BY RUMEYSA KIGER / ISTANBUL
100 Ottoman Armenian intellectuals who were arrested
This is a segment from a collection of portraits by artist Nalan Yırtmaç of 100 Ottoman Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and taken to concentration camps on April 24, 1915, created for the exhibition “Without knowing where we are headed…” Report ZAMAN
A new exhibition at the Depo art and culture center in İstanbul by artists Nalan Yırtmaç and Anti-Pop points a finger at the brutality experienced by Armenian people living in the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey.
On display since April 4 on the first floor of Depo in the Tophane neighborhood, “Without knowing where we are headed…” invites the audience to reflect on both the past and the present day.
The exhibition is made up of portraits of 100 Armenian intellectuals who were among the more than 200 significant figures from the Armenian community who were arrested on April 24, 1915, upon the order of Talat Pasha, the interior minister of the time.
These intellectuals, most of whom were arrested in İstanbul one day before the Allied landings in Çanakkale (Gallipoli), were taken to two concentration camps in Çankırı and Ayaş, near Ankara.
According to the exhibition catalogue, “These arrests constitute the first step of the Committee of Union and Progress government’s decision of deportation, which soon evolved into genocide. Following the arrest of approximately 250 people [starting] the night of the April 23 and lasting through April 24, a massive police operation was set in motion targeting 2,500 people over the course of a couple of days.”
Yırtmaç picked 100 of these opinion leaders and made new portraits of them. “This work pulls them out from under the generic heading of ‘arrested and cast-out Armenians‘ and turns them into people with familiar names and faces, the active participants of the cosmopolitan Ottoman intellectual milieu,” she explains in the catalogue.
She produced the portraits in her own language based on photographs from the few publications that have survived to present day.
On the wall right across from the portraits, another powerful work by Anti-Pop links these killings with a recent one, the assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in 2007.
“The work created by Anti-Pop immediately after the assassination of Hrant Dink on Jan. 19, 2007 is exhibited alongside these portraits, drawing attention to the agonizing continuity between 1915 and the massacre of Dink. On one side there are intellectuals arrested and killed 100 years ago, and on the other a revolutionary who paid with his life only a few years ago for believing that Turks and Armenians would reconstruct their own identities on healthy grounds and live in equality and freedom,” the artists explain.
The show aims at coming to terms with the great catastrophe experienced in the Ottoman state and Turkey, “to bow our heads and mourn together,” they say.
A letter dated May 30, 1915 written by an Armenian prisoner at the Ayaş camp, Sımpas Pürad, is also featured in the show’s catalogue. It reads: “Last week, from among us, Agnuni, Khajag, Zartaryan, Cangülyan, Dağavaryan and Sarkis Minasyan were summoned by Ankara and they set on the road. We do not know their whereabouts now. I grieve, because although we suffered so much hardship under the autocratic regime, we are still being unjustly persecuted in this era of freedom and constitutionalism. Was this the fortune to befall those who suffered and toiled for the sake of the motherland all those years?”
Journalist, political activist and educator Karekin Khajag also wrote to her wife and family: “My Dear, They’re sending me far, so far away from you, towards Dikranagert [Diyarbakır]. With me, are the following prisoners of Ayaş: Agnuni, Zartar, Sarkis Minasyan, Dr. Dağavaryan and Cihangül. At the Ereğli train station, I met an Armenian who promised me to deliver this letter to you. Look after yourself and my girls Nunus and Alos well. We don’t know why they brought us here, but I have great hope that we will see each other once again. So, goodbye, I’m kissing you and my sweet girls. Yours, K. Khajag.”
“Without knowing where we are headed…” will continue until April 26 at Depo. For more information, visit www.depoistanbul.net, www.anti-pop.com and nalanyirtmac.blogspot.com.tr.