By Teresa Duhl
Special to the Press & Guide

In Turkey, a 100-year-old Armenian woman, named Asiya, still resides in her family’s hometown of Chunkush. Not far away, a new school was erected in 2014. The connection between this new school and Asiya brings the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide into sharp focus. New York Times bestselling author Chris Bohjalian met Asiya when he visited Turkey in 2013. In two Washington Post op-ed pieces, he wrote about Asiya’s story and the anger he felt when he saw the school for the first time.

In 1915, Turkish and Kurdish killing squads rounded up the 10,000 Armenians living in Chunkush. They took them to the very spot where the new school now stands, at the edge of a ravine about two hours from Chunkush. At the pit of the ravine is the Dudan Crevasse.

Asiya’s mother was among the Armenians taken. She stood at the edge of the ravine holding her infant daughter. What did she see? Her neighbors and family pushed or stabbed into the crevasse? Did she look around at the frightened faces next to her? Perhaps she closed her eyes. What sounds did she hear? Screams, shouting, gunshots, the thud of bodies thrown onto other bodies? Was Asiya crying in her arms? What did she feel? Fear, rage? Would it be possible to feel peace?

One thing is certain, at the edge of the ravine, she waited for the force, whether bullet, bayonet, or boot, that would thrust her into the Dudan Crevasse below. She held her daughter and waited. She did this in the same space that, 100 years later, would be the home of a new, gleaming elementary school.

But death did not come. One of the Kurds found her attractive, so he pulled her from the line. He married her and raised Asiya as his own daughter. Asiya and her mother were saved from death, but they also had to hide their Armenian heritage for the remainder of their days. Even in 2013, when Bohjalian first met Asiya, she would not speak of her Armenian heritage with him, he said.

Bohjalian suggests the new school was built to cover up the mass grave and the larger history of Turkey’s orchestrated slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians.

“I do not know the thinking behind the placement of the Yenikoy elementary school. But I have my suspicions. I would not be surprised if next year when I visit, the crevasse has been filled in: the evidence of a crime of seismic magnitude forever buried,” he wrote in 2014.

Whether the school has been erected out of genuine need or as a means of covering up the evil that took place at the Dudan Ravine, its existence is ironic. A school now marks the unmarked mass grave of 10,000 Armenians. An institution of knowledge serves as the symbol of a space where heinous acts of ignorance were perpetrated.

“The irony, however, is this: It will no longer take complex directions or GPS coordinates to find the 10,000 dead at Dudan. All you will need to tell someone is to visit the Yenikoy elementary school. Go stand by the playground. The dead are right there,” wrote Bohjalian.

Though, as of yet, he has not made Asiya’s story into a novel, Bohjalian has written 18 books, including one that focuses on the Armenian Genocide, “The Sandcastle Girls.” He and eight other Armenian authors will present at the Book and Author Festival at the University of Michigan-Dearborn on Saturday. Continued…