme to share it. It pained Eren to be identified as a Muslim on his ID. He had been posted to Sivas (the Turkish name for Sepasdia) for military service, so before heading there he thought it safer to convert. Together with his father, uncle, and brother, they went to the Civil Registry office to change their religion and name. “It’s very painful,” he said. “So we changed the name but then the official says, ‘All right, now we have to circumcise you.” His uncle and father were alarmed and said, “No, no, we are Alevis!” And they had escaped unscathed. “Conversion was painful but we had to do it, otherwise our life in military service would have been very hard.” But Eren had had no problem in military service. “On the contrary, every time the Turks were at each other’s throats my superior would come to me and tell me, ‘You are Armenian, you are honest,’ and they had assigned me as secretary to the commander: only later they saw I was Armenian.” In the past, they were safer. “We dyed eggs red for Easter.” There was fear then, but now it was worse. He was afraid. Of what? That he was Armenian. Still? It seemed incredible, amid the uncovered women wearing the latest 293

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fashions in the modern setting of Ankara. I asked him two more times if he really felt fear as an Armenian, and he responded “Yes,” both times: Don’t be fooled by the sights and the talk of democracy. This is a scary place: it’s a very fascist country. This government is dreadful. In the past it was fine, we even gave out Easter eggs to our Muslim neighbors. In the 1950s there was the Hacı Doğan quarter, where all the Armenians of Ankara lived. Now there are no more Armenians. Back then, half the residents were Armenian, half were Kurds. We celebrated Easter and Kurban Bayramı together. But now that the country is taking on this Sunni and neo-Ottoman character, it’s much worse.

Eren had a “friend,” a nice guy, but he had found out he was an agent for the MİT, the national intelligence organization, and they followed him. Police did not disturb him directly but nor did they hide that they had Armenians under surveillance. Should something happen, they knew right away where to find the Armenians. “We stayed in Ankara because we like it.” He had a brother who lived in Bodrum, on the coast. “All my mother’s relatives went to Australia 20 years ago.” His mother spoke Armenian but he did not. His wife’s family were Muslims from Greece who had settled in Turkey during the population exchanges of 1922, but she was an atheist too. A column of communists marched past us, chanting slogans and waving red flags. Eren wanted to illustrate why he did not reveal his Armenian identity: Armenian here is still an insult. Let me tell you a story. There was a big earthquake here in 1999. Thirty-five thousand people died.14 We went with a friend to help build a home for those who had lost them. The sun was strong and I was building a wall, then I built a restroom. I went to buy a T-shirt, a red one. So the guy selling it asked me if I was Armenian. “Why?” I responded. “Our neighbor said so.” Their neighbor was a cop who did not like Armenians, so he had said, “He is Armenian, charge him more.” And we were there to build homes for these people. I went to help these Turkish people, to protect them. I built more floors for that house. I do it because I love this country and this people. But this how we Armenians live here in Turkey.

His grandfather had fought for Turkey in 1923, called the “Independence War” in official historiography. “The press found us because they wanted to do a story about Armenians who fought in the independence war.” But Eren declined to speak about his grandfather, prompting the journalists to ask if they could know why. No, he had responded. “They mentioned my grandfather’s name, Kevork Gülsöken, from Tokat.” A close friend of Donat was married to a girl from Tomarza, Kayseri. When she got married, she brought old silverwork to Donat for restoration. “They had 294

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Armenian initials and inscriptions, so I asked her where she had obtained it.” She said that her grandparents had killed Armenian neighbors and looted their homes. “And they took all their belongings.”     

Later in the week, Nigoğos took me for a walk around the antiquarians’ quarter in Ankara’s old town. One had several Armenian pieces, including the prize item of his collection: a large, bell-shaped candle snuffer, with “Surp Garabed” inscribed on it in Armenian. It was from the completely demolished monastery in Mush. Next door, there was a nervous knife- and bead-maker. To my astonishment, he had placed a postcard of an Armenian fedayi from Sasun on the display, with an Armenian and English inscription on it. The fighter in the black-and-white photo was holding a long rifle, and wore an elaborate costume and turban in the Kurdish style with wide leg trousers, a variant of the şalvar, with a pattern of thick stripes with rhomboid motifs. The knife-maker was not saying if he was Armenian, and launched into a breathless tale about the death of fedayi Kevork Chavush.15 The knife-maker was from Varto, a historical Armenian county of Mush, but he was not elaborating on his origins. “He is a little unbalanced because of the oruç pangs,” Nigoğos whispered to me in English, referring to the Ramadan fast. It was a hot day, too. Perhaps prolonged fasting under the strain of work and weather had a similar effect to alcohol. The story this master craftsman told conformed more or less accurately to the death of Kevork Chavush as narrated by the fedayi’s comrade, Vahan Papazian. The knife-maker never acknowledged he was Armenian. But once on his social network he posted a photo of destitute Armenian children, in time for an anniversary of the Genocide. One of his contacts had made a mocking comment about how these kids looked like Tarzan. “These are Armenian children, brother,” he had responded. And he had shared the photo of a map of Western Armenia. A couple of years earlier I had interviewed Yusuf Halaçoğlu, a former president of the Turkish Historical Society. He had agreed right away to be interviewed. Halaçoğlu was perhaps the foremost denialist of the Genocide. In 2007, he had he caused a commotion when he said that he possessed lists of “hidden Armenians,” suggesting that they constituted a fair proportion of militants in the PKK and the Maoist guerrilla group TİKKO (Türkiye İşçi ve Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu, or Turkish Workers’ and Peasants’ Liberation Army). Shortly afterwards, he was demoted from the presidency of the Historical Society. He received me in his office at Ankara’s Gazi University, large and austere except for two large epic paintings of Atatürk, one of them equestrian. It was summer and the building was empty except for the friendly security staff. When we sat down for the interview in his office, Halaçoğlu left the door open. 295

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“I reckon there are half a million hidden Armenians now in Turkey,” he responded to my question about their numbers, after a lengthy introduction according to which not more than 10,000 Armenians had died in the deportation convoys, while hundreds of thousands had died of hunger and disease behind the Russian lines, in Yerevan, and elsewhere in what is now the Republic of Armenia. “Most now live under the guise of Kurds, for example the Raştonik, and other Kurdish tribes.” An important part of them had resettled in the big cities and some had joined the ranks of the PKK, he said, but he could not guess the number of Kurdish militants of Armenian origin. He also believed, “with a 90 percent certainty,” that Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader, was descended of hidden Armenians. Why had these Armenians gone underground? Why were they scared and why had they converted to Islam? “Some Armenian women and girls married Muslims, they mingled with Muslims and are now assimilated,” he responded. “But some acted out of fear of the Kurds.” After he had spoken about them in 2007, he said, a few that still preserved the memory of their identity had started to emerge, expressing a wish to rejoin the Armenian community and the Church. “More than 1,000 returned to their old religion, were baptized again, and nothing happened to them, because in Turkey the Armenian identity is not repressed, because we have so many Armenian friends, and because Armenians for their minority status are under protection.” Halaçoğlu said the statement attributed to him about the hidden Armenians had been a consequence of misunderstanding by reporters: “I was talking about the lists of Armenians who left from the Ottoman Empire and went to the States.” Then I asked him about the murder of Hrant Dink: “Ah, Hrant Dink! The murder of Hrant Dink is something mysterious.” His assassin was a Turk, he said. “But who provided the logistical support for him, who set him on the way to carry out the murder?” Halaçoğlu said he had sent his information to an Armenian scholar in Los Angeles, who “had the same reaction.” This unnamed ideological author of Dink’s murder now used a Muslim name, but by origin he was an Armenian from Elazığ. “It’s hard to have an idea about the things we have brought out,” he added. “We need to do research on this.”     

Three years later, in 2014, Nigoğos and I were at Baydar’s lounge in Ankara, talking about Paulicianism and his family, while the others were checking out a video clip of a Sufi song. It was interpreted by Hayko Cepkin, an Istanbul Armenian singer who had been classmates with one of the Armenians at our table at Getronagan School, the community’s most prestigious educational 296

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institution in Istanbul. Its graduates included many of the intellectuals that started the Zartonk, the Renaissance movement that renewed Armenian literature and art in the late nineteenth century, only to be cut short by the Genocide. In the video, two whirling dervishes in white were spinning on an ancient bridge somewhere in Eastern Anatolia as Hayko sang Demedim Mi (Did I Not Say?), a mournful theme, with percussion meant to produce ecstasy. The dervishes were a widely known expression of the Mevlevi Sufis, an order that had close relations with the Sabbatian movement, one of the strangest episodes in Ottoman history. Sabbatai Zevi, a Salonica rabbi, had proclaimed himself the messiah in 1665, gaining an immense following among European Jewry to the point that it alarmed the Ottoman government. He was arrested and given the option of converting to Islam or being executed. He chose the former, adopting the name of Aziz Mehmed Efendi. Two hundred Jewish families who remained loyal to him, some 1,500 people, became Muslim too. They formed a separate grouping within the Islamic community of Turkey which survived to this day, albeit much exposed to progressive assimilation. While they called themselves ma’min (believers), among Turks they came to be known by a different name: “converts.” They were the original dönmes, a designation extended in Turkey to any person who converted to Islam. The 200 families that had followed their messiah into Islam in 1666 had accepted his explanation that “conversion was a temporary punishment for Jews because they had not recognized the true God that he had discovered.” For the Ottoman Empire was the land of dissimulation. At a secret meeting of Paulicians in Gyumri (in what is now the Republic of Armenia) in 1837, possibly the last such gathering to be documented after a gap of eight centuries since the participation of the Paulicians in the First Crusade, a recantation had been declared, urging the followers of the sect to hide their true belief from the Armenian Apostolic Church: Always go to church, not that our kind considers it real; but externally ye shall perform everything, and keep yourselves concealed, until we find an opportunity; and then, if we can, we will all return to this faith of ours. And we swear, even if they cut us to pieces, that we will not reveal it.16

Not unlike these Paulicians, dönme Jews, hidden Armenians, and persons like Nigoğos were born into this psychology of dissimulation, and the fear it entailed. This double life of false appearances and shrouded realities sometimes went on for generations, centuries after the original secret had long been forgotten and there was almost nothing left to hide.

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Cæsaria The bus dropped me off outside the Kayseri Armenian church, Surp Krikor Lusavorich (St. Gregory the Illuminator). It was closed. I called Marzbed, the head of the Kayseri Armenians’ Compatriotic Union in Istanbul, and he told me that he would telephone the porter to open it for me. The porter’s daughter was sick, Marzbed told me after he had got hold of him, and he had taken her to a hospital in Istanbul. Everywhere I went in Turkey at any given time, people I met were sick or had someone close to them afflicted by disease. On a few occasions it may have been an excuse for absenteeism or a polite manner to avoid a meeting, but I witnessed many cases with my own eyes. As for the church, it would be impossible for me to enter. There was only one key in possession of the porter for safety reasons, Marzbed said. In the hour I waited for Marzbed’s phone call, a mustachioed man approached me to tell me that sometimes there would be a porter. This man was an Alevi: “Our people love yours.” He was referring to Armenians. I asked him if he had ever been to cem evis, the Alevis’ prayer houses. “No,” he said, but he still said that “our rites are very similar to yours.” Then another group of people bicycled by and stopped outside Surp Krikor’s main entrance. They were in their 30s and 40s, fair-skinned, blond or red-haired, and had clear eyes. All were Arabic speakers but the youngest among them spoke some basic Turkish. They were Chaldean (Assyrian Catholic) refugees from Mosul who had arrived only months earlier. The Islamic State had captured their hometown, in northern Iraq. Then the oldest among them asked me in Arabic, but I understood, whether I was an Armenian or a Turk. They wanted to know if the church was older than 100 years. One of the Chaldean men rubbed the church wall with his right hand, put it to his forehead, and made the sign of the cross, though he then greeted me with the Islamic salute, “Selâmün aleyküm” (“Peace be upon you”). But he repeated they were Catholic Chaldeans. Theirs was a branch of the Assyrian Orthodox Church that had split off from the mother Church 298

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and proclaimed its fealty to the Pope. The Vatican had decided to call them Chaldean, but ethnically there was nothing Chaldean about them: they were Assyrian. As seeing the church was not possible, I decided to meet the last Armenian in Talas, a district near Kayseri that had a concentration of wealthy Armenians prior to the Genocide. Marzbed had cautioned me that Jirayr could be quarrelsome. He did not have his contact details. Finding him, however, was as easy as taking a taxi and telling the driver that I was looking for the last Armenian in Talas. In one of the largest cities in Turkey, with a population of about 1 million, Jirayr was a very visible man who gave a lot of interviews to Turkish newspapers and TV. “There is nothing of a hidden or secret Armenian about him,” I had been told by a friend based in Denver who had met him earlier in Kayseri, during a special service at the Surp Krikor church: “He wears a very prominent gold cross.” As described, the cross was there, refulgent beneath his open neck, as he waited for us outside his home, in sunglasses. We had stopped twice to ask for directions and those neighbors had already told him about us. He lived in the Gulbenk neighborhood of Talas, where the family of Calouste Gulbenkian, at one point in the twentieth century the wealthiest man in the world, hailed from. Jirayr spoke with me as he played tavlo with his friends. He said he was rich, with a fortune of $1 million that he attributed to his Christian faith. Despite his age of 75, Jirayr believed he looked younger by at least a decade because he did not smoke. Armenians were no longer bothered in Turkey, according to him. Jirayr had worked in the neighborhood of Beyoğlu in Istanbul but now that he had made “a lot of money” he had decided to return to Talas. The other Armenians’ houses had been confiscated by the Turkish state, which had given them to Muslim refugees from Bulgaria. His had been built 300 years ago, and his great-greatgrandfather had been born in the same house, which had a walled courtyard. His family was related to the Gulbenkians. There was a marble stele by the entrance from an Armenian school that had been donated by Gulbenkian in 1847. The school had been blown up with dynamite during the Genocide, but Jirayr’s grandfather had rescued the marble inscription by bribing officials. He also had two other historical artifacts with Armenian inscriptions on them. There were two mansions up the street from his home that had belonged to the two most prominent families from Talas: the Karamanians and the Gulbenkians. Their houses were separated by a very narrow path. Both mansions stood on large plots. The house of the Karamanians was more beautiful at least from the outside and the arch by the entrance looked like an Armenian church narthex. Now owned by Turks, they were both run-down, with parts of the Gulbenkian mansion collapsed. Jirayr was effusively pointing 299

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out different parts of the properties with fingers bedecked in rings with gold coins. We returned to his home as he was expecting a visit from his neighbors, a Turkish family that came in with a plateful of dolmas to welcome me to the neighborhood, one of those little gestures that tended very fragile bridges across abysses of history. Jirayr took off his large, red-framed sunglasses for the first time. He had small eyes. The Turkish family had come to use the house for their son’s engagement. For all his boastful talk with me, Jirayr, too, was “the good Armenian neighbor.” It was an insurance policy, perhaps one that ran against his instincts. Yet the family had retained their property. He told me that there was badarak (mass) only three times a year at Surp Krikor Lusavorich, which he would attend while in town, for he wintered in Istanbul at a luxury hotel. His previous address in Istanbul was the London Hotel. Clippings of interviews with him published in a Kayseri newspaper and in Hürriyet, a national circulation daily, hung framed on the courtyard wall. His house was very old, he said, requiring him to spend approximately $100,000 in renovations, but it was worth it, for it was the place where his grandfather’s grandfather was born and so had he been. And he had a fortune of $1 million, he reminded me again. “You should always have money,” were his parting words for me. “Without money you will never have a woman nor friends.” He was unmarried, but he knew he had a son from a brief relationship with a Croatian woman he had met in Istanbul. She had left for Croatia with the boy soon after his birth. Jirayr had never met his child.

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Amasia and Gümüşhacıköy A journalist friend had said that the owner of the Emin Efendi Konağı, a hotel in the old quarter of Amasia across the River Iris, was familiar with the Armenian families of the city. The man was waiting for my companion and me with a wide smile in his office. My companion was looking for any clues or relatives about her grandfather’s family, who were from Amasia. We were offered a tea despite the Ramadan fast. When had the family we were inquiring about left town? “In 1915,” we said. He turned with a confused look to his daughter, the hotel manager, who had arranged the interview, arching his eyebrows. The name we told him did not sound familiar and he was going to ask his Armenian friends in town. “Are there Armenians left?” I would like to be introduced to them. “They are all Turkified now, they have assimilated,” he said, promising that he would ask them if they would agree to meet. It was clear he would do neither, and he did not. A hotel worker, a great-grandson of Macedonians who had been resettled here in 1918, took us to the ruins of a chapel he said was Armenian in his village, near the city. It had been overrun by thick vegetation, with trees growing from within it, and was much lower than the ground around it, as if sunk in a lush depression. There was a number of old houses nearby, which the young man told us were those of Armenians. They stood abandoned. Upon returning to the city we went out for a walk across the river. While peering at the renovation work of an old building, a man approached us. He was the head of a team of construction workers at the site, a former caravanserai, Taş Han. It is now a luxury hotel. He was a white man with browncolored eyeglasses. “Are you Armenian?” he asked, recognizing the language we spoke. “I am Armenian, too,” he told us. Construction work had brought him here from his hometown of Diyarbakır. His relatives had left the village of Duman near Hınıs, in Erzurum, during the Genocide. His grandfather, 12 at the time, had set off in the deportation convoy with two brothers, who were seven and five. An older brother managed to stay in Hınıs, after converting and 301

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marrying a Muslim woman. The youngest died of starvation during the march, near Mush. The other brothers continued on to Aleppo from Diyarbakır, where they lost track of each other thereafter. “That’s all I know,” he said. There was nobody around us but his pupils were moving restlessly behind the brown eyeglasses. This construction worker had been imprisoned in 1980 for 12 years for his militancy in TİKKO. He had joined it as a Kurd. “My people are the Armenians, but I am a Kurd now,” he said, an idea I had heard before from other descendants of converted Armenians. “This is Armenia but Kurds live on these lands now: I am Armenian, but the Armenians are gone, and we are all Kurds now.” He did not have any relationship with Armenians other than “Kurdified Armenians like me.” There were many of his kind in Diyarbakır, “some 50,000, I reckon, or maybe more.” We continued with our search. While browsing old books in the lowerground-floor bookstore of a gallery at the edge of the city, we engaged in conversation with the shopkeeper, a man in his early 40s. There were still Armenians in his youth. He had fond memories of one called Mari, a classmate he had lost track of after finishing school. Perhaps there was still an Armenian or two in town. We should come back in the afternoon. A mustachioed friend of the bookstore owner was waiting for us when we returned. An old man who had a hardware store would be our connection. He wanted to see the picture of my companion’s grandfather. “Oh yes!” he exclaimed. “Your cousin will be coming shortly.” Some 20 minutes later a thin man with a hunch and a very worried expression walked in. The only one not smiling, he shook hands with us and made us climb into a taxi. The old merchant, Haci Şukru, was happy for what he believed was a family reunion. Abel was the last Armenian left in Amasia. A cobbler, he was 57, married, and had one daughter. He was originally a Christian but had become a Muslim by custom, and was known by a Turkish name by everybody in the city. He had an Armenian friend called Hrant, who lived in a village some 60 kilometers away, but did not know of any other in the vicinity. All other Armenians that had somehow remained after the Genocide had moved out of Amasia when ASALA had started a terrorist campaign against Turkish targets in 1975. An Armenian woman had been killed in Amasia at the time, Abel mentioned. He only spoke some sentences in fluent Armenian but he said, again in Armenian, that he did not speak the language even though he understood it perfectly, to the point that I would speak in Armenian and he would respond in Turkish. In the early 1960s Archbishop Shnorhk, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, had recruited Abel and his brother as students for the Surp 302

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Haç Tıbrevank School in Istanbul, which depended on the Church. Patriarch Shnorhk had continued the work of his predecessor, Patriarch Karekin, of bringing youth from the scattered communities of Anatolia to give them an Armenian education. His classmates were from Dikranagerd, Cæsaria, Malatya, and other provinces in the interior. At Surp Haç, Abel had coincided with Hrant Dink, also a student there at the time. But Abel was missing home and returned to his family in Amasia a couple of years later. His brother Gosdan stayed on, continuing his studies at the Boğaziçi University in a career that would take him to prison: as I would find out three years later, Gosdan went on to become a Marxist–Leninist ideologue. Upon his arrest following the coup d’état of 1980 by General Kenan Evren, deputy prosecutor Selahattin Karagöz began Gosdan’s indictment by reading: “Somehow born in Turkey, having studied as a Turkish national in higher education institutions on behalf of the community, educated at Boğaziçi University, living thanks to the highest blessings bestowed on him by the state and the people, this Armenian son of an Armenian …” Abel had compensated for his brother’s prominence in the revolutionary movement by ostracizing himself almost completely, blending in as anonymously as he could with the population of Amasia. Abel put us briefly on the phone with Gosdan, calling him somewhere in Europe, where he lived. It surprised me at the time that he did not know his brother’s telephone number by heart, which he dialed after looking it up in his notebook. We spoke briefly, mainly inquiring about family relations. It turned out, as we suspected, that my companion’s grandfather and Abel were not related. A thickset woman with a round face walked in, accompanied by another one who resembled her in the Islamic garb of headscarves and ankle-long skirts in the light colors of summer dress. They also looked alike, differing only in age (but not by very much) and the eyes, deep blue and large in the younger woman, who was Abel’s wife. She looked tired, which she blamed on her diabetes. The other woman was his mother-in-law. Both women introduced themselves as Turks. Years later I found out they were Islamicized Armenians from Tokat. Abel put on a cap and walked us through empty back streets to the center of town and turned back, after a shy hug. Iftar time was approaching, even though the merry crowds plying the riverside of Amasia were not particularly observant and, other than certain resistance to offer alcohol, the restaurants lined up along the boulevard were busy all day long. Lights were scintillating across the Iris at the half-timbered mansions and houses staggered on the crag. Then the calls from the minarets announced the break of the Ramadan fast, echoing across the air of Amasia, the city Julius Cæsar had captured with the assertion “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). Two thousand years later, the muezzins 303

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were announcing in Arabic a variation on that phrase and invoking Allah, in the ancient Greek city under a Turkish flag.     

The hammam of Gümüşhacıköy inspired reverence as you walked into it. This was coupled by a feeling of something profane and amiss inside the building. The pool in its middle did not seem extraneous and matched the octagonal walls enclosing it. But then you raised your head and understood, upon seeing the round dome, that it was not a house of worship. The dome was diminished, as if it had been shrunk like a Jivaro head. Yet, if only for the salvation of the body, the Turkish bath mimicked sacred architecture, or at least one that evoked the floor plan of an Armenian church with its traditional eight sides. The Megerian siblings and I were surveying the renovation work at the hammam their father had donated to the town a few years before the Genocide. They were two of the last six Armenians in Gümüşhacıköy, near Amasia. I had found their home after asking at Şahnur Giyim, the clothing store I had been told to make my first stop. Şahnur, the store owner, gave me the directions to Soghomon and his sister Nazeli. I didn’t find their house the first time, so I returned to the store. This time, Şahnur repeated the directions in more detail, telling me that I would find them: “They never leave home.” Şahnur looked kind but I did notice a trait in him that I had observed among Armenian merchants in Turkey of his age group, over 60: they were reluctant to speak in Armenian in the store or public places, even if there was no one around. As I got nearer, I asked a passerby where the house of Soghomon and Nazeli was. The old man looked up with curiosity and pointed to a half-timbered house in the ancient style of Black Sea architecture, the bricks arranged diagonally in the upper-floor facade. The door was open. With some trepidation, I walked into the house, as stately and somber on the inside, where it became fantastically harrowing. There was a classic bicycle, a 1950s black Raleigh in almost mint condition, covered in dust, with petrified and grayed bread in the basket behind it. Large garbage bags, full of indiscernible content, hung from the tall walls of the coach house, the cavernous entrance to the home: it was covered from one end to the other with row upon row of these bulging sacks. It was as if the walls bore enormous fruits or were monstrously pregnant, covered in wombs. The coach house led into an inner courtyard, much reduced by more clutter and garbage bags with mysterious contents, scattered on the floor. They had gathered dust, like items hoarded a long time ago for a catastrophe that had not happened yet. “Baron Soghomon … Baron Soghomon …” I called out, using the Armenian polite form of address. A long minute later, a creaking door opened into the square courtyard and an old, pale man with silver hair and inquisitive 304

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stare came out looking at me, clearly yet hesitantly responding, “Evet …” in Turkish: “Yes …” Right away, I told him in Armenian that I came on behalf of Miss Sonia, the headmistress of the most important Armenian school of Istanbul. “Oh, our Sonia!” he said, brightening up. His hands and lower lips were trembling, as was his head. With visible concern, he wanted to know how I had found his house: I told him about Şahnur, the Armenian clothing merchant. I did not tell him that another neighbor had also pointed out his house to me. “These are very bad people: they murdered lots of ours.” I thought it was wise to tell him that I would name interviewees with pseudonyms, but he said, “I speak up openly: I am not afraid of anyone.” A little later his sister Nazeli arrived, her head covered in the Islamic style. She was small, but her gait and speech revealed she ran the house. The older of the two, she spoke excellent Armenian. Soghomon did too, albeit more hesitantly. Nazeli had been sent away to Istanbul to an Armenian school and had returned home after graduating. Her brother only spent one or two years in Istanbul, but then decided to return home to his mother in Gümüşhacıköy. Even though Nazeli was tidily dressed, for some reason her brother insisted that she changed out of her daily work clothes. The sister looked a little embarrassed that an outsider was seeing the state of their house, as if it was a secret. They may have been hoarding everything, perhaps for decades. Both were unmarried and they took care of each other as if left alone in the world. Perhaps being together all the time prevented them from realizing how they were aging, or their quirks for, unmarried and childless, they had no other reference than themselves and their childhood memories from the same home. Their great-uncle had studied architecture at the American College in nearby Merzifon: he was murdered in the Genocide. Soghomon would get very emotional when he recalled the great-uncle he did not know. They remembered very well the visit from Patriarch Shnorhk of Constantinople in 1989: they calculated that at the time of his visit there were still 20 or 25 Armenians in Gümüşhacıköy. Their house had been built by their grandfather Hagop Ağa perhaps 150 years ago. The sister insisted that we moved into their garden for tea and cookies. It was separated from their home by another house that had belonged to an Armenian. But he had sold it to a Turk, and it now sat empty. Tin plates were scattered around the garden, half full with food for a dozen cats and kittens roaming around the plot. Their mother, Hayganush, had been exiled during the Genocide to Der Zor, in the Syrian desert, but had returned afterwards. They had traveled in a carriage up to the border with Syria. In Syria, orphans were grouped together and taken care of by the Near East Relief Society: these orphans were given one dish of food per day, but some of them were severely impaired or ill from 305

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the trek across the desert and died. Hayganush had lost her youngest sister. “My mother used to tell me that the corpses of the orphans would pile up by the hundred and they were carted away every day.” Then Nazeli surprised her brother by saying they had a photo of their mother in Arab garb from the time of the Genocide. Nazeli had seen the photo decades ago. She had put it away because their mother had become very upset when Nazeli had shown her the photo, reminding her of something she did not want to discuss.1 Notwithstanding my insistence, they told me that would be almost impossible to find the photo. “Really, it will be impossible,” Soghomon said. These large plastic bags, then, probably contained a century’s worth of objects. As Soghomon and I were waiting for Nazeli to come back to the garden with the tea and cookies, a woman with her head covered like a Muslim leaned in, saying in Turkish she had heard that someone had come by the town that day looking for Armenians. Soghomon sensed my suspicions. “This lady is Armenian, too,” he said. The lady, Margo, confirmed it in Armenian. She spoke it flawlessly, but her discourse was insecure. As Soghomon was speaking, Margo had the habit of cutting him off, but after a while they were both speaking with me, without listening to each other, as people who have always been together for ages may be prone to do because they already knew what each other had to say. They were both saying the same: Soghomon in Armenian and the lady now in Turkish. From time to time, locals would make them uncomfortable; they would be hostile to them, and they would ask them why they were not leaving. There were no more Armenians left: what were they still doing in Gümüşhacıköy? In other words, their neighbors were suggesting, or sometimes telling them openly, to sell up their properties and leave. I asked Soghomon why they had decided to stay alone in Gümüşhacıköy. “How could I leave the home built by my forefathers?” His face was red with anger: “The graves of my parents are here, I have grown up here, and I will not leave; where would I go?” During his military service, his superior had asked him if he was “an infidel,” but he had responded, “No, my captain, I am not an infidel, I am an Armenian.” Turkey was a police state in disguise and breaking at the seams, political discontent adding to the strain on people who could barely make ends meet. The blame was on the government, Soghomon said, and its Islamist policies that added fuel to the fire, supporting the Islamic State. “The Islamic State is continuing in Syria what the Young Turks began here in 1915,” he commented. At that point, Nazeli walked in with a tray of cookies and the tea, telling us to talk quietly because the neighbors were sitting on the other side of the garden wall, and they could hear. Soghomon could not care less. He would speak freely, 306

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because he did not fear. Why did he not, I asked. “I am a member of a minority and the police has to defend me.” Armenians, and possibly other minorities, had developed a contradictory relationship with the Turkish state, on the one hand hating it or fearing it, but on the other hand relying on it against the bigotry of neighbors or strangers. Aliens in their own land, they did not trust those around them. Soghomon invoked his minority status with instinctive self-confidence, almost with pride, perhaps forgetting for a moment that he was forced to count for his own protection on a state that had annihilated his people. Margo said that her daughter had stayed in the village and married a Muslim Turk, but had not converted to Islam. Her daughter did not want to live anywhere else. Margo had lived in Istanbul, but had not integrated into the Armenian community, she implied, and had returned to Gümüşhacıköy after her husband’s death. Down the street from their home there was a water fountain with an Armenian inscription, before which Nazeli, Soghomon, and Margo posed for a picture. It was the surviving fragment from the Armenian church and school that the new kaymakam (district governor), arrived from Erzurum, had ordered blown up in 1941. A school building had been erected in their place, in the anodyne style that marked the advent of modernity in Turkish cities and towns. Two years later as the kaymakam was pruning a tree in his home’s yard, a branch fell on his head and killed him. “God punished him for destroying His house,” Soghomon said with satisfaction as we passed by the late kaymakam’s house on our way to the Armenian cemetery. The murderous tree stood right in the middle of the garden. A tall fence surrounded the cemetery, on the outskirts of the town. All tombstones were written in Turkish except for one with an Armenian inscription that predated the Genocide. Locals had found it elsewhere, but moved it to the cemetery for its preservation. After a prayer for the dead, Soghomon and Nazeli accompanied me to the bus station. They would hold hands when crossing the streets of the town where they had grown up. Their voices would rise when asking in Turkish the street vendors about their produce, but would die down to murmurs when speaking to each other in Armenian, the whispers of the last two leaves on a very old tree that would fall with them, alone in the world, or in a world that had left them alone.

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Kastamonu Until the 1970s, approximately 250 Armenians lived in Tütenli, in the province of Kastamonu. Now there are at most ten left if we count the seasonal population, those who winter in Istanbul and come to the village for the summer or the warm seasons. Before the Genocide, Tütenli, or Tuhtenli, was a separate district, but now it had been reduced to a quarter, albeit an isolated one, of the village of Kapaklı. Yet if we still counted it as an individual administrative unit, along with Vakıf, in Cilicia, it was possibly the second entirely Armenian and Christian village left in Turkey, even if an elderly couple had converted to Islam in 2012. There were also three villages of Islamicized Armenians in Kastamonu: Gökağaç, Yazı, and Masıroluk, where Armenians had begun to convert approximately 30 years ago. In the city of Kastamonu, there were approximately 30 Armenians left. After hearing that Tütenli was my destination, the cabdriver began speaking to me about Armenians, never calling them by their name but only referring to them as “your people,” as we drove through rolling hills covered in the merriest of greens and conifers. We arrived at a picturesque village where blinds and windows were banging in the strong wind. All the houses, made in the half-timbered style of the Pontic Greeks, were empty, except for a complaining cow that leaned out of the gate to a barn. A herd of cows was grazing in the distance. We decided to return to Taşköprü, the biggest town in the area. We stopped in front of a house where a man was chopping wood. This man, who sported the trimmed mustachios and long beard of Muslim conservatives, called a local Armenian, Papken, who at the time was in Istanbul. Papken urged us to visit Tütenli, where we would find his mother and his relatives, who would be very happy to receive me. The bearded man had been the village chief in the past and, after four decades in Istanbul, had decided to spend retirement in his village. He gave us the correct directions to Tütenli: we had stopped somewhere else the first time around. 308

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Tütenli was a compact and isolated neighborhood, completely removed from the core of the village of Kapaklı, a good 20 minutes by car from there. You would not hear the call for prayers from the mosque. When we entered the Armenian neighborhood, a tall man in elegant sport clothes was expecting us, standing in the middle of the road outside a Greek-style house. Taniel smiled nervously at me and I interpreted his suggestion that the cabdriver stayed as a reassurance for all, that a local Muslim be present and that the Armenians had nothing to hide from the Turks. Perhaps it was simply a gesture of hospitality among locals, but the Muslim driver’s presence would inevitably distort and hinder our conversation, and perhaps that was the goal Taniel was seeking. Yet the cabdriver declined the invitation to stay. There was Baydzar, the mother of Papken, and her brother, Simon. Baydzar said she was 100 years old, but Taniel told me she was approximately 85. Simon was born in 1937. The home was entirely paneled in wood inside and had low ceilings, the rooms looking much smaller than it would have seemed from the outside, which all contributed to its coziness, enhanced by the burgundy colors of the rugs. Autumn was making way for winter with chilly weather even though the village was not very high. Winters were not what they used to be, Simon said. They didn’t get as much snow as they used to since the construction of huge dams. Baydzar spoke in the local dialect of Armenian without mingling a single Turkish word, which even fluent speakers among Diaspora Armenians seldom did in conversational use. Only some verb tenses and declensions were used differently in Baydzar’s speech, but it was perfectly understandable for a standard speaker. “Many bad things have happened here: these are very bad people,” she said, as soon as she saw me, and without much of an introduction from myself. “The atrocities they have committed have no name: they are barbarians.” Then she lowered her voice: “They have butchered a lot of ours,” she said, making a sweeping gesture. “They say that the massacres did not happen but they lie, they have massacred a lot of Armenians, they have pushed them down the gorges, and they have cut them up with their knives into little pieces.” She repeated she was approximately 100 years old. “We saw the massacres, so you don’t,” her parents used to say. Baydzar spoke with no fear but Taniel did not say a word in the conversation, and I could sense unease in him. It was also clear that he knew or understood Armenian very well but he did not speak it once. At the house there was also Taniel’s wife, who was 45 and spoke the local dialect sweetly, apologizing for not speaking standard Western Armenian. Scorn if not discrimination by the Istanbul Armenians toward those from Kastamonu and the Black Sea, calling them Poshas (Gypsies), might have dented their self-perception. Initially, it had actually misled me into believing that these Kastamonu Armenians were really Poshas, a secretive group I had 309

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been trying to locate to see to what degree their Armenian-based dialect and traditions had been preserved. A young woman came into the main hall with tea and cookies. She remembered that perhaps until 30 years ago they celebrated Easter, dyeing eggs red, and Armenian New Year (Gağant), which they welcomed with bountiful tables laid out in the village. I wanted to see the other Armenians in the village, especially Emmanuel and Lydia, a newly Islamicized couple. Taniel’s wife had suggested that Emmanuel had converted to Islam mainly because local Muslims had helped him out with money problems. We left with Taniel toward Emmanuel and Lydia’s. Simon was heading home, too, across the road. Right at that moment, Simon’s wife was also returning home, leaning on a cane, and she spoke with her husband in Armenian. I was surprised the man spoke fluent Armenian. During our conversation he had only used Turkish. Emmanuel and Lydia had converted two years ago. They did the namaz five times a day and attended mosque every Friday. They had both adopted Islamic names after conversion, but none of their neighbors used them. Their home was picture perfect, immaculately furnished and decorated in the Western style. He wore a hajji’s white skullcap. Before her conversion, Lydia was a regular churchgoer as a Christian in Istanbul. Emmanuel was her second husband. Her first husband, Garabed, was from Belançağır, an Armenian village in Kastamonu that used to have some 40 Armenian inhabitants but had now been abandoned completely. Emmanuel was short, with clear-colored, naïve eyes in a small face. Incurious and simple-minded, he spoke very little, not out of fear but because he did not have much to say. Work, home, and family were the limits of his life. Now that he had become a Muslim, he would go to mosque every Friday, even though it would be very surprising if he knew the prayers of his new religion. His wife said that they were learning Arabic in order to read the Qur’an. “Öyle”—“like that,” or “for no particular reason”—he responded when I asked him why he had converted to Islam. Since conversion he no longer considered himself Armenian. But there were now descendants of Islamicized Genocide survivors who called themselves Armenian, I observed. Not him, Emmanuel retorted. Like the other Armenian women in the village, Lydia wore a headscarf too, but hers was tied more like a bandanna. It took me a while to realize she was Emmanuel’s wife, for Taniel kept calling her Lydia, by her pre-Islamic name. Only upon my asking did she mention her Islamic name, Leyla. “I am no longer Lydia,” she said with a bitter smile. Her decision to convert had come from the bottom of her heart. It was a mystic experience. One night in her dreams she had seen a group of fairies gathered by a tree at the far end of 310

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her orchard. The fairies were playing the saz and reciting Islamic prayers. One of the fairies had turned to her and told her that her name was now Leyla. The following morning, she went to the local müftülük, an agency that appoints imams and issues decisions on civil matters of a religious nature—including marriages and conversions—and she left the Armenian Church to become a Muslim, adopting the name given by the fairy to her, Lydia, the granddaughter of Genocide survivors. Emmanuel had said he had chosen his own Islamic name. Did he know what his new name mean? Why had he chosen it? He did not know what his new name meant. With a maternal smile, his wife said that probably the imam had suggested this name because it resembled his original name in sound, which is what I thought as well. I asked Lydia if she ever felt a sense of betrayal to her people and ancestors by converting. “No, never, I am no longer Armenian,” she said with a bitter grimace, unlike her joyous expression when she had talked about the Hajj two years before. She recalled her pilgrimage with a different smile, peaceful, kind, uncertain. Or perhaps she was acting. “I am very happy that I became a Muslim, it’s the real religion of my soul, and I am a new woman now.” There were many Islamicized Armenians, who regardless of their religion considered themselves Armenian, for example in Diyarbakır, I said. “I am now a Muslim, I am no longer Armenian,” she repeated, and she waved, as though ridding herself of a disease. “I want to speak openly,” she finally said. She had lived for many years in Istanbul, an active member of the Armenian community along with her late husband, who died of cancer. Every Sunday she went to Surp Harutyun, the fishermen’s church in Kumkapı, where they would receive a weekly support of five Turkish liras every weekend after mass. But when her husband died, Lydia, with no children, was left alone. Nobody in the Armenian community aided her, or they ignored her. She returned to her village, where her Muslim neighbors helped her pull herself together—the Armenians live for the most part in Istanbul in the winter. A few years later she had married Emmanuel, who was also widowed, and they both converted. When we left their home, a man with an affable expression greeted us in Armenian, “Parev.” Taniel said he was the son of Emmanuel, who had three boys and one girl from his first marriage. This son, in his 30s, lived in Tütenli throughout the year. I asked if this son had converted to Islam too. Taniel looked at me as though I was kidding: “No, come on now,” he said. That was something only Emmanuel would do, he suggested, as if it was an inside joke. I was waiting with Taniel outside the entrance to the Armenian village in the chilly air of autumn, by the oldest Armenian home in the village, built a century and a half ago. I had called the same cabdriver to come and pick me up. 311

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On the road, I expressed my wish to see Masıroluk. It was the village where the Armenians had decided to convert 30 years ago, according to Baydzar, but I did not tell the driver this. The man turned to me in surprise: “Didn’t I tell you that I was from that village?” I asked him about his origins. A different people lived in their village before, he said, but they had left. He did not say that they were of Armenian origin, neither did he deny it, nor did he say that they were not of Armenian origin. “Our elders spoke a different language,” he said. “My grandfather said, ‘İnç g’anes’ to greet his friends,” he said as an example. I begged him to repeat it so I could record it. He did, but he did not know what it meant. Was it Greek? I asked him, but he did not know either. That was all he knew about “the language of his grandfather.” I started to recite basic words in Armenian: hats (bread), vosgi (gold), arev (sun), dzarr (tree), gov (cow), chur (water): “I know chur,” he said, turning to me with a broad smile: “It’s water.” He did not know dığa (boy). Then I said ağçig: “Girl!” he exclaimed. He seemed calm and happy. So I decided to let my mask drop: “What your grandfather was saying was ‘How do you do?’ in Armenian, in a conversational variant.” And for good measure, I added, “All these words you are using are Armenian,” so if his grandfather spoke the language he was Armenian and so was he, I said. “Didn’t you know?” I asked him. “No, I didn’t know,” he said as we were driving through a thick forest. Baydzar had told me that there was a cabdriver from Masıroluk who did not speak Armenian but he remembered his heritage as a child and was trying to rescue what he could from his memory. He would occasionally speak with her, in an effort to save these shreds from the past. This cabdriver, however, insisted that he sincerely did not know that his grandfather’s language was Armenian. After I told him that it was, he paled, and fell into a gloomy silence. With alarm slowly growing in him, he begged 1,000 times that I promised him that I would not use the footage of him saying these words. “What a terrifying country Turkey must be, and how racist,” I told him. “You dread that it may be known that you are Armenian and that you fear that I may show videos on the internet with you saying ‘hello, how are you,’ ‘girl,’ and ‘water,’ not even knowing these were Armenian words.” He listened in astonished silence while the forest grew darker. “Why?” I said. “Aren’t we Armenians human?” It was not that, he said. There was no point in visiting their village, he told me. “There are 20 sorry souls with nothing to say, and they remember nothing.” Before he dropped me off, he implored me a few more times that I would not post the videos of him saying these few words in Armenian. Of course I would not, I told him. Despite a ready smile on his face, what gave away his sadness was his voice. That he could not disguise. 312

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We had arrived at Taşköprü. I told him that he was from a nation that was older than the Pompeiopolis ruins nearby, from the first century bc. He remained silent when I told him that he was Armenian, too. Should I return, he said, I ought to call him to travel around Kastamonu. I wrote down his name as the Armenian cabdriver of Taşköprü. It was a traditional job among Armenians in Uruguay. So many were cabdrivers in the South American country that a few decades ago it was not unusual to flag one down in Montevideo to the call of “Hey, Armenian!” The Kastamonu cabdriver laughed, and bid me farewell with the Turkish expression, “May your road be always open.”

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Yozgat The knock on the door was peremptory, very much unlike that of hotel staff: “Police!” There were three agents: two were good, even greeting me and smiling. The other one played bad cop convincingly, but did not overdo it. The camera tripod had attracted his attention, thankfully passing over the notebooks, which he browsed cursorily and put away when the first samples of flowers and leaves dropped out. After the bad one was done examining my luggage, the good cops thanked me and bid me a good stay in Yozgat. The balcony of my hotel room opened onto the main square of the city. In the evening, Prime Minister Erdoğan would speak from the podium set up there as part of his campaign for president. A visit I had planned to the village of Bebek would spare me his angry voice, magnified 1,000-fold. A young mother and her teenage daughter worked as maids at the hotel where I stayed in Yozgat, and would stare at me with curiosity. Most unusually in the Anatolian interior, both wore crosses. They looked Armenian, but when I asked if that was so, they shook their heads. Were they perchance Chaldean? The young girl nodded enthusiastically, “Yes, yes, that!” she said in Turkish. To check if she was lying, I suggested if they were Greek Orthodox, and she acknowledged that too. In other words, they were anything but Armenian. Only later did I find out that Turkey had resettled Armenian refugees from northern Iraq, who tended to be Kurdish speakers, in Yozgat. Two Yozgat Armenians I met in Istanbul guessed there would not be more than a handful of Armenians left in the province, which had the reputation of being a nationalist stronghold. Both were jewelers at the Great Bazaar. The family of one of them had been deported to make way for Muslim refugees from Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1933. The other one’s family emigrated in 1950 because their Muslim neighbors had made their life impossible, burning their crops and killing their animals. A friend from Ankara, a distant relative of the late Patriarch Shnorhk on his mother’s side, had an Islamicized relative in Yozgat, Mustafa Oğuzhan, born in 314

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1933. He lived on a farm with his second wife, whom he had brought in from Marash after the passing of his first wife, and their four children, the youngest of whom was ten years old. A Turkish flag flew outside his home and there was another one in the living room, which Mustafa used to do the namaz. Dilşad, his oldest daughter from the second marriage, disguised displeasure, which flickered for a second in her eyes, when I told her she had a striking resemblance to an old friend, a granddaughter of Marash Armenians: “That may come from my Marash side,” she said. “My father is Armenian only on his mother’s side.” She was articulate, and spoke English fluently. An observant Muslim who always wore a headscarf, she was an Economics student at Bilgi University in Ankara. At that moment, she was helping her youngest sister with her lessons in Arabic, which she took privately at a Qur’anic school. Mustafa’s Armenian mother was 16 or 17 when she had married a Muslim and converted. She was born in 1910, “but she had not seen massacres or anything of the sort.” Yet, “she had suffered a lot,” he said, without elaborating. Her sister Lusiné had remained a Christian and moved to Istanbul. The sisters had never spoken or met again. At the time there was not enough money to come and go. That was why the links had been lost, he suggested. Perhaps his mother’s Islamicization had affected relations too, he wondered, but if it had been so he would not have been welcomed by his Armenian aunt and cousins, at whose home Mustafa had lived for years while working in Istanbul. He was very fond of the Armenian side of his family, even if contacts had died over the years. On his father’s side, I was sensing he was Kurdish and so he was, albeit Turkified. Any surviving Armenians had left Bebek in 1946 “because there was no work.” There was famine in the village. Yozgat was the poorest province in Turkey. “We went to Istanbul to learn how to make money, but we are still poor.” He spoke some Armenian. Once he had been called “dog” in Armenian in Istanbul and he had understood, to the consternation of the people who had insulted him. “Şun,” he said the word in Armenian, smiling. As my train of thought was running erratically, I asked him if there were wolves in the vicinity of the farm. “Yes, but they are not a threat to humans,” Mustafa responded. “If wolves are taken care of and loved by humans, they protect humans, and they reward them with their loyalty.” In the past, there were many immigrants from the Balkans: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia. “The good ones among these new refugees mingled with the Turks and Kurds, and the rest left in 1948.” They picked little fights but had given up, seeing that they could not get ahead of the local Muslims. “Kurds and Turks were not happy with these refugees that came from the Balkans, because they didn’t want to share with them the property left by Armenians.” 315

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Dilşad asked me if there were any functioning churches in Turkey. So diminished and inconspicuous was the Christian presence in Turkey that even a well-read bilingual student, who was comfortable discussing foreign affairs and study abroad, did not know that there was an active Christian community in the country, concentrated in Istanbul. A good part of Eastern Anatolia was Armenia, well before the arrival of the Turks, I told her. Did she know the history? “A little,” she responded and looked away, and I understood immediately from her evasive eyes that she knew better than she admitted. “This village was Armenian,” I continued, “but it all ended in 1915.” Then she inquired about my travels in China and I told her a little anecdote about the first restaurant in Beijing I had entered for dinner after arriving late in the evening on my first trip, in the summer of 1993. I had drawn a pig on a napkin to order food, but the waitresses were smiling, a little embarrassed, and saying, “Méyio, méyio!” (“No”), one of the three words in Chinese that I knew. It turned out to be a restaurant of the Hui, the Mandarin Muslims. But the Hui, whose neighborhood I had also visited in Xian, were different than the Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people in China’s westernmost areas, mainly in the province of Uighur Xinjiang. Now Dilşad’s face lit up, with bright eyes and a broad smile: “How lucky you are to have visited those lands!” she exclaimed. “The first Turkic races came from there.” The genesis of her nation had marked the demise of mine. Mustafa’s 15-year-old son drove me on the tractor to the cemetery to visit the grave of his grandmother. It was a large field of indeterminate contours, with broken stelae and a few slabs engraved with a cross, but I saw none with Armenian or Greek inscriptions, or any non-Latin alphabet, other than old Islamic tombstones in ornate Arabic. Some old graves looked desecrated. Neighbors had repeatedly reported it to the gendarmes but they did nothing about gold diggers, the boy said. A hawk was flying over the cemetery in wide circles, patiently. I had visited Mustafa in the hope that he could provide some insight into any Armenian life in Yozgat, but there was none left to his know­ledge. Patriarch Shnorhk’s mother was born in the village of Bebek, too, and was related to Mustafa’s mother, but he did not know about it: only that she had married in İğdeli, where the churchman was born, and nothing else.     

Aziz, the grandchild of Patriarch Shnorhk’s mother from her second marriage, was working in his field but he would come and meet me, his wife told me, inviting me to wait for him in the yard. Shortly after he arrived on his tractor, 316

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he ushered me inside and laid out a bountiful table of food and fruits for me in the kitchen, even though it was Ramadan. The imam of İğdeli, a young man from the Black Sea region, had called in too, and I accepted the hospitality with his sanction. It was halal, he said. Travelers were exempt from the fast, he said, without helping himself to any of the cheese, honey, watermelon, or bread, with colors and perfumes that invited unrestrained feasting. I had been lucky to find Aziz, as he usually resided in Kayseri and only summered in İğdeli, which coincided with the harvest season. He was on the record setting straight a controversy about the alleged kinship of Patriarch Shnorhk Kalustyan—who served from 1961 to 1990—with the highest Islamic authority in Turkey. Born in this village in 1913, Patriarch Shnorhk’s life embodied the trials and tribulations of Armenians in Turkey in the twentieth century. “Only my mother and I are left of our clan of 70 people,” he had said. A tenacious advocate of the Armenian communities left in Anatolia after the Genocide, Patriarch Shnorhk was also the object of much public attention in Turkey for insistent claims that he and imam Lütfi Doğan, the head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, were half-brothers. During the Genocide, Patriarch Shnorhk’s mother, Shushan Gültane, had lost her husband, the prelate’s father. Afterwards she had married a Turkish man whose surname was Doğan and with whom she had children, including Aziz’s mother. I asked Aziz about Shushan Gültane’s marriage to Hacı Ali Doğan, his grandfather. To his know­ledge there had been nothing out of the ordinary to it, other than a widow taking a second husband and converting to his religion, implicitly ruling out any of the sordid underside involved in the unions of surviving Armenian girls and women with Muslim men after 1915. There was no point in my probing further, I reckoned, as Aziz would hardly know, or would not disclose it even if he did. There was at least one mention in the literature that Shushan’s second husband had abducted her.1 But other than the coincidence of the Doğan last name—a very common one in the country—there was no substance to the story, as Aziz had repeatedly said in several interviews, dismissing these reports as baseless. Yet he only stoked the fire in a country where conspiracy theories were more accepted currency than official stories, perhaps on account of commonplace fabrications. To complicate matters, two unrelated imams, identically named Lütfi Doğan, had succeeded each other at the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, one serving from 1968 to 1972, with the other taking over until 1976. As both Lütfi Doğans disliked each other, they used these stories about either’s kinship to Patriarch Shnorhk to smear each other, exchanging accusations of hiding an Armenian origin. More importantly, the imams were born in the provinces of Gümüşhane and Ermenek, both far from Yozgat.2 317

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“Patriarch Shnorhk was not related to either Lütfi Doğan,” said Aziz, as he spread on the table clippings of articles in which he denied any kinship, as did the families of the imams as well. The controversy had been reignited in 2005, when the Primate of the Armenian Church of Germany, Archbishop Karekin Bekdjian, said in comments published in the Turkish press that Patriarch Shnorhk had told him that Lütfi Doğan, former head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, was his half-brother. I telephoned Archbishop Karekin in October 2013 and he ratified that Patriarch Shnorhk indeed had told him about being brothers with Doğan. Their conversation had taken place after class at the seminary in 1961 or 1962. “The Patriarch told me so himself,” Archbishop Karekin said. “Now, the Doğans and others have refuted it, the Patriarch’s sister denies it and keeps silent, so I cannot add anything else, but I can just confirm the Patriarch himself said so.” He believed the Patriarch referred to the second Lütfi Doğan, who was born in Ermenek in 1927. A journalist who in 1998 had had the opportunity to read Patriarch Shnorhk’s private diaries recalled no mention of any kinship to Lütfi Doğan. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople did not respond to my request to see the diaries. An Armenian priest based in Istanbul also told me that the rumor circulated among seminarians in the 1960s. Yet a former student of the Tıbrevank High School in Istanbul, where seminarians studied at the time, said that it was an inside joke. This former student, and now a retired editor at Aras Publishing House, was surprised to hear the story I relayed from Archbishop Karekin. Shortly after the November 2013 conference on Islamicized Armenians at Boğaziçi University, an Istanbul-born Armenian scholar now based in Paris told me of an immediate family member who had been mentored by Patriarch Shnorhk. This relative, the Paris scholar said, remembered the late prelate speaking with Lütfi Doğan on the telephone every day. Aziz was shaking his head when I told him this, insisting that none of it could be true and that there was absolutely no relation. Even if there was, it would have mattered less than what both men left behind, so I asked Aziz how he related to his Armenian ancestry. For, as Hrant Dink had observed, what mattered was that Patriarch Shnorhk had Muslim relatives. “Ellhamdüllillah we were born Muslim.” Even though the spirit of my question was about the tragedy of Patriarch Shnorhk’s family, Aziz had first interpreted the question through religion. That was the default in Turkey. According to Aziz, the Patriarch’s mother, Shushan Gültane, had told Aziz’s mother—Hanımkız, her daughter from her Turkish husband—that she had remained secretly a Muslim. Yet since 1959, Shushan had joined her son first at the Armenian monastery of Jerusalem and then in Istanbul, where she passed 318

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away on November 1, 1969, with then Religious Affairs director Lütfi Doğan praying with Patriarch Shnorhk during her burial ceremony at the Armenian Cemetery of Balıklı, thus fueling the rumors even more. His grandmother’s Christian burial caused Aziz consternation. Yet, as Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan had observed decades later, it would not have been allowed had Shushan been a Muslim. In addition, her attendance of service at church whenever her health permitted it was well documented. Aziz’s eyes welled up when he remembered the Patriarch and his grandmother, and he hugged me: “We are all relatives.” As a parting gift, he gave me a pen and a red cap with the white logotype of an insurance company. It was one of those simple gifts that had much larger value. As it bore the colors of the Turkish flag, the hat was the single most effective camouflage item to blend in with the crowd. John McPhee would get “puzzled glances” at every truck stop he entered in the US as he traveled in big rigs for the writing of Uncommon Carriers, his chronicle of unusual means of transportation. A baseball cap he bought at a gas station outside Atlanta, with an American flag and a spread eagle emblazoned on it in primary colors plus gold, made him invisible: “The glances died like flies.”3 My red-and-white hat did the trick most of the time. Even in Turkey, however, it did not escape the attention of some. A leftist friend in the Black Sea area was half-serious when he asked me about the choice of colors. The response that it was a gift from the great-nephew of Patriarch Shnorhk did not convince him. He was a friend, but the hat was not foolproof.

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Part VII

Kharpert

Eighteen

Argat The woman in the black niqab trudged in the snow. Only her eyes were visible through the veil, but she was looking down at the path, trickier on the stretches covered in slush and water, the residue of the melting ice on the sides. It led into her hometown in the mountains of Kharpert, the province Turks called Elazığ. She was headed to the home of her cousin, Kirkor Menaf, the first “hidden Armenian” I had known. I had met him and his two cousins in the summer of 2011 in their village, where there were another four secret Armenian families, out of a total of 20 households. Argat was the archetypal Armenian village nested in an unreachable valley, comprised of houses that from a distance looked pressed against each other, huddled amid the immensity of the surrounding crests, “where even the road gets scared of itself and shrinks,” as Hagop Oshagan had written in his novel The Remnant, the culmination of the literature of catastrophe spawned by the Genocide.1 The Sönmez family did not disclose their identity in the cities where they lived and worked in the winter. But in the last years of his life, Kirkor Menaf had begun to tell his closest friends that he was an Armenian. Yet in our later conversations, he was disillusioned by the reluctance of Christian Armenians to accept the Muslim ones. For in their case, conversion had been complete. It had been God’s will that they had found Islam, the true path, through the exactions of the Genocide and for mysteries that were not for men to understand. They hid their origins, however, because “every time something goes wrong in Turkey, they blame it on the Armenians,” Kirkor Menaf had explained. Our first contact had been through a social network. He was the administrator of a web page dedicated to Western Armenia. Interest in his Armenian origin had piqued him in his late teens, and had only grown. Nothing Armenian was alien to him; neither the literature nor the music but, first and foremost, the history. An attempt at self-teaching Armenian had been truncated by all the reasons that doomed the language: lack of interlocutors and any practical 323

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application; a singular alphabet and an arcane grammar, with a rich lexicon in which words imported from Parthian, Assyrian, or Arabic had been assimilated and transformed beyond recognition. Nobody else in his family shared his curiosity, even if all acknowledged their origins. For them, Islam made any other affiliation of secondary relevance. He described the geography of the homeland in its original names, rather than the Turkish ones, and he loved the circumspect architecture of the Armenian churches, in one of which an ancestor had served as a priest. Yet during the long silences in our conversations in the Ramadan of the summer of 2011, when we had first met, he would throw himself into impromptu prostrations, whispering verses in Arabic to Allah. Two separate persons coexisted in him: one who called the River Murat by its Armenian name, Aradzani, and the province where he lived Kharpert, and the one who revered God with prayers learned by heart in a language he did not understand. Perhaps the name he had chosen for himself, dropping the Islamic Abdul for the Armenian Kirkor, his grandfather’s original name before his conversion, and keeping a Muslim middle name, Menaf, was an unintended reflection of the duality he was trying to reconcile within himself. So versed in Armenian history and culture, Kirkor Menaf represented a case for the acceptance of converts into the mainstream, or so I thought. Yet most Armenians probably lacked the referents to relate to him on a religious level. The sight of him performing the namaz and reciting lines from Arabic scriptures had showed the limits of rapprochement. He belonged to a community of faith that was alien to fundamental markers of Armenian identity: the language; the Church; the land (which an Islamic nation, if not Islam itself, had conquered and emptied of its Armenians); and the history, which still found Armenians and Muslims in separate, often enemy camps. Religion may not have been the main trigger for rivalry, though that was debatable too, for since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century Armenia’s conflicts have been with Muslim nations, up to the present dispute with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It had all begun with the Arab invasion, which had damaged Armenian statehood beyond repair. “She is Armenian, too,” one of the cousins of the extended clan had told me when I inquired about the woman in the black niqab, as she donned the strictest Islamic garb that seemed uncommon among the women of Argat, whose colorful costumes and shawls I had noticed in the briefest of glimpses, as they would vanish behind doors at the appearance of a male stranger. Not only by religion, but even sartorially, she was near the end of the Armenian identity spectrum— the farthest removed from the core. If it were represented as a chromatic scale, the black of her garments would mark that extreme. Yet curiously, the same color could also symbolize the other end of the continuum, the Armenians most deeply enmeshed in the trappings of the nation, none more so than the clergy in 324

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their black cassocks. For the powerful impression of seeing her shuffling forth in the snow amid the mountains had brought me back to her relative in New York, Archbishop Oshagan Tcholoyan, of the Armenian Prelacy. The clan was a microcosm that encompassed the diversity of a nation that is mostly unaware of it. The woman in black was headed to the funeral of her cousin, that the women in the clan would hold at home while the men would pray for him in the mosque. Kirkor Menaf had returned to the land in which he was born and raised, a part of a historical homeland where Armenians were thought to have been exterminated, or assimilated, to the last one. He had died of stomach cancer two days earlier at the age of 26. A cousin had told me his last words to his mother were in Zazaki: “Ez ho mırim,” which sounded so eerily similar to the Armenian “Yes gı merrnim” (“I die”). A photo captured in his last hours showed him stretched on a bed by a curtained window, black eyes wide open in his emaciated face. His olive skin had become yellowish and shiny, and he had turned toward his older brother, an imam in a skullcap, reading from the Qur’an. The youngest brother and his sister, in a purple hijab, were at the bedhead, looking at Kirkor Menaf. Another photo, from a few months earlier, showed him sitting next to his father, already skeletal but with a big lump that had grown on the side of his belly as the cancer destroyed his stomach. His other brother, also an imam, had showed me the list of the 25 most played songs on Kirkor Menaf ’s smartphone. The first five were by Ara Dinkjian, an Istanbul Armenian oud player, topped by his Bu Akşam (Tonight) in Turkish, and the sixth was Aram Tigran’s Cano. The conductor Robert Spano has said that music is not necessarily universal: it may be first and foremost local, as it relates to a people’s soul in the same way a language does to its speakers. If music be as good a benchmark as any that have been suggested to determine identity, then Kirkor Menaf died as Armenian as any, if only buried in an Islamic shroud. Until only two days before his parting, Kirkor Menaf was confident he would heal, which had made it even more poignant for his relatives who had seen an older sister die of the same untreatable cancer some years earlier. His last messages had showed diminishing hope: “Ahpar, I am ill,” was his last one, which he addressed to me by a conversational form of “brother” in Armenian. He had been insisting with growing urgency that I come to Kharpert. Yet I only got to see the little mound on the plot where he was buried, still missing the tombstone. Kirkor Menaf died on the day I took the bus from Dikranagerd.     

The fingers of one hand were not enough for Şefik, Kirkor Menaf ’s younger brother, to count the imams in the Sönmez family. The inclination to serve God 325

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ran so strongly in the clan that it had traveled across religions. They spoke of an elder who had been the pastor of an Armenian church by the River Aradzani, but the details had been lost. Şefik had been the imam of the Great Mosque of Harput, a twelfth-century construction with a crooked minaret, short and curved inwards on a gentle gradient toward the top, like a lighthouse. They were the descendants of Kirkor Ogasian, originally from Bağin, an Armenian village two hours’ march across the mountains from Argat. After the destruction of Bağin in the Genocide, Kirkor’s two older brothers left for Rhode Island. For reasons unknown to both the Ogasians in Providence and the Sönmez in Kharpert, Kirkor stayed on under the protection of a Kurdish ağa and married Zerman, an Armenian orphan. Both converted around 1925. Kirkor refused to join his brothers in the US even though they had promised to give him, the Sönmez say, “his own weight in gold.” They would still correspond in Armenian until 1964, when a last letter postmarked in Providence arrived from Melkon Ogasian, who in the spidery handwriting of a trembling hand reported of his illness and old age, and begged for news from Kirkor and his family. Then they showed me a yellowed sheet of paper with handwriting in Armenian script on both sides, but the beautifully spelled out words were unintelligible from the very beginning: յասին վալքորանիլհաքիմ իննըքը լըմինալ մորսըլիմ ալա սիրաթին մոսթաքիյմ …

yasin valkoranilhakim innıkı lıminal morsılim ala siratin mostakiym …

The alphabet was Armenian, but the language was Arabic. It was a 1920s transcription by grandfather Kirkor of Surah 36, that someone had dictated to him: “Ya’ Seen. By the wise Qur’an, indeed you are from among the messengers on a straight path.” The chapter, known by its first, mysterious two words, variously described by Islamic scholars as one of the names of Prophet Muhammad or a miracle only known to Allah, is considered “the heart of the Qur’an.” Kirkor Menaf ’s imam brother may have been reading to him from this chapter, as is customary on the deathbed of Muslims, when his last picture was taken. Not only did the Armenian calligraphy show an educated hand, but a native Armenian speaker’s pronunciation limitations also showed through, including the difficulty in pronouncing the w at the beginning of a word. Even though nobody in the family could read the document anymore, they were aware of its seminal value as testimony marking their transition into Islam. Kirkor Menaf was aware that his grandfather was a Genocide survivor with little choice but to 326

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convert in order to survive. Did that not temper his Islamic devotion? “Maybe our elders regretted their conversion, but we don’t know anything about that,” he said. “We remember and grieve over the sorrows, but we do not regret that we changed our religion.” As if to rebuke me, I was later shown an old picture of the Kaaba that a hajji had brought in the 1970s for grandfather Kirkor, who very much wanted to travel to Mecca but had died in 1981 without being able to afford the pilgrimage. As nobody but Kirkor Menaf was into their Armenian past with so much passion, the family probably would have assimilated earlier, were it not for a custom widespread in Anatolia, including among Islamicized Armenians: they married into the clan, probably following an economic rationale to avoid the partition of their properties. But by doing so they had preserved their Armenian identity in its most basic expression—the ethnic origin—and the memory of their origins. Only that linked them to their past as, in addition to Islam, they were Zazaki speakers and not only Turkish citizens, but also tended to sympathize with Erdoğan and the Islamist right. His two imam brothers were unlike him, not only in the absence of devotion to all things Armenian but also in a lack of general curiosity, except the younger one, who shared Kirkor Menaf ’s fancy for gadgets, which did not extend to any interest in the outside world. While I wondered if this trait could be attributed to the immanentism inherent to their religious vocation, Kirkor Menaf had observed that young people became more indifferent to history and their own past as they moved from the village to the cities. The older imam among the Sönmez brothers had responded to massacre stories that came up in conversation by saying that the taking of innocent lives was against the precepts of Islam and that it was unjustifiable under the Qur’an. Yet he was judging the Genocide as a Muslim cleric rather than as an Armenian, as if it was somebody else’s history rather than his own. Women and men lived in separate quarters at the Sönmez household, and I never saw them interacting. The women would leave the food outside the door of the hall where the men resided, decorated with large wooden rosaries and mementos from the Mecca pilgrimage of Kirkor Menaf ’s father, which had cost him $5,000. But one day I had to fetch my camera from my bag, which I had left in the kitchen, next door to our room. One of the younger women of the household, in her 20s, was there doing her chores, barefoot and in a colorful dress that suggested her curves. Her head was uncovered, her tousled hair falling on her shoulders. It had never occurred to me how much more sensual a woman’s hair could really be if you had not seen it before. She did not run away, flouting custom. We both observed each other in complete silence, the little subversion we indulged in the segregated household. 327

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A little later, I joined Kirkor Menaf and his cousin Şenol on an excursion to the top of the mountain, an hour-long climb. There were the ruins of the first house his grandfather had built, right after marrying Zerman; it was all that was left of the hamlet of Mezreh. Şenol donned his rural guard camouflage uniform and led the way, riding his donkey through the lush vegetation, along a creek that sometimes wound into our path. Not even under the summer sun while climbing the mountain did Kirkor Menaf break the fast, and only once did he bow down at the creek to wet his lips. As he had a neurological disorder, Şenol was exempted from the restrictions of the Ramadan along with me, so we helped ourselves to the chilly water we cupped in our hands. At home in the village, his brothers and cousins would laugh when the şofra, the large tray of food, arrived for me and Şenol joined me, saying, not unaware of the comic effect: “I have psychological problems, so I can eat, too.” He was well informed. One day he engaged in discussion with Kirkor Menaf on how many Armenians there were in Turkey, quoting accurately from Hrant Dink’s articles and other news stories he had read in Agos. Once he started talking frantically about guerrillas and the PKK but he was hushed by the others before I could understand anything. The last night in Argat on my first trip, as we all sat around a campfire, I turned my eyes up. “Are you looking at the stars?” Şenol asked me, triggering the laughter of the Sönmez men. “There are seven stars in the form of a trapezoid in the sky,” he said, as we all fell silent. “I am one of those seven stars, and I am looking down at the world with sadness.” His melancholic streak had shown itself on the excursion to Mezreh. Şenol had been singing sad Turkish songs at a distance, while Kirkor Menaf and I sat mostly in silence under the shadow of an ancient oak tree, with enormous roots that clutched the land around the dilapidated walls. On our way up to the ruins of Mezreh, Kirkor Menaf had showed me an almost vertical wall of a mountain. “That’s the Armenians’ Gorge.” Armenians had been thrown to their deaths from there in 1915. There were no more bones left, he had said even before I had managed to ask, “Is there …?” It was a path I would retrace three years later when I returned for his funeral. We came for a walk with Ibrahim, one of the cousins, amid mountains that showed their teeth in the thick of the winter, with the trees naked and much of life around us frozen. I had been introduced to Ibrahim at the funeral service in the mosque that morning, after Kirkor Menaf ’s younger brother, the other imam, had given the ezzan through the minaret’s loudspeakers. Kemal, the closest to Kirkor Menaf among the cousins and still the most rattled by his death, had joined us too. I knew Kemal from the visit in the summer of 2011, and we had become close as he spoke English: “We are Zazas now,” he had said with a contented smile, to explain how their Armenian 328

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identity was no longer a source of anguish for them, but he immediately rephrased it as “Zazaki speakers” after he had taken a second look at me. In his late 40s, Ibrahim was twice Kemal’s age and remembered grandfather Kirkor as well as what his parents said of great-grandmother Zara, who to the end of her life would cry every day to the lamentations of “Savage Zazas, how could they!” The grandchildren of Zara, the parents of the youngest generation of the Sönmez, remembered her for her wails of “Vahşi Zazalar” (“Savage Zazas”). She was five when she saw bandits decapitate her parents and her seven siblings. Zara had then fled through the mountains from their village, Sığek, to another one called Bahro, seeing huge piles of corpses along the way. Ibrahim had in common with Kirkor Menaf the attachment to his roots. He had even learned some letters of the Armenian alphabet before his enthusiasm had tapered off under the grinding demands of adult life. On a brochure he took out of his pocket he wrote “պապա,” or “baba,” Armenian for “dad,” but he wanted to toss the paper away in embarrassment. Finally persuaded not to, we walked the mud trail to the edge of the village and followed the path toward the Armenians’ Gorge (“Ermeni Deresi” in Turkish), on the Red Hill (“Kızıl Tepe” in Turkish), which they had asked me to translate into Armenian: “Garmir Pılur,” a name that some in the family took to using, even though I could not confirm that it was the historical name. “They had killed so many people that a year after 1915 they could still detect the smell of blood coming from the mountains in Argat,” Ibrahim said, quoting his grandfather’s recollection as we stood on the edge of the gorge in the freezing morning. “Savages.” The story unwound the skein of memories, relayed by his elders: In 1925 or 1926, three young Armenian women came to Argat begging for food. One of them had a baby. They were beggars. The Zazas asked them for gold but these women did not speak Zazaki and did not understand, but they finally figured what these Zazas wanted. But they didn’t have any gold: they were beggars. They were saying they didn’t have any gold and that they had come to ask for some food. At the time there were these fatwas that whoever killed seven Armenians would go to heaven and these Zazas were trying to get money for the pilgrimage to Mecca, so they threatened the women that they would kill them if they did not tell them where the gold was. And they threw these three women and their baby into this gorge, the same one where they had killed a lot of Armenians in 1915. My father was born in 1921. He used to say that after the Armenians were liquidated people began to die of starvation, because there was no more food or work left. Armenians used to bake bread loaves as long as the street, my father said. But Zazas did not know how to make things work. My grandparents, Kirkor and Zerman, had covered the fence of their house with thorns and broken glass,

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Secret Nation and they would wake up at the cries of Zaza thieves when they tried to invade their home. Another Zaza man liked a beautiful Armenian woman, so he kidnapped her but he killed her child, snapping the boy’s neck like a bird’s and tearing him apart. He just ripped him up like a chicken before his mother and grabbed her. After the massacres there were many orphans left in the streets of Palu. There was a group of very small children, whose parents and older siblings had been deported. The kids had been left in the city square to be picked up by Muslim families who wanted them. One Zaza gathered nine of these orphans and put them on a cart that he took to a forest, where he decapitated the children and then pushed the cart with the bodies into a lake. He would tell the story for decades, laughing. On his deathbed in 1960 he was barking like a dog and braying like an ass.

In their own language, Ibrahim said, the name the Zazas give to the 1915 massacres was tertele (pillage). Kemal had not spoken a word, still looking dejected and his eyes dry, as the three of us faced the Armenian’s Gorge from the path covered in snow. He kicked a rock the size of a watermelon into the ravine. It rolled violently down the slope, dragging smaller stones with it, and crashed against the serrated bottom, cracking open. It was red inside.

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Dersim “It is the Turks who are afraid,” he said, and stamped on the ground: “This is Armenian land.” The student of Economics at Utrecht had been living in the Netherlands since childhood, but returned to Dersim with his family and his Dutch girlfriend every summer for long stays. He was talking calmly, making no effort to be heard over the deafening noise around us, like a doctor pronouncing an irreversible prognosis, and he did rather look like one with his rimless eyeglasses and white shirt. At no time did he say he was Armenian. He may not have been, as probably most in the crowd at the stadium were not. The revelry was still going strong past midnight at the summer music festival. Spontaneous halay dances erupted across the stadium: men and women interlocked arms and held each other by the little finger as they took three sideways steps to the right, followed by one to the left. The Utrecht student’s friend was accompanied by a local Alevi friend: “The Armenians are the owners of these lands,” he said, stamping too. His grandmother was from a village he declined to name, where everybody was an Armenian converted to Alevism. Then faces started turning to the source of growing roars, like an approaching thunderstorm. A thick column of people brandishing big red flags broke into the Tunceli stadium, chanting slogans as one and punching their raised left fists: Savaş, arın, kazan! İbo yaşıyor, TİKKO savaşıyor! Savaş, arın, kazan! İbo yaşıyor, TİKKO savaşıyor! War, purification, victory! Ibo is alive, TİKKO is fighting! War, purification, victory! Ibo is alive, TİKKO is fighting!

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What in the distance had looked like flags were vertical red banners, like those seen in demonstrations during the Cultural Revolution in China. Not only the form, but also the substance had Chinese inspiration, for those banners bore the images of Mao and another man with Caucasian features in a cap and what looked like the collar of a Mao suit, the uniform of the Chinese in the People’s Republic well into the 1980s. It was the founder of TİKKO, İbrahim Kaypakkaya, known to his followers by the shortened form “Ibo.” The demonstrators were members of the Democratic Rights Federation of Dersim. It was in this province that Kaypakkaya had been badly injured during fighting against the Turkish army in 1973. He was captured and shot dead in prison a few months later. On the other side of the field, Atatürk looked down on the crowd from a portrait sketched in pencil, blown up into a gigantic mural. But the revolutionaries’ parade was a side distraction at the music festival. An even more subversive show would happen a few minutes later: Թշնամին պարտած է, կեցցէ՛ Հայաստան, Կեցցէ՛ Հայաստան եւ ազատութիւն …

The enemy is defeated, long live Armenia, Long live Armenia and freedom …

Most of the public did not understand Armenian, nor were they aware that this was a revolutionary song, one of those sung by fedayis fighting Turkish soldiers and Kurdish bandits from the late nineteenth century until 1915. That the songs by the Maratug ensemble did not ruffle any feathers attested to a new era of freedom dawning in Turkey. Maratug’s lead vocalist, Ardashes Darontsi, later performed on stage with Mikail Aslan, the best-known musician from Dersim, whose own rendering of Armenian songs from the province had been compiled on a CD called Petak (“beehive” in Armenian). Everybody in the city said that Mikail Aslan was one of the province’s hidden Armenians. Backstage after the show was over, the singer looked at me with a grave expression when I mentioned it to him. He stayed silent for a few seconds as he examined me with a curiosity that felt hostile: “We in Dersim know very well who among us are the Armenians, and we protect them, and we will not let anything bad happen to them.” It was probably the first time in a century that a music group from Armenia had performed in the historical lands. The participation of the Maratug band had been conceived and organized by Mardiros Azad, the founder of the Center of Dersim Armenians only a year earlier in 2010, shortly after deciding to convert to Christianity and dropping the name given to him at birth as an Alevi, Selahettin, to adopt an Armenian one. To the admiration of Diaspora 332

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Armenians and the chagrin of many of those still in Dersim who preferred to conceal their identity, he said that a majority of the rural population in the province was of Armenian origin. Dersim had been a haven for Genocide survivors who had made their way there.1 Locked in the eponymous mountains, it was a demographic island within Turkey. The only province with an overwhelming majority of Alevis, it had long been a thorn in the side of the Ottoman Empire by virtue of its autonomy. It was the epicenter of two major uprisings against central power: the Koçgiri rebellion of 1921, so named after the tribe that led it, and the 1937 revolt, headed by an Alevi religious chief, Seyid Rıza.2 Most of the literature refers to these rebellions as Kurdish uprisings, but it would be more accurate to call them Alevi. Hostility between Dersim Alevis on the one hand, and Sunni Muslim Kurds and Zazas on the other, frequently erupted into fighting in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sunnis often attacked Alevis at the behest of Turkey’s central power: right after the Armenian Genocide, many Kurdish ağas were co-opted by the Turkish government into its patronage system, as it distributed the properties and wealth that had belonged to the Armenians.3 Alevism is a syncretic religion that professes adoration of Imam Ali yet ignores basic tenets of Islam, a heterodoxy that has earned the misgivings, if not outright enmity, of more conservative Muslims.     

The Istanbul cabdriver looked extremely tired, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the maddening traffic of the evening rush hour. Other than the traffic, which had only got worse, this was not the Turkey I had visited for the last time 15 years earlier, in 1996. Back then, Armenians were so inconspicuous that Turkish tour guides guessed there were 1,000, or at most 2,000 left in the entire country, even though the Istanbul Armenian community estimated it had 50,000 members. But now, Armenian music would be blasting from speakers on Istiklal Street, the ancient Pera, from the Mephisto Bookstore, or a tiny store that sold CDs. A crowd would gather on April 24 to commemorate the Genocide and so would another one outside the offices of Agos on the anniversary of Hrant Dink’s murder. There was a feel of Indian summer to it. Yet it was a period of amazing freedom, when only the older people were still afraid of photo and video cameras. I asked the cabdriver where he was from, as I had been doing for a few days, stopping people randomly under the guise of asking them for directions, and I would engage them in conversation to learn about their origins. “Tunceli,” he said, or “Bronze Hand” in Turkish, the official name for Dersim after the military operation designed to tame the province since 1935. The 333

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driver awoke from his sleepless exhaustion with wide eyes when I called the province by its old name—probably something he did not expect from a foreign passenger—and pulled over when I asked him if he was Armenian. Indeed he was, and his grandfather’s name was Agop, but he did not remember anything else, and he spoke as if in a slumber. It was an extra­ordinary coincidence, as an hour later I would be boarding the bus toward his hometown, on a trip organized by Agos for the music festival. A few days earlier, after humiliating me for an endless ten minutes on my ignorance about Dersim with an old Armenian map opened on his desk, the newspaper’s editor, Sarkis Seropyan, had told me I would be welcome to join them on the journey. The municipality of Şişli, where the newspaper offices were located, would provide a bus. The humbling encounter with Seropyan left me with an urgent desire to obtain a comprehensive map of Dersim—it had proved impossible to find one in Istanbul. The group gathered outside the Agos building included the newspaper’s editors, Manuel, an architect who had collaborated on the restoration of the Surp Khach Church in Van, as well as a number of youngsters and a group of Cæsaria Armenians. There were also two young Alevi women. One was a teacher originally from Dersim, and the other one was a filmmaker born in Erzurum, but also based in Istanbul for the last 20 years. The three of us spoke the whole night until dawn, when we had our first breakfast at a large tea garden on the outskirts of Amasia. They both had Armenian grandmothers about whom they only knew that and little else, other than a guess that they were 1915 orphans. Pelin, the teacher, spoke perfect English after a season as an au pair in Connecticut. A petite woman with emerald eyes, she had an acerbic sense of humor. Now newly married, she intended to spend some time in her hometown in Dersim after spending most of her youth in Istanbul. The filmmaker, Esra, was of a more melancholic disposition and soft-spoken, an olive-skinned, slender woman. They described themselves as Kurdish, even though their Alevi religious identity was their first identity marker. “Alevis are not Muslim,” Pelin said. They were not bound to observe any of the five pillars of Islam, even though most were agreeable to the zakat (alms for the poor). But they did not have to proclaim the Shahada (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God”), observe Ramadan, do the five prayers a day, or make the pilgrimage to Mecca. “If you do only one or neither of those, then you are not a Muslim.” Those Alevis who held they were part of the Islamic community were in error or fear of persecution. Esra said her mother believed her husband to be probably of Armenian origin. But Esra’s father denied it, even though he was also vehement that they were not Kurds. Animosity toward Kurds was not uncommon among 334

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descendants of massacre survivors, but it was also found among Alevis, even though many people of rebel sympathies in Dersim would identify themselves as Kurds. Yet as many Dersimlis I spoke with insisted Alevis were a separate people with their own religion. Esra occasionally heard her grandparents speaking in whispers in the kitchen in an unintelligible language, as if doing something secret. Curious about it, she had asked her parents what language the grandparents were talking in. It was Zazaki. At university at the age of 19, her friends told her that Zazas were Kurds.4 Until then she thought she was a Turk. For her, it was the start of an awakening that would be fueled further at university, where she fell in love with a Kurdish student who introduced her to the PKK. A few months later, she was climbing the mountains around Diyarbakır to join a rebel unit. As the others on the bus were dozing off amid the muffled rumble of the engine, I listened to the melodious voice of Esra, turned round in her seat, telling me the story of her life and war: What is important is not being a Kurd or a Turk or an Armenian or any other nationality. What matters is Kurds’ right to freedom. I was not raised as a Kurd but as an Alevi. My mother is a Turk, but she is Alevi too. Still, my parents belong to a generation that believe or say, even if they don’t really believe it, that they are Muslim. So they avoid identifying as Alevis, but even saying Alevi is better than saying you are a Kurd, for it does not mean that you would want a separate state. At the university in Thrace I made two Kurdish friends, and I felt that fighting for the Kurdish people was so romantic. I still believe there has to be an independent Kurdish republic, but not fighting for it with guns. You have to fight with ideas, with intellectual power, with art, because the world has changed. But in the 1990s, it was so meaningful to fight with the Kurdish guerrillas. I fell in love with one of these Kurdish friends. He was from Bingöl. He is now serving prison for life. Before that he had been arrested as a sympathizer of the PKK but he later joined as a full member. So I decided to become a guerrilla too. There were people called milis, who were the intermediaries between the guerrillas in the mountains and the supporters among the inhabitants of towns and cities. We met one of these milis in Diyarbakır. It was the spring of 1990. Three days later we met again at night and he drove us to the foot of a mountain. A fedayi had come down to guide us in the climb to the camp. I no longer remember which mountain it was, but the march up was exhausting. It was still dark when we got there. Every day was the same: we would break camp every night and move elsewhere. We slept and ate in the mornings. The milis would bring us food, but we were permanently hungry and thirsty. In the nine months I was with them I did not see combat. Then one morning in the winter of 1991 our position was attacked by helicopters of the Turkish army.

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Secret Nation I think there were at least two gunships but there may have been more, I don’t know. Of our unit of 30 people, 13 died. We did not have time to bury the dead. It was winter. Some of our fighters were frozen, we were really frozen from the cold, and that’s why some of us were so numb that they could not react in time when the helicopters attacked. There were kids who were 13, 14 or 15 years old among the dead. I was 20 at the time. I don’t remember which mountain it was and I don’t know how we managed to flee. We walked for 18 hours without food and water. We were thirsty and starving, and almost frozen. But then other units came to our help. The attack was so big that other comrades had seen it, too. In winter we lived in caves or tents. There were Turks, Laz, Germans, and of course Kurds in our unit, but I don’t remember any Armenians, nor did I encounter any Armenians in the PKK. Among those who died there were friends of mine. I was shell-shocked, horrified, and I asked for permission to return to my family in Istanbul. Our commander was Durak Kalkan. I was psychologically shattered, so I was authorized to go back. But I felt guilty, so in 1993 I contacted the PKK again. My psychological state was very bad. We met in a café in Istanbul. I called some friends in the movement, and the police listened to the conversation. Then one day I was walking in the neighborhood of Sarıgazı to meet my contacts to rejoin the PKK. An unmarked van pulled over near me and a man got out of it, grabbed me by one arm and pushed me inside. There were six or seven men in the van. They bandaged my eyes and they started to beat me, cursing me. They struck me on the head a lot of times. They told me they were taking me to the Counterterrorism Branch Directorate at Gayrettepe, an Istanbul quarter. They kept my eyes covered for 13 days. Sometimes they would give me water. They hung me from the ceiling with my hands tied behind my back, with wires attached to my nipples, my genitals, my fingers, my toes, and the bottom of my feet, and they discharged electricity. They would throw water at me all the time: “Whom do you know? Where did you go? Why did you join them?” The police already knew that I had been in the PKK but they were only able to catch me when I tried to rejoin the movement. They tortured me for nine days, and then they put me in jail. A doctor came to see me. He asked me if I felt any pain but when I said I did he wrote that I did not. Also, he asked me if I had been tortured, to which I responded that I had, but he wrote that I had not. Then they took me to court. I told the judge that I had been tortured but he told me it was impossible, because in Turkey torture was prohibited. I told him that I had signed the confession under torture but he did not believe me. Our cell at the Bayrampaşa prison housed 60 inmates and lights out was at midnight. My family could visit me once a week, for two or three hours. I was in prison during the hunger strikes against the transfers to prisons with isolation cells. Dozens of people died in operation “Back to Life” in 2000, when the police intervened to move the inmates.5 I got a two-year commutation from my 12-year sentence, and I got out a few months after the riots.

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DERSIM I was shocked to see my family in a new home, my brothers and sisters grown up, and the computers. But the thing I was most in awe of was cell phones. Three months later I enrolled at university to study Performing Arts and Cinema at Bilgi University. I think the world has changed, but I am still convinced that there has to be an independent Kurdistan. Prison changed my mentality and I no longer believe in the armed struggle. But I don’t regret that I joined the fight. I did what I had to at that moment of my life.

Pelin and Esra split from the group as soon as we arrived in Dersim, while the rest of us were taken by Mardiros Azad for a tour of Mazgirt, a town of 1,700 inhabitants, less than an hour away from Tunceli. Two musicians received us to the piercing sounds of a zurna, a wind instrument, accompanied by the bass notes of the davul, a large drum, that constrained the zurna’s sharp pitch and dictated the rhythm. There were “no Armenians left,” said a man that towered above all the others and behaved with portentous gravitas. “We did not bother them, they left on their own some 20 years ago,” a clarification that was usually heard in areas of Turkey with a far worse reputation for Armenians than Dersim, and which made me wonder if it was all as rosy in the province as had been purported. His luxuriant mustachios stretched out like gray wings, yellowed from smoking. They were a mark of hierarchy: he was a dede, one of the highest ranks in Alevi tribes, of the Ağuçan aşiret. Flanked by two other men with bushy, black mustachios, he locked arms with them in a halay dance, marking the step. Their photo circulated in the Armenian press with equivocal captions, showing them as “hidden Armenians.” Three young men and an older one were playing cards at a table outside the teahouse next to the field. “I am of the nation of Hrant Dink,” said a voice, in English. The game went on with poker faces and in absolute silence, the only response to the questions I asked. Inside the teahouse, Ali, a 71-year-old man who introduced himself as the son of an Armenian mother and a father who was half Armenian, said it did not make any difference for him: “Zazas and Armenians are the same, there is no difference.” Ali lifted both index fingers, holding them side by side. “There is no problem here,” a man with overgrown eyelids sitting with us concurred. “My mother-in-law is Armenian,” he said with a serious demeanor but I still inspected Ali’s face to see if it could be an inside joke. A man then entered who looked different than the rest in his complexion and garb. “He is of your people,” Ali and the other man said, and invited the man to our table. Yet he shook his head in denial when introduced as an Armenian, leaving Ali confused. The man stood up without saying a word and walked out. 337

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The streets were empty. A mother and her two daughters were idling the afternoon away when I approached them with my query. They pointed to a house across the street. A woman was lulling her baby by the open door and, unsurprised, invited me in: a man and his daughter, from the Agos group, were inside. They were her relatives. The family of the woman with the baby was one of the last three Armenian households left in Mazgirt. All the others had left, pursuing better economic opportunities. She knew her grandfather’s name, Khoren, her last link to her origins. By religion she was now an Alevi.     

“I was ten when my older sister came running toward me outside the school.” Arzu was now 21, the youngest of three siblings, and was an Economics student at a university in Western Anatolia. “She told me we were Armenian: she had just found out from the school’s principal.” Arzu did not know what it meant at the time, but it came as a shock. Nobody in the university knew of her origin and she feared for her life should they find out. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt that blended in with the walls. We stood in the corridor of her house. On condition that I blurred her face, she agreed to pose with the picture of Imam Ali flanked by the other 12 imams, six on each side. The colors and the arrangement of the subjects had an uncanny resemblance to a Last Supper painting, with Jesus in the middle of the 12 apostles. She said they thought of themselves as Christians. Their relatives that had moved out of Dersim and settled in western Europe had rejoined the Armenian Church. The Agos group visited their house in a village outside Mazgirt and sang the Lord’s Prayer hymn for her grandfather, who had been paralyzed by a stroke years ago. The family believed he had lost consciousness yet his beady eyes were following us vividly. Doctors had explained it was probably a reflex reaction but he was looking at people’s eyes and appeared to notice what happened around him. Was his mind still awake, trapped inside a body that had lost the ability to express itself ? He was born in 1918 and had seen the killing of family members in the massacre of 1938. Their grandfather was scared by what he had witnessed and his Armenian origin, so he never spoke about it, apart from once telling Arzu’s brother, “I have seen incredible things.” “Our most important interior problem is the problem of Dersim,” Atatürk had said in a speech in 1936. “We have to remove and cleanse this wound, this terrifying abscess, from its roots.”6 Accordingly, shortly after the renaming of Dersim as the new province of Tunceli in January 1936, large-scale deportations of Dersimlis began as part 338

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of the demographic engineering that Turkey still pursues to homogenize the population into a malleable mix of Sunni Muslims that could be grouped under the generic label of Turks. “That policy started in the 1840s,” Sarkis Seropyan told me as we were walking in Mazgirt. “And the 1938 massacre in Dersim was its direct continuation, unlike the Armenian Genocide, which was a particular event with its own logic, and that involved in large part a land appropriation and wealth transfer as well as the liquidation of the Christian core of Anatolia.” Alarmed by the resettlement of large groups, the Alevi leader Seyid Rıza revolted against the Kemalist government and its assimilation policies. The rebellion culminated and concluded with the 1938 massacre, including an aerial bombing campaign.7 Sabiha Gökçen, the first military aviatrix in Turkey and the world and the adoptive daughter of Atatürk, took part in these missions, bombing the village of Keçizeken and the house of Seyid Rıza, thus entering the pantheon of Turkish heroes in her own right. Under the title “The secret of Sabiha-Hatun,” an article Hrant Dink published in Agos on February 6, 2004 said that Sabiha Gökçen was an Armenian orphan of the Genocide, from an orphanage in Cibin, near Urfa, whose real name was Hatun Sebilciyan. In the 1970s, there were rumors about Gökçen’s Armenian origin in the Diaspora communities of the Middle East. Dink’s article was based on an interview with Hripsime Sebilciyan, who claimed to be Gökçen’s niece.8 Like a delayed-action bomb, the news story only made waves when Hürriyet, the largest-circulation newspaper in Turkey, picked it up a couple of weeks later. The fury of extreme nationalist Turks was unleashed against Dink, shot dead three years later by a 16-year-old from Trebizonda, Ogün Samast. The moral dilemmas implicit in the life and work of Gökçen, hailed for her role in a massacre of a civilian population, would only be compounded should her origins be true, which has never been confirmed. Yet her case was an extreme demonstration of the mutability of identity in the century of genocide in Turkey. Were the ruins of an Armenian church, or one turned into a mosque, still Armenian or a church, wondered Ishkhan Chiftjian, a writer based in Leipzig.9 It was the conundrum faced by the descendants of survivors left in the historical lands.     

The shell of a medieval Armenian church in Ergan stood majestic over the village of low huts and one-floor homes, with gigantic arches and truncated concavities that suggested the vaults of a monumental construction from a civilized past. Not far from it was the concrete entombment of what neighbors said were the remains of the last Armenian, an unadorned sarcophagus of a woman that had 339

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died in 1961, with only the date of her passing inscribed coarsely on it. The Alevi woman living in the house across from it remembered a verse in Armenian she had learned from a childhood friend, long lost in an unknown past: Իսկ կատու կայ վեր ի Վանայ Տէրտէրի տղայ ի դիւանայ Աստուած մեզի դուռ մը բանայ

Born in 1938, she did not know any of the meaning of it. Other than the rhyme the verses did not make a lot of sense, except for the concluding line: “There are cats in Van / The son of a priest in the chancery / May God open a door to us.” The woman’s son, who was visiting from Germany where he was now based, said the government had evicted any locals with revolutionary leanings. “They have resettled Turkish nationalists: they are not finding any gold in the Armenians’ graves, so now they are digging up ours, too.” We walked into a building that was being renovated prior to its conversion into a mosque. Its domed, cavernous rooms made with dark, volcanic rock evoked familiarity in the Armenians of the Agos group. Yet Manuel, the architect, cut short our hypotheses: the part of the building that would have corresponded to the altar was not pointing to the east. It may instead have been a section of a monastery, perhaps housing the cells. Hozat, the district’s administrative center, was full of flatterers, Mardiros Azad had warned us: some might tell us they were Armenian only to please visitors. As we sat down in the park, the conversations in a strange language by some in the Agos group had attracted attention, and a group of young people called us to their table near ours. They wanted to introduce us to a pale-skinned woman in a bright green dress, her hair dyed red. She was an Armenian from Malatya, but had only found out four years earlier, at the age of 17. Her family had received special police protection after three employees of a biblical society in the Eastern Anatolian city were murdered by five Islamist young men: they had tied the hands and feet of the three evangelicals and had then slit their throats. Only when policemen were deployed outside their house had she been told by her parents that they were Armenian. She remembered sometimes in her circle of friends she would be called “Armenian,” but she assumed it was a joke and did not make much of it. An atheist, she now identified herself as an Armenian and had not encountered any problems, even though once she had an argument with negationist classmates at the university in Manisa, in western Turkey. While she was reclaiming her identity, others were renouncing it. The Tezkans, who lived in a village overlooking the city of Tunceli, no longer saw themselves as Armenian, even though they acknowledged their origins. As 340

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Zazaki speakers, they considered themselves Kurds. When I arrived, they were entertaining the family of their future in-laws, Alevi Turks whose son was engaged to Çağla, the oldest of the Tezkan children. “Our grandparents were Armenian, but we no longer are,” said the oldest member of the family, Çağla’s great-uncle Ahmet, who was in his 60s. Until 1966 they had received letters from relatives in the US but they had burned them all, out of fear. In any case, there was nobody left to understand Armenian. No memories were preserved from 1915, but the family remembered that in 1938 the village ağas were rounded up and thrown into the Halbori and Lesh gorges, Ahmet said, pointing to them in the distance as we walked in the field outside their house. “What we know about the Genocide is what we have read in the books: our elders were too scared to tell us anything about it.” The visit to the Tezkans was an unexpected detour in my plan to find a map of Dersim. A comprehensive one, the size of a movie poster turned landscape, was displayed in the lobby of the city hall. I walked into the building to ask for a copy. The atmosphere at the security office by the entrance, manned by the municipal police, was jovial, with the agents loudly cracking jokes in the dead hours of the summer afternoon. They all looked to be Dersimlis—whiteskinned and with Roman noses—except for one, a Turk, who was sitting at some distance from the rest, with his legs crossed and leaning back in his chair. He was older and bald, and unsmiling. While he would not be noticeable in a street, inside the enclosed space he stood out. “What do you want the map for?” The Turkish officer was intrigued, unlike the others. As he was not buying any of what I was saying, he muttered through his teeth, addressing all and no one in particular: “Look how many pens he has,” he said, pointing with a nod to my top pockets, overflowing with pens. “He is CIA.” One of the younger police officers frowned and looked down in embarrassment, as I did. His son, the Turkish policeman said, was an IT student. Could I get him a job in America? He did not have good grades and was not really into his career, but he thought it offered good professional prospects. As I waited for a response to my map request, my gaze started to wander around the upper walls of the office in order to avoid eye contact with the others, and inevitably rested on the only image in the blank space: an Atatürk portrait. One of the Dersimli policemen saw it and stretched his arms in a shooting gesture, pointing at Atatürk: “Pumm!” We all suppressed laughter except for the culprit, who was giggling like a mischievous schoolboy, and the Turkish policeman, whose unsmiling long face I sought out. A municipal employee finally came in. The Dersimli officers had been searching for one of the Armenian ones, Nuri Tezkan, who even brought me to the office of the city mayor to help me get a map. He also tried to negotiate a car for my research, which I had not requested. The mayor smiled sarcastically, and 341

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asked Tezkan if he really was seeking state support for a Diaspora Armenian looking for descendants of Armenians. As I addressed the man in English, he must have assumed I did not understand Turkish. “Who sent him?” asked the mayor about me: “The Diaspora or Yerevan?” We finished the tea and left empty-handed. Nuri put me in a cab and sent me on a visit to his family. On my return, I asked the cabdriver to take me to any Armenian village he knew. He remembered one from his childhood summers. But when we arrived along a winding mountain road, past PKK graffiti on rocks, we only encountered a vast plateau, perfectly flat and cleared of trees or any construction. Two adult men and a teenager stood outside a small tent. The Turkish army had razed the village to the ground in the war against the Kurdish insurgency in 1994, they said. It was their hometown and now they only returned to camp in the summer. The population, which had included four or five Armenian families, had not returned. “You are standing on the Armenian church,” the boy told me, squinting from the sunlight. I did not understand, until he pointed out the outlines of the church perimeter, like a ghost drawn on the ground. That afternoon I bought a bus ticket out of Dersim. As I was returning from the station up the sloping street, I noticed the sign of a women’s cultural association above a narrow door. On a hunch, I entered. A man who turned out to be a German and his Dersimli girlfriend were having an animated conversation with the head of the association, a small woman brimming with energy and lively humor, with a falcon’s nose and a falconer’s eyes, who eased me seamlessly into their discussion, even if it was unrelated. She had the map I was looking for. She wanted to cut it down into smaller pieces because a roll of that size would attract attention in the city, but I begged her not to. Still, the map had to undergo treatment. “This is Dersim,” she said, crossing out Tunceli with a thick black Sharpie, and ripped off the title, “TÜRKİYE,” writing in large block letters: “DERSIM.” Where were the Armenians, she challenged me. Why, she wanted to know, had they given up the struggle? I should return to the province to prove my mettle: You are Armenian. This land has been waiting for you. Come and claim back your land. Get a gun and go to the mountains to fight. If your wife doesn’t join you, we’ll get you one of our women, and she’ll fight alongside you.

The rolled-up map, half my height, was attracting attention, I noticed, in the militarized and heavily policed streets of the city. Across the narrow street from the women’s cultural association, there was a fortified military residence or some kind of headquarters. There were permanent patrols by light armored vehicles, like huge cockroaches unafraid of the light. They resembled the Land 342

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Rover Tangis of Northern Ireland, with their caged windshields and windows, some also crowned with a gun turret. Not the map in itself, but the amendments made by the head of the cultural association were worrying. At a stationery store, a shopkeeper showed me the door, annoyed that I had distracted him from a soccer match on TV to ask about an Atatürk poster. I was looking for an outer skin to wrap around the map. Then I walked into a booth-sized convenience store, right outside the city hall, to buy a copy of the Hürriyet newspaper. “Are you Armenian?” the shopkeeper asked me with a smile. It felt like an ambush. He was sweating and nervous, a plump man shorter than me, bald and with a bushy mustache. Only then did I notice a young man in a black leather jacket, with looks that betrayed him as an out-of-towner, with his eyes fixed on me. “Yes, I am Armenian,” I responded. “I am Armenian too!” exclaimed the man, and turned to the young man in black: “But he is a filthy Turk!” he said, pointing to him with both his hands, with particular stress on the Turkish word for “filthy”: pis. The clumsiness of it made me nervous, for it was obvious that I had been followed and this was a textbook example of a setup, but I still wondered how the police had guessed that I would enter this store, and how they had had the time to suggest a script to the shopkeeper to frame me. “No, Turks and Armenians are brothers,” I responded with a smile, noticing the shopkeeper’s relief: “Yes, yes, aren’t they?” The unsmiling man in black was not into the brotherhood of nations, asking me what had brought me to Tunceli. The music festival, I said, to the approving noises of the shopkeeper, who could indeed have been Armenian to judge from his looks. What did I think of Erdoğan, the man in black asked me. I had noticed he was taking off some of the many large silver rings he wore, including on the thumbs, and putting them back after fiddling a little with them. Was that a code, I was wondering. Still, it was all so amateurish that I decided I could play the dumb foreigner, but then a uniformed policeman entered to buy cigarettes and the shopkeeper began to sweat again. The man repeated the question about Erdoğan as the policeman still lingered on. I did not remember any musician with that name. No, he was the prime minister, he said: “Başbakanımız” (“Our prime minister”). That was not a soccer team that I knew, because I liked soccer but not that much. With a little impatience, perhaps because of my unconvincing number, the shopkeeper said something about a political leader, and I said that I did not understand anything about politics. I suggested we took our picture together: the merchant looked at me alarmed, shaking his head, while the policeman and the man in black were talking in whispers. The policeman left and I followed in his steps after shaking hands with the duo. I walked back to the hotel at a leisurely pace, but my arms were trembling. As I was walking down the following morning I bumped into the city hall policemen, the Dersimli ones and the Turk, who was walking some steps behind. 343

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The Dersimli ones hugged me and we kissed on the cheeks, like family and old friends. The Turk and I shook hands and embraced somewhat hesitantly. At the bus station, there were only two of us waiting for the bus to Erzurum, the other a Sufi dervish with a wild beard. He wore a white suit that resembled a karate outfit, with a red silk belt and a green silk headband. Small tapestries, like those popular in Diyarbakır, were displayed around the doorway of a souvenir store: the size of prayer rugs, they bore the images of Imam Ali, Seyid Rıza, the Marxist–Leninist revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş, and Che Guevara, but none of Atatürk.     

As the head of the women’s cultural association had urged me to, I had returned to Dersim three years later and had taken to the mountains, if not with a gun. With all the other passengers unloaded, the minibus was now dashing through a vast plateau, a treeless palette of light greens and matte colors, to the outer edges of the district of Mazgirt. It dropped me off in a village perched at the edge of a gorge. A man in a dark suit and matching hat directed me to the home of Hüseyin, the 77-year-old son of Genocide survivors, and then walked away, leaving the streets now completely empty. Like villages all over Turkey, many of its residents spent the winter in Istanbul, Izmir, or other big cities, and returned for the warm seasons. Surprise was followed by displeasure in the face of Hüseyin’s daughter. Both stunned and agitated, her father had turned to look at me and was at a loss to figure out how I had found him. None of the names of common acquaintances assuaged him. “My father is just recovering from a heart attack and cannot be disturbed,” she told me, still sullen, as she served me tea, which she did not refill after I finished it. The man, blushing and heaving, did not speak once with me. The village was deserted. A carved Armenian trefoil cross was set into the wall of a house, beneath a window. Nobody responded to my knocks on the door. A window opened on a second floor after my shouts and a young man leaned out, inviting me to come up. They were newlyweds, and students at the University of Tunceli. The Crying Boy, a reproduction painting that had once hung in my family home, presided over the room. The young man laughed: his father had stuck an Atatürk portrait on the reverse, and he would turn it over at the time of counterinsurgency raids in the 1990s. There were four Armenian families in the village but they did not recognize it openly, the couple told me. Old Hüseyin was a man of the older generation, they said, but there was nothing to fear anymore, and locals had never bothered them anyway. A driver the couple knew was going to pick me up shortly. 344

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Two of the driver’s neighbors in his village, half an hour away, were assimilated Armenians, he said, indicating they were Alevis. He seemed genuinely surprised that I still encountered fear among them. “But why?” he kept asking. At his insistence, we had lunch at his home with his wife. They both had a large build and were fair-skinned and with sandy hair, straight noses, and clear eyes, like the young couple that had received me previously, with gentle features reminiscent of early Celtic heads carved in stone. The family in the first house he sent me to were unlike them: shorter and with dark hair over white skin, and aquiline noses. As warmly as they welcomed me, they denied they were Armenian. Their ancestors, they believed, had come from Iran. “Khorasan,” mentioned one. “What do they fear?” The driver was perplexed when I reported back to him, while he showed me around his field, lined with fragments from columns and tombstones he had collected from ruins that the army was clearing nearby. Soldiers had told residents to take any of the remains that otherwise would be destroyed. There was a little horse statue with a strange inscription on it. It was identical to those in a cemetery outside the village of In, near Hozat: the writings carved on them seemed a hybrid between runic and Armenian script, even though it was impossible to make out any single character in the vertical signs beneath the line running along the top, like Nagari or other Indian alphabets. There were similar, horse-shaped tombstones at a Yezidi cemetery in northern Armenia, without inscriptions. With hopes of better luck, we hopped into his minivan to see the other Armenians, who lived ten minutes away. The house seemed familiar, and when I walked into the corridor with yellow walls I sought out the picture of Ali and the twelve imams that had reminded me of the Last Supper. We had returned to Arzu’s home. She was curled up in the sedir, with two Alevi friends that were visiting her and her sister, who was in advanced pregnancy: she had wed an Alevi neighbor a year earlier. The first time we had met, the girls had expressed their hope of marrying Armenians and eventually returning to the Church, as their relatives who had moved to Europe had done. Dersim Armenians had come a long way since Mardiros Azad had revealed their existence in 2010, but they were still wary of upsetting an order of things that had got them through the Genocide and the 1938 massacres, as well as the latent and actual violence that has threatened Armenian lives in Turkey for more than a century. “What do they fear, really?” Fevzi repeated, with rhetorical intent, when I met him the following morning at a tavern he ran in the center of Tunceli. “How many years is it since they killed Hrant?” An Armenian Alevi, he too had only begun to unhide himself two years earlier, but understood others’ caution: “And still they wonder why.” 345

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His grandfather, Hüseyin, was from Şıkso. As a tailor, Hüseyin made the white overcoats, called kumaş, that ağas used. Thanks to his grandfather’s work, which involved considerable travel, Fevzi was familiar with the geography of Dersim. There was an interesting village nearby, Fevzi said, Kanoğlu, where locals spoke Kurmancî and Turkish but were neither Kurdish, Turkish, nor Zaza, and did not acknowledge themselves as Armenian, even though everybody knew they were. Fevzi’s father, the son of the overcoat-maker for the ağas, was wearing a fine one in the Western style, matching his cap. A man of sad demeanor, he spoke with no enthusiasm but without reticence either. His grandfather, Hagop, had died before 1915, and his father Hüseyin, whose Armenian name he did not know, had survived under unknown circumstances. From time to time, Fevzi’s father would attend Thursday prayers at the cem evi, the Alevi house of worship. “The Armenians’ religion is better than ours,” Fevzi’s father said. “I am all for our common humanity but I feel closest to Armenians.” Şıkso was a mainly Armenian village, and growing up he had a lot of Armenian friends, none of whom acknowledged it. They celebrated the Alevi holiday called Xeleş, and Gağant, the Armenian feast of the New Year, when they went door to door collecting candies, fruits, and apples. They also observed Black Wednesday, or Kara Çarşamba, an Alevi feast in Dersim that marked the coming of spring in March. His mother, whom he had lost at a young age, spoke about a feast that involved the dyeing of eggs, but they no longer did it, and he did not know it was Easter. But he knew about the traditions of abstinence and fast during the 40 days of Lent, if not by name. A young woman, a regular at Fevzi’s, told me her family now suspected they were Armenian. Her mother had found a strange letter among old family papers. It was written in the Armenian alphabet, in a strange combination of four languages—Armenian, Zazaki, Kurmancî, and Turkish—and employing dialectal expressions from Hozat. It was unintelligible, making them wonder if it was code. The letter was dated in 1939, written from prison: she did not remember if it was postmarked in the province of Erzurum or Sivas. They thought it might have been from a political prisoner after the Dersim massacre of the year before. Her mother had sent that letter to Agos to be deciphered, but someone at the newspaper had later told them that it had been lost. With my heart already bleeding at the loss of this Rosetta letter, they told me they had not photocopied or photographed it before putting it in the mail. Neither Fevzi nor any of the locals at his tavern knew where I could attend a Gağant celebration, a tradition that was dying out and that the younger generations only remembered from distant childhood or their elders’ tales. The general 346

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consensus was that I ought to try my luck in Hozat or one of the surrounding villages. Upon entering Hozat, a town of 4,600 residents, a gigantic inscription on the hillside proclaimed “Önce Vatan” (“Homeland First”) with the outline of a soldier raising an assault rifle. From Mt. Nemrud in Adıyaman to this hill, mountains have been used for propaganda, now degraded from the Commagenian Hellenistic art to today’s magnified graffiti of the coarsest variety. Grayer in the light of winter, there was a coziness of uncertain source in the office in Hozat town hall, where a municipal official began placing calls to inquire about Gağant celebrations in the vicinity. “I am Armenian, too,” he told me when his aides walked out. He refused to speak any further, giving me to understand that it was not a very good idea to do so in a government building, not even one as small as this. There was not much more to tell anyway, he added, because he knew little else other than his origin. Most people had lost their own story. “If these mountains spoke …” “Mountains don’t speak; we have to,” I retorted. He did not respond and picked up the receiver one more time. His phone calls had borne fruit. The village of In was marking Gağant that evening, the Armenian New Year by the old calendar—called Rumi hesabı (Greek calendar) by the locals—on January 14. A cabdriver from In would pick me up shortly. Before I left his office the municipal official, with gray curly hair and gray eyes, told me again: “I am Armenian, and I know I am Armenian.” While the cabdriver harped on about the calamitous state of the Turkish economy, I contemplated the range around us with new eyes. The commonplace phrase of the municipal employee had awoken me to the life of mountains and their stories, if one was able to read them, from the geological to the historical, for the hibernating animals in their now leafless trees were also alive. “If these mountains spoke …” But the mountains do not speak. It is left to us to speak. Mountains are not alive, or rather they are, for they are not stone alone. They are also the plants, animals, and people that give them life and voice. Mountains were not lifeless, and not in Dersim. “Ermenileri Kayaları,” the driver around Hozat had pointed out three years earlier, as we drove past a row of cliffs: “Armenians’ Rocks,” used to throw Armenians to their deaths in 1915. The name had survived even though the gorge had been used again in the 1938 massacre of Dersimli Alevis. We went into a tiny teahouse presided over by a picture of Imam Ali, wrapped in his green tunic and looking like Jesus. The unavoidable Atatürk, the executioner of Dersim, was there, too. He had a strong following among Alevis for his anti-Islamic streak. According to a popular thesis among his admirers, 347

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Atatürk was ill at the time and blamed 1938 on İsmet İnönü, his successor. The men were playing cards, a game called in Turkish “Süper Elli Bir” (Super 51). Gağant at In had begun in the morning, when children went in groups from door to door, reciting little verses or singing the equivalent of carols, and were given fruits, candies, and toys. In the past, they would dress up in costume but they no longer did it. For my sake, the driver called his wife and had his two young children and a couple of others come to the teahouse, where the attendant gave them a pouch of sweets as a photo opportunity as they looked on timidly and confused. A man in a black hat was sitting, bağlama in hand, against the wall, reciting a poem about Imam Ali that the card players occasionally turned their heads to listen to. To the accompaniment of the bağlama, the troubadour then rendered a number of fast-rhythm songs in Zazaki, interspersed with verses he delivered with a grave demeanor. Alevism, he said, was the purest form of Islam, and they celebrated the Armenian Gağant by the Greek calendar to honor the former inhabitants of this land. “He is Armenian.” The troubadour was pointing with a sardonic smile to the only man who was sitting alone, holding a shepherd’s crook and slumped on a bench with his back to the window, against the farthest wall from the entrance. A bachelor in his 60s, he was the only Armenian in the village. He looked sad, so I asked the troubadour to sit with him and talk, so as not to appear in all the photos alone. The troubadour let out a little laugh, echoed by the complicit ones of others who were in the loop, but obliged and pretended to talk to the shepherd. Yet the Armenian was not playing along and kept looking at the lens, with a frown and scared eyes like the bullied boy of the class. Some mild form of disturbance seemed to affect him. His name was Hüseyin, son of Hüseyin, grandson of Hüseyin. He insisted that was his grandfather’s name even though he said he had been a Christian Armenian. It was an unusual name for a Christian. He said he was a shepherd and he did not know anything else. His father was five or six years old during the Genocide, when he lost his parents and five siblings, who were decapitated. An aşiret had killed his grandfather, but he could not name the tribe. His mother was Armenian, too, and her name was Besia. The other men would occasionally turn around to hear what he was saying but stuck to their game. The shepherd’s father had also survived the 1938 Dersim massacre. “They attacked from the air,” Hüseyin said. They killed the ağas of the village, but residents had been mostly left alone. The ağas were shot or thrown into gorges. With the troubadour leading the column, the men started marching toward a clearing in a wood outside the village, by a creek that seeped from an underground course into a pond. Night had fallen. A huge pyre of wood and tractor tires was shooting up flames as tall as trees. As revelers gathered in the clearing, 348

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they lit thin wax candles in nooks on rocks, turning them into natural shrines. There was no music but percussion, with men and women embracing into lines that danced the halay to the beat of the troubadour’s davul drum. A 15-year-old girl split from the line and started dancing ecstatically in the middle of the semicircle formed by the other dancers. The rhythmic movements of her hips responded to the strikes of the mallet, like a charmed serpent. “She wants to marry tonight,” the troubadour said, now absorbed in the symbiosis between her and his drum, while the men in the halay line tapped the ground and the women rotated their raised hands and made undulating movements with their fingers, mimicking the dance of the flames. Shortly after midnight, as the pyre began to die down and the candles had melted into the rocks, the cabdriver and other men climbed onto the roofs of houses and each poured water from reused plastic bottles into the chimney of his abode. “Zemzem suyu, cenneten geliyor,” the cabdriver explained: “The Zemzem water comes from heaven.” It was supposedly from the Zamzam Well in Mecca, considered a miraculous fountain in the Islamic tradition that dates back to the time when Abraham’s son, Ishmael, was crying out with thirst. It was a syncretic addition by the Dersim Alevis, perhaps only in the village of In, to an Armenian Church festivity they observed according to the Greek calendar. We drove past the cemetery with the horse-shaped tombstones, hidden in the night. The same cabdriver drove me out of In, prior to a stop at his family’s house, where I was invited to join in the celebrations with drinks and sweets. “This son of mine with a bird brain,” his father mocked him. “I told him to get out of this village, go to Istanbul and learn a craft with an Armenian master.” As we were driving, the chauffeur pulled out his cell phone to show me photos of Byzantine solidi, gold coins dug out by a friend in Sivas, he said. As no response was forthcoming from me, he fell silent until we saw ahead of us a column of three armored police jeeps patrolling the deserted highway that led into Tunceli. It was almost three in the morning. “Look at them, wandering about like a pack of dogs,” said the driver. The model of Otokar jeep used by the police was called Akrep, or “scorpion” in Turkish.     

“We don’t have a French ship, but at least we have a French car,” said Hayati, a fellow journalist that Mardiros Azad had introduced to me, a little irony on the French vessels that had rescued the Armenians of Musa Ler and his Peugeot, with which we were searching for Armenians in Dersim. We had met a few days earlier by the statue of Seyid Rıza in Tunceli. An acquaintance had seen him and had joined us too: this man was a cousin of Sakine Cansız, one of the founding members of the PKK and rumored lover of 349

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Öcalan. Like every other member of the Kurdish guerrilla, Cansız too was said to be Armenian. But there was some truth to it, her cousin said. “Our paternal grandmother was Armenian,” he told us. “She was five years old at the time of the Genocide, and of course Sakine knew about her Armenian ancestry.” He did not know, however, how Sakine related to it, or to Armenian history. What was out of the question, he clarified, was that Kurdish irredentism had driven her more than anything else. Sakine was unknown to the outside world until she was assassinated along with two other Kurdish militant women at the Kurdish Information Center in Paris in January 2013. The murder has not been solved, contributing to the proliferation of conspiracy theories in a country where they are rife, from “dark forces” in the Turkish “deep state” that were trying to derail the negotiations between the government and the PKK, to the settling of scores within the rebel movement. The Peugeot was racing across a flat land flanked by mountains in the distance, the straight highway empty other than two motorcycles with sidecar that dashed past us in the opposite direction. We arrived at H., one of at least six entirely Armenian villages in Dersim. Hayati went for a walk and left me in the company of Emin, the only person to be seen in the village of 16 households. He was sitting on an old couch in the yard, his stare lost in nowhere, and did not even look up when I approached and greeted him. Emin had seen his son Imam shot in March 2004 by two strangers who had come to pick him up. Imam, a former TİKKO militant, had resisted. Like Mardiros, they were members of the Mirakian tribe, the only surviving Armenian one in Dersim. Emin’s father, Imam senior, had also been killed by a special commando, but he believed it had been a case of mistaken identity. That, too, may have happened to his son, who had long since left the years of militancy behind. This was also the village of Aysar, the wife of an Armenian acquaintance from Amasia who had fought in TİKKO and had later moved to exile in northern Europe. He had introduced his wife as a Kurd, even though I could not think of any reason why he would have kept her crypto-Armenian identity a secret in the safety of the West. Outside Emin’s house there had once been an Armenian church, the name of which he did not remember. It was now reduced to a pile of rubble. There was a huge boulder in its place, encircled by a low ledge. Two tortoises lived in the enclosure, beneath some rocks. The biggest one hid his head inside his shell as soon as he saw me. They both breathed heavily, and panted when I held them up. Emin said the church was already in ruins by the time he was a child, probably destroyed, he guessed, in 1915. On top of the rubble were the melted 350

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remains of wax candles, yellow and slender. Alevis lit them every Friday night, he said. There was a 200-year-old mulberry tree outside the church ruins. Emin had planted three nutmeg trees, the oldest of which dated back to 1959. Another two, under whose shadow we were sitting, were 15 years old. The traditional pairing of mulberry and nutmeg trees of Armenian households had survived conversions and loss of other attributes of the identity. Born in this village in 1926, Emin had done his military service in 1949, serving in the cavalry in Antap. In the two hours of silence we exchanged, interspersed by brief dialogues, he softened for some reason when he asked where my ancestors were originally from. To the mention that one of my grandfathers was from Kilis, he remembered that he had made a horseback journey to that city once during the 28 months of his conscription. “My father was Armenian,” Emin said. His elders had become Alevis even before the “Armenians’ slaughter,” as he called the Genocide, using an infrequent Turkish word, kırım. And he stood up, walking heavily home, panting like the tortoises had when I scared them.     

Police had closed Asaf ’s workshop because of unlawful noise so he had time to spare. It was the second stop of our exploration in Hayati’s French car. Asaf was less convinced than Hayati that his shop had been closed because of his Armenian ancestry, rather than animosity among neighbors for undisclosed grievances that, he hinted, were unrelated to his ancestry. We were in a mixed-population village. Only some of the residents were of Armenian descent, albeit all converted to Alevism. “We are Armenian, too, but we don’t admit it, because we are no longer Armenian, we are already Muslim.” With a somewhat convoluted reasoning, Asaf ’s sister, Zelal, was keener on driving this point home, whereas he was more relaxed about the inevitability of their origin. They had no proof they were Armenian but accepted their non-Armenian neighbors’ claims that dated back to their childhood memories, and much earlier too as their family had come to Dersim from Erzurum and settled in the Dzeranik village in the late nineteenth century. They suspected they might have converted before the Genocide. Asaf ’s mother-in-law was on the first-floor balcony too, smoking in silence: “My mother was Armenian, too,” Edibe said, to the astonished reaction of her son-in-law and own daughter. She was two years old when her mother, Kumru, and her father, Hasan, were murdered in the 1938 massacre, along with her threeday-old sister, thrown into the Laç Gorge. Her grandmother had hidden her, and her paternal uncle had raised her. Prior to leaving for conscription in 1940, Edibe’s 351

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uncle had registered her as his newborn daughter, using her dead mother’s name, which was why Edibe believed she was older than her ID showed. “My uncle was like a father, but he always called me ‘my niece’ and I never called him, ‘father,’ even though he was the only one I knew,” she said. “I only know my blood father’s name, Hasan, and how he was killed, but nothing else.” Armenians had been coming to this village from elsewhere for more than a century, Edibe said. Her mother, Kumru, had come from Tercan to marry Hasan, and other Armenians had come from Tıtenik and Ispir, in Erzurum. Until 1995, Edibe had worked as a live-in maid for 15 years for an Armenian family in Kemaliye, Erzincan: Arto and his wife Maranik, and their sons Stepan and Hagop. She had lost track of them when they moved to Istanbul. Even though they had Christian names, Edibe said this family was integrated into the Alevi community. “They loved Hazrat Ali, but they never mentioned Muhammad,” she said. Then she suggested that they must have converted to Islam, at least nominally because the father and sons had been required to undergo circumcision. “They didn’t like that a lot, so they said they were Alevis.” She laughed. “I never heard back from them after they left for Istanbul.” Old stories, she muttered. “Me, Armenian? That I don’t know, but my uncle never called me ‘my daughter’ and I could never call him ‘father,’ even though he was all the family I had.” These were old stories, Zelal echoed. “I am not Armenian,” she said. “I am an Alevi.”     

A flash of light that resembled a gigantic Medusa, head down, broke into the evening sky. In scintillating lilac colors that turned to turquoise for a moment, it was about to plummet toward the mountains. But then it exploded in silence like mute firework, a spectacular teardrop above the summits that vanished as soon as it had appeared. Without turning back to look, Ümit smiled knowingly as he followed my expressions of astonishment: “It is the season of the shooting stars.” It was the first one I had ever seen. Then I noticed Ümit’s prominent silver crucifix, one of the very few I had seen on anyone but priests in a year in Eastern Anatolia. The bandanna he wore in the colors of the Kurdish flag had misled me about his identity. But he was an Armenian from H., the same village as Emin, the silent man who lived outside the ruined church with the pair of tortoises. I assumed he was a Christian: “I am not, but I will become one, of course, because I want to, and it is in my blood.” He had only found out five years earlier, at the age of 30, that he was Armenian. Since childhood, he heard that they were called “f îlla” but he did not know it meant “Christian,” or “Armenian.” 352

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One of his cousins had just been baptized in the European capital where she lived: “Idil Dağlar has joined the Armenian Church.” I was astonished to learn she was Armenian. Her husband, an Istanbul Armenian who had later joined the TİKKO guerrilla, had told me in our correspondence and telephone conversations that she was “Kurdish,” yet she was apparently another member of the Mirakian tribe. We were at the home of one of the family patriarchs, Kenan Amca, in a valley ringed by mountains. There were six entirely Armenian villages in the vicinity of Mazgirt: Xoşkiği, with eight Armenian families; Şordan, with six; Danaburan, with three; Sundam, with one; Hors, with three; and Canik, with two or three families. At least two families in these six villages were secretly Christian. As we were driving, Hayati had warned me not to bring up the name of Mardiros Azad, a relative of Kenan Amca from the Mirakian tribe. They had fallen out over something, but Hayati said he didn’t know what it was. Mardiros would later tell me that Kenan had berated him for disclosing the existence of hidden Armenians in Dersim at a time they still felt fear. Kenan was intrigued by the mention of an eagle we had seen while we were descending the road that wound around the mountain into the village of Akis, in a valley surrounded by the heights. Locals knew of two eagles, but this one with white patches beneath the wings seemed to be a juvenile exemplar that Kenan had not heard about. “Before the Genocide, Akis belonged to the Mirakians,” Kenan Amca said. His great-grandfather, a priest at the church of Kızıl Tepe (Red Hill), had been murdered there in 1915, when çetes had set it on fire with him and other Armenians inside. His son, Kenan Amca’s grandfather, was pushed to his death from the same mountain, which towered over the village, in the massacre of 1938. “Our elders used to tell me these stories but I used to get upset and I didn’t pay much attention to them: they said it was done by bad people who professed a bad religion,” Kenan Amca said. “But I slowly began to own up to my Armenian origin and then I moved to Cologne, Germany, where I lived for 28 years, and there I opened up.” He met Armenians and made friends among them, attending church and community events. Now he had returned to spend retirement at his birthplace. “I am not a Christian yet, but I am working toward becoming one,” he said. “I will be baptized.” He then recalled a childhood story: One day in winter my great-uncle took my cousins and me to a river. There were Erdoğan, Musa, and Hakkı with me. We were little; I was about ten at the time. We started a bonfire inside a cave. My great-uncle was reading something. He was praying, but he was crying as he prayed. We had brought our blankets, the yorğans, and my great-uncle kept reading something by the fire, but we didn’t understand what he was reading. Then he walked into the river and he read

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At moonrise, Kenan’s sister, Dicle, mentioned that “moon” in Zazaki was amsa, similar to amis (month) in Armenian: in Turkish, ay (moon) also designated “month.” According to the philologist Hrachya Ajarian, the stem for amis was a proto-Indo-European word, mens, from which had been derived the terms in different Indo-European languages for “moon” and “month.” Armenians used lusin for the moon, a cognate of luys (light).10 Dicle was taking classes in Armenian at the offices of a cultural association in Istanbul, Nor Zartonk. She had found an uncanny resemblance between her mother tongue, Zazaki, and Armenian. But the word that had most struck her for its similarity to Armenian was hasganal, which in Zazaki was “to love,” and in Armenian, “to understand.” Kenan’s other sister, Sibel, was married to a Muslim. They were both teachers and lived in Amasia. A preview of this book which I had published in 2012 had, with the subject’s consent, revealed to the wider public in Turkey the existence of the last Armenian in Amasia, and it had been picked up by the Turkish press. Sibel and her husband told me the brother of the last Armenian of Amasia was a prominent figure in the country’s revolutionary Marxist movement and— they said, erroneously—he had been killed under the military dictatorship of General Kenan Evren in 1980 or 1981.11 I often assumed that Armenians of Turkey of all stripes would probably share a common stance on Turkish history and its figures. Yet I had noticed that Atatürk commanded a reverence—even for Sose, my dearest friend from Sasun—that went beyond pretense, and it would confuse me. And they did not seem brainwashed because it was possible to talk with them dispassionately about it, but it was a deeply engrained thought. Yet I could not understand how they did not see the contradiction of revering a man who shared in the ideology that had caused the extermination of the Armenians, for he had been a Unionist and, despite some later attempts at whitewashing his record, Atatürk carried on with the legacy of the Unionists and created the Turkey for the Turks. Kemalism was especially strong among teachers. The conversation at the open-air dinner was flowing pleasantly with Sibel’s husband. Then he asked me if Armenians hated Turkey, and if I believed that the events of 1915 constituted genocide. Of course I did, I told him. “But the Turks say you had taken the Russian side and that you were going to betray the Ottoman Empire,” he said. What betrayal? I asked him. With what army? And the women and the children? 354

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And the old people? And the disarmed conscripts? What were they going to do? And the tortures and cruelties? Then he asked me about NagornoKarabakh. I told him that it was one of the oldest Armenian provinces, which had enjoyed autonomy or independence for much of its history. “But Azeris say these are their lands.” They said many things, was my answer. Seen from the Armenian side, it looked like Turkic peoples were not done with the land grab and purging it of Armenians, only to keep digging it up in search of gold to pillage the dead after the living were gone. “I am not a Turk,” he said. “I am a Circassian.” Should anyone, just because he was born into a certain nationality and its history, be held accountable for it? It would only make matters worse to discuss the prominent participation of Circassians in the extermination of Armenians, alongside Turks and Kurds, and we would not close that chapter by opening it at the table. We left the discussion at that. Kenan Amca showed me to the sofa bed. “You will sleep next to Atatürk,” he said, with mock solemnity. It was the standard Atatürk picture—in police stations, public offices, schools, and teahouses, the one dangling from mirrors in taxis. I laughed: was this the punishment for my outspokenness? Kenan Amca barely smiled and shuffled in silence out of the room, its window opening into a backyard of mountains. The moon was dancing in the backyard puddles, multiplying, its perfect circle and light mirrored into a black-and-white blur below, the fallen archetype. Yakamoz, “reflection of the moon in the water” in Turkish, had been voted the most beautiful word in the world in a competition in Berlin in 2007. It came from the Greek diakamos, now forgotten in the original language. The dogs went berserk, with all three barking at the full moon into the wee hours. It was the first time I had witnessed the literary image in real life. In the morning, Kenan Amca said they were barking at the bear that came for the wild bees’ honeycomb in their orchard. Garip, their huge, one-year-old Kangal, had mauled a bear cub once. A Dersimli friend had told me that these dogs could kill a bear, never mind a wolf.

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Van

Twenty

Van We believe that life originally came from water. Our yearning for the sea may hark back to those origins. In mythology, Hayk, the patriarch of the Armenian nation, settled in the vicinity of Van, the region whose historical name was Vasburakan. The battlefield where he killed his enemy, Bel, was called Kerezman, which in Armenian afterwards became the word for “cemetery.” In classical Armenian, dzov meant “lake,” but in the modern language it signifies “sea.” The name the ancients gave to Lake Van, Vana Dzov, would now be translated as Van Sea. The world was smaller then, or larger, for “country” was called aşxarh, a word that in the modern language came to mean “world.” And Van was at the center of the Hayots Aşxarh: Armenia, or, as the modern reader would interpret it now, the Armenian World. A beam of sunlight that entered from the slot window of the Surp Khach Church, on the island of Aghtamar in Van, bathed the choir that had come from Istanbul for the liturgical service presided over by General Vicar Aram Ateshian in September 2014. This was the fifth mass at the cathedral since restoration was completed in 2007. Pilgrims from all over Turkey and different parts of the world had packed the church. A contingent of Islamicized Armenians had come too, including Sevag and a small group from Dikranagerd, as well as a group from Mush that counted among them the man said to be fedayi Serop Aghpyur’s grandson. He was handing bunches of grapes to the pilgrims. Figures from the Old Book shared the walls of the church with the dynasty of the Ardzrunis, the kings of Vasburakan. The royal family stood alongside John the Baptist and the prophet Elijah. Some of the sculpted characters were youthful. One had lost an eye to a bullet that had made a cylindrical hole. Another one held a scroll. There were objects in the hands of two that remain unknown to us. A lion was facing west and another large feline, perhaps a panther, lurked next to a grazing goat. The deacons were singing: Առաջնորդացն մերոց եւ առաջին լուսաւորչացն, սրբոց Թաթէոսի եւ Բարթուղիմէոսի առաքելոցն,

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Secret Nation եւ Գրիգորի Լուսաւորչին, Արիստակիսի, Վրթանիսի, Յուսկանն, Գրիգորիսի … հովուաց եւ հովուապետացն հայաստանեայց, եղիցի յիշատակ ի սուրբ պատարագս, աղաչեմք:

Of our leaders and first enlighteners, the holy Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew and Gregory the Illuminator of Aristakes, Vrtanes, Husik, Grigoris … and of all the pastors and chief pastors of Armenia, be mindful in this Holy Sacrifice we beseech the Lord.

The Armenians of Van rose up against the Ottoman Army and the Hamidiye Cavalry in April–May 1915, repelling them until the arrival of the Russian troops. Many Armenians followed the Russians in a first retreat later in the year of the Genocide. The remaining Armenians left with the Russians in the final withdrawal in 1918. As in so many places elsewhere in Turkey, there were rumors of the existence of Armenian descendants in Van, a phantasmagoric presence some locals insisted was real. The Surp Khach Church, considered the most exquisite example of Armenian medieval architecture, had come close to disappearing too. Every year I would hear rumors of Islamicized Armenians from Van attending the service, so I introduced myself to as many people in the crowd as I could. Outside the groups that had come from Dikranagerd and Mush, as well as a converted Armenian from Sasun—all of whom I knew—only one young man from Van, a member of the municipal staff organizing the event, said his grandmother was Armenian, and that was all he knew about her. In snide comments and certain attitudes, locals had shown at least circumspection regarding the Armenian legacy, when not contempt. While not as hostile as Erzurum, it was less embracing than Diyarbakır. For all that, a Turkish journalist, Yaşar Kemal, had alerted a high-ranking military officer in 1951 to prevent the demolition of Surp Khach, which was about to be dynamited. A couple was picnicking on the island after the liturgy. “We are Kurds, but first we are Muslim,” the husband responded. His wife refused to shake hands with me in observance of Islamic restrictions on contact with unrelated men. There were, he said, five clans of Armenian origin in Van. A member of one of them was a colleague of his in the school where they both taught. Hamshentsis, Islamicized Armenians of the Black Sea area, had also provided leads about Van Armenians. Freight workers had told me stories about villages of converts around Muradiye. In that district, too, was the hometown of two grandchildren of Armenian grandmothers whom I met by chance in Istanbul, where they worked as waiters in a restaurant near the Beyoğlu district. The even 360

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more rudimentary Turkish I spoke when I first began this work in 2011 did not allow me to couch my speech in euphemisms that I learned along the way. The older of the two was observing me in astonished silence as the cook, nearby, was laughing loudly. Unafraid because he had nothing to hide, the Kurdish cook, who had heard my queries, referred me to another waiter. Also from a village near Muradiye in Van, his grandmother’s name was Hatun, a Genocide survivor: “We know the stories,” he said, but he was nervous about speaking. It was work time for him, and a few heads had now turned and were looking in our direction. The older waiter from Muradiye brought me the check. He leaned over and whispered in my ear: “We were all Armenian before, but we are now Kurds, efendi.” As I was leaving I approached to greet him and see if we could meet again. Who did he mean by “we” and “all”? Where? How had they preserved the memory of it? But he just nodded and ignored, stone-faced, my pleas for more information, a cell phone number or an email. I wrote my contact details on a napkin, which he refused to take.     

“My grandmother was a splendid Muslim,” Alaattin said, and then clarified: “She became a faultless Muslim.” A couple of weeks earlier, I had bumped into a Hamshentsi friend at a drugstore in Hopa, a Black Sea port city near the Georgian border. He was a committed socialist of somewhat quarrelsome disposition that drinking tempered or enhanced, according to circumstances and mood. Sitting on crates in a corner of the tiny shop, he and some Hamshentsi pals were sharing a beer. The friend or foe test with his drinking mates had taken them and me approximately two seconds, at first sight and in silence. Turkish nationalists from my point of view, they had identified me as an Armenian, with the ensuing, passive hostility. In 1998, shortly after the Good Friday Agreement that ended violence in Northern Ireland, a fellow reporter, from a country where eye contact was usual in the street, had the impression that in Belfast pedestrians would return the glances, trying to determine whether the approaching stranger was of their tribe or the other. Eventually, these Hamshentsis had softened a little, and a polite conversation followed in which contentious issues were avoided. One of them, a former university student in Van, recommended to me Selçuk Şahin, a sociologist who should be able to help in my endeavors. “Şahin?” a communist Hamshentsi friend had reacted later. “Who is referring you to that fascist?” Both Selçuk, a sociologist, and his brother Mesut, a former national assemblyman for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), of Kemalist orientation, received me cordially. They were very well spoken, Selçuk preferring English. Alaattin, a wealthy businessman and their friend, had been summoned 361

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by Selçuk to the fine Persian and Anatolian rugs store he ran with his brother in the commercial district of Van. “Are you Armenian?” Alaattin asked me upon introductions: Write: this is what my grandmother Nano said. This war was started by the Russians, they gave weapons to the Armenians, they told them: “Kill the Muslims, we will give these lands to you,” so the Armenians started attacking the Muslims. But then the Russians withdrew, and the Ottomans massacred the Armenians. Russia started this war. It wasn’t the Ottomans. Armenians, Kurds, and Turks lived peacefully side by side. There was no problem. Nobody was armed at the time.

Thus the Genocide in a nugget, from an Islamicized survivor’s grandson. “We lived in peace with the Ottomans for 1,000 years.” Alaattin was of the Barzani aşiret, perhaps the most storied Kurdish tribe, with prominent figures among its number including Mesud Barzani, then president of the autonomous Kurdish republic in northern Iraq. The branch of Alaattin’s family had first moved in 1910 from Iraq’s Barzan region to Iran, and then into Van in the spring of 1915, not the timeliest opportunity to resettle in the region, and a riddle my interlocutor could not explain: “Why move to Van in 1915?” Chance had it that at the time Nano’s family “were gone” and their house and lands in the village of Zaytar, where the combined households of Nano’s father Xıno and his brother Nacar had lived, had been granted to Alaattin’s Barzani grandfather, “who was already fabulously rich,” which was presumably why he had taken the property of deported or murdered Armenians: My grandfather and his family came to Van in the spring of 1915. The Armenian women were gathered in a caravanserai in Adras. Nano lived there for six months: her brothers went to Armenia; I don’t know if her parents went to Armenia as well, or died. My grandfather’s family was living at Nano’s family home. The Armenians’ houses were empty, so he took Nano’s, not knowing her yet. When things had calmed down a little, Nano returned to her family home and met my grandfather, who had arrived from Iran. She told the army lieutenant, “I am left alone, and this is my house: if he takes me, then I will marry him.” And they got married. Nano was 19 and my grandfather 23. She was very neat and very beautiful. She kept her name even after converting. They had five daughters and a boy.

A little-known facet of the Genocide was the encouragement of marriages of Armenian women with Muslim men as a means of wealth transfer, as explained by the historian Taner Akçam. “Moreover, painstaking efforts were made to induce Muslim families to adopt Armenian children and accept Armenian 362

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brides.” The incentive, Akçam wrote, was economic, quoting a telegram sent by the Ottoman government in August 1915 to all the chairmanships of the Abandoned Property Commissions: “The personal property of the children who are to be left with people worthy of trust for the purpose of education and upbringing, together with that of those converting or marrying, will be preserved, and if their testators have died, their hereditary shares will be given.”1 Had his grandmother perchance ever gone to Armenia, to look for her brothers? “No! She was a fabulous Muslim, Allah be praised!” She did the namaz five times a day, and was so well read, Alaattin said, by virtue of the Ottoman culture in which she had been raised. “How wonderful were the Ottomans! They had gathered all the women and had not hurt them, they had only deported the men, but only because the Russians had incited them to rebel,” he said. “We have lived with the Turks for 1,000 years and if the Russians had not meddled, nothing would have happened,” Alaattin claimed his grandmother Nano said. “What a neat, splendid Muslim she was!” Nano had died in 1965. An enthusiastic storyteller, Alaattin said all this in a loud voice and a grin that bared his very white teeth. I had noticed the Şahin brothers squirming as he spoke, for regardless of any ideological take they might have and that they had still not insinuated, they were probably versed in a history of the land that wasn’t as rose-tinted. Did Alaattin know that Armenians were here before the Turks? “Yes, of course, my friend, these are Armenians’ lands, of course, we all know it: Armenians use the soykırım [genocide] word for it: Erzurum, Kars, Adıyaman, Van, Antap, Adana.” The tone changed a little after that. But he insisted: “We lived together without a problem for 1,000 years.” And then he added, “This war, these massacres, were started by Russia: Muslims did not kill Armenians.” On the occasion of an election campaign fund-raiser, Alaattin had told the then prime minister Erdoğan the story of his Armenian grandmother. “Your life is like a novel!” Erdoğan had responded, probably aware that so many other lives in Turkey were comparable, too. A few years ago Alaattin had traveled with Selçuk to Armenia, searching with no success for his grandmother’s relatives. “They make çorek, lavaş bread, like us, and they are poor,” he said of his impressions from the country. “But they don’t like us,” he added. “How would they like you?” asked Mesut, the former lawmaker, exasperated, his white skin rapidly turning red. “You slaughtered them all!” Mesut’s choice of pronoun, you, caught my attention. At the time of the Genocide, the Şahins’ ancestors did not live in Van or anywhere else in the Ottoman Empire. As if reading my mind, Selçuk explained that they were from the Bıruki aşiret that came from Yerevan, later to become the capital of the 363

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Republic of Armenia. After Armenia’s proclamation of independence in 1918, 60,000 Kurds had left the country and moved to Turkey, he said. At the time, their tribe, led by Kınyaz Kartal, comprised 12,000 households. “We suffered too,” Selçuk said, meaning the Kurds, “at the hands of Armenians, of Turks, of God, but then again, everybody knows his own pain, everybody thinks about himself.” The Kurds that remained in Armenia are Yezidis because they became Yezidis. They had converted to Yezidism, a pagan religion, so as not to be disturbed, he believed. “The rest came to Turkey, went to Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.” According to Selçuk, there were at most ten Muslim Kurdish households left in Armenia, led by Kınyaz Hamid, and they lived in Abovyan. “There are only Yezidis and they say they are Yezidis, because if they said they were Kurds they would have a difficult life in Armenia: I’m sure if I spoke these things in Armenia they would deport me.” Alaattin looked a little taken aback at Mesut’s reaction, but then he spoke again: “There was one Harut in Yerevan, our interpreter.” They had visited a faculty of foreign languages with him, and the students were looking at the visitors from Van with unfriendly faces. “I asked them why they were not talking to us, considering that they spoke better Turkish than us, and Harut had responded, ‘You made a genocide against us.’” Alaattin had said: “But it wasn’t us,” which was strictly true, depending on the scope you gave to pronouns. “They are a beautiful people,” Selçuk said. “It was like the Catholic scolding the Jew: ‘Why did you kill Jesus?’ ‘Come on now, that was 2,000 years ago.’ ‘Well, I just found out.’” During his tenure as a lawmaker, Mesut had once approached the then president Abdullah Gül, asking him about lifting the blockade Turkey had imposed on the border with Armenia, so Armenians could come and visit their ancestral lands, saying that they no longer were claiming them back, and that in any case Kurdistan was under Turkish sovereignty, probably meaning that its might was incontestable by tiny Armenia. “Open that border, open the gate,” he told Gül. “It’s a little too early,” the Turkish president had responded, “we need time.” Armenians had changed and were looking for dialogue, Mesut had added: ASALA was in the past and no longer active. In his speech at the inauguration of Surp Khach in 2007, Mesut said he had called on Armenians to visit this part of their homeland: “These are your hometowns, come, see, these are your churches, come every day.”     

Imran’s walrus mustache enhanced his striking resemblance to William Saroyan. Like an alter ago of the American-Armenian, or a character from one of his plays, Imran spent his days in the disenchanted world of a theater in 364

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Van. Others had noted his likeness to the playwright, too, he said. There was a strong reason why he should, I suggested. He nodded gently, a chuckle drawing beneath the groomed, silver curtain that fell on his lips. A duck with a faint echo of Disney’s Donald, costumes, including a navy blue jacket with golden epaulets, and disassembled castles were gathering dust. No play had been staged since the 2011 earthquake, while the theater underwent extensive renovation. I had traveled all the way down from Istanbul to meet Imran and Tayfun again, this time to take samples for a DNA test, but his colleague was not showing up. “He got scared,” I thought, even though it was Tayfun that had initially introduced me to Imran. Tayfun’s cousin, too, had agreed to speak with me for the briefest five minutes at school after asking a student, insolently lingering in the classroom, to leave. The Kurdish man I had found picnicking on Aghtamar had referred me to the teacher, Abuzer. It was parents’ and teachers’ meeting day prior to the start of classes, following the summer break. Abuzer was nervous and evasive: “I just say we are Armenian because we have no relatives and know nothing about our ancestors before our grandfather.” Then he excused himself. “That’s really all.” But his Kurdish colleague had spoken with certainty about Abuzer’s ancestry: “He is 100 percent Armenian, and he says it, too.” Imran locked his office door at the theater building. As I pulled out the DNA kit, Tayfun showed up. “God knows what you thought about me,” he told me, guessing correctly but obtaining no confirmation from me. “You thought I backed out, didn’t you?” He had left his cell phone at home and could not warn me that he would be late. “I just want to know who I am: if I am Armenian, I’ll say I’m an Armenian; if I’m Jewish, I’ll say I’m a Jew; or if I’m a Gypsy, then I’ll say I’m a Gypsy.” And he rubbed the swab inside his right cheek, then on the left. Then I put Imran’s vials with the DNA samples in the envelopes. No member of the other four Armenian clans mentioned by the Kurdish teacher on Aghtamar had responded to my queries. Tayfun’s family was small, but for some reason it was known in Van. He knew nothing about his family history. “There is the psychology of forgetting,” he said. “There was fear at the time and there still is fear.” Life seemed to be quiet these days, I observed. “It is so because we are not even daring to test the limits.” Of course there was fear, Imran concurred. “At the time not only was there the psychology of forgetting, but also everybody was in denial of himself, we too denied our identity, but because of that I don’t know my history … We have brothers here but we cannot find each other because we have forgotten, we don’t know and we feel fear.” 365

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Imran knew of no relatives on his father’s side. “We have absolutely no one on my father’s side,” he said as his rationale, too, to believe he was of Armenian descent. Hakecemal, his father’s hometown, was an Armenian village before 1915. As Imran’s father was born in 1908, he would be old enough to remember the massacres. Until the day he died in 1983 he did not say one word: Nothing; he felt fear, a lot of fear. He did not like Kurds at all, as Kurds are reactionary and pick fights. My father married twice: his first wife was Armenian, I’m absolutely sure she was, already converted, but I didn’t know her. Her name was Halime. We went to the Civil Registry but they did not have any information or, if they did, they did not give it to us. She died young and afterwards my father married my mother, an Acemi, an Iranian people. He must have been Armenian. And he was not religious: he did not do the namaz, nor did he fast during Ramadan.

“You don’t trust anyone,” Imran said. “It’s not the state, it’s the people: you fear the people, the state doesn’t meddle, and now there is the Islamic State.” But not in Turkey, I said. “Yes, there are secret ISIS combatants among us: there are many.” Tayfun was becoming nervous: “We are talking to you now but we don’t know who you are, you may compromise us.” A subscriber to Agos, Imran had been teaching himself Armenian. “Armenian here in Van is still an insult: the people, the language; ‘dığa’ [‘boy’ in Armenian] in Van is used as a profanity, even if they don’t know the stem and think it’s dialect.” In Istanbul he had a lot of Armenian friends, but Van was a dangerous place to advertise oneself as such. Like Imran’s father, Tayfun’s grandfather also disregarded Islamic duties and rites, none of which he observed. There were many secret Armenians in Van, but they did not speak about it, he said. “When you become closer with them, they tell you in confidence that they are of Armenian origin, but they don’t admit it openly, and they have no information: they just know that.” His sister had done research on their family for years but had been unable to find anything, other than reaching a broad conclusion: “Brother, we are either Armenian, or we really are Arab.” Their grandfather insisted they were of Arab origin but, if it was so, why did they not have any relatives, why did they not know their past, and why did their elders fear so much? “Living here is like this: our grandfather did not say anything,” he said. “My father only knew his grandfather, but he didn’t know anything beyond him.” Yet if his grandfather was of Armenian origin, that would make his mother of Armenian descent too, as his parents were cousins, the children of two brothers. When the DNA test results were returned some six months later, the Armenian ancestry of both Imran and Tayfun was confirmed. Yet Imran 366

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was not close to any other Armenian within a genealogically and historically significant time period. This might very well mean that his father was the last surviving person of his now extinguished family or clan. Tayfun’s four closest matches were Armenians now living in the Diaspora, with ancestors that came from Urfa, Antap, and Kharpert.

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Tatvan and Surp I visited the church in the village of Surp with my driver, Sadık, a mostly inexpressive but righteous and kind man. The church belonged to a Kurdish family, like many churches in Western Armenia that are owned as real estate by individuals. These ones seemed greedy. Other families say, or at least pretend, that they would return it to the rightful owners or the Armenian Church if they knew how to do it. The Surp family used the church as a depot, but at least they took care of it and kept it clean in its desecration. The floor was flat too, without any of the craters that treasure hunters left in their wake. The old man said his father bought the church and its plot of land in 1952 for 81 Turkish pounds. He said it with a somewhat ironic smile, boasting about their stroke of luck or business acumen, as if meaning, “we bought a church for a song.” He knew that I was Armenian, but he did not even pretend to put up an appearance of respect, so natural the pillaging and appropriation of Armenians’ land and properties must have felt, including a sacred building, that he spoke without contrition. On the east-facing wall were two khachkars (stone crosses), as well as a number of carved or high-relief crosses set into the wall, with barely intelligible inscriptions, only some of which made sense. The man later showed me a carved wooden stele with an Armenian inscription on it. He was asking 1,000 Turkish liras ($500 at the time), which I could not afford and nor was I ready to pay. Many people had tried to buy it but he had never been willing to part with it until then, and not for a cent less. It was like a memorial inscription, but something completely unlike anything I had seen before and of unknown usage. Nobody had been able to read it, he said. Then his children came and objected to their father’s offer to sell the beam, which was almost 1.5 meters long. One of the children said that the church was open to everybody, but that the annotated beam was not for sale and nor should it be. Another one said, reasonably, that it was preferable that it stayed where it belonged, because if customs looked into it they could have trouble, and the 368

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buyer too. He may have been right. “Let that beam stay, too,” he said, when I pointed out that they already owned a church. Another son, the youngest, said that everybody was free to come and visit and take photos of the church, and of the wooden stele as well, but that they were not going to turn in, surrender, or sell anything. “Are you Muslim?” I asked them. “Yes,” said one in the mocking tone of an obvious answer to a silly question. “What would you think if at home, in my own backyard, I had a mosque, and a historic one at that, and that I used it as a depot to keep drums of fertilizer, pesticides, and brooms?” They responded with platitudes, without answering my question. There was an old man of Armenian descent in the village, but these Kurds discouraged me from trying to approach him. They said he would get scared and could even call the Jandarma (rural police) if I sought him out to speak about his origins, which he would deny anyway, and I would not be doing anybody a favor by attracting unwanted attention. In doubt, I preferred to err on the side of caution. They had heard about a family I was looking for, the Çiftçis, an Islamicized Armenian family from the village of Govi, but had lost track of them some 30 years ago or maybe more. Their village was now completely Muslim, they said. That night I did not find any buses going to Erzurum or Rize, where I was headed next, so I decided to stay in Tatvan in the hope that the following day I would find the Çiftçis. A granddaughter of converted Armenians in Diyarbakır had referred me to that branch of her family, from whom her ancestors had parted in 1915. They had stayed in touch until the 1960s but then the letters had stopped. The following morning, the same driver, Sadık, drove me to the hamlet of Bağ. Lush in splendid isolation, Bağ stood by the lakeside. There were no more than 20 houses facing Lake Van, which spread like a sea at the edge of the hamlet. We got there along a winding road, at least half an hour from the main highway. The land was fertile and the fruit trees abundant, on emerald fields under a silver sky. On a slope there were the ruins of a small Armenian church. A year in Armenian notation was written on a khachkar, dating it to around the fifteenth century. There were some carved crosses set into the walls of the church. I approached the Kurdish women in their colorful garb. They were laughing and friendly, and were kind toward a male stranger, veering from the norm around here. They were combing wool, while some other women were driving their grazing flocks. Smiling, they agreed to be photographed. Two men with heavy mustaches approached us—they almost looked like twins. In the past there 369

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were Armenians, but they were all gone. It was not clear if by “in the past” they meant before the Genocide or even after. They had shaken our hands for about two minutes, squeezing them and looking into our eyes, to the point that I thought that the greeting was more a warning than a welcome. I turned to Sadık to see if there was any threat implicit in this strangest of greetings, but he was looking away in embarrassment. It turned out to be an expression of respect, for both men turned out to be very courteous afterwards, and something in their gait and attitude as they accompanied us to the church indicated that it was their property, or so they considered it. Yet they observed the decorum of silence. The place, and the people too, felt more primitive than Surp, yet they were so much kinder. When trying to exchange contact details it turned out they did not have cell phones, so any contact would have to be by regular mail. They did not know what the internet was, and did not understand when I spoke about e-posta, the Turkish word for “email.” One of the men thought he had heard about the Armenian family of the Çiftçis, but he could not recall in which village. He, too, said that Govi was completely Muslim. I said they were Islamicized, but they told me that there was nobody by that surname in Govi. It was also likely that they had left the village because the family in Diyarbakır had not heard from their Govi relatives for half a century. Van was the capital of the province of Vasburakan, the mythical birthplace of the nation and the ancestral home of the Armenians of Cilicia. From Vasburakan too, princes Shapuh and Hamam Amatuni and their retinue left for the Black Sea. They had parted from the vicinity of Oshakan around ad 774–5, after a failed rebellion against the Arab occupiers of Armenia and their brutalities. This migration of the Amatunis was the genesis of the Hamshen Armenians. Yet there was a finality to Van in legend too. It was where Little Mher, the son of Sasuntsi Davit, was commanded by his father to spend childless immortality until the collapse of the world, before it was born anew. The world would then belong to Mher. Davit’s son was waiting for the hour of demise and renewal mounted on his horse, with its hooves dug in, inside the cave behind the Gate of Mher, a blind portal. It was carved on the Crow’s Rock, an old Urartian altar in Tuspa, outside the city of Van. This passage of the Sasuntsi Davit epic evoked the Second Coming, or the rebirth after the catastrophe.

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Cilicia

Twenty-Two

Cilicia The region of Cilicia comprises a Mediterranean stretch of Asia Minor in what is now Turkey’s south-east. From 1080 until its fall in the 14th century, the Kingdom of Cilicia was the last Armenian state until the proclamation of the Republic of Armenıa in 1918, which was then Sovietized until its second independence in 1991. In 1375, Cilicia fell to the Mamluks, an Islamicized caste of slave soldiers of Caucasian and Balkanic origin. But around the same time at the end of World War I, separately from the Republic of Armenia founded in the Caucasus, Cilicia was reconstituted as an independent region under French mandate. It is one of the least-discussed chapters of twentieth-century Armenian history. Approximately 170,000 Armenians returned to their homes in Adana, Antap, Marash, Urfa, and Kilis, and elsewhere in Cilicia, following resettlement measures taken first by British and then French occupation authorities. The defeated Ottoman troops, headquartered in Adana, had to withdraw from Cilicia. After a six-century hiatus under Islamic and then Turkish domination, Cilicia was to become again an independent Armenian state. Under attack by the Turkish forces regrouped under Mustafa Kemal, the French agreed to withdraw from Cilicia in October 1921. Yet Armenians put up a fight before moving into Syria. In some regions, there were clashes off and on against the Turks for almost the entire duration of the Cilician protectorate. There were battles at Antap, Zeytun, and Marash, before the Armenian population followed the French troops in their retreat south of the Alexandretta–Kilis line. Very few Armenians are left in Cilicia now. There are clusters of hidden Armenians near Sis, the ancient seat of the Catholicate of Cilicia, in the province of Adana, and in Urfa. Unlike descendants of converted survivors elsewhere, they ignore or avoid their kin. If on a scale of fear, Diyarbakır is the safest place for Islamicized Armenians in the historical lands and Erzurum the most perilous, Cilicia would lean much closer toward the latter. The exception in Cilicia is of course the village of Vakıf, preserved as a felicitous anomaly only because it was incorporated into the Turkish Republic in 1938, after two decades under French mandate in Syria. 373

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Urfa Fifteen thousand Armenian families are said to have retreated into Sepasdia and Cæsaria in the eleventh century, following the advance of the Turkic tribes. Some of these families later grouped in Cilicia. In his preface to the English translation of Vahram’s Chronicle of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia During the Time of the Crusades, Charles Friedrich Neumann criticizes the thirteenthcentury author, as “he mistakes every where the passions of men for the finger of God.” The medieval scribe described the birth of the Cilician state as follows: Gagik II, the anointed king of Armenia […] gave up his country to the Roman Emperor, in exchange for the great and celebrated town of Cæsarea, and other places in Cappadocia; and in consequence of this, the Armenians lived as emigrants under the Greeks. But the jealousy which had existed for so many centuries between the two nations, was rooted too deep in the heart of every individual, and caused many disorders. The metropolitan of Cæsarea, named Marcus, had a dog, whom he called Armen. Gagik hearing of this, invited Marcus to dinner, and asked of him the name of the dog: the frightened metropolitan called the dog by another name, the animal did not hear; but as soon as he called him by the proper name, Armen, the dog ran to him. The king then gave orders that both the metropolitan and his dog should be put into one sack together, and tortured until they could bear it no longer. As soon as the Greeks heard this news, they rose against the Armenians; and the sons of one Mandal killed the King Gagik. This discouraged the chieftains and the leaders of the army, they ran away and were scattered over various parts of the world. A famous chief of the blood royal, Rouben by name, baron of the fort Kosidar, hearing the news of the king’s death, fled with his whole family to Mount Taurus.1

According to Vahram, Rouben’s grandson, Toros (spelled Thoros in the translation), would consolidate the Armenian hold over Cilicia. “He governed 374

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valiantly, and so much was he esteemed that Cilicia lost its proper name, and has been called The Country of Thoros.” Little is known about Vahram: he was a priest, the secretary of King Levon III, and a native of Edessa (modern-day Urfa). Erkâm had come to pick me up in the center of the old town. We had first met in Istanbul at the conference on Islamicized Armenians, of whom he was one. He was telling me a story from his grandmother, a Genocide survivor who had undergone forcible conversion: In 1961, the police gathered the Armenians of the city of Urfa, including my grandmother. “They put us all in a cage: we were all Armenian.” My grandmother and all the people there were terrified. They also recognized each other, even though they were careful not to keep in touch. The police fingerprinted them and wrote down their names, and they were then released. I never understood why the police did it. It may have been to make sure that the police could locate them.

We were in the courtyard of an ancient Armenian mansion near the fish pool, one of the childhood memories of my grandmother Azniv before being sent out into the desert at the age of six. So lovingly would she evoke it still 80 years after last seeing it, that it corresponded to the mental image I had made of it. In my imagination or her telling, the fish were red. But carp, large and gray, swarmed in Abraham’s Fishpond, as the oblong pool was known. It was believed that Abraham, the common patriarch of the three great monotheistic religions, was born here. In legend, Nimrod, castellan of the Urfa citadel, had thrown burning logs at Abraham to kill him, but God had turned the fire into water, and the logs into the carp. The fish were sacred. A curse would befall anyone who ate them and they would go blind. “When we were little we knew we were different, but I could not tell how,” Erkâm said. “Another kid once called me ‘Armenian, son of an Armenian,’ during a fight.” Once there was a blood feud between two Kurdish tribes in Urfa and his grandfather said, “These ones have massacred Armenians: look what has become of them.” And when Erkâm’s Kurdish paternal grandmother had arguments with her daughter-in-law, she would tell her, “You are an infidel’s daughter, aren’t you?” In secondary school, Erkâm started wondering why they did not have relatives on their father’s side, why they did not belong to an aşiret. They had acquaintances who were a little different, about whom his mother used to say, “They are from our people, too,” without elaborating. When the children asked them, their parents and their elders used to say, “We are migrants.” But the children would point out that they did not mingle with the other migrants from the Balkans. The mother would not respond, but also would not let her 375

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children mingle with the grandchildren of other settlers’ children: often these migrants were Roma. When Erkâm was 15, his mother told her children that they were Armenian. One day in 1985, an argument broke out in his class over Armenians. The night before, Turkish television had aired a documentary about Soghomon Tehlirian, the Armenian militant who had shot dead Talât Paşa, one of the main ideologues of the Genocide, in Berlin in 1921. Erkâm’s classmates had launched into profanity-laced tirades against Armenians, and they had reacted in stupor when he had come out in their defense. “Why do you care, are you Armenian?” they had asked him. “I may very well be,” he had responded in anger. But that night he did not sleep. The following morning he took it back, saying “it was a joke.” His school was across the street from the Church of Surp Asdvadzadzin (Holy Mother of God). “It had been turned into a depot at the time, and it broke my heart every day to see those drums spilling oil and filth stored inside it,” he said. Mutilation followed desecration, prior to its conversion into what is now the Selahaddin Eyyubi mosque. Erkâm’s grandfathers, Ahmet and Halil, had met as children in the deportation convoys from Erzurum, the province they both hailed from. Most of their families were slaughtered in Palu, thrown into the River Aradzani (Murat, in Turkish). His father’s father, Ahmet, was the only survivor of his family. Halil’s mother and a sister survived. Erkâm did not know his elders’ Armenian names prior to their Islamicization. On the deportation road from Erzurum to Urfa, Halil and another Armenian boy, bigger and older than him, strayed from the convoy. Halil was 11 and his friend 14. They were spending the night on the mountain. A Kurdish young man approached them, threatening to kill them. The other Armenian boy put a choke hold on the Kurd from behind, while Halil grabbed a large stone and hit him on his head until the man died. Halil made it with his mother and two sisters up to Hilvan, a town in the province of Urfa, but the women were kidnapped by Kurds. A Kurdish ağa from Hilvan took in Halil. One of the sisters, whom her captor wanted to kill, managed to flee and joined a group of Armenians that were being deported to Der Zor: they lost track of her after that. Halil’s other sister, Fatma, remained in the Hilvan area, taken as a wife by a Kurd. The mother found her children only in 1930: she had been forcibly married off to a Kurdish ağa in Siverek. After her husband died decades later, Fatma moved in with her brother. Erkâm, born in the early 1970s, had a blurry memory of Fatma from his childhood. In 1920–1, Erkâm’s other grandfather, Ahmet, had worked for a kind of camel transportation company run by Hamidiye officers along the route between Malatya, Diyarbakır, and Urfa. He was briefly married to a beautiful Kurdish woman called Leyla Yalaz. After they split she moved to Akçakale, a mostly 376

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Arab district in Urfa, with the son she had with Ahmet, Hamza. It is not clear if Hamza knew that his father was of Armenian origin. Erkâm knew that Hamza’s descendants were in Akçakale and Izmir, on the Mediterranean, but there was no contact between the families. For his part, Ahmet later married Ayşe, another Kurdish woman. They had a lot of children, of whom four sons and one daughter survived, while the others died of disease in childhood. When Halil was drafted in 1945, Ahmet took care of his family for the four years of conscription. Upon his return, Halil gave his daughter Fatma to Ahmet’s son Ismail. His grandfathers were the closest of friends but very different, Erkâm said. “Halil was humorous and enjoyed company, and Ahmet was terrifying: he never smiled, never joked, and he hardly ever spoke.” So frightening was Ahmet that even his own family had been relieved when he passed away. “When women saw him approaching they would scatter like chickens.” Yet Halil could be fearsome, too. The Kurdish family that had raised Halil fell into a blood feud with another Kurdish ağa’s tribe. As a warning, Halil left three bullets outside the home of their rival’s family. “In Hilvan only one person is so brave, and he is Armenian,” the enemy ağa had said. For all their mettle, they must have been so scared of their Armenian origin that not once did either grandfather say a word about it, not even their pre-Islamic names. “Not one thing: we did not even know they were Armenian.” None said anything about the massacres. All the Genocide stories passed on to Erkâm and his siblings came from their grandmother Ayşe. “Even though she was Kurdish, it was Ayşe who used to tell us tales about the massacres,” Erkâm said. She had seen Armenian children being thrown into a pyre in the presence of their Armenian mothers: “Muslims have caused so much suffering that I pray to God that He will cause a calamity to us Muslims.” They were still afraid to say they were Armenian, and preferred to keep their identity secret. Only their most immediate friends knew of their origin. Erkâm did not hide his leftist political orientation but if he said he was Armenian, things could take a turn for the worse for him. A Christian Armenian girl I had met at the Armenian lessons at the Nor Zartonk cultural center in Istanbul was born in Urfa in 1971, shortly before her family settled in Istanbul. Theirs had been, she reckoned, the last Christian Armenian family left in Urfa. Erkâm’s grandmother used to say that there were a lot of Armenians in the city, but they were scared. There was always the risk of war in Turkey, in which case the first ones to be targeted would be the Armenians. The Armenians of Urfa did not keep in touch with each other. “It’s not like Diyarbakır,” Erkâm said. 377

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That evening at Erkâm’s home, Halil and Ahmet’s grandchildren were gathered around a table of local delicacies, including the gâvur salatası (infidel’s salad) with cucumber, tomato, parsley, nutmeg, pomegranate juice, and ice. Everybody around the table, including Erkâm’s cousins’ wives, was an Islamicized Armenian, who under an alien religion and in silence had kept their identity alive. Armenians in Turkey were not as intimidated as before. Still, the new tolerance was precarious. “There is no security,” Erkâm said. His cousin Behçet intervened: “Who can have security in the Middle East?” It was the first time I heard a resident of Turkey describing his country as part of the Middle East. Urfa was three hours by car from Aleppo and at least 13 from Istanbul. On Erkâm’s insistence, Bekir, his youngest, unmarried brother took me with reluctance to their parents’ home, warning his father would not be happy to meet Diaspora Armenians. Ismail, Ahmet’s son, and his wife, Fatma, Hilal’s daughter, welcomed me warmly. Ismail was wearing a galabeya and an Islamic skullcap. The mother was wearing a lilac cotton gown and a white cotton yazma (headscarf ). They queried me about my ancestry. “My grandmother was from Hromkla,” I said, giving the Armenian name of the village Turks usually call Rumkale, in the province of Urfa. Fatma smiled knowingly. “Is he of our tribe?” she asked her son in Kurmancî. Bekir nodded. Ismail was visibly disturbed, and he did not look at me again. An angry twinkle shone in his eyes. That was as close as we got to discussing our common Armenian identity, but it was enough to unnerve him, as both brothers had warned me. We had not even said the word “Armenian.”     

“Sünnetsizler,” the police were telling him while they beat him up: “Uncircumcised ones.” It was a common figure of speech for Armenians among Turkish ultranationalists and law enforcement officers, especially for those suspected of fighting with the guerrillas. It was Zafer’s first arrest, in 1980. He was 14. His name was known to the police, as his two older brothers were leftist militants. Zafer showed me a scar on his torso left by torture during his first detention. Until then, he did not know that his grandmother was Armenian. He learned it from his police captors. “We know you, uncircumcised Armenians,” they kept saying as they discharged electricity on him or waterboarded him. It was after this ordeal that he would ask his mother about their identity. By the time of his later arrests in the early 1990s, his two brothers had already joined the PKK. Both died in combats against the Turkish army. One was killed in Van in 1993, the other in Diyarbakır in 1995. Both died at the age of 33. 378

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“Her name was Sayranush, not Siranush,” Zafer said, referring to the more common name. His grandmother’s was unique: “Sayranush is the name of a flower.” They were two sisters in the village of Azabak, in Tokat. His grandmother remembered the women were crying over the slaughtered men. Sayranush was six or seven in 1915. A few days later, the soldiers came and gathered all the women and children. They picked the beautiful women and they carried them away. Sayranush grabbed her aunt by her skirt but the soldiers beat her up and took the aunt with them. Sayranush ended up in the deportation caravans, along with her sister Hayganush, their mother and a grandmother. During the march, the mother and the grandmother died, and their bodies were thrown into the Euphrates. The sisters were separated upon arrival in Urfa. Sayranush was taken by a Kurdish ağa in Hromkla, under whom she was Islamicized and married off to a Kurd, with her name changed to Emine. She had been searching for her sister for years to no avail. Then one day she heard a story about a woman who resembled her in a Turcoman village of the province. It was Hayganush, whose name after forcible marriage and conversion had become Fatma. The sister’s children and grandchildren were very close to this day, but Zafer said that Hayganush’s family rejected their Armenian origin. Like Erkâm’s grandmother, in 1961 Sayranush was taken to the Emniyet Müdürlüğü (Security Directorate), which usually handled serious crimes and political cases, and inspired dread in the population. Everybody there was Armenian, survivors from the Genocide, Islamicized orphans from 1915. They took her fingerprints and she was sent back home. “So the state knows where we are, to persecute us still,” she had mumbled, after the experience that had terrified her. Two other men had joined Erkâm, Zafer, and I for the conversation in the park near Abraham’s Fishpond. Ali Haci and Niyazi also had Armenian grandmothers. “In Urfa there are 3,000 Armenians who are secretly Christian, and Zafer and Erkâm know them,” Niyazi said. The others stayed silent, looking down. Another four Armenians, three of them from Christian households, Zafer was sure of. A day or two after Hrant Dink’s murder on January 19, 2007, he had invited policemen routinely assigned to his workplace to come home to dinner. “They turned it down because they had guard duty outside the homes of three Armenian Christian families.” As he had never discussed his own ancestry, especially in view of his past arrests, Zafer had refrained from delving further into it, so as not to arouse the policemen’s suspicions. But the day Dink was shot down, another man whom everybody knew to be an Armenian had vented a century of anger. He had never spoken of his ancestry before. This colleague of Zafer, who strangely kept a recognizably Armenian family name, came to work drunk. “He cried all day long, cursing 379

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Turkey and the Turks,” Zafer remembered his workmate. Notwithstanding some socialist sympathies, this man did the namaz five times a day. “That day he said that he was Armenian, too, damning the moment his family had become Muslim, saying that his relatives in Istanbul had remained Christian.” The man’s rant was a long malediction on Turkey: “On and on he was wondering, ‘What are we doing here? How have we ended up in this state? Why are Armenians under Turks?’ He was shouting one insult after the other, things that would have landed you in jail or worse at other times, but everybody pretended not to listen; it was unreal.” The following day, however, he had returned to his normal state of silence. His Armenian rage only lasted one day of inebriation. Ali Haci was the grandson of Lusin, who was four years old in 1915. She was having breakfast with her family the morning soldiers came into their house in the village of Hopak, in Adıyaman, and killed her father. Along with her mother, Evsane, and two older sisters, she was put in a deportation convoy. The women were shot at in the vicinity of Akçakale, near Urfa’s border with Syria. A bullet aimed at the mother went through Lusin’s arm, merely grazing Evsane. In Ali Haci’s telling, a Kurdish family undertook the care of the injured girl while Evsane went on to Aleppo with her two other daughters and the other Armenian deportees. For the following 14 years, they had no news of each other. In 1929, Lusin received a letter postmarked in Chicago. It was from her mother, who had been unable to find her until then. Evsane had been taken as a wife by an Armenian named Serop Jololyan and had moved with her two daughters to the US. “Evsane and Serop sent gold and $500 to the store of Mehmet Melik in the village of Sultantepe once or twice a year, but Mehmet Melik tore up the letters, took $400 and gave Lusin the remaining $100.” Mother and daughter never saw each other after 1915. The letters stopped in 1940. In 2009, they received a phone call at Ali Haci’s home in Sultantepe. It was a man from Chicago. Ali Haci’s mother-in-law, who only spoke Kurdish, was home alone, and they were unable to communicate. “She said to call back again in the evening, but she said it in Kurmancî, and this man did not call again.” Ali Haci now wanted to get back in touch with the descendants of Evsane and Serop Jololyan, with a desperation he did not disguise. His 27-year-old daughter had cancer. It was a constant in Turkey: America loomed large as the promised land in the imagination of family members of cancer patients. “Please find the family of Serop Jololyan,” he said as he scribbled his name and telephone number. Zafer took me for a tour of Armenian churches turned into mosques in Urfa, giving me a rule of thumb for spotting those that were converted from churches: “The minarets are always newer, very often detached and built with 380

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different stones.” The principle held, as I would also observe elsewhere in the Armenian provinces. Armenians were still regularly called gâvur in Urfa, but it was not necessarily in the religious sense of “infidel” anymore. It could and would still be used as an insult. But it was also a racist term that had been incorporated into conversational speech, enfeebled into a common word, Zafer said: We had a neighbor here in Urfa called Gâvur Mahmut. This Gâvur Mahmut had been found by a Kurdish shepherd on a mountain in Malatya, who took his flock to graze on the pastures on the slope. But he noticed that one of the goats split from the rest and stood alone in a distant spot, as if examining something. This happened a few times, so he decided to follow the goat and found a baby wrapped in a kundak, a swaddle blanket. That baby was Gâvur Mahmut. The Kurds who took him in and raised him told him the story, and that’s all he knew about his past. An abandoned Armenian baby. Gâvur Mahmut was a man without a past. Can we say that? I don’t know. He was the man without a past, or one who didn’t know the past, and I don’t know if ignorance makes any difference. Let us suppose we all forget all the wrong deeds of the past. Would we all become better people, and this a better world? I don’t know. Gâvur Mahmut’s two sons enrolled in the PKK, and they died fighting against the Turkish army. We know that his daughter lives in Urfa, but we don’t know where she is.

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Marash “We threw the infidels from there,” the young man told me, pointing to a precipice that fell to a dizzying depth in Ulnya, the historical name for the town also known as Zeytun. He was the great-grandchild of Macedonian settlers that had come to take the properties of the Armenians, including those of my mother’s clan, the Zeytountsians. My young guide’s forefathers had arrived after the massacres, but the young man, without any obvious intention to offend, unapologetically owned up to his side of history, complete with its verbiage, even when talking to someone who had introduced himself as an Armenian. The young man’s father took me for a tour of Zeytun in his motorbike sidecar. It was a staggered town atop a mountain that soared steeply to aerie heights. At the entrance to Zeytun, in the lower quarter, he pulled over outside a rural guard checkpoint. One of them, in camouflage fatigues, threw a hostile glance at me and took my picture, while an older one, sitting cross-legged at the cabin door, told me twice: “Korkma” (“Don’t fear,” in Turkish). They had guessed I was Armenian. It was the only time in Turkey where I first had to stop at a rural guard post prior to entering a village. Yet in the century since the Genocide, Zeytun and the province where it was, Marash—also the name of its capital—had become strongholds of Turkish nationalism. Zeytun was completely emptied of Armenians and, in the city of Marash, there were only two descendants of Armenians left that I could find, and they were both distant relatives of an upstate New York Armenian engineer, Ara, who provided their contact details. In 2009, Ara had found his centenarian uncle in the village of Geben. In 1915, his father’s younger brother had split from the deportation caravan and had decided to return to their hometown. They lost contact with each other afterwards. Ara had met the old man, an imam, and had shown him the photo from his father’s youth. The resemblance between them was extra­ordinary. The old imam had looked perplexed at the photo, unable to say a word. It has been captured on video, showing him puzzled, moved, but silent. A month later, he had passed away. By then, Ara had established the 382

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kinship beyond reasonable doubt and had connected with the Muslim branch of his family. His two relatives, whom I met in the city of Marash, each had one Armenian ancestor three and four generations ago. Şenay was delayed by more than one hour, and she only advised 15 minutes before arriving that she would be late. The experience at Zeytun, where the sidecar guide pulled over to drop off a sack of potatoes at his uncle’s, and then at his family’s home for a tea break with his wife and children, notwithstanding my urgent pleas that I was in a hurry which he most gently ignored, had convinced me that “Armenian time,” a widespread tradition of tardiness that held up the start of any schedule or program in the Diaspora by up to two hours, must have been born in Marash or somewhere nearby. That, and almost nothing else, was what Şenay had of Armenian in her. Only her great-great-grandmother was Armenian, of whom she knew nothing else. The memory of it would surface only when she became stubborn, with her friends teasing her that her century-old vestige of “Ermeni damarı” (“Armenian streak”) had got the best of her. Later in the evening I met Ihsan, Ara’s other relative. Serious and a man of few words, he was a ranking member of Erdoğan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym of AKP, and turned up with impeccable punctuality. There was really no point in visiting Geben, he said. The four Armenian families that had made it past 1915 had moved to Istanbul some 30 years ago, as they were still being harassed despite their conversion to Islam. These Armenians had dug up “their gold” and taken it with them. “There is a lot of gold beneath these lands,” Ihsan said. A Geben man had made an Armenian friend during military service, and with the guidance of this Armenian he had found a trove, enough for him to open a factory. Muslim refugees from the Balkans had been resettled in Geben. In the 1920s, they had demolished the Armenian church and had leveled the plot where it stood with concrete. Ihsan did not feel any link to his Armenian origin. “Not in the least: we know that my grandfather’s father was Armenian,” he said. “That’s all.” He was surprised I had met Şenay. “She is not even Armenian.” Then he remembered that her paternal grandmother’s grandmother was Armenian. He had never been given trouble for his Armenian origin, but he did not know if they spoke behind his back. There was absolutely nobody else he could think of with even the remotest Armenian ancestor in Marash, so he decided to call an old man who used to be well connected with Armenians, Assyrians, and other minorities left in the city. “Ermeni …” Ihsan was whispering on the mobile phone to the obviously confused man on the other end of the line, while everybody else in the tea 383

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garden was discussing loudly everything from sports to politics and weddings and disease in the family. “Try in Istanbul: they have many churches there, and then there is a village in Hatay,” the old, hoarse voice on the phone told me kindly, probably feeling sorry for the clueless visitor he must have thought me. “You will not find any in Marash; there was a handful but they were Muslim anyway, and must have left some 30 years ago.”

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Kilis The only thing left of Armenians in Kilis was the houses. Nobody knew of any Armenian, converted or otherwise. There was only one person everybody talked about, a converted Jew whose family had left for Israel very shortly after the country’s founding but he had chosen to stay in his birthplace, had married a Turk, had converted to Islam, and had changed his last name to something that meant “Pure Turk,” but everybody in town still called him “the Jew.” A man who appeared to suffer from some sort of derangement offered to walk me through the old Armenian neighborhood of Kilis, near the marketplace. This man spoke a dialectal Turkish mixed with Arabic words and inflections. My great-grandfather Bedros had been murdered here, in the massacre of 1895. He worked as a tanner when the Armenian merchants were targeted by a mob. His corpse was thrown outside his family home, with a mark hacked into his forehead with axes. In family lore, at the same time, inside the house his wife was in labor, giving birth to my great-uncle Alexander. As I walked about the marketplace, an Arab merchant invited me over to have tea with them, while the strange man that had volunteered as a guide idled about. They had no idea about Armenians in Kilis. Their best guess was Istanbul or the Armenians of Hatay, about whom they had heard. The strange man took me to Armenian houses. One opened into an inner courtyard. Its rooms had been assigned to the families of rebels fighting in Syria. There was a roomful of young orphans, who were introduced to me as “the children of martyrs.” Most were too young to understand their condition and were giggling merrily, but two girls were older, around ten. One of them was holding a baby. The other older girl was prematurely wearing an abaya, an Islamic garment that covered up everything but the face. They all had large eyes and were excited to pose for the camera. The mothers of most of the children were alive, but some were orphans of both parents. A teenager from the Turkish family that lived below—even though in Kilis ethnicities were uncertain, most people preferring to describe 385

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themselves as “Muslim,” the blanket for all—invited me to join them for tea and cookies in the courtyard. They believed these orphans’ parents were from the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda-related militant group, but one of them suspected they were Islamic State. There were also some injured combatants, teenagers with sad faces, unthreatening without the hoods and weapons. I extended my hand to respond to one’s greeting, but I noticed he was missing all his fingers. A short walk from there I noticed the entrance to the local newspaper. After introducing myself as a fellow journalist, I decided to ask them about Armenians in Kilis. As they exchanged glances among themselves in astonishment, a man walked in, tall and fashionably dressed. “He is Armenian,” said one of the reporters, with the obvious intent to tease him. His response was, “O Rus,” which in Turkish means, “He is Russian.” But it was the beginning of a pun: “O-rus-pu,” or “Whore.” Still, they were willing to run an article, saying that an Armenian from the States was looking for relatives. As it would probably attract enterprising treasure hunters, I passed up on the offer. On a sidewalk near the marketplace, a young woman stood by a store holding the hands of her two little daughters, both with their faces completely bandaged, except for slots for their eyes, nostrils, and lips. The openings were wide enough to make out the girls’ smiles for the photo. They were refugees from Aleppo and had both been injured during a bombing. The strange man that had showed me the Armenian houses said four Islamicized Armenians still lived in town, he reckoned, and we were going to see them. He had been mumbling a few things in conversations on a prehistoric cell phone a little away from me, so I assumed he was making the arrangements for our meeting. “Something unexpected has come up,” he said. “I need to run to the hospital, but I’ll come back soon.” He hopped on a Russian-style motorcycle that I had not seen earlier, and sped away, whipping up a small cloud of dust. That was the last I saw of him, and of any hope of finding Armenians in Kilis.

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Adana Sinan refused to meet me. He was 100 percent of Armenian origin and lived in the old city of Sis, where my grandfather Avedis had studied until the massacre of Adana in 1909, when the Church decided to send the seminarians home and his uncle, their guardian since their father’s murder in the massacre of 1895, decided to ship him and his brother Alexander to Egypt. Sinan was born in Hajin, the ancestral hometown of many Diaspora Armenians. His family stayed behind in 1915 and converted to Islam. Their relatives had left for Argentina and Lebanon. “Two things: if you have a map in hand, bring it, but do not come with phony maps,” Sinan said, when he had first contacted me over a social network. “If the map is in the city of Hajin, the work is a little difficult: but if it’s in the villages, it is easy.” The gold disease had infected him. There were seven Armenian families in the village of Paghnik. His mother’s aunt, Hripsime, had remained a Christian for the 100 years of her life, but had died named Ayşe, nominally a Muslim. He was a socialist. At the last minute, he backed out from meeting me. Even though I had deep doubts about the legitimacy of his Armenian claims, in view of his initial interest in the treasure maps, he eventually put me in touch with Rıdvan, a lawyer of Hrant Dink’s family, and his partner Neslişah, who thought she was of Armenian origin, which was partially confirmed by a DNA test. Her paternal great-grandfather had moved to Adana from Tarsus, but they did not know anything about his ancestry. Her father was not a religious person and was a liberal, but he refused to entertain they might be of Armenian origin, even though Neslişah and her three sisters strongly suspected so, as did their mother. Rıdvan and Neslişah were heading to Kobane the following morning to take food, medicines, clothes, and aid to the Kurds in the northern Syrian town besieged by Islamic State terrorists. On the home front, the religious sanctimoniousness of the Erdoğan regime was taking a ridiculously serious turn. A hotel 387

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in Urfa had not allowed them to stay, not even in separate rooms, because they were not married, and so they had had to spend the night in their car. They took me to the home of a PKK operative, who had served more than 20 years in prison. Rıdvan told me that he came from a major Kurdish tribe. This militant’s family was extremely wealthy, but he had forsaken his share of the fortune for his socialist principles, and to join the cause. He lived in a barely furnished apartment in a working-class neighborhood where most residents were Kurdish. We squatted on the carpet and cushions to drink tea. The PKK man was wearing a Mao-style tunic in olive green and matching trousers of the Kurdish şalvar type, a local reinterpretation of the riding trousers introduced by the British Army in Mesopotamia. He wanted to know how Armenians felt about the Kurdish revolutionary movement. Among the more politically active of the Diaspora Armenians there was a current of support for the Kurdish revolutionary movement, I told him. Yet, I added, that was tempered by the know­ledge that the Genocide executioners were in large measure Kurds and that what they called Kurdistan, the ever-expanding territory that grew with Kurdish demographic explosion and migrations, to us was Western Armenia. The guerrilla bit his lower lip, displeased that he had not heard raving support for the ideals espoused by the PKK. More than the actors, perhaps the most important aspect of Kurdish involvement was motivation and intent. In an interview with the Istanbul newspaper Agos, the researcher and writer Fırat Aydınkaya1 identified four different explanations for Kurdish participation. The first thesis was espoused by one of the Genocide architects, Talât Paşa, and was supported by prominent voices in the negationist camp. In this view, “We, the Turks, thought about doing a humane and clean deportation, but the Kurds from within sabotaged the work and they carried out the genocide.” The second thesis was that “The Armenians started this whole business, and the Kurds responded,” which, Aydınkaya said, was the view of Kurdish nationalist ideologue Nuri Dersimi (1890–1973), a variation on the negationist theme of Armenians rising up against the Ottoman Empire, incited by Russia, Great Britain, or other powers intent on carving it up or destroying it. This was still a common view among certain conservative Kurdish circles, a silent segment of Kurdish society that garners much less media and scholarly attention than the large and growing number of Kurds who call for recognition of the Genocide.2 According to the third thesis, apparently the most widespread, the Kurds who took part in the massacres “were ignorant or simple-minded,” and “were manipulated.” One of the most prominent exponents of this view was the Kurdish nationalist writer Cegerxwîn (1903–84). It still had adherents, the largest number of whom began to subscribe to it after Atatürk’s brutal suppression of the Sheik Said rebellion and the crushing of the subsequent 388

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uprisings, including the Dersim massacre in 1938. The second precept in this formulation partially, and perhaps in an unintended manner, undermined any mitigating circumstance this argument might have, for whoever let themselves be used was anticipating rewards later denied. But this proposition, which still had many adherents even among Armenians, gained renewed importance among leftist activists of the 1970s, who reinterpreted it through the prism of a feudal social order by which the Sublime Porte manipulated the responsive Kurdish sheiks and aşirets. These, in turn, incited simple-minded Kurdish laymen into anti-Armenian violence. The fourth thesis, which was the one advanced by Aydınkaya, was that ordinary Kurds and the aşirets took part in the Genocide and had already been preparing for it since the 1890s, with special participation by the Hamidiye Regiments, the Kurdish cavalry formations created by Sultan Abdül Hamid II. The state mobilized ordinary Kurds, Aydınkaya said, using as its main agent the sheiks in Anatolia, whom people looked up to as the authority on earthly and religious matters. The sheiks had issued the fatwas and instigated the attacks against “infidels.” Yet the definition of Kurdish responsibility in 1915 was complex. Their parti­ cipation was secondary, as there was no evidence of Kurdish involvement in the planning and the laying of the ideological foundations of the Genocide. More importantly, there was no Kurdish state nor any government structure within the Ottoman Empire that acted on behalf of the Kurdish people, which did not exonerate but complicated the attribution of responsibility. That being his premise, the Kurdish writer Ibrahim Halil Baran wrote that the massacres were not only a crime against Armenians and Assyrians but, he argued, also against what he called “Kurdistan,” that is, the historical territories where Armenian statehood was established in different periods. Baran, however, saw these lands as part of the Kurdish homeland, a view he supported after a long exposition of cherry-picked historical facts. In a generally sympathetic article for the recognition of the Genocide, and in which he called on Kurds apologizing for it to return property they may have inherited to their rightful Armenian and Assyrian owners, Baran also broke down the perpetrators by their nationalities, including Arabs and Yezidis, the point being that there were others too, in addition to Turks and Kurds, yet they get very little mention.3 The gist of his argument was summed up in the conclusion of the article: “Massacres are not the work of peoples, but of states.” He argued that nobody in his right mind would blame Armenians for the massacre of Dersim in 1938 just because Sabiha Gökçen, the Turkish aviatrix who strafed civilians during the uprising, may have been of Armenian origin. He added that, “Even if there were Kurds who carried out the massacres, that does not invalidate that it was organized by the Turkish state, and that, again, makes it the real guilty [party].” 389

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But in the body of his article, he said that Turkish and Armenian propaganda made the task of elucidating the “real” human toll of the massacres impossible—a very obvious challenge to the estimate of 1½ million, or three-quarters of the Armenian population, something that was immediately corroborated on the ground. And yet, he argued that Turkey, as the inheritor of the Ottoman Empire, owed reparations to “Armenians, including those of Kurdistan.” So, in this author’s view, the Kurdish state did not exist as a responsible entity of the massacres—which is true, even if the Kurds became an absolute majority in the Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire after the Genocide—yet it does, or it should, as a beneficiary of potential indemnity for the extermination of Armenians and Assyrians in territory he claimed as Kurdistan. The PKK guerrilla of Adana said that the slaughterers of Armenians had been the mountain Kurds, or tribal Kurds, and not the sedentary ones. There were many types of Kurds, he said: “Muslim Kurds, socialist Kurds, Yezidi Kurds, Armenian Kurds …” I stopped him there, asking him to define what were the “Armenian Kurds,” but he did not or could not. However, he said that the “Armenian Kurds” were fighting shoulder to shoulder with their brethren for the liberation of Kurdistan. Among Kurds, the revolutionary movement’s epos had given way to a romantic revisionism of Kurdish history, in which they were absolved of any and all sins by virtue of their ignorance, their naïveté, or their manipulation by Turkey and other colonial powers. Kurds were fundamentally innocent of all wrongdoing. In his explanation, the Genocide and other atrocities were written off to a few ignorant and greedy accomplices of the Turks.     

Shortly after Agos published an article about this book project, Ramazan contacted me over a social network. Originally from the province of Adana, he was now living in Istanbul: I have read that you have been doing some research regarding the people with Armenian roots in Turkey. I believe I am one of them, and I wanted to contact you. I’d like to ask you if you know how I can get data with the old surnames of people who emigrated from their villages around the year 1915 and specifically the eastern region of Turkey. My grandfather’s village is Keği.4 My grandfather had migrated from that village to Adana in 1915 at the age of seven, and he changed his surname. I suppose that my grandfather was a Turkified Armenian. I know that there were also some Kurds in that village, but I do not think he was a Kurd. Why would a Kurd move to Adana at the time? Kurds stayed in their regions. I also know

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ADANA that he had some Christian family members who emigrated to the United States from that village before 1915. How would he know he had some Christian family members in the United States if he was not Armenian? This is what I know from my father: • My grandfather had no relatives that we know of; • My grandfather remembers that he used to go to church with his mother when he was little, and that he was afraid of the priest in black cassock and hid beneath the pew where his mother sat; • My grandfather’s aunt sewed up a kind of a jacket and she put some gold in it and let my grandfather go away with it, because it was wartime and people used to die. It was kind of spring time. He never saw his family again; • His family were merchants and they were well off and they had gold; • At about the same time his sister migrated to the United States (we don’t know how he knows this). My grandfather never wanted my father and his siblings to contact anyone from the United States. He told them that they were Christians. This was probably the reason he was afraid; • My grandfather got married to my grandmother because she also came from that region in Turkey and she also had this kind of story. Her family also migrated to Adana around the 1900s from Harput.5

Ramazan then added a cryptic reflection: My father’s family did not acquire any kind of family culture. You can even see that now, there are very different kinds of lifestyles in our family. This is probably because my grandfather was not able to raise his children with his own culture. He also was very confused, I suppose.

A business trip brought Ramazan to New York before I started my second, extensive tour of Turkey. For quite some time, it turned out, he had been aware of his Armenian ancestry. Yet even before finding out about his origins, he and his older brother felt different than the other schoolchildren. They were not able to define what it was, yet they saw the family life of their classmates was markedly different than their own. While he was loath to be more specific, from his description a picture emerged of a more urban household, and a markedly more secular one. Their dishes were different, too, as were “strange words” used in the family. No matter how much I insisted, he did not give examples of this lexicon. Yet these commonalities were shared among his parents and grandparents because they were all Armenian. The Patriarchate of Constantinople had rudely rebuffed his attempts to find out more about the Armenian families from Keği and Harput before the Genocide: he was looking into a connection with a Surp Toros church in the hometown of one of his grandparents. 391

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He was trying to reconcile both worlds, for he was aware of his roots yet he called himself a Turkish citizen with Armenian origin, both of his identities qualified. A believer in God, he did not see himself as a Muslim: “It is only on my national ID.” Yet he enjoyed the Islamic holidays as opportunities to get together with his family. “I don’t want to lose that tradition, either.” His girlfriend was a Turkish Cypriot girl who shared his secular outlook, as did his parents, who considered themselves secular Turkish citizens: My parents told me about my roots. But it is also important here to mention that they did not have the ethnic awareness that I have now. They did not experience this period. Our perception of life is very different. But at least they told me about my roots.

We met again in Istanbul. He had begun to take lessons in Armenian, and in a short time he had attained basic conversational proficiency. But on the other hand, he was a successful member of Turkish society—he worked for a multinational corporation, and traveled extensively. When the time came for him to have a family, it would be important that his child knew his roots. “But I would rather raise my child as a world citizen,” he said, and repeated something he had told me before in New York: “I would definitely give my child a mixed Armenian and international name.” This, he insisted, was very important. It did not take much to see that his Islamic name bore heavily on him. His brother had joined us that evening in Istanbul. Zülfü had emigrated to a major English-speaking destination for immigrants, where he had become a successful restaurateur. He was enjoying an extended vacation in Turkey and, right off the cuff, proposed a road trip with a friend to Dersim, as he had found the location of a great-grandfather’s grave. Eventually, contact tapered off. Ramazan and Zülfü’s parents declined my repeated requests conveyed by Ramazan to meet at their home in Sis. They were aware of their history and its consequences, but it was a page they had turned. Nowhere in Turkey had I encountered so much fear as in Adana. They had the memory of two major massacres to reckon with. In the course of one night during the massacre of Adana in 1909, a woman, whose testimony Zabel Yesayan quotes in Amid the Ruins, had lost her entire family. The woman’s husband had been murdered by the mob that had now surrounded their house. A Turkish neighbor came to protect her and fend off the attackers, while urging her to convert to Islam. She wanted to be martyred with the rest of her family, but relented upon the pleas of her teenage son, who did not want to part from life so young. A short while later, Turkish families came to take away her two daughters as brides. Then the gang of murderers 392

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grabbed her son, who was trying to fight them off to the screams that he was now a Muslim. “We are taking you to be circumcised,” they responded, roaring with laughter. He was knifed and his body was thrown in the river. A Turkish neighbor later told the mother that the boy had not suffered for too long. “They all have blood under their nails,” the Turkish woman said of her son’s butchers. Maddened, the woman had gone to the court to curse Turks and Islam. The guard had sent her back home, telling her that an “evil wind” had blown and had now gone away.

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Antap On a trip he made to Antap in December 1951, Yervant Kuchukian said that “the older men remembered the past events, whereas for the youth we were an issue relegated to history.” Resettled in Beirut, Kuchukian mentioned that he had heard of locals bearing Armenian names, who made the sign of the cross when kneading the bread. There was also a woman left with five children fathered by a Turkish soldier who had taken her as a wife. A Genocide survivor himself, Kuchukian traveled for business to his birthplace and stayed for 100 hours. It had only been 36 years since the massacres, yet the Turkish families he encountered employed a similar discourse to that prevalent today in civilized company: Armenians did not deserve “what happened to them.” It had all been the doing of “ignoramuses” and “komitacis,” a word with pejorative overtones initially used for Macedonian militants and Young Turks, later extended to political party members. The polite reinterpretation by Turkish laymen of the official state line was that, “we were all brothers, what a shame all this should have happened,” and variations in the same key.1 Fatih, a Turkish friend from Antap and an expert on the city and its Armenian history, introduced me to the only Armenian in town he knew, and the only one I met. I knew of a woman of Armenian descent too, but it was impossible to find her. Hospitable to a fault as Antaptsis are famous for, Fatih was also humble in a manner they tend to be less noted for, which makes them the butt of jokes they even tell among themselves. We visited the palace of the Jebejian clan, now split into two museums. One was devoted to Atatürk, filled with Turkish nationalist paraphernalia and ephemera of dubious worth, without even a mention of the rightful owners. Instead, the residence is presented as “a donation” by a Turk. The second, older museum was a tastefully curated collection of toys, even if the enormous cellar had been turned into a fantasy cave world that verged on the tacky, with the funky illumination of a 1970s nightclub. Then Fatih walked me through the run-down splendor of the Nazarians’ palace, its court turned into a café. A gilded foyer on the piano 394

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nobile of the first floor opened into three separate rooms with doors baroquely decorated with paintings of English, Moorish, and French armies, the years of construction of the different wings written above in Armenian, Western, and Islamic notation, from 1856 to 1859. “They know there is something wrong with this name, so they kept changing it for a while but they never got around to getting rid of it completely.” Fatih was laughing. We were in an old Armenian neighborhood in the old quarter of Antap, reading the name plates of a series of streets called Heyik, some showing attempts to scratch off the e and replace it with an a, but then the e had been redrawn over it more boldly. It was a derivate of Hayk, one of the archaic names for Armenia and Armenians, and the name of the nation’s mythical patriarch. At some point it had even been called Hayk, had been changed to Hayik and later to Heyk, before settling into its uncertain present spelling. The unholy etymology suspected by city officials had been corrupted, and compensated with complementary epithets: Heyik Müslüman Sokak (Armenian Muslim Street), Heyik İmam Sokak (Armenian Imam Street), and Heyik Mescit Sokak (Armenian Mosque Street). We then lost ourselves in the maze of the Antap bazaar. A man who resembled Fatih’s aged double, his copious mustache as snow-white as his hair, sat outside a small shop of leather goods. His father, Hacı Ali, was a Genocide survivor who had escaped with his life after a Kurdish ağa in Besne, in the province of Adıyaman, had taken him into his household as a farmhand. “So your father had converted,” I commented, believing I’d misunderstood him when he said they had never been Islamicized. “No, he had not: but what did you want to do in a place where Fridays are the holy day and the majority of the people are Muslim?” Köksal responded: You have to live amid them, right? At least for the sake of appearances. My grandmother’s great-nephew and his family are in Istanbul, and they are fully Armenian. We once visited them in their neighborhood, Bakırköy. His wife was scared of us. “We are Armenian, too,” I told her. “You live in Bakırköy, where almost 70 percent of the population are Armenian, and I live in Antap,” I said, “And before that in Besne, where 75 percent of the population are Muslim and 25 percent are Armenian: how would you want me to live among them?”

In any case, Köksal was indifferent to nationality or religion. “For me what matters is how, not what, people are: whether it’s Armenian, Christian, Jewish, Alevi, Sunni, it’s not important at all.” His circumstances prevented him from being indifferent to his nationality, and he only hid it because in Antap, in a potentially dangerous way, his identity mattered. “But do your immediate neighbors know you are Armenian?” I asked him. 395

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“They know me as an Alevi. Here I’m an Alevi.” “Are you Alevi?” “Truth be told, I am not that either. If you are Armenian, you cannot be anything other than Armenian. Alevis respect Armenians, however. Among Sunnis, you are done for if you are Armenian.” Alevis were once the majority of Antap’s population, Fatih said, but during the reign of Yavuz Sultan Selim in the sixteenth century, Muslims from Marash were resettled in Antap to make Sunnis the population’s majority. Since the 1890s, Alevis got along very well with Jews and Armenians, which continued to this day with whatever remnant of either community there still is. But Sunni Muslims and Alevis did not get along with each other. They did not greet each other and did not do business together. “One interesting thing is that in 1560 there was an uprising in Antap against the Ottomans,” Fatih said. Köksal did not know anything about his family’s past. “Our elders did not tell us stories, they felt fear.” Fatih said there were 20 Armenian families of coppersmiths in Antap only some decades ago. That number was now down to two, but we could not talk to them because they did not accept their Armenian origin. “There is an Armenian family of baklava makers in Antap,” Fatih told me. “What can their last name be?” As I was trying to guess, Fatih stunned me by saying, “Abuşoğlu.” Köksal was laughing, so he knew some Armenian too. It was a composite name that meant “son of an idiot.” I later visited the store and took photos of the name, proudly displayed on the window. The suffix oğlu is “son” in Turkish, whereas abuş in Armenian had only one, unambiguous meaning (the word was made up of the privative prefix ab and uş, a Farsi origin stem for “mind” or “intelligence”). These Abuşoğlus were Armenian but they did not know it or they pretended they did not: “They are a very Muslim family, and they don’t know about their origins, and not even the meaning of their last name, because they would change it if they did.” Fear was still pervasive. “It is because of fear that we still remain secret,” Köksal said. “Some decades ago in our hometown of Besne, after the last prayer call from the mosque in the evening we did not leave home, because locals would ask us, ‘Where are you going, infidel?’” And they still called them “infidel,” he added. “Would you become Christian, if you had a choice?” “I would become of all true religions. Did Jesus lie? Did Muhammad lie? No. Then I respect those religions. I would become of all those religions.” But Fatih disputed Muhammad’s truth: “Muhammad did not speak the entire truth.” He also said that if Armenians were opening up in a place like Diyarbakır, it could also happen in Antap, where the population was less 396

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devoutly Muslim. And he disputed the myths about the rebellion led by Sheik Said, now eulogized in the romantic reinterpretation of modern Kurdish nationalism. “Sheik Said was fighting for the establishment of a Sunni Muslim state, not for an independent Kurdistan.” He was against the secular Turkish state, Fatih said, and “for me, that was wrong.” It was his Islamic devotion that had gained Sheik Said such a strong following in Diyarbakır during the 1925 rebellion, Fatih said. “According to me, he was not very different than Dr. Reşit,” he continued, comparing the sheik to Mehmet Reşit, known as “the butcher of Diyarbakır” for the annihilation of the Armenians during his governorship of the province in 1915. Fatih harbored doubts about many who nowadays claimed Armenian ancestry in Diyarbakır: Now, when you go to Diyarbakır, a lot of people say, “I am of Armenian origin.” Part of that may be true, but part of that may be people who are after making money. It’s not unlikely. Twenty years ago, people in Diyarbakır, Mush, Van, Tatvan, and other places started seeing Armenian visitors and that they were well off, and saw it as an opportunity to profit from it. There are people who are truthful. But I suspect that if two are telling the truth, eight are lying.

Köksal was nodding in agreement: “Yes.”     

A construction worker was scraping at a trefoil cross in high relief on the archway. The lives gone a century ago, the blades had now turned on their legacy. It was Genocide by other means continued, before my eyes. A chisel was undoing what another one, in constructive hands, had made in the late nineteenth century. The mutilation of Surp Asdvadzadzin, the Holy Mother of God Armenian Cathedral, was the first step toward its Islamicization and forced conversion into a mosque, called Kurtuluş (Independence). Visitors were barred from entering the church, but the destruction worker scraping the cross had turned a blind eye. Surp Asdvadzadzin’s interior, its vaulted enormity, luminous and white, triggered spatial sensations that evoked memories of St. Sophia and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A gigantic Turkish flag, hung vertically down from the apse, defaced the cathedral’s altar. It had been displayed, Fatih told me, to hide the shadow of a cross that they had been unable to erase from the apse, “like a ghost.” The church had a cruciform footprint. “Yet despite small side spaces giving the outline of a cross, the effect of the light and spacious interior, crowned by an immense dome of nine meters in diameter, relates more to an Ottoman imperial mosque than a church,” with a rounded dome that “also invited this 397

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comparison.” Built between 1878 and 1893, the cathedral had been commissioned by Nicholas Ağa Nazaretian, an Armenian notable and the wealthiest man in the city. Sarkis Balyan, of a distinguished Armenian family of Ottoman court architects, was noted as a mosque architect.2 A friend of Fatih had bought an old Armenian mansion a few years ago, a few blocks down from the cathedral. A disc in volcanic rock, inscribed in Armenian with an invocation of God’s blessing and 1890, was set in the facade. The attic, above the third floor of the mansion, had commanding views of Surp Asdvadzadzin as it faded into the evening. Shortly after moving in, the homeowner had found two notebooks, with pages eaten away by rot, filled with spidery Armenian handwriting. One contained what appeared to be minutes of the parish council. The second, written in more elaborate language with terms and declensions from classical Armenian, was filled with different entries that interwove divine intention with salient chapters of Armenian history, in what may have been homily drafts. There was a mention of the Battle of Avarayr, between the Armenians commanded by Vartan Mamigonian and the Sassanid Persians, who were trying to restore the Zoroastrian cult in Armenia, but were also driven by political concerns about Armenian links to Christian princes. Among the fragmentary sentences I could make out, one said “for the people’s peace,” and another, “Without a doubt, Vasak must have.” Vasak was an Armenian prince who, along with his forces, defected to the Persians against his own people in the battle of ad 451. Although a military defeat, Avarayr led to the Persian monarchy shortly afterwards ceasing its campaign against Christianity in Armenia. The clash had another lasting consequence. As the country was at war, Armenians were unable to send delegates to the Council of Chalcedon in the same year, and eventually rejected its decisions. This was in large part due to poor communication and misinterpretation, that for a long time caused the Armenian Church to be considered erroneously Monophysite by the Catholic Church. The confusion was put to rest by Pope John Paul II 15 centuries later. In any case, the Armenians split from the rest of the Christian community and theirs became an autocephalous, national church. As I tried to turn the notebook’s page, the edge I was holding came off and turned to dust.

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Musa Ler The curtain of fog was falling and drawing in rapid succession, but it never dissipated, apart from instants when the sun blinked and disappeared again. Musa Ler was trapped in a gigantic net of low clouds: we marched into them as they moved in the opposite direction, away from the still distant sea. “Fog helped the Armenians defend themselves.” Asadur knew it from his grandparents, who during the resistance of 1915 had taken to the mountain that descended into the Mediterranean. While Van and Urfa had also risen up against the Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars that had come to exterminate them, Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, helped turn the local story into myth. In truth, the Armenians of Musa Ler (Musa Dağ is the Turkish name) had fended off two major assaults for 53 days and, as the Turks were getting ready to launch a major offensive, the French battleship Guichen spotted the two large flags tied to tall trees, one with a large red cross on it, and the other with a legend in English that said “CHRISTIANS IN DISTRESS: RESCUE,” and came to evacuate the Armenians. Caravans of Arabs with blinkered horses trotted past us, sporting fancy saddles and tapestry saddlebags. “Thieves,” Asadur said. They were making off with laurel, feeding an international circuit of illicit trade in plants that had pharmaceutical companies as their final destination, our guide said. Twice I fell, hit by the saddlebags—veritable punch bags—in the blind trot of the Arabs’ horses. Our expedition team also included Asadur’s two sons, and a brother and a sister from the Armenian community of Aleppo who were sitting out the war in Vakıf, the last entirely Armenian village in Turkey at the foot of Musa Ler. A Turk, a teacher and a friend of Asadur, had joined us, too. The fog was uneven, with most of our surroundings walled off behind it and clearings that exposed patches of the wooded mountaintop, a flat and verdant plateau. The gray and green that crowded our field of vision was dreamlike in the blur. Then Carmen, the Aleppo girl, pointed to the prow of a ship made of assembled stones. It lurked behind a fog curtain that moved against us. Musa 399

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Ler Armenians had erected it in 1925 in homage to their French saviors. Yet both Asadur and Carmen, who had already climbed the mountain three times during her sojourn, said we would find signs of destruction. The ship atop the mountain. It was almost a parable on Musa Ler, which translates as Mt. Moses, a name with a prophetic echo of a mysterious covenant. The Ship Atop the Mountain was also the name of a novel by Gostan Zarian about an Armenian seaman who impossibly tried to transport a ship from a Georgian port on the Black Sea to Lake Sevan, in the landlocked Republic of Armenia after its first independence in 1918. Yet the archetype of the ship atop the mountain was Noah’s Ark that moored on Mt. Ararat, the sacred mountain of Armenians. And here was this stone boat, the mountaineers’ tribute to the French Navy, atop a mountain that had become mythical in the aftermath of the Genocide, the only site of unequivocal successful resistance. Not far from it was a square perimeter defined with rocks. The unmarked stones crowded within the enclosure were graves of those who had died during the siege in 1915, in combat or otherwise. Some in the village of Vakıf claimed they could still identify their ancestors’ tombs. Several, if not all, bore signs of desecration. Vakıf was the last Armenian village in Turkey. It was in the sancak (district) of Alexandretta, which had followed a path that differed from the rest of the historical territories after the Armistice of 1918. As it was occupied by France at the end of the war, the Armenians returned to their homes in Musa Ler soon after. Alexandretta became a special administrative region from 1921 to 1937. Following riots in the district, the French agreed the constitution of a joint assembly that eventually proclaimed the region the autonomous republic of Hatay, which in 1939 was annexed by Turkey to form the province of the same name. France was distracted by the buildup of tensions in Europe and was ready to make concessions to Turkey in return for support against the German threat. Yet when the region was placed under Turkish rule in 1939, 14,000 Armenians parted again from their villages in Musa Ler: Kabusia, Yoğunoluk, Bitias, Xodır Bey, Haci Habibli, and Vakıf. The first five were completely vacated by the Armenians. “Vakıf was the poorest of the six, and some of the Armenians chose to stay behind,” said Rostom, who was spending his retirement in his hometown, after living in Istanbul since his early youth as a student at boarding school. Today, “the last Armenian village in Turkey,” as it is labeled in every reference to it, has a population that swells to a little more than 120 in the summer, when those who have emigrated to other cities or countries return. It’s all that is left of the 4,200 Armenians that fought off the Turks in 1915, sailed away to safety in Egypt, made it back home three years later, and left again, for good.     

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The boarding school Rostom and his four friends had attended in Istanbul was the Tıbrevank. Opened under the auspices of Patriarch Karekin Khachadurian, the school had been an educational haven for the remnants of Armenians in Anatolia. Hrant Dink was one of them. Rostom and his friends were at the school at the same time as Dink. Yet these men had arrived in Istanbul at a very young age, most against their will, at an eventful time, shortly before the pogrom of September 6–7, 1955. The bombing of the house where Atatürk was born in Thessaloniki triggered attacks by mobs, mostly against the properties of Greeks in Istanbul. “We saw a group of men trying to set up a bomb outside the Tıbrevank, and Antranig screamed, alerting us to what was going on, but one of the men said, ‘This is an Armenian school, it’s not Greek,’ and they left.” But there was a Greek school near Surp Garabed Church, which was burned to the ground: Then in the middle of the night came our preceptor, a priest called Der Shnorhk, with his beard shaven and dressed in white. He said it should be all right if we shaved our beards and dressed in white, to pass for Muslims. We were angry that they had taken us so far away from our home and put us in harm’s way: “Why did you bring us here?” we were screaming. “We were safe in our village.” Finally, an hour or so after midnight it all ended and we went back to our rooms. The following morning, the older among us went to buy newspapers and saw what a disaster it had been. They had hit a priest in the head and murdered him. The man that had bombed Atatürk’s house in Salonica was a Turkish agent provocateur sent by Adnan Menderes, the prime minister at the time.

Armenians and their properties were attacked, too. Yet there were happy mistakes amid the disaster. An Armenian merchant had gone with a heavy heart to his music store in Istanbul the following morning, expecting to find it looted and destroyed. Whereas the windows of other Armenians’ and Greeks’ stores were shattered, his was intact. After much puzzlement, he realized that the mob must have mistaken Beethoven’s death mask in the window for that of Atatürk. It followed the same pattern as the massacre of Alevis in Marash in 1978,1 or the arson attack against the hotel in Sivas in 1993 that had caused the death of 35 people, suggested another of the former Tıbrevank students: These are people who lack jobs and the government knows it, and nationalists hire them for this kind of work. It is the same with the rebels who took Kesab. In Antakya, too. There was a restaurant in Yayladağ that prepared three meals for 5,000 people every day for a week before the offensive on Kesab. They entered Kesab from there. It’s on the other side of the mountain. Once I went secretly to Kesab as a child, through clandestine crossings on the mountain in the 1950s.

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Kesab was an Armenian village on the other side of the Musa Ler region, within Syria. In March 2014, combatants fighting the Syrian government entered from Turkey into Kesab, before Syrian troops recaptured it. Yayladağ is a border town. A Tıbrevank graduate now living in Paris had still fresh memories of Gosdan, who went on to become a prominent ideologue of the Marxist– Leninist Communist Party of Turkey.2 So dangerously salient a figure would he become, that his brother Abel, the last Armenian left in Amasia, had no choice but to disappear into anonymity. “He was forced to become invisible,” he said of Abel, of whom he had heard nothing until I told him that he worked as a cobbler in his hometown. “Gosdan came to the school on my last year before graduation,” the Parisian continued: He was shy and withdrawn, he spoke with a thread of a voice. He became very leftist in school, then he went to Robert College,3 a very intelligent man, and then he joined leftist organizations, became one of their leaders. They tortured him, with beatings, electricity, water; they said not even an animal would be able to put up with the tortures they inflicted on him.

A former classmate who now lived in Berlin added: “Gosdan organized the printing press in Marash Elbistan for the Marxist–Leninists. It was the most modern one in Turkey: he had had it brought piece by piece from Europe, and assembled it.” These men and Gosdan were all disciples of Patriarch Karekin, who had left his position as the primate of the Armenian Church in Argentina and returned to Istanbul only on condition that they rebuilt the Tıbrevank. He negotiated the opening of the school with the governor of Istanbul, Fahrettin Gökay. “There is even a story: the Patriarch had received a Chevrolet as a donation from America, and he did not use the car until he sat in it with Gökay,” one of them said. “But I also believe they were both masons, so there were those links as well,” added his table neighbor and former classmate. They were the generation of the Tıbrevank. Since his election in 1951, Patriarch Karekin had started a secret project to bring children of surviving families in the historical provinces into Armenian schools in Istanbul, the older among them chosen to attend Tıbrevank. The goal was to save them from assimilation and Islamicization. Patriarch Shnorhk, his successor upon his passing in 1961, continued this work with renewed vigor, which turned many of the children that came from the interior into a generation of leaders of the Istanbul Armenians and Diaspora communities. For the understated heroism that this work implied at a time that was still 402

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extremely dangerous for Armenians in Turkey, as demonstrated by the Istanbul pogrom of 1955, both churchmen are still hailed for their courage and vision. Yet one Tıbrevank graduate at Vakıf implied that Patriarch Karekin acted with the connivance of Turkish officials. This corresponded with an insight offered by Fr. Nerses, himself the member of a family that had moved to Istanbul from the interior, with whom I had a conversation in an august setting in Istanbul in 2011. There were no more than 1,000 people in Anatolia who said, “I’m Armenian,” and who were also Christian, according to Fr. Nerses. A different prelate at the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople stated the same almost verbatim in 2014. Before discussing the work of Patriarch Shnorhk, Fr. Nerses suggested we first needed to understand why the Genocide had happened. “We were already a weakened nation when the Turks arrived, as the Arab conquest in the seventh century had destroyed Armenian statehood.” Why, after nine centuries of domination under the Turks, and of uneasy coexistence that had not been entirely sterile and harmful for Armenians, had the extermination been carried out only in 1915? None of the current accepted explanations satisfied Fr. Nerses: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the simultaneous rise of nationalism; the Balkan wars that preceded World War I; the Turks’ fear of collusion between Armenians and Russians, or that the latter would instigate the former to rebel against their Ottoman masters; or Kurds’ anxieties about the emergence of a Christian Armenian state on lands they lorded over. None of that would explain it. “We must delve deeper, look farther back,” he insisted, saying he did not have the answers but was searching. His views had been shaped in Armenia, where he had lived for six years shortly after independence, but he had then decided to return to Turkey: “The Constantinople Armenians need me,” he had concluded and packed up. “For a long time, there has been a tacit consensus among the higher powers for an Armenia without Armenians, or with only a token presence at most: that is why Armenia is bleeding to a tiny population.” What might look like a casual development, or “inevitable” in view of the economic constraints, was “a concerted plan by higher powers.” The Republic of Armenia was ruled by 40 families that were responsive to these foreign players. It was not just a result of the laws of history and the economy that more than 70 percent of Armenia’s population lived in poverty. “For a long time, until 1915, we thought we had earned the privilege to live on our historical lands of Anatolia, so that numbed us to the signs that foretold what was going to happen.” The Turkish rulers had never wanted Armenians to be more than a minority on these lands, so even minor moves at self-assertion were enough to trigger a genocidal backlash. 403

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Perhaps a lifetime in monastery and church had given him resolve in the face of past disasters and those to come, for he described with calm the dismal state of his nation, as one steeling himself to the will of God, sublimating resignation into resistance. Yet he could not disguise he was distraught over the liberties that had begun to bloom in Turkey lately. “Turks have not had a happy life, either; they have suffered a lot, too, and now freedom is growing in the country,” he said. “We will see where all this will lead to.” It was a spirit that pervaded Armenian literature for a century, present in writers and books as diverse as Gurgen Mahari’s Burning Orchards, and Twilight of the Ants by Zaven Biberyan, the sense that peace was the necessary precondition for catastrophe. In the premonitory words of Mihrdat Noradoungian on August 29, 1908, a month after the Young Turk Revolution and the unprecedented freedoms that it had brought with it: Though during the last fifteen years a lot of blood has spilled, there was the fear of greater bloodshed which did not happen. One should know that this has become a natural law and that natural laws are unavoidable. Whatever did not happen in the beginning could still happen. Whatever the revolution did not do, the counterrevolution will be able to do.4

“But returning to Patriarch Shnorhk,” Fr. Nerses continued, “his work to bring the children from Anatolia to Istanbul was not as secret as purported.” Only the naïve could believe that such an undertaking would escape the attention of Turkish officials, or that it could be done without their consent, even if tacit. “The youth from the interior received an Armenian education, and they moved away from their homeland, thus serving Turkey’s goal of emptying the Armenian lands of Armenians, or rather, finishing the job off, with no bloodshed.” It contributed to their dispersion, as their training facilitated their emigration from the country as well. “Remember, the plan is Armenia without Armenians, and it has been in the making for centuries, and not only Turkey has pursued it: Russia has too, and it still does; nine-tenths of Armenia are gone,” he said, referring to the territories of Western Armenia. We also spoke about current Patriarch Mesrob. Since 2009, he had been suffering a degenerative disease that had completely deprived him of his mental faculties. Archbishop Aram Ateshian, as General Vicar, had been running the Patriarchate since then. The Turkish government had refused to allow a new election as long as Patriarch Mesrob was alive, even if incapacitated. There were three hypotheses for the Patriarch’s illness, Fr. Nerses said: The first hypothesis is that of a brain injury that may have occurred in his youth in a car accident, in which a friend traveling with him died. That crash, a consequence of drunk driving, awakened in Mesrob the religious vocation. The second

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Patriarch Mesrob was outspoken on many issues that were usually silenced in Turkey, so others also believed the third hypothesis, including the editor of an Istanbul newspaper. Conspiracy theories had gained new currency following Hrant Dink’s assassination. At Vakıf, one of the aged schoolmates, a former student of Patriarch Shnorhk, was evasive regarding Fr. Nerses’ thoughts that I relayed three years later. “Be careful about what you are doing here,” he told me, indirectly expressing selfish concern: The police follow you. They know where you are and who you are seeing. But I never feel it, and you never will: they have undercover agents and informants. They inform each other when a stranger visits a village. Don’t rule it out. Nothing will probably happen, but they are watching you. Be careful. They follow you … at the feast yesterday there were people we did not know.

He referred to the party in the evening that preceded the Sunday of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God and the Blessing of the Grapes, the latter a pagan rite of fertility assimilated into the Armenian liturgical calendar. Grapes had been given preference over other fruits, for Noah grew them in the valley of Mt. Ararat. “Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20). After the service in the small village church, the public had received bunches of blessed grapes before being helped to large servings of harissa, a porridge of wheat and lamb or chicken, considered the national Armenian dish. It had been simmering in massive cauldrons all night long till noon, while a small army of volunteers beat the stew into a pulp with enormous wooden spoons. This man also hinted at another factor that had set apart the Armenians that had chosen to remain in Vakıf from those that departed after the territory reverted to Turkish sovereignty. Most families that stayed were sympathizers of the Hnchak party, the Armenian Social Democrats that had fervently opposed the Young Turk government from the beginning of the 1908 revolution. Yet by 1939, when Turkey annexed Alexandretta, the Armenian political scene had been extremely polarized. The Sovietization of Armenia in 1920 had exacerbated it, especially following the trauma of the Genocide, which in the eyes of the Hnchaks made the Soviet Union appear as the lesser evil when compared to Turkey. At the time the Dashnaktsutyun, the major political force in the Diaspora, had taken on a markedly anti-Soviet line. The rivalries between both parties explained, partly, why some Hnchak families had decided to stay in 405

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Musa Ler: not because they wanted to live under Turkish rule, but because they were poor and, also, did not want to follow the Dashnaktsutyun. Now the situation in the village was “a little difficult,” Rostom said. “From the outside it looks all right and clean, the houses neat and the gardens tended, but assimilation is seeping, and the population is low, in winter it’s barely 85–90 people, but in summer the expatriates return and it grows to 150.” The Musa Ler dialect was disappearing: “The young ones cannot speak it … when I went to Tıbrevank in Istanbul I learned Armenian easily because at the time we spoke the dialect in the village, our variant of medieval Armenian, even though it was closer to classical Armenian grammatically and in sounds, but in the last 20 years unfortunately these new generations have begun by speaking in Turkish and at home they are speaking in Turkish, due to the influence of TV … it’s the same everywhere in the world but our situation is different.” Rostom had returned to settle back permanently in his hometown to help revert the assimilation: If we lose the language we lose everything. That’s why I came back. I feel obliged to preserve and teach the language. Perhaps by staying here all year round I can change a few things. There are now 25 young people here but it is not clear how their education will ensue. They will attend university. What will happen to them after they attend university in the big cities like Ankara or Istanbul? I don’t know that they will return … We have to preserve the dialect, the customs, the Armenian identity. You see what they say: this is the last Armenian village in Turkey. Were it not for the church, nobody would know it is an Armenian village. They cannot speak the dialect anymore, or they can but they don’t. The old people use the dialect among themselves but with the young ones they speak in Turkish.

We continued the conversation with Rostom into the evening. The Tıbrevank generation were progressive. He mentioned the name of a bestselling, trilingual Armenian writer in Turkey, who has published his works in Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish. The founders of a major publishing house were graduates too. “The first time we brought in traditional Armenian dances and music from Armenia was thanks to the efforts of the Tıbrevank graduates: at the time it was very difficult, and a big risk, to go to Armenia; but we procured all that through secret channels.” They sent a young graduate to Soviet Armenia, who stayed there for two or three months, learned the repertoires by heart, and brought them to Istanbul. The Paris of May 1968 had been mirrored by the Tıbrevank students in Turkey, but they had encountered scorn among the traditional Armenian community of Istanbul. “They called us ‘the porters’ children,’ all of us who came from the interior.” But if nothing else, a former student had changed the power dynamics among Armenians in Turkey and how they had reasserted themselves following a century of silence: “After Hrant’s murder, all the Armenians stood 406

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up, including the hidden Armenians; he didn’t fear, so we shall not.” Now the hidden Armenians were scoffed at by the traditionalists. “They discriminate them because they converted, but what would they do?” Rostom wondered. “They stayed on their land, and they are surrounded by Kurds: what would they do?” As we were speaking, a revolutionary Armenian song resounded from down the road: Ձայն մը հնչեց Էրզրումի հայոց լեռներէն Հայոց լեռներէն …

A voice rang from the Armenian mountains of Erzurum From the Armenian mountains …

It would have been inconceivable a few years ago. So eerily free had Turkey become that it fed the anxiety of people with long historical memories. They fretted about an equally forceful backlash. Yet something Rostom remembered made him laugh. When Turkey annexed Alexandretta in 1939, a public celebration was organized, but the Turks did not have a band and a choir. The newly anointed local government appealed to the Armenians, who obliged by providing their musicians and singers. Their repertoire was entirely made up of revolutionary songs that celebrated the feats of the Armenian fedayis against the Turks. “They had not done it to provoke the Turks, but because they knew nothing else,” Rostom said. “The people could not tell the difference or care about it, but a cabinet minister that had come from Ankara was infuriated because he had recognized the marches, and after the party was over he berated the local officials.”     

A friend of Rostom, Zarmayr now lived in Paris. He was the son of Ohannes, a Musa Ler combatant in 1915 who became a secular priest two decades later. Despite Zarmayr’s resolute opposition, his parents had agreed to send him to Istanbul with Fr. Sahak, who had arrived in 1955 during his tour of Anatolia to gather Armenian schoolchildren and give them an education. The children were not allowed to return home for two years. He did not want to leave and it was very hard for him to part from his family, as he was ten at the time. In their teachers’ experience, it was only after two years that these new students would get used to being away from their families and would refuse to return on their own. “It was true, it worked like that,” Zarmayr said. “I wrote letters home—of course in Armenian—telling them that in Istanbul I could die under a car or that I could commit suicide,” but his parents did not flinch, he remembered with a loud laugh. He did not know where these letters 407

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were now but had looked hard for them: his father had kept them and had once showed them to him. Zarmayr’s father, Ohannes, was anointed a secular priest in 1937 with the name of Der Ghevont. Ohannes had been one of the leading fighters during the 1915 resistance, and among the first in Musa Ler to hear the account of an Armenian Protestant minister, Dikran Antreassian, who had arrived in the area speaking of the deportation and massacres of Armenians in Zeytun. A lot of problems had begun to appear in Musa Ler in the last days of the siege, Zarmayr’s father would recall. “After all, there were at least 4,000 people up there; there had been instances of theft, too,” Zarmayr said. “And food was very scarce toward the end.” After Alexandretta’s annexation by Turkey, Der Ghevont decided to remain in Vakıf and serve his parish, against the pressures of his wife, who was from the nearby village of Tırtux. She wanted the family to follow the other Armenians into Lebanon, because all of her relatives were gone and she was left with no blood relations except her children. The village was so poor that all its roads were dirt tracks, and residents went shopping in Samandağ on a donkey. From time to time, when the weather was good, a truck would come and the children would hang on the back “and the smell of fumes would seem sweet to us.” They did not have running water at home, and they would collect the water from the open sewers with pots and pans on the upper part of the mountain. “On the higher part, the water would be cleaner, and we would boil it for hours in large pots, but when it rained it would be cloudy.” His father had resisted becoming anointed a priest but the Vakıf residents had put so much pressure on him that he had finally relented. Previously the priests came from Aleppo, but they did not stay for too long. They found life in the village taxing, so the locals decided to choose one of their own. “My father served very well, he was beloved and respected,” Zarmayr said. When Der Ghevont rode his donkey past the Alevis in the lower villages, they would stand up to acknowledge the Armenian priest.     

We had gathered at Asadur’s the evening before our climb of Musa Ler. Lena, his wife, was a Russian Molokan, a Christian sect known by a name that came from moloko (“milk” in Russian), due to their tradition of consuming dairy products during Christian fasts. A community of Molokans had settled in Kars when the city had been incorporated into the Russian Empire. Most local Molokans had eventually been Islamicized after the new Soviet government ceded Kars to Turkey in 1920. Lena, however, had joined the Armenian Apostolic Church just before her marriage. 408

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In addition to Asadur and Lena’s children, there were the siblings from Aleppo and Asadur’s mother, Rita, whose short-term memory was being slowly eaten away by the onset of senility. She was Zarmayr’s sister. Born in 1931, she retrieved from the further recesses of her mind a childhood song: Հայրիկը ծերացել է, ազգին համար ցաւելով Ազատութիւն կը կոչէ, սէր, միութիւն ցանելով Հայրիկին քարոզները հանեցին մեզ լեռները Թշնամոյն դէմ կռուելով, հայրենիքը փրկելով … Երբ որ գնդակը դպաւ դարձեալ պատերազմեցաւ Թող համբերէ Հայրիկը Զի զոհ գնաց վասն ազգին Քաջասիրտ Խորէնը:

Our father has aged, hurting for the nation He calls for freedom, sowing love and unity His homilies took us to the mountains Fighting the enemy, saving the homeland … When the bullet hit, he resumed the battle Let our father be patient For the brave Khoren Was sacrificed for the nation.

When the Armenians took to the mountain in 1915, one of the women in the clan left her newborn in the village. Ohannes, Rita and Zarmayr’s father, climbed down the mountain all the way to the village and brought the baby back to the mother at the crest of Musa Ler. The Armenian teenager from Aleppo, Shant, had been kidnapped in 2013 when his family was on its way to Turkey. A driver they thought reliable was carrying them to the border but at a checkpoint the Free Syrian Army had taken him and a younger cousin hostage. His mother had almost fainted when the militants had told her, “Forget this boy of yours.” An impossible ransom had been negotiated down to an amount manageable for his family in the course of three nerve-wracking days: We were held in a villa that had belonged to an Armenian. These were not Islamic State, but Free Syrian Army militants. There was a Kurdish man, whom they beat very brutally with sticks every day, so badly that they made him cry and beg that they kill him. I don’t know what he had done. There were also two wealthy Kurdish brothers, from whom they were demanding a $200,000 ransom. They treated the Kurds very badly, and they criticized them, as well as the Armenians, saying that they supported Assad, and that Assad’s army did not

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The Turkish teacher who had joined our excursion to Musa Ler was becoming a nuisance. A self-professed socialist, he was asking probing questions from the comfort of Marxism, affordable for a person who did not fear the extinction of his nation. Why was the Armenian Diaspora “so intransigent” and “what did they expect from Turkey”? Was it “money” or “the lands”? All the while he insisted that he was an internationalist, “more of an anarchist,” opposed to all kinds of nationalism, beginning with the Turkish one. Eighty million Turks or 1 billion Chinese could afford these ideological luxuries, but they could cost Armenians dearly after their onerous century, I suggested. The grilled halibut combined with rakı, undiluted and with no ice, had been a terrible combination and was making me feel unwell. I was feeling the effects of the Turkish teacher’s generous pourings of liquor, as the alcohol was beginning to take hold. It was a thankful development, for I was sharpening my tongue and that might escalate the discussion. But I took a nap instead. When I woke up on the narrow ledge where we had camped, the skies opened to an immaculate blue: the sea spread below us in its splendor, so near that it was possible to make out each wave as it rose and crashed against the rocks, and water returned to water. Until that moment, the fog had walled off the Mediterranean. We stood in awe of it, a few steps from the crag that Armenians had climbed down one century ago toward the safety of four French ships and a British one. The vision of the sea lasted about two minutes, a little more than an illusion. Then the fog descended upon us with leaden thickness, plunging Musa Ler into murk, like it had indistinctly for ages, and in 1915.

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Part X

The Black Sea and Hamshen

Twenty-Nine

Hamshen I “And this is the sister of the sun,” said Ihsan, pointing with his cigarette, the forest around us lush and verdant in the rain, while further away a thick curtain of fog obscured the view of the mountains. “Aakagin kuyrı.” I plucked it. Its five petals fell apart in the palm of my hand, and the raindrops washed them away. The star-shaped flower, yellow and wild, resembled a sketch I had made in my notebook to represent the five elements: air, fire, water, the earth, and the ether. “And here we have a mayir,” Ihsan said of another wild flower as he went on to name the botanical universe around us in Hamshetsnak, his eighthcentury dialect, one of the oldest variants of Armenian still spoken. The road to Xigoba, the largest Hamshen village, was blocked by a tall heap of earth and stones, either because of a mudslide or construction work. We all stood indifferently under the rain that weakened to a drizzle before intensifying into rain again and, briefly, a downpour. It was the usual weather of this corner of the Pontos, the land of the Hamshentsis. In the locals’ reckoning, it rained 300 days a year, and it did feel that way. After a while it no longer mattered, as umbrellas did not matter either and which anyone here seldom carried. A car had eventually come to pick us up, and at intervals between the showers we had managed to grill the abundant meat cuts. Shortly after seven, a collective howl went up from the mountains in the distance, amplified by the wind, as if an enormous pack of wolves were lamenting some collective disaster. “It’s jackals, they cry under the rain,” said the home owner. “We call it the jackal’s wedding.” Hamshen was in a confine of the Armenian World, the Hayots Aşxarh. Their language, fantastically archaic, was an invitation to bond, even though their conversion centuries ago set them apart from mainstream Armenians. The Genocide had come to deepen the divide, for unlike the Christian Hamshentsis and the other Armenians, they found themselves on the other side: a few even took part in the massacres. Yet the internet and social networks, as well as growing secularization, were beginning to sweep differences away. Still, over the 413

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centuries the Hamshentsis have evolved into a distinct group. Alongside those who had begun to embrace their origins, there were those that did not feel part of a broader Armenian world, even when they recognized a common ancestry. At the other extreme there were also rabidly anti-Armenian Hamshentsis. These rifts also played out among the Islamicized Hamshentsis. Their example only confirmed that identity was a variable value. Fewer of us in the current world preserved the same national identity for a lifetime. The Hamshentsis were no exception. They too had a sense of dislocation, that the recent rapprochement with Diaspora and Istanbul Armenians had awakened or deepened. They were living on lands that had been theirs for 1,300 years but were reminded not only by the Laz, the indigenous population that preceded them, but also by the police, that they were Armenians come from elsewhere. If a notion as fickle as a nationality must include the elements—the earth, for the land; water, for the blood or the origin; air, for life; fire, for the common will; and the ether, for the culture—the Hamshentsis, like the Diaspora Armenians, displaced from the ancestral lands, were also missing something. Like the sister of the sun, the metaphor for the five elements, the petals fell apart but they still existed separately in the mud. Nothing was lost and everything was transformed. Yet the flower was no longer its former self. Perhaps the spirit behind the name of an aboriginal nation in Chile had universal value: Mapuche meant “people of the land.” As a Mapuche leader once told me in Temuco, “Without our land we are not a people.” If history was any guide, that seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. The first contacts on the internet had felt like a leap across centuries, when I slowly deciphered obscure words that came from a time when Armenia was under the rule of the armies of a new religion that had been created in the Arabian desert only a century earlier. Some words were incomprehensible and yet others sounded so magically ancient, such as Hayk, as my first interlocutor in a chat box, Nejdet, called Armenia by a name it has not had since the fifth century. Osman was the first Hamshentsi I saw in Turkey, in Kadıköy. He was fluent in Hamshetsnak but as he was a graduate from a British university we had settled on English. His self-discovery had begun some 15 years earlier at the age of 15, when together with his younger brother he began to do research on the origin of Hamshentsis and put together the information they managed to obtain from family stories and books in Turkey. They had soon realized their people were of Armenian descent. On his social network page, he had written a slogan in a number of languages, including in Armenian, and in the Armenian alphabet, which the Hamshentsis have not used since their Islamicization began 414

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in the sixteenth century: Ազատ Սեւ Ծով, read “Azad Sev Dzov.” It meant “Free Black Sea,” which he had also written in Turkish, Kurdish, and English. It was a remarkable, if harmless, act of intellectual subversion. In the summer of 2011, we met at Lusnika Lus, a café ran by Hamshentsis that catered to the growing Hamshen community of Istanbul. Its name in Hamshetsnak meant “Moonlight.” He backpedaled on the bolder messages we had exchanged over the internet, saying “nothing is fully what it is purported to be, neither the bread nor men, so you cannot really say that Hamshentsis are Armenian, or even fully Hamshentsis: we keep changing.” Osman’s mother was cousins with Müjdat’s father. A journalist and a writer, Müjdat had published possibly the first honest article by a Hamshentsi in Turkey about his people’s relations with Armenians. It was about his uncle, who was beside himself with fury when rumors circulated in Hopa about some strangers taking blood samples from Hamshentsis to prove genetic links with Armenians. “Mek Ermeni çik!” the enraged man would say: “We are not Armenian!” But a couple of years later, with the border with Georgia open after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, traffic from the new republics increased along the Black Sea corridor. They would set up what came to be known as “Russian bazaars.” Müjdat had accompanied his uncle as he was checking out items one day, until he started haggling hard in the local tradition to the point of exasperating the merchants, who started complaining in their own language about the difficult customer. But Müjdat’s uncle had understood what they were saying. “Ağpar, tu hay es?” he asked the dumbfounded salesmen: “Brother, are you Armenian?” and then begged for a discount. Osman was born in Hopa. When he was three his father moved for work to Istanbul, so he grew up with his mother and grandmother in Ardala, their village, learning Hamshetsnak from them. Turks would call them Laz, he said, because their accents were so similar and because the Hamshentsis, or Hemşinli as they were called in Turkish, were until a few years ago even more of an obscure group for the Turks, an inconspicuous tiny minority that in any case avoided the limelight. His maternal grandfather, Zia Şişman, had shared a story about Armenians that had passed down to him. When Zia was 15 in the early 1900s an Armenian ağa on horseback came riding through Ardala with his escort and captured him to bring him as indentured labor to his lands. “Armenians could grab anyone they wanted with impunity,” Osman said. The story was strange as there were no records of Armenian ağas in the area, but more so because a Christian citizen of the late Ottoman Empire could attract disproportionate reprisals from the aggrieved Muslim party with the connivance of the state. And yet there were records of Armenian farmers hiring Hamshen hands for seasonal work in Erzurum in the nineteenth century. Class resentment combined 415

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with conversion to Islam by many Hamshentsis may have contributed to the alienation between the two branches of the same people. Zia was made to work for the Armenian ağa for three or four days and then he managed to escape back to Ardala through shortcuts and paths he was familiar with. A young woman of striking beauty, with sea-blue eyes and the delicacy of glasswork, was having lunch a few tables away from ours. She was not Hamshentsi, and had not even heard of the minority, yet when told about them she inquired if she looked Armenian: “My grandmother was an Armenian from Elazığ.” Her curiosity about the Hamshentsis was making Osman a little uncomfortable, and he engaged in the gymnastics of explaining who his people were while refusing to call them “Armenian,” while she was careful too, inexplicably for me, avoiding describing herself as a Turk, which conveyed the sense of ethnicity, opting instead for “Turkish citizen.” As we left, Osman offered to walk me to the Surp Takavor Armenian Church, a couple of blocks down the street. Inside the reception cabin, the porter was portentously reading the Nor Marmara newspaper, his face buried behind the broadsheet, one of the three Armenian dailies of Istanbul. So rare was the sight of anyone reading a newspaper in Armenian in Turkey, or anywhere in the world outside of Armenia and perhaps Lebanon, that I took a picture. “Who are you?” screamed the porter, running out of the cabin, on the verge of a more violent reaction. Osman was more taken aback than I was. Then he accompanied me to the ferry terminal at Kadıköy for my boat ride across the Marmara back to the European side of Istanbul. I never met with Osman again. A few weeks later he had deleted from his social network page his multilingual slogan about the Free Black Sea.     

The reflections in the glass distorted the color of the Black Sea as I peered out of the bus window, wondering if it was perhaps Homer’s “wine dark sea,” or if perhaps we should expand our chromatic concepts to account for richer nuances under each name. Under the overcast sky of the coast more than two hours past Trebizonda and on the outskirts of Hopa, the sea could be said to have earned its name. Yet the reasoning was contrived and unpersuasive. Nothing was as impermanent as the color of the sea, disputed by light and the elements in it. I got off at the Hopa bus station and started walking toward the city center. A tall young man in a red T-shirt, his expression unreadable in the dying light of dusk, was looking at me, his overgrown black beard covering his neck and giving him priestly portent as he stood there like a sentinel on a tower. We made brief eye contact, and exchanged knowing silences, as I had recognized 416

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the oval face, sharp eagle nose, and almond-shaped eyes, features that were common among the Hamshentsis, many of whom bear a remarkable resemblance among themselves after almost 12 centuries of inbreeding. Many, in fact, are related as cousins in different degrees; I sensed he had recognized me as a Diaspora Armenian, the sight of whom had become less uncommon in this untouristy city along the Black Sea corridor. It took a few seconds to add up the available data, physical traits, outfits, and circumstance, to tell anyone from the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus next door from a Western visitor of the same descent. Next to the man in red there was someone else, shorter and gray, at the blurry edge of my field of vision. This gray figure was now hovering in the corner of my eye, first on my left, and then on the right. The store blinds were down on the main commercial street in Hopa, suffused in the gray of the sky and the concrete walls. I was walking down it in the hope of finding a cell phone store to have my phone repaired, and somehow look for Ihsan’s number on the internet for I had lost it. He was to host me on this, my second trip to Hamshen. I remembered this stretch from my first time in the city, when Kiram had walked me to his cousins’ grocery store to leave my bags there. We had then visited his political party’s offices and had ambled around town, and Kiram had introduced me to some of his friends. Three summers later, in 2014, the street was completely empty after business hours, with only a few stores left open. The gray blur had now come into focus: he was a disheveled man, with a long mop of gray hair, and I saw him following me. Then he started to walk by my side, staring at me with wide eyes. “Merhaba,” he greeted me in Turkish, to which I responded with a grumble as I was now becoming nervous. I turned briefly to look over my shoulder on the right and could get a glimpse, in thick and hurried brushstrokes, of someone with an angular face observing me attentively. The police had already found me, I thought, and I had only myself to blame with my camera and photographer’s vest. The deserted street added to my unease. “Avedis?” I stopped in my tracks, astounded that they would care so much about me as to deserve their personalized attention. But it was Ihsan. “Where were you, dağa?” he asked in Hamshetsnak, calling me by a dialectal variant of “boy,” as Armenians do among friends. We only knew each other from social networks and telephone conversations, and it felt strange. He had the worn demeanor that settles after 50 on men who read a lot and are alone, with a remarkable facial resemblance to a dear friend of mine of Italian origin, who had been classmates with Barack Obama at Harvard Law School; yet he had been driven out of New York’s corporate world first into journalism and then off the face of the internet, achieving his goal of becoming untraceable on Google. I had never managed to find him again except for a 417

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telephone call to a number in the Bronx that went unanswered. Like him, Ihsan, also unmarried, had a pointed nose and eyes with a slight downward slant that enhanced the disappointed stare of the idealist after half a century of life. And yet the idealist’s eyes still queried and hoped against hope, because it was all they could do. I had become friends with Ihsan on Facebook a year earlier. He had agreed to host me months before but I was unable to reach him by phone, and I needed to find a place with WiFi to get in touch with him. Chance has a way of arranging things that prevision does not. Or maybe it was its opposite, destiny, which enabled the encounter. For the believers of the latter, accepting it is wise and challenging it is futile: everything happens because it must. Where chance is random, destiny is necessary. The immediacy created by a language like Armenian, almost a secret code for a small nation, had dispelled in seconds the separation between mainstream Armenians and the Hamshentsis that had begun more than a millennium ago. It was a long time, but the bridges had not been burned. “We have been waiting for 1,200 years,” Ihsan said. The phrase would have sounded conceited in a different context, but that evening in the empty commercial district of Hopa, he was rendering almost verbatim in Hamshetsnak the thought that was traveling in Western Armenian through my mind. And he let out one of his nasal, sad laughs that I would hear for so many weeks, and we hugged.     

Ihsan and his friends Resûl and T.—whose full name earned him a number of jokes for being the same as that of the Genocide mastermind—took me to a fish restaurant in the forest of Lome, in a Laz village near Arhavi. The restaurant owner was a red-haired man with a profuse beard on a large, Mingrelian round head with a body matching in size and shape. He was a man of communist convictions (which did not bear much relation with the menu’s prices), I was told in reassuring tones by my companions, reflecting more on the true state of the Hamshen and Laz communities’ relations rather than my ideological convictions. “The Laz were Islamicized too, we were Christian Mingrelians,” he told me when Ihsan introduced me and told him about my book project. In the polarized reality of Hamshen and Turkey, my friends would often assume that I was a Marxist as well, for it was impossible that as an Armenian in Turkey I could be a fascist. The restaurant was almost a secret place set in a small forest clearing bounded by rosebushes, their perfume mingling with the fragrance of 1,000 plants and trees. The darkness of the vegetation was the first thing that had impressed Hetoum of Korykos, an Armenian monk, in his travels in the region in the fourteenth century, mentioning obscure lands above the cloudline.1 418

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My fellow diners praised the Turkish historian Taner Akçam for his pioneering work on the Armenian Genocide, saying he had been their party’s leader, but they did not say which one in the large and contentious hive of leftist groups. Turkey’s hardcore left had been riven by internecine fighting in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, during his exile in Germany, Akçam had been the intended target of an assassination gone awry, in which the wrong man had been killed. “You came 1,200 years late,” repeated Ihsan, addressing me and summing up in his language, which was that old, the feeling that was hovering over the table, of time travel, of a reunion among long-separated and lost family members. And they were avid for news about the Armenians of Syria as the war was raging in Aleppo. “Our people are still there,” Resûl said, confusing me for a moment with the word he used, Meronk, normally reserved for a close or tightly bound group. Yet I realized he was talking about Armenians, banding Hamshentsis together with them. And as the drinks started to take hold, T. began to damn Atatürk and his izar, the shroud in which the Muslim deceased are wrapped.     

“Aspadz for us is a bad word,” said Onur, speaking of God in the Hamshetsnak variant for the Armenian name, Asdvadz. “He has caused us a lot of suffering,” he continued in his breathless monologue, as if trying to make up for all the lost time, explaining the many uses of God among the Hamshentsis, not all of them necessarily as a curse. In one interpretation, the Armenian word for the Creator had become a profanity among them after their conversion. “We have suffered a lot at the hands of the state and the Laz, a people like wolves, since we came down to the coast: it’s been barely 50 years that we have begun to come to the cities by the sea, we were on the mountains of old.” Onur recited Hamshetsnak phrases by their elders invoking God: Aspadz asdeğits herru e. Aspadzit madağ linim. Aspadzı tsavıt arrnu. Ellahı tsavıt arrnu. God is far away from here. Let me be a sacrifice to your God. May God take your pain away. May Allah take your pain away.

In the past, he said, they were afraid to speak in Hamshetsnak on the phone for fear of being discovered by Turks. “Outside Hopa and Kemalpaşa we used to say we were Turks.” Then he added a phrase that came across as disingenuous, 419

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confirmed by the sardonic smile of the other Hamshentsis under the gazebo taking cover from the torrential rain: “Aspadza vordağ ar? İnçi hayin mortadza?” (“Where was God? Why did he butcher the Armenians?”). But there was a residue of attachment to God in Armenian or the Armenian God among the older generation, who still invoked him in their pleas. And a memory of violence in their conversion had survived in a saying: Xeça aşxarh, xeça! Turke vordağ a, azo guda. Woe unto the world, woe! Wherever the Turk is, he gives the ezzan.

“My grandmother said it secretly because they knew about the Genocide: ‘The Turk massacred us, butchered my grandparents, if I tell my grandchildren they will massacre them as well,’ was their reasoning.” The saying was known by many Hamshentsis, who repeated it with some slight variations. In two different versions I heard, they would add at the beginning or end: “The Armenian old woman said …” Three years later after I first heard it from Onur, a businessman born in the village of Dzağrina in the Hopa area, who often went to Armenia and spoke excellent Eastern Armenian in addition to Hamshetsnak, told me the phrase came from the times of the Russo–Turkish war of 1877–8. The open-air movie festival at Makrial (Kemalpaşa in Turkish) had been suspended due to rain, as only the most improvident organizer could have relied on the local weather for such an endeavor. A crowd of young people from the internal diaspora of Hamshentsis, all members of socialist parties, were gathered under the gazebo. There were activists from Ankara, Bursa, and Izmir, as well as Erzurum, where there was a Hamshen village. At best, a few of them spoke broken Hamshetsnak. But one of them, who was fluent in the dialect, chimed in on the conversation with Onur. A few years earlier, during a political party conference in Van, he had scalded himself with some tea and had exclaimed “Aspadz!” as a curse. A surprised comrade had asked him if he was Armenian: he was a hidden Armenian from Van, who, remarkably, had recognized the Hamshetsnak name for God. “Isa vova?” the amused voice of Kiram, Onur’s cousin, had queried when I had telephoned him a little earlier: “Who is this?” He would become my host when I arrived unannounced in the summer of 2011. Within my first six hours in Hamshen, I had been introduced to their popular theology, and the faint echoes of forced conversion, as well as their enduring fear even centuries after Islamicization. 420

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Had they thought about opening a newspaper or a publication in their own dialect? “Devletı mezi caş g’ana,” responded Onur with a laugh, echoed more loudly by Kiram, sitting next to him: “The state has us for lunch.” Kiram estimated that there were up to 20,000 Hamshentsis in Hopa and Makrial. Our first stop with Kiram after he picked me up from the Hopa bus station was a gathering in memory of Metin Lokumcu, a teacher who had died during a protest against Erdoğan when his election campaign bus had driven through the city in May 2011. The demonstrators were all Hamshentsis, except for the only Laz, who became the martyr, Sırrı the poet had said. Fifteen Hamshentsis were arrested. Police came to Kiram’s family home to arrest him too, but he had fled to the mountains and stayed there for a couple of months: he had also disappeared from social networks. “The Turk slaughtered the Armenian because he was stronger, but if Armenians were stronger they would have massacred the Turks,” Sırrı believed. But Armenians had lived under Arab, Persian, and Russian rule too, yet annihilation had only happened under the Turks, I retorted. He was using the “genocide” word in a very lax way, in the Turkey of the extremes where anything was a genocide and nothing was. “The United States is powerful now and it is carrying out a genocide in Afghanistan, in Iraq,” Sırrı continued, ignoring my comment. Had not white men taken the lands of the Native Americans? “You are saying that you would not have butchered the Turks, even if you could, but I believe you would have, too,” he insisted, bringing the conversation to the minefield of alternate history, hypotheticals that were impossible to prove or disprove, and were irrelevant except when trying to lock in an argument. Sırrı had opened his remarks by saying that the Hamshentsis were socialists. “Are Armenians socialists too?” The explanations about a plurality of currents among Armenians did not convince him. He was trying to position himself against nationalism, which he detested as much as other Hamshentsis, and equated the nationalism of a genocide victim to the nationalism of the perpetrator, who on top of that had overrun these territories. As I knew him for his poetry, I asked him if he could write a verse or at least recite one. He was not inspired. One of the indirect consequences of the Turkish blockade of the border was the fact that the Hamshentsis, many of whom are in the transportation business, had begun to travel to Armenia via Georgia: if the border had been open, there would be no need to travel by way of Georgia and hence there would be less of a motive for Hamshentsis to go to Armenia. Most who visited were in thrall with the familiarity they found with the people, the land, and the language, feeling an affinity that some confessed they did not feel with Turks. I asked Sırrı if he had been to Armenia, where his poetry had been published. He said he could not afford it, and my eyes instinctively went to his shoes. And I remembered the soles of Hrant Dink’s shoes, worn and with a hole, those of 421

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a struggling journalist and writer. Seeing the Armenian hell-raiser was humble had shocked many Turks, so used to thinking of Armenians as wealthy. And for all his hostility I felt sorry for Sırrı, who had seen years of prison for leftist militancy and had made ends meet by working in the construction of public works such as dams and roads. Another Hamshentsi friend I knew from social networks, Hamza, had greeted me with indifference. Perhaps it was the opiating effect of social networks on curiosity. It could have been wariness, too, about Diasporan Armenians who visited the Hamshentsis with missionary zeal to bring the “lost brothers” back to the fold and reconvert them to something like full Armenians. “Yes, we are Armenian but we say we are Turks so they leave us alone: you were Armenian, and you were butchered,” he said. “Our grandmothers converted to Islam crying and crying, ‘Why in the world would we go through that suffering again?’” Here too was that notion again of suppressed memories of pain, for what is unknown about Hamshentsis’ conversion exceeds the little we do know. According to a benign theory, their conversion was moved by the expediency of embracing the ruler’s faith and securing their properties and well-being, as much as that was possible in a consistently violent state like the Ottoman Empire, at a time when derebeys (valley chieftains) roamed the Pontic Mountains, pillaging and ruining villages. Kiram laughed, moved to it by the dry yet pointed sarcasm in Hamza’s tone, even though it was a succinct description of Armenian fate in the Ottoman Empire. “You tell us to ‘return,’ but man, we moved out of Armenia 1,300 years ago, so where do you want us to return? I have a friend in Yerevan who tells me to ‘return’ and I tell him, ‘Man, what would I return to? To do what there? You are starving, what would I do?’ We became Muslim 300 years ago, why would we become Christians again?” There was an elusive quality to Hamza’s approach, the Armenian who was unloving of Armenia—“Yerevan,” in local parlance, calling it by its capital, as Armenia was larger than the current borders of its republic. Perhaps in a way he himself was unaware of, his notion of his identity was unrelated to the state and, arguably, predated it. Yet by his own oblique admission, he was Armenian and, unlike many other Hamshentsis, he kept Hamshetsnak as the household language, which he and everyone in his family, including his youngest son, spoke with a rich fluency that was becoming rarer by the day. He also knew obscure words that other Hamshentsis had never heard. For some curious reason, many Hamshentsis asked me what we called the camera in Armenian, which is nıgari mekena. Hamza was the first one to ask and told me that they called it gumuşnik, an unusual word (perhaps of Arabic origin) for a language that had essentially fossilized in the Middle Ages and had been borrowing from Turkish for modern objects. 422

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At a tea garden in Makrial where people were playing tavlo, one of the men playing asked me if I was Armenian: “We too,” he responded. “We are Hamshen Armenians.” He worked between Armenia and Turkey, in transportation, which had proved a boon for Hamshentsis. I wanted to know his name: “In Armenia, Artur; here it’s Birol,” he said, his wit celebrated by everybody’s laughter: the unspoken assumption was that everybody knew that a Turkish name would not make anyone very popular in Armenia, so in the course of doing business there Birol used a name that was common in the former Soviet Union. One of the men in the group was stocky and completely bald. He spoke Armenian fluently, which probably indicated he traveled to Armenia frequently as well. But his name left me wondering a little. “My name is Dzağig,” he said, and he blushed when he saw what must have been an expression of confusion on my face. His name in Armenian meant “flower.” “We now speak with the Armenians of Armenia, Lebanon, New York, but our problem is the Istanbul Armenians who say that it is not possible for Armenians to be Muslim … they look down on us, and they have told me to become a Christian,” Kiram said. “But I am an atheist, and besides, we converted to Islam 300 years ago, man … they tell me that Kiram is a Muslim name: my name is Kiram; why would I change it?” A comrade from the party was named Ardanuş, from Malatya. “You are one of ours, you are Armenian,” Kiram had told her when they had first met a few years ago. “No,” she had responded, “I’m a Turk.” Kiram said, “Go ask your grandparents and come back.” She did, and a month later she acknowledged to him: “Yes, we are Armenian.” Most Hamshentsis knew the name of Ardanuş (officially spelled “Ardanuç”), for it was the name of a town in the vicinity of the city of Artvin, less than an hour by car from Hopa. Yet they mostly knew it as the site of a 1915 massacre at the Cehennem Deresi (Hell’s Gorge), just outside the town. A man in white with copious white mustache and green eyes, who had sat silently in the Makrial park as we talked, said in Hamshetsnak, “Aşxarhi hayer, joğvevika” (“Armenians of the world, unite!”). “Vor miyasin mortevika,” came the swift riposte from Mustafa, the atheist, anarchist and anticapitalist—he described himself by all the things he was not—“So you are all butchered together,” to an avalanche of laughter from everybody. The man in white acknowledged the rhymed colophon to his comment with a smile. The exchange was extremely rare, for Hamshentsis were still wary about displaying affinity with their kin that had remained Christian. But it was also revealing for he called Armenians Hai, the Armenian word for it, which Hamshentsis were believed to have abandoned in favor of the Turkish Ermeni, 423

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also used with pejorative intention among them. Growing contacts since the mid-1990s with Armenia and the Diaspora had revived the word among them. Still, some Hamshentsi men in their 70s whom I met separately said they had always known and used the word. But the response to it was no less curious, for it had expressed, with pristine sarcasm, the fears of Hamshentsis about their Armenian origin.     

Kiram believed so many Hamshentsis were leftists to distinguish themselves from the Laz, who were integrated into the Turkish establishment. The Hamshentsis had always abstained from having contact with the state, a goal facilitated by their topography. The long arm of the Ottoman state had a feeble reach in their mountain villages: Although mountains were thus not able to offer shelter to openly Christian people in Hemshin, they nevertheless played a role in the development of the Hemshin identity. Bryer once noted that “the bounds of the Ottoman Empire were not two-dimensional but vertical too, ending (as in the Pontos) at between one thousand and two thousand meters, above which the mountains offered a kind of freedom.” This freedom, while insufficient in the case of Hemshin to preserve an openly Christian population, allowed for various Christian rites and customs practiced by converted populations, either crypto-Christians or “imperfect converts,” to survive. Conversely, mountains also permitted newly converted populations to get away with half-hearted acceptance of Islam and lack of zeal in following rules and precepts prescribed by it […] it is doubtful that the unique, modern-day Hemşinli identity could have emerged without the perpetuation of various Christian traditions made possible by the freedom of life in mountains, even if these traditions have lost their original religious meaning with time.2

The massacre of the Christian Armenians had reinforced their enmity with the Turkish state and its loyalists, Kiram said. I wondered if he had brought up the Genocide as a backhanded means of flattering a visitor from the Diaspora. Yet in his travels through the region, a chronicler from Of, a Black Sea county, had made note of a surprising anecdote about a Hamshentsi man, which implicitly acknowledged the origin of their language as well as the massacres and, perhaps more importantly, this minority’s Armenian roots, as well as a tone of defiance: When Hasan Umur, the historian of the county of Of, visited Hopa in the 1940s, he was quite astonished to hear that some villages spoke an Armenian dialect. When asked about it, one of the Hemşinli told him that “they would like to get rid of that language, but could not manage to do so.” One may assume that this person knew what kind of language his people were speaking.3

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They had been persecuted too, something the other Hamshentsis mentioned as well, but they could not bring up examples, as if memory was stunted. There had been centuries of memory suppression, as the Hamshentsis’ conversion preceded the Genocide. Yet they all spoke of a vague recollection of pain of uncertain source, yet acutely felt. Was it perhaps the fear of the Genocide that hit so many of their kin, or people who spoke their language, even though they were Muslim? “We too felt a lot of fear when you were slaughtered,” Kiram had told me a few times, confusing me, prompting me to ask him if they had suffered massacres, too. “No, no, only your people were slaughtered but our elders saw it and were very scared.” And even though they had resettled here more than 1,200 years ago, the Laz still call them “newcomers” and “Armenians” even though they have been Muslim for centuries. “The Laz tell us, ‘You are Armenian, you came and took our lands.’ They are nationalists. They say, ‘We are Turks.’ They don’t like us. Once every ten years we give one of our women to the Laz.” The Laz were a people of the sea, Kiram said. “We are a people of the mountain.” Kiram and his father said that the Hamshentsis were meat-eaters. We were at his family home in the village of Şana, a half-hour drive up the hills from the center of Makrial. There had no been no genocide against the Armenians, Kiram’s father said. On the contrary, he claimed, Armenians butchered the Turks. His sister, Kiram’s aunt—a mostly silent woman—reacted with dismay. “How can you say that?” she said, upset. “How can you say it didn’t happen? You were there when momik said the villages filled with orphans, the women, the men being marched off into the mountains. You were there when she told us the stories of orphans roaming the towns and villages.” And she continued, calling their grandmother by the diminutive of the Hamshetsnak word, momik: “The little, little children were left orphans in the village of Şana, our momik told us.” When I pointed my camera at her to video it, she fell silent, and started nodding in approval of her brother’s denials and accusations of massacres by Armenians. In silence, she was making a gesture of a dagger going into the belly, as her brother described the slaughter Armenians had carried out. Kiram got angry when his father had denied the Genocide. Along with his sister, he refuted him, partly in Turkish and partly in Hamshetsnak. When his father tried to counter him, Kiram shut him up, loudly and angrily. His father once again tried to speak, but this time Kiram’s sister and his mother also silenced him, berating him. “Shut up,” they told him. We were on the balcony, while it rained torrentially over the blooming green of the mountains, and dense clouds, silver, gray, and black, were giving up their colors as night crept in. The following morning, Timur, Kiram’s cousin, gave me a different explanation as well. He said that the Hamshentsis tended to be leftists because of the problems afflicting Turkey and not because of Hamshentsis’ particular concerns. The family made some money with their tea plantations as did so 425

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many Hamshentsi families. Despite Timur’s proclaimed indifference to the particular Hamshentsi identity and his aversion to what he felt was Armenian nationalism, the first time he had seen me he had told me, as I was together with Kiram, “Mer dığots e nıman” (“He resembles our young men”). Of course, I did, I said: “We are the same people.” He had smiled uncomfortably and looked away. Kiram laughed his hearty laugh, more often than not sincere. Sometimes, however, you could sense when something made him uncomfortable in the way it is done in these lands, with nuanced words and reactions that often reflected a deeper disquiet than they actually showed. “I have become a communist because of the problems in Turkey, that everybody shares in this country, not only the Hamshentsi,” Timur said, as we sat on his balcony while he fed a visiting robin that came for its meal every morning: It is not possible for us to become Armenian. Our mind has changed. Turkey has the Kurdish problem. They are 25 million. It is not a big issue that the Hamshen young are not learning Hamshetsnak because they will not study in Hamshetsnak in the university. It is not a problem that they learn at school in another language. The main problems of Turkey are: unemployment; lack of freedom, including the Kurdish and Armenian issues; recognition of the Genocide, how do you call it? Medz Yeğern. But learning Hamshetsnak is not an issue. We already speak Turkish.

The demise of the language did not concern him, as Hamshetsnak was a doomed language. “Tomnetsav,” he said, or “It’s finished,” in Hamshetsnak. “Moliyadz enk,” he added: “We have forgotten.” He derided Orhan Pamuk as an elitist who did not discuss the problems in Turkey. He talked about the Medz Yeğern and they kicked him out of the country, he said with undisguised schadenfreude that I had difficulty understanding, as it placed Timur closer to the Turkish nationalists. Then I accompanied him as he fished in the creek that run merrily outside his home. We entered the river up to our ankles to net a small, sardine-size fish he called kapçin, to prepare a Laz meal “with Hamshen bread.” Or a Hamshen supper with a Laz fish, and he laughed at his witticism. The creek, called Xelun, was no wider than the narrow streets of Makrial, but it ran strong. On our return from fishing, Timur’s brother, who like Timur was a baker, asked my name and I asked him his in turn: “Mine is a Muslim name but I am not a Muslim; I am an atheist, a Marxist.” He had served time in prison from 1982 to 1990 and then again from 1999 to 2001, because he was a member of the Marxist–Leninist Communist Party. He had once met a hidden Armenian from the region of Van who had mentioned clusters of hidden Armenians in the villages around Muradiye. Both brothers had round faces, with red, curly hair, reminding me of an acquaintance, a former IRA operative who had left 426

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Belfast and become a peace activist in Dublin. And the scene looked Irish anyway, with the trees, the rain, and the thick fog. Timur’s prison term had been more eventful. During his decade behind bars in Gebze prison, he had taken part in the famous hunger strike on December 19, 2000 against the “F-type” prisons. Like other inmates, he had developed Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder, after Turkish troops stormed Gebze and the other prisons where riots had broken out. The rioting inmates were reportedly tortured.     

The first time I came across the name of Hamshen was in Buenos Aires in 1984. I was at the library of Narciso Binayán Carmona, an Argentine-Armenian journalist of encyclopedic know­ledge and a commensurate collection of books which, with the more than 40,000 volumes he reckoned to have, was among the largest private libraries in Argentina. Unpretentious as he was, despite being a recognized writer at La Nación, the most prominent broadsheet in the country, he would agree to receive me at his sprawling home where the walls of most of the rooms were covered in books from floor to ceiling, as I began to map out my route into journalism in that pre-internet time, when newspapers were cathedrals of know­ledge. While I waited for him in the living room as he finished writing a column or some other engagement with another guest, I would pick up books and open them at a random page. The first time I did this had been especially felicitous. As I was reading the introduction to the Spanish edition of Spengler’s The Decline of the West, I sensed the hand of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. He had indeed signed these prescient pages written in Madrid in 1923, with a clear-eyed foreboding that the subsequent two decades justified. I relished the discovery and this random reading at Binayán’s library became a habit. Then one day I opened a little paperback in French with a faded pinkish cover: Les Musulmans Oubliés: L’Islam à l’Union Soviétique (The Forgotten Muslims: Islam in the Soviet Union) that Binayán later told me he had bought in the flea market in Paris. The first page I opened in the middle of the book had a short entry on the “Hamchen.” That was a strange name for a people in the Soviet Union, I thought, assuming for some reason that the name was a variant of the Arabic khamseen, which in addition to meaning “fifty” is also the name of a Sahara wind. How would a people with that name end up in the Soviet Union, which at the time for most laymen on the other side of the Berlin Wall was generically known as “Russia.” To my astonishment, I read they were Muslim Armenians in Abkhazia and Georgia, an offshoot of the community on Turkey’s north-eastern Black Sea 427

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coast. Muslim Armenians! How could Armenians become Muslim and stay Armenian? As the Armenian nation in its current conception and the Church were essentially born together, especially after the creation of the alphabet in ad 401 or 402 for liturgy in the vernacular, at the time this seemed an oxymoron. That evening I asked my father about the Hamshen Armenians. They were Turkified now, he told me, but spoke an archaic dialect of Armenian. It was the pre-internet days of the Cold War in which countries were farther away than they are now, where there were remote places hard to reach and obtain information about. There were parts of the world that were mysterious in an objective sense of the word. Few things could beat Islamicized Armenians. Turkey was even more of a closed land for Diaspora Armenians than the Soviet Union.     

Across the street from where we sat at the teahouse in Makrial, there was a torn election poster for the Turkish candidate for the ESP, the Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi (Socialist Party of the Oppressed), of which Kiram was a member. Earlier that day, Kiram had introduced me to the ESP candidate, a young Turkish woman. The party did acknowledge the Genocide and wanted justice for it, she said. But she saw more urgency for the Kurdish question. “Turkey slaughtered the Armenians and they were finished, so now it is a historical problem, but they kept on slaughtering the Kurds once and again, and they still did not disappear,” she had said. She was born in Şavşat, in the province of Artvin not too far from Cehennem Deresi (Hell’s Gorge), the site where Armenians had been massacred. As we were walking down the main commercial street in Makrial, a man standing at the entrance of a shoe store called out to Kiram’s father. “This bastard is Hamshentsi,” Kiram’s father said of his friend, who was game and returned the compliment and then turned to me, asking me to take their photo. “You are Armenian, but we are Hamshentsi,” he said jovially. “You are Armenian, too,” I said. “Hamshentsi Armenian,” the man proposed as a compromise. “The Hamshentsi are not Armenian,” Kiram’s father rushed to say in a loud voice, almost panicking and red. I sensed he was afraid, but not of me or his friend the shopkeeper. He must have feared spies around us. And being seen in my company could have been compromising until not long ago in Turkey. He was proclaiming publicly and in the street that they were not Armenian, in the Armenian dialect of the Hamshen. Kiram had told me as much a couple of nights before, following the argument at their place about the veracity of the Genocide. His father boasted of his Marxist–Leninist convictions, his fondness for rakı and his contempt for Islam. But he feared much more to concede he could have been of Armenian origin. 428

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So when insensibly I asked the shopkeeper what he thought, whether the Hamshentsis are Armenian or not, he was reluctant to give an answer. “We are Hamshentsi, we are Muslim,” he responded, the joke long suffocated in the fear that had descended on all of us. My gyavur damarı (infidel’s stubbornness) had taken hold of me and I said, “Yes, Muslim Armenians.” But Kiram’s father was saying, “No, no, no.” As we were walking toward the bus I asked him if the Laz spoke Hamshetsnak. No, Turkish, he said. They also spoke Laz among themselves but the common language for the communities was Turkish. There were still Laz living in Makrial in addition to the Hamshentsis, but there were also some Turks. Kurds would come to Hopa and Makrial for seasonal work but most would not stay. An olive-skinned man with a black handlebar mustache passed us without greeting Kiram’s father, smoking in a manner that is common in Turkey and further east, hunched into himself and looking down. “I know that man, he is a Turk,” he said. “We are Turks, too,” he added, never missing an opportunity to drive the point home. “You are Hamshentsi,” I responded. “Yes, yes, we are Hamshentsi,” he was satisfied. “I’m an atheist,” he added. “And a Marxist–Leninist.” Like most Hamshentsis? “No, there are those who go to the mosque,” he said. And he laughed, and so did I, happy to have found in humor a common language with him.     

We were sitting at the Hopa Park teahouse when I recognized Selahaddin, who was trying to create his own Hamshen party. Kiram smiled but looked at him with viperine eyes, and they did not greet each other with anything other than a nod. Kiram told me Selahaddin was closer to Kurdish politics, and a member of the BDP, the Kurdish party close to the PKK. But he was “a good guy,” Kiram added. His description of “good guy” usually applied to people with whom he did not see eye to eye, did not greet nor talk to. Selahaddin was with a fat man wearing thick-framed eyeglasses. He approached me to greet me—the familiarity we all derived from social networks in remote parts of the world still felt strange—but I noticed he was not speaking with Kiram. The fat man was a Turkish journalist, Selahaddin said, and for some reason everybody at our table, including Kiram, laughed, because he said it with a tone as if it was an inevitable obligation to satisfy a master. But when he was done, he said, he would like to speak with me. He had just launched a project to start the Hamshen political party, based on the specificity of his community, saying that when they were asked if they were Turks or Armenians they responded, “We are Hemşinli.” There was something that was specifically Turkish here too, the ambiguity of this kind of statement that avoided affirmatives or negatives: when asked if she was Armenian, a woman in 429

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Sasun had not said “No,” just “We are Muslim.” Selahaddin’s efforts eventually came to nothing. He returned to his table and said something to the Turkish journalist, who laughed loud enough to be heard by us some 10 meters away. But then the rain started, and Kiram and our group went in a different direction. I bumped into Selahaddin again in the minibus that was climbing up the Makrial mountains through the villages of Hamshen, an impressionist watercolor of green and red spots—flowers in wild bloom—through the curtain of rain that descended more forcefully on the windshield than the broken wipers could handle. Selahaddin sat a few rows back, obviously to set some distance. I was not sure what to make of him. The first time I had contacted him he had written a message full of disdain: I was conducting an online survey among Hamshentsis, in which he identified himself as a Marxist–Leninist and ridiculed the notion that Armenians could be the Hamshentsis’ kin. He also disputed that the “Hemşinli” (he called his people by its Turkish name) had any notion of a separate identity from the Turks other than a somewhat localist bent reflected in the use of their dialect and some customs. He had also written a couple of lines in Hamshetsnak mocking the survey initiative, in a message that was otherwise in Turkish. But a few months later his views had changed, as had others’ as they rediscovered their people’s history. Even when he tried to found a Hamshen party, however, he had insisted on the particularity of their communal identity, saying that Hamshentsis denied either Armenian or Turkish origin. They were Hamshentsis. “Ask a Hamshentsi if he is a Turk and he will say, I am Hamshentsi; ask him if he is Armenian, and he will say, I am Hamshentsi.” He had been interviewed by a journalist who signed her pieces in the Turkish press with a name ending with oğlu, and with ian for those she wrote for the Armenian press.     

Torkom had invited me to a gathering in Istanbul with his brother Markar, who was working on a documentary on Hamshen. They were both Christian Armenians of mixed Malatya and Dersim origin, but Markar was based in the Netherlands. Neither spoke Armenian, but Torkom had fought as a volunteer in the Nagorno-Karabakh war against Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Other Armenians from the Anatolian interior had joined in too, he said. It was the first time I had heard about the presence of Armenians from the historical lands on the front line against the Azeris. But I was drawn to the sound of Hamshetsnak coming from Rahmi, who was speaking on the phone. It was difficult to decouple the Armenian language 430

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from the identity so I sheepishly asked him how he felt in terms of identity. “We are Muslim,” he said, smiling, without adding the disclaimer that I often heard from other Hamshentsis that he was a communist or an atheist. “Yes, we are Armenian,” he added, in response to a second question I made. Hamshetsnak, he said, was not disappearing. Many women barely spoke anything but Hamshetsnak, with a very weak know­ledge of Turkish or none at all. “I only speak Hamshetsnak with my mother.” At that moment Rahmi’s cell phone rang and I saw “Civan” on the screen of his iPhone. Civan was a member of Vova, a band of Hamshen musicians that sang in the vernacular and had put their culture and music on the map in Turkey and, increasingly, in the Armenian Diaspora. Rahmi passed the phone almost immediately to me, as if Civan knew that I was there. We kept missing each other. I had called his home upon arriving in Istanbul. “He is not here,” came the answer in Turkish, in the mellifluous voice of a woman after I had inquired in Hamshetsnak. Did she not speak Hamshetsnak? “No, I am not Hemşinli but I love them, and I love Armenians,” she said sweetly, almost apologetically. Not yet being confident in my Turkish at the time, and calling from a strangely placed payphone in a cavernous corner inside a gallery in the Beyoğlu district, I asked her to please repeat what she had said. “I am not Armenian, but I love Armenians very much,” she said in the same, soothing voice. At the time the thaw between Armenians and Turks at the level of civil society was just beginning, and many Turks would often make clear by additional expressions of courtesy how they felt about so many unspeakable things. It was an effort to reassure their Armenian interlocutors that they understood us and that we could trust them. “Parev, inçbes ek?” came Civan’s grave voice, greeting me in Armenian. He had only slowly overcome his misgivings about the Hamshentsis’ origins, after initially disputing these theories strongly, out of conviction rather than fear. And even today, while he acknowledged the indisputable evidence of their Armenian origin, he at the same time reminded everybody that they had been Muslim for centuries now, and that there was a strong Turkish component to their identity. Civan’s Hamshetsnak was fluent and his vocabulary remarkably rich, occasionally borrowing words from standard Eastern and Western Armenian rather than Turkish to substitute for those missing in the dialect. We met up with Civan that night at a tea garden in Gezi Park. He was making an effort not to look tired after his 50-kilometer commute, and a long day at work. That evening, he and another eight Hamshentsi friends had been doing renovation work in the suite of offices that would soon house Hadig (“Seed,” in both Hamshetsnak and Armenian), a cultural and social center for the growing community of Hamshentsis in Istanbul, which he estimated at around 3,000 people. 431

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There were three reasons why so many Hamshentsis were leftist, according to Civan: 1. They came down from the mountains to the cities, where they became workers rather than capitalists. 2. The Laz would dismiss them as “thick-ribbed Armenians,” a pejorative expression both in terms of social class (as peasants) and national origin. 3. The Hamshen did not attain positions of power in Turkey. At the time I was under the impression that his acknowledgment of the Armenian origin of the Hamshentsis was still grudging, but when we met he did not convey any hint of misgivings or reluctance. As we were getting ready to leave, his 18-year-old daughter joined us, a tall girl with big black eyes, who spoke fluent English and had just enrolled in the Psychology Faculty that day. She did not speak Hamshetsnak nor did she seem interested. Civan had big plans for the Hadig cultural center, including teaching and practicing the language. Many young Hamshentsis, especially those born and raised outside the Hamshen regions, in the internal Turkish diaspora, did not speak it or were forgetting it. I had seen young men in Hopa who did not speak Hamshetsnak and were not interested in learning it. One, from the smaller Hamshen community of Erzurum, was in the ESP, the same socialist party as Kiram. Kiram scolded him teasingly, a bit pour la galerie to impress me, and the young man played the part, smiling a little shyly and promising to study it. That night in Gezi Park, Civan told me that Hamshetsnak was “the language of the women,” confirming what Rahmi had told me. Kiram’s grandmother, whom I met in the late stages of her Alzheimer’s and, as it happened, her life, only spoke Hamshetsnak. She would be mumbling a stream of incoherent phrases in the dialect, which Kiram and the rest of the family would ignore as they walked past her in their home in the village of Şana. Yet I found hearing this old woman endlessly fascinating, as she whispered things to herself in an obscure and archaic variant of Armenian, while I wondered about the meaning of words that came from a very far epoch and an unreachable mind. “Betqes ta?” I asked her one evening to test the limits of her conscience, asking her in the dialect if she was doing well. “Soy em” (“I am well”), she responded firmly, after a second of shock when she froze on the couch. She had lost her sight by then and, in the delicate frame of her covered face, crowned with a headscarf on top of a cap, her unseeing eyes were searching for the source of the stranger’s voice. Anxiety ensued. Alarmed, the grandmother was asking “Vova? Vova?” (“Who is it? Who is it?”). Her daughter, Kiram’s aunt, took her lovingly by the arm and led her away. 432

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Poshas The former district governor of Artvin, Mithat bey, was my link to the Poshas. I had been hunting for them for a long time and, after following many false leads, I thought I had finally found them this time. He was a most polite man to whom I introduced myself over the telephone. Established in Istanbul for the last ten years, he agreed to put me in touch with the Poshas of Artvin. For a group that has long been discriminated against, he had only the best things to say about them. But Mithat bey had warned me that I would not find anyone who spoke the language. “The Poshas have assimilated,” he told me. He referred me to a different man, a former official, Şihab bey, who was as kind, whom Mithat bey believed of help in my quest. I thought him a Posha but only later did I find out he was not. Şihab bey, too, was originally from Artvin but had retired many years ago to Bursa, where he said there was a large Posha community, and that they were doing well at that, too, having opened jewelers’ or other businesses. I spoke with both men over the telephone, and both, Turkish government officials whom I told I was Armenian, offered me unconditional and prompt help. They did not ask for any reference. Further, they put in a good word to introduce me to this secretive group that spoke Lomavren, a dialect derived from Armenian. More a secret jargon of limited vocabulary, rather than a language in its own right, some basic Lomavren was not too difficult to follow for a Western Armenian speaker. Still, a minute-long, fast monologue by a fluent speaker of Lomavren, a 78-year-old woman in Artvin, sounded completely unintelligible for an Armenian and Turkish speaker, apart from isolated words. A short conversation this woman had with a relative of about the same age was as obscure, if only slightly less so because the other speaker borrowed more words from Turkish. Şihab bey told me that there were still Poshas who spoke Lomavren in Artvin. But he had told me that my Armenian origin might cause unease among the Poshas, so prior to heading to Artvin it would be good to speak 433

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with them. He put me in touch with another official in the Artvin district government, Fatih bey, a Justice and Development Party official, in whom I had not placed much hope or trust. Yet as soon as I telephoned him, Fatih bey went out of his way to help me, without even having seen me and after I had told him that I was Armenian. I had looked for the Poshas in Istanbul. At a regular hangout of what Istanbul Armenians called Poshas in the quarter of Kurtuluş, only two had said they were indeed Poshas, even though one spoke fluently standard Western Armenian rather than Lomavren, while the other only knew Turkish but could understand Armenian. While “Posha” was used as a derogatory term by Istanbul Armenians for some of their kin from Sinop and Kastamonu, as well as others from elsewhere in the Anatolian interior, I was uncertain about them after corroborating that they may not have been Poshas at all. Still, there are references in passing to the itinerant Poshas spreading as far as Kastamonu.1 Before finding the Artvin connection, I had been searching unsuccessfully in the Black Sea region, following some vague hints that I might find Poshas there. But an anecdote a Hamshentsi man told me in Makrial made me return to Istanbul. This Hamshentsi man had attended a wedding in 1980 or 1981 in Afyon Karahisar, in Western Anatolia, and the singers had started singing tunes that nobody was paying attention to. But he had begun to pick up words and expressions that he knew to be Armenian, yet the musicians did not look Armenian and the language was a strange mix, from which he could understand fragments, such as “ağçig dığa sirets” (“the girl loved the boy”), which were more or less the same in the Hamshetsnak dialect. “Everybody was dancing and not paying attention, but I was intrigued.” So he had approached them and they had told him they would speak after the party was over. They were a touring band of Posha musicians, but he could not remember where they were from: Van, perhaps. Amid whispers, both the Hamshentsi man and the Posha musicians had hinted at their links to Armenians. These were the years of turmoil in Turkey: not only had there been a resurgence in hatred against Armenians due to the terror attacks by ASALA and other Armenian groups, but there had also just been a military coup, led by General Kenan Evren. The mystifying anecdote sounded like a good lead, and I thought I knew where to start my search. My calls to the Roma, Çingene, and Lom Center went unanswered for days and nobody opened the door at the address indicated in the quarter of Cihangir. But as I had rented an apartment in Kasımpaşa, an Istanbul quarter with a significant concentration of Roma residents (and the childhood neighborhood of Erdoğan) I started looking closer to home. The tea parlor attendants across from my apartment building told me where to ask. Yet unversed as I was, calling people by a name they were discriminated against 434

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was not opening many doors. The neighbors I initially approached denied they were Gypsy but when I hinted at the possibility of hiring a band for a recording session, conversation started to flow. A young man from Eskişehir, of dark complexion and cunning eyes, without ever telling me if he was a Roma, wanted to know how much money was in it. He had approached me when he overheard me talking to a woman, who had said, “I’m not a Gypsy, I’m from Thrace.” The Eskişehir boy had smiled coyly when I told him that I was looking for Gypsy musicians. A musician himself, he passed up on my offer when I told him that I wanted to listen to a performance by Poshas, a group of people he had never heard about. He directed me to a café down a steep street, at a far end of Kasımpaşa. “They are all Gypsies down there.” By the looks I got upon entering Muzik Kafe, it became clear that it was indeed frequented by such patrons. There were clusters grouped around different tables. They all laughed when I asked if there were any Gypsy musicians. I had obviously dispensed with euphemisms. “We are all Turks,” one said, mockingly, as the laughter continued. It was a musicians’ hangout where they waited to be hired for parties, weddings, or other celebrations. Yet nobody had ever heard of Poshas. An accordion player from Edirne showed me to a young man, hugely obese and olive-skinned, who was sitting alone with his head down, concentrating on something, pen in hand. The rest were mocking him loudly and not gently, but he appeared immune to it, lost in the bubble of his own thoughts. Yet the others did not seem hostile to him, those strange ecosystems that develop among groups of friends. When I told him what I needed, he took his eyes off the sudoku game for a second and, on a scrap of paper he tore from a newspaper, wrote down the telephone number of a Gypsy musician from Kayseri who might help me. But he knew nothing about Poshas. By the time I thanked him he had already shut out the outside world, as the cruel taunts around him continued. The Kayseri musician, whom I called, had never ever heard of Poshas. In Kasımpaşa they were all Roma, the root of the other name for Posha, Lom: in the Posha dialect the r was transliterated as an l, so Roma became Loma or Lom, and their language was the Lomavren. Yet this chain of false leads had brought me to the Artvin connection and back to the Pontos and to the luxuriant world wedged between its mountains and the Black Sea. An endless series of telephone calls, built on referral upon referral, finally got me on track to finding the elusive group. No Roma I spoke to knew of the existence of the Poshas. Fatih bey summoned to his office a Posha official, Altınbaş bey. The good word of Şihab bey carried a lot of weight. He had been very supportive of the Posha minority, and most beloved for organizing their soccer team and getting the team its first set of official jerseys decades ago. “That was a big deal at the 435

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time,” Altınbaş bey said. Altınbaş bey had played for the team, Lomaspor. They were amateurs then and did not play for money. So close had Şihab bey become to the Poshas of Artvin that he had even learned a little of the dialect: “He had once traveled to Batumi on a business trip with his Posha secretary,” Altınbaş bey said. “When they were served lunch, she had warned him, ‘Şuni mis e,’ and he had not touched it.” Şihab bey’s secretary had literally said, in Armenian as well as in the Lomavren dialect, “It’s dog’s meat,” a euphemism for pork, forbidden to the Muslims. Fatih bey gave Altınbaş bey the afternoon off to show me around the community of the Poshas in the city. The first stop was in the square outside the Center Mosque, to meet one of the oldest Poshas in Artvin. Haci Mehmet was 96 and a basket-weaver, the old specialty of Poshas. He spoke some Lomavren for the camera, but it was clear he had forgotten a lot of the language. Originally from Bulbuçuz Kığ, he was a white man with blue eyes, white beard, and Islamic skullcap. Conscripted in 1943, he had served in Kars for two years and another two years in Ararat. Altınbaş bey took me to his family home, where his mother and an aunt engaged in conversation in Lomavren but I could not understand anything but loose Armenian words inserted in an alien context. It was heavily influenced by Turkish but with a different syntax that was not possible to follow for nonspeakers. These ladies spoke it just for my sake, for they only used what they considered a secret jargon when trying to hide something from nonspeakers. Turkish was their regular conversation language. They even seemed genuinely surprised that Lomavren would be considered a language. Verbs, some of which came straight from the Armenian, were conjugated in a similar manner to Armenian. Yet despite the considerable Armenian vocabulary, Altınbaş bey said that the language generally was not too different than the Roma he had heard spoken by Gypsies. One word even the least proficient Poshas employed was manuş (policeman). It sounded, or may originally have been, an apocope of manuşag, Armenian for “violet” or “purple,” a word of Assyrian origin. Yet the Posha speakers did not know the word “manuşag,” nor were they aware of any such chromatic connection to policemen. In the late nineteenth century, manuş meant “person” or “man,” and its acception for a law enforcement officer seems to be a later development, perhaps the evolution of a euphemism. The orientalist Kerope P. Patkanov, who used the variant spelling manus, gave the example of “samél manus es,” for “you are a good man.”2 In response to my question, Xoca Hasan, a Posha imam at whose home we were and the cousin of Altınbaş bey, told me that the nearest Posha community to Kastamonu was in Zonguldak, on the western Black Sea coast. Altınbaş bey said that “there are Poshas everywhere,” a couple of times. He lived in the 436

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apartment below Xoca Hasan’s, in the Kolorta neighborhood, formerly the Greek quarter of Artvin. They were all observing the Ramadan fast, and were a little wizened. Still, the women seemed to be holding up a little better than the men. There was a remarkable lack of the fear or tension that is found in other households in Turkey, especially when someone was filming. None of the Poshas ever asked for gold maps, even though the topic came up in reference to a question about the markers that, according to Vrtanes Papazian, they drew during their migrations as secret road signs for their kin or to indicate if households in the neighborhood were friendly or hostile.3 The Poshas knew nothing about that and thought these were indications by Armenians to find the buried gold. Xoca Hasan wanted to know if I had ever thought about becoming a Muslim. “No,” I told him. “I am a Christian, I was born a Christian, and I am happy with it.” Then he took a look at the sketches I made in my notebook of city skylines. As I was in the Black Sea, I had instinctively drawn staggered skylines, with many mosques and minarets figuring prominently in the sketches. The imam was delighted, a smile drawing widely on his face: “Next time you come here I will make you a Muslim,” he said. I was reminded of a ninth-century Persian Islamic mystic who ruefully observed as he grew older that his Jewish and Christian neighbors born into their religion were not converting to the truer one, which puzzled him in an unhappy way. The imam, a baritone, intoned a surah. He said he spoke Arabic well and read the Qur’an every day. Altınbaş bey was insisting that he sang another surah. “One is enough,” Xoca Hasan said. One of the older women said a grandfather had fought in Kars during the Russo–Turkish war of 1915–17, in which he had fought against the Armenian volunteers who had taken part in the conflict. He may have served in the disastrous battle of Sarıkamış. But she left the most fantastic story for last: one of their elders had fought with Shamil against the Russians in the rebellion of the Chechen warlord against the Russian Empire. Then, quite unexpectedly, she brought up the massacres of Armenians, which were well remembered in the north-east and mostly by the Hamshentsis. She knew I was filming them, with my camera light blinking, and I reminded her about it, but she did not care: “The Turks massacred the Armenians at Hell’s Gorge, in Ardanuş, pushing them into the abyss; they massacred the Armenians and the Christians in order to bring the Muslims to take their place.” She knew the history exactly. Even though she was not a perpetrator and was not expressing support for what she described, there was no pain or contrition in her tone, and at the time I interpreted it as a sign that she did not know I was Armenian. But when we were later discussing the words for family relations in Lomavren, she had recognized the word kuyr (“sister,” in Armenian). She 437

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smiled knowingly and told me, “That’s a word your people use, but not ours.” She therefore knew more about the connections of her language to Armenian, or more importantly, about the connections of Armenians and Poshas, than she was letting on. In his remarkably lasting observations from 1898, however, Vrtanes Papazian noted that Poshas considered Lomavren “an artificial language, a jargon.”4 And obviously, she had guessed my identity correctly. Right away she added, “Poshas love Allah very much.” The emphasis caused me to wonder if she meant God as we all know it or the Allah of Islam as different than the God of others. Papazian mentioned Poshas’ reverence for the priest which coexisted perfectly with a somewhat superficial attitude toward religion. A similar reflection was found in a lighthearted vein by Ortega y Gasset, when the Gypsy went to confession but the cautious priest asked him if he knew the Ten Commandments. The Gypsy responded, “Well, Father, I wanted to learn them, but I heard talk that they were going to change them.” The family of Xoca Hasan had an outward religious devotion that perhaps suggested a relatively recent conversion, but they did not appear more zealous than the Arabs I had seen in Sasun. The women did not remember old sayings in Lomavren. Frustrated, one of them said, “Xelkemize gennemiyor,” which could be literally translated as, “It is not coming to our mind,” that is to say, “We are not remembering it,” in a very rare Turkified variation of an Armenian expression that anybody who spoke a little of both could understand rapidly. As we were walking away from the neighborhood in the upper part of town, Altınbaş bey approached a young man and asked him to speak a little Lomavren for me. He greeted me in the dialect and said a few other words but that was it. I asked him to sing a song in Lomavren or say a poem, but he responded that Lomavren was not a language. He was trying to say it was more of a secret jargon, but less than a dialect: “Laz, Russian, Kurdish, Circassian, Turkish, Georgian, Armenian: those languages are spoken in Turkey but we are not like them, we do not speak a different language; we have taken a bit from the Laz and another bit from the Georgians, but we are the first nation of this land, we are an indigenous population, pure Turks,” he said, using the Turkish word for it, Öztürk. “Our ancestors have come from Central Asia.” Altınbaş bey later told me, “He is just a kid, talks nonsense, knows nothing.” Then he added, laughing, “What language were we talking at home?” And the two old ladies were speaking it fluently, even though the men, while they seemed able to follow it, appeared a little more uncertain about using it. Yet he did not dispute the part about the Poshas’ origins. All the Poshas I spoke with agreed they were the original, pure Turks, and that they had come from Central Asia. They did not mention the Khorasan myth, popular elsewhere. It was a point of pride that every “pure” Turk came from that city in 438

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Iran. Yet apparently all these ancient stories that spoke of migrations, driven by the Mongol and Tartar hordes’ westward march, indicated passage into Armenia by way of Khorasan only to avoid the deserts of Iran: “Coming from Khorasan” meant that the people “were not autochthones, but immigrants.” A Şavşat man we were with said, “We are the original Turks.” But the women tended to say the Poshas came from Ajaria and Batumi in Georgia, from the Black Sea area, the seat of large Posha communities. The Central Asian origin was more popular among the men. What researchers surmised about their origins came from linguistics, which dates the arrival of the Poshas on the Armenian plateau from India by way of Iran probably around the early tenth century, as none of the words borrowed from Farsi belong to the Middle Persian or Pahlavi period. Significantly, too, there is a complete absence of words of Greek origin in the Lomavren vocabulary, which would indicate that the ancestors of the Lom never made it to the Greek areas further west in Byzantine Anatolia prior to the Turkic invasions that began in the eleventh century.5 We went out for a walk in the city of Artvin, a magic mountain of a place. It was built like the Tower of Babel in the painting by Bruegel the Elder, of concentric levels that spiral in decreasing diameter toward the summit. A hurried woman we bumped into, her head covered in a long, rose tul shawl, teased me, challenging me to understand the chores she was about to describe in Lomavren: “Hande erdoğ, dukhande alur maderduğ, ve başka sigara xemela.” She was in a rush, and offered to repeat more slowly the little snippet in the language of the Poshas, of Armenian words and inflections with a Turkish mix, which I understood: “I am going to the market, I will grind flour at home, and will also smoke a cigarette.” Altınbaş bey recognized a Posha friend from Şavşat who was waiting for his wife outside a hospital, and we engaged in small talk with him. He obviously realized right away that I was Armenian, for he greeted me with a Lom salute based on Armenian, with a Turkish auxiliary: “Ağeg misin?” (“Are you well?”). A Hamshentsi young man approached us: “These Poshas, be damned, they call us Armenian, and we tell them we are not,” he told me in his perfectly clear Armenian dialect. “We tell them we are Hemşinli, we are not Armenian; there is only one people in Turkey.” Amazingly, the Poshas understood too, and were laughing. As Altınbaş bey’s father worked at the tea harvest in Borçka and the Hamshen villages of Hopa, he had spent long seasons with Hamshentsis so he understood Hamshetsnak and also some Western Armenian by way of Hamshetsnak. But his friend had understood too, even though Lomavren and the dialect of Hamshen are not mutually intelligible. The Hamshentsi man was intrigued that I spoke Hamshetsnak. “Are you Hemşinli, too?” Armenian resembled Hamshetsnak, I explained. “It does, very much,” he agreed, a 439

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malignant cloud passing across his bespectacled eyes. His clan was from Borçka, a district with one of the largest concentrations of Hamshentsis. An old shepherd in a cap and with long, straight mustachios said they were called “posha” because their nomadic elders wandered about empty-handed. “Posha,” according to this view, came from the Turkish boş (empty). Xoca Hasan and Altınbaş bey had given me this explanation, which I would hear again later from Hafid, of the Yeşilkapı family, with whom I would stay for a few days, as well as from others. It had already been elucidated in exactly the same terms by Vrtanes Papazian more than a century earlier. In his 1899 book, Papazian said that “Posha” or “Bosha” was a term coined in the nineteenth century. In Armenian literature, he said, they were known as “Kınçu” or “Gınçu” (“Gypsy”) and they called themselves “Lom,” which meant “free man.” I would find the best Lomavren speakers in Şavşat, according to the Poshas of Artvin. A Şavşat cabdriver took me to a cousin’s cousin in the village of Carat to talk with native speakers. After a difficult bargain, he agreed to drive me for $100 to this village halfway between Şavşat and Ardanuş. It was a great investment. The entire village was inhabited by Poshas, and his cousin and his family had a better know­ledge of the language than most others. In addition, they were of the friendliest disposition, and greatly curious about their connection to Armenians. By comparison, a man I had met at his shoe store in Artvin had freaked out badly at the similarities between Armenian and Lomavren and had written down my name and telephone number with police-like precision. The store was claustrophobic and the size of a very large shoebox, with a low ceiling which made it look all the more threatening. He had been friendly when I had walked in with Altınbaş bey but in the afternoon he had turned surly and defensive. It also disturbed me that he asked my name and then rang up a number, and tried many times, and I was wondering who he was calling because I did not like his expression. The way he was looking at me was threatening and I was seriously considering walking out. He did tell me he was looking for a police officer he was friends with, yet I kept a level head. This also indicated that the vast network of rumor mills had already been in action, and the voice had spread the word that there was an Armenian in town looking for Poshas, as was the case in small towns and even compact cities like Artvin, which got relatively low numbers of visitors, especially within a small community like that of the Poshas. Without my asking, the first thing he said was that Poshas were not Armenian. He took out a heavy volume about the history of Artvin by a Turkish historian who said Poshas came from Central Asia and were pure Turks, pretty much the same as every minority that was Muslim in Turkey. The merchant went on to brag about Poshas’ Turkishness, and other propaganda that he parroted from the book, the sole purpose of which was to put to rest any 440

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theories about the Poshas’ Armenian district. “Fine,” I said, “I knew that.” I told him that I just wanted to listen to their language. He said he did not speak the language and that there were no songs in Lomavren. Poshas, he said, were like pure water: “They are as clean.” Two customers walked in, engaged in animated conversation: one was tall and athletic; the other one was short, with a large head and a strange expression. The short one spoke Lomavren fluently and had some rudimentary know­ledge of its grammar which, as with any argot not used formally, presented some challenges. The owner of the shoe store, whose voluminous presence and square eyeglasses made him look like the former Turkish president Turgut Özal, got rid of the hot potato he considered this issue to be by telling me this young man knew the language well. He looked relieved, as I felt too. His customer indeed had a solid command of the dialect. He told me the conjugations and the pronouns, which were all Armenian-based derivatives of the dative of the first person singular, indzi (to me). The three plural pronouns (we, you, they) were all the same in Lomavren, a strange hybrid of Armenian and Turkish: indzimiz. Yet the young customers’ linguistic scrupulousness was unusual. As noted more than a century earlier by Papazian, “the Posha never bothers to correct the word spoken by his son, if he shortens it or alters it.” Thus, they have “gradually lost many words and the grammar.”6 You could perceive among the Poshas a certain reluctance to prominence or attention after so many centuries of discrimination and of having their name also used as a pejorative. But Altınbaş bey felt a little awkward when other Poshas said that they were pure Turks. He looked away uneasily, as he also did when I told his Hamshentsi friend that I was Armenian. There was a second of discomfort, which also showed in their complete silence about their connections to Armenians or, rarely, their denial, which hinted at a know­ledge or suspicion about it. The deputy mayor of Artvin turned down my request for an official car for us to visit Posha communities in Artvin, Ardanuş, and Şavşat, as Altınbaş bey had suggested. He had told me that the chances of my petition being denied were less as I was a guest, whereas he was a public employee. But the deputy mayor’s explanation for his refusal was convincing as well: he would have to fill out official forms with my identification, explain my mission, and he hinted it might not be a very good thing for me as it could backfire. I understood he was doing me a favor by allowing me fly under the radar. I was happy too, for receiving formal help from the Turkish government was disturbing my conscience even though Fatih bey had been extremely gracious, to the point that I was wondering if it was mere hospitality or whether there was an undeclared 441

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Armenian connection. But the other two officials I had not met, Mithat bey and Şihab bey, had been as gentlemanly to a fault. Kamil, the man who Altınbaş bey and I had met outside the hospital in Artvin, was the bus station shoe shiner and the supervisor of the public facilities in Şavşat. He tried to help but the local Poshas scattered like frightened doves. A number of cabdrivers were there: one was upset and even scared by the questions hinting at a separate identity for the Lom, saying they were not, that the Lomavren language did not exist, and that the two elderly women I had spoken with had made up words to fool a gullible tourist and had tricked me. The language did exist and I did not appreciate that he was taking me for an idiot. “Do you know more than me?” he asked. “No, but I know the language exists, and I can recognize it, too.” His restlessness obviously stemmed from the Armenian origin of the dialect, which was why he denied it. A young man, plump and friendlier, was also insisting as much, with less vehemence. Then along came a young cabdriver who suggested I was making a lot of fuss, but that he could help. Bargaining was tough and slow, over a number of teas. The plump man, who was trying to convince me the Poshas were not a separate group, finally joined us in the cab, saying he was a cousin of the chauffeur. On the road to Şavşat, he talked quite a bit about the language that a few minutes before he had insisted did not exist. We stopped at a house where there was nobody, then another where a man with silver hair said he did not speak it as well as the elders, so we headed off to meet the cabdriver’s distant cousins: the Yeşilkapıs of Carat. In the cab, I wondered if they knew any stories of maledictions and spells among the Poshas, but the chauffeur and his cousin grumbled a bit that it was Ramadan. Yet they had misunderstood my question and I did not manage to explain the nuance, so the answer degraded into a duel of vulgarities. The cousins were outdoing each other in a contest of imaginative profanities that they insisted were “Posha curses,” unaware that Armenians, too, draw from the same Turkish vocabulary in ire or frustration. Hafid Yeşilkapı was the cabdriver’s aunt’s husband, and the most fluent speaker of Lomavren in the group. He was accompanied by Mehmet, a young man with long, straight hair who looked very much like a Beatle, with an air of George Harrison, an impression enhanced by his fashion sense, with loose button-down shirts with oriental motifs. He was thrilled to have just become a father. Opposed to causing suffering to animals, he had become a vegetarian. His wife was a very white young woman, thin like him, whose voice I never heard nor did I see her smile, unlike the other women in the combined household of cousins. Her head was doubly covered, like conservative Muslim women in Turkey, the scarf worn over a hair-holding cap. 442

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We picnicked at the foot of the Şavşat fortress, built in the tenth century by the Bagration kings, the Georgian branch of the Armenian Bagratuny. Hafid’s children, especially his oldest son and daughter, had a good command of Lomavren and a fairly robust vocabulary, especially for young people who were not even 20 years old. They had learned it from their mother, a fluent speaker with excellent pronunciation. Thanks to her, Hafid’s know­ledge of the language had improved too, despite which he still appeared hesitant at times, especially on certain verbal tenses. Yet he was firmer on the links he hinted at between Poshas and Armenians. There were dozens, possibly hundreds, of Armenian words that had survived in their dialect. His great-grandparents were from Urus Xev, also known as Unusxer or Urusxev, a large village in the Artvin area, near a village called Tibet: They abandoned Urus Xev in 1915. They owned these lands, the totality of which perhaps is our family’s. But during the Armenian Genocide they fled the village, heading toward Ajaria or somewhere else in Georgia. The locals took them over. Then Atatürk came, and we could have claimed our lands back. We have the deeds to these lands from the Republic’s independence period. But the locals had settled by then and built on the land so we had to give up on our claims. They are not Poshas. They are Ardanuş locals. They say they are just that: “Biz yerliyiz.”7 They are not Turks, they are not Poshas, neither Georgians, nor Laz. Nobody knows what they are. What does “local” mean? But they won’t say. In any case, when the Genocide ended, they grabbed the lands. I have an Atatürk-era property deed. After the Genocide our family came back, but the lands were gone.

I had not told Hafid that I was Armenian even though he had obviously guessed it, to judge from his bold use of the expression Ermeni Soykırımı (“Armenian Genocide,” in Turkish). It was especially brave in the Black Sea region, a hotbed of Turkish nationalism of the most deleterious kind, and in the presence of the cabdriver’s cousin, who had said he was a policeman when explaining why he did not want to be seen in the photos I was taking. He was not sure if the Şavşat Poshas were also targeted in the Genocide. Hafid’s grandparents may have fled the Russo–Turkish war of 1915–17, rather than the massacres by Ottoman forces and their accomplices. There is today a dwindling community of about 100 Christian Posha households in Akhalkalak, Georgia, who have almost completely assimilated into the Armenian mainstream and have forgotten the Lomavren, other than a few words. The literature on the Armenian Poshas after 1915 is scarce. I recalled reading that the Van Poshas fought alongside the other Armenians in the defense of the city, led by the Dashnaktsutyun leader Aram Manoukian. Poshas who were members of the Armenian Church or Lomavren speakers must have met the same fate as other Armenians: massacre and deportation; kidnapping and 443

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Islamicization. It is very likely that large communities of Poshas, such as those of Palu and Van, disappeared completely. The Artvin area Poshas were vaguely aware of the existence of pockets of their brethren elsewhere in Turkey but were not in contact, nor was there any umbrella organization or network, informal or otherwise, that fostered such links. Their dates were uncertain, too. Some of them thought that the Genocide had happened around 1918–20. But Hafid’s articulate discourse betrayed political education or indoctrination from the left. He said their family remembered relatives that were massacred but was unable to give details. “The Poshas have been in contact with the Armenians, they have mingled with them,” he said, in a stronger cue that he had already recognized me as one. I tended to distrust the discourses that followed this acknowledgment, for it blurred the distinction between information and flattery. The off-duty policeman was trying to convert me to Islam in the meantime, saying that it would just take the recitation of the Shahada: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” His insistent repetitions of the declaration of the Islamic faith, in his boyish, reedy voice, was the aural background to our conversation. As I had noticed in others, unrestrained loquacity seemed to be a coping mechanism for the pangs of hunger. It was Ramadan, and the policeman was observing the oruç (fast) every other day, whereas the rest in the group were ignoring it every day, and were munching away at snacks and having soft drinks. “Just say it: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God,’ and you will become a Muslim right away.” Yet Hafid cut his Islamic proselytizing short: “Their prophet came earlier,” he said in reference to Christ. In another observation of the Poshas’ attitude toward religion, Papazian had noted that despite their reverence for priests they had no religion: “He is a Turk in Turkey, or an Armenian among Armenians.”8 Born in 1960, Hafid’s older brother had been the last one in his family to be born when the family were still nomadic and lived in tents: Oğuz, whom I would meet a few days later, had been born in a field near the village of Tibet, a vast clearing in a forest where we stopped during a visit a few days later to mysterious ruins nearby. His oldest memories dated back to their nomadic period, when they moved around the province of Artvin, until the government forced them into sedentary life. By the time Hafid was born, the family had settled in the town of Çayeli between Rize and Artvin on the Black Sea coast, where he was raised. He had worked for what he called “Armenians” in villages nearby. They were, he said, Hamshentsis and Horoms. It was extra­ordinary. The Hamshentsis he was talking about were Rize, or Western, Hamshentsis, and went by the Turkish name of “Hemşinli.” They had converted earlier than those in Hopa and had already lost their Armenian dialect. To outsiders, they presented themselves as 444

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Turks. Obviously, to locals and insiders they presented a different facet: “They do acknowledge themselves as Armenian,” insisted Hafid as I kept asking for confirmation, to make sure he was not mistaken. But the second group he described was a fabulous finding. The Horoms were an almost extinct group, except for a few pockets of descendants of Genocide survivors in Salonica and Athens. They were Armenians that as early as the sixth century split off from the Armenian Apostolic Church and became Greek Orthodox, but kept the Armenian language. Many of them, including their descendants in Greece, still describe themselves as Armenian-speaking Greeks rather than Armenians of the Greek Church. Hafid said there was a group of Horoms in a village near Çayeli, who called themselves Armenian. “They were all crying when Hrant Dink was murdered,” Hafid remembered. “Of course they cried, because they were Armenian.” They were fully Armenian, and admitted it too, even if they were Islamicized. As I had done with the Western Hemşinli, I double-checked a number of times that he had said Horom, and that he was sure they were Armenian, and he insisted it was so. Hafid was as sure about it as he was about his own name. The Poshas had two names for non-Poshas that mirrored those used by Armenians: they called the majorities of the population where they lived “locals,” and their word for “alien” was aturba, a title of respect. There was also a nuance of segregation to the use of aturba, if not necessarily in a derogatory manner. They used it for people who were not “one of ours.” An exchange of correspondence on the curious word had linguist Bert Vaux wondering if it might indicate “man without a turban,” with the initial “a-” as privative prefix. Yet a little later, Vaux wrote that it may have been a false lead. A fellow linguist, Patrick Taylor, had looked into the word and had dissected it, arriving at a different conclusion: The European words English turban, French turban, etc. come from Ottoman tülbend (modern Republican tülbent) and possibly also partly from the etymon of the Turkish word, Persian ‫( دنبلود‬dōlband): “turban, wrapping cloth or sash for a turban.” In my experience the modern Turkish word refers to the piece of patterned or plain muslin that women in villages still cover their hair with, as opposed to the modern eşarp. A turban such as a man wears is a sarık. The usual Persian words are ‫( راتسد‬dastār) and ‫‘( ةمامع‬imāmat, ‘imāma). The early modern European languages all had forms with -l- such as English tolipane, French tollibane, Italian tolipante. The l-forms are still alive and well in the English word tulip. The first -r- forms show up in Italian turbante, as far as I can gather, in 1487, before the Portuguese even reached the Indian Ocean, so we should probably look at the -r- as a European development. Is the -r- influenced by turbine, “whirlwind,” tornare, etc.? The European forms with -o- in the first syllable are interesting. Do we get them from the Ottoman, but from a less colloquial, more

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In the late-nineteenth-century works of Papazian and Patkanov, aturba meant “Tatar, Turk, ‘infidel’ (i.e. Muslim).” In further conversations with Hafid, he became less sure about the massacres of Poshas at Urus Xev, and I was wondering if he was perhaps referring to the Russo–Turkish war, with the Armenian volunteers’ offensive. He was convinced his ancestors were not Christian, so the case for the massacre of a Muslim community by the Turks was not very convincing. He said, however, that Poshas were third-class citizens, scorned. Kurds of the Hamidiye Cavalry had massacred them, and the Poshas had fled to Abkhazia, Batumi, and elsewhere in Ajaria and Georgia, according to stories passed on by their elders. “Our IDs do not say that we are third-class, but that’s how we are looked down at.” Armenians and Poshas were “almost” the same, he believed. In the course of centuries, they had mingled. In any case, “Posha” or “Bosha” only designated the Armenian Roma, or Lom, notwithstanding the dictates of expediency of those living in Turkey. The off-duty policeman said that Poshas had a reputation for being thieves, drinkers, and pimps, but they were hardworking people with traditional values, and that is what I had observed in their families the days I spent with them. Repeatedly in his book, Papazian remarked on the honesty and work ethic of the Poshas, especially the women, whose integrity he lauded. As an aside, he said, Poshas would not engage in the arts of divination, even though he had witnessed that they would fill a bowl with water to read the future in its reflection. Hafid’s youngest daughter, ten-year-old Huri, was a gifted young girl, articulate and endowed with old-school, perfect manners, acting with a refined 446

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aplomb above her age, so graceful that she seemed from an era that predated irreverence. When asking about my family she began with my father. When told he had passed away, she sweetly offered her condolence in formal Turkish. Her oldest sibling, Aze, wore Islamic garments that enhanced her beauty, defeating their purpose. She was about to marry, and was proudly wearing red gold Turkish lira earrings her fiancé, also a Posha, had presented her when he proposed. The second oldest, Tahir, was an intelligent young man in what could be seen by his know­ledge of the Lomavren language as well as Turkish, yet completely indifferent to furthering his education, another trait that Papazian had observed. He worked hard, doing the overnight shift at a road construction project on a stretch that connected Şavşat to Artvin. It was remarkable that someone of his age—the youth were generally ignorant of the language, indifferent, or had poor know­ledge—spoke it so well. It was, he suggested, because it was a secret language and that could have its uses. His father had explained as much: they only used Lomavren, which they called by the Turkified name of Lomca—they had never heard the correct name for the dialect—to keep a conversation secret or to warn about impending danger. Perhaps it was no coincidence that every example he gave was a variation of “watch out for the manuş” (policeman) or “beware the aturba” (“stranger,” that is, non-Posha). He had to think for a few minutes to translate into Lomavren “Give water to this tall man.” However, he translated with the speed of a reflex act, “This man is dangerous: run away!” The elderly spoke perfect Lomavren, Hafid insisted, but they refused to do so in my presence out of fear, but also because they thought that I was paying him for this work and they did not want to “work for free.” I was left with the impression, however, that the language had become poor. In the evening, Hafid told me that in the morning Iskender Şah, one of the last masters of basket-weaving in the style of the Poshas, had told him that Lomavren was fundamentally a dialectal variation on Armenian. But when we had gone to see him that morning, Iskender Şah barely spoke with me in any language, be that Turkish or Lomavren. Hafid told me he was scared. They were afraid to be associated with Armenians and some, in their uncertainty or ignorance, feared they might be Armenians, and that the news could spread. Hafid insisted that the Poshas came from Central Asia and that they were pure Turks, and that over the centuries they had mingled with the Armenians and had assimilated, but he said it tentatively, as if awaiting confirmation of the hypothesis. Not as well intentioned, the off-duty policeman the previous day had described it in less equivocal terms as “Armenians and Poshas had sex.” Past midnight, we were having a tea as we waited for Tahir to come for a late meal, during a break from his work on the road construction. We had sat under a gathering of all visible constellations outside his home on the hill, amid the 447

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songs of nocturnal birds from the dense forests surrounding Carat, a ten-house hamlet. Hafid asked me what I knew about the Poshas, in the clearest indication yet that he did not buy what he had said about the “pure Turkic origin” and the Central Asian ancestral homeland (which in the Poshas’ case was not very far from the truth, or geography, anyway). The little I knew I shared with him: Turkish authors placed their origin in Central Asia and described them as one of the Turkic tribes, but European anthropologists and linguists, however, traced them to India, from where they had migrated in the tenth century, perhaps as mercenaries, and had arrived in Armenia by way of Persia, assimilating the language into their dialect and customs. Part of them had become members of the Armenian Church. I explained to him about the Christian Poshas of Van and Erzurum, and those of Van who had joined the other Armenians in the resistance against the Turkish attack, and that there were still Armenian Posha outliers in Ajaria and southern Georgia, almost completely integrated into the mainstream Armenian community. In Hopa, I told him, the Poshas were called “Ermeni Çingene” (“Armenian Gypsies”). I also mentioned the book by Vrtanes Papazian and read him a quote from my notes about the Posha woman: Few are the women who are as honest as the Posha woman. She knows how to throw around unbecoming words, insult with filthy words, but should anyone dare to call her honor into question will do so at his own risk: she becomes a lioness and she dies for her family, without the slightest stain to her marital fidelity … They are also Christian and, unlike Gypsy women, they no longer engage in divinatory arts or dancing.

Hafid was listening intently. He had dropped out of school at the age of 17 to get married, but it was clear he was an avid reader or had received political training, which I suspected came from his affiliation to leftist parties. Socialist organizations, especially among the Kurds, were apt to organize ideological indoctrination sessions, which had spread education in villages and among minorities that lived in poverty or in very humble conditions in Turkey. The Yeşilkapıs might not qualify as poor, even though they worked very hard for the home they owned and to put food on the table. Hafid was building his prefabricated home with some subsidy from Turkey’s central government. However, I told him, I thought Poshas were not Armenian. He nodded, but I was not sure how he took it. He had been trying to establish some sort of connection between Poshas and Armenians. Turks, he said, looked down on them as thirdclass citizens. They had had no contact with the Armenian community: if they had, they would be disappointed to find out that “Posha” was still mostly used in a pejorative sense, while any reference to a related, but separate, community 448

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was long forgotten: this derogatory intent was not only wrong in principle but also false and unjustified. Should there be something to see improved in them, it would be the injustice of poverty that hits everybody without distinction and which stemmed from the fundamentally uneven starting point for all of us. The station of life or society we were born into made all the difference in our future fortunes. His children were gifted with intelligence and rich personality. Aze, the oldest, was remarkable not only for her beauty of black eyes and the tussled hair that insinuated itself beneath a loosely tied headscarf. She also stood her ground and was not shy about it. That was unusual in other parts of Anatolia, where women were more submissive, at least in appearance. Hafid’s wife was endowed with a strong character, too. Her perfect command of the language had earned my admiration, with a sure pronunciation that was true to the Armenian sounds. There was also another concept, more delicate, that I abstained from quoting. Papazian had remarked on a curious difference between the Posha men and women. Regardless of its accuracy or lack thereof, it coincided with an observation noted by Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the account of her journey through Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. The Posha woman, Papazian wrote, was taller and had an imposing poise and beauty that the man lacked. In Sarajevo, West had noticed a similar contrast between men and women: They are handsome and sinewy like their men; but not such handsome women as the men are handsome men. A sheep-breeder of great experience once told me that in no species and variety that he knew were the male and the female of equal value in their maleness and femaleness. Where the males were truly male, the females were not so remarkably female, and where the females were truly females the males were not virile.11

“The Poshas are not Gypsies,” Hafid said. Strictly speaking, this was true. Initially I did not detect any hint of discrimination in the manner of saying it, yet I began to wonder when he pointed it out more than once. Altınbaş bey in Artvin was more agreeable to the notion that they might be related to the Roma, but had also said that the Trebizonda Poshas spoke a different variant of Lomavren that was “closer to the Roma.” There was a nuance in his statement he did not want to explain. The following morning, we visited the village of Satlel to see a sepetçi (basketweaver), one of the traditional occupations of the Poshas. The man was the last one doing it in the district, but the previous night he had feasted on rakı. After waiting for an hour in the porch we were given to understand that he would not wake up from his hangover any time soon. From the talk afterwards it became clear that they were a little forgiving about drinking, even during Ramadan. 449

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We then went to see the ruins of the Tibet church, a splendid construction in white. There were five of us: Hafid, his brother Oğuz, the Beatle, and the driver, who physically resembled his father, a grave man whom I had met the previous evening. But when I had tried to check on the spelling of a word, I had found out that his stoic demeanor, especially in a conversation about the language, probably stemmed from his inability to read and write, more a symptom of insecurity than authority. We then picnicked at Tabagetil, the fields where the Yeşilkapıs and their clan had last set up their tent and where Oğuz had been born, before the Turkish government obliged the country’s last nomadic groups to settle down around 1966, forcing the Poshas into walled enclosures for the first time in their collective existence. The Tibet church, made with volcanic rock, only survived in a majestic facade and two lateral walls, a central arcade that may originally have been blind but that now had a gaping hole in the middle and was flanked by similar tall, blind arcades, with the typical Armenian church window slots opened in them. Hafid was in awe of the masterly masons that had made it. There were no inscriptions left and it was not clear if it had been an Armenian or a Georgian church, adding mystery to the splendid construction. A sheep tied outside the church was very friendly to strangers and, unlike her kin, loved to be petted, fully domesticated and more of a local mascot than a flock member. The church had been much ruined by treasure hunters, Hafid said. The Beatle had detected that an arch was missing—an elaborate soffit that had still been standing a few years back. Destruction had continued. I was not sure whether their distress was genuine but so it seemed, for other friends who had made much the same remarks and were Islamicized Armenians or Turks or Kurds were more neutral in their attitude (not to say indifferent) toward the undoing of the cultural heritage of Armenians: it was normal that people would look for gold and destroy, or so they conveyed with their attitude. Even if there was some posturing in the Yeşilkapıs’ reaction, it reflected sympathy, or an awareness of wrongdoing. “When Atatürk died, all Turkish citizens were expected to cry, so our grandparents and other Poshas would chop onions to have their eyes well up,” Hafid said while we walked about the ruins. I used an Armenian expression to call one of the kids that was playing soccer: “Dzo,” a common vocative. Hafid was mystified. Those settlers who called themselves the “locals” in the Carat area used that expression, Hafid said, dzo or jo, only to address other family members. But he did not know their nationality nor where they came from. They were mostly fair-skinned and blonde. He used to tell them, “I am a Posha, what are you?” and they simply responded, “We are locals.” That frustrated Hafid: “But what’s that?” he wondered. “We are all locals wherever we are: what are they hiding?” Whatever they were, experience demonstrated that even after language and religion changed, prejudices died last, segregation against other groups 450

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being the final barrier to fall. The locals despised the Poshas, Hafid said, “but they tell us we are ‘brothers’ when we come face to face.” Locals and Poshas did not give or take women from each other. After Atatürk’s founding of the Republic, the government told the Poshas to go and take the properties of the Armenians and live in them, but the Poshas were not able to cope with the walls and had left to resume their nomadic life, Oğuz said. At variance with his brother, Oğuz said that Poshas had not been deported in 1915. Only in the Soviet Union under Stalin had the Poshas suffered persecution and displacement, he said. Until the 1960s they wrote çiftçi (farmer) in the Poshas’ IDs, code for nomads or Romas and Poshas, he added. The widespread use of plastic had spelled the death of the Poshas’ nomadic life, Hafid conjectured, as the demand for basket-weaving fell sharply and hence there was no need to travel from village to village to offer their wares, and this had forced them to finally agree to the government’s demands to settle down. Both brothers, however, had for a long time wondered if they and the Poshas generally had converted from being Armenian, so it indicated they had an awareness about the connection, even if it was a taboo. A Hamshentsi friend had told me that the Şavşat Poshas denied that they were so and said the Poshas were those from Ardanuş, whereas the Ardanuş Poshas returned the favor to their Şavşat kin. An initial impression that Poshas distrusted Kurds was mistaken. Tahir, Hafid’s son, told me enthusiastically, “Kurds and Poshas are like brothers,” clasping his hands to symbolize it. Then I understood the source of Hafid’s political education. He was probably a sympathizer of the HDP, the pro-Kurdish party, or in any case he was a leftist. During the visit to Tibet, Oğuz had twice angrily answered calls from debt collectors, but now concluded that to the best of his judgment, after hearing how much rent cost in New York and how much a journalist could expect to make monthly, Turkey was the best of all possible countries in the world. Always respectful toward his older brother, Hafid now interjected with restrained yet unusual bitterness: “It is not, my brother,” he said, blushing. “Turkey is not even by far near to being the best country in the world: when my 18-year-old son has to work the overnight shift at road construction to help maintain his family, then Turkey is not the best country in the world.” Outside Carat and a few people in Artvin, among the Poshas there was a streak of timidity, probably stemming not from fear but also from centuries of persecution and discrimination by the neighboring peoples, as well as probably poverty. “The Armenians were second-class citizens, whereas we were third-class,” Hafid repeated. That explained the weak sense of identity among the Poshas; they knew little about their own history and were not very interested, suggested 451

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the head of the Center of Lom Culture in Hopa, Ismet Hoca. Astonished, he heard, with a growing expression of concern on his face, about his people’s connections with Armenians. A shy man, he was a teacher with whom I had many Hamshentsi friends in common. Poshas used to do menial jobs, with which he was trying to explain their lack of assertiveness. It was the first time he had heard there were Christian Poshas, affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church, all of which sounded very subversive to him. Upon mention of the Armenian Genocide, he said he did not know what I was talking about. Unusually, he was a young man who was as scared as the older generations were. Yet Poshas were still exposed to rejection and there was fear among them. As the principal of a public school, Ismet Hoca was concerned by this conversation. He ratified what others had told me, that the best speakers of Lomavren were in Ardanuş and Şavşat; the best local expert on the Lom, Mehmet Hoca, whom I did not manage to contact despite my repeated attempts, had now retired as a school teacher and lived in Şavşat. The language, however, was dying. Hafid said that Iskender Şah spoke the language well and that he also knew the history well, including about the “Armenian period” of their history, as Hafid referred to 1915, but Iskender Şah did not want to speak out of fear. The family was going through rough times, too. They were living in a temporary house—a big farm, and very comfortable on a large plot of land—after their house had burned down. Also, their son’s wife had walked out on him and he scraped a living selling his hand-made knives with plastic handles. The basket-weaver, for whom we had waited in vain outside his house in Satlel, may have been fluent in Lomavren, but a young relative, who was in the porch with us as Iskender Şah dozed off his hangover, had dismissed the importance of the language, saying it had never been a “mother tongue” for him or any Posha. Hafid had told me as much. Even their elders spoke Turkish alongside Lomavren, which was too poor to express complex ideas. Upon my return to the city of Artvin, I visited the Poshas’ uphill quarter, Kolorta, for the last time. A young man had approached me in an unfriendly manner to ask what my business was in their neighborhood, but other Poshas, who recognized me from my previous visit with Altınbaş bey, welcomed me back with smiles and effusive greetings, including an old man, who hugged me. Like so many others in the Anatolian interior, he complained of the difficulties of life in Turkey, that money was not enough to make ends meet. Unlike some others in Anatolia, and despite knowing that I was Armenian, he did not ask me for gold maps or treasure maps. Then I realized that not once had any Posha asked me about it, whereas almost everywhere else I had been in Turkey it was a recurring question above all among Kurds and Zazas, the worst places being the areas of Erzurum, Mush, Sasun, and Kars. But Poshas, possibly the 452

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worst off as a group in terms of income, were all hardworking and never showed any sense of greed, even though their hardships were plain to see. They did not even bring up the issue indirectly. Neither had the Hamshentsis, with the exception of an old woman who asked me if I would translate a treasure map for her, but her neighbor had laughed her off, and she could not find it anyway. This Posha man in Artvin, Şerafeddin, explained his difficulty in making money by saying he only knew manual labor. “This works,” he said raising his hands, and then stroked his head: “But this doesn’t.” I asked the man to tell me one of Nasreddin Hoca’s tales in Lomavren. He told the same story that a Posha man had recited for me in Şavşat. But Şerafeddin wanted to rehearse first. His first try seemed to me more felicitous than the second version. It sounded mostly Turkish, except for two Armenian words: xelq (“crazy,” in this sense in Lomavren; it also means “mind,” as in Armenian) and axor (“sty,” in both languages). Nasreddin Hoca was a character of Eastern popular wisdom—based on a Sufi sage who died in Konya in the thirteenth century—to whom witty jokes or ironic stories were attributed, usually with a little moral attached. What Şerafeddin said about 1915 was more interesting. Spontaneously, but probably suspecting that I was Armenian, he said that Turks at the time had massacred Poshas, too; that they had been slaughtered alongside the Armenians. They were not Christian back then, he said in response to my question. He too attributed the massacres to Atatürk. It was yet another hint of suppressed animosity among Poshas toward Atatürk for some unexplained reason that had been muted. It had only survived in a vague sense of hostility, with no clear anchor for the memory. But there was again a reason why Hafid’s grandfather hated the Republic’s founder and had been forced to chop onions to shed tears over his death. Hatred for Atatürk among Sheik Said and the Kurds that rebelled with him in 1925 was rooted in the abolition of the caliphate, and the perceived loss of privileges for the country’s Muslims. Among Poshas, however, the motive for animosity toward Atatürk remained uncertain, and did not appear related to Islam. “Maybe we will find a wealthy Armenian uncle,” Hafid had joked, as other Poshas had turned down the opportunity to take their DNA tests as well. The results returned months later: against my expectations, he turned out to be of Armenian origin. In other words, at some point, his ancestors had veered away from the Armenian mainstream and had become Poshas, a group he was mostly unrelated to in genetic terms. Curiously, there was a tiny probability that his family and mine were related at the tenth degree. More to the point, the results showed his connection to the Noratunkians or Noradoungians, a large Armenian clan which had included notable members such as Gabriel 453

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Noradoungian, who briefly served as Foreign Minister of the Ottoman Empire in 1913. The relationship was more remarkable because of a strange coincidence that accompanied Hafid: a connection to the Horoms. It might be a coincidence—but a curious one—that the oldest ancestor of his distant relative Noratunkian was called “Horom.” Hafid had alerted me to the existence of a Horom community nearby, for whom he had worked in the past. A change of denomination had preceded these Horoms’ Islamicization: they had abandoned the Armenian Apostolic Church as early as the sixth century to become Greek Orthodox. Yet several centuries and two religious affiliations later, they had still not abjured their ancestral allegiance. As Hafid reminded me several times, he was working for them in their village near Çayeli in January 2007 and had seen them “crying for Hrant Dink, because they too were Armenian.”

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Horoms The residents of Markerit probably knew or suspected the truth about their origins, even if they left it unspoken. For strangers, they had spun a mythology that divided the locals into three groups: the Horoms; the Damascenes and the Baghdadis; and the Central Asians. That the Horoms were Armenian was a carefully hidden secret in which all the village residents seemed to have a stake, for some unknown reason. Yet it had finally been revealed when an interlocutor who spoke with the heavy cadence of someone who has been nourishing hatreds for a long time had said: “We give women to the Horoms, and take from them, but we are not Armenian.” So, were the Horoms Armenian? “No, they are not.” But why did you all call them Armenian? “We do not, but ‘Horom’ is an Armenian name,” he said, trying to sneak out of the quagmire he had walked into. It was the convoluted formula the villagers had come up with to say that they were Islamicized Armenians, something the Horoms themselves would not say. By the looks of the three other men with us, he had let out something he was not supposed to, and was trying to unmake the damage. It was too late, for he had already, unequivocally, spilled the beans. I could notice by the cabdriver’s expression that they struggled to square circles, aware of the contradictions they were straying into. But they would not venture beyond that. The second euphemism for the Horoms was “Elazığlı,” or someone from the province of Elazığ, the Turkish name for Kharpert. By inference, I had confirmed my hunch that those persons whom Hafid called Horom were of Armenian origin. The cabdriver who took me to his hometown, this village on the Pontic range that I am calling by another name, was softly but relentlessly probing me about myself. He had been unable to find me on the social networks, which was stoking his suspicions. Indirectly, he was trying to see if I was Armenian, but did not get around to it. It was my second visit to Markerit. The cab stopped as we climbed the mountain, covered with thousands of conifers, the smells of the verdant life 455

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wafting into the car. An 80-year-old man accompanied by a friend, a red-haired man in his 50s, recognized the cabdriver and we stopped to chat a little by the steep roadside. The old man was sitting on the stump of a tree. The views were spectacular, of hills covered in luxuriant splendor beyond which the Black Sea spread to invisible shores. They said they had a dialect that did not amount to much of a different language but that they had endings in their speech derived from the Hamshetsnak, like the ta conditional syllable added at the end of a question, the equivalent to the “if ” in English, and equivalent to the Turkish conditional syllable at the end of a question, mi or mı. They clarified they were not Hamshentsis, nor were they Laz. These two men said they were not Horoms, who lived in a separate quarter in the village and had their own mosque. The old man’s companion said that the name indeed meant “Armenian Greeks” by a corruption of the Armenian term Hay (Armenian) and the Turkish word Rum (Greek), and “Hayrum” had over time become “Horom.” This was uncommon know­ledge, for even in areas with denser populations of Islamicized Armenians these basic etymologies were not known. He said it was an Armenian word used for the Greek Orthodox faithful. It was not the accepted explanation but, in its wrong way, it described accurately the people, for that was the name given to the Armenians who had split from the Armenian Apostolic Church and joined the Greek Orthodox Church. They were also known as Chalcedonian Armenians and, according to a myth, they were the Armenized descendants of Xenophon’s Greek mercenaries, who had fought for the Persian king Cyrus against Artaxerxes, his rival for the throne. In any case, the Armenian Horoms were already established as a separate group by the sixth century of the Christian era, when Catholicos Movses Yeghivartetsi prohibited Armenian Apostolics from accepting icons or holy images from their Horom brethren. The Horoms were concentrated in the city of Agn and surrounding villages, in Elazığ, which they had abandoned in 1622–8 during an uprising by a local chieftain, Abaza Paşa. Most of the Horoms had migrated to Bithania, settling in the city of Nicomedia and surrounding villages, on the western Black Sea coast near modern-day Adapazarı. Had a group of Horoms split from this group and moved east, settling in this Pontic village? But the red-haired man stopped short of saying that these Horoms were Armenian. The Horoms had arrived in Markerit from Elazığ some 200 years ago, and then he specified “Harput,” at the time a prominent Armenian city and source of Armenian emigrants, including the first that would settle in the US in the late nineteenth century. More to the point, it was a major center of the Armenian Horoms, and the place where the movement originated. I refrained from asking if these Horoms perchance were from Agn, as that could have betrayed me as an Armenian even though their smiles already indicated they suspected as much, including the young cabdriver, Abdürrahim, 456

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who was not unpleasant but who did not hide his misgivings about me. He was initially unsmiling and probing in his questions, but when I insisted on asking the names of trees and birds, and showed scant interest in people and their stories, he appeared to lower his guard. Toward the end, and after a number of positively idiotic questions to convince him that I was merely a tourist with higher aspirations, he had opened up a bit. The man who had given me the wrong etymology, but which led to the right answer regardless, had embarked on a convoluted explanation saying these Horoms were not Armenian but had a Greek name, but were not really Greek but Turkish like all of them are Turks, but the name was a Greek variation on Armenian. In other words, they were Armenians with a Greek connection but he did not want to say and nor were they interested in disclosing it. The following day I visited Carat again, the Posha village near Şavşat, so I asked Hafid once more if the residents of Markerit were of Greek origin or Armenian. “No my friend, they are Armenian!” He had worked and lived among them for decades and he swore by it. He was absolutely sure: “Why don’t you believe me?” More interestingly, he said that not only the Horoms but the others were Armenian too. So they were possibly Western Hamshentsis of the Turkish nationalist streak, in a more advanced stage of assimilation at least to the outside world, for apparently they did not hide it from Hafid that they were Armenian. He also said that they accepted it, except, it seemed, to outsiders. That might explain why the non-Horoms of Markerit were keen to keep their neighbors’ origin secret: even if they disliked them, attracting unwanted attention to them could also shed light on their own ethnicity, which they disguised behind small-town mythology that did not hold up to scrutiny. The Western Hamshentsis, who lived in the areas around Rize as well as the districts of Çamlıhemşin and Hemşin, had forgotten the language by the nineteenth century but had retained some words and names of Armenian origin. Hafid also told me that all the residents of the village of Asifos, near Çayeli, were Armenian, too. They were Hamshentsis that had been Islamicized for a longer time than the Eastern Hamshentsis and had lost the language but not the awareness of their Armenian origin. His friend Kamran confirmed it at his home in Çayeli. I had met him at the teahouse, a place that I found slightly disturbing having first spotted the attendant’s twirled mustachio, that by then I had learned to identify as the mark of a Turkish nationalist; the proliferation of flags and Atatürk portraits in the salon dispelled all doubts. But the attendant had then approached me to tell me that he was Armenian, too. He had stunned me: “We are Hamshentsis and we have assimilated, but we know we are Armenian,” he had told me, surprising me by recognizing me as one, as I had not revealed it. They were not like the Hamshentsis of the Hopa and 457

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Makrial regions, who had preserved the language and whose Islamicization had apparently happened at a later stage. But Armenian they were, even though they did not say it loudly. Abdürrahim, the cabdriver, was glad to take me back along the winding road that hugged Markerit all the way to the neighborhoods nearer the hill’s crest. We stopped to speak with a man with a broad face and red beard, with whom we reviewed again the three groups living in the village: the Horoms, called Elazığlı because of their origin from that province; a second group who said their ancestors came from Damascus and Baghdad; and a third one, that traced their origins to Central Asia. Men from all these groups were overwhelmingly fair-skinned and usually blond or redheads, like the Laz and Georgians. I did not see a single woman in Markerit, not even walking on a road or in the fields. The old man and his friend we had met upon entering the village had told me they were of Damascene origin. A balding man with white hair had accompanied me in the cab to the village and he said his family were from Damascus originally, too. Then we stopped to speak briefly with a logger in his early 20s, who held a large ax, its blunt edge resting on the back of his neck. He said his family was from Damascus and said that the village’s speech was not a dialect but a mere localism, or an accent but little else. When I asked the red-haired man if they were assimilated Horoms, he reluctantly agreed but the young man with the ax objected. It was incorrect to say they had “assimilated.” The word had a negative connotation even among Turcophile minorities. The old man said their ancestors had come from Syria in the sixteenth century. They bristled at my suggestion that they were Arabs. “We are absolutely not Arabs.” Reactions did not get better when I asked them if they were Kurds, and if there were any in the village. All three in a single voice said, “No, in this village there are no Kurds.” Their thinly veiled hostility toward Armenians notwithstanding, they did not strike me as particularly nationalist or Islamist right away, but they definitely were not leftists either. In the polarized politics of Turkey, it had become very difficult to hold a middle ground: to my surprise, in Turkey I generally found myself closer to socialist parties, whose discourse would not necessarily represent me elsewhere. As I was distracted with these thoughts, the old Damascene man in the cab began to praise Erdoğan and how much good he had done for the country. When I had asked these three men what the Horoms had been in the past, the youngest one had said that now they had already disappeared. He said it looking into my eyes and I realized he was giving the consensus answer of the village for the outsiders: a lie. For some reason, the young man with the ax had an inhibiting effect on the others and they were showing it. He realized that I was not buying his 458

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explanations, and the cabdriver saw it, too. Even if there was a truth to what they were saying, if they came from Damascus in the sixteenth century and were not Arabs or Arabic speakers, what were they? And why had they come all the way up to the Black Sea coast? They could not answer. The cabdriver was now unhappy and he said that at the time Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire and coming from Damascus did not mean they were Arabs. He was not saying that they were Turks either, however. We reached the upper part of the village. There were a dozen men gathered outside one of the many mosques in Markerit. Most were in their 30s and 40s but there were at least four or five who seemed past their 60s. The imam, an out-of-town cleric who only visited to serve the local mosques, greeted me enthusiastically. I told him I was writing a book about Anatolia and that friends from Şavşat had told me to come to Markerit because it was an interesting village, a comment they celebrated with booming laughs. I told them about the Horoms. “Yes,” they acknowledged, not laughing anymore, and they stayed silent. “So, are you Horoms?” An embarrassed silence ensued, followed by hesitant answers amid a confusion of voices. They said the Horoms were indeed Greek Christians and that “Horom” was an Armenian word. Armenians and Greeks had lived together in this village in the past, which was why the name had remained, said the imam, a friendly man. So were Horoms, Armenians, and Greeks the same with different names, I asked? “No, no.” All three were different, came the answer right away. So there were three different groups: Horoms, Greeks, and Armenians? “It’s not exactly that either,” the imam said, without much conviction. He was painfully beating about the bush but was unable to provide an answer, attempting to provide information without violating what was obviously a pact of silence in the village, while the locals bravely stayed mum and were not volunteering the responses they knew all too well. “The Armenians left during the Russian War,” the imam finally said, blushing a little. Now all the relieved voices said, “Yes, yes, the Russian army occupied the village, and the Armenians left with them when they retreated.” It was like those collective lies that students developed spontaneously in a classroom to explain away mischief. At the summit there were the ruins of an Armenian church, the imam said. I told him that according to my Şavşat friends the Markerit residents were Horoms, and the imam said that this was a probably a joke. And he proposed an extra­ordinarily unusual example: “If the Greeks had carried out a lot of massacres, so then they would have a bad reputation, and your Şavşat friends imply that we are Greek as a joke, as a taunt, by reason of rivalry between villages.” Never mind that Şavşat and Markerit were far from each other, unlikely to develop those animosities that are common between next-door neighbors. He was also implying that by using “Horom” as a taunt, the bad 459

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word was for the Armenians, for the Horom name was employed exclusively for those among them who belonged to the Greek Church. Still, he unusually discredited the Greeks with false massacre accusations, whereas nationalist Turks would pick on Armenians first as their scapegoat of choice. It probably meant that the imam had smelled that I was Armenian. By now, he also knew that I knew, so he left his discourse at that. There were some Horoms in the group who were following in silence the conversation about them. One of them invited me to take some pictures of his plantation but he did not want to appear in the photos. He did not know why his ancestors had left Elazığ centuries ago and had come to the Pontos. A little more relaxed now, the men said that in addition to Elazığlı, the Horoms were called Harputlus or Xarbuzlus. They dated their arrival in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century, two centuries after the other two groups. I had noticed they had angular faces and aquiline noses, eyes close together, with protruding cheeks. In contrast, Damascenes and Baghdadis, as well as the Central Asians, had broader faces and eyes farther apart. There was no record of Turks migrating out of Elazığ two or three centuries earlier, unlike the Horom exodus of the seventeenth century from Agn and elsewhere in the province. But more importantly, why would a Turkic group be called “Horom,” a name used to designate an Armenian Greek Christian denomination? And if they were Greek alone, why were they not called “Rum,” the name used for them all along the Black Sea region? The existence of a now destroyed Armenian church in Markerit, as the locals indicated, also suggested that the Horoms upon their arrival from Elazığ had encountered their Apostolic kin. This village was worth yet another visit so I decided to travel again to Çayeli. I went to the café the Markerit men frequented when they came to town for business or shopping, two blocks down the street around the corner from the Security Directorate. The waiter, a bearded redhead, remembered me from my previous trip and called me inside. Minutes after I sat down, the Horom man in his 60s who had showed me his plantation walked in. He appeared happy to see me and agreed to talk. He only knew that their forefathers had migrated from Elazığ, or Harput, even though he said predictable lies about their origins: “pure Turks from Khorasan.” Why if they were “pure Turks” had they migrated from Kharpert to this corner of the Black Sea? “That I don’t know,” he said with a smile. Then he made obscure references to the Trebizond Empire, the last Byzantine state to succumb to the Ottomans in 1461, eight years after the fall of Constantinople. If I was not reading too finely between the lines, he was suggesting the Horoms had withdrawn to a secluded village in the Pontic Mountains for their safety, amid a substantial Christian presence. The other interesting fact 460

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was the proximity of the Markerit Horoms to the Hamshen districts of Pazar, Çamlıhemşin, and Hemşin. While I was speaking with him, another man from Markerit came and sat at our table. He claimed Damascene ancestry, of a clan that had settled in the village in the sixteenth century. Of course they were not Arabs: they did not speak Arabic, and did not have any trace of Arabic in their language other than those terms incorporated into standard Turkish, unlike, say, those Arabs who had settled in Sasun in the tenth century and still spoke their vernacular ten centuries later. One thing should not mean the other but it might serve as guidance. The Damascene had an aquiline nose and wore square, thick-framed eyeglasses that matched his square face and jaw. “You are Damascene, there is no Baghdadi blood in your veins,” the Horom said, as if sharing an inside joke, for the Damascene let out a loud laugh. The soft-spoken Horom was looking at him knowingly, for whatever the charade was, it was not meant to be understood by outsiders. It sounded like an elaborate prank at the expense of outsiders, and these origins they had copied from the One Thousand and One Nights were a big joke that hid something else; yet the three groups at the village were separate. That was for sure, for otherwise the Horoms, some 40 people, would not care to have their own separate mosque only a few minutes’ walk from that of the others, as well as their own cemetery. The Damascene asked me where I was from. “Argentina,” I said, thinking it safer than the US, which always triggered very animated, and badly distracting, political discussions. But in this case the Damascene reacted in anger, turning red, with a tirade against Argentina for the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. For a moment I thought his sense of humor was getting bizarrely out of control and looked at the Horom, who with his eyes and a subtle tilt back of his head hinted that I should ignore what his neighbor was saying, so it was not a joke. The Horom finally came to my rescue: “No, it wasn’t Argentina, it was America,” and he promised to explain it later. The conversation was taking the weirdest turn to my alarm, because the Damascene seemed really agitated, unless he was putting on an act. Yet I saw that the other patrons, mostly from Markerit, were now looking at him, so this was new even for the café regulars. The Damascene insisted: “Are not Argentina and America the same?” Then I noticed that the Horom was sharply dressed and well educated. Even the Turkish he spoke was different. He explained calmly that Argentina was in South America and “America, the United States,” was in North America; it was a different country. The Damascene’s anger dissipated a little. It had been the strangest conversation, but had taken an unpleasant turn over a topic that was not of immediate relevance at that moment for any of us. Once he had calmed 461

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down, the Damascene walked me to the bus stop where I would wait for Abdürrahim, the same cabdriver that had taken me to Markerit the first time. The Damascene joined our ride. It was a cloudy and rainy day in the village. When winter approached the village emptied, the cabdriver told me. People would move to their winter quarters in Çayeli, Rize, Istanbul, and other cities. We stopped outside a grocery store on the mountain road by a wooded gorge, with a view of mountain summits shrouded in the mist. The shopkeeper was a voluminous man, related to the Damascene that had come with us, with a broad, Henry VIII face, and red hair. Their ancestors had come from Damascus on invitation by Sultan Yavuz. At the time, Damascus was part of the Ottoman Empire, it was not an Arab city, he said, rebutting my suggestions about their origin if they really came from the Syrian capital. The legend at Markerit was uniform, and perhaps they had all begun to accept it. As for the mentions of “Horom,” the fat grocer dismissed them as inside jokes. They called their neighbors “Horom” just to taunt them, just like they mocked the Hamshentsis by calling them “Armenian,” mere bad words friends tease each other with. The Markerit Damascenes were neither Greeks nor Laz, but he also said that they were not Turks either. The Damascenes had arrived much earlier than the Harputlus, as he called the Horoms. That was easy to tell, as the Horoms lived on the upper part of the mountain, more inhospitable and less fertile, although there was also the possibility that they had been pushed up later. The Damascenes outnumbered the Harputlus by ten to one. There was no discrimination among the villagers. The three groups took and gave women among themselves—the benchmark for assessing intercommunal relations. Yet after a few courtesies spoken with a sullen tone, he said they lived separately, “in the same way that cats and dogs do not mingle,” and the cabdriver and he bared their teeth in merry roars, celebrating the witticism. But the Damascene, who had earlier grown angry with Argentina over the bombing of Hiroshima, looked on somberly. Once the laughs had subsided, the fat grocer continued, with slow diction: “The Armenians committed atrocities against the Muslim residents, slaughtering pregnant women and killing their unborn infants, burning mosques with people locked in them, massacring and trying to occupy the land together with the Russians.” He said all this in one breath. The comment on the Armenians’ violence was completely unrelated to the conversation. Yet together with his reference to cats and dogs not mingling, he was indirectly alluding to the Harputlus—the Horoms—as Armenian. Yet for all his dislike, not to say hatred, he stopped short of saying the neighbors he loathed were of Armenian origin. That was how close he got to saying that the Harputlus were Armenian. The Laz, the Turks, and others who disliked the Hamshentsis would openly taunt them as 462

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Armenian. In Markerit, however, they did not give the Horoms’ secret away, not even those who nursed barely disguised animosity toward them and the Armenians, like this self-restrained brute. The grocer may have suspected that I was Armenian, for he repeated that they outnumbered the Harputlus by ten to one. Or, to keep up the pretense, these non-Turks and non-Arabs were ten times more numerous than these non-Armenians whom they despised, a bit of information he brought up perhaps to remind me of one thing or another. He stood up and walked toward his store. The sky was overcast and the black clouds were restraining an imminent downpour, so I told Abdürrahim to start the car and return to Çayeli. The grocer was searching for something inside a tin box or a drawer at his store, and came back with the loose trigger of a Remington in his palm: “They have all come and gone.”

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Hamshen II The last night in Batumi, a port on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, prior to reentering Turkey, two men in fine clothes were having dinner in a waterfront restaurant. They were a table away and fragments of the conversation in Turkish would drift in my direction with the breeze, as their discussion, fueled by generous servings of rakı, was gaining in volume yet below a level that would attract wider attention. Upon hearing “Ermeni” I started to take more notice. With some nervous surprise in his voice, the older of the pair, a bald man with a white mustache that wrapped halfway round his cheeks, was telling the other one, a black-haired man with a large head and his back to me: … In the time of the Ottoman Empire, together with the Kurds they massacred the Armenians. A teacher said it on TV; there were a lot of Armenians. Not a single one was left. We were like brothers …

The larger man responded something angrily and was shaking his head, upset, lifting and putting down the rakı glass without bringing it to his lips. The other one said, “We told them to go to Patagonia,” which his companion, still shaking his head in disapproval, must have disputed for I heard the other man repeat “Patagonia!” with the same tone of a bad confession, with a pleading voice, that had only grown more assertive as he had blushed more for the drink rather than the conversation. “We were like brothers …” With sad sarcasm, I thought that my family, which had ended up in Buenos Aires by way of Aleppo half a century after the Genocide, had involuntarily heeded the perpetrator’s prescription, with a sister of mine having settled in Patagonia. The Georgian–Turkish border had become a compound. Last time I had crossed it from Turkey one summer night in 1996 it was a miserable affair of rusting iron gates and barbed wire under floodlights, behind which a Georgian conscript had asked me if I knew “what” Lavrenti Beria was. “Mingrelian,” I said, assuming correctly that the question was his ethnic identity. He celebrated 464

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my right answer with loud cries of “Bravo!” Beria was one of Stalin’s lieutenants and one of the least-known butchers of the twentieth century, an eager mastermind of the extermination of millions of Soviet citizens, including some prominent ones who died by his own hand. The Laz, the dominant minority in the north-eastern extremity of Turkey’s Black Sea coast, are Mingrelians who were Islamicized in the fifteenth century.1 The anecdote about the Georgian border guard and his question about Beria reminded Ihsan, who was hosting me in Hopa, of a Hamshentsi acquaintance who was arrested in the Soviet Union as a spy and sent to Siberia. Mecdeddin worked as a double agent for the Soviets and Turks. In 1938, while in Soviet Georgia, he was caught by the NKVD and sent away to a labor camp in Siberia for 15 years, after which he was returned to Turkey. “He spoke Turkish, Russian, and Hamshetsnak but was illiterate in all three languages.” Rakub, Ihsan’s great-grandfather, died at the age of 110 in 1965 in Çançağan, his Hamshen village near Makrial. He had served with the Ottoman Army in what at the time was called Arabia, a designation that in nineteenth-century Ottoman geography encompassed modern Iraq and part of Syria. “They asked him: ‘What have you seen in this long life, including the seven years you served in Arabia with the Ottoman Army?’ And he responded, ‘I only know today: I don’t know yesterday or tomorrow.’ And they asked him, ‘How come you don’t know?’ The man said: ‘I only know today: I have forgotten yesterday and I have not seen tomorrow.’” In family lore there was one story that Rakub had told upon his return from military service in the early 1880s. On one occasion he had been hosted at an Armenian family’s home in Arabia, and his leonine appetite had aroused the complaints in Armenian of the unsuspecting women, who believed their guest was a dacik conscript, as he ate his way through all the food in the house: “It has no beginning and no end,” they were murmuring, to describe the soldier’s voracity. Rakub had laughed upon hearing the saying that the Hamshentsis also used. The embarrassed women were wondering aloud if or how “the Turkish soldier” understood Armenian. “The anecdote was his way of saying that we were of Armenian origin,” Ihsan said, who had heard this century-old story from his father in 1974 when he was ten years old, and that today saw no small significance in its telling. There was no internet and no newspaper then, but more importantly there was fear in those days of speaking about it, so this was how they communicated it. At the same time, he said the implications did not go very far, for they at no moment felt anything but Hamshentsi, and not Armenian. In any case, the difference in religion was all that mattered, and any connection on another level was of little relevance. 465

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Sitting at Rengi, the Hamshentsi-owned café on the Black Sea waterfront, Ihsan mused in unintended rhyme: Mek homşetsik dzovun hed kordz çunik. Dzove caninn a: tsuge, navage. Homşetsiki değa lerrn a: gove, adzu, karre Mek dzove inç kordz unik? Tsin egoğ a, bızdige vaxenagu. Tsin iren asegu: İnç vaxenasgu? Tu can as. We the Hamshentsis have nothing to do with the sea. The sea is the Laz’s: the fish, the boat. The Hamshentsis’ place is the mountain: the cow, the goat, the lamb. What have we got to do with the sea? A horse comes and the child gets scared. The horse tells him: why are you scared? You are a Laz.

The last two lines about the horse were a joke by the Hamshentsis meant to indicate that the horse will not harm a sea-dweller like the Laz. The larger point was about the division of land and labor that had taken place between peoples. As the late arrivers, the Hamshentsis were relegated to the mountains and the harder work of animal husbandry in the heights compared with the easier life of the fishermen by the coast blessed with a temperate climate as well. A pair of dolphins were leaping, now to the east, now to the west, against the blazing sky of late summer sunset, and some patrons approached the tables that were right on the waterfront to snap photos and delight in the view under the red sun. Ihsan and Resûl were playing a double-stack card game called pişti. The hand that matched the cards displayed on the table won. The knave took all, and bluffs were allowed. It was a fast, easy game to idle away the boredom without thinking too much. Those Armenians who dream about a Hamshen uprising did not know what they were talking about, Ihsan said. If the Hamshentsis even started to think about something like that, the Turks would round all of them up in a couple of hours and load them onto five or six railway carriages and deport them. “In a couple of hours and with five or six train carriages, the whole thing would be over,” he repeated. “That’s all it would take.” 466

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The evening of January 27, 1983, when the ASALA militant Levon Ekmekjian was condemned to death and spoke on Turkish TV, a crowd had gathered enraptured in front of the television sets. He was executed the following morning. There was a myth that he spoke in Armenian on TV, sending shivers down the spine of more than one Hamshentsi, many of them unaware until then of their language’s connection to Armenian. If Ekmekjian did, that footage has not reached us. But three Hamshentsis, at different times and places, told me that they knew of parents or acquaintances who had seen Ekmekjian speaking in Armenian on Turkish TV. That was when rumors started to swirl around in uneasy whispers among the Hamshentsis about their unholy origin. They lent new credence to suspicions that surfaced from time to time, whether because somebody’s grandfather had mentioned something or because someone had returned from Istanbul and a chance encounter with an Armenian had stoked these impressions. But that night in the village of Goromad, near Makrial, one man had drunk one too many, as many Hamshentsi men were not averse to doing. Mustafa had raised a glass to the ASALA militant’s health in Hamshetsnak: “Isa im hopor dağan a!” (“He is my cousin!”). Someone gave him away, for agents came and took him to the police station the following day. The chief wanted to know: “So, who is your cousin?” Mustafa, who the previous night had drunk past memory, did not know what they were talking about. “Which cousin?” he wanted to know, as the Hamshen clans tended to be large, with cousins by the dozen. “The one who was on TV the other night.” Mystified, he started to mumble cousin names: Ali, Ahmet, Zafer, and on and on, and at one point had wondered aloud why would any of his cousins be on TV, as they were peasants or workers on tea plantations, with nothing special about them. He kept on naming but the police interrogators still said, “No, no, the other one.” The officers were still unhappy and running out of patience; but slowly, fear started to run through Mustafa’s nerves as blurry flashbacks were alerting him to something that he was still unable to pin down. “This will refresh your memory,” the commander said, with a heavy slap on his face: “Levon Ekmekjian, do you remember that cousin now?” It was the first round of beatings he got in detention. “They did not keep him for long, just a few days,” Ihsan said laughing, “but they taught him a bad lesson.” Ihsan remembered seeing the transmission in Istanbul, where he was a university student at the time. “The avedis,” he said to my confusion, for in Armenian when not applied as a male name the word is mostly used in a religious sense, for it means “good tidings” or, in layman’s speech, “good news.” But the Hamshentsis used a variation of the word to mean “news” regardless of its nature, sometimes pronouncing it havedis or havadis. Ihsan’s maternal grandfather, who died a centenarian in the village of Garci, would hush the 467

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children when he turned on the radio, telling them in Hamshetsnak, “Cut your voices, I am putting my ear to the havadis,” in a literal translation of his plea for quiet to listen to the news. That helped explain why my name so often seemed familiar to many in Turkey, as it is a somewhat archaic synonym for news and also for good tidings in Turkish too, by way of Arabic. Mustafa’s little run-in with the authorities was a variation on a story that I had been told one evening in Istanbul. It had circulated at the time among Hamshentsis who were living elsewhere in Turkey, such as in Istanbul or Izmir. A Hamshentsi truck driver who was at a rest stop on the road watching the TV statement by the ASALA militant had raised a toast to him, shortly after which he had been carried away by the police and had disappeared without a trace. Mustafa had died in a car accident a few years ago. Resûl told me he knew his son and would take me to his store, but both he and Ihsan were unsure that the kid would know anything about the story as he was not even born when the Ekmekjian incident happened. But I was curious to find out if he might know anything about Levon Ekmekjian’s rumored speech in Armenian on Turkish TV. The following morning Resûl took me to Mustafa’s son’s clothing store. Upon entering, a young man with an Islamist’s long untrimmed beard and no mustache was leaning back on an executive-type chair with his legs stretched on the desk and looking at me with unmitigated hatred. I assumed him to be the owner of the store. Another man in his early 20s, with large, almond-shaped Armenian eyes, who was ironing a tailored pair of jeans, raised his head for a moment to look at me with a sad expression and then continued his work in silence. “Are you Mustafa’s son?” I asked the bearded man. He made a nod in the direction of the ironing boy, who was now watching me in surprise, and asking me with a shy voice what this was about. I told him that I was a writer from New York and that I needed to speak about his father, and that I would come back when he had a moment. “Who are you?” asked the bearded man before Mustafa’s son responded, with an imperative tone of voice more appropriate for an interrogation than for a stranger who walks into a store that was not his anyway. The bearded man said he spoke Russian, Georgian, and Hamshetsnak, but he refused to speak it with me, so we spoke in Turkish. “A writer from New York.” “Are you Armenian?” “Yes.” “What’s your name?” “Avedis Hadjian: what’s yours?” “Ismail Karakan.” 468

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He was from one of the biggest and wealthiest Hamshen clans, with a number of large properties in the city, transportation businesses, as well as lands and tea plantations. I knew some of the family who worked the truck routes to Armenia and I mentioned their names, which he recognized as relatives with a curt monosyllable. Some of his cousins and uncles often went to Yerevan. The Karakan clan was famously divided between those who were “Armenian” and those who were “Turks,” the latter apparently with a larger following. “Did you come directly from New York?” “Not immediately.” He guessed, sarcastically yet correctly, that I had entered from Armenia, and he laughed. “Are you a Christian?” “Yes.” “Is everybody a Christian in Armenia?” “Most people.” “There are no Muslims,” he asserted rather than asked. “There are a few, mostly Iranian, and there is an old Iranian mosque.” He reacted with a smirk, perhaps an expression of Sunni disdain for Shiʿa. “Why do Armenians hate Turks?” “Not all of them do, but do you know about the Genocide?” Again, he lifted his bearded chin in angry denial, with incuriosity. It reminded me of the phrase attributed to Caliph Omar to seal the fate of the Alexandria library and burn its books: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved: if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.” Most learned minds doubted the veracity of this phrase. Yet even if apocryphal it was an apt description of a fanatic’s mind. “Well, in that case you will not understand anything.” “But Armenians come and go to Turkey.” “It has been 100 years, and this is our land too.” “Why did you come to Turkey?” “To write a book about the remnants of Armenians who stayed behind after the Genocide.” Mustafa’s son was following the conversation with an expression of concern, while he continued to fiddle with the scissors in his sartorial endeavors. The bearded man took his long legs off Mustafa’s son’s desk. He wore black leather boots in a military style from a major fashion brand. “Remember what I tell you,” he told me. “The world will be speaking in Russian in ten years.” He predicted there would be a nuclear war in five years, after which “the whole world will be like Syria and Iraq now, the whole world: Daeş has started the job, and then there will be a nuclear war,” he said, using 469

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the Arabic acronym for ISIS, the Islamic terrorist group that was active in Syria and Iraq. There were steps in the middle he was not explaining, including the five-year period from the nuclear war to the entire world speaking in Russian. It was as unexplainable as the rebirth that would follow the Day of Judgment, yet he was clearly one of those men who were attracted to the apocalyptic views of the Islamic State. I asked him why such a war would break out. “There is no why or because,” he said. “It is going to happen.” “Conflicts will never finish,” he added with a grin. And he opened the door, saying, “They never end.” He said it one more time, in lieu of goodbyes or other hypocrisies that I was happy he dispensed with, freeing me from the duty of reciprocity. “Bitmez,” he repeated: “They don’t end.” And I could finally speak with Mustafa’s son, who was now a bit shaken, his eyes wide as he looked at me with anxiety, responding in Turkish to my queries in Hamshetsnak as he slid his large scissors through the jeans legs and sewed them, telling me he did not know anything about his father’s arrest, nobody had ever told him anything about that, and that a customer was coming for these trousers. Mustafa’s son only knew his father had spent a year in prison for his leftist political activism, but he didn’t know much about it because he was little at the time. He said his grandfather, Muhammad, had fought against the Armenians in Erzurum in 1916. When he was little, he passed his hands over big scars on his grandfather’s chest and back, and asked him what they were. “Scars from the war against the Armenians,” his grandfather used to respond. Later that day I went to an establishment that belonged to the Karakans, and a phone call came. The manager’s son picked it up and said that his father at the moment could not respond because he was doing the namaz. These ones were from the “Turkish” side of the clan. In that sense too, they were unusual among the Hamshentsis, who tended to be overwhelmingly secular in the Hopa and Makrial areas.     

Paramaz, the owner of the Yoldaş Pançuni restaurant in Hopa, remembered his Kurdish mother mocking his Hamshentsi father during his prostrations in Islamic prayer. “Who are you fooling with the namaz?” she used to ask her husband: “Your people are Armenian.” Paramaz, a hardcore Marxist with an oceanic sense of humor and inextinguishable joie de vivre, proclaimed his dislike of Islam in very unequivocal terms every time the opportunity arose. There were no ambiguities about him generally, unlike other Hamshentsis who might feel more sharply the differences with their Christian kin, whereas he was as Armenian as any of those descended from the majority that did not 470

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ever convert to Islam. A fluent speaker of Hamshetsnak, he was a devotee of Armenian literature, which he read in Turkish translation. Comrade Panchuni, a satire by Yervant Odian on the Armenian revolutionaries of the early twentieth century, was his favorite, to the point that he had named his restaurant after the character, who among Armenians has become a nickname for windbags in positions of power. Yet in one prescient passage written in 1914, the satire foretold the Armenians’ immediate future, as well as that of the author: “The Istanbul Armenians are plotting a dark conspiracy to expel their kin from the country, to have them deported to the deserts of Arabia.”2 The sarcasm became macabre a year later. Odian was among the intellectuals rounded up in April 1915 and was deported during the Genocide and forcibly converted by Arabs in northern Syria, when he took on the name of Aziz Nuri. Some years later, however, he returned to Istanbul and the Armenian Church. “I have drunk so much that I have become a Turk!” said a man in Hamshetsnak who was sitting at the table right behind ours, with two others in their 50s or 60s, alcohol and sun-induced rosiness in their fleshy faces. The three men with snow-white hair were having a good laugh. The man who had drunk so much that he had become a Turk was from one of the largest clans, a member of the nationalist Republican People’s Party (CHP). These were the gems, when people spoke freely, unaware there was a journalist or stranger amid them, the epitome of the invisibility of a fly on the wall in a newsworthy environment. That was usually so hard to attain with a camera hanging on one’s neck like ballast. “I’ve become a Turk, too,” Ihsan said, reckoning that he had drunk about 35 tons of alcohol in the last 40 years. Ihsan complained to the waiter about the cook’s excesses when the chicken came soaked in oil, using surprisingly rich terminology in Armenian. The Kurdish cook was always game for Ihsan’s little jokes, which would just slide by him, as he did not take his weary eyes off the chicken spit. “Tell our friend from America how many children you have,” Ihsan would make fun of the cook, as the man sweated in front of the chicken turning on the roaster. “Three,” the man would answer, solemnly. “He has seven,” Ihsan told me in Hamshetsnak, with a quiet smile, the first time I witnessed the recurring exchange. “He is not counting the daughters.” This rite would happen every day, and the cook would duly comply with expectations, without ever showing if he realized that the joke was on him. In less than two years of reading and reasoning, Ihsan had come to embrace his Armenian identity. A voracious reader with a home full of large volumes of Marxist thinkers and Russian authors, including classics such as Dostoevsky, he was as Armenian as anyone can be, hard to tell from the others, three centuries of Islamicization completely washed away. And that was in large measure because he spoke the language and had learned the history, and had 471

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appropriated it, even though it was not part of his family’s and his group’s—the Islamicized Hamshentsis’—history. The Hamshentsis were a curious case because, in one sense, they would be at the farthest end on an imaginary Armenian identity spectrum, as their conversion began more than three hundred years ago. They were also among the most distant geographically from the historical Armenian lands as they had already migrated out of what was the Armenian state of the time, under Arab rule, into a remote corner separated from the Armenian lands by the Kaçkar mountains. Yet they had retained their language, which bridged in minutes a different religion, and a chasm of centuries and geography. A pillar of the Armenian identity, almost a secret code spoken by very few outsiders, the language was the preserve of a small nation for which it had a strong bonding power. This combination of sounds created an identity and held it together. At the same time, the lack of historical memory and written records, combined with Islamicization, enabled them to make a claim to Turkish nationality, as many among them did, as well as a powerful local identity. The village is the frame of reference for the Hamshentsis. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that for the Hamshentsi, his hometown was his homeland. Inward-looking and fiercely localist, their sense of belonging to a particular group did not override their attachment to their clans’ fiefdoms. Many villages were, indeed, the strongholds of big and ancient Hamshentsi families. Very often, the contentious antinomy of whether they were Armenians or Turks was glossed over, beneath their clan and village loyalties. The Eastern Hamshentsis, those clustered in villages around the cities of Hopa and Makrial (officially called Kemalpaşa) in the farthest north-eastern stretch of Turkey, still spoke Hamshetsnak as their mother tongue, even if it was falling into disuse among the younger generations. The Western Hamshentsis, those from Rize province, no longer spoke the language, even though some of the words had survived in their dialect. Among the Western Hamshentsis, rejection of their Armenian ancestry is much more pronounced, but in my encounters with them there appeared to be growing acceptance of their Armenian roots. Among the Eastern Hamshentsis, each village in the constellation of Hopa and Makrial had its own character. It went beyond geographic particulars, with political leanings that determined how they related to Turks, Armenians, and the Hamshen identity. Of the first round of Hamshen villages I had visited so far in the Hopa area, Zurpici was the one where the language seemed to be the least spoken, especially compared to the other three I had seen then: Xigoba, Çavuşlu, and Zaluna. In Zurpici, Turkish had become the main language of conversation 472

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and, when they spoke Hamshetsnak, it was an impoverished variant. There was one exception—a young couple who spoke fluent Hamshetsnak as did, unusually, their two little daughters. I asked one of the girls to make a drawing in my notebook. She drew herself to the right of a large mosque with three minarets, with one rising from behind the middle of the building and two shorter ones flanking it. Her mother was a little embarrassed for some reason. “It’s a mosque,” she said with a shy smile, blushing. “We are starving for history,” said Yaver, a man in his 20s in Çavuşlu. He was with his mother and a friend outside their house, and they initially reacted with misgivings. “He may be a policeman,” Yaver later joked in Hamshetsnak, also curious to know where I had learned their language, smiling but still a tad suspicious. Yet they warmly welcomed me into their home with tea and cookies spread on the table, for far more often than not, in Hamshen as elsewhere in the land, hospitality was the attitude that prevailed toward the traveler. His mother was excited. She had found out only five years ago that the Hamshentsis were of Armenian descent, and she was still in awe of the discovery that had been brought by a professor from Yerevan—she was probably talking about Sergey Vardanyan. “When did the Hamshentsis become Armenian?” she wondered. It also intrigued her where Armenians came from, as they were used to the Turkish historical narrative of people always coming from somewhere else. While indeed the Hamshentsis had arrived from somewhere else, they were generally part of the indigenous population, a notion that went understated in Turkey. It was also a clear example that belied the notion that the Hamshentsis had “always” known they were of Armenian origin. A Kurdish friend of Yaver was visiting as well. He, too, wanted to know where Armenians had come from, resisting the notion that they were as indigenous as they could be, the result of assimilation between several local tribes and nations that eventually gave birth to the Armenian nation. He kept insisting, “Did they come from Central Asia?” He was also adamant that Armenians did not accept the Hamshentsis because they were Muslim, even though he did not explain what his statement was based on. The Karakans, the clan of the aspiring jihadi, had welcomed me in Zaluna. A man was talking with another through the grille of an open window. It was a large house with walls in brown or mustard, so casually accepting of the Hamshentsis’ Armenian origin that they were completely unconcerned about proclaiming it on the record, as their children came out to play with the foreign visitor. The men told me that I was in safe territory for the full extent of the tea plantation, which I traversed along a path that cut through its steep incline. I stepped off in front of a tea depot that was swarming with three generations of planters, the flowery motifs of the women’s garments enlivening the concrete esplanade where the tea leaves had been spread. 473

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An old woman in full Hamshen garb, her headscarf tied into a crown in the traditional manner, was holding a shepherd’s crook and walking around the tea planters bagging the leaves on the depot’s forecourt, speaking loudly in Hamshetsnak. Girls were chatting among themselves about things that pertained to them and no one else, while a farmer was shouting an angry command to his wife. Their cries in their archaic dialect prevailed for a moment over the surreal murmur of eighth-century Armenian words that rose from women in headscarves and men bending over the jute sacks in the shadow of the white mosque next door. At the men’s cigarette break, as they waited for the trucks, the shouting man was enjoying the numbness of exhaustion but was up for a talk, and agreed to list all the villages in the Hopa area: Xigoba, Zurpici, Dzağrina, and another dozen, finishing with Ardala. “Don’t go to Ardala,” he told me. “There are many fascists there.” He was not kidding, as Hamshentsis were prone to do when the name of that village came up. It was the butt of jokes among them, which was why he insisted he was serious, and his fluent Hamshetsnak contributed to conveying his message. He had sat on the sidewalk under the shadow of the mosque to smoke, still sweating profusely. The old woman with matriarchal poise and Hamshen costume had me accompany her to her home for a plate of chicken and rice with pickles in large helpings that in Turkish they used to call “orphan’s portions.” It was well past lunch hour but the dish would do me no harm, as she correctly judged by my looks. Her white-haired son, elegantly dressed and wearing immaculately polished brown shoes, often transported cargo to Yerevan and spoke excellent Eastern Armenian. They were the pro-Armenian faction of the Karakans, to give it a name that does not render adequately the nuances that are found among the Hamshentsis and how they related to their origins. The other Karakan faction had undergone such a thorough conversion that they tended to gravitate toward the farther end of both Islam and Turkish nationalism. As I was looking to hitch-hike back to Hopa, a man in his 50s, with the characteristic blue eyes and white skin of the clan, who could have been a brother of the one I had seen at the matriarch’s house, pulled over his truck, but was going in a different direction. Yet he wanted to say on the record what he thought about who the Hamshentsis really were, that everybody knew about their origin with only different degrees of denial and acceptance, and that he did not fear. “Let them come to me if they have a problem—we are Armenian, too,” he said, addressing imaginary naysayers, and probably real ones he did not name too.     

“Yes,” Ihsan agreed that night at home in Hopa, “do not go to Ardala.” He also expressed concern about my plan to visit the village of Ançyoğ. 474

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A few hours before, outside the Pançuni restaurant, a man in a white baseball cap pulled down low and walking briskly with a bowed head had approached me after shoving a man aside with his shoulder. He turned out to be Ardeletsi Cesur, a social network connection whose fluency in Hamshetsnak he had first revealed to me by expressing himself about the Turkish government in words and spirit that were very close to those of many Armenians, notwithstanding profile pictures in which he could be seen in the uniform of a Turkish conscript firing heavy artillery. A couple of my Armenian female connections had been frightened when he sent friendship requests on the social networks along with messages in Hamshetsnak they had mistaken for Turkish or some incomprehensible dialect. “Who is Cesur?” they asked me, alarmed that a man they thought was a Turkish soldier had tried to flirt with them. Cesur was plying the streets of Hopa anonymously because the police were after him for beating up someone. Yet that weekend he was heading to the yayla for a short summer vacation with his family, and I was welcome to join them. “The cops are looking for him, and there is a chance of one in 1,000 that he may be caught,” Ihsan told me, advising me to turn down the invitation. “It’s very unlikely things will go wrong, but if they do it will not be good for you, or him, if they nab him.” But in attitudes and discourse, Cesur seemed to contradict what Hamshentsis said about Ardala as a nest of Turkish fascism. And even the harshest critics of Ardala—an island of Turkish nationalism surrounded by the mostly leftist villages of the Hopa Hamshentsis—acknowledged they were the best speakers of the dialect. It was too good to miss, but Ihsan was still trying to deter me. “You may go to the yayla if you really want,” he said before putting out the last cigarette of the night. “But do not go to Ardala.”     

There were three tea harvests a year. A taxi had driven me to a middle valley in the village of Xigoba, the most populated of the Eastern Hamshentsis with approximately 300 households. Hamza came with his two young sons to pick me up from there. Hamshetsnak was their mother tongue, and the children were as fluent as any proficient adult, which was now unusual among the Hamshentsis. Along the way, just like Ihsan had done weeks earlier, they described the flora and fauna around us in Hamshetsnak as we climbed up the steep paths to the crest of the mountain, through terraced tea plantations. They were connected to the çay alıms (tea depots) with a pulley system by which the leaves were sent down to be loaded into sacks and transported to factories. We passed by a hive dripping with honey: “Wild bees have made it, and only bears can eat it,” Hamza said. 475

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His home was at the very top of the mountain, with breathtaking views of mountains covered in green. He was from a large and possibly storied clan, the Muslioğlis. They might be descendants of Husep, an Armenian who in the early eighteenth century had fled oppression by derebeys, the Muslim valley lords in the Pontic Mountains, and founded a secret village, Mala, “in the densely forested valley of the Sera Dere.”3 Although well versed on Hamshentsis and their language, Hamza did not know this story. A Star of David carved on a roof beam of his two-century-old home intrigued him more: he guessed that it was Jewish but I told him that I had seen similar stars on Armenian tombstones in Crimea. It was impossible to know where it came from, other than guessing that it had been cannibalized from some other construction more than 200 years ago. Down a very long stairway that went all the way up to the summit I descended to the lower quarter of the village. An old man invited me into his courtyard for tea with his wife, whom he was lovingly tending. She was entering a more advanced stage of senility, he told me with sadness when she asked me three times within ten minutes if I was married. The man was bemoaning the turmoil in the Muslim world and how they were butchering each other. “Haram,” he said, using the Arabic word for something forbidden or unbecoming, horrified by the Islamic State. “This is haram.” I had mistaken him for Rıza Haci, whom I went on to visit right after. Rıza Haci was a character everybody had told me about in Xigoba, including a family that had gathered around a table, with father and sons asking me to join them too for tea and talk, introducing themselves as “Armenian, too.” At least in regards to Armenians who visited from elsewhere, this salute had become standard among those Hamshentsis who acknowledged this origin, also signaling to their guests that they were in a friendly home, if not necessarily territory. Those that did not say it initially would not do so later either, or they would deny it. Rıza Haci’s family was busy with wedding preparations for one of his great-grandchildren, but they readily ushered me in for a talk. At 102 and emaciated, his hearing faltered somewhat but he still had a sharp mind and eyesight—he would not let me finish my tea before already calling a grandchild’s wife to pour me more. All his in-laws, children, and great-​grandchildren spoke excellent Hamshetsnak, and he understood all my questions, but responded in Turkish. In 1917, he had fought for the Ottoman Army in Erzurum against the Russians and Armenians, whom he accused of brutalities. An in-law then asked me to let him rest, and invited me to join them in the porch. The wife of another relative, a dark-skinned woman with almond-shaped eyes, said her father shortly before dying had told her and her brother they were Armenian. Their mother had died young. “Hamshentsis are of Armenian origin,” I told her. 476

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But she was not a Hamshentsi. There were ten households in her hometown of Serinsu, a village in the province of Artvin, and she now suspected all of them to be Armenian, but she wanted first to confirm her own identity: “How can I find out?” She could take the DNA test, I said, offering her the opportunity to do it on the spot as I had the kit with me. As she agreed, one of Rıza Haci’s relatives whispered something to her I could not catch and this woman, who was 35, looked up concerned: “There is no need to do it,” she told me. As I began my descent to the city of Hopa, I greeted a teenage girl hanging clothes on a balcony. Three young faces resembling each other, with wide open eyes, popped up at separate windows, all three in brightly colored headscarves: “Usdi mer lezun xabrigus?” one of them asked, unaware of how richly layered her question sounded to my ears in her archaic dialect, wanting to know from me, the man with the strange accent: “Whence do you speak our language?” She had used a classical Armenian preposition. Upon leaving Xigoba, after passing the sharply arched stone bridge that marked the village limit, I heard some cries in the ancient Armenian of the Hamshentsis, probably the tea harvesters communicating from one plantation to another distant one, the voice traveling with clarity from the mountain. For interlocutors born into unequal environments and unequal opportunities, dialogue required additional efforts. We were engaging from different planes, like men talking to each other from different levels on a mountain, like the harvesters over the steeply terraced plantations. Although Armenians engaged with the Hamshentsis on a linguistic level, our points of reference were different. Birol, a 12-year-old I met at Rıza Haci’s home, spoke perfectly in a language that for him evoked a whole set of associations completely unrelated to memories of a lost homeland, Mt. Ararat, and the Armenian alphabet, as they did for Diasporans. He was happy that I admired his fluency in Hamshetsnak yet it would be hard to communicate to someone of his age, who probably did not know the history of his own people and its conversion, the poignancy of hearing a child born into centuries of Islamicization still speaking a dialect of Western Armenian, a language that was endangered everywhere else. I had learned about the tea harvest in the villages in a conversation with Hamza a few days earlier at the Hopa Park teahouse. A stranger, who had introduced himself as a Laz, had approached a table I was sharing with other friends to tell me with urgency and a severe voice that the Hamshentsis were not Armenian. In addition, he had offered me a path to salvation, adding that I could “become a Muslim.” It would be my pleasure, I responded. If he became a Christian, I would become a Muslim. Roaring laughter engulfed our table, except for him. “I don’t want to become an infidel,” he responded. “Allah has said that Christians are 477

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going to burn in hell,” he added, the pupils of his angry eyes rolling left and right but avoiding mine as he discharged his flaming discourse. It was remarkable, not only for the simplicity of damnation he believed in. A clean-shaven man, with the receding hairline of someone past the first half of his likely lifetime, he lacked anything particularly memorable about him, including his correct, forgettable dark trousers and cream-colored shirt. His bland appearance could have made him anyone anywhere, those characters our eyes naturally skip in a crowd or the subway. And yet he shared the eschatology of the aspiring jihadi who was parading his beard and warrior fashion boots at the tailor’s store in Hopa. “You are going directly to hell,” he concluded, giving up on his salvation mission in a finale that we applauded with loud laughter, because for some reason it sounded funnier in Turkish than in translation, even if that was not his intended effect: “Sen direkt cehenneme gidiyorsun.” Hamza was sitting at a nearby table, with his cousin Dursun and his wife, and he agreed to take me to see the tea harvest, or çaykağ in Hamshetsnak. But the conversation soon drifted eastward, with Dursun’s wife wanting to know how often I went to Yerevan. That was one place Hamza would not go. “There is no Armenia here,” he said, placing his hand over his heart. “There is no Yerevan here.” Most people would probably interpret that as a metaphor that indicated indifference. Yet his comment was more assertive: quite literally, he was saying he did not love Armenia. In Hamshetsnak, “it is in my heart” (“Im sirdin meçı ga”) meant “to love.” “With pain upon pain, tear upon tear, our elders became Muslim, why would they become Armenian now?” he repeated what he had told me years earlier. “What would I do in Armenia, where Armenians are starving, what would we do there? I am Armenian, I have no problem with that,” he added. “They butchered Armenians because they were Armenian, so why would we say we are Armenian … yes, we are Armenian, but why say it?” In a curious way, he was articulating a notion of Armenian identity that had regressed into a pre-nationalist stage, or one detached from the country or nation state. How many Hamshentsis shared his views could not be known, but perhaps his approach explained, too, the ambiguities of those who acknowledged or even embraced their Armenian origin, but were unable to relate to Armenian nationalism. Afterwards Hamza showed me a very old Qur’an in the offices of his Marxist party in the basement of a commercial gallery in Hopa. There were photos of revolutionary martyrs, Marx, and Che Guevara. In the torn folds of the Qur’an’s cover there were yellowed pages from a newspaper article in Armenian, possibly from the late nineteenth century. Hamza was wondering what the article said. But the letters were too worn and small to be legible. Dursun was there too, as well as another Hamshentsi friend of theirs, who said that Armenians were 478

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too “Armenianist”—he meant “nationalist,” for which he used the expression “Haici,” a combination of the Armenian word for the nationality, Hai, and the Turkish suffix ci for “-ist,” to indicate a profession or orientation. Dursun was skeptical about the value of the newspaper cuttings. He guessed that the binder must have been Armenian and used the papers only as padding in the cover’s restoration. When Hamza had come to pick me up from the middle valley of Xigoba to visit the tea harvest, he had introduced me to the old women that were gathered there as “an Armenian, just like us.” And the women had giggled, acknowledging it in nods and whispers. Weeks later I returned to Xigoba. It was my last night before leaving Hopa for good. There was a gathering at Ummi’s, a lawyer who two decades ago at the age of 17 had become paralyzed after the truck in which she was traveling in the yayla overturned, a fairly common occurrence. Appalled at myself, I thought how unfair it was to ache more for seeing a beautiful woman relegated to a wheelchair rather than other misfortunes equally worthy of compassion, yet instinct did not necessarily know what the intellect did. Then Ummi’s nephews and nieces came with friends, talking loudly in Hamshetsnak and singing for us, and looking in fascination at how their names were spelled in the Armenian alphabet.     

The tour of Hamshen villages resumed in Garci, infused that morning in the gray light of a struggling sun. The first miles into the village that spread up all over the mountain revealed that it was the domain of the Köroğlus, with the name engraved on Islamic tombstones clustered in small cemeteries mostly on the left-hand side of the road. They were usually across from houses tucked away in the woods. The stelae probably were also testimony to a high degree of endogamy within the clan, which many Hamshentsis reckoned was the largest in the Hopa area. “This is our mountain,” Haşmet said as we walked into his terraced tea plantation past a cloud of bees hovering outside wooden hives. Half a dozen women were harvesting the second flush with clippers, and were topped off with large bags that captured the leaves. “There are only three households that are not Köroğlu further up.” He was a dark man, like many members of the clan I met in the lower quarter, whereas further up the village and across the winding path on the crest the blonder types with blue eyes and white skin appeared to be more common. The pelican-like scissors they were using for the harvest were frowned upon by tea aficionados, as the choicest types are plucked by hand in Sri Lanka, India, 479

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and China, one of Haşmet’s relatives told me while lopping the dark leaves. That was exquisitely irrelevant, however. “What is killing us is Chernobyl,” she said, and her eyes welled up as she kept clipping. One year ago, she had lost Ailin, her 20-year-old daughter, to cancer. “The winds blew the poison across the sea, and it has been settling on plants and trees.” We talked about the 1986 nuclear disaster in what was then Soviet Ukraine, and about Pripyat, the ghost town where the reactor used to be; and then she asked me about my family story. She knew Hamshentsis “had been Armenian,” but had converted centuries ago, and was curious to know when and why, because they didn’t learn it in school and probably it had been such a long time ago that it was forgotten. She then tried hard to recall old Hamshen names she had heard as a child or learned from her momi (grandmother). And yet every word and memory about anything in this world we discussed with her on the upper steps of the plantation brought her back to Ailin, and to the radiation emanating from further inland on the opposite shore of the Black Sea. The Hamshetsnak spoken in Garci seemed more removed from the standard of classical or Western Armenian than elsewhere in the Hopa area, if the minor difficulties in understanding were a reliable benchmark. Haşmet, who borrowed more heavily from Turkish than his sister and other locals, confirmed that the local speech had its peculiarities, which were only minor words or variations of scant importance but were enough to convert it into little more than a patrilect (the peculiarities of the conversational language of a family or clan) as its speakers numbered around 300 households in a village of their own, but not enough for a dialect. Yet the possibility of an expanding clan developing its own language was interesting to entertain, as the ultimate theoretical consequence would be that of a family becoming a subgroup within an ethnic group or subgroup, speaking a dialect of a dialect. The mountain of the Köroğlus was friendly territory. The women would invariably welcome the visiting stranger with a greeting and a smile. A young one had returned to the tea harvest near the hilltop after the namaz at a musalla, a little prayer hall on the mountain. “Talk with my mother,” she said. The young woman’s Hamshetsnak was somewhat broken. Then an older woman emerged from the end of the road, where it sloped down beyond the range of vision. She wore a blue tunic and a matching headscarf and came with the rested expression of someone who has woken from a revealing dream. And she sat down on a large rock that winds and other agents had eroded into a gentle shape and smooth surface, and looked at me in silence with her sea eyes, waiting for me to speak. A fleeting smile drew on her face as soon as I pronounced my greeting. The barbed wire that ran behind her was the only encroachment of civilization; her grace and garments, and the blue headscarf that hung round her luminous face, felt like a strange déjà vu. It was not only the dialogue in the old language, 480

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with words that had the silence of the mountain for themselves, but the familiarity was also pictorial, with Renaissance Marian elements of composition and color, especially her blue tunic and shawl. “There are some people who come and whisper, ‘The Hamshentsis are Armenian,’ and I respond, ‘Yes, we are, and I am so happy about that, look at what a civilized nation they are, and think what this country could have been had they been allowed to live,’ and I ask them if they don’t think that Armenians are human, too,” she said. “We are born what we are.” The whole mountain belonged to the clan, which gave them the confidence that comes with strength in numbers, something that Armenians had been sorely missing most of the time in most of their overrun homeland, where shortly before the Genocide they had been given in the dubious label of “loyal nation” their epithet in the Ottoman Empire. The reason to be loyal was obvious: troublesome conduct would make life worse, yet fear, too, is a powerful incentive for violence. At the highest stretch of the road right beneath the sprawling crest, a man in his 40s was painting his old house: he guessed it was 200 years old. His momi was inside, with a little great-grandchild tottering around her long skirt. The old woman responded to my greeting in her language with a cautious smile, one I had seen before when they sensed that I was Armenian. No other who looked like “one of us” and spoke their language could possibly be anything else. This man knew that Armenians called themselves Hai and said that he always had. That was no small linguistic matter: the conversion of the Hamshentsis was believed to have been so thorough that they had dropped the Armenian word for the people, and instead used the Turkish one of Ermeni. Yet he disputed that they were of Armenian origin, as we switched randomly between Hamshetsnak and Turkish. It was fair, I said, that they were now Muslim and considered themselves Turks, but their origin was indisputably Armenian. All evidence to the contrary in the Turkish literature was fabrications and pseudoscience. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s false,” the man said in Turkish, his eyes and voice turning inimical, “but we are not Turks: yes, we are Turkish citizens, but we are Hamshentsis.” And, he added, he was not a Muslim: “I am a socialist.” Further up, the road led onto a plateau with a house, outside which a group of headscarved women and girls with uncovered heads were having tea. Their seating was arranged in a horseshoe shape. Behind them, the plateau edge fell sharply into a wooded abyss. A woman in thick eyeglasses, who spoke rapidly a complicated Hamshetsnak with ellipsis of vowels, had the commanding voice, cracking jokes that the other women celebrated with loud laughs and I missed for the most part. Yet she was a natural comedian, and even when I had difficulty understanding all that she said, I would get the cues that prompted us to laughter. The woman with eyeglasses had not met an Armenian before. She 481

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was curious that Armenians and Hamshentsis understood each other—she had heard about it, but did not know anything about their history, and asked me to tell them about it. “We would never know,” she said, in a funny tone. “We only get TRT1 up here and they are never going to tell us that,” she said in reference to a Turkish state TV channel, making the group of women laugh again. Then a teenage girl in the prime of her beauty came out of the house, all in white and a loose white headscarf, the symbol in the past, and perhaps today too, that she was open to courtship. I just saw her round black eyes and beautiful smile. The woman in eyeglasses introduced her by her name, and she then flew back to her cocoon in the back of the house. She said a few phrases in Hamshetsnak but I was too distracted by her looks to pay attention. They treated her like a precious secret, something to be beholden for a moment but not meant to be captured even for a picture, for they would not allow me to photograph her. As I stood up to leave, a curtain drew behind a window grille. The girl in white flickered for a second at the brief opening and after waving goodbye she disappeared. And I continued on to Zendit, which was at the end of a road that began a slow descent a few feet after the women’s home. The first and last households that I saw in Zendit openly described themselves as Armenian and welcomed me as a conational, and in their lack of flattery you could see that it was no mere gesture. They spoke with no conditionals, no mention of historical accidents that had sent us on diverging paths, with conversations that were about work, family, and how bad the economy was, with the declining prices of the tea, with which they were barely breaking even. But in one home, when they again described themselves as Hai, my curiosity was piqued, so I wanted to know when they had learned the word. “We have always known it,” said the man, in his 60s. That seemed strange and contradicted the available records about it, in which the word had been eradicated completely from usage among them. Yet when I pressed, the man said that they had only begun to use it after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the borders, with the increased traffic of Armenians who came to Hopa for trade. And that corresponded with what my closer acquaintances had insisted and what was known in the literature on Hamshen. He and his wife packed up and dropped me off near the hilltop kağniver (upper village). They were visiting their son, whose house was perched on a dizzyingly steep slope that the couple’s van, the engine whining a little, incredibly climbed with the ease of a goat, as I watched with some anxiety from the road while I headed westbound to Dzağrina. Outside the last house I passed by in Zendit, three generations of a family were returning home at the top of the hill, in a neighborhood with half-​ finished constructions, as the sun shone feebly through the passing clouds. The patriarch walked ahead, holding a crook, his eyes hidden in the shadow of his black beret, followed by his wife, as well as their daughters and grandchildren, 482

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one of them in Messi’s Barcelona soccer jersey. I told the child that I had grown up in Argentina, the country where his idol was born. But his mother smiled and told me he was too little to understand. They wanted to know how the other Hamshentsis had received me and they were curious to know how come I spoke their language. I got blank expressions when I said I was Hai, so I tried Ermeni, and one of the young women shrugged, saying, “So are we.” She spoke almost indifferently, naturally and with no fuss, with no intention to flatter anyone. Her aspect was not especially remarkable but she had a rich stare, and a richer attitude, with engaging power. There was a spark of quiet defiance in her eyes, like those I saw when some Hamshentsis would say that they were forced to become Muslims. What this proved, too, was that there were Hamshentsis in a village at the top of the hill, far from Hopa or any other relatively large city, who were no longer afraid to assert their Armenian identity.     

The sun was setting in a red sky that the parting clouds had revealed in the final moments of daylight. The houses and the mosque of Dzağrina, on a hill opposite Zendit, rose from the thick of the woods amid the boundless exuberance of trees and the universe of the Pontic flora. The village’s name also evoked its blooming topography, as its first syllable was identical to the stem of dzağig, or “flower” in Armenian. In Dzağrina, where I arrived after crossing over the mountain top from Garci, a 12-year-old boy who spoke a broken Hamshetsnak corrupted by Turkish wanted to guide me to a spectacular waterfall, about which I had been told in the other villages. To his disappointment, I wanted him to guide me to the mosque and meet people. We encountered a few old women on the way, the friendliest of whom was one leading a cow to a pasture, whereas the other ones would soon withdraw inside their homes after mumbling a few things in Turkish. One told me to get lost. When I reached the mosque, an old woman was playing with her grandchildren by the water fountains for ablutions. She covered her face with her black shawl when she saw me, refusing to speak. The child that had guided me then introduced me to a small man, his oliveskinned face furrowed by wrinkles. He wore eyeglasses with black frames and a matching mustache that was aging slower than his hair. He barely said his name and was reluctant to speak. Then a man in a long white robe that on closer inspection looked like a galabeya, a rather unusual sight in the Black Sea mountains, walked up to me with long strides. “Selâmün aleyküm,” he said curtly, staring at me with his green eyes, unblinking under his frown. His white pilgrim cap stood out on the reddish tan of his face, making me wonder if he had just returned from a Hajj to Mecca. I stood silently as the hajji repeated 483

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the Muslim greeting, this time raising his voice. It was a trick, I thought. In my understanding, perhaps mistaken, non-Muslims were not allowed to use the religious greeting, which meant, “Peace be upon you,” so I responded with the lay Turkish greeting of “Merhaba,” which he ignored, repeating instead, now blushing in anger, “Selâmün aleyküm!” The old man and the boy who had accompanied me were looking on in silence as the man seemed to be getting more upset. Unfriendly as he wanted to appear, I was not sensing danger, and I was marveling in silence at the strangeness of it as we stood in a circle outside the white mosque, breathing in the raw smells of the earth and the wild luxuriance around us, as close as it can get to a landscape of bliss. It perhaps misled me into letting my guard down when hostility could have been real. Seen from Zendit and Garci, Dzağrina appeared like a pilgrimage destination, distant yet rising on the horizon, half lost in patches of fog, built around a picture-perfect white mosque, the sliver of mist cutting the minaret through the middle, as if its top was floating on it. I thought it best not to disregard customs, as I predicted that this man was bound to ask what my religion was. But when the child said sotto voce, “Aleyküm selam,” looking at me, I followed his silent advice and repeated the magic words. The man now shook my hand and his tone changed, introducing himself and asking me who I was. He was neither the muhtar (village chief ) nor the imam of Dzağrina. The grass shone like jade, after yet another shower that I had learned to ignore like the locals, used to walking under the rain with botanical indifference. The man in the hajji garb had become friendlier and wanted to see what I was writing in my little notebook, asking me to turn over the pages. He made me stop at the drawing of the five-petal flower. “Is that a masonic symbol?” he inquired, wanting to know if it had a secret meaning. “No, it’s aakagin kuyrı, the sister of the sun, a wild flower I saw in Xigoba,” I said in Hamshetsnak. He took his eyes off the notebook for a moment and looked up at me in surprise, without making any comment. “Are you a mason?” he asked in Turkish, the only language he spoke throughout with me, even though he must have understood Hamshetsnak. “I’m a Christian Armenian,” I responded, because it was the truth, always the best policy, but also because I was sensing it would probably be the lesser of the two evils. His face relaxed into a broad smile. “Your people are like ours,” he said with joy, now leafing enthusiastically through my notebook, asking me about the strange alphabet or any drawing that caught his attention, pointing approvingly to a little sketch of a city with a minaret rising above it. But I had misunderstood. He meant Muslims and Christians resembled each other, not Hamshentsis and Armenians. They were not Armenian, he said with no hostility, and he tuned out as I talked while his eyes wandered in curiosity over the Armenian handwriting in the notebook; “It’s a beautiful alphabet,” he said. He shook my hand again, and bid me safe 484

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travels under Allah’s caring eye, before walking away in the same long strides I had mistaken for hostile hurry. Past a tree-lined field where little boys around eight or nine years old were playing hide-and-seek, shouting that I take their photo—none spoke Hamshetsnak, even though two of them said they understood it—I came upon a couple who were standing by the entrance to their lush garden, flanked by tall plants of red hibiscus that they took pride in showing to me, as well as a small beehive nearby. He was the former muhtar. The crown of his head was completely bald, with white hair rising on the temples, and he had a long mustache that wrapped around his cheeks stopping only short of the long sideburns. The face, with green feline eyes beneath arched eyebrows, and a large forehead, seemed familiar. The uncanny resemblance came from history books and portraits and, as this Hamshentsi man of a Laz mother would have probably laughed if told, I abstained from mentioning he had an air of Franz Joseph I, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, although his mustache was certainly not portentous in the way the imperial one was. His wife was dressed in the traditional costume of the land, with a matching headscarf decorated with flowers in many hues of red that looked like large gladioli. The angular motifs somehow enhanced the aquiline nose that gave her face an avian character. As was common among the Hamshentsis of her generation, she had an official Turkish name and a completely different one in Hamshetsnak, by which she was called by family and friends: hers was Maşikar, a very old name that intrigued her as well. She had often asked her mother why she had been given that Hamshetsnak name, but the meaning remained obscure to her, too. Maşikar’s two younger sisters had died of cancer. “It was because of Chernobyl,” she said. Earlier in the week, I had met a Hamshentsi documentary director now based in Istanbul, who was preparing a film on the levels of cancer in the Artvin and Hopa region, which were four times higher than elsewhere in Turkey. He was working with a Laz colleague who had a Jesus or janissary face. They said the number of cases spiked a few years after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and that was one hypothesis they were considering. They were analyzing whether there was justification for the locals’ contention that radiation particles had blown over from Ukraine across the Black Sea and had come to rest on tea leaves, vegetables, and food. As everything regarding Armenians could still stir passions of the wrong kind in Turkey, but also among some Hamshentsis, I had developed a tendency to try to interpret every sign and clue to tell friend from foe, especially when walking alone into villages set in forests where strangers—Armenian, at that— attracted attention. In the presence of potential threat, the first natural alarm was a gut feeling that felt like a knot in the stomach. It did not usually fail, 485

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for the brain must have collected hints and signs through the eyes and other senses, in the stare or subtle body language, which our mind might take a while to process and turn into rational and verbalized thought. Wrong readings were not uncommon. It had happened with the men playing poker in Diyarbakır, whose demeanor appeared hostile yet they turned out to be hidden Armenians themselves. But it was generally spot on, as experience taught me to trust. I was also beginning to learn that villages, especially in Eastern Anatolia, were not really free territory open to outsiders. While there was no legal restriction to enter them, custom dictated that the village chief should be informed or that one be a local’s guest. With the first courtesies I exchanged with this man it became clear from the beginning that he had patriotic feelings for Turkey, yet he was hospitable above and beyond the call of duty, regardless of my Armenian ancestry. What would he make, I asked him, of a couple of very strange Hamshen names I had been told in the village of Garci right on the mountain across from theirs by one of the Köroğlu women, including a strange hybrid of Armenian and Turkish, “Armengül,” which would mean “Armenian rose.” His response was polite but swift: “There are no Armenian names among us.” That revealed where he stood generally on the divide. Yet that tug in the stomach was not forthcoming. It felt safe territory. We moved into the living room after contemplating the blazing sunset from the porch, a red sky that was soon merged into the advancing blue. The first thing my eyes rested on inside the house was a little Turkish flag on the wall at eye level, next to his reading chair. It was not wise to keep walking in the mountain after dark, Kemal told me, and invited me to stay on as the guest room was ready. They were pleasantly incurious about my competence in Hamshetsnak, as it created a sense of familiarity. Yet it did not go much beyond that. He was fluent in Hamshetsnak but his wife mocked him, saying that he had learned it after marrying her as he had grown up with a Laz mother and spoke it lamentably when they wed: “Of course he does not acknowledge it, but he learned more with me; his mother was Laz.” The anecdote was revealing for something else, too. Hamshentsis used to say they only rarely married outside the group, but I had encountered several instances of mixed marriages even among the older generations, including the parents of Kemal, who was 65. We had breakfast in the porch in the gray morning. They recommended me to their children, who were living in Izmir, asking me to please send the photos to their older son’s email address, as they were not particularly versed in technology. They also wrote down the name and contact details of a Western researcher who had stayed at their home years ago: I passed on to her the greetings and the fond memories Kemal and Maşikar had of her, briefly introducing myself in my message. This person based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 486

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wrote back, perhaps misinterpreting my message as a request for advice on this book project, warning me of the risks of “reism” in my quest, suggesting in academic jargon that I might fool myself into seeing what I wanted to see among the Islamicized Armenians. She did not express any thanks nor any pretense of recalling or caring about her hosts from a few years back. I thanked this researcher again with a brief reflection on how Atatürk’s reism, to borrow the word, had made for a brittle sense of identity in Turkey.4 The couple hugged me warmly and they bid me farewell as I continued my pilgrimage on the road that wound up to the upper part of Dzağrina. Shortly after skirting the mosque at the hilltop, the road penetrated into Ardala, the village where the purest Hamshetsnak was spoken.     

A short man was sitting behind the desk, with a taller one at his side and assisting him a little obsequiously, with a merriness to his reddish face and his groomed mustachio, slightly tilted upwards, an expression of joy that was missing from the other’s grim and jaundiced semblance, which still had an air of familiarity. Even the cadence of the short man’s speech struck notes that I had heard before but could not pin down. When I explained that I needed the izin (safe-conduct) to photograph the traditional costumes, the flora, and the fauna of the Hamshen villages around Hopa, he gave me a look completely devoid of any interest, and seemed mildly displeased: “What do you want these photos for?” The office had been built to Kafkaesque specifications, except for its tall ceiling, and its occupants were behaving in the prescribed manner, if it is fair to argue that architecture conditions our conduct. There was a desk and three chairs, and nothing else. The walls were bare. Perhaps even Atatürk’s portrait, quite oddly, was missing from the brown walls, the color of choice for lazy bureaucrats, but that may have escaped my attention, also unusually. It was all very peaceful, with the window open into a lush inner courtyard. A few sparrows were still chirping late in the morning, yet even the sounds coming from the free creatures outside contributed to the unsettling atmosphere. Their ancient dialect, songs, and customs had drawn me to the lands of the Hamshentsis. But the short man said he could not understand—he said with a tone that revealed he understood perfectly well—why someone who had been raised in Buenos Aires and was based in New York would care about life in little villages perched on the edge of the Black Sea. “Aren’t there better things to do with your time in your faraway hometown?” he said, feigning surprise with a dour tone that hid sarcasm very well, even if it was clearly the goal he sought. 487

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“I am Armenian,” I told him. His face lit up with a smile of sardonic satisfaction, probably for seeing his suspicions confirmed. “İnçbes es?” he asked, in Hamshetsnak and still smiling, using the same formula employed in Western Armenian as well to say, “How are you?” I responded and pretended joy at dealing with a Hamshentsi, even though he was a public servant and one of those who probably saw Diaspora Armenians as uninvited and unwelcome missionaries. “Nisd!” he ordered me to sit, still in Hamshetsnak. And he started making phone calls inside the Hopa district governor’s office, to figure out what to do with me. He had told me he was from the village of Çançağan, which rang a bell, too. The assistant asked me in a hushed voice something I could not understand initially. The tone was friendly, and even if the previous day I had learned not to trust politeness, it was a relief to let all masks of pretense fall. He was a Laz. While his boss was busy working the telephone lines, he asked me if I believed the soykırım had indeed happened. I feigned ignorance of the word, “genocide” in Turkish. “Genotsid,” he whispered in Russian, trying not to attract the attention of his boss, who had turned to look quizzically at him while holding the telephone receiver as he searched for answers that were not forthcoming. I could no longer pretend that I did not understand if only not to insult his intelligence, and I gave an honest answer: “I am a guest in this country and talking about this topic in a public building makes me uncomfortable.” It could very well be a trap, as it took a few wrong words to the wrong people to get into trouble; further, I was in a public office and talking about the Genocide was still punishable by law in Turkey even if, after Hrant Dink’s murder, Article 301 was seldom enforced to prosecute this violation. The boss put his hand on the receiver’s mouthpiece and told his assistant to desist, which, I sensed with no little surprise, he was doing on my behalf as the discussion in the district governor’s building was making me nervous. The assistant blushed, considerably so for it to be noticeable on his tanned face, and he gestured with his hands that he understood me. After a moment of silence, the Laz assistant said in a whisper, “We love Armenians very much.” And he repeated, “very much.” It was then that I noticed he was saying it with sad eyes. “Many Turks massacred Armenians against their will,” he said with shame, as his Adam’s apple was rising and falling, overcome by unexpected emotion that he was trying to suppress. “My wife’s grandfather has massacred Armenians,” he continued, speaking with contrition. He paused, his breathing becoming a little heavier. “Suç …” he started to say, “guilt” or “offense” in Turkish. But then the boss put down the telephone and spoke. “You look at history with only one eye,” the boss told me without looking in my eyes. The second person plural was meant for Armenians in general. “My momi used to tell us that Armenian soldiers had entered their village 488

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with Russian troops, and massacred Hamshentsis.” These events, he said with a certainty that sounded suspicious, had happened in 1914, a patent fallacy as these territories were in the Russian Empire at the time. He had deliberately placed those events in 1914 to implicitly portray the Genocide the following year in a logical sequence, as a backlash against atrocities he accused Armenians of committing. “The Armenians, not the Russians,” he said, still looking out of the window, referring to those massacres his momi had described. “We told them, ‘Why are you slaughtering us? We speak the same language,’ but they massacred the Hamshentsis, raped the women, and committed all kinds of barbaric acts.” Then the Armenians had lit a ring of fire around the village, which the boss represented with a sketch that looked like a sunflower. He then mimicked how Armenian soldiers had torn open wombs and cut off women’s breasts with bayonets and other crimes about which there was no record whatsoever, but which corresponded exactly to documented testimonies about brutalities committed by Turks and Kurds in the Armenian Genocide. This representation reminded me of the argument at Kiram’s home three years earlier, when his aunt had suddenly changed the track of her story about the caravans of Armenian orphans when I had begun recording her on video, and had shown with her hands, with very similar gestures, how Armenian bandits had disemboweled Hamshentsis in 1915. In the meantime, his Laz assistant had sketched a bayonet, pointing to the left, or in a westward direction, whereas I had noticed most of us in the West instinctively tended to draw guns with the muzzle to the right, or to the East: it was probably related to writing direction, with perhaps in this case a curious ghost from the old Ottoman script, which used an Arabic-based alphabet and a right-to-left direction. If this was not a case of reading too much into little things, it might have been related to a little detail an Islamicized Armenian acquaintance had noticed in the gesture with which Westerners ask for the check at a restaurant, joining the forefinger and the thumb and moving the hand from left to right, whereas people in Turkey tended to do the same signing gesture in the air, but in the opposite direction. The boss had stood up to look out of the window. Then he turned to query me on my interest in the folklore, the plants, and the animals of Hamshen villages, but the laugh I let out at the sarcasm answered for itself and was matched by that of the boss and his assistant, which created a brief moment of clubby sense of humor. “My cousin is well read,” he said, when he asked where I was staying. “He likes Russian authors a lot, right?” And that was the reason why he seemed familiar, I understood then. Now it all made sense. I would have believed him even if he had told me he was Ihsan’s brother, not just his cousin. Resemblance with Ihsan extended even to his voice. They both came from the same village, even if they were at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. 489

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“The Kaplans cannot become imams, my grandfather used to say,” Ihsan had told me, adding that his father was an observant Muslim. “Why they could not, I don’t know.” This cousin had been an imam in the past, Ihsan told me after the incident. But like Henry Youngman, who had read about the evils of drinking and had given up reading, Ihsan’s cousin had resolved incompatibilities by quitting his religious career—drinking is forbidden in Islam—and doing what presumably could be the next best, or worst, thing, and had joined the AKP, Turkey’s ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party. Yet despite opposite views in politics, both cousins shared a profound intellectual curiosity, for even the manner in which Kâzım was parroting the blatant propaganda of the Turkish government revealed him to be a well-read man. Ihsan, a convinced Marxist–Leninist, did not let his political thinking fossilize into puritanical dogma or diminish his capacity to listen, let alone enjoy whatever good life had to offer. The boss recited the lyrics of a Hamshen song that he had learned from his grandmother: Asa sevdam, asa, Ku dardet şad a … Teved cadgis kesa, Hokis al hon a … Tell me, my love, tell me, Your worries are many … Pass your hand over my forehead, My soul is there too …

But he refuted that they were of Armenian origin and repeated the official line of Turkish historiography, that the Hamshentsis had learned their dialect following years of trade and relations with Armenians, for whom they worked as shepherds. Kâzım was conveniently ignoring that they had coexisted in their current geography with the Laz for twelve centuries among considerably fewer Armenians. They were similarly not in a dominant position, and yet the Hamshentsis had not acquired the Laz language as their own. The other, more flagrant inconsistency was the fossilized quality of Hamshetsnak, which had remained roughly unchanged since the eighth century, whereas the Armenian spoken in Eastern Anatolia had evolved considerably in the same period. All this official discourse based on lies and fear was tiresome and tedious yet it was interesting to observe for its nostalgic value. It reminded me of the bad old times of the Soviet Union, where patent falsehoods were proclaimed and repeated in Pavlovian spirit, to the point that it became dogma— the Berlin Wall was built to prevent masses of Westerners from migrating to the 490

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communist bloc in uncontrollable numbers, for example—and yet in the end it was all very clumsy and believed by no one but fanatics and fools. Unlike Russia, where for all the neo-Soviet propaganda of Putin the days of Leninism were gone for good, the cult of Atatürk was very much alive in Turkey. And that made me wonder how all these people would feel when the masks started to fall apart and the farce of state lies came through. A few days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an Armenian writer explained to me how the trade-offs had worked. This writer, Vardges Petrosyan, told me how he had enjoyed the plush privileges endowed by the regime in exchange for his services as a literary mouthpiece. But those who denounced the communist propaganda of Soviet Armenian intellectuals ignored the fact that, in his words, “We had to build 70 statues of Lenin in order to erect one for Mesrop Mashtots,” the creator of the Armenian alphabet. So I was wondering if Kâzım was one of those state servants who echoed the official line pour la galerie, for he seemed too learned to buy a century of lies, and I sensed, in the punctilious repetition of the hogwash about the Turkic origin of the Hamshentsis and the stories of Armenian brutalities, that he was undergoing the conversion from dogma to truth, for he was reciting them with the dutiful tone of a student who has memorized the lesson. Kâzım had asked me to pen a hand-written letter addressed to the kaymakam (district governor) to get permission to photograph “nature” in the Hamshen villages, which I did solemnly and with none of us laughing. “I want to photograph people, too,” Kâzım said. “It’s the same: that’s nature, too.” “Should he add that he is of Armenian origin?” his Laz assistant asked, but Kâzım hurriedly hushed him. The letter came and went a couple of times, it was stamped, went one more time, while there were discussions on the telephone with different officials about the request. The kaymakam finally decided against granting the permission, and Kâzım told me if I really insisted on visiting the villages, to ask for the muhtar and use common sense. And he crumpled the letter he had so carefully dictated in formal Turkish for me to write, in which I ceremoniously appealed to the governor’s goodwill and benevolence, and threw it in the bin, much to my chagrin as I would have wanted to keep that little piece of ephemera. After his Laz colleague left the office bidding me a moving farewell, Kâzım again approached the window and, now looking at the trees, now turning to the office but with his stare lost somewhere above the line of sight, as Ihsan too was prone to do when he delved into intellectual explorations, he started speaking in fluent Hamshetsnak, disappointment coming through every word he spoke with the articulate proficiency of men who read a lot, and the same nihilism of the idealist man that ran through the veins and discourse of his cousin, which was only accentuated by the physical as well as vocal resemblance. He said he 491

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was not happy that the world was so divided, and he also said that he did not like the Turkish state, and its nationalist and oppressive nature. Even though I was not sure how sincere he was, disillusionment was drawn in his face, well trained to disguise emotions. He then asked me to accompany him to his personal office, a smaller and cozier one with his name on the door. On the bookshelf, lost amid bureaucratic documents, I saw the prominent volume of Raymond Kévorkian’s Ermeni Soykırımı (The Armenian Genocide) that, with reference to all the available documentation, details all the massacres big and small, the pillaging, and the names of butchers and executioners of the extermination, making it the most thorough account of the Genocide to this day. There was also Paul Paboudjian’s 1915 Öncesinde Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Ermeniler (The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before 1915) and Ayhan Aktar’s Sarkis Torosyan: Çanakkale’den Filistin Cephesine (Sarkis Torosyan: From Çanakkale to the Palestinian Front), about an Armenian officer who had fought courageously for the Ottoman Army as the Genocide was being carried out, and on whose figure and deeds Turkish historians cast doubt for many decades, only to be proved beyond doubt after family testimony was found. It was dawning on me that there was to Kâzım the courage of subversion in his readings, and an awareness of truth behind his declamations, in the Orwellian world he was born into and in which he had to eke out his living. It made me wonder how far down the long road toward embracing his Armenian roots Kâzım was. These were not the books you would see on the shelf of someone who felt contempt for Armenians and who believed the nonsense about the joint Russian-Armenian incursion against his grandmother’s village in 1914. Even though they were from Ihsan’s clan, his branch of the family had changed their last name during Atatürk’s law on surnames of the 1930s, whereas Ihsan’s had kept their original one—not disclosed in this book but that he believes stemmed from an Armenian word.     

The circuitous road to Kâzım’s office had begun the morning before in Ardala, the village many Hamshentsis laughed at and were wary of. It was a nest of Turkish fascism, as the rest of the Hamshentsis put it, while acknowledging that it was where the best Hamshetsnak was spoken. After leaving Kemal and Maşikar’s home in Dzağrina I had climbed up to the upper part of the village, which first wound downhill around the mountain and then rose at a gentle angle by the edge of very steep slopes, the vertiginous tea plantations all over the villages of Hamshen. A Hamshentsi family agreed to 492

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squeeze me into their car as they pulled over on the road, and dropped me off at the entrance to Ardala. I had somehow missed the back roads leading into the village through the higher passes and now had to come down to the highway and then climb back up. Ardala had its lower and upper neighborhood, each with its distinct personality, as I had been told and would corroborate. A large Turkish flag, with the portrait of a younger Atatürk in a tall Astrakhan hat printed on it, was hanging by the entrance to the road that wound into Ardala, next to a large bakery—a trade the Hamshentsis excelled at. In the past, these signs would have given me a sense of foreboding but a long time in Turkey had numbed me to these omens. Atatürk portraits were a dime a dozen in Turkey and I had enjoyed hospitality in homes where the flag and other national symbols were prominently displayed. And in my experience, it was not rare for these overt displays of patriotism to hide what the true thoughts were. And indeed, upon meeting the very first residents of Ardala who lived in the houses behind the large Turkish flag, I was welcomed warmly, with them telling me without my asking, “We are Armenian, too,” and they were calling themselves Hai. They were the Kızılays, the family of Osman, my first Hamshentsi friend on a social network and the one who had the slogan of “Free Black Sea” on his home page. They asked me if I was Armenian, too, and where was I coming from. Next door, a man who very much resembled the first one was returning from the pastures with his cow. He greeted me cordially too, and hesitated for a moment to shake hands with me because, he said, his hands were dirty. He repeated verbatim what his brother, the man in the first house, had said in Hamshetsnak separately a moment ago: “Mek al Hai ik” (“We are Armenian, too.”) He had been to Yerevan a couple of times, carrying freight. A little further up, a group of women in their traditional costumes and two young ones in Western clothes, one of them in advanced pregnancy, were lolling outside their homes. The women were more reserved and appeared incurious about my request to hear stories and songs in their dialect. The pregnant woman was sympathetic and inquired among the older women. I agreed to just take notes when I noticed their nervousness to do it for the camera. She told me the best singer and storyteller was an old woman who lived on the top floor of a four-floor building, so she called her out from the street. The old woman’s granddaughter or granddaughter-in-law leaned out, her headscarf on, to say in Hamshetsnak that the momi was doing the namaz at the moment. They were unsmiling and guarded, but not hostile. It was not uncommon to encounter resistance among women in Anatolia to being photographed or filmed by strangers. After waiting for 20 minutes for the unseen woman to finish her prayers or for anyone else to agree to recite a little verse, I decided to continue my trek up. 493

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As the road’s incline was getting pronounced, I waved at a pickup truck that was racing forth. The young driver was a Hamshentsi from Borçka. Two lightly clad girls were walking by the roadside, and he stopped to pick them up without any prior exchange, so it seemed to be the local custom in the mountain villages. He spoke in Hamshetsnak with me but in Turkish with the girls. The girls got off ten minutes later. This part of Ardala was thickly forested, with the road under the permanent shadow of trees. We stopped at the tea depot where the driver had to pick up a load of bags. Before I got out, he offered me a ride out of Ardala, telling me he would be leaving in one hour and asking me to save his name and number on my cell phone. Many people in Turkey and in the Hamshen villages had given me rides but this was the first time someone who did not seem especially interested in talking further or in my work—he had not even asked—had done this, so I thanked him for his generosity and he repeated at what time he would be driving off from the tea depot. Some children were lazily milling around. A short man in his 40s was sitting on a ledge, smoking, his abbot’s belly barely contained within his blue T-shirt, torn in one or two places. The friendliness I had found among the Kızılays in the lower quarter and the other Hamshen villages was becoming rarer the further I climbed the hill. The fat man was responding in Turkish monosyllables to my questions in Hamshetsnak, and looked at me a couple of times with deliberate rancor. As I was about to walk away, he asked me if I came from Armenia. No, but I was Armenian from America, I responded. He continued smoking in silence, the children looking at me with some curiosity for a moment but returning to idle boredom just before I resumed my uphill march, under the tall trees that met at the canopies, forming a leafy tunnel over the road. There was a mosque at a bend in the road, renovation still in progress. Two young men from Xigoba, the largest Hamshen village in the Hopa area, were finishing the work. “Have you lost your mind?” they asked me in Hamshetsnak, laughing. “What has brought you to Ardala?” A small old man, wearing a hajji cap, came running down in his slippers from the prayer hall when he heard the conversation. He seemed inoffensive enough even though he was babbling some words in Hamshetsnak with discomfort, asking me a little nervously a couple of times if I was from Armenia. Then the imam, as short as him, a beardless redhead who could not have been much older than 20, came to greet me with friendliness and to show off the mosque, of white external walls and spectacular arabesque work inside, with interwoven patterns in blue, red, and gold. He was a Turk from Trebizonda, so he regretted he did not speak Hamshetsnak. So young was he that he could have passed for a teenager had he been in school uniform. A new carpet had been laid, the fumes of glue, paint, and plastic converging in the synthetic smell of new things. He wanted to know 494

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if I was a Muslim, which he asked with some shyness. “We are brothers,” he responded when I said I was Apostolic Armenian. “Biz kardeşiz,” he repeated, and asked the old pilgrim to take our picture with his cell phone, which the old man held hesitantly until I approached him and explained how to use it. At that moment a young man, athletic and bald, dashed into the mosque without much reverence and practically berated the old hajji, towering over him and demanding explanations about what was going on. He turned to me in astonishment when I spoke to him in Hamshetsnak. “Are you from Armenia?” he asked in Turkish. “Who sent you here?” He was using the common formula in Anatolia when you were recommended from out of town to be a local’s guest, especially in villages or towns. I had been asked the same question in other Hamshen villages as well, yet as the reception was welcoming I had come to dismiss it as little more than a convention. It did not take me more than a few seconds to realize that I was the reason of this young man’s anger, but it was not clear why he was taking it out on the hajji, who was sorely shrugging with a sheepish smile, his beady pupils rolling nervously from me to the bald man. One of the Xigoba teenagers was following the conversation from the window, looking at the bald man with scorn. He may have been fishing for anecdotes to add to the vast stock of jokes about the Ardeletsi. They were mostly unfit to print, yet one of the many friends who had advised me against going to Ardala told me that if I was still going, against all prudence and reason, not to do it on the night of a full moon. But the imam, also in a pilgrim cap, was of amicable disposition; he told one of the men from Xigoba to come and take one more picture inside the mosque, with him in the middle, and the bald man and I flanking him. The bald man reacted with an unhappy laugh to this but complied if only not to make a scene in the presence of the cleric, saying with an annoyed smirk, or smile: “Two Muslims and one …” he said, “I don’t want to say one what …” without completing the thought. But he displayed a toothy grin for the photo on the imam’s smartphone. He looked very much like Ardeletsi Cesur, the one the police were looking for. I mentioned his name to him; of course he knew him, he acknowledged without much warmth. Before he returned to Rize for the day, the imam thanked me again for visiting and asked me if he could drop me off somewhere along the road. Then he drove off in his curvy hatchback, with the old Ardeletsi hajji in the passenger seat. The empty road wound up steeply past vast tea plantations that stretched beyond the hilltops, out of sight. After some 20 minutes without a person or vehicle passing by, I came upon a wooded stretch of the road. A fat young man in white shirt and jeans, smoking by the roadside, left my greeting in Hamshetsnak unanswered, asking me instead if I was from “Ermenistan”— the Turkish name for Armenia—and what I was doing in their village. “Kezi 495

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kuton,” he said in Hamshetsnak and advised me to leave, using the colloquial equivalent of “they beat you up” in his dialect, exactly the same phrase a thug would use in Armenian except for some mild differences in the vowel values. And yet the transparency of his hostility was a welcome wake-up call, for I had got there despite my gut advising me against the decision of my mind. A Kurdish friend in Diyarbakır had observed that there was some truth in me of the gyavur damarı (infidel’s stubbornness) that in local lore they attributed to Armenians, and even if she pretended to be teasing there was perhaps a note of caution about pushing the limits too hard in my quest in Turkey. “Kezi kuton,” the young man repeated, and swung his clenched fist at the height of his hip. “Tun kezi soy put a’a,” I told him in the Hamshetsnak goodbye: “Take care of yourself.” So I turned back, letting my instincts retrace my steps. He did not answer back in the customary “Tun al kezi” (“You too”), but acknowledged it with a nod. It was a brief sign that he had lowered his guard. He did not look much unlike myself in height and countenance, short and with black hair, aquiline profile and eyes close to the bridge of his nose, if only on a beardless and swollen face and body, and wearing imitation Texan boots. And that should have been all there was to it, yet the appearance of calm was not assuaging what now felt like a punch in my stomach as I began to march down the slope at a slower pace than I felt compelled to, trying to keep a semblance of calm so as not to attract even further attention. The engine clank preceded a black pickup truck, the trees reflected on the windshield, a Turkish flag flashing for an instant beneath the glass, like an omen. A blond man with a hook nose resembling a pigeon’s beak peered at me as he passed me and pulled over by the young man, a little further up the road. I was now walking briskly, ignoring the calls of the young man to stop, as he hurried after me with difficulty and finally caught up. “They want to talk to you,” he said, panting, and handed me a cell phone. A man with a bass voice asked laughing in Hamshetsnak if I was Armenian, the preamble to a ramble laced with insults in Turkish, making predictable comments about my birth and describing themselves, an indeterminate first person plural he did not explain, as “the children of Atatürk.” It was a phrase—“Biz Atatürk’ün çocuklarıyız”—he repeated often, the chorus to his profuse litany of curses in Turkish. The Voice kept calling me “Hagop,” even though I corrected him a couple of times. It was indeed like my friend from Urfa had told me: Hagop was the name Turkish fascists hated the most. Strangely, I would still respond, begging his pardon with the formal expression of “Efendim?” every time I missed a question, which he would answer himself anyway as he dismissed my responses with sarcasm, calling me in turn an ASALA terrorist, a spy, and an Armenian son of an Armenian as the beginning of a profanity, a nationality this child of Atatürk incorporated 496

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into the wealth of Turkish words and expressions meant to aggravate, a master of which he proved himself. There was a dissonance, which took me a while to figure out and perhaps instinctively drove me to talk back without disrespect, between the baseness of his lexicon, on the one hand, and the correctness of his grammar and immaculate pronunciation, on the other. It was a strange case of a vulgarian with an educated voice. His discourse was articulate and controlled, and seemed that of a wordsmith, speaking in the well-constructed sentences and punctuation that come naturally to a man who writes regularly. Every few minutes, he would ask me to pass the cell phone to the young man. On a couple of occasions when I missed his request, the Voice would switch to Hamshetsnak and, not hearing the young man, he would insist, “Işxan! Işxan!” an Armenian proper name and noun that means “prince.” “Işxan?” I asked both the Voice and the young man. But he said, “Islam, pass the phone on to Islam,” and the young man confirmed that was his name. We were then walking by the deserted tea depot where the driver from Borçka had dropped me off. There was a second occasion, however, in which I was sure he was calling him “Işxan.” I handed the cell phone over to Işxan, or Islam. And then I ran. The road was empty all the way down to the cluster of buildings where the group of women had been milling around. The sky was overcast. I looked up at the window of the apartment where the old storyteller lived, and the curtain was drawn. At this speed, I should be at the home of the Kızılays in less than 10 minutes. Their cordial welcome had drawn me to ascend into the depth of Ardala. I had dismissed the jokes and warnings as fossilized impressions of locals who usually had more difficulty than outsiders in appreciating change among themselves, even a long time after it had been happening. The world was transforming thanks to social networks, I had thought to myself as I pressed deeper into the village’s wooded heights. I had passed up two opportunities to get a ride out of this place that was growing darker the more I climbed. But when I let my gut take charge of my steps, I realized that I had been given fair warning and, for all the jokes about them, the Turkish fascists of Ardala were no fun. And then a green Fiat Doblo overtook me and pulled over 30 meters down the slope. Three men stepped out of the car. The man in the imitation Texan boots with his half Al Capone smile stepped out still panting a little, accompanied by an olive-skinned man, slightly taller than him, with a stern expression and calm behavior, who was now holding the cell phone and speaking with the Voice, which he handed over to me for a long outpouring of insults in Turkish. There was also another man, the driver, whom I did not register. The oliveskinned man had a large forehead, and resembled more a Turk in his features than a Hamshentsi. He spoke exclusively in Turkish, and asked me to delete the photos I had taken in Ardala. The phone would come and go, while this 497

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dark-skinned man took what appeared to be instructions from the Voice. They were not letting me go, and the olive-skinned man advised me against trying to, because he said they would then take action, which he did not describe but there could be little doubt about what he meant. If I tried to escape, he said, they would also take my camera. At no moment did he say anything unbecoming nor did he lose his composure, while he handed over the phone. The Voice resumed his harangue, interspersed with brief coughs of sarcastic laughter. He spoke as if from a silent chamber. Perhaps he used a noise-canceling microphone, which made the clarity of his well-pronounced insults more nitid and ominous, like the evil character in a movie. It was all ridiculous, but at that moment it did not feel like it. And his articulate speech contrasted with that of most of the villagers, in his grammatical correctness and pronunciation, even if the discourse was of the basest type. The olive-skinned man’s Turkish was not unlike the Voice’s, in that it seemed closer to the grammatical standard. Unlike the others, he never said one bad word. Then the olive-skinned man told me they were going to fetch a Turkish flag to hang in front of me and take my picture with it. The Voice had commanded them to do so. “Don’t do that,” I said, suddenly revolting at the thought. “I am Armenian.” We were standing by the construction site of a two-floor brick building. A man in his undershirt was leaning out of an unfinished window opening, madly shouting things at the top of his voice, his long uncombed hair and mustachio covered in a white patina of lime. He went on in a deranged fashion in a language which I could not determine was Turkish or Hamshetsnak, all the while waving a small Turkish flag like a demented sports fan. “That flag is too small,” one of the men said. A little crowd had surrounded us, including one of the women I had approached, who looked at me with concern or fear, and three young men, one of whom was slender and tall and gesturing at me reassuringly, advising me to stay calm. The olive-skinned man asked me who had sent me. “No one,” I said. “I know Hamshetsnak is well spoken here, and I wanted to gather songs and old sayings.” Nothing in his expression changed and he gave names of well-known Hamshentsis from Hopa and Istanbul, some of whom were my friends. Yes, I knew them, and was friends with them, I said. He also wanted to know if I knew the people from Hadig, the Hamshentsi organization in Istanbul. He again asked me if they had “sent me.” There was no way to convince him that I had come on my own. “Did they send you?” I repeated for the umpteenth time that I had come on my own, but he was insisting, asking if they had sent me to spy. He also wanted to know why I spoke Hamshetsnak like them. The other Armenians spoke differently, he said. He told me he had seen me on the streets of Hopa. And he explained, as if confiding to a person he trusted, 498

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that there was discord with the Hadig people. “There are problems,” he said. “I didn’t know,” I responded, relaxing a little. “Had I known you would be so upset I would not have come here: I didn’t come for propaganda here; I just wanted to listen to your language.” Our conversation was in Turkish. And I turned around to the woman who was looking at me worriedly, and I asked her to tell them what I had asked from her and the other women. “He just wanted to listen to songs in Hamshetsnak,” she said with no small courage amid angry men from her own neighborhood. Then I asked her: “Did I ever bring up politics? Did I ask if you felt Armenian or anything of the sort?” Again, not only did she shake her head, but she said: “He did not say anything about Armenians,” and she repeated, “He just wanted to record some songs.” But I saw she was pale, and noticed a slight tremor in her lower lip. And that worried me, because she was with people she had spent her life with, and she may have sensed that things were as bad as I felt with the knot in my stomach. I was telling the olive-skinned man that I was sorry, that I did not want to bother them, and that I would leave of my own accord. There was no need to call the police, I said. “We are not going to call the police,” he said. “They don’t like us, and we don’t like them.” He was stern-faced, but he added: “Do not worry.” That calmed me a little, but they were not letting me go, and that was what mattered. The knot in my gut was not going away. A few minutes later I realized he was speaking on the phone with law enforcement, or some ranking member from the armed services, because I heard him describing me and addressing the person on the line as “Komutanım” (“My commander”). Now I became alarmed at my decision to carry with me all my notes from the trip, as well as all the memory cards with the photos and video. They would all be confiscated, I feared, and I would lose it all, for I had not made backup copies. At that moment I did not think how compromising it could also potentially be for some of the people who had agreed to speak with me. I was only considering the lengths of my stupidity and lack of wisdom, and wondering in shame how I could have been so short-sighted. But the olive-skinned man remained methodical, not showing any emotion and abstaining from expletives, as if doing his work. He did not speak one word too many and did not laugh when the others did, instead coordinating everything on the phone with the Voice, with the selfless professionalism of a soldier who took orders. The olive-skinned man had told me they would not call the police, but he had lied, and I remembered the wisdom of old Armenians who had grown up in the Ottoman Empire or even the Istanbul of the republican era and their advice never to believe and never to trust or to fall for the good manners of people of the land. I was ashamed of the smugness that came with some traveling, making one believe they knew better than to cast a country in simplistic terms 499

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of good or evil. Or the transition from Herodotus to Tacitus, from the morality of the Greek traveler and historian to the sophistry and cynicism of the Roman Empire at its height, and yet coming back humbled to Herodotus, for yes, for all the shades of reality, there was still good and evil. I asked the teenager who had gestured to me not to worry if the Fiat man was calling the police, and he nodded. “But he had said that he wouldn’t,” I told him. He shrugged. And he was not saying a word. They brought the Turkish flag and were trying to keep me still. Nobody put a hand on me but I was surrounded and it was done mostly jokingly, with the fat man in imitation Texan boots smoking and puffing some laughs, complaining that they could not keep me still. At least one man snapped photos on his cell phone, as I became enraged and started shouting at them in their language that at no time had I come to tell them that they were Armenian—they had now surrounded me and there were two men on my left, one with a manic expression clenching his fist and saying that he would love to beat me up, the other behind him hurling insults about Armenians’ birth. And yet I was drawing grim satisfaction from their know­ledge of how offensive the Turkish flag could be. As far as I was concerned, they were using their flag as one more profanity that they threw at me. Still, I was trying to understand why a piece of cloth with a certain set of colors and symbols would matter so much. The olive-skinned man had passed me the cell phone again but I was now attempting to talk the Voice’s language, which had become foul even by his own standards. The man in imitation Texan boots, the one who had first told me to get out of Ardala, now had an amused expression. “What did he tell you?” he asked, with what seemed genuine curiosity. I repeated what the Voice said, still betting that this young man could not be that bad after all, and that he would be embarrassed. “Then that’s what you are!” he exclaimed: “An Armenian son of a whore.” Raising his voice, he added: “We are the children of Atatürk!” Fear rather than rage was drawn on his face. “Of course you are,” I responded. But I looked again at his face to confirm my impression and saw he was more scared than I was, shouting in terrified denial. Then we all fell silent. A Land Rover jeep from the Jandarma appeared. “Hah! You now shut up!” said the one who had been saying that he wanted to beat me up, and the others celebrated. The four gendarmes got out of the jeep in formation, two from each side of the car—holding assault rifles diagonally across their chests with the barrels pointing down and wearing their berets tilted to one side—in a perfectly choreographed display of authority. Two of the gendarmes were smiling, enjoying the moment. The theatricals were not threatening. Their sergeant approached the Ardeletsis and spoke with them. I saw one who had taken photos of me with the Turkish flag, showing him something on his cell phone and the gendarme shaking his head in disapproval, speaking with 500

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an unhappy expression. I thought the sergeant was asking the white-haired man to delete the photos. The gendarmes put me in the back of the jeep, flanked on the left by a short and dark-skinned conscript from Urfa, a smiling lad who couldn’t have been much older than 20 and who, when I told him that my grandmother was from there, spoke with brotherly affection about his hometown and Armenians. And he obviously agreed that some of the best food in Turkey came from there. “Antap, Urfa, and Adana,” he said, listing the holy trinity of cuisine in the land. He spoke a sing-song, slow Turkish, with a big smile, reassuring me that everything would be fine and I would soon be back on the road. I listened in amazement how he spoke so freely in the presence of the other gendarmes, whose loyalties and stance on all things Armenian were still unknown. A tall man from Elazığ with a white face and square jaw, also friendly, was on my right. He also told me in a whisper not to worry, but he did not speak for the rest of the trip. The driver was a wretched soul with a pale face, while the sergeant was soft-spoken and polite. He thought I was Hamshentsi as well, and so he was telling his commander over the radio. “No, I’m Armenian,” I said. He swung around from the passenger seat, wide-eyed: “Then how come you speak Hemşince?” From the corner of my eye, I noticed the Elazığ gendarme smile knowingly. The Ardeletsis had told him that I spoke Hamshetsnak, and that I said I had come to record their speech. He wanted to know what I was doing in the village. “I was trying to record popular songs and collecting wild flower samples.” The Urfa gendarme let out a loud laugh and the Elazığ one was clenching his teeth in a suppressed laughter. The sergeant tried to contain his too, and looked away in embarrassment. The driver was focused on the road, stepping hard on the accelerator. We drove to the Jandarma headquarters in the center of Hopa, next door to a pastry shop where I used to get my breakfast, tended by a charming woman from Garci. I was made to wait in a central lobby. The Elazığ gendarme was manning the reception desk. “Abi,” he addressed me in a soft voice, calling me “older brother,” a common vocative in Turkey. “Where are you from?” He wanted to know what life was like in New York and how he could make it there, to learn English, speaking in a barely audible tone. There was a sign next to him in heavy Helvetica typeface that said, “In the beginning there was Turkish,” a phrase with an echo of John 1:1. This poster showed a somewhat blurred picture of the sun against a dark background, which included a list of Turanian languages. It was a pictorial representation of the “sun theory” posited by the chief ideologist of Atatürk’s Turanian linguistic supremacy, İbrahim Necmi Dilmen. I asked to use the WC and he said I would have to be escorted, with a gendarme waiting by the door. That gave me a measure of the seriousness of my situation. 501

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The reception desk’s phone rang and the Elazığ gendarme escorted me to an office next door, where a fat colonel with big black eyes and yellowed irises asked me in hurried, angry Turkish who I was, what I was doing in Ardala and Turkey, and who was paying my expenses. The sergeant had come by the door and was explaining the circumstances of my detention, with the colonel pretending to be upset, throwing angry glances at me, but he was hamming it up and he was not making me anxious. In a nod to me, the sergeant said my Turkish was very basic and that I did not understand very well. Yet I wondered if this was the proverbial good cop–bad cop situation. Only when the Elazığ gendarme returned with teas in tulip-shaped glasses did I notice a man, somewhat unkempt and with a whiskey barrel of a paunch, in an old and faded blue T-shirt. Sporting a mustachio that looked like a shaggy outcrop, he was on the farther end of the bench I was sitting on. This man was following the conversation with the smile and laid-back attitude of small-town people, and I assumed him to be a civilian or relative of the colonel—there was some physical resemblance—until I noticed the handle of a gun tucked beneath his T-shirt. And yet he was not someone that inspired mistrust: everything about him and his body language inspired confidence, contributing to camaraderie while the five of us were having tea. Except for the Elazığ and Urfa gendarmes, who were Kurds, all the others were Turks, one of those strange things that in police stations or schools—by their speech or physiognomy— became oddly visible, or obvious. The colonel wanted to know how come I spoke Hemşince, the Turkish name for Hamshetsnak. It was not that different than Armenian, I told him. He looked stunned, but with a hint of a smile beneath the ire he feigned. “Are they Armenian?” he asked me. As I was wrangling my way in and out of trouble with a confusing blabber, the Elazığ gendarme, still standing at the door, said softly as if in confidence, looking at me, “the Hemşinlis are Armenian,” but I was still responding with evasive comments, and he quit insisting after saying a couple of times, “but they are.” Then the colonel turned to the man in the blue T-shirt as if exchanging meaningful glances, asking him how the tea was, an unusual question in a country where it was more common than water and was drunk by the gallon in every office and household every day. The whiskey-paunched man said the tea was fine, and added something with the same casual smile, the tail end of which I caught, suggesting I should be sent to the MİT in Ankara. He was not raising his voice, as if talking about some banality. But he was recommending I be shipped off to the headquarters of Turkish intelligence in the capital. I turned to him in alarm, and I saw the colonel realize that my Turkish was not all that bad. There was some coming and going, and a short gendarme who 502

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was the deputy commander showed up. I immediately felt he was Kurdish. The commander wanted to talk to me, he said. The commander was on the second floor, and the office was luminous. The standard Atatürk portrait was hanging in the room and piles of books were arranged before his desk, with a somewhat staged look. On top of the first pile there was a book on the Hamshentsis. I was too distracted to remember but it may have been Hemşin’in Tarihi Köklerine Doğru (On the Historical Origins of Hamshen) by Remzi Yılmaz. The commander and his deputy allowed me to browse it and I thought I found a passage that said something on the Hamshentsis being pure Turks from the steppes of Central Asia. But this was not the best setting for reading, so I put it back on top of the pile of books. The commander was younger than his immediate subordinates by at least a decade or more, probably in his late 20s, a dark-haired man with thick eyebrows, and a serious demeanor that was somewhat staged and stiff. He asked softly in a bass voice, and I had to repeat everything. He appeared a little confused when I told him that I was collecting old songs and flowers, and exchanged glances with his deputy, who shrugged slightly with a hint of a smile. The deputy would tell the commander the official Turkish names for the villages I visited, looking at him showing, or feigning, ignorance of the Hamshen names that everybody used and that not even the Ardeletsi used for their own village. “Are you an American citizen?” He nodded when I said yes. “Journalist.” At no time, neither he nor any officer had asked for my ID, which puzzled me. It was a curious omission. The commander was genuinely intrigued why I had not sought permission from the muhtar, or village chief, but seemed to accept my explanation that I ignored the protocol and that I had not observed it in the other villages, without any problem. In Dzağrina I had stayed with the former muhtar the night before, and he had not told me anything about it. When the deputy told him the official name of Dzağrina, the commander asked me if had visited the waterfall and strongly recommended me to see it next time I came by. I told him that only in Ardala had I encountered problems, and he shared my opinion that they could be “aggressive.” He added that in any case I should avoid that village altogether in the future. “Don’t go back there.” In appreciation of his honesty, I told him that as an Armenian in Turkey I was aware of sensitivities and that nothing was further from my mind than provoking people. “I am not mad,” I told him, to which he let out a loud laugh, suddenly out of character for a moment. He then launched on an explanation about the origins of all peoples in Turkey, that there was only the Turkish nation in the entire country, with dialectal differences. It was a memorized cliché, but he expressed it politely and without any offensive comments. He recommended that I seek authorization from the kaymakam (district governor), and asked the deputy commander to see me out. I 503

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shook hands with him but he had now reverted to his stoic appearance. I thanked them and walked over to the government building, a couple of blocks away. A porter at the large and deserted office building, as most public buildings in Turkey’s interior are, sent me to a large reception hall on the second floor, where a smiling employee told me to return the following day. As I was heading back home, someone tapped me on the shoulder. The sergeant that had detained me in Ardala had come running, to ask me, panting, to return to the Jandarma headquarters. He was smiling but still gasping from the sprint. Everything was fine, it was nothing important, one little thing they needed to sort out. He was trying to be reassuring, but he had run too fast to catch me to be convincing. It would be a moment, he said. I was made to sit, again in front of the sun poster about Turkish being the mother of every language, with the Elazığ gendarme there, but now avoiding eye contact with me. The colonel with the angry face was in his office talking with the man in the blue T-shirt, whose soft voice came as a distant drone or murmur. The sergeant told him that I was here. “Let him wait outside,” I heard him say curtly, without looking at me even though I was in the lobby, diagonally across from his office, the door of which was open. After a while I tried to make eye contact with the Elazığ gendarme and asked him what was going on but he arched his eyebrows. Then the dark colonel came out and I asked him why they had brought me back. He was walking away, ignoring my question but retraced his steps and apologized, telling me that I had to wait. They all seemed to be busy with something else but I was sensing, perhaps with some paranoia, that it all had to do with me. The Urfa gendarme reappeared, also avoiding talking to me except when the sergeant told him to ask me if I wanted some tea. When the sergeant finally came out of his office, I asked him what was going on. He, too, was about to walk away, but then turned back and whispered, trying to adopt the most amicable face and an innocuous voice, “Our friends in the police want to speak with you.” For all his efforts, everything in his tone and eyes was communicating that this was now becoming a big deal. With him gone, I asked the Elazığ gendarme if the Jandarma and Polis were not the same, and his expression answered more than his words: “No, we’re only law enforcement for the villages: they are the police.” The Urfa gendarme approached me and this time told me in a very low voice not to worry, that just like here at the Jandarma, the police would only ask me a few questions and would let me go. “They just want to speak with you, and then you will walk out,” he said. But I now felt that this was getting out of hand, and feared that I would have my notebooks and memory cards confiscated. The deputy commander who had escorted me out the first time came down from his upper-floor office. He was upset to see me back, his grudge clearly not directed at me: “Are you still here?” And he ran back up. 504

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I had been sitting there for close to two hours, expecting to be whisked off to the police station at any moment, when the olive-skinned Ardeletsi—the Voice’s assistant, who had staged my “hostage” photo with the Turkish flag and had called the gendarmes—turned up, looking dejected yet concentrating all the hatred he could muster into his cavernous eyes, which he trained on me. It seemed he had overreached. A gendarme escorted him to the office of the sergeant, who left his door open. The Voice’s assistant sat in front of the sergeant, who was explaining with a profusion of angry gestures something that was disappointing him by the looks of it, and he tried unsuccessfully to reply only to be rebuked by the sergeant. He and his sidekicks must have been the ones who reported me to the police after the gendarmes let me walk away. Five minutes later, the deputy commander walked up to me in his martial gait, usually the way to tell new conscripts from professional officers, the fruit of years of training and rehearsals, or an instance of faking it till making it. “You can go now,” he told me and, for a second time, escorted me to the back gate. The surly colonel was there too, as were a dozen gendarmes—I saw the tall Elazığ one, and the sergeant. They had gathered around me, while the Voice’s assistant was sulking in the background, like a beaten neighborhood bully, staring at me from the lobby. I shook hands with the deputy commander—he had seemed friendly from the beginning, and whatever had happened in the background and that I did not know about, I had a feeling he had weighed in to let me go—and thanked him for his courteous behavior as the fat colonel, who was listening with amused curiosity to my short words of gratitude, looked on. I shook hands with him as well. “We are relatives, aren’t we?” the deputy commander said, with a little, not entirely sincere smile, and I understood he meant Armenians and the undefined “we” he had in mind: whether Turks, or perhaps Kurds, as I rather took it to mean, for he reminded me a lot of the Kurds I had met on this trip. Or, perhaps, there was a less metaphorical reference to somebody in his lineage, with so many grandchildren of Armenian women in Turkey. Regardless of how sincere or not, he had been gentlemanly and righteous from the beginning, and had tried to help me. Maybe all these gendarmes were standing there because it was not always that a foreigner got caught in a situation like this, or maybe because what had gone on behind the office doors and phone calls was more serious than I was aware of. I never found out, and did not linger much longer in Hopa to learn. But seeing them made me think again how agreeable fellows could become cogs in the mechanics of coercion. They were employed by an imperial state to impose its will on a plural population. These men—themselves diverse in mentality and outlook, sensitivities, and secret ambitions, as any two or more different individuals are bound to be—grouped together into a regular 505

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armed formation, were the enforcers of that state will, or the reason why Turkey was what we knew it to be.     

Kâzım was not speaking as he typed away on his computer. There was no reason for me to be in his office at the headquarters of the district government of Hopa, and I was by now suspecting that he had taken me there to let his library speak for itself: Kévorkian’s book as well as the others on the Genocide said what he had better not in his capacity as a state official, one of those enforcers of Turkey’s will. His case reminded me of Nehru’s comment to Khrushchev, or one attributed to him, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would not be able to maintain uncontested rule over such a well-read population. Yet Turkey was still far from attaining Soviet levels of schooling, for Kâzım’s intellectual preparation was not indicative of the prevalent educational standards in the country. His discourse was an exercise in ambiguity, which I had come to appreciate intellectually and linguistically, if not morally, as it offered a richer milieu for the development of ideas. Ambiguity was one of the cornerstones of Shakespeare’s literature, and perhaps the main key to its timelessness and beauty, as William Empson, an undergraduate at Cambridge, had suggested in a monograph that would later be expanded into Seven Types of Ambiguity, the little book that revealed this literary technique.5 Macbeth, especially, makes ample use of this language: “and oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.” Both Kâzım and his cousin Ihsan were stunted Shakespearean characters. Despite their intellectual and moral sensitivity to the history they were born into, they had remained ungerminated seeds, trapped in the infertile monotony of modern life and the false trappings of their bureaucratic jobs, like the overwhelming majority of us, even those with shallower minds and souls. Few of us yearn for tragedy in our present, yet fewer of us enjoy the transit through life lost in the secondary cast, unheard or unseen, and forgotten, only to exit with our song unsung. Perhaps Kâzım was no friend, but I left his office sure that he was no foe, suspecting that he had begun a journey into the truth. A space populated with books created an atmosphere of know­ledge waiting to emerge, creating silent bonding by their mere presence. But that sensation was magnified when the books bore the name of Armenia or Armenian names in a government office in Turkey, for they reconnected me at an intimate level to the home of my childhood and to many houses, schools, newsrooms, and offices all over the world, where Armenian communities were still struggling for justice. Kâzım’s 506

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office book cabinet was a small step down the path to acknowledgment. In this minor, remarkable subversion, of displaying 1915 literature in a public building of the perpetrating state, Kâzım had secretly asserted that we belonged to the same world. It was a silent yet unmistakable instance. He was browsing something in his papers and I stood there contemplating the books, exclaiming surprise at these titles, with him nodding and looking down. Only upon transcribing my notes did I realize two omissions that I had missed in his long soliloquy about Armenians’ alleged brutalities. While his Laz colleague was in the office and in our conversation afterwards, Kâzım at no time had said that the Hamshentsis were Turks, nor had he disputed the veracity of the Genocide.     

After I left Kâzım’s office. I bumped into the green-eyed teenager, the one who had counseled me to keep my cool and seemed friendly during the Ardala incident. He apologized for the behavior of his fellow villagers: “There are people in my village who are not people,” he said, using a Turkish expression to indicate lack of decency. “They are an embarrassment.” Later I would find out he was from the same clan as the Voice and the olive-skinned man, who was the Voice’s son. “Why were you at the Jandarma yesterday?” the pastry shop attendant asked me in Hamshetsnak. I realized, with a shiver down my spine, that the gendarmerie headquarters were a couple of buildings down the street, and I certainly did not want to bump into any of them, not even the nice ones. “I forget,” I responded, to the last laugh I stole from her before I left Hopa. She was the Köroğlu girl who had introduced herself as an Armenian the first time I had come to this café. The gang at Pançuni wanted to hear all about Ardala that night, while Ihsan rebuked me for ignoring his warnings not to go there. One wanted me to describe the men, and he was trying to guess who each person was. It was part of a somewhat ritual rivalry between the Hamshen socialists and fascists, the latter overwhelmingly outnumbered in the Hopa and Makrial areas. They would engage in collective brawls, usually after dark in Hopa’s commercial district. Paramaz, the owner of the restaurant, proposed that we return to Ardala to sort this affront out, but I was not up for it and wanted to finish the trip and get out of Turkey without much of a police record. Yet he was still yearning for a good fight “with bare knuckles, like a man,” and so were a few of the other “good ones,” whose support I found heartening and made me feel morally vindicated. 507

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They were also appalled at the Turkish flag display. Quite revealingly, they considered it offensive. I had assumed that someone who was born and raised in Turkey would approach local national symbols differently than a Diaspora Armenian, yet they all thought it an outrageous insult. The Kurdish girlfriend of Paramaz, himself of a Kurdish mother, was shocked too. “Are you joking?” And regardless of how many years have passed, “Turk,” “Turkey,” and “Turkish” were words that still jarred me for a second or two until reason reclaimed my senses, and yet the enormity of the crime still weighed down on the name, even after accounting for the righteous. The following morning I went for breakfast to a café by the sea and joined Erke, a balding redhead with a long goatee and always a hazy expression, his eyes more often than not bloodshot, as likely from lack of sleep as it was from excess of drink. He was a good storyteller and a fluent speaker of Hamshetsnak, as well as an enthusiastic fighter in the street battles against the fascists, even though some of his drinking buddies would be on the opposite side. Erke was sharing the table with two Hamshentsi friends, including one who had given his two children Armenian names. They were going for a picnic to a Laz village halfway between Hopa and Makrial, with a Laz friend of theirs— they duly clarified that their non-Hamshentsi friend was a Marxist, which reflected more on local relations and politics, neither of which concerned me. We rode in the Laz’s pickup, with both Erke and I sitting in the back, leaning against the rear of the cab. With our eyes on the road we were leaving behind and the traffic trailing us, Erke, who was usually of a humorous disposition, fell into a bleak mood. When they were little, he said, the elders in his village told the kids—their grandchildren, relatives, or friends of their age— how they had massacred Armenians, throwing them over the precipice at Cehennem Deresi (Hell’s Gorge) in Ardanuş. His own grandfather said he had massacred Armenians, Erke said. “They would gather us and tell us these stories of Armenians being thrown over the precipice, and we the children would listen awestruck,” he said, opening his large eyes even wider to mimic their surprise. Never had I thought that as the grandchild of a Genocide survivor I would hear the matching story from the grandchild of a perpetrator. And not in my wildest imagination would I have imagined that it would have involved converted Armenians who spoke the same language, in which Erke’s grandfather had told it and he was now relaying it to me. There were the remains of childhood shock in his older voice of the present, one less prone to commotion as age may wear down convictions and morality, giving our expression a hardening veneer of cynicism. But beneath that patina of cynicism there was still that shock of a child who had heard his grandfather tell him about killing dozens of people. I double-checked with him that his grandfather had said he had massacred Armenians, and he twice confirmed it. 508

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I also asked his grandfather’s name, which he said after an instant of hesitation that maybe only lasted a second, yet was still noticeable. I had heard survival stories from my grandmother and from countless others, and Erke spoke of at least two other old men in his village who said they had slaughtered Armenians. He described his grandfather’s past deeds in a speech with no adjectives, like a natural catastrophe, a tale with no morale. A Hamshentsi academic, Dursun, had earlier told me that some Western Hamshentsi bandits were known to have slaughtered Armenians in 1915, including Yakub Mullaoğlu. It was not clear, however, if any Hamshentsis from the Hopa area had participated in the massacres, or if they merely claimed to in order to prove their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. Ihsan had doubted it too. Yet Erke’s testimony seemed to explain why so many young Hamshentsis were so familiar with the massacres at Cehennem Deresi in Ardanuş. On the mountain we opened the bottles of beer and the snacks. The views were spectacular, even if the shed precariously perched on a cliff induced vertigo, linked to firm ground by just a narrow plank over an abyss. One of the Hamshentsis, who did not take off his sunglasses, raised a toast to the memory of Hrant Dink. It was paradoxical, I reflected, that one death had forced Turks to confront the 1½ million that had preceded him a century earlier. It had nothing to do with Dink’s nationality, the man in sunglasses responded: “Hrant was killed because he was a socialist.” Many Turkish communists had lost their lives for the same reason, too. I begged to disagree: Dink had lost his life after he wrote that Atatürk’s adoptive daughter was an Armenian orphan from the Genocide. Didn’t he remember the confessed murderer posing with the policemen displaying a Turkish flag? The soccer fans who had gone to the stadium wearing white caps like that worn by Dink’s murderer? And the crowd that had taken to the streets after his murder with the placards, “We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant”? Were they proclaiming it because of Hrant’s socialist convictions? The man in sunglasses became enraged and started to attack me, shouting at the top of his voice: “You are not a communist! Hrant was murdered for being a socialist! It’s got absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or nationalities: fascists attack communists, that’s the fight we have now in Turkey, it’s got nothing to do with Armenians or anything else.” Erik, the Hamshentsi that had given his children Armenian names, and the Laz—who had initially said that indeed Hrant had been killed for his ideological convictions, not his nationality—were all silent now, following the protocol I had observed in arguments among the Hamshentsis with me, probably because any mediation would have led to escalation. The mood was ruined and the unusually glorious weather did not dispel the poisoned air. We finished the beers and headed back to Hopa, Erke and I again going in the truck’s cargo bay, now in silence. 509

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In the course of three days, Armenian identity had exposed me to the ire of Hamshentsis on the far right of Turkish nationalism and on the far left of Turkish communism. It was high time to leave Hopa. I would visit a pocket of Hamshen in the western Black Sea area, a 15-hour trip along the coast, accepting an invitation from Melahat. She had a bed-and-breakfast near a Genoese fortress in Akçakoca. This cluster of three Hamshen villages, with a population of approximately 1,000 inhabitants, had formed after the 1878 Russo–Turkish war.     

A man of uncertain relation to Melahat came to pick me up from the bus stop. Numan did not look Hamshentsi, nor did he seem interested in anything about Hamshen. The ring with the Ottoman imperial seal he wore made me wary of him. The hunch was minimally confirmed when Melahat told him I was Armenian. He grimaced and pulled his chair back from the table in disgust. “Oh, what is it?” asked Melahat with an embarrassed smile, knowing full well the reason for his reaction. We were on the balcony of the bed-and-breakfast, with an unhindered view of the Genoese fortress cutting against the Black Sea. But he left it at that and did not display any hostility again. A woman of gentle speech, there was some coldness in her detachment, her lips pursed as if in bitterness. She was in her mid-30s but had lost her husband to cancer some years ago. Yet she did not display a lot of emotion when speaking about him. “His uncle was a general in the Turkish army,” she commented as the only, unusual biographical information about the father of her oldest daughter. Pointing to her, a beauty coming of age, Melahat had said, “Her father is …” and had squinted her eyes, sticking her tongue out as she tilted her head, with an irreverent gesture with her hands to indicate finished. But I was not sure what to make of it. Her husband had kidnapped her and forced her into marriage when she was 18, she said a few hours later. A Laz, he had nabbed her in broad daylight in the center of Akçakoca, and had kept her hostage for three months. She was locked in a windowless room, chained to the floor with a leash long enough to allow her to walk to a toilet. Her parents had been driven witless trying to find her, but her captor’s uncle, the general, had pulled strings to stall the police search. Yet on some Turkish patriotic days she would put a photo of that general as her profile picture on a social network. Finally, she had relented and had agreed to marry him: “I had no choice.” Well read as she was, Melahat knew about Armenian history and the origins of Hamshentsis, and she was curious to learn more. But it would be a stretch to expect her to “feel” Armenian. “It’s been more than 300 years,” she said with 510

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a smile. “We need some time.” She asked what Armenians called themselves in Armenian, but she blushed when I responded: “Hai.” After hesitating a little, she said Hai was a curse among the Hamshentsis of the Akçakoca area, and she gave some examples of phrases in which it was commonly used, the mildest of which were: “Hai, kezi inch asim?” (“What can I call you, Armenian?”) and “Hai tsımorı” (“To your Armenian mother”). For a long time, it had been assumed that the endonym for “Armenian” had disappeared among the Hamshentsis, who referred to the Armenians by the Turkish word of Ermeni. At least in Akçakoca it had survived, if exclusively as a swearword, its original meaning forgotten. We drove to the center of the city, where a man in Italian sunglasses and a beige suit, a cousin of Melahat, gave us his large BMW to visit the Hamshen villages. He did not seem very pleased to hear me speak in Hamshetsnak so we reverted to Turkish. At her home in the village of Hemşin Köyü, Melahat’s father, a large man, received me very warmly, as he would a family member, kissed me on both cheeks after a big hug and, even if he was a man of few words, rejoiced in our conversation in the vernacular. The women in her household—Melahat’s mother and her aunt—were much more reserved, their greetings mere nods and murmured salutes. “But we are of Greek origin, from Trebizonda,” Melahat’s father said. Melahat had heard it before and she was mystified for there was nothing Greek that had survived in the family lore, traditions, or even words, so she wondered if it could have been an old tactic to deflect the negativity associated with being Armenian, for a Greek origin in Turkey was not as bad back in the day. More importantly, she did not understand how they had ended up as Hamshentsis if they were of Greek ancestry. We waited for the muezzin’s call—actually, the imam’s through loudspeakers—to break the bread and the fast of Ramadan. Right after the ezzan the jackals on the crests howled for nearly ten minutes before the laments began to die down. Some distant cries, shrill and mournful, lingered over the mountains for longer. There were three Hamshen villages on the same hill. Melahat’s, Hemşin Köyü, was at its foot. In a middle valley there was Yenice. At the top there was the most populated one, Karatavuk, even though locals said that Hemşin Köyü’s population had now overtaken it. As I had seen in the Hopa and Makrial area, here, too, each village had its own peculiar character notwithstanding their proximity, each separated at most by 20 minutes by car. Hamshetsnak was spoken fluently in both Karatavuk and Hemşin Köyü, even though the younger generations no longer used it. The language had disappeared in Yenice, the middle village. There was another particularity to Yenice, Melahat said: these Hamshentsis would give their daughters in marriage to outsiders—people from the city of Akçakoca or anywhere else—but not to men of the other two 511

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Hamshen villages on the same mountain. Why was that, I asked Melahat, to seek confirmation for a hypothesis that had just occurred to me. She did not know, or did not want to say as we walked about her land. Their modest family home had a forest for a backyard. It took us about half an hour to walk down to its sloping end, drawn with barbed wire. “This is mine,” Melahat was saying in Hamshetsnak. Barefoot and wearing a loose white T-shirt and shorts, she led me to a large rock at the bottom of the forest, an enchanted land of blooming life, intensely green and heavily wooded. “They say there is gold buried beneath this rock.” She pointed to a very faint scratch on the surface of the rock that was not easy to discern in the shade of the thick foliage. I divined the Է, the Armenian E, confirming it by sliding my finger over the worn surface. “It’s a letter, but it is also an old name Armenians gave to God,” I told her, “for ‘E’ in Armenian means ‘Is,’ as in ‘He is.’” As we made our way back up to her home, we bumped into Melahat’s uncle, who had dug up ancient artifacts, including a fragment of a carved ivory pipe that he carried with him. Earlier in the day, we had walked to the house of the Hemşin Köyü village chief, the muhtar, an imam by profession. He was sitting in the shade of his ample porch, coping with the pangs of thirst and hunger of Ramadan in the summer. With Melahat and her friend Numan gone for a walk, the imam, who had recited the article of faith about the Hamshentsis being of “pure Turkish” stock and other tenets of their mythological origin, asked me in a whisper if the rumors about their Armenian origin were true. “Beyond any doubt,” I responded, as he nodded in silence, accepting the veracity of the statement. “But why should it be such a taboo?” Then I told him my view about our common origin from apelike hominids, the same word in Turkish as “monkey” (maymun), which in addition to translating poorly the concept I wanted to convey could also cause offense. That was the case, eliciting an enraged reaction from the imam: “Impossible!” Then he launched into a fast-clipped recitation of how Allah had populated the world after creating Adam from the original drop of semen. So quickly was he rolling his tongue that I could only capture some names and numbers, and the multiplications he was making with remarkable speed or memory. The figures I was picking up sounded a lot like the Twelve Tribes of Israel as listed in the Book of Revelation: 12,000 from the tribe of Reuben; 12,000 from the tribe of Manasseh, and so on, for a total of 144,000 persons. Then he quoted the 25 prophets mentioned in the Qur’an, giving their Turkish and Arabic names: Adam, Enoch, Noah, Heber, Methuselah, Lot, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Jethro, Job, Ezekiel, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Elias, Elisha, Jonah, Zachariah, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Muhammad. The nervous energy of his discourse reminded me of the Ankara dagger- and bead-maker, who had recited in one breath the life and death of fedayi Kevork Chavush. 512

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His mother was reading an old Qur’an that by its looks could not have been newer than the nineteenth century. She held it in her lap while sitting on the steps of an external stairway into the courtyard. A small woman in full Islamic garb with her head covered in a shawl, she was running her eyes over the snakelike Arabic script with intense concentration, indifferent to her starving body and to the sun of noon. An old mill spun water from the creek that ran through the backyard. It did not take me long to understand the feeling of déjà vu: the scene was familiar, a free interpretation and rearrangement of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Yet beyond the faint and accidental iconic echo of the 1930 painting, there was a deeper historical relevance of Armenian import to the scene that was placidly playing out at the imam’s house in Hemşin Köyü. The story was coming full circle: this woman, whose ancestors had migrated to the Black Sea in the eighth century after rising up against the Arab conquerors of Armenia, was now beholden to their religion and scriptures. After dinner we headed to Karatavuk. We were to meet the village chief at the teahouse. Melahat said she would wait in the car. Unusually, she had covered her head with a shawl. Numan accompanied me to the teahouse, a long room with gray walls where men had gathered around tables playing tavlo or cards, the teardrop tea glasses next to them. It was Anytown, Anatolia, complete with the yellowed Atatürk portrait. But nobody was expecting us, and the village chief was not answering the telephone as Numan dialed his number with growing frustration and, I noticed, concern. A man barged in: “Are you Armenian?” I just remember him as a dark blur, with a thick mustachio. “We are Turks,” he responded, livid, and kicked us out, and the shocked patrons returned to their table games as if they had not heard anything. Melahat’s Turkish friend was upset and confused. He had not made much of an effort to disguise his dislike of Armenians when he had learned I was one, yet this smallest example of anti-Armenian Turkish nationalism in action had taken him aback. Melahat took it upon herself, for being seen in a car with two men unrelated by blood or marriage to her. It was namahrem, an unbecoming condition in Islam, even though she had waited inside the vehicle as Numan and I walked to the meeting with the no-show muhtar. Then we went to Yenice, the middle village. Men had gathered in a circle, and the air was very tense. Numan was still rattled after the little incident at Karatavuk. Yenice’s village chief, with bloodshot eyes, asked me jokingly if I observed the Ramadan fast. One man who introduced himself as an accountant said Hamshentsis came from the Altai Mountains but others disputed this, indicating that they were Turks from Khorasan. I was still nervous, fearing a repeat of Ardala after being kicked out of the teahouse, and was expecting a Jandarma jeep to pull over at any time. I just followed this discussion about the imaginary Turkish epic origins of the Hamshentsis with fraught distraction. 513

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One of them, in a red polo shirt, was aggressively parroting the “pure Turk” narrative, raising his raspy, smoker’s voice to abort speculation by the accountant who, timidly, had begun to suggest that their minority might be of non-Turanian stock. The man in the red polo shirt had intensely black eyes very close to each other beneath thick eyebrows, and the bushy, handlebar mustachio that matched his discourse, if there was any truth to the correspondence between facial hair and ideology in Turkey. He then proposed that the muhtar opened the village museum especially for us. We walked through its simple yet well-​curated exhibition of artifacts, mostly old farming implements. When Melahat saw an old wooden cradle she exclaimed its name in Hamshetsnak, and the man in the red polo shirt shut her out angrily, berating her: “Its name in Turkish is beşik.” She knew, Melahat acknowledged softly, paling. “Fine then, call it by its Turkish name,” he continued to scold her, still frowning in fury at the sound of a Hamshetsnak word. It was obvious he knew it was Armenian. As we came out of the museum a very old woman, small and clad in black, was being led to the mosque for the last namaz of the day. She was the last person who spoke Hamshetsnak in Yenice, the village chief said. Right away I called out in Hamshetsnak if she was doing well. She turned around in astonishment, her feeble, blank eyes seeking me out in the pitch dark. “Ha, soyam, isa vova?” she asked in a thread of a stunned voice: “Yes, I’m fine, who is this?” I kissed her hand, and noticed she had almost lost her sight. We exchanged brief courtesies in Hamshetsnak, and by the questions she did not ask I understood she had realized I was Armenian. “Eski Türkçe konuşuyorlar,” the man in the red polo shirt said proudly, with a broad smile: “They are speaking in old Turkish.” Then I confirmed my hypothesis as to why the Hamshentsis of Yenice refused to marry their daughters to their kin from the village on the crest, Karatavuk, or the one on the foothill, Hemşin Köyü, but they would to any other Muslim or Turk. With this old, Hamshetsnak-speaking woman, the last vestige of their links to Armenian—that dialect the man in the red polo shirt had called “old Turkish”—would disappear. The Hamshentsis of Yenice had decided to dissolve their identity beyond recognition, erasing all traces of an origin they did not even name.     

I had been to Karatavuk and Hemşin Köyü the previous year. Cesur, a man with many names and identities, had taken me there in October 2013. Our first contact had been through a social network, on which he had opened a page for “Muslim Armenians,” with a green crescent emblazoned over the red, blue, and orange Armenian tricolor. The banner image displayed the crossed-out faces of Talât, Enver, and Cemal Paşa, the Young Turks who orchestrated the Genocide 514

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and were all gunned down in the early 1920s as part of “Operation Nemesis,” a covert mission organized by the Dashnaktsutyun. We had first met one evening for a coffee in the Sirkeci district of Istanbul. Cesur had found out through a DNA test that he was of Armenian origin, perhaps a Hamshentsi. His paternal grandfather had not told the family anything about his past and, acting on a hunch, Cesur had decided to have himself tested, participating in a program called the Armenian DNA Initiative. He offered me a long weekend road trip through the periphery of Istanbul and the western Black Sea coast to meet his relatives. We hit the road on a rainy Friday. In Istanbul, Cesur worked at a foundation that claimed to help the families of Islamic refugees from the wars in the Middle East. Yet the traffic of people I saw in his office the few times I visited did not look like displaced people. They were invariably men with sinewy build and manners that betrayed military training, and in gait and garb they looked very much like combatants in Syria. The young Chechen who came with us for the first leg of the trip resembled the foundation’s guests, too. He was wearing olive-green fatigues and military boots. Everything was martial about him, except perhaps the trimmed mustache and long beard in the Islamist fashion. In the two hours he traveled with us he did not speak a word. Cesur’s cell phone rang incessantly while he drove, and he muttered cryptic answers to mysterious questions that came from the other end of the line, but which essentially boiled down to arranging the stay of people. After he hung up, he would typically call a different number passing on information about newcomers’ names and their intended lodgings. The stern-faced Chechen, who spoke an accented Turkish, did not know Russian, which seemed strange. We dropped him off outside a modern, six- or seven-floor apartment building in an isolated area outside the Asian exurbs of Istanbul. We waited until the street door was opened for the Chechen, who lifted his left hand in greeting and walked in. “It’s his parents’ home,” Cesur commented as we drove in the middle of nowhere. The Chechen was spending a short vacation with his family, whom he was visiting from a nebulous place that was left unspoken in Cesur’s shifting explanations. At the time there were rumors in Turkey about extremists staying in similar apartment buildings, like those built after the 1999 earthquake in the area. Our first stop was somewhere in Istanbul near Sabiha Gökçen Airport, a ground-floor apartment where three generations of women lived, including a young mother who was related to Cesur. He had already broken the news to her that they were of Armenian origin. She welcomed us with a bountiful breakfast. What did she know about the Genocide? She disguised her discomfort over my question behind a smile. Now that she knew she was Armenian, she said, she 515

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wanted to inform herself about it. Another woman with sad eyes was a friend or relative of Macedonian origin. She had lost her daughter and her son in-law in the 1999 earthquake and was now raising her granddaughter, who was a baby at the time and had suffered brain injuries that had left her impaired. Yet through hard work and discipline, the orphaned girl got good grades in school and had mastered verbal speech with difficulty. She was now considering a university career, her grandmother said with a smile that beamed for an instant on her grief-stricken face. As we approached Sakarya we stopped at a cousin of Cesur in an industrial district. His mother was a pale Circassian with prominent cheekbones, dressed in black and a flat-topped cap covered by a turban, with the looks and fashion of an old woman that reminded me of Stalin’s mother. There must have been cues in Cesur’s cousin’s appearance that made me think of him as a Turkish nationalist. We went with him to his home office to check the DNA data on his computer. Sure enough, the walls were decorated in nationalist insignia. His know­ledge of Armenian ancestry would not make any difference to his views, he said after he saw the data, enthusiastically explained by Cesur. What those views were I was not told nor was I curious to find out. It was already evening by the time we got to an uncle who lived in a house previously owned by Greeks. This man was Cesur’s relative on his mother’s side, Islamicized Greeks. The stop was worth every minute for Cesur’s comic relief, if not for much else. There were 60 tons of gold buried underneath his house, his uncle suspected, but the lack of a metal detector was frustrating him badly, as these were hard to come by as well as expensive. One night not long ago, a friend had helped him dig down several feet at a suspected treasure site by the light of his car headlamps but they had only managed to attract the police, who had sent them home. Cesur was laughing as we drove away: “Sixty tons of gold!” He would remember that a few more times yet, shaking his head in embarrassment. The last home we visited was that of other relatives on his mother’s side, Islamicized Greek ancestors who were receiving a lot of guests that night for some reason. The atmosphere at the ample house, with guests in several of its rooms, was welcoming and merry. It was curious to hear them refer to Istanbul by its old Greek moniker of Poli, short for Constantinopoli (Constantinople), even though they had been Islamicized for centuries. Most Christians living in the ancient Byzantine capital called it by its new, Turkish name. Then another family called, Muslims from Salonica who had settled in Turkey during the population exchanges in the aftermath of World War I. A man in a bespoke gray suit and sporting gold teeth was accompanied by his two attractive teenage daughters. Unlike the older women of the house, their heads were uncovered. As they entered, they respectfully kissed the hand of the matriarch and that of her 516

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husband. Cesur seemed miffed for some reason, and as soon as the girls walked into the room where we sat he said we had to leave. In the car, I commended the coexistence of women who went around freely with their heads uncovered, respecting the older ones who did wear headscarves. Ultimate freedom, he said, was in the word of God. The young girls’ dresses, modest yet suggesting their curves, had probably prompted his hurry to leave. These converted Greek relatives had Hamshentsi in-laws in one of the three villages of Akçakoca: one of their sons had married a woman from Hemşin Köyü. We were going to visit them the following morning; they had already made arrangements by telephone. That night we slept at the house of other relatives of his, all of Balkanic descent. The head of the family was of Albanian origin. Before lights out, Cesur had a discussion with his cousin, the son of the Albanian man. It was time to acknowledge the existence of Kurds, Cesur argued. “We exist, Kurds say,” he repeated, with some theatricality probably aimed at me, to show that he was on the tolerant side of the Islamists in Turkey. But I had seen his occasional, contained scorn for them: “Kurds,” he said with a sardonic tone in his voice, when he had overtaken a Fiat van overloaded with people and numerous pieces of baggage on the car’s roof rack. I had smiled and looked at him to confirm the spirit of his comment. “But it’s true: they are Kurds,” he had said, smiling as well. Cesur’s cousin was upset. “But what are you?” I asked him. “I’m Albanian,” the cousin responded, to my amazement, as he was the fourth generation in Turkey. “So are you not a Turk?” I queried, surprised. “Of course I am: I am an Albanian and I am a Turk.” But he did not consider Kurds a separate nation, and hated the PKK. “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene,” he said, stretching out his arm with his fingertips joined in a gesture of emphasis. He was seeking my assent for Atatürk’s slogan about the happy Turk. He could not seek my support, I told him. “Don’t look at me: I’m Armenian.” And he and Cesur took it lightly, and laughed heartily. There had been several stages to Cesur’s relationship with Armenians. At 15, a teacher had inflamed his anti-Armenian feelings during a history lesson about atrocities he said Armenians had perpetrated against Turks, betraying the country. He had come home infuriated, browsing the telephone book looking for surnames ending in ian or yan that might betray an Armenian origin, to call and threaten or insult them. He did not tell me if he went through with it, even though he left the impression that he did. It would have been difficult for him, I thought. Turkey’s name laws had forced the overwhelming majority of Armenians in Turkey to change their last names to Turkish ones, and there were few left with ian or yan, having frequently changed that suffix for the Turkish oğlu, which also means “son of ” or “descendant of.” And the stem very 517

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often was Turkish too, except in Van and further east, where they were almost invariably Armenian names. Then in 2006, Cesur went to Canada as an exchange student. One day he was stuck in traffic outside an Armenian church in Toronto as people were coming out of it. He remembered feeling in his gut a familiarity with them. It was a very strong sensation that left him shocked. But he had forgotten about it until he got the DNA results, showing that he was descended from an Armenian man from Trebizonda. Cesur’s son had been disappointed to hear that they were Armenian. “But I will remain a Muslim,” he had responded. “Yes,” Cesur said he had told his child. “We will remain Muslim.” A woman had once approached the boy as he was manning a street table in Istanbul gathering funds for families of refugees in Turkey and had criticized their initiative, asking the boy’s nationality. But the woman had embraced him when he said he was Armenian, as she was one, too. Their last name in Turkey often indicated converts to Islam, or non-Muslims, which had attracted the headmaster’s attention at his son’s school. When he said they were Armenian, the headmaster had seen his suspicions confirmed: “Eh işte” (“That’s it,” or “I see”). But the kid then added, “But we are Muslim.” And the headmaster had laughed. By contrast, before going to the Albanian cousins’ house, we had seen his paternal aunt. She was thrilled to hear they were of Armenian origin, in an almost childish manner that had caused me to wonder if she was informed about Armenians and their history and present in Turkey. Indeed, she was disconcerted when in the conversation it became clear that I was a Christian, telling me something like, “But you were Armenian, I thought.” Poker-faced, Cesur broke the news that Armenians were Christian in their overwhelming majority. “Are they?” she exclaimed. “That’s why my friends were shocked when I told them that we were Armenian.” Cesur made a better job of suppressing his laugh than I did. More knowledgeable, Cesur’s older brother did not seem very happy about their newly revealed Armenian origin. He had a small face, with the beginnings of balding showing ungracious aging of his pale and yellowish skin, his thin body a little bent with the hunchback that is not uncommon among the men of humbler means and will in Turkey or the Middle East. He shared his more athletic brother’s enthusiasm for the Caucasian peoples’ spirit of fighting, but was more vocal about it, whereas Cesur limited his comments to allusions in passing. “Researchers have demonstrated that there is a gene that makes Chechens brave in warfare,” he said, with a malicious tone, squinting behind his glasses. “Do Armenians have such a gene?” he asked, hoping for a saving grace in the calamity that had befallen his own blood, in a country where race still told the unstained from the impure in the popular imagination, with Öztürk 518

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(Pure Turk) not an uncommon last name, and a favorite one among converts. “Not that I know,” I disappointed him, cautioning that I was not versed in genetics. He lived in a building similar to the one where we had dropped the Chechen. Cesur said his brother paid a very low monthly mortgage installment subsidized by the government for those whose property had been destroyed in the 1999 earthquake. Cesur boasted about it, as if showing off the munificence of Erdoğan’s government and Turkey’s wealth, even though he stopped short of praising the country’s leader. His older brother bid me farewell with a sad smile before getting out of the car, his demeanor now become miserable and the hunch more pronounced as he walked into the building, shrugging inside his coat under the pale sky of no sun and no rain. The following morning, we went through picturesque villages on rolling hills as we skirted by the Black Sea on the way to the Hamshen villages. His Greek relatives’ in-law was waiting for us at an intersection. An affable man, he had been the village chief of Hemşin Köyü and spoke some Hamshetsnak. He showed us an old wooden mosque, which contained inside it an imperial-era proclamation written in Ottoman script. There was a gazebo nearby with some old farming artifacts and instruments. More than a century ago, children had kicked a ball into the mosque through the glass window without breaking it, the former muhtar said. The kids had run inside to find an old man with a long beard and in a tunic, who had handed the ball back to the boys and had vanished into thin air. Then we went to the functioning mosque. An old man sat next to me, urging me to become a Muslim. I told him, no, thanks. “Meğk e, dğas, anang mi xosir,” he said in perfect Armenian: “It’s a shame, my son, don’t speak like that.” I was not sure if he could guess what familiar chords he struck with me, with words that could have come from my father. We exchanged little jokes, and he was relishing speaking the language, I could tell, as it was probably dying in the village with the new generations. He joked that he wanted to marry an old Armenian woman, now that he was a widower, and settle in America. We did not stop at Yenice, perhaps a wise decision, and went straight to the hilltop village, Karatavuk, where we entered a gray teahouse on a cold day, full of men. Soon a crowd formed around us. Men spoke an Armenian very close to Western Armenian. You could not tell them from other Armenian old men in clubs all over the world playing tavlo or nardi as they were, except for one or two with Islamic-style beards and skullcaps, and one with the white cap of the hajji, whose Hamshetsnak was as fluent. “Tu vovas? Ermeniyes ta? Usdi egoğas?” the Hamshentsi men of Karatavuk village asked me: “Who are you? Are you Armenian? Where are you coming from?” The form usdi—an archaic form of “whence,” a word that has fallen into general disuse in English, too—gave their language an echo of classical 519

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Armenian. There was a rumor, mentioned to me in Istanbul, that there were some secret Christians among them. A man who resembled an old friend of my father, with his square face and elegance, as well as a cap to disguise his bald head, also asked me to convert. He wanted to give me a Qur’an. I said I would exchange it for a Bible but as I had none I could not accept his offer. But he said I ought to convert to Islam, and I said it sounded like a fantastic idea, and we could swap religions as well as holy books, so I would become a Muslim if he became a Christian. The dozen or so men surrounding us celebrated my counteroffer, including the hajji, for not even religion stood in the way of the Hamshentsis’ strong sense of humor. Then the man in the cap refuted that the Hamshentsis were of Armenian origin, and repeated a popular thesis among them, a kind of Hamshen Adam and Eve, according to which a Turkish man had married an Armenian woman, their male offspring had kept marrying Armenian women and thus had emerged the Hamshen people. In this genealogical pyramid scheme, the men were always Turkish and the women always Armenian, but never the other way around. A man in a black coat with thick mustachios gave me a bad vibe. He was speaking with Cesur a little farther from the group and had avoided being in the photo. As I had seen a couple of hostile glances more to the back of the tea hall I thought he was from that party. But as we were accompanied by a local we were safe. Later Cesur told me that the mustachioed man was a policeman— my intuition had not been that wrong—but that he was admitting to him that the Hamshentsis were indeed of Armenian origin, and that their elders would tell them so in hushed voices. Two young men stood out, one looking like a churchman with full mustachios and beard, in a long black cassock and a round miter-type hat, to the point that I had been stunned, initially mistaking him for an Armenian priest. He was accompanied by another young man less showily dressed, and they asked Cesur for a ride. They were from Van and were traveling around Turkey spreading the word of the Prophet, some kind of Muslim missionaries. You are from an ancient Armenian capital, a city with an Armenian majority until the Genocide, I told them, and their ignorance, which seemed sincere, surprised me. They did not know, and were curious about it. Maybe they were of Armenian origin, I suggested, for they looked Armenian. Perhaps we are, they agreed. “We don’t know.” I told the one in the black priestly cassock that he had an air of a famous Armenian priest and composer, Gomidas Vartabed, an impression reinforced by his hat. They laughed, and his companion put the hat on my head for a moment. They were in their early 20s, and they were of Kurdish origin. “But man is man, and there is only one God,” one of them said, to indicate they were not much into nationalities. 520

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But on the road, as we were driving back to Istanbul and I was reviewing in my mind my experiences with the Hamshentsis, I noticed with one ear that something had been souring. Cesur’s voice had risen in his conversation with the missionaries, and he was now arguing. They were simply listening, not answering back, which would not have been a wise idea anyway as they were Cesur’s guests, or passengers. They wanted to be dropped off somewhere in Istanbul but Cesur said he was going somewhere else and dropped them off in a satellite city an easy hour and a half from Istanbul, with looming gray and brown towers, as indistinguishable from any other. They were Sufis, Cesur said angrily once they’d got out of the car, dismissing them as sissies and not real Muslims. His idea of Islam, I was understanding, was the hardcore one that would stick to as close an interpretation of the Qur’an as possible regarding infidels and despising minorities—this surprised me, considering how he had embraced his Armenian identity—and the beard grown to Qur’anic specifications, even though he was clean-shaven most of the time. As a teenager he had been a Sufi, “a waste of time.” He then turned his discourse to the war in Syria. It infuriated him that people spoke of minorities’ rights in Syria, saying that they were not in the majority so what rights should they have? Then I reminded him that Armenians in Syria, as in Turkey, were a minority. After some evasive comments, he returned to his main point: Sunnis were in the majority and they should rule as they pleased, which all conformed to the Qur’an, the word of Allah dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to Muhammad. With half a smile, he told me he had read an article I had written about the Mexican Tzotzils, a native people of Chiapas, a few of whom had become followers of a strange Muslim sect. “I read what you wrote about those Sufis in Chiapas,” he said, but didn’t add, as most people do out of courtesy when not honesty or conviction, that he had liked it.     

Back in Istanbul, I saw Cesur a couple more times. At the office of the foundation to aid refugees and their families, he showed me the gruesome pictures of a recent Armenian convert, from Armenia, his body charred, hair and beard disheveled, and the mauled face frozen in a grin of death. He had joined one of the militant groups fighting in Syria. In a photo taken shortly before his demise, the smiling Armenian fighter was flanked by other joyful combatants, one of them an Azerbaijani: the photo had been used in a propaganda article on an Islamist news site about the brotherhood in Islam that transcended nationalities and the petty conflicts associated with them. Cesur was proud of them, waxing piously about how the long beard and mossy shade of a mustache of a true believer set them apart from Jews and Christians. The screen saver on 521

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his office computer showed him hugging his smiling little daughter on a beach. She wore a jilbab, a long garment all the way down to her ankles, complete with a tightly tied headscarf, a very unusual sight for a girl that age in Turkey. While we’d been driving to Hemşin Köyü, Cesur had spoken with admiration of a recent Armenian convert from Jordan. This man had joined an extremist group in Syria and had come to Turkey for medical treatment, but had later been deported to Egypt. (The following month, at the conference on Islamicized Armenians in Istanbul, Cesur told me that the Armenian convert had since reentered Syria and died in combat. Earlier that day at the conference, Cesur had also introduced me to a dark man in military fatigues, a recent Armenian convert from Abkhazia—an autonomous republic that seceded from Georgia in 1993—who spoke Armenian as if spewing poison, and avoided eye contact.) I had also noticed that parts suite of offices were inconspicuously fortified. A four-digit electronic code would open the heavy door to the office of his boss, a strange precaution for the head of a charity that helped refugees. The foundation’s director was a young Kurd from Malatya, a softly spoken man of agreeable conversation, much averse to the cult of Atatürk, probably because of the latter’s hostility to Islam. Were Armenians Caucasian or Mesopotamian, he asked with avid curiosity. These were not categories I was familiar with, so I ventured it would be probably more correct to see them closer to Mesopotamian civilizations, even though I sensed both he and Cesur had a weakness for Caucasians due to the reputation of Chechens and Circassians in combat. Their disappointed nods to my response seemed to confirm my hunch. I had got wind of what they were really doing at the charity he was working for—they were later accused of channeling money for Al Qaeda, or their founder was, and Cesur’s boss had expressed surprise in statements to the press. I wanted Cesur to arrange an interview with a jihadi like those who were being whisked off to Syria. He did not say no and did not acknowledge nor deny that he could put me in touch with some relative of the families they were helping. I had to push a little hard, but after a couple of weeks he called me and asked me to meet him at the Great Mosque in Fatih, a large neighborhood in Istanbul, that had become an Islamist bastion. I got through a long street market beneath a canopy of white canvas, with stands illuminated by single bulbs that shone brightly on fruits and vegetables. A throng of women in black hijabs, the largest concentration I had seen in Istanbul, was buying their groceries in a hurry. Many of the salesmen sported Islamic-style beards too. Outside the dark court of the mosque—he was waiting for me by the Eastern Gate—cats were meandering around trees and some stelae under the drizzle. Some dark-skinned children, barefoot and their clothes in tatters, were playing soccer outside the mosque, in an illuminated section by 522

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the stairs. One of the boys approached us. With a voice and self-confidence that suggested an older age than his appearance indicated, he asked Cesur for some spare change. He called him “Abi,” with a thick Anatolian accent. Cesur looked at him sternly and asked him what he was. The child did not understand. “You mean?” he asked. “Are you a Sunni or a Shiʿa?” Cesur asked the barefoot kid. “Abi, ben Kürt’üm,” the kid said: “Brother, I’m Kurdish.” Cesur did not seem pleased: “Kurdish?” he said and then ignored him, turning to me to continue our talk, and the barefoot kid walked out of the Eastern Gate. “We are going to see a Kurdish jihadi,” Cesur said. He was from Mardin. “You will not see his face and you cannot give his name or say anything about the venue or the city or any other detail about where the interview took place or how it was arranged.” I agreed. We drove through the narrow and hilly streets of Fatih, and he pulled over in front of a gate at a most inconvenient corner, where he had to move the car around a couple of times to let traffic through. A number of calls came and went, as we waited there for nearly an hour. Cesur was unusually silent, and he seemed a little anxious. “It’s been canceled,” he said. I would not see him again until a year later, in Istanbul. He had come to a speech about the Genocide at Galata, organized by a human rights organization, but had an unusually haggard look to him. We greeted each other but spoke only briefly. From what I followed of his social network activities, he was pushing an Islamic agenda. A common acquaintance had suspected him of trying to convert Christian Armenians and was wary of him because of that. But he had a clearer target, I could detect: he aimed to capture the attention of the already Islamicized Armenians, to attract them to the particular strain of Islamist militancy he espoused. If this reading was correct, his efforts were not paying off.     

I returned to Hopa one last time, and was having dinner at Pançuni. Şevket remembered a visit he had paid to an acquaintance in Yerevan. It was a little after Armenia had gained independence in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. His host had pulled out from a drawer a Qur’an with a photo of Atatürk inside. It would be his pass in case Turks invaded the country, the Armenian man thought. Şevket took a sip from his glass and repeated the story of the pusillanimous man he had met in the Armenian capital, this time laughing— malignantly or stupidly—a loud, hoarse laughter, baring the large, yellowed teeth of his denture. He had invited himself to our table and ordered a bottle of the best rakı on my account, a little luxury in Turkey where liquors were heavily taxed under Erdoğan’s regime. 523

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Şevket asked me if I was from the Diaspora. “Yes,” I said. He asked what the Diaspora wanted from Turkey. I could not speak for it, I said. But I was a member, came his déjà vu response. So were millions of Armenians. Could he speak for what all of Turkey, each resident in the country, wanted from Armenians? But he insisted that I was a Diaspora member. Then I realized he didn’t know what the Diaspora was. Like this man, others in Turkey probably thought it was a political organization, or a cabal. They did not know it meant dispersed people. And so I explained to him, Ihsan translating the concept in its complexity into Turkish. Although now grasping it was something other than a party or a secret society, Şevket was still not quite sure what it was. Then I asked for the check, and the unusually unsmiling Pançuni waiter charged me for my guests and myself, but excluded the bill for Şevket, whom he charged separately. That was unusual, as I’d made it clear that I wanted to pay the bill for the whole table. Without my asking, and despite my insistence to the contrary, the Pançuni server charged Şevket separately for the bottle of rakı, which he had drunk alone. The antipathy towards Şevket from the Pançuni staff could not be more obvious, and it felt like an unspoken form of solidarity with me and with my precarious finances too. “He says he is a socialist but alcohol lets out the fascist in him,” Ihsan told me of Şevket as he lit his umpteenth cigarette on our walk back to his apartment on the Black Sea coast, now a dark space of wheezing water and crashing waves, probably guessing how I felt not only about the toothy drinker but also about the frightened Armenian who kept a Qur’an and a picture of Atatürk in his home in Yerevan. It was probably more of an amulet than a guarantee of immunity in case of war or massacre. And I was wondering, to be fair to the thankfully anonymous man from Yerevan, how I would have felt and behaved in his shoes.     

Ömer, a Hamshentsi physics student, invited me to a cousin’s wedding in Makrial. She was marrying a Rizeli man. Rizelis were Greek, he said. They were no longer members of the Orthodox Church as they had been Islamicized centuries ago, but to Hamshentsis and neighbors they were still known as “Rum” (Greek). Religious marriages were mostly private and quick, involving an imam blessing the new couple and proclaiming them husband and wife. This was often done at home, in the presence of immediate family and close friends. Wedding parties, instead, were noisy affairs in hangar-sized banquet halls, concrete boxes with powerful sound systems and amplifiers cranked up to 11. Hundreds of guests attended them. 524

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Lyrics in any language were mostly drowned in the buzzing sound of the overworked speakers, as the disco mirror ball bathed the floor and the merrymakers in colored lights. All were united in gigantic horons, the circular dances that had taken up most of the hall. A fight broke out between a tall Hamshentsi teenager, who had been dancing and drinking quite enthusiastically, and an opponent I could not see. The music did not stop, with shreds of melodies coming through the bass booms. Still, in the noise, I could pick up the lyrics of some Hamshetsnak songs. Sometimes fights would become collective brawls, with men throwing punches and women screaming for someone to do something, but this scuffle had been defused within minutes of breaking out. The special effects ceased and the white lights were turned on: a speaker took to the microphone to introduce the newlyweds, following which a procession of guests walked up to the stage to greet them and put gold bracelets on the bride’s wrist or attach Turkish gold pounds to her gown with safety pins. There would be an after-party gathering at the bride’s home in Makrial. Ömer and I hopped into the women’s van—there were more than a dozen Hamshentsis. There were also two or three Rizelis from the groom’s side, who sat still as their new in-laws exchanged gossip in several simultaneous conversations in Hamshetsnak. A long table had been set up outside the bride’s home, with men smoking and drinking around it, while the women sat on a circle of plastic chairs in the front yard. The Hamshentsi women wore richer dresses in colors and design, their headdresses tied in flamboyant styles. The Rizelis were in plain overcoats, their heads wrapped in headscarves secured in a tight knot beneath their chins, the typical costume of Muslim women in the cities, especially those of Islamist affinities. Even though it was dark, I took some pictures of the women and then joined Ömer at the table. There was some buzz at the other end of the outdoor table, with the Rizeli men looking in my direction, so my friend went to check things out. All was calm and a good mood prevailed, with groups of two or three people engaged in small talk. Ömer sat back next to me and with a quiet voice told me, in Hamshetsnak, that the Rizeli men were upset that I had photographed their women, one of whom had complained to them. Yet nothing ominous appeared to be stirring, as the Rizeli men had stopped looking at me and continued their chitchat while they smoked. Soon, Ömer and I were discussing other things, as we waited for our turn to greet the newlyweds and their parents inside the house. Some 20 minutes later, however, Ömer picked up some threatening rumors that I did not, for the tone around the table had not changed: “They are still angry,” he told me, and approached them to see if we could calm them down. But two Rizelis, one a curly redhead with bushy mustachios and the other a lean man in a hajji cap, stood up and started talking more loudly. The redhead walked 525

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up to me and asked for my ID, the kimlik, as they call it in Turkish. He reeked of alcohol. I suspected he wanted to see my religious affiliation, for he probably assumed that identification documents everywhere in the world showed it, too. “Are you a policeman?” I responded. “We will surely call them,” he said. At that point, another of Ömer’s cousins intervened, recommending in excellent English that I appease the Rizelis and apologize for the photos, which I did. This cousin was a United Nations official in Tokyo and he consistently refused to speak in Hamshetsnak. We resembled each other physically and in height, and could easily have passed for relatives. The UN official cut me off somewhat sharply, saying he did not know Hamshetsnak, or perhaps he was aware that it could be an irritant, for we all sensed that the problem was not the photos I had taken, but that I was Armenian. The Rizelis were complaining more loudly now, despite my apologies and the UN mediator’s intervention. Then the redhead grabbed me by the arm and started to choke me. “Get his hands off him, he’s our guest!” exclaimed the UN official, now standing up along with the other Hamshentsis, getting ready for some action. I pushed off the Rizeli and ran, while the hajji was shouting, “Call the Jandarma, call the Jandarma!” A friend of Ömer’s cousin had a getaway car already started and Ömer, one of her female cousins (in a state of panic), and I jumped into it and drove off at full speed. As we raced down the Black Sea highway back to Hopa, blinking blue lights filled the cabin of our car. The girl was screaming that the police had caught up with us and we were all going to jail, but then we saw an overturned car by the entrance to a long tunnel and understood, with guilty relief, that the police were not after us. On another level, it had been a practical demonstration of how a personal mishap could escalate into an intercommunal incident. The Hamshentsis had stood up for me not out of Armenian kinship, but only because I was their guest. Yet the camps had divided along ethnic lines: Hamshentsis versus Rizelis, or Armenians versus Greeks, as was often the case on this land prior to the arrival of the Turks. In other circumstances, it could have had the potential for a broader dispute, with community identity playing a major part in it.     

The second time I saw Timur, Kiram’s cousin, in 2014, it took him a while to recognize me, but then he hugged me joyously. It had been three years since I had been their guest. He was on the balcony with two mugs of Nescafé while reading Tekelistan, a volume the size of a telephone book by Yalçın Küçük. The title of the book, which became a bestseller in Turkey, would translate as Monopolyland. As Timur ran to the kitchen to bring me coffee, I quickly 526

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browsed a few pages. It seemed to boil down to how Turkey was run by a covert Jewish cabal in cahoots with Armenian and Greek conspirators. Reviews I later checked out confirmed the quick impression I gathered from reading a few lines, in which these three minorities were conspiring with foreign powers to rule or destroy Turkey by terrorism, by democracy, by capitalism, and by communism. Küçük was one of those Turkish socialists whose views coincided with those of the extreme nationalists, except perhaps on the distribution of wealth. Kiram—whom I had met briefly in Istanbul—and Ihsan had already told me that Timur’s mental health had deteriorated since the last time I had seen him. Both had used the same expression in Hamshetsnak, which is exactly the same in Armenian: “He comes and goes.” The Korsakoff syndrome was hitting Timur hard, including memory loss and hallucinations, which seemed to correspond with Küçük’s book of confabulations on the table, its cover illustrated with rows of scarabs and cockroaches climbing what looked like skyscrapers. The robin that Timur fed on the ledge of his balcony no longer came. An expression of gloom sat on his mother’s face when Timur, who seemed to have forgotten me for a moment but then had remembered me again in a flash of lucidity with even more accuracy, told her that I was Armenian and that I could speak Hamshetsnak. Dressed in light pink and pastel colors, she continued wrapping up vine leaves. “We converted from Armenian but we are no longer Armenian,” she said softly, without taking her eyes off the leaves that she rolled with unhurried care, equating Armenian with Christianity in the first part of the proposition. Her confessional tone conveyed an idea of something wrong; either the Armenian past or the conversion. It was also unusual for her honesty, which was still uncommon in people of her age in front of strangers, especially Armenians. Timur would drop by the kitchen every few minutes to insist that she spoke in Hamshetsnak with me but she never indulged me, even though they were communicating in their vernacular. As her silence began to define me as an intruder, I excused myself from that unlit space charged with unease and returned to the balcony where Timur was smoking and reading that conspiracy book while his Nescafé waited on the table, next to the ashtray. But after a few fits and starts that led nowhere except for the meanders of Timur’s tortured mind that alternated between Hamshetsnak and Turkish, the conversation was not taking off, other than his invitation to come with them on their excursion to the yayla, the mountain pastures where most Hamshentsis camped during their summer vacation, an idea that pleased his mother as well. She warmly repeated her son’s proposal, and made me wonder if I had been missing hidden clues in the little she spoke, or had misread her attitude. But an unexpected change in my plans prevented me from joining them a couple of days later, as I was entangled in the Ardala incident. 527

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Across the bridge of the creek where Timur and I had been fishing three years before, I started my downhill march from the village of Halbaşı past the school building and the tea depot, shouting a greeting in Hamshetsnak from the road to anyone I saw sitting on their large porches, to which they responded in kind with polite incuriosity. I had now entered into the territory of the Altındağ clan, the largest in Makrial. After passing four or five houses with people idling in the torrid afternoon, a group of old people responded to my salute with insistent exclamations of welcome, led by the rich voice of the family matriarch in full Hamshen garb, beckoning me to join them on their porch. She hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks, and was watching me in amazement with her wide-open blue eyes. To hear the six people talking in a language that was an ancestor of Western Armenian still exerted an undying fascination in me for this living fossil, as Hamshetsnak had remained mostly unchanged for centuries. “Vorti … vorti …” she repeated as she contemplated me, using a word for “son” that in contemporary Western Armenian has been mostly relegated to literary usage. She was incredulous that a foreigner was speaking her mother tongue, weaving phrases in a language that was closer to the classical language of church liturgy. And I was enraptured by the magical mundanity of it all, hearing these words buried in the oblivion of centuries spoken by a woman who was wearing traditional costume. The conversation was as unreal to the unaccustomed ears as to feel transported a few centuries back, as it must have been unremarkable in its banality for the speakers. Her Hamshetsnak was exquisite and made very little use of the Turkish phonemes that entered it much later, which gave her speech an echo of classical Armenian, a variation of which it originally was when the Hamshentsis settled on the Black Sea coast around ad 790 after leaving their original home of Oshakan in present-day Armenia. But at the time, Oshakan was one of the easternmost cities in the province of Vasburakan, which has mostly fallen inside what is Turkey and had Van as its capital. After a failed revolt against the brutalities of the Arab occupation of Armenia in ad 774–5, they followed their princes Shapuh Amatuni and his son Hamam to a border outpost of the Byzantine Empire, where upon the ruins of the fortress town of Tambur they founded a city that was called Hamamashen, meaning “built by Hamam,” and whose original location is now unknown. This group of elderly people from the Altındağ clan were relatives of a friend in Istanbul, an acquaintance they celebrated as a new serving of tea and sweets was under way and which opened a round of discussion among the women about her continued unmarried state, the gravity of which could not be overstated now that she was past the very mature age of 25 and soon approaching the time when men would not look at her. But the matriarch said 528

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that university students were this way these days, and she would rather have her embrace the challenges of married life later in life and be well prepared, than get an early start in unhappiness. Her generous blue eyes and the delicate face, framed in her coif turban, hinted at a vast stock of beauty mostly spent in her youth, yet ample enough to carry her gracefully through life. “How come you speak Hamshetsnak?” one of the less talkative women wanted to know. “Are you Hamshentsi?” “I am Armenian,” I said. “You said it before I did,” said an elegantly dressed man with a knowing smile. He was observing me with friendly eyes from behind large square glasses. “But so are you,” I said, intending to tease rather than provoke him, curious to see how the little experiment would play out. “And I knew you would say that, and even if you did not, that you would think it; but, no, we are not,” he said with a voice that was as firm as it was calm. “We speak the same tongue, which we learned as a result of trade, but we are not Armenian.” As in the Diaspora, it is in the increasingly rare language of family and friends—as Hamshetsnak is for the Hamshentsis—that Armenian was a powerful vehicle for bonding. It created an instant sense of community among a reduced people in an alien world, conjuring up in words a homeland that is largely lost. Using it over tea with people of grandfatherly age and disposition, yet disavowing the kinship that so naturally came through the language, accentuated the sense of displacement and loss still felt a century after the Genocide. While unrelenting in his refusal to acknowledge any Armenian origin, at no time did this man identify himself and his community as Turks. And yet I wondered how it felt on the other side of the mirror, what was going through the mind of this man, who was kind, when addressed by a stranger in the same language he learned first and spoke as a child to his mother in his small village, removed by mist and mountains from a larger and different world. “We are Armenian, too, so they say,” the matriarch retorted gently, looking at me. But the man was shaking his head, smiling. The woman insisted two more times with her line, the second time more vehemently and in surprise—as if the man was denying a universal truth—until the man’s smile waned. The others kept silent, all the more remarkable because nobody was voicing agreement with him. As a stranger, I would hardly expect support on a contentious issue that provoked no small anxiety among older people; but the four other women and the man had their gazes lost somewhere on the porch’s floor, offering me the opportunity to bid goodbye on cordial terms. It was remarkable to see women speaking freely in the presence of men and strangers compared with the strictures of Islamic household life in the villages of the east, where segregation was almost complete. 529

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Further down where the road took a broad bend, the slope on the left rose at an easy angle into a rounded hill. It was crowned by a white house with a long table laid outside beneath an improvised canvas shade, three men in dark clothes sitting around it. They were too far to shout out to, so I just waved at them with a wide movement of my arm; they returned the gesture, with one of them standing and beckoning me to come up. A watermelon in the middle of the table had been carved up. One of the men filled up a plate with portions for me. A woman brought out another watermelon, which one of the men stood up to cut up with a large knife. They were from the same clan as the family I had previously visited, and their name as well as that of my friend in Istanbul served as an introduction even though their hospitality ensured from the beginning that there was need for none. Clouds were gathering at a fast clip, drawing over the sun in the minutes since I had left the other home, matching the somber expression of the three men. The women were talking in hushed tones by the kitchen window. The smiles that accompanied their usual questions and courtesies were not dissipating the air of melancholy, heavier than the despondence brought on by darkening skies. The man who was sitting next to me was often looking down with dry, red eyes. His brother had been murdered in a city on the Mediterranean coast in what the press had described as a mafia-style settling of scores. Next to him was a man with blue eyes, a truck driver who had been to Armenia and had stayed there for 63 days. His other relative, the stocky, dark man who had called me up, had served 15 years in prison for leftist militancy, but he looked healthy and had a sharp mind. For a long time until World War II broke out, the border between Turkey and Soviet Georgia was open for daily travel and trade between citizens of both countries. Many Hamshentsis would travel at the time. The Altındağs did too: they visited their relatives in the Georgian region of Ajaria around the port of Batumi—people Stalin later deported to Kazakhstan in 1944 for “refusing to renounce Islam,” as the dark man described it. They mostly traveled, however, to trade in sheep and goats and, apparently, intelligence. A year later seven members of the clan were executed in Turkey for espionage, the family and other Hamshentsis said. The case had been mentioned to me for the first time in Istanbul. Two young cousins of the Altındağs also told me the story in Makrial a few days later. They had taken me to speak to one of the clan elders for more details, a man who was smoking on a bench in the street. The old man said that the seven men accused of spying used to enter the Soviet Union through a corridor the Hamshentsis call Medz Mağlut (“Büyük Çalılık” in Turkish, or “Big Bush”). He believed the men used an unauthorized crossing. But they were smuggling merchandise and animals, he said, which corresponded 530

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to the version given by the dark man: “They were not spies.” One of the seven, Timur, would take advantage of these trips to visit a sister, Pempe, who lived in Batumi and was among the Muslim Hamshentsis later deported to Kazakhstan. He said some others were also removed to Kyrgyzstan. The seven—five Altındağs and two Millioğlus, a related, smaller clan—had eventually become double agents, with both governments turning a blind eye to their smuggling in exchange for the information they carried. But upon returning from one of those trips they were detained by Turkish authorities and executed extrajudicially near a gorge in Ardahan or Erzurum in 1945, the old man said. The first Altındağs I met were university students or graduates in Istanbul, including my first friend from the clan, Amberin, who had learned to write in the Armenian alphabet—which Hamshentsis had forgotten—on a course she took at Nor Zartonk, an Armenian cultural center in Istanbul. More colorful characters in the past had given the clan its fame: one of them perhaps a century ago was known as Tsiyu Koğ (Horse Thief ), one of the great-grandchildren in Makrial had told me, laughing. Legend had it that this ancestor, married to a Kurd, would provide information on herds to his in-laws’ tribe, whose men would then rustle the horses, and they would split the proceeds. Then I struck up a friendship with the clan in Makrial, at a teahouse that belonged to the family. I had been there on my first visit with Kiram and had found it abuzz with Hamshetsnak speakers. When I returned three years later, I tried to film the patrons without their knowledge, just to capture the conversations as naturally as possible. But a young man saw it and raised the alarm, initially thinking that I might be an undercover agent. Clarification did not calm things down, as one patron walked up to me to proffer a loud rant in Hamshetsnak against Armenians. “Leave him alone!” commanded a voluminous man in a yellow shirt hurrying toward us and telling the patron to get lost, which he obediently did. The man in the yellow shirt would introduce me to his other relatives on the upper floor, a more reserved game salon where most players seemed to be clan members. Like most Hamshentsis, the majority of the clan appeared to be leftist. Socialism had bred the habit of reading, which had made not only the Altındağs, but also Hamshentsis in general, conversant in history and politics. Driven by their Marxism and an admiration for the Soviet Union, which had also served as a gateway to Russian culture and literature, there were Hamshentsis who felt fascination for that closed world just next door, as Soviet Georgia was on the other side of the mountain. One summer day when he was ten years old, Ihsan was on the mountain, where they had gone along with other Hamshentsis for their vacation in the pastures, right by the fenced border. He put one foot on the other side of the barbed wire to claim that he had been to the Soviet Union, only to have his older brother—now a teacher who 531

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takes credit for introducing Ihsan to the literature and authors his younger sibling cultivated—run up to him shouting and waving his hand. “What are you doing?” his brother asked him, agitated. “You could have been shot!” And Ihsan clarified: “We were afraid of the Turkish soldiers shooting at us, not the Russians; we didn’t fear the Russians.” Marxism, though, had been Ihsan’s ruin by omission, in a contrived way. He used to read leaning on a large rock, a thick chain link sticking out from beneath it. “I read Das Kapital sitting on top of a treasure trove!” The members of another clan, the Karakans, had found a jar full of gold buried underneath that rock, which they had invested in a hotel and other companies, Ihsan said. Ihsan’s socialist convictions did not get in the way of his life, or he preferred that they did not. “We can’t go out with Resûl and the girls!” he lamented. “We take them out and he sits very upright and tells the women, ‘Because Lenin said …’ and goes on like that,” Ihsan loudly mocked his best friend one night. “Tell the woman, ‘How lovely your hair is’; who cares about Lenin?” he went on, cursing the Russian revolutionary. The drizzle started anew as I walked by an abandoned and half-ruined tea depot, its whitewashed concrete walls painted with communist political graffiti, so I waved at a black pickup truck that was driving slowly in my direction. There was a young couple in it. They were speaking Hamshetsnak with each other, a relatively rare occurrence among people their age. “It’s because of her,” the man said. Prior to getting married he was beginning to forget the language he spoke only with his mother and grandmother as a child; he spoke in Turkish at work and with friends. “Our kids speak Hamshetsnak, too,” the wife said. But, she added, most children no longer did, as they started their schooling early and did not use the language. It was the exact opposite of what happened five decades ago when Hamshentsi children would start their first day in class without knowing a word of Turkish. I had been told a story about a Hamshentsi man who had come back home crying from the first day at school because he believed his language was Turkish, yet nobody understood what he said and he could not understand what others were saying.     

My last foray into Hamshen was for the Vartevor celebration at the pastures of Bilbilan, a mountain in Ardahan where many Hamshentsis from Hopa and Makrial camped in the summer. That year Hadig had organized a festival on the occasion of the ancient pagan celebration—“Vartavar” in standard Armenian—that the Armenian Church had assimilated into the Feast of the Transfiguration but which had lost all national and religious significance among the Hamshentsis. 532

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Before heading to the Bilbilan yayla, an Altındağ friend had invited me over to his family home in the village of Halbaşı, in Makrial. Their relative from across the road, a tall man with a hawkish nose and green eyes, spoke fluent Eastern Armenian, as he traveled with some regularity to Armenia. He recommended that I see his mother up the mountain. That night I set out with Emre in the rain along a wooded road, slippery and dark, as the last ezzan issued from the mosques. It was followed by the jackals’ long howling, which sounded as powerful and yodeling as the call for prayers. The locals called it “Riyapin xağe” (“the jackal’s game” in Hamshetsnak). A friend from Urfa said that in Ankara the jackals’ wailing was followed by the barking of dogs, a succession that caused the children to cry. Lest I fell for mystical interpretations, Emre told me that the minarets’ loudspeaker sounds probably hurt the jackals’ sensitive hearing. The momi welcomed us with tea and pastries. Her grandson was there along with a granddaughter and her husband, who recognized me from the photo the Ardeletsis had taken of me with the Turkish flag. “I told them that what they did was wrong,” he said. I still found it surprising that Turkish citizens would be so keenly aware of the offensive power of their flag for an Armenian. “The people in our village had found a baby in a little hole in the ground during the Genocide,” the old woman said. “He was obviously Armenian.” A family had taken him and raised him as a Hamshentsi. “He grew up to become a tall man, married one of our girls, and then we lost track of him.” On the way back we stopped by at a house where a member of Kiram’s clan and his family were having tea in the porch, and we had a conversation in Hamshetsnak with the adults—the couple and the man’s mother—but their children did not know the language well or at all. His wife spoke Hamshetsnak fluently and, with her slender face and stilted nose, she could pass for a Hamshentsi. But she was not: “I’m a Palik.” However, she could not tell me what they were. Although also from the Black Sea area and Muslims, they were not Turks and nor were they Kurds, which was more vehemently denied by the man than his Palik wife herself. Most Hamshentsis I asked about them had heard the name and knew of their existence or even some of them, but they did not know what ethnicity it was. “Not even the Paliks ourselves know what we are,” the woman said. The closest suggestion I was given by a friend, that Palik may be a corruption of the name “Pavlik” or “Pavlükalar,” as Paulicians are called in Armenian and Turkish, respectively. Yet if the profession of ignorance was taken at face value, it was a most interesting case of a people or group surviving only in a name whose significance nobody knew anymore. A neighbor came by, curious about the animated gathering. Seeing I was Armenian, she asked me if I could read Armenian, for she had a treasure map she needed to decipher. Kiram’s cousin and his family laughed, and I decided to 533

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take it lightly against my instinct. The Palik wife predicted the woman would be up all night thinking about the heaps of gold. She ran back to her house next door and a number of lights came on in some rooms. I was curious to see it too, especially if it was in Armenian. But after half an hour she came back defeated, unable to find it. The following day I headed to Hopa. I needed to repair the charger for my computer and there was no replacement available anywhere nearer than Ankara, so asking around I was referred to an electrician. A young Hamshentsi greeted me with some reservation. “Why do you speak our language?” he had asked me. It was not that different than Armenian, but my response did not convince him. “The other Armenians don’t.” He was from a village in Makrial where I had many friends but he said he was now living in Hopa and no longer hung out very much with the Hamshentsi crowd. Despite his misgivings, the Hamshentsi still behaved professionally and brought me to a Laz electrician’s shop. “If he cannot help you, then nobody around here can,” the Hamshentsi had said, as he ushered me into a tiny office crammed with old computers, transistors, and cables covered in layers of dust and smelling of plastic and tobacco. The Hamshentsi greeted the Laz with the religious salute of “Selâmün aleyküm,” which was fairly uncommon among the Hamshentsis. The electrician was very religious, and smoked a lot. Tobacco was perhaps the only license he allowed himself during the Ramadan. He was kind, but hostile to Armenians—which he had figured I was within the first three minutes of conversation. Yet he wanted me to listen, and so I did. Biased as he was, it was also clear he had read a lot, for he was familiar with the political divisions among the Diaspora Armenians, a very unusual occurrence. Armenians had massacred Turks in Erzurum during the Russian occupation, he said—the same accusation I had heard from Rıza Haci and other Turkish nationalist Hamshentsis. It all boiled down, still, to what a shame it had been that “the loyal nation,” as the Armenians were known, had been let down by their politicians. He then mentioned the Ramgavar party—to my astonishment, he knew more about the political scene in the Diaspora than some Diaspora Armenians themselves—whom he labeled as “okay”; he spoke with some reserved admiration about the Hnchaks—the Armenian Social Democrats, “nationalist Armenians, leftist too, but brave”—and was trying very hard to remember the name of the Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), and he was very surprised that I did not know it. “The Diaspora is of that party,” he insisted. “How wouldn’t you know?” They were “the worst,” he said: very nationalist, very bad, he kept saying, and he basically dumped a lot of what had gone wrong on them. But I was not going to tag along, so I feigned ignorance within reasonable limits, without overdoing it, not too much as to arouse his suspicions. So yes, of course, I knew about 1915 534

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and to me it was a genocide but I did not know much about the political parties, and he listened with surprised attention, and probably no little incredulity, that I did not care much about Armenian politics. His grandfather had fought on the front in Erzurum and had decided to return to Hopa to be with his family when the massacres began, he said, without specifying if those of Armenians by Turks or those he accused Armenians of perpetrating against Turks. Along the road, his grandfather had seen corpses scattered on the mountains with all kinds of mutilations, including men with their penis cut off and inserted in their mouth, the electrician said as he worked on the repairs. He kept on spewing his tales with the drum of his voice, monotonous as he spoke and smoked in the claustrophobic office. Were it not for the macabre value of what he was saying, I would have run away long ago. Had his grandfather taken part in the massacres? I asked. But he kept on droning, without listening or pretending that he did not. It was yet another instance of unstoppable loquaciousness that I had come to associate with the Ramadan fasting and that I had observed in other shopkeepers before. A softly spoken man who said the worst things with an almost timid voice, he looked like a hermit scientist, with curly hair and yellowed mustachios, a tinkerer who rejoiced in fiddling with electronics and history. I was starving after the almost hour-long lecture following a long day with no food and was tired of standing, so I ran to the first inconspicuous restaurant on the corner. It was still Ramadan and I wolfed down a pide at a table in a dark corner, far from window view. When I returned to the electrician’s he told me to be careful about the charger, apologizing for using black plastic tape on the white charger. He asked a very modest fee of ten Turkish liras for the charger that I used to finish writing this book. “People are people, and God has created us all equal,” he said. “But truth is truth.”     

So much had changed in the last few years, hadn’t it? I asked Civan. He agreed, but they didn’t know the history, he said. We were at the Bilbilan yayla, a windswept vastness that the elements had softened into a wavy plateau. When the gradual opening up between Hamshentsis and Armenians had begun, he was among the most skeptical about the Armenian origin, yet had gradually come to accept the evidence. Still, 300 years had elapsed since conversion and they were in large measure Turks as well, and that part of themselves could not be denied either, he believed. A big Hadig sign said, “Kimanag te hozaik” (“You will learn we are here”), a tone of defiance that Armenians would probably interpret with nationalist 535

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overtones not intended by the Hamshentsis themselves; it was more of a localist and ideological statement, as most of them leaned toward the left in Turkey’s polarized politics. The Hadig festival, which almost coincided with Vartevor, had attracted a large crowd of young Hamshentsis. A brawl suddenly unraveled an enormous horon, or circular dance. It was all-out fighting between some men, with large groups trying to break it up. But it took a while to figure out it was not part of the dance, until the women began to scream. Most revelers, however, dispersed and soon formed a smaller horon some 100 meters away, mostly made up of women. Some Ardeletsis recognized me from the photo with the Turkish flag. One called his wife to meet the man “caught by the fascists.” He invited me over to visit him at his place and gave me the names of those who had harassed me. The Voice was a cameraman and reporter for TRT1, the state broadcasting corporation. That explained the silent chamber he seemed to be speaking from, and his perfect voice and diction, if not the foul language. The Ardeletsi man said that I ought to return to Ardala with him, and see if any of these people, of whom he spoke disparagingly, would dare approach me. He looked at me with a mystified expression when I asked him if it was possible that Islam, the man in the faux Texan boots, was also called Işxan, and he said, “No, everybody calls him Islam.” Then I saw a group of six- or seven-year-old children speaking among themselves in Hamshetsnak. They got excited to be filmed and sang a little tune in the language, “Hats peri, dunıs gera” (“I brought bread and ate it at home”), but then their parents sent them away as a comedian was about to begin his routine. “At Friday prayers, the imam said that patriots had handlebar mustaches, the tips curled up, whereas communists’ were horseshoe types, curved down,” the young man said in Turkish. “A fascist that night happily looks in the mirror and confirms that he has a patriotic mustache. But after his shower he looked down and thought that they did not look right.” As the group dispersed laughing, the comedian and I talked. He was from Oce, a village of Western Hamshentsis in the province of Rize, those who had already begun to abandon Hamshetsnak in the early nineteenth century and then had forgotten it. A few words, however, still survived in their dialect, including curses and parts of the anatomy, the basest vestiges from a language left to die. But now there was a growing rapprochement between the Eastern and Western halves of the people. It was the first time such a large group from Oce had come to the Bilbilan festival. There would be a Vartevor celebration in his village that I ought to attend. The Ardala incident had made me sensitive and I did not want a repeat, as Western Hamshentsis were known to be hostile to Armenians. “You should not worry, Oce is leftist,” my friends said. The comedian insisted I would be his guest. “Oce is different.” 536

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My friend from Istanbul, Amberin, offered me a ride back to Hopa in the car of her sister’s boyfriend, Güntekin, a Köroğlu from Garci. Amberin was the second of four Altındağ sisters (the oldest of whom had not joined us), a captivating sight to behold in variations on the same theme: white-skinned, blond, with green or blue eyes—the color was not easy to tell under the changing light. They used Hamshetsnak among themselves, even though their mother was a Rizeli Turk, or what the Hamshentsis called “Rum,” a converted Greek who had learned the language after her marriage. We drove first to Ardahan, a city as sad as Kars or Sarıkamış, with cold weather and the spiritless architecture of a frontier town that bore the traces of the Russian colonial past and the thrifty utilitarianism of modern Turkish construction. If not unfriendly, the Turkified Kurds that made up most of its population had the withdrawn character I had noticed in other places where the ghosts seemed to be more of a presence than the living. At the Ardahan café where we made our first stop, Güntekin insinuated that the fight at Bilbilan was partly due to the animosity between the “pro-Armenians” and the “pro-Turks” among the Hamshentsis. “It was not exactly that, but it was part of the reason,” he said. One camp had begun to embrace their Armenian roots whereas the others adhered to their Turkish identity. The differences ran along ideological lines, too: the former, or “pro-Armenians,” accepted their origin as part of a socialist conception that took man as the measure of humanity and saw Armenians as being as worthy a people as any other in the world. “We are leftist,” a young Hamshentsi writer, who was making a name for himself in journalism and literature in Istanbul, had told me. “That’s why we accept our Armenian origin, because for us it does not matter.” People in this camp also tended to be averse to Armenian nationalism, to the point that sometimes a few saw the Genocide as the outcome of a clash of two demons. The “pro-Turks,” on the other hand, considered themselves of Turkish ethnic origin and tended to be on the far right of Turkish politics. Clan rivalries, unstated, also appeared to overlap the ideological conflict. Living in villages that were mere minutes apart by car, the clans had developed peculiar political identities, with Ardala—at least in its upper quarter—the most extreme case of ideological cohesion. None of my Hamshentsi informants was able to explain how these contrasting characters had evolved in such a compact geographical space with an identical economic and social structure. If those were the extremes, there was a whole range of possibilities that probably accounted for the views of most Hamshentsis. While Amberin had taken to identifying herself as a “Hamshen Armenian” and had already visited Armenia, Güntekin, a worldly man who had worked for years as a graphic designer in Istanbul and had a passion for photography, was trying to articulate the ambiguity he felt toward his Armenian origin. It fell back to his conviction 537

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that the measure of humanity is man without any further discrimination. Even sympathizing Hamshentsis would have some difficulty reconciling their stance on identity with that of Armenians. In large measure, especially after 1915, the Armenian identity had come to be founded on exclusion or rejection of any Turkish component to it, whereas in the case of the Hamshentsis it had become an inextricable part of who they were. He knew they were of Armenian descent but he clearly found it a stretch to claim themselves to be Armenian after centuries as Muslims and removed from the mainstream, even though he did not say it straight out. “Why would that matter, anyway?” he said. “We are all human, that’s all that counts.” After all those years in Istanbul, which he missed for its cosmopolitan life, Güntekin did not have too many friends in Hamshen and, he said, he did not enjoy their proclivity for partisanship, and some names I mentioned only got a polite acknowledgment from him. Amberin’s sisters stayed silent as this conversation unfolded, but Gülşen, Güntekin’s girlfriend, had an excellent know­ledge of Hamshetsnak. We were soon taking words apart in an etymological game to kill the minutes as we drove back first to Makrial and then to Garci. In Hamshetsnak, she said, weapon was called tevug, a cognate of tev (arm). It was a word that had not been in use in Armenian since the Middle Ages. “The weapon was seen as an extension of the arm,” she said, a similar etymology to what I remembered for “arm” in Romance languages, and we were soon pondering in the dark on the similitudes of “arm” and “Armenia.” At that point my attention tapered off as we were passing the Şavşat fortress and my mind flew to the Poshas and the Yeşilkapı family, whose village, with all lights off, we soon sped past. After we left the three Altındağ girls at home, Güntekin told me his father had also heard ASALA’s Levon Ekmekjian speaking in Armenian. His father had realized then that the rumors that they were converted Armenians were true. But the following morning when we saw his father in the porch he did not acknowledge any recollection of it. As I was becoming uncomfortable, I begged Güntekin not to insist: “But dad, you told me!” And the man was shaking his head with a smile but not speaking a word, examining me with amused mistrust and curiosity. Güntekin had given me his room and taken the smaller guest room despite my insistence. He wore fine clothes and I saw a navy blue blazer ready for use in the morning. The youngest of five siblings, he had returned to Hopa, or rather to the clan’s village, to be near his mother, whose health had been precarious for the last year. She was a Laz but had learned Hamshetsnak after her marriage.     

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The following morning, I headed for the Vartevor celebrations in Oce. When I boarded the bus a slender young man stared firmly at me when I gave my destination to the driver. It was his hometown. After we got off the bus on the Black Sea highway by the village’s access road, Güven brought me to his family’s place. His mother was a Western Hamshentsi and his father a Laz, who greeted me happily, but then I saw his frown as he called his 21-year-old son aside for what I could only guess would be a reprimand: Güven emerged with a long face and grumbling, but it was clear that I been invited to lunch by the Hamshentsi side of the family only to be disinvited by the Laz in-law. His maternal uncle welcomed me warmly yet disputed they were of Armenian origin out of the blue, without my saying anything about it. A tall man with the air of film noir actor, he had been living for decades in Istanbul, where he worked as a shoe merchant in the Grand Bazaar and had a close Armenian friend. We spoke in English, occasionally switching to Turkish to include Güven in the conversation. The uncle lowered his guard when I said that they were indeed of Armenian origin, but that I had come to accept that it did not necessarily mean that everybody was, because of that, Armenian; that I accepted that some may have become something else over time, no matter how coerced or unfair their initial conversion, or forced Islamicization. With that sorted out, he went on to describe a very complicated dish his mother used to cook and that he had not had in decades. It involved burning the trunk of a young tree—killing it, indeed—and then burying the ashes for a week, after which they were used for a stew of “incredible taste,” which he missed dearly and wondered if it was of Armenian origin. “Ask around and let me know.” A self-described leftist, he revered Atatürk. It was more of a taboo with him to discuss the Kurdish issue and the state of the Turkish Republic than the Genocide. Güven later told me that his uncle had been a militant in an armed leftist group in the 1960s, and had injured his hand during a botched attempt to make a bomb. Then the women started setting the table for lunch, so Güven and I took the hint and decided to go for a walk around the village, and wound up at the school building where the Vartevor celebration would be held. A huge portrait of Atatürk covered a good part of the school building’s facade. A young woman was rehearsing some poetry by the edge of a gorge, while the sun was bathing in its dying colors the Kaçkar Mountains as it descended into the Black Sea. She was a Literature student. “We are Armenian, too,” she said. “But I don’t discuss it with my father, so as not to have trouble.” She had found out about it at the university. The Western Hamshentsis had been in the first line of denial. Yet here and there, change had begun. The girl that had sold me the bus tickets in Rize, a woman covered in the most conservative Islamic fashion à la turque, had introduced herself as an Armenian, without 539

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even knowing that I was one, after I had asked her if she was a local. She was a Western Hamshentsi but she had simply said she was Armenian, without even mentioning initially the name of her minority group. The pastry shop waiter who brought us the teas was a Western Hamshentsi or, as they call themselves, Hemşinli. Yet he probably felt differently than the bus company agent, probably sensing my nationality. When I asked him about the dialect of their common village, he only made a curt comment, lifting his index finger: “One country, one language, one flag.” The film noir uncle turned up at the school with his 12-year-old daughter, both sharply dressed. We sat with a view of the Black Sea and discussed her career choices in English, which she spoke fluently as well, making her father proud. But then the public was called to attention, as the festival was about to begin with the Turkish national anthem. They stood up and sang it with patriotic passion. Culture could make a difference, I had thought, and there could always be hope with a well-read person, as long as there was the yearning to learn. How fantastically simplistic it was. I had not understood anything, for if culture was the only benchmark of progress and the sole anchor of hope, we would fail to explain the twentieth century, the bloodiest in history, with the most civilized continent spawning two world wars. The festival was as well choreographed as it was unremarkable, an ethnographic show with no water games or anything rooted in its past in pagan Armenia. It was Vartevor only in name, the last yet powerful link to its origin. There were different numbers, including a symbolic one with fruits and farming implements that appeared to represent the yield of a bountiful earth, a sort of Bacchanalia that was danced away in a void of history or frame of reference in front of the gigantic mural of Atatürk. That night Hamza came to Oce. In the name of the Hamshentsis of the Hopa area, he spoke of the fraternity uniting both branches of the same people and how a common celebration brought them together as they participated in the construction of a new Turkey, one fairer to the workers and the poor. Relations between Eastern and Western Hamshentsis, marked by the latter’s distrust over the former’s preservation of their Armenian dialect, were a new development after centuries of growing apart, to the point of becoming separate minorities in their own right. Earlier, Güven and I had been idling away the lunch hour after his father had disinvited us, walking in and out of every nook and cranny in the village. We sat down by a secluded cascade that ran through a mossy bedrock under the majesty of ancient beeches, chestnuts, and oaks. The trees tinged this clearing in the wood with the dark browns of their heavy wood, and as many hues of green as light allowed. They rose from a microcosm of plants and shrubs that outdid each other in wildness and exuberance, fed by the prolific Pontic rains. A few children were swimming in the pond, while two young women in bikinis had 540

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stretched themselves out on the overhang of the waterfall, speaking words lost to the swoosh of the creek. A pale man with gray eyes walked toward us and greeted me. He must have been in his 40s and his face was familiar but I was not sure from where. We had met at the Hadig festival at Bilbilan: he was with the group from Oce that had come with the stand-up comedian. Then the sight of his querying eyes refreshed my memory. It was the same stare, gentle and curious, that I had caught in him as the Altındağ girls and other Hamshentsis traveling in the back of a truck were loudly singing in Hamshetsnak. He had then watched as Amberin and I spoke in our ancient code, exchanging words and ideas that have been traveling for millennia and that were now extinct for this man. Afterwards I had a brief conversation with him. I vaguely remembered he had spoken of forgetting and loss, of a vanished language and the end of the memory bonding us, which only one of us preserved, like a bridge with a collapsed half. Like his feisty counterparts from Oce, who were hoarse and exhausted from merrymaking, he too said they wanted to recover the truth about themselves. The comedian and the young crowd regretted that the Western Hamshentsis no longer spoke Hamshetsnak: they wanted to learn it, as so many of us yearned to do good deeds. Life might give us the chance for it, or deny it. The group from Oce expressed their hopes and wishes, and carried on with the partying. This man with gray eyes, however, stayed near us, listening intently as Amberin and I continued to talk. Yet he stood there like a doomed tree, unable to soak in the rain. With the language, his past had disappeared, too: the memories of the great migration of the Amatuni princes leading their people to the Black Sea; the Turkic invasions and the Islamicization; and the different paths that had ended in Genocide for one part of the nation and a botched conversion for the other. Centuries later, history still found him striving to reconstruct his identity: who they were, where they came from, and why. The memory was encoded in a combination of sounds and signs, words and letters that were alien to him, in Hamshetsnak and in Armenian. All of that was lost for the man with the gray eyes. There was nothing left, but life.

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Notes Introduction 1. Mihrdat Noradoungian, “Ազատութեան գինը” (The price of freedom), Puzantion 3,617 (August 19–September 1, 1908), p. 1.

Chapter 1: Sasun 1. Bishop Garegin Srvandztiants, Գրոց ու Բրոց եւ Սասունցի Դաւիթ կամ Մհէրի Դուռ (Writing and Digging and Davit of Sasun, or Mher’s Door) (Constantinople, 1874). Bishop Srvandztiants was the first to transcribe the epic, as told by a villager called Gurbo who, after much insistence, agreed to recite it in one go for three days. The epic has come to be known as Sasuntsi Davit (Davit of Sasun) or Sasna Dzrer (Daredevils of Sasun) in Armenian. 2. James Russell, “The epic of Sasun: Armenian apocalypse,” in Kevork B. Bardakjian and Sergio La Porta (eds.), The Armenian Apocalyptic Tradition: A Comparative Perspective (Leiden and Boston, 2014), p. 42. 3. Manuk Abeghyan, Հայ ժողովրդական վէպը (The Armenian Popular Narrative) (Tiflis, 1908), p. 88. It was Abeghyan who suggested a correspondence with prince Davit Bagratuny. Abeghyan also paired the other protagonists with historical figures, but the name of Davit’s son, Mher, puzzled him, for it did not fit his elaborate genealogical and chronological systematization: “Surely that has been influenced by a famous person and an event that are unknown to us,” he surmised. However, it has since been suggested that Mher corresponds to the name of the Zoroastrian deity Mithra: for a detailed discussion, see Russell, ibid. 4. Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Recalling the appalling: mass violence in eastern Turkey in the twentieth century,” in Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Mary Chamberlain, and Leyla Neyzi (eds.), Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity (New Brunswick, 2009), p. 185. Fîlla in Kurdish is a word employed for Christians or strangers, usually in a religious sense, that is, non-Muslims; it is especially used for Armenians. It may also have a pejorative sense. The word appears to be derived from fellah (“peasant” in Arabic), but the explanations for the meaning it acquired in Kurdish are speculative. 5. Some of the names he mentions may have been neighborhoods within the villages. Gusked and Ardgunk were villages in their own right, according to existing lists. 6. From “El Golem” (The Golem), a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, in Obras Completas: 1923–1972 (Complete Works: 1923–1972) (Buenos Aires, 1974), p. 885. 7. Zabel Yesayan, Աւերակներուն մէջ (Amid the Ruins) (Istanbul, 2012), p. 137. 8. Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London and New York, 2004), p. 117. 9. Taparragan [Kevork Halladjian], Դէպի Կախաղան (To the Gallows) (Boston, 1932), pp. 65–6. 10. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 88. 11. Ibid., p. 13.

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Notes to pages 23–55 12. Cyril Glassé, The New Encyclopedia of Islam (New York, 2002), p. 121: “Touching a dog entails a hadath, or impurity.” But cruelty against them is thought forbidden by scholars: see Yusuf al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam (Kuala Lumpur, 2013), p. 129: “Referring to the following verse of the Qur’an, ‘There is not an animal on the earth, nor a bird flying upon two wings, but comprise nations like yourselves’ (Qur’an, 6:38), the Prophet said, ‘If dogs were not a nation (Ummah) among nations, I would have ordered that they be killed.’” 13. Ermanna Panizon, “L’Assasinio di San Pietro martire di Giovanni Bellini: strategie narrative, precedenti iconografici e analisi iconologica” (Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of St. Peter Martyr: narrative strategies, iconographic precedents and iconological analysis), Ricche Minere, January 2014, pp. 43–61. 14. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1874), vol. 1, p. 181. 15. Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life, vol. 2 (Paris, 1833), p. 4. 16. Anon., The Life, Writings, Opinions and Times of the Right Hon. George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron (London, 1825), p. 400. 17. Mt. Maratug, another name for Maruta or Mereto. The rendering preserves the pronunciation by the interviewee. 18. Dayı is “maternal uncle” in Turkish. The choice of words may not be casual, as many Arab and other Muslim men in Sasun have taken Armenian wives, often forcibly, especially after the Genocide. It also has a pejorative connotation. 19. Surp Giragos Armenian Church. Having fallen into disrepair after the 1960s, it was renovated and reconsecrated in 2012. 20. He only mentioned the sisters after I asked him. 21. Kevork Chavush (1870–1907) was a fedayi guerrilla from Sasun, who is hailed as a hero not only by Armenians but also by Kurds. He fought against the Kurdish tribes and Turkish troops during the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s, and was a leader in the resistance in the Daron region (Mush and Sasun) against the Ottoman attacks in 1904–7. His biographies say he was born in the village of Mgtink, not far from Pertank, in the district of Psanats. He died from injuries sustained in combat. 22. Gevork Arakelyan, “Новый вид муравьев рода Diplorhoptrum Mayr (Hymenoptera, Formicidæ) из Армении” (A new species of ant of the genus Diplorhoptrum Mayr (Hymenoptera, Formicidæ) from Armenia), Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia 92/2 (1991), pp. 93–6, and email correspondence with the author. For a discussion of the Myrmoxenus ravouxi, see Rumsaïs Blatrix and Claire Sermage, “Role of early experience in ant enslavement: a comparative analysis of a host and a non-host species,” Frontiers in Zoology 2 (2005), pp. 2–13. 23. Berm had a population of 180 Armenian households in 1894 before the massacres of that year: there were 110 households in 1914. See Raymond Kévorkian’s essay “The Armenian population of Sasun and the demographic consequences of the 1894 massacres”, The Armenian Review 47/1–2 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 41–53. The median Kévorkian estimates for each household is ten persons, but he notes that the Patriarchate of Constantinople at the time suggested an average of 20 persons per household, but clarified it could be as high as 70. 24. Glak Tarontsi, Ապստամբ Սասունը՝ մի էջ Սասունի նորագոյն դէպքերից (Rebel Sasun: A Page from the Newest Events) (Geneva, 1903), p. 23. No confirmation was found for the casualty figures. 25. Telephone interviews with Shiraz in May and June 2015. He passed away shortly afterwards, in October, in Los Angeles. Accounts of his trip have been published with some variations in Armenian newspapers of the Diaspora, including Aztag in Beirut. 26. Osman Köker, Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago: With the Postcards from the Collection of Orlando Carlo Calumeno (Istanbul, 2005). 27. Yesayan, Amid the Ruins, p. 190. 28. Aşxarh in modern usage signifies “world,” but in classical Armenian meant “land” or “country.” 29. Nerses Shnorhali, Թուղթ Ընդհանրական (Pontifical Letter) (Etchmiadzin, 1865), p. 352.

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Notes to pages 56–77 30. Barnabas Meistermann, “Transfiguration,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1912), vol. 15, p. 19. 31. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (New York, 2002), p. 59. The first aerial bombing by aircraft took place in Turkey: it was carried out by Bulgaria against Ottoman forces in Adrianople (modern-day Edirne) in October 1912, during the First Balkan War. The precursors of modern-day drones were unmanned balloons loaded with a single explosive, which were first used by the Austrians against Venice in 1849. 32. M. Haber, M. Mezzavilla, Yali Xue, David Comas, Paolo Gasparini, Pierre Zalloua, and Chris Tyler-Smith, “Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations,” European Journal of Human Genetics, 21 October 2015, pp. 931–6. In the early Christian era, possibly the fifth century, the historian Movses Khorenatsi had written that the nation had been established in 2492 bc, a date that recent genetic tests, remarkably, have proved to be generally accurate. 33. Armenian origin can still be seen as a source of dishonor even in modern-day Turkey, where even a man of temperate political discourse, such as then president Abdullah Gül, in 2008 sued opposition parliament member Canan Arıtman who had openly tried to “discredit” him by suggesting his mother was Armenian. In 2010, Cem Büyükçakır, the director of the Haberin Yeri news website, received an 11-month prison sentence for publishing a reader’s comment that claimed Gül’s mother was Armenian, even though he had removed the comment after receiving a warning about its legal implications. 34. Scant testimony is known about the prevalence of some order in the initial stages of the massacres in Sasun, so that the deportees were able to carry at least some valuables worth robbing. Anecdotes passed on orally among families of Armenians from Ayntab and elsewhere in Cilicia, near the Syrian border, indicate that some were able to buy food or water from Arabs and others, albeit at exorbitant prices. Raymond Kévorkian suggests the existence of a similar situation when Chechens recruited to participate in the extermination of Armenian deportees in northern Syria “set about selecting the people who still possessed financial means: these people were methodically stripped of their property and killed on the spot, so as not to risk leaving these resources to the Bedouins who had been charged with accomplishing the final liquidation of these convoys deeper in the desert” (Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, p. 665). 35. Hratch Dasnabedian (ed.), Սիմոն Զաւարեան. Մահուան Եօթանասունամեակին Առթիւ (Simon Zavarian: On the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of his Death) (Beirut, 1997), p. 428. 36. From the poem “Եկեղեցին Հայկական” (The Armenian Church) by Vahan Tekeyan, in Mushegh Ishkhan (ed.), Արդի Հայ Գրականութիւն. Գեղապաշտ Շրջան՝ 1900–1915 (Modern Armenian Literature: The Aesthetic Period 1900–1915) (Beirut, 1975), p. 179. 37. Unesco lists Western Armenian among the critically endangered languages. It was systematized in the nineteenth century, based on the speech of Constantinople Armenians. 38. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. A. D. Godley (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 135–7. 39. See Roy Jackson, What is Islamic Philosophy? (London and New York, 2014), p. 146, for a discussion of the link between jihad and conversion. 40. A restrictive regime of rights exists in Turkey, often nominally, for three non-Muslim minorities (Armenians, Greeks, and Jews) recognized by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. 41. According to one early interpretation, “fire worshippers” was a euphemism for “Arabs” intended to avoid provoking the Muslim rulers of Armenia in the ninth century. Later research has uncovered a deeper plot in Davit of Sasun of Zoroastrian origin. In addition to exploring the correspondence between the character of Mher and the Zoroastrian divinity of Mithra (see n. 3 above), James R. Russell also traces apocalyptic elements in the Armenian epic to the Jewish messianic belief in the return of King David. See Սասունցի Դաւիթ (Sasuntsi Davit) (Yerevan, 1961), James R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987), and Russell, “The epic of Sasun,” pp. 41–77. 42. The Battle of Sarıkamış in December 1914–January 1915 was a major disaster for the Third Army commanded by Enver Paşa, one of the architects of the Genocide. Harsh winter

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Notes to pages 81–98 conditions contributed to the Russian victory in this town in the vicinity of Kars: the territory was still part of the Russian Empire, conquered in the 1877–8 war. Upon his return to Istanbul “Enver publicly recognized the loyalty and bravery of the Ottoman Armenian soldiers during the Sarıkamış campaign,” and said that an Armenian officer, Sergeant Major Hovhannes, saved him from being taken captive. See Simon Payaslian, United States Policy Toward the Armenian Question and the Armenian Genocide (New York, 2005), p. 54. 43. See Martin S. Banks, William W. Sprague, Jürgen Schmoll, Jared A. Q. Parnell and Gordon D. Love, “Why do animal eyes have pupils of different shapes?”, Science Advances 1/7 (2015), n.p. 44. William Gladstone, “The villainies of Moussa Bey,” The Brisbane Courier, October 7, 1895, p. 7. 45. See Dikran M. Kaligian, Armenian Organization and Ideology Under Ottoman Rule: 1908–1914 (New Brunswick and London, 2011), p. 72, for a detailed discussion of the Hamidiye and their activity after this Kurdish cavalry, founded by Sultan Abdül Hamid II in 1891, was officially disbanded in 1908: “The Hamidiye were not disbanded but reorganized between 1908 and 1910 and renamed Tribal Regiments.” See also Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (Chicago, 1991), and Robert Olson and William F. Tucker, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925 (Austin, 1989). For Musa Beg’s role in the massacres in the region of Mush in 1915, see Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 237–8. 46. Cemal Madanoğlu, Anılar: 1911–1938 (Memoirs: 1911–1938) (Istanbul, 1982), pp. 163–4. 47. According to a report sent by the General Command of the Jandarma in September 1938 to Interior Minister Şükrü Kaya, 834 people had died in the last three years of combat in Sasun, in addition to 80 soldiers. Another 3,577 people had been deported to western districts of Anatolia, implicated as collaborators with the rebels, the report indicated. Minister Kaya was well versed in these matters: he had been the General Director of Deportations during the Genocide of 1915. See Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi (Prime Ministry General Directorate of State Archives of the Republic of Turkey), BCA 030.10.116.805.26, quoted in Abdulaziz Kardaş, “Cumhuriyet Dönemi’nde Sason İsyanları ve Alınan Tedbirler” (Sason rebels during the Republic period and the measures taken), The Journal of Academic Social Science Studies 43 (Spring 2016), p. 61. 48. See Ahmet Kahraman, Kürt İsyanları (The Kurdish Rebellions) (Istanbul, 2003), pp. 317–21, and Ümit Üngör, “Recalling the appalling,” pp. 187–8. 49. Secular priests in the Armenian Apostolic Church need to have been married for at least one year prior to ordination. They are usually the pastors or spiritual fathers of parishes, celebrate the Divine Liturgy and assist the bishop in tending to the needs of the community. Çoço Siro said that another priest was also assassinated in Badırmut, but a Kurdish man rescued his wife, Hızmo, when she was pushed into the river. She later married her savior and converted to Islam, staying in her ancestral village. 50. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, Scene 2). There are more than 160 versions of the Davit of Sasun. In the composite version collated by Manuk Abeghyan and co-authors, verses go from 13 syllables (or in a very few instances, 14) to as little as five, including instances of iambic pentameter: see Manuk Abeghyan, Երկեր (Works) (Yerevan, 1985), pp. 8–11. Abeghyan mentions that there was one person in the nineteenth century in the district of Moks who knew the 40 branches of the epic (compared to the four known to us) but whose versions were not recorded. All trace of that man was lost when he moved to Constantinople. 51. I owe the transcription and most of the translation of this song to Seda Altuğ, as well as Hasan Eken, who deciphered difficult passages in the song. 52. Quoted in Mark Mazower, “Travellers and the oriental city, c.1840–1920,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (December 2002), p. 97. 53. Ismaïl Kadaré, Muzgu i perëndive të stepës: roman (Twilight of the Eastern Gods) (Tirana, 2006), p. 20. 54. Ismaïl Kadaré, Le Grand Hiver (The Great Winter) (Paris, 1992), p. 193. 55. This I did very seldom in Turkey, and only in Istanbul: about two out of every five people I approached were indeed of Armenian descent, or had an Armenian grandparent. Outside

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Notes to pages 98–116 Istanbul it did not feel safe in Turkey to approach strangers in the street under false pretenses to ask if they were of Armenian origin. This is merely anecdotal and no scientific value is claimed or implied. 56. Iosif Brodskij, Fondamenta degli Incurabili (Embankment of the Incurable) (Milan, 2014), p. 87. 57. I owe this interpretation to the scholar Vartan Matiossian. No mention of Rûm is known in the recorded versions of the epic. It is believed that Sultana Tzimisces or Sultana Chimishkik is based on a male historical character, the Byzantine emperor John I Tzimisces (969–76), who was of Armenian origin but was considered a threat by the Armenian king Ashot III, who mobilized his armies against him. Vanik’s mention of “Kurmancî,” a synonym for “Kurd,” seems a novelty, too. The rest of the fragment he recited is a description of the suicide by Davit’s wife upon learning of her husband’s murder. Also she is named Çavraş in this version—in most other ones her name is Khandut or similar variants. At the end there is an oblique allusion to the legend that her breasts broke apart from her body when she hit the ground and a stream was born from them. I have preserved as literal a transcription as possible, including non-grammatical constructions.

Chapter 2: Commagene 1. Levon Ter Petrossian, Օտար աղբիւրները Հայաստանի եւ հայերի մասին, 12. Ասորական Աղբիւրներ, Բ. Անանուն Եդեսացի Ժամանակագրութիւն (Foreign Sources on Armenia and the Armenians, 12: Assyrian Sources, 2, The Chronicles of Anonymous of Edessa) (Yerevan, 1982), p. 57. 2. Cicero, Letters to Quintus and Brutus; To Octavian; Invectives; Handbook of Electioneering (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), p. 121. 3. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 471. 4. A car accident on November 3, 1996, in Susurluk, in the western province of Balıkesir, is generally taken as confirmation of the “deep state.” Sedat Bucak, a right-wing lawmaker from Urfa, was the only survivor of the crash of his Mercedes-Benz 600 SEL, in which the three other passengers died: Abdullah Çatlı, a convicted drug trafficker and hit man, and a militant of the Grey Wolves, a Turkish far-right group; his girlfriend Gonca Us; and Hüseyin Kocadağ, a senior police official. Çatlı was carrying a false passport in the name of Mehmet Özbay, the same alias used by Mehmet Ali Ağca, who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1991. 5. Daniel David Luckenbill, The Annals of Sennacherib (Eugene, Oregon, 2005), p. 17. 6. This is attested by the Avercius inscription on a funerary monument for the bishop of Hieropolis in Phrygia, which is dated no later than ad 212: Jörg Frey, Jan G. Van der Watt, and Ruben Zimmermann, Imagery in the Gospel of John: Terms, Forms, Theology of Johannine Figurative Language (Tübingen, 2006), p. 396. 7. See George Aghjayan, “The Armenian key to the homeland,” The Armenian Weekly, special issue on the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, April 2015, pp. 25–7, for an explanation of the difficulties in estimating the numbers of survivors and hidden Armenians. In private correspondence with this author, Aghjayan stressed that “we cannot know” how many there are: an unknown number of Armenians, unaccounted for, survived the massacres of 1915 and concealed their identity by Islamicizing, understandably averse to revealing their origins. The additional complication of defining them as Armenians can be circumvented, according to Aghjayan (a view this writer also endorses), by instead acknowledging them as descendants of Genocide survivors. 8. Fr. Michael Chamchian, History of Armenia: From bc 2247 to the Year of Christ 1780, or 1229 of the Armenian Era, trans. Johannes Avdall (Calcutta, 1827), pp. 105–7. The legend has been banished to the list of apocrypha in De libris non recipiendis (Books not to be received) in a papal decree that dates to the sixth century. Despite the papal banishment, Fr. Chamchian, of the Mekhitarist Congregation—which is in communion with Rome, unlike the Armenian

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Notes to pages 116–171 Apostolic Church—quotes the King Abgar legend at length and face value in his book, which inaugurated the modern Armenian nationalist narrative. 9. It is likely a variant of the ancient Cybele and Attis myth that dates to prehistoric Asia Minor: James R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987), pp. 415–16. 10. See p. 58. 11. Readers would be best advised to consult the primary sources for theories on human evolution: Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York, 2012) and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1874). They should also note that in the conversation quoted I erroneously referred to Tattersall as the director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York: at the time of writing the president (the proper title) of the institution was Ellen Futter; Tattersall is Curator Emeritus of the Anthropology Division. 12. Ghevont Alishan, Յուշիկք հայրենեաց հայոց (Memories of the Armenian Homeland) (Venice, 1869), p. 99. 13. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York, 2013), p. 56. 14. Jenny White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (Princeton and Oxford, 2014), p. 91. 15. Taparragan [Kevork Halladjian], Դէպի Կախաղան (To the Gallows) (Boston, 1932), pp. 760–1 and 766. 16. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (Los Angeles, 2012), p. 67. 17. Ter Petrossian, Assyrian Sources, p. 122. 18. In classical Armenian: “Խելամո՞ւտ իցես կարգի Բազմաստեղաց, եւ քո բացեա՞լ իցէ զպատրուակ Հայկին.” In the original in Hebrew of Job 38:31 it says “Orion” (even though the original language of the Book of Job is a matter of contention, as some believe it a later translation into Hebrew from an unknown language). 19. Grigor Narekatsi, Մատեան Ողբերգութեան (The Book of Sorrow) (Constantinople, 1845), p. 157. 20. Yeghishe Charents, “Դանթէական Առասպել” (Dantesque legend), in Բանաստեղծութիւններ Ա. Հատոր (Poems, Volume 1) (St. Lazarus, Venice, 1991), pp. 81–5.

Chapter 3: Dikranagerd I 1. Tovmas Mgrdichian, Տիգրանակերտի նահանգի ջարդերը եւ քիւրտերու գազանութիւնները՝ ականատեսի պատմութիւն (The Massacres in Dikranagerd Province and the Kurds’ Atrocities: A Witness Account) (Cairo, 1919), p. 63. 2. Ibid., p. 63. 3. Andrew Lawrence, The Skyscraper Index: Faulty Towers (London, 1999). While the thematic link is indirect at most, it is eerie to note that the research paper came out two years before the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers in the terrorist attacks of September 11. 4. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), pp. 361–2. 5. Mgrdichian, The Massacres in Dikranagerd, pp. 55–6, and Kévorkian, ibid. 6. Ahmet Yukuş, “96 yıl sonra bir ilk çan sesi!” (The first sound of a bell in 96 years!), Habertürk, November 5, 2012. 7. Carl Jung, The Collected Works, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, 1972), vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, pp. 3275–6. 8. Sakine Cansız was one of the cofounders of the PKK and one of the more prominent members of the organization. She had been arrested and tortured by Turkish police in the 1980s. In a crime that remains unsolved, she was assassinated at the Kurdish Information Center in Paris in January 2013, along with two other Kurdish female activists: Fidan Doğan and Leyla Söylemez. For more on Sakine Cansız, see pp. 349–50. 9. Mgrdichian, The Massacres in Dikranagerd, p. 54. 10. Professor Maria P. Pedani, an Ottoman History expert at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, did not consider a nationalist interpretation of Sabbah’s uprising. “The idea of nation was developed in the period of the French Revolution and Illumination, and exported outside

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Notes to pages 185–231 Europe in the nineteenth century,” she said in private correspondence. “The Seljuks were a tribe in origin, not a nation.” Sabbah was the teacher of a religious movement: he wanted to create a state for his followers outside the reach of the Seljuk sultans. 11. For more on Osman Sebrî, see p. 109. 12. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Tome V: La Prisonnière (In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Prisoner) (Paris, 1923), p. 222. 13. Hrant Dink, “Ruh halimin güvercin tedirginliği” (Like a nervous pigeon: my unsettled state of mind), Agos, January 10, 2007, p. 12.

Chapter 4: Siirt 1. Mesud Barzani, Barzani ve Kürt Ulusal Özgürlük Hareketi: 1 (Barzani and the Kurdish National Liberation Movement: 1 (Istanbul, 2006), p. 221. 2. Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (Chicago, 1991), p. 371. 3. See chapter 1, n. 45.

Chapter 5: Dikranagerd II 1. Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History, Book 19 (London, 1862), pp. 188–9.

Chapter 6: Bitlis 1. The official census figures actually showed a 10 percent increase in the population of the city of Bitlis, from 43,109 in 2010 to 47,904 in 2014. 2. See Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 343, and Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2014), p. 89. 3. The confusion was not helped, as described in the following section, by that clan member’s subsequent and contradictory statement that the tribe’s Islamicization had followed the massacres. 4. Hakan Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries (Albany, 2004), p. 114. 5. Şükran Vahide, Islam in Modern Turkey: An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (New York, 2005), pp. 116–17. To my know­ledge, this story only appears in Turkish records and I did not find information from Armenian and other third parties to corroborate it. While this in itself should not disqualify its veracity, a deed of this nature would have certainly attracted attention not only for its righteousness, especially by a member of the organization that carried out the Genocide, but also for the existence of Armenians right after the massacres that had almost completely wiped them out in Bitlis and its environs (see Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 337–53). In addition to the 15 women and girls found by the Russian forces when they took Bitlis in March, another 100 Armenian women and children were later encountered in surrounding Kurdish villages.

Chapter 7: Mush 1. Ghevont Alishan, Յուշիկք հայրենեաց հայոց (Memories of the Armenian Homeland) (Venice, 1869). 2. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 235.

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Notes to pages 246–274

Chapter 8: Erzurum 1. Reports in the Turkish literature indicate this church was “Orthodox Armenian” (meaning Apostolic Armenian) built in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but do not mention its name. Some reports in the Armenian literature say it was St. Mary’s, which was built in 1840. 2. Milorad Pavić, Хазарски Речник (Dictionary of the Khazars) (Belgrade, 1985), p. 47. 3. Ibid., p. 47.

Chapter 9: Hınıs 1. See Alexandre Papadopoulo, Islam and Muslim Art (New York, 1979), p. 272, and José Pereira, The Sacred Architecture of Islam (New Delhi, 2004), p. 126. 2. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 303. 3. See Robert Olson and William F. Tucker, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925 (Austin, 1989) for a detailed account of the formation of Kurdish nationalism. 4. Manuel Mirakhorian, Նկարագրական ուղեւորութիւն ի հայաբնակ գաւառս Արեւելեան Տաճկաստանի (Descriptive Journey Through the Armenian Populated Counties of Eastern Turkey) (Constantinople, 1884), p. 45. 5. Ibid., p. 46. 6. Hrachya Ajarian, Հայերէն Արմատական Բառարան (Armenian Etymological Dictionary) (Yerevan, 1926), vol. 1, p. 129.

Chapter 11: Sarıkamış, Kars and Ani 1. Nagorno-Karabakh is the mountainous district of the Armenian region of Karabakh. After Armenia joined the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh was declared an autonomous region. In 1923, Stalin ceded the landlocked territory to Azerbaijan, despite its Armenian majority. A secession war broke out in 1988 in the waning days of the Soviet Union, which ended with the de facto independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. A precarious ceasefire maintained since 1994 was punctuated by a four-day war in April 2016. 2. In English, erythrophobia is used as a medical term to designate fear or anxiety about blushing. Our usage here is etymologically correct, if not widespread. 3. Maria Pia Pedani, “L’idea della morte nel mondo ottomano” (The idea of death in the Ottoman world), in Antonio Fabris (ed.), Tra quattro paradisi: Esperienze, ideologie e riti relative alla morte tra Oriente e Occidente (Between Four Heavens: Experiences, Ideologies and Rites Regarding Death Between the East and the West) (Venice, 2013), p. 108. 4. For more on the Battle of Sarıkamış and Sergeant Major Hovhannes, see p. 77 and chapter 1, n. 42. 5. Born in 1897, Yeghishe Charents was killed during the Stalinist terror of 1937. Paruyr Sevak (1924–71) is the other giant of Armenian poetry of the twentieth century. He died in a suspicious car crash; Sevak’s nationalist poetry put him at odds with the Soviet regime. 6. Yeghishe Charents, “Դանթէական Առասպել” (Dantesque legend), in Բանաստեղծութիւններ Ա. Հատոր (Poems, Volume 1) (St. Lazarus, Venice, 1991), p. 81. 7. Yeghishe Charents, Երկիր Նաիրի (The Land of Nayri) (Yerevan, 1977), p. 8. 8. Yeghishe Charents, “Dantesque legend”, pp. 72–3. 9. Aristakes Lastivertsi, Պատմութիւն (History) (Venice, 1844), p. 30. 10. Ibid., p. 2. 11. Michael McCormick, Ulf Büntgen, Mark A. Cane, Edward R. Cook, Kyle Harper, Peter John Huybers, Thomas Litt, Sturt W. Manning, Paul Andrew Mayewski, Alexander Frederick Medico More, Kurt Nicolussi, and Willy Tegel, “Climate change during and after the

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Notes to pages 274–297 Roman Empire: reconstructing the past from scientific and historical evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43/2 (2012), p. 190. 12. See chapter 10. 13. Hate speech in Turkey is generally not prosecuted, except when it is aimed at “Turkishness” (punished by Article 301 of the Penal Code) or Islam: the Armenian intellectual Sevan Nişanyan was sentenced to 16 years in jail for an unauthorized construction inside the hotel complex he owns; albeit unlawful, the practice is commonplace in the entire country, and he was prosecuted only after making a mocking comment about Muhammad.

Chapter 13: Ankara 1. Karen Khanlarian, Հայ բնակչութեան էթնոկրոնական վերակերպումները Թուրքիայի Հանրապետութիւնում (1923–2005 թթ.) (Ethno-Religious Transformations of the Armenian Population in the Republic of Turkey: 1923–2005) (Antelias, 2009), p. 22. 2. For a concise explanation, see Ludwig Paul, “Zazaki,” in Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian Languages (London and New York, 2009), p. 545. 3. Nazaret Daghavarian, Քրիստոնէական բողոքականութեան եւ Գըզըլպաշներու աղանդին ծնունդը (The Birth of Christian Protestantism and the Kızılbaş Sect) (Constantinople, 1914), p. 80. 4. It is interesting to note that Bogomilism, a doctrinal offshoot of Paulicianism, appeared in Bulgaria at least a century and a half before the Byzantine emperor John I Tzimisces resettled Armenian Paulicians in the Bulgarian city of Philippopolis (modern-day Plovdiv). Yet Paulicians and Bogomils never merged in Bulgaria and remained distinct groups, even though it has been proved that the former gave rise to the latter, perhaps by way of missionaries. See Milan Loos, Dualist Heresy in the Middle Ages (Prague, 1974), pp. 59–60. The two books of reference on the Paulicians remain Frederick C. Conybeare, The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia (Oxford, 1898), and Nina Garsoïan, The Paulician Heresy (The Hague and Paris, 1967). 5. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Boston, 1853), p. 392. 6. John Robert Barnes, “The dervish orders in the Ottoman Empire,” in Raymond Lifchez (ed.), The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey (Berkeley, California, 1992), p. 47. 7. David George Hogarth, “The problems in exploration I: Western Asia,” Geographical Journal 32/6 (1908), p. 558. 8. Rev. G. E. White, “Survivals of primitive religion among the people of Asia Minor,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain 39 (1907), p. 161. 9. Fr. Boghos Meherian, Պատմութիւն Վարուց Տեարն Հ. Պօղոս վարդապետի Մեհերեան, Շարագրեալ յիւրմէ, 1811, Վենետիկ, ի վանս Սրբոյն Ղազարու (History of the Life of Father Boghos Meherian, Composed by Him, Venice, 1811, in the Monastery of St. Lazarus), Library of the Mekhitarist Congregation of Venice, Manuscript 560. 10. For more on Özkan, see chapter 9. 11. Robert Olson and William F. Tucker, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925 (Austin, 1989), p. 37. 12. Theodore Bent, “The Yourouks of Asia Minor”, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 20 (1891), p. 270. 13. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), p. 311. 14. The more common estimates for the casualty toll of the earthquake hover around 17,000 dead and more than 45,000 injured. 15. See chapter 1, n. 21. 16. Conybeare, The Key of Truth, pp. xxvi–xxvii.

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Notes to pages 306–354

Chapter 15: Amasia and Gümüşhacıköy 1. The siblings said they did not know the story behind the photo. It is possible their mother was abducted by Arab Bedouins, like so many Armenian girls during the Genocide. Some were freed afterwards, ransomed by Armenian organizations.

Chapter 17: Yozgat 1. Roupen Melkonyan, Իսլամացուած հայերի խնդիրների շուրջ (On the Issues of the Islamicized Armenians) (Yerevan, 2009), p. 58. 2. See Söner Yalçın, Beyaz Müslümanların Büyük Sırrı (The White Muslims’ Big Secret) (Istanbul, 2006), p. 19. Yalçın says that the family of the first Lütfi Doğan moved from Kelkit, in the province of Gümüşhane, to Yozgat during World War I for two years and later returned to their hometown. Yalçın suggests a convoluted, and incomplete, explanation of how Doğan might be related to Patriarch Shnorhk by way of two marriages. 3. John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers (New York, 2006), p. 14.

Chapter 18: Argat 1. Hagop Oshagan, Մնացորդաց (The Remnant) (Cairo, 1932), vol. 1, p. 58.

Chapter 19: Dersim 1. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York, 2011), pp. 298 and 382: “This state of affairs obliged the authorities to devise a mechanism allowing them to control, at the very least, access to Dersim—since they could not establish military supremacy over the district itself—in order to make it as hard as possible for the deportees to escape from their system.” 2. For more on Rıza, see p. 339. 3. Robert Olson and William F. Tucker, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925 (Austin, 1989), pp. 73–5. 4. See p. 287 for the debate about the identity of the Zaza people and language, and their relation to the Kurds. 5. On December 19, 2000, Turkish authorities launched operation “Back to Life” in 20 prisons across Turkey to transfer inmates to high-security prisons known as “F-type,” with individual or isolation cells, in contrast to the dormitory-style cells. At least 28 prisoners and two soldiers died during the attempt to forcibly transfer inmates, some 800 of whom had been on hunger strike since October of that year in protest at the transfers. 6. Ramazan Aras, The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey: Political Violence, Fear and Pain (London and New York, 2014), p. 57. 7. Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London and New York, 2000), p. 80. 8. Hrant Dink, “Sabiha-Hatun’un sırrı” (The secret of Sabiha-Hatun), Agos, February 6, 2004, p. 12. 9. Ishkhan Chiftjian, “Իսլամացումը իբրեւ վերապրում եւ անհետացում” (Islamicization as survival and extinction), VEM Pan-Armenian Journal 46 (2014), p. 140. 10. Hrachya Ajarian, Հայերէն Արմատական Բառարան (Armenian Etymological Dictionary) (Yerevan, 1926), vol. 1, p. 157. 11. The brothers Abel and Gosdan: see chapter 15.

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Notes to pages 363–424

Chapter 20: Van 1. Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton and Oxford, 2012), p. 319.

Chapter 23: Urfa 1. Vahram Rabuni, Vahram’s Chronicle of the Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia During the Time of the Crusades, trans. and preface by Charles Friedrich Neumann (London, 1831), pp. 26–8.

Chapter 26: Adana 1. Ferda Balancar, “Bir başka açıdan Kürtlerin Ermeni Soykırımın’dakı Rolu” (Another aspect of the Kurds’ role in the Armenian Genocide), Agos, April 24, 2015, p. 17. 2. Bilgin Ayata, “The Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian reconciliation process: double-bind or double-blind?,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47/4 (November 2015), pp. 807–12. 3. Ibrahim Halil Baran, “Ermeniler, Kürtlerden Özür Dilesin” (Armenians, apologize to the Kurds), Rudaw.net, April 24, 2015. 4. In the province of Garin (Erzurum, in Turkish). Ramazan’s message has been edited for grammar and punctuation. 5. Harput was another Armenian-populated province at the time. Its Armenian name is Kharpert (see part VII of this book).

Chapter 27: Antap 1. Yervant Kuchukian, Հարիւր ժամ Այնթապի մէջ՝ յուշեր եւ տպաւորութիւններ (One Hundred Hours in Antap: Memoirs and Impressions) (Beirut, 1953). 2. Alyson Wharton, “Identity and style: Armenian Ottoman churches in the nineteenth century,” in Mohammad Gharipour (ed.), Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of the Non-Muslim Communities Across the Islamic World (Leiden, 2014), pp. 91 and 99.

Chapter 28: Musa Ler 1. In December of 1978, the Grey Wolves, an extremist Turkish group, killed approximately 100 Alevis in the city of Marash and caused extensive damage to property. 2. For more on Gosdan, see p. 303. 3. Robert College is the old name for today’s Boğaziçi University. 4. Mihrdat Noradoungian, “The price of freedom,” Puzantion, August 29, 1908, p. 1.

Chapter 29: Hamshen I 1. Hayton (also known as Hetoum or Héthoum of Korykos), La Fleur Des Histoires de la Terre D’Orient (translated as “A Lytell Cronycle,” c.1520), quoted in Hovann H. Simonian, “Hamshen before Hemshin: the prelude to Islamicization,” in Hovann H. Simonian (ed.), The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey (London and New York, 2007), p. 24. 2. Hovann H. Simonian, “Hemshin from Islamicization to the end of the nineteenth century,” in Simonian (ed.), The Hemshin, p. 73.

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Notes to pages 424–506 3. Rüdiger Benninghaus, “Turks and Hemshinli: manipulating ethnic origins and identity,” in Simonian (ed.), The Hemshin, p. 366.

Chapter 30: Poshas 1. Vardan Voskanian, “The Iranian loan-words in Lomavren, the secret language of the Armenian Gypsies,” Iran and the Caucasus 6/1 (2002), p. 180. 2. Kerope P. Patkanov, Цыганы: Несколько словъ о наречıяхъ закавказскихъ цыганъ: боша и карачи (Gypsies: A Few Words About the Dialects of Gypsies: Bosha and Karachi) (St. Petersburg, 1887), p. 85. 3. Vrtanes Papazian, Հայ-Բոշաներ (Ազգագրական Ուսումնասիրութիւն) (Armenian Poshas: An Ethnographical Study) (Tbilisi, 1899), pp. 18–19. 4. Ibid., p. 56. 5. Ian Hancock, “On Romany origin and identity: questions for discussion,” in Adrian Marsh and Elin Strand (eds.), Gypsies and the Problem of Identities: Contextual, Constructed and Contested (Istanbul, 2006), p. 79. 6. Papazian, Armenian Poshas, p. 56. 7. “We are locals,” in Turkish. 8. Papazian, Armenian Poshas, p. 16. 9. Coffee pot, with which Turkish coffee is prepared: briki, borrowed from Ottoman Turkish, is more commonly employed in Greece; in Turkey the device is called cezve. 10. Ադրբեջան means “Azerbaijan” in Armenian. 11. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (London, 2007), pp. 371–2.

Chapter 32: Hamshen II 1. Mingrelians are one of the constitutive nations of Georgia and a majority of them are Christian Orthodox. The Artvin province in Turkey used to be under the rule of Georgian princes and intermittently also had Armenian rulers. 2. Yervant Odian, Ընկեր Փանջունի Վասպուրականի մէջ (Panchuni in Vasburakan) (Istanbul, 1914), pp. 41–2. 3. For the story of Husep, see Hovann H. Simonian, “Hemshin from Islamicization to the end of the nineteenth century,” in Hovann H. Simonian (ed.), The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey (London and New York, 2007), pp. 59–60. The story, initially based on oral testimonies, is not without inconsistencies, as Simonian points out in his analysis. 4. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, reism is the doctrine that only things exist. The name is derived from the Latin noun res (thing). The most developed version of reism can be credited to Tadeusz Kotarbiński (1886–1981), a Polish philosopher and one of the leading members of the Lvov–Warsaw School. 5. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1966).

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Further Reading This list is by no means extensive and should only be taken as a guide to literature on the narrower topic of Armenians and their descendants who remained in Turkey after the Genocide. Hence, the copious bibliography on the Armenian Genocide and its centennial, as well as general interest titles on Armenian history, have been omitted.

In English Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of the “Lost” Armenians in Turkey (Piscataway, New Jersey, 2014) Tuba Çandar, Hrant Dink: An Armenian Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey (Piscataway, New Jersey, 2016) Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir (London, 2008) Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (London, 2015) Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier, Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide (Montreal, 2015) Rubina Peroomian, And Those Who Continued Living in Turkey After 1915: The Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Armenian Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature (Yerevan, 2008) Hovann H. Simonian (ed), The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey (London and New York, 2007) Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London and New York, 2015)

In Armenian Karen Khanlarian, Հայ բնակչութեան էթնոկրոնական վերակերպումները Թուրքիայի Հանրապետութիւնում (1923–2005 թթ.) (Ethno-Religious Transformations of the Armenian Population in the Republic of Turkey: 1923–2005) (Antelias, 2009) 555

Secret Nation

Lusine Sahakyan, Համշենի Մանրատեղանունները (Microtoponyms of Hamshen), trilingual edition in Armenian, Turkish and Russian (Yerevan, 2012) Sergey Vardanyan, Կրոնափոխ համշենահայերի բարբառը, բանահյուսությունը եւ երգարվեստը (The Dialect, Folklore and Songs of the Converted Hamshen Armenians) (Yerevan, 2009)

In Turkish Ahmet Abakay, Hoşana’nın Son Sözü (Hoşana’s Last Word) (Istanbul, 2013) Altuğ Yılmaz (ed.), Müslümanlaş(tırıl)mış Ermeniler: Konferans Tebliğleri (Islamized (Islamicized) Armenians: Conference Papers) (Istanbul, 2015)

In French Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Les restes de l’épée: Les Arméniens cachés et Islamisés de Turquie (The Remains of the Sword: The Hidden and Islamicized Armenians of Turkey) (Paris, 2012)

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Index This index follows the Turkish orthography of treating Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö and Ü as separate letters of the alphabet. Names and page numbers in bold text indicate chapters or parts of the book. Abaza Paşa ​456 Abdül Hamid II, Sultan ​4, 6, 22, 36, 64, 84, 132, 194, 389 Abgar, King of Edessa. See under Edessa Abkhazia ​427, 446, 522 Abughamrents Surp Krikor Church (Ani) ​ 276 Abuşoğlu ​396 Acemis ​366 Achæmenid dynasty ​106 Adalet Partisi ​43 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party) ​211, 246, 383, 433, 490 Adana ​89, 191, 363, 373, 387–93, 501 1909 massacre of ​21 Adapazarı ​456 Adıyaman ​105, 107, 108, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 185, 347, 362, 380, 395. See also Mor Petrus Mor Pavlus Church Adras ​362 Afghanistan ​421 Africa ​154, 155 Afyon Karahisar ​433 Aghpyur, Serop ​95, 195, 231, 232, 359 Aghtamar ​247, 359, 364. See also Surp Khach Church Agn ​456 Agos newspaper ​3, 166, 175, 265, 333, 334, 346, 366, 388, 390 Ağa, Hama ​42 Ağa, İzzet ​43 Ağa, Süleyman ​43 Ağpik ​237 Ağrı. See Ararat, province Ağrı Dağı. See Ararat, Mt. Ağuçan aşiret ​337 Ajaria ​438, 446, 448, 530

Ajarian, Hrachya ​354 Akçakale ​376, 377, 380 Akçakoca ​510, 511, 517 Akçam, Taner ​21, 362, 363, 418 Akhalkalak ​443 Akhurian River ​275 Akis ​353 Kızıl Tepe (Red Hill) ​353 AKP. See Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi Aksak, Muhyettin ​246 Aktar, Ayhan ​492 Akyol, Mustafa ​126 Akyürek, Ramazan ​126 Al Nusra Front ​386 Al Qaeda ​386, 522 Al Sabbah, Hassan ​171 Alakilise ​266 Alamut ​171 Alaric ​269 Albania ​97 Albanians ​517, 518 Albruz Mountains ​171 Alduş. See Gerger Aleppo ​80, 131, 147, 155, 230, 287, 302, 378, 380, 399, 409, 418, 464 Alevis ​2, 163, 183, 196, 257, 282, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 298, 331, 332, 333, 337, 338, 341, 345, 347, 348, 349, 352, 396, 408 Alexander the Great ​106, 191 Alexandretta. See Iskenderun Ali, Hacı ​395 Ali, Sabriye ​38 Ali Ağa ​183 Alios ​137 Alishan, Ghevont ​120, 273 Alpaslan ​281 Alper, Özcan ​8, 9 Altai Mountains ​513

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Secret Nation Amasia ​ 301–7, 334, 354, 402 Amatuni, Prince Hamam ​370, 528, 541 Amatuni, Prince Shapuh ​370, 528, 541 America. See United States Anatolia ​1, 6, 7, 54, 170, 174, 178, 189, 229, 233, 283, 284, 291, 296, 315, 317, 327, 339, 389, 403, 407, 433, 439, 449, 452, 459, 486, 493 Ançyoğ ​474 Anderson, Shareen ​272 Andranik, General. See Ozanyan, Andranik Ani ​ 265–78 Cathedral ​276 Kingdom of ​281 Ankara ​9, 164, 210, 231, 263, 265, 266, 267, 286–97, 314, 420, 502, 512, 533, 534 Bilgi University ​315, 337 Gazi University ​295 Anonymous of Edessa. See under Edessa Antakya ​401 Antap ​125, 126, 211, 214, 225, 363, 367, 373, 394–8, 501 Antiochus, King ​106, 107, 120, 132 Antreassian, Dikran ​408 Apka ​149 Apo. See Öcalan, Abdullah Ara the Beautiful, King ​116 Arabs ​201, 245, 385, 389, 399, 438, 458, 459, 461 Aradzani River ​100, 103, 324, 326, 376 Arahtu Canal ​113 Arakelots Monastery (Mush) ​95, 237 Arapınar. See Kobane Ararat Mt. ​13, 121, 161, 185, 191, 227, 263, 266, 267, 405 province ​88, 161, 184, 263, 436 Ararat, Aram ​254 Ardahan ​531, 532, 537 Ardala ​415, 474, 475, 487, 493, 494, 497, 503, 504, 507, 513, 527, 536, 537 Ardanuç. See Ardanuş Ardanuş ​423, 437, 440, 441, 443, 451, 452, 508, 509 Ardgunk ​20 Ardzruni, dynasty ​359 Argandene ​132 Argat ​ 323–30 Ermeni Deresi (Armenians’ Gorge) ​ 328, 329, 330 Kızıl Tepe (Red Hill) ​329 Argentina ​3, 4, 387, 461, 483 Argint ​34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 173, 174

Arif, Ahmed ​162 Aristotle ​70 Arkan, Hasan ​156 Arkhunt. See Argint Armée Secrète Arménienne de Libération de l’Arménie (ASALA; Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) ​172, 275, 302, 364, 433, 467, 468, 496, 538 Armenia ​290, 362, 363, 364, 373, 374, 403, 404, 416, 422, 423, 424, 439, 448, 469, 478, 494, 495, 530, 540 Arab rule of ​13, 370, 403, 404, 472, 528 Azerbaijan, war with. See NagornoKarabakh war Republic ​54, 79, 195, 227, 260, 261, 266, 296 revolt against the Arabs ​79, 528 Socialist Soviet Republic ​51, 120, 268 Turkey, 1918 war with ​266 Western ​151, 167, 174, 193, 244, 252, 265, 272, 295, 323, 368, 388 Armenian Apostolic Church ​7, 9, 55, 75, 130, 136, 137, 143, 144, 150, 151, 161, 167, 182, 207, 234, 237, 249, 288, 291, 296, 297, 338, 349, 353, 368, 398, 408, 428, 443, 448, 452, 454, 456, 532 Diaspora ​7, 8, 30, 59, 76, 77, 112, 115, 153, 167, 225, 235, 283, 339, 342, 378, 388, 402, 405, 410, 414, 417, 424, 428, 431, 524, 534 Genocide ​1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 16, 27, 34, 36, 37, 38, 51, 57, 61, 63, 64, 70, 77, 78, 85, 89, 94, 97, 105, 108, 110, 111, 115, 129, 130, 131, 137, 138, 142, 143, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160, 165, 168, 170, 172, 182, 193, 194, 196, 197, 207, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 225, 227, 234, 237, 238, 252, 255, 256, 261, 269, 270, 284, 285, 287, 292, 295, 296, 297, 299, 301, 305, 306, 311, 317, 323, 326, 327, 329, 333, 339, 341, 345, 347, 348, 351, 354, 355, 360, 362, 363, 375, 376, 377, 379, 382, 388, 389, 390, 394, 395, 397, 400, 403, 406, 413, 417, 420, 421, 422, 424, 425, 426, 428, 443, 444, 452, 464, 469, 471, 481, 488, 489, 507, 508, 509, 514, 520, 523, 529, 533, 535, 539, 541 Arab role in ​85, 86 Kurdish role in ​85, 389, 390 Highland Plateau ​1, 54, 63 millet ​16, 17 Patriarchate of Constantinople ​85

558

INDEX Armenian Democratic Liberal Party. See Ramgavar Party Armenian Relief Society ​8 Armenian Revolutionary Federation. See Dashnaktsutyun Armenian Social Democratic Party. See Hnchak Party Armenians’ Gorge. See under Argat Arpi ​68, 69, 215 Arsameia ​103, 104, 110, 131 Arsames, King ​132 Artuqqid, dynasty ​203 Artvin ​8, 423, 428, 433, 435, 436, 437, 440, 441, 442, 444, 447, 452, 453, 477, 485 Kolorta, quarter ​437, 452 See also Tibet ASALA. See Armée Secrète Arménienne de Libération de l’Arménie Asi ​86, 87 Asia, Central ​80, 274, 438, 439, 440, 447, 448, 458, 473 Asia Minor ​128, 132, 279–319, 374 Asifos ​457 Aslan, Mikail ​332 Aspincer ​215 Assad, Bashar ​185, 409, 410 Assumption of the Holy Mother of God, Feast of ​405 Assur ​113 Assyria ​113, 158 Assyrian Empire. See Assyria Assyrian Orthodox Church ​111, 115, 122, 128, 129, 137 Assyrians ​58, 115, 152, 160, 163, 170, 183, 238, 389, 390 Asurbanipal, Emperor ​161 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal ​3, 5, 9, 30, 57, 78, 79, 112, 118, 157, 170, 172, 207, 220, 221, 222, 247, 251, 253, 267, 286, 291, 292, 295, 338, 339, 341, 344, 347, 354, 355, 373, 388, 394, 401, 418, 443, 451, 453, 457, 487, 491, 493, 496, 500, 501, 509, 513, 522, 523, 524, 540 Ateshian, Archbishop Aram ​149, 359 Athens ​445 Atlanta ​121, 319 Augsburg ​150 Auschwitz ​21 Avarayr, Battle of ​398 Averroes. See Ibn Rushd Avgerian, Fr. Haroutioun ​28 Aydınkaya, Fırat ​388, 389 Ayşin, Mehmet Can ​166 Azabak ​379

Azadiye Welat ​185 Azerbaijan ​78, 292, 430 Azeris ​262, 263 Babylon ​113 Badıkan aşiret ​42, 234 Badırmut ​61, 85, 90, 91, 92 Baghdad ​62, 458 Bagration. See Bagratuny Bagratuny Davit ​15 dynasty ​277, 443 Bağ ​369 Bağin ​326 Bahamdan ​44 Bahro ​329 Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipelines ​292 Balak, Turk ​104 Balsamo, Carino of ​25 Balyan, Sarkis ​398 Baran, Ibrahim Halil ​389 Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (BDP; Peace and Democracy Party) ​233, 234, 262, 429 Barzan ​362 Barzani aşiret ​362 Ahmed, Sheik ​190 Mesut ​190, 362 Mustafa ​190 Basil, Emperor ​281 Basra ​62 Bastagian, Mihran ​159 Batman ​71, 83, 158, 162, 182 Batumi ​436, 438, 439, 446, 464, 530, 531 Bayazet ​ 259–64, 274 Bayrampaşa, prison of ​336 BDP. See Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi Bebek ​314, 315, 316 Bedik, Teteri ​87 Bedir Ağa ​109 Bedouins ​64, 86, 194 Bedri aşiret ​32 Behring Breivik, Anders ​247 Beijing ​316 Beirut ​394 Bekdjian, Archbishop Karekin ​318 Bekira Mahmutka aşiret ​174 Bekran ​35 Bel ​113, 120, 359 Belançağır ​309 Belfast ​361, 427 Bellini, Giovanni ​25 Bennigsen, Alexandre ​8 Bent, Theodore ​291

559

Secret Nation Beria, Lavrenti ​464, 465 Berlin ​376, 402 Treaty of ​36, 71 Berm ​36, 38, 47 Bertolucci, Bernardo ​284 Besne ​395 Besni ​125 Bıruki aşiret ​363 Kınyaz Kartal, leader of ​364 Biberyan, Zaven ​404 Bilbilan ​532, 533, 535, 536, 537, 541 Binayán Carmona, Narciso ​8, 427 Bingöl ​7, 202 Birinci Ferman (First Deportation, 1915). See under Sasun Bithania ​456 Bitias ​400 Bitlis ​69, 155, 174, 192, 194, 207–26 Eren University ​210 Great Mosque ​210, 211 Black Sea ​79, 80, 175, 284, 309, 316, 319, 360, 370, 413–541 Blessing of the Grapes ​405 Bodrum ​294 Bogomils ​289 Boğaziçi University ​303 Islamicized Armenians, Conference of, 2013 ​35, 318, 522 Boğazkere grape ​197 Boğosyan, Sarkis ​183, 184, plate 3 Bolis. See Istanbul Borçka ​439, 440, 494, 497 Bosnia-Herzegovina ​289, 315 Botan aşiret ​194 Bozika ​94 Bozkurtlar. See Grey Wolves Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of ​229 Brodsky, Joseph ​98 Buenos Aires ​8, 283, 427, 464, 487 Bulbuçuz Kığ ​436 Bulgaria ​289, 299, 314, 315 Bunyatyan, Monsignor Grigoris ​8 Burma ​284 Bursa ​49, 192, 420, 433 Buxoram aşiret ​32 Byron, Lord ​28 Byzantine Empire ​267, 289, 290, 528 Cæsar, Julius ​303 Cæsarea. See Cæsaria Cæsarea Maritima ​80 Cæsaria ​289, 294, 298–300, 334, 374, 435 Marcus, metropolitan of ​374 California ​190, 227, 232

Caliphate ​292 Calumeno, Orlando Carlo ​49 Cambridge University ​191 Camil Paşa ​173 Canada ​518 Canik ​353 Cansız, Sakine ​151, 349 Carat ​442, 448, 450, 451, 457 Carbeas ​289 Cartagena ​53 Cartier-Bresson, Henri ​283 Caspian Sea ​175, 292 Cegerxwîn ​185, 388 Cehennem Deresi (Hell’s Gorge) ​423, 428, 437, 508, 509 Cemal Paşa ​110, 514 Cepkin, Hayko ​296 Chabinas, creek ​103 Chalcedon, Council of ​398 Chaldeans (Catholic Assyrians) ​77, 163, 298 Chaldiran, Battle of ​251 Charents, Yeghishe ​138, 271, 272 Chavush, Kevork ​32, 95, 229, 250, 295, 512 Chay, Battle of ​43 Chechens ​515, 518, 519, 522 Cherkezian, Sarkis ​153 Chernobyl ​480, 485 Chiapas ​521 Chicago ​380 Chiftjian, Ishkhan ​339 Chile ​131, 414 Chimishkik, Sultana. See Tzimisces, Sultana China ​316, 332 Chlghadian, Fr. Mgrdich ​145 CHP. See Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi Chuljian ​187 Churchill, Winston ​59 Chveneburis ​293 Cibin ​339 Cibran, Khalid Beg ​193 Cicero ​106, 107 Cilicia ​49, 63, 252, 308, 370, 373–410 Armenian Catholicate of ​187, 373 Toros, ruler of ​374 Circassians ​275, 355, 516, 522 Civar ​215, 234 Cologne ​353 Commagene ​ 103–39, 159 Committee of Union and Progress (İttihad ve Teriyaki) ​5, 21, 143, 197, 221, 251, 354 Constantine XI, Emperor ​267 Constantinople. See Istanbul

560

INDEX Crimea ​271, 476 Crimean War (1853–6) ​162 Crucifixion ​115 Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP; Republican People’s Party) ​361, 471 Cyprus, Northern ​166 Çakıroğlu, Dursun ​88, 89 Çamlıhemşin ​457, 461 Çançağan ​465 Çavuşlu ​472, 473 Çayeli ​444, 445, 454, 457, 460, 463 Çelikan aşiret ​35, 36 Çermik ​182 Çetin, Metropolitan Bishop Mor Filiksinos Yusuf ​107 Çiftçi ​369, 370 Çukurova University ​191 Daghavarian, Nazaret ​288 Dalek ​35, 42 Dalvorig ​230 Aram of ​230, 231 Damascus ​458, 459, 462 Danaburan ​353 Danze ​42 Darius, King ​106 Daron ​ 207–39 Darwin, Charles ​64, 118 Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) ​5, 66, 195, 197, 405, 406, 515, 534 Davit of Sasun ​13–15, 17, 18, 23, 32, 33, 72, 81, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 370 “deep state”. See under Turkey Demir Kapı (Iron Gate). See Kuba Demirbaş, Abdullah ​162, 163 Demirci, Aram ​38 Demirci, Isa ​38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47 Demirci, Kevo ​35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47 Demirciyan, Artin ​168 Demirciyan, Davit ​168 Demirciyan, Dono ​168 Demirciyan, Hanım ​168 Demirel, Süleyman ​5, 43 Demirtaş, Selahattin ​254 Deniz Gölü ​263 Denver ​299 Der Hagop, priest of Badırmut ​61 Der Hayo. See Der Hagop Der Zor ​305, 376 Dersim ​2, 3, 4, 152, 155, 187, 196, 220, 288, 331–55

deportations and 1938 massacre ​3, 4, 333, 337, 338, 339, 345, 347, 348, 389, 392, 430 Ermeni Kayaları ​347 Dersimi, Nuri ​388 Derxaç ​72 Derxane aşiret ​32 Derxaş. See Derxaç Deyika ​39 Diken, Şeyhmus ​177 Dikran, King ​175 Dikran-Amed ​163 Dikranagerd ​7, 8, 9, 42, 60, 83, 108, 141–204, 259, 270, 301, 302, 325, 335, 359, 360, 369, 370, 373, 376, 377, 378, 396, 397, 486, 496, plate 3 Gâvur Mahallesi (Infidels Quarter) ​141, 162, 163, 164, 177, 200 Mardin Gate massacre ​202 See also Surp Giragos Church Dilmen, İbrahim Necmi ​501 Dilmun ​113 Dimi. See Zazas Dink, Hrant ​3, 112, 126, 170, 188, 213, 238, 239, 296, 327, 333, 337, 339, 345, 379, 387, 401, 405, 406, 421, 445, 454, 488, 509 Dinkjian, Ara ​325 Divriği ​289, 290 Diyarbakır. See Dikranagerd Diyarbakır-Sur ​162 Djeredjian, Hovhannes. See Shiraz Doğan, Hacı Ali ​317 Doğan, Hanımkız ​318 Doğan, Lütfi ​317, 318, 319 Doğubeyazıt. See Bayazet Don River ​274 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor ​186 Dublin ​427 Duman ​301 Duman, Dikran ​168 Dzağrina ​420, 474, 482, 483, 484, 487, 492, 503 Dzeranik ​351 Dzmag ​25 Ecevit, Bülent ​113 Edessa Abgar, King of ​115 Anonymous of ​104 Cathedral ​276 Edirne ​435 Efendi, Aziz Mehmed. See Zevi, Sabbatai Egypt ​400, 522 Ekmekjian, Levon ​467, 468, 538

561

Secret Nation Elazığ. See Kharpert Empson, William ​506 Enver Paşa ​110, 269, 514 Erat, Divan ​216 Eratik, Hakan ​117 Erbil ​190 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip ​3, 4, 9, 18, 79, 94, 170, 171, 221, 222, 245, 257, 314, 327, 343, 363, 383, 387, 421, 434, 458, 519, 523 Eremli ​177 Ermenek ​317 Ermeni Deresi (Armenians’ Gorge). See under Argat Êrs ​194 Eruh ​191, 194 Erzincan ​130, 194, 273, 352 Erzurum. See Garin Esen, Mehmet ​194, 195 Eskişehir ​435 ESP. See Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi Euphrates River ​103, 106, 107, 109, 113, 128, 131, 133, 136, 137, 379 Evren, General Kenan ​303, 354, 434 Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi (ESP; Socialist Party of the Oppressed) ​428, 432 Ezro, Ahmet ​40 Fatimids ​273 Ferman (Armenian insurgent, Sasun) ​87 Ferman (Deportation). See under Sasun Fermana Fîlla (Edict of the Armenians) ​18 Festival of the Roses. See Vartavar Feyzi, Pirincizâde ​143 Fırat, Şerif ​291 Fîlla Tepe ​172 Fort Kosidar ​374 Rouben, baron of ​374 France ​214, 217, 263, 400 Fraser, John Foster ​97 Free Syrian Army ​409, 410 Gagik, King ​281 Gagik II, King ​374 Galatasaray Lyceum ​37, 283 Garci ​467, 479, 480, 483, 484, 486, 501, 537, 538, plate 4 Garin ​77, 117, 169, 171, 174, 207, 208, 243–78, 301, 307, 334, 344, 351, 360, 362, 369, 373, 376, 415, 420, 432, 448, 452, 470, 476, 531, 534, 535 Garmir Yerets Vartabed. See Der Hagop Gate of Mher (Van) ​370 Gâvur Mahallesi (Infidels Quarter). See under Dikranagerd

Geben ​382 Gebze, prison ​427 Georgia ​260, 272, 415, 421, 427, 439, 443, 446, 448, 464, 465, 531 Georgians ​186 Gerger ​103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 116, 118, 123, 128, 136, 137 Germany ​105, 148, 162, 251, 267, 353, 418 Getronagan Armenian School ​296 Gez ​244, 248 Gezi Park ​431, 432 Gezmiş, Deniz ​344 Ghazaryan, Stepan ​272 Ghiulisar. See Gülizar Giardino della Minerva ​81 Gibbon, Edward ​290 Gladstone, William ​84 Goğag ​54 Golosik ​172 Gomidas Vartabed ​520 Gomk Monastery (Sasun) ​32, 66, 67, 170 Goromad ​467 Gortaqum ​172 Gotortsir ​20 Govi ​369, 370 Goya, Francisco ​17 Gökağaç ​308 Gökay, Fahrettin ​402 Gökçen, Sabiha ​3, 339, 389 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Gredara ​35, 43 Greece ​294 Greek Orthodox Church ​445, 454, 456, 460 Greeks ​5, 58, 160, 170, 187, 281, 308, 516 Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar) ​292 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” ​177, 344, 478 Gulbenkian, Calouste ​299 Gusked ​15, 61, 64, 87, 88, 89 Gusketa ​20 Gül, Abdullah ​364 Gülen, Fetullah ​170, 171, 221, 222 Güler, Ara ​2, 283 Gülizar ​83, 84 Gülsöken, Kevork ​294 Gülüce ​130 Gümüşhacıköy ​ 301–7 Gümüşhane ​317 Gypsy. See Roma Gyumri ​275, 297 Ğullık ​40 Haci Habibli ​400 Hadig ​431, 432, 498, 499, 532, 535, 541

562

INDEX Hadjian, Alexander ​385 Hadjian, Avedis ​387 Hadjian, Bedros ​385 Hagopian, Hacifaykı ​172 Hagopian, Sarkis ​172 Hagopian, Soğo ​172 Haifa ​80 Hajin ​387 Hakecemal ​366 Halaçoğlu, Yusuf ​295 Halajian, Kevork ​130 Halbaşı ​533 Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP; Peoples’ Democratic Party) ​251, 252, 254, 255, 257, 451 Hamamashen ​528 Hamburg ​147 Hamid, Kınyaz ​264 Hamidiye Cavalry ​84, 108, 132, 192, 193, 194, 195, 360, 376, 389, 446 Hamshen ​7, 79, 80, 81, 361, 413–541, plate 4 Hamshentsis ​7–9, 79–81, 360–1, 413–26, 428–32, 434, 437, 439–41, 444–5, 451–3, 456–7, 461–3, 465–8, 470–98, 501–3, 507–15, 517, 519–21, 524–41 Han Deresi River ​43 Hani ​188 Harbak ​87 Harput. See Kharpert Harvard Law School ​417 Hasan Paşa Han ​201 Hatay ​105, 119, 384, 385, 400 Hayk ​113, 120, 138, 141, 359 Hazro ​173, 230 Hazzo. See Kozluk HDP. See Halkların Demokratik Partisi Hell’s Gorge. See Cehennem Deresi Hemşin ​457, 461 Hemşin Köyü ​511, 512, 514, 517, 519, 522 Hemşinli. See Hamshentsis Herend. See Argint Herodotus ​70, 500 Heyder Ağa ​109 Hınıs ​171, 249, 250–8, 290, 301 Hikmet, Nâzım ​186, 257 Hilvan ​133, 376, 377 Hiroshima ​461 Hizan ​213 Hizbullah (Turkish militant group) ​127, 179 Hnchak Party (Armenian Social Democratic Party) ​405, 534 Hobbes, Thomas ​189 Hogarth, David George ​290

Holocaust ​21 Holy Mother of God, Feast of ​124 Holy Transfiguration, Feast of the ​26, 55, 56, 532 Homer ​416 Hopa ​79, 361, 415, 416, 419, 420, 421, 423, 424, 429, 432, 439, 448, 451, 457, 465, 470, 472, 474, 475, 477, 478, 479, 480, 482, 483, 485, 487, 498, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 523, 526, 532, 534, 537, 538, plate 4 Hopak ​380 Horoms ​444, 445, 454, 455–63 Hors ​353 Hovhannes, Sergeant Major ​269 Hovhannes-Smpad, King ​281 Hoxha, Enver ​97 Hozat ​340, 347 Hozat, Besse ​196 Hromkla ​131, 378, 379 Hui ​316 Humphrey, Nicholas ​191 Huns ​274 Hürriyet newspaper ​41, 300, 339 Ibn Rushd ​72 Ibrahim, Mufti ​143 In ​347 Infidels Quarter. See Dikranagerd, Gâvur Mahallesi IRA. See Irish Republican Army Iran ​54, 155, 217, 227, 251, 256, 345, 362, 398, 448 Iraq ​62, 160, 161, 217, 362, 421, 469, 470 Mongol invasion of ​62 Iris River ​301 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ​426 Iron Gate. See Kuba Isa, Fr., priest of Mardin ​85 ISIS. See Islamic State Iskenderun ​187, 373, 400, 405, 407 Islamic State (ISIS) ​9, 37, 223, 260, 263, 306, 366, 386, 387, 470, 476 Islamiyet ​23 Israel ​217, 385 Istanbul ​1, 3, 4, 9, 13, 69, 81, 85, 88, 93, 100, 105, 112, 114, 143, 153, 177, 184, 193, 203, 212, 221, 235, 238, 239, 253, 267, 274, 281, 282, 284, 309, 316, 333, 334, 336, 349, 354, 360, 366, 377, 383, 390, 392, 400, 402, 403, 406, 414, 415, 416, 423, 431, 433, 434, 460, 471, 485, 498, 499, 515, 516, 520, 528, 530, 531, 537, 538, 539 Beyoğlu ​217, 299, 360, 431

563

Secret Nation Fatih ​522 Istiklal Street ​37, 47, 283, 333 Kadıköy ​414, 416 Kasımpaşa ​434, 435 Kumkapı ​85, 93, 114, 283, 311 Kurtuluş ​1, 9, 433 pogrom of September 6–7, 1955 ​401 Sirkeci ​515 Üsküdar ​220 See also Galatasaray Lyceum; Surp Garabed Church; Surp Haç Tıbrevank School; Surp Harutyun Church Italy ​214, 217 Izmir ​49, 173, 211, 377, 420, 486 İğdeli ​317 İkinci Ferman (Second Deportation, 1938). See under Sasun İnönü, İsmet ​89, 348 İttihad ve Teriyaki. See Committee of Union and Progress Jamanak newspaper ​283 Japan ​262 Jebejian ​394 Jerusalem ​273 Jews ​58, 163, 238, 296, 385, 396 John Paul II, Pope ​398 Jololyan, Serop ​380 Jordan ​522 Jung, Carl G. ​150 Justice and Development Party. See Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi Kabusia ​400 Kaçkar Mountains ​263, 472, 539 Kadaré, Ismaïl ​97, 98 Kadı Köy (Dikranagerd) ​183 Kafle Manug (Manug’s Cave) ​60 Kağkig ​94 Kahraman, Ahmet ​88 Kahta ​119, 123 Kale, Mahmut ​255, 256 Kalkan, Durak ​336 Kalustyan, Shnorhk, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople ​43, 48, 249, 302, 305, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 402, 403, 404, 405 Shushan Gültane ​317, 318, 319 Kapaklı ​308, 309 Karagöz, Selahettin ​303 Karamanian ​299 Karatavuk ​511, 513, 514, 519 Karde ​20

Kars ​117, 263, 265–78, 362, 408, 436, 452, 537 kingdom of ​281 Treaty of ​229 Kartal, Kınyaz. See under Bıruki aşiret Kasım, Sheik ​40, 41 Kastamonu ​1, 308–13, 433, 436 Kavar ​234 Kaypakkaya, İbrahim (“Ibo”) ​332 Kayseri. See Cæsaria Kazakhstan ​364, 530, 531 Kazanjian, [first name unknown] ​266 Kazanjian, Sosi ​8 Keçizeken ​339 Kedir River ​89, 90 Keği ​390, 391 Kemal, Mustafa. See Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Kemal, Yaşar ​360 Kemal Paşa, Deli ​88 Kemaliye ​352 Kemalpaşa. See Makrial Kendo aşiret ​32 Kerezman ​359 Kesab ​401, 402 Keshishian, clan ​49 Kévorkian, Raymond ​492, 506 Khachadurian, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Karekin ​303, 401, 402, 403 Kharpert ​119, 174, 296, 323–55, 367, 391, 416, 455, 456, 460, 501 Khars ​83 Khojaly ​78 Khorasan ​80, 345, 438, 439, 460, 513 Khrushchev, Nikita ​506 Kızıl Tepe (Red Hill). See under Akis; Argat Kızıl Tepe Manastır (Red Hill Monastery). See Maryam Asdvadzadzin Monastery Kızılbaş ​183, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292 Kilis ​131, 351, 373, 385–6 Kirbo aşiret ​213, 218, 220 Kobane ​37, 387 Koçgiri ​291, 333 Rebellion ​291, 292 Komu, Avedis ​255 Konya ​453 Korsakoff syndrome ​427, 527 Korykos, Hetoum of ​418 Kozan. See Sis Kozluk ​23, 88, 94, 149, 182 Köker, Osman ​49, 200, 203, 293 Kuba ​133, 136 Kuchukian, Yervant ​394

564

INDEX Kulli Xane ​40 Kulp ​177 Kurban Bayramı ​232 Kurdistan ​145, 151, 174, 179, 180, 185, 193, 252, 265, 270, 335, 337, 388, 389, 390, 397 Southern ​190 Kurdistan Worker’s Party. See Partiya Karkeren Kürdistan Kurds ​5, 9, 173, 176, 239, 262, 287, 288, 291, 296, 302, 333, 335, 362, 364, 366, 389, 403, 451, 458, 464, 505, 517, 520 Kurmancî. See Kurds Kurs ​192 Küçük, Yalçın ​526, 527 Kürdistan. See Kurdistan Kütahya ​19, 87, 89, 99 Kyrgyzstan ​531 La Nación newspaper ​427 Laç, Gorge ​351 Lastivertsi, Aristakes ​274 Lausanne, Treaty of ​142, 186, 336, 414, 415, 418, 421, 424, 425, 426, 429, 432, 438, 456, 465, 466, 477 Lawrence, Andrew ​145 Lawrence, T. E. ​124, 290 Lawrence of Arabia. See Lawrence, T. E. Lazian, Kurken Efendi ​130 Lebanon ​7, 387, 408, 416 Leipzig ​339 Lenin, Vladimir I. ​120, 229, 491 Levon III, King ​375 Vahram, chronicler and secretary of ​ 374, 375 Levon V, King ​49 Lezgins ​275 Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey. See Türkiye İşçi ve Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu Lice ​142, 164, 168, 232 Lokumcu, Metin ​421 Lom. See Poshas Lome ​418 Los Angeles ​143, 146, 178, 296 Lynchburg ​121 Macedonia ​173, 314, 315 Macedonians ​173, 301, 382, 516 Madagascar ​288 Madanoğlu, Cemal ​87 Mahari, Gurgen ​404 Mahmut, Gâvur ​381 Mahsum, Barut ​127

Makrial ​419, 420, 421, 423, 426, 428, 429, 430, 434, 458, 465, 467, 470, 472, 507, 508, 511, 524, 528, 530, 531, 532, 533, 538 Mala ​476 Mala Hıseyni Hıse aşiret ​37, 38, 39 Malatya ​110, 155, 183, 192, 234, 340, 376, 381, 423, 430, 522 Mamigonian, Vartan ​398 Mamluks ​49, 132, 373, 374 Manazgerd, Battle of ​281 Mandel aşiret ​173 Manicheans. See Paulicians Manisa ​340 Manoukian, Aram ​194, 443 Manoyan, Giro ​197 Manug’s Cave. See Kafle Manug Mao Zedong ​332 Mapuches ​414 Mar Petyun Church (Dikranagerd) ​144 Marash ​80, 315, 373, 382–4, 396, 402 1978 Alevi massacre of ​292, 401 Maratuğ. See Maruta, Mt. Marcellinus, Ammianus ​200 Marde aşiret ​27 Mardin ​74, 85, 93, 127, 158, 169, 201, 225, 265, 523 Margosyan, Mıgırdiç ​141, 162, 177 Marmara Sea ​416 Mart Maryam Monastery (Venk) ​111 Maruta, Mt. ​9, 13, 20, 26, 32, 34, 55, 56, 57, 79, 84, 94, 115, 155, 208, 224, plate 2 Marx, Karl ​134, 478 Marxist–Leninist Communist Party of Turkey ​426 Maryam Ana Church (Dikranagerd) ​144, 183, plate 3 Maryam Asdvadzadzin Monastery (Mush) ​ 231 Maryland ​153 Mashtots, Mesrop ​120, 491 Masıroluk ​308, 312 Masis ​13 Matto, Hama Aliye ​40 Mazgirt ​337, 338, 339, 344, 353 Mazower, Mark ​97 McPhee, John ​319 Mecca ​77, 246, 327, 349, 483 Medz Mağlut ​530 Meğraked Bridge ​229, 250 Meherian, Fr., Boghos ​290, 291 Mekhitarian School, Pangaltı ​49 Mekhitarist Congregation ​28, 120, 227, 273, 290 Melik, Mehmet ​380

565

Secret Nation Mereto. See Maruta, Mt. Mersin ​201 Merzifon ​305 Mesopotamia ​104, 119, 132, 138, 154, 203, 388, 522 Messi, Lionel ​483 Mezreh ​327 Mgrdichian, Tovmas ​143, 159 Mıstan ​202 Mısto, Xelile ​35, 39, 40 Mışuş ​172 Miami ​187 Midyat ​158, 159 Mikoyan, Anastas ​97 Mikragom ​172 Milionchyan, Ashot ​272 Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı (MIT; Turkish national intelligence organization) ​ 294, 502 Millik ​40 Milton, John ​28 Mingrelians ​418, 464, 465 Mirakhorian, Manuel ​252 Mirakian ​350, 353 Mirdêsî aşiret ​108 Miro, chief of Khars ​83 MİT. See Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı Mizak ​164, 165, 166 Molokans ​408 Mongok ​237 Monophysitism ​398 Moore, Thomas ​28 Mor Barsuma Monastery (Gerger) ​137 Mor Petrus Mor Pavlus Church (Adıyaman) ​122, 137 Morgenthau, Henry ​143 Moscow ​186, 229 Patrice Lumumba University ​292 Mosul ​62 Moussa Bey. See Musa Beg Mullaoğlu, Yakub ​509 Murad I, Sultan ​267 Muradiye (district in Van) ​360, 361 Murat River. See Aradzani River Musa Beg ​83, 84 Cezahir, brother of ​83 Musa Dağ. See Musa Ler Musa Ler ​125, 349, 399–410 Mush ​6, 7, 8, 18, 72, 84, 172, 227–39, 295, 302, 359, 397, 452. See also Arakelots Monastery Muslioğli ​476 Husep ​476 Muşk ​172

Muşuni ​172 Mutafyan, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Mesrob II ​319, 404, 405 Mutki ​208, 213, 215, 223 Müşkünüz ​213 Nagorno-Karabakh war ​77, 78, 117, 217, 225, 266, 275, 324, 355, 430 Nalcı, Aris ​197 Narekatsi, Grigor ​138 Nazaretian, Nicholas Ağa ​398 Nazarian ​394 Nazism ​21 Nefsi Gerger ​110, 131, 133, 134 Nehru, Jawaharlal ​506 Nemesis, Operation ​515 Nemrud, Mt. ​120, 347 Nesin, Aziz ​282 Netherlands ​331, 430 Neumann, Charles Friedrich ​374 New York ​131, 162, 210, 282, 283, 391, 392, 451, 468, 469, 487, 501 Nicomedia ​456 Niç ​208, 209, 215, 223, 224 Nisibis, School of ​114 NKVD ​465 Nor Marmara newspaper ​416 Nor Zartonk ​354, 377, 531 Noradoungian ​453, 454 Gabriel ​453 Mihrdat ​4, 6, 404 Noraşen ​262 Noratunkian. See Noradoungian Norşen ​172 Northern Ireland ​361 Norway ​247 Nurî, Mehmet ​108, 109, 185 Nursî, Said ​207, 220, 221 Obama, Barack ​417 Oce ​536, 539, 541 Odian, Yervant ​471 Of ​424 Ogasian, Kirkor ​326 Ogasian, Melkon ​326 Olbiş ​103, 109, 133, 135, 136 Ongik ​20 Orginos ​172 Orion. See Hayk Ormanian, Malakia, Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople ​55 Orontid dynasty ​106, 175 Ortega y Gasset, José ​427, 438

566

INDEX Orwell, George ​133 Oshagan, Hagop ​323 Oshakan ​79, 370, 528 Ottoman Empire ​4, 5, 7, 197, 269, 271, 297, 354, 363, 388, 389, 390, 403, 415, 422, 459, 460, 462, 464, 481, 499, 509 Ozanyan, Andranik ​95, 190 Öcalan, Abdullah (“Apo”) ​132, 153, 156, 158, 185, 232, 296, 350 Özal, Turgut ​441

Polo, Marco ​171 Pompeiopolis ​313 Poshas ​1, 219, 268, 309, 433–54, 538 Pripyat ​480 Proust, Marcel ​187 Providence ​326 Putin, Vladimir ​491 Puzantion newspaper ​4 Qamışli ​148, 182, 185, 287

Paboudjian, Paul ​492 Paghnik ​387 Pağeş. See Bitlis Pahlavuni, Prince Vahram ​276 Palak, Naum Fadik ​162 Paliks ​533, 534 Palu ​330, 376, 444 Pamuk, Orhan ​426 Papazian, Vahan ​295 Papazian, Vrtanes ​437, 438, 441, 444, 446, 448 Paris ​350, 402, 407 Parthians ​107, 131 Partiya Karkeren Kürdistan (PKK; Kurdistan Worker’s Party) ​50, 69, 71, 95, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 169, 172, 192, 193, 232, 233, 270, 287, 296, 327, 335, 336, 342, 349, 350, 378, 381, 388, 390, 429, 517 Patagonia ​464 Patkanov, Kerope P. ​436, 446 Paulicians ​288, 289, 290, 291, 296, 297, 533 Pavić, Milorad ​249 Pavlükalar. See Paulicians Pazar ​461 Peace and Democracy Party. See Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi Pelke ​40, 41 Peoples’ Democratic Party. See Halkların Demokratik Partisi Persia. See Iran Persian Gulf ​142 Pertank ​32 Perugia ​49 Peşvar ​128 Petrosyan, Vardges ​120, 491 Pirşenk ​83, 87, 92 Pışut ​49, plate 1 Picasso, Pablo ​284 PKK. See Partiya Karkeren Kürdistan Pleiades ​138 Poli. See Istanbul

Rabet ​149 Ramadan ​34, 209, 224, 227, 246, 250, 295, 301, 303, 316, 327, 366, 437, 444, 449, 511, 512, 513, 534, 535 Ramgavar Party (Armenian Democratic Liberal Party) ​534 Raştonik aşiret ​296 Red Hill. See under Akis; Argat Red Hill Monastery. See Maryam Asdvadzadzin Monastery Refahiye ​292 Rehim, Sileyman ​133, 134, 136 Republican People’s Party. See Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi Reşika ​42 Reşit, Mehmet ​397 Rhode Island ​326 Rıza, Seyid ​333, 339, 344, 349 Rize ​369, 444, 457, 472, 495, 536, 539 Robert College. See Boğaziçi University Rojava. See Qamışli Roma ​1, 376, 434, 435, 438, 449, 451 Roman Empire. See Rome Rome ​107, 131, 274, 500 Rumkale ​378 Rushdie, Salman ​282 Russia ​77, 195, 229, 244, 266, 267, 269, 271, 296, 354, 360, 362, 363, 388, 403, 404, 408, 427, 437, 462, 489 Russo-Turkish War (1828) ​293 Russo-Turkish War (1877–8) ​36, 420, 510 Russo-Turkish War (1915–17) ​256, 269, 272, 437, 443, 446, 476 Sabbatian movement ​296 Safavids ​251, 288 Sağlık, Hüseyin ​133 Sağlık, Ömer ​129 Sağlık, Ramazan Ağa ​133, 134 Sakarya ​516 Salerno ​81 Salo aşiret ​156

567

Secret Nation Salonica ​97, 118, 297, 401, 445 Samandağ ​125, 408 Samast, Ogün ​112, 126, 339 Samatya ​14, 96, 100 Samiramis, Queen ​116 Santiago ​131 Sarajevo ​449 Sargon, King ​159 Sargsyan, Mihran ​227 Sarıkamış ​ 265–78, 537 Battle of ​77, 268, 269, 437 Saroukhanian, Hagop ​14 Saroyan, William ​208, 213, 214, 221, 364 Sason. See Sasun Sasun ​1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13–100, 149, 170, 172, 173, 191, 208, 236, 238, 295, 354, 360, 438, 452, 461, plate 1 1894 massacres of ​27, 34, 36 1925–37 uprisings ​86, 87 Birinci Ferman (First Deportation, 1915) ​ 18, 86 Daredevils of. See Davit of Sasun İkinci Ferman (Second Deportation, 1938) ​ 18, 19, 27, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95 Sasuntsi Davit. See Davit of Sasun Satlel ​449, 452 Scopes, John Thomas ​118 Scorpio ​138 Sebilciyan, Hatun. See Gökçen, Sabiha Sebilciyan, Hripsime ​339 Sebrî, Osman ​109, 185 Seleucid Empire ​106 Selim, Yavuz Sultan ​396, 462 Seljuks ​290 Semal ​229 Senekerim, Armenian king of Van ​281 Senekerim, Assyrian king ​113 Sepasdatsi, Murad ​194 Sepasdia ​1, 7, 174, 246, 281–5, 293, 374 Hotel Madımak ​281 1993 attack on ​282, 401 Sera Dere ​477 Serkis Ağa. See Vartanian, Sarkis Seropyan, Sarkis ​265, 334, 339 Sevak, Paruyr ​271 Seventh Day Adventist Church ​262 Severan Bridge ​103 Sèvres, Treaty of ​291 Shakespeare, William ​506 Shamil, Imam ​437 Shatt al-Arab ​62 Sheik Fatma ​71, 72 Sheik Said ​177, 193, 251, 253, 388, 397 Mehdi, brother of ​193

rebellion ​108, 251, 292, 397 Selahaddin Fırat, son of ​253 Shiraz (photographer Hovhannes Djeredjian) ​48, 49, plate 1 Sıçan Deresi ​192 Sığek ​329 Sığert. See Siirt Sındor Kaya, Mt. ​48, 51, 54, 56, 57 Sırxo (Armenian insurgent, Sasun) ​87 Siberia ​465 Siirt ​ 190–5 Silk Road ​214 Silvan ​142, 175, 183 Sinop ​1, 433 Sis ​187, 373, 392 Sivas. See Sepasdia Siverek ​376 Smith, Dr. Floyd ​145 Soghomonian, Soghomon. See Gomidas Vartabed Soviet Union ​8, 79, 97, 405, 427, 451, 465, 480, 482, 490, 491, 506, 530, 531 Communist Party of ​506 Spano, Robert ​325 Spengler, Oswald ​427 Srpots Arakelots Cathedral ​269 St. Gregory the Illuminator ​55, 100, 225 St. Lazarus Monastery, Venice ​28, 273 St. Nerses Shnorhali ​55, 56 Stalin, Iosif V. ​79, 451, 465, 516, 530 Sufis ​290, 344, 453, 521 Mevlevi ​297 Sulduz ​272 Sultantepe ​380 Suluk Bridge. See Meğraked Bridge Sundam ​353 Surp ​ 368–70 Surp Asdvadzadzin, shrine of (Sasun) ​20, 26, 34 Surp Asdvadzadzin Cathedral (Antap) ​ 397, 398 Surp Asdvadzadzin Church (Hınıs) ​250 Surp Asdvadzadzin Church (Urfa) ​376 Surp Garabed Church (Istanbul) ​401 Surp Garabed Monastery (Mush) ​232, 295 Surp Giragos Church (Dikranagerd) ​9, 32, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 152, 156, 161, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 176, 177, 182, 183, 184, 189, 192, 200 Surp Haç Tıbrevank School (Istanbul) ​ 303, 401, 402, 406 Surp Harutyun Church (Istanbul) ​114, 311 Surp Khach Church (Aghtamar) ​359, 360, 364

568

INDEX Surp Maryam Asdvadzadzin Cathedral (Istanbul) ​85 Surp Minas Church (Gez) ​244, 248 Surp Sarkis Church (Dikranagerd) ​144 Surp Sdepannos Church (Xas) ​252 Surp Takavor Church (Istanbul) ​416 Surp Talita Church (Xas) ​252 Surp Yerrortutyun Church (Xas) ​252 Sülüklü Han ​152, 155, 167, 175, 184, 187, 188, 259 Sydney ​274 Syria ​7, 63, 64, 107, 124, 130, 131, 305, 306, 373, 380, 402, 418, 458, 459, 469, 470, 471, 521, 522. See also Free Syrian Army Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch ​107 Şabin-Karahisar ​284 Şağlamor, Mt. ​23 Şamşat ​123 Şana ​425, 432 Şavşat ​428, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 447, 451, 452, 453, 457, 459, 538 Şedırki ​182 Şehidiye, Cami ​169 Şellefyan, Mıgırdiç ​43 Şenik ​215 Şıkso ​346 Şırnak ​87, 191 Şigo aşiret ​32, 66, 236 Şişli ​334 Şişman, Zia ​415, 416 Şordan ​353 Şukriye aşiret ​32 Şukru, Haci ​302 Şükrü Ağa ​109 Tabagetil ​450 Tabor, Mt. ​56 Tacitus ​500 Tağvetsor ​26 Talas ​299 Talât Paşa ​110, 376, 514 Tambur ​528 Tan, Uner ​191 Tano, Reis ​36, 43 Tarsus ​387 Taşköprü ​308, 313 Tatvan ​ 368–70, 397 Taurus mountains ​13, 23, 54, 191, 374 Tayfun, of Gusked ​89 Taylor, Patrick ​445 Tcholoyan, Archbishop Oshagan ​325 Tehlirian, Soghomon ​376 Tehran ​116

Temuco ​414 Tennessee ​118 Tephrice. See Divriği Ter Hovannisian, Nigoghos ​195 Texas ​270 Teyzé, Baydzar ​183, 184, plate 3 Theodora, Empress ​289 Thessaloniki. See Salonica Thrace ​435 Tırtux ​408 Tibet (Artvin) ​443, 444, 450, 451 Tigran, Aram ​177, 325 Tigran Honents Church (Ani) ​276 Tigranes the Great, Emperor. See Tigranes II, King Tigranes II, King ​107, 120, 175 Tigris River ​142 TİKKO. See Türkiye İşçi ve Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu Tiridates, King ​100 Tokat ​283, 294, 303, 379 Tokyo ​527 Tolstoy, Lev ​168 Tomarza ​294 Toronto ​518 Toumanian, Hovhannes ​162 Trabzon. See Trebizonda Transfiguration, Holy. See Holy Transfiguration Trebizonda ​126, 191, 339, 416, 449, 460, 494, 511, 518 Tribal Regiments. See Hamidiye Cavalry Tuhtenli. See Tütenli Tuman, Nigol ​195 Tunceli. See Dersim Tur Abdin. See Midyat Turcomans ​260, 262, 263, 379 Turkey 1923 War ​294 1935 Census ​18 Civil Registry ​34, 58, 92, 94, 122, 123, 129, 156, 183, 236, 293, 366 “deep state” (derin devleti) ​112, 127, 176, 350 Korean War, military mission in ​15, 20 Kurdish rebellions ​71, 170, 333 population exchanges after World War I ​ 173, 294 Turkish Historical Society ​295 Tuspa ​370 Türkiye İşçi ve Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu (TİKKO; Liberation Army of the Workers and Peasants of Turkey) ​ 295, 302, 331, 350, 353

569

Secret Nation Tütenli ​308 Tzimisces, Sultana ​99 Tzotzils ​521 Uighur Xinjiang ​316 Uighurs ​316 Ukraine ​271, 485 Ulnya. See Zeytun Ummah ​23, 148 United Kingdom ​159, 388 United Nations ​527 United States ​155, 159, 180, 181, 217, 218, 227, 270, 319, 326, 341, 380, 391, 402, 461, 494 Urfa ​109, 125, 131, 133, 164, 166, 171, 192, 339, 367, 373, 374–81, 388, 399, 501, 533 Urğancıyan, Ari (Faris) ​215 Urğancıyan, Şahin ​215 Uruguay ​313 Urus Xev ​443, 446 Utrecht ​331 Ürek, Archbishop Mor Gregorius Melke ​ 107, 128 Vakıf ​124, 125, 308, 373, 399, 400, 403, 405, 408 Van ​7, 185, 195, 247, 359–67, 370, 378, 397, 420, 433, 444, 448, 519, 520, 528 Armenian defense of ​57, 194, 360, 399, 443, 448 Aykesdanner, district of ​215 Kingdom of ​281 Lake ​113, 273, 369 Vananta, King ​281 Vardanyan, Sergey ​473 Vartan (Armenian insurgent, Sasun) ​87 Vartanian, Azad ​156 Vartanian, Sarkis ​155, 156 Vartavar (Festival of the Roses) ​26, 34, 266, 532, 536, 539, 540 Vartevor. See Vartavar Varto ​155, 156, 295 Vasak ​398 Vasburakan ​274, 359, 370, 528 Vatican ​299 Vaux, Bert ​445 Velioğlu, Hüseyin ​127 Venk ​111, 113 Visigoths ​269 Voskedzar ​23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30 Vova ​431 Vranovça ​173 Washington ​190

Werfel, Franz ​399 West, Rebecca ​449 White, Ellen ​262 Wood, Grant ​513 Xaço, Gilen ​177 Xas ​252, 253, 254 Xelun, creek ​426 Xerzan ​86, 87 Xındzorik ​39 Xian aşiret ​234 Xian (China) ​316 Xigoba ​413, 472, 474, 475, 476, 477, 479, 494, 495 Xodır Bey ​400 Xoşkiği ​353 Yağnik ​236 Yakutiye ​246 Yalaz, Leyla ​377 Yayladağ ​401 Yazı ​308 Yeghivartetsi, Catholicos Movses ​456 Yenice ​511, 513, 514, 519 Yerevan ​2, 229, 234, 259, 260, 266, 272, 296, 342, 363, 364, 422, 469, 474, 478, 493, 523, 524 Yesayan, Zabel ​21, 53, 392 Yezidis ​163, 345, 364, 389 Yılmaz, Remzi ​503 Yoğunoluk ​400 Young Turks ​4, 207, 306, 394, 404, 405, 514 Yozgat ​233, 314–19 Yugoslavia ​315 Zakho ​160, 161 Zaluna ​472, 473 Zara ​287, 289, 290, 291 Zarian, Gostan ​400 Zavarian, Simon ​66 Zaytar ​362 Zazas ​216, 221, 222, 286, 287, 288, 329, 333, 335, 337 Zendit ​482, 483, 484 Zengezur ​262 Zevi, Sabbatai ​297 Zeytountsian ​382 Zeytun ​373, 382, 383, 408 Zildjian, Avedis ​144 Zillan ​88 Zir ​293 Zonguldak ​436 Zoroastrianism ​398 Zurpici ​472, 474

570

Plate 1. The residents of an Armenian village in Sasun (possibly Pışut), in a photo taken by the photographer Shiraz during a pioneering journey in 1973. Such was their isolation that they asked Shiraz to advise “the Armenian king that there are still Armenians in Sasun.” However, the last Armenian monarch, Levon V of the Kingdom of Cilicia, had been dethroned in 1375 by Mamluk invaders.

Plate 2. Pilgrims climbing Mt. Maruta in July 2011. The girl was scared when she realized that the bag had flipped over, revealing the embroidered Armenian cross. “We are Muslim,” they said when asked if they were Armenian.

Plate 3. Baydzar Teyzé with her husband Sarkis Boğosyan at home in the grounds of Maryam Ana Assyrian Church in Dikranagerd (Diyarbakır), in December 2013. They were the last Christian Armenians. Baydzar was also the last speaker of the distinct Armenian dialect of Dikranagerd. She passed away in June 2014. Sarkis died in January 2016.

Plate 4. Tea harvest in the Hamshen village of Garci. Tea production is the main economic activity of the Hamshen villages around Hopa. All family members join the effort for the çaykağ, as the tea harvest is called in Hamshetsnak.