hidden” Armenians in Turkey Archives

Features — By Avedis Hadjian on December 4, Published in Ianyan magazine.

Thanks to one of our Subscribers he emailed me an article about hidden Armenian in Turkey by well-known Armenian Avedis Hadjian on December 4, and published in Ianyan magazine,

So I had to publish it too. Please read it

The only way that every diaspora Armenian could appreciate how lucky they are no matter what country they live in other than the occupied Western Armenia now so called Turkey, here why:

Imagine you live in a country:

1- You have to pretend you believe in a religion that not your own and have to practiced everyday

2- You cannot tell your children and grandchildren that you are an Armenian

3- The worst of all you have to hang the picture of the criminal leader of the country that Slater your grand-prances and you have to face it every day in your leaving room.

Only in a country so called Turkey…

Avedis Hadjian is a writer based in New York. He has published in the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Bloomberg News and other newspapers and news sites. This article is an excerpt from his book “A Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey,” due in fall 2013

“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 belonged to the little-known Armenian Gypsy community, in the Kurtuluş district of Istanbul. I was at a teahouse where Armenian Gypsy men usually gathered, trying to interview them. And he was right. I didn’t know what Turkey is. But Turkey, and many Armenians themselves, didn’t know who he was either.

In Turkey, there lives a mysterious minority known as the “secret Armenians.” They have been hiding in the open for nearly a century. Outwardly, they are Turks or Kurds, but the secret Armenians are actually descendants of the survivors of the 1915 Genocide, who stayed behind in Eastern Anatolia after forcibly converting to Islam. Some are now devout Muslims, others are Alevis –generally considered an offshoot of Shia Islam, even though that would be an inaccurate description by some accounts–, and a few secretly remain Christian, especially in the area of Sassoun, where still there are mountain villages with secret Armenian populations. Even though Armenian Gypsies wouldn’t strictly qualify as Secret Armenians, they share many traits with the latter, including reluctance or fear to reveal their identity even to fellow Armenians.

No one knows whether the secret Armenians are in the thousands or the few million. For the most part, they fear coming out. “Turkey is still a dangerous place for Armenians,” one secret Armenian woman from Palu told me.

The secret Armenians do not mingle with the other, “open” Armenians, of the active but dwindling community in Istanbul. Most don’t talk to strangers. Breaking taboos in Turkey can be deadly. After all, they remember what happened to Hrant Dink. Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, was shot dead in Istanbul in 2007 by a young man, enraged by his unforgiving pen on controversial issues ranging from the Armenian Genocide to modern Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Atatürk.

It is not easy to define 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, unconvinced about their conversion. Some are known to be Armenian to their neighbors and don’t hide it, while others keep it even from their own children, some of whom find out from other kids, who taunt them for being Armenian.

Rafael Altıncı, the last Armenian in Amasya, was raised a Christian and for one year studied in Istanbul at the Üsküdar Surp Haç Armenian High School, where Hrant Dink was also a student at the time. For all practical purposes however, he’s a Muslim and is married to a Turkish woman, with whom he has had a daughter raised as a Turk. Still, he considers himself an Armenian.

In the mountains of Mush, Jazo Uzal is the last Armenian in the Armenian village of Nish, four hours of tortuous drive from Bitlis. Mr. Uzal remains a practicing Christian, spending the winters in Istanbul, but back in the village he observes the Muslim feasts, including the Ramadan.

For his part, Mehmet Arkan, a lawyer in Diyarbakir, didn’t know his family was Armenian until he got into a fight with a Kurdish kid when was 7 years old and came back home crying, saying he had been called “Armenian.” He soon found out from his father that they were indeed Armenian, though telling anyone outside home was strictly forbidden.

“Ten years ago we would not admit it, but now it’s no longer unsafe in Diyarbakir,” he said in an interview, as the local government is embracing its Armenian past, recently restoring the St. Giragos Church and instituting a course in Armenian for beginners. Mr. Arkan feels no less Armenian for being an observant Sunni Muslim.

As my trip in search of secret Armenians was drawing to a close last summer, I experienced a final 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 haven’t chosen.

I was heading to the Istanbul Airport, where my flight to New York awaited me. I took the metro, and I got off at Lâleli Station for my transfer. 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 four-foot tube on the tram, wrapped in old newspapers, containing valuable and potentially troublesome material: a map of Tünceli, a rebellious province, with the name “TÜRKİYE” torn off. Inside the cylindrical tube, I had also placed compromising notes written in Turkish of an interview with a Zaza activist. (Zazas are a branch of the Kurdish people who are in the majority in Tünceli.) But what I really wanted was what I had rolled inside the map: four precious, autographed photos by Armenian-Turkish photo-reporter Ara Güler.

I debated whether I should try to recover the tube. I knew that should anyone unwrap the map, the contents could get me into trouble with the police. I was also aware of how slim the chances were of getting back an item lost in the mass transit system of a city of 13 million people.

The map of Tünceli had been given to me by the Zaza activist, who had torn off the name of Turkey from it –fragments from the E in “TÜRKİYE” were still visible at the bottom of the map, looking like stripes of a tattered flag. The name of Tünceli had been angrily crossed out in thick, black sharpie, and atop it the activist had written the province’s old name, Dersim. “Dersim is not Turkey,” the activist said.

Turks mention “Dersim” and “1938” in the same breath, the way people elsewhere speak of the Olympic Games. Nineteen thirty-eight was the year of a massacre by Turkish military forces sent to suppress an uprising. Although Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had recently apologized for the massacre, calling it “the biggest tragedy in our history,” the name “Dersim” still has 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 to what the notes revealed. During an interview conducted in a building facing the Turkish military base in Dersim, this Zaza 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 has the highest concentration of secret Armenians, a topic that obsessed 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 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, Khatun Sebilciyan.

Thus, 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 Kurds, only two decades after the Genocide.

Back at the tramway 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 K’s turning into “Kh’s.”

After taking my report, the stationmaster invited me for tea. Someone dropped by to greet him. The station master’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 am 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 few months earlier, Argentina had received unflattering coverage in the Turkish press over formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Many Turks are aware of Argentina’s sizable Armenian community.

A few minutes later, a young man in sunglasses, 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 Zaza activist had given me the map. The man 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, the old Hürriyet newspapers rolled along the outer side, with a photograph of Prime Minister Erdoğan sporting an angry expression and wagging his finger at God knows what.

By Gayane Mkrtchyan
ArmeniaNow reporter

Turkish lawyer, writer and human rights activist Fethiye Cetin, the author of the memoir entitled “My Grandmother”, says that when her 70-year-old Armenian grandma Hranush was talking about her roots it felt like easing the burden she had been carrying on her frail shoulders for years. She was “emptying her soul” during the declining years of her life trusting Fethiye with what she had kept in the dark depths of her memory. Talking about it soothed grandma Hranush’s pain, and the legacy inspired her granddaughter’s first book.

“My grandmother got liberated from that burden. Our people used to say that in order to be free of that burden one has to talk about it. My Hranush grandma developed also another way, she found women like her, they’d lock the door and talk for hours. At the end of her life she told me. Regardless of how difficult the story was, I feel lucky to have learned the truth,” Cetin said during a meeting at Civilitas Foundation last week, as part of “Up the Hill” Armenian-Turkish joint project. .

Her grandma had many grandchildren but trusted her story only to Fathiye for one reason: “I was 24, a socialist, was against the government policy in many issues and always voiced my objections. I was saying that I’d fight for rights and justice. Knowing all that she trusted me.”

Years later her grandmother’s nephews invited her to visit the USA. She put flowers on her grandma’s parents grave, saying: “I apologize to you for all those who gave you that pain, who divided your family.”

Cetin, who was also Hrant Dink’s attorney and a political prisoner, says she feels guilty.

“I wasn’t the immediate participant of the 1915 massacre, but continued the denialist policy, because I still kept silence even after having learned a lot. And then I wrote this book. When writing I cried all along: crying and writing, that process was therapeutic for me. I wrote and felt more at ease. I wrote and put it aside. For a long time I was unable to read it, just like a runner who has finished a marathon is so tired he can’t even see,” recalls Cetin.

Some time later she heard one of the Turkish politicians speak about Turkey’s policy of denial and without waiting any longer sent her book to a publisher. “My Grandmother” became a reason and a path for many Turkish citizens to reveal that their grandma or grandpa were Armenian; it helped them rediscover their Armenian identity.

Cetin’s grandmother, Hranush Gadaryan was born in Harpap, people knew her as a Turkish Muslim. She was an eyewitness and survivor of the atrocities of the Armenian Genocide. Before she died she confessed to her granddaughter that she was by birth an Armenian Christian. She had been taken away from her parents, who got killed, to be raised as a Muslim by a Turkish military official and was given a Turkish name Seher.
Cetin’s parents died early, so she was raised by her grandparents.

“We were a Muslim family, lived in one of the villages of Diarbekir. My grandmother’s story which had a lot of pages to be ashamed of, I had not read in any textbook. I entered a law faculty to become an attorney. I was aware that denying was a grave sin, by which we were further insulting the holders of that pain. I started believing that the truth was what my grandma had told me. I realized that there was a need to fight for the rights of Armenians and other ethnic minorities in Turkey,” she said.

Cetin says that she is not afraid to openly speak up for Armenians in Turkey.

“I can say one thing: nothing can be solved by being afraid. If you are just, and want to fight for justice, you have to also consider the consequences. What is the worst that could happen? My life will be taken away. But if you are fighting for justice and have a goal, you feel that your body is not that important. No big difference whether it happens now or ten years later. I live with that burden and that heavy weight, and the right way is to fight,” she says.

After her book was published, Cetin received a call from a young lawyer from Harpap village who invited her to go visit. The only surviving relics left from the Armenians that once populated it were dried out springs standing out for their unique architectural solutions.

The springs of Harpap got renovated with Hrant Dink foundation’s initiative. The Turkish culture ministry pitched in to help finance the repair.

“Now the springs are alive again, with waters flowing gaily. We did that for the peace of the souls of those who were either murdered or displaced from their birthplace. I found my grandma’s house and planted trees in the courtyard. When digging the earth we kept coming across stones from the ruins of her house. With every hit of the spade it felt as if the earth was hurting and moaning. We named the trees: Hranush, Khoren, Iskuhi, Hovhannes, Armine, Lusine, Zeinab. Conversations with the villagers opened a road through which we were able to talk about history, face that history and the pain it holds, and we shared that pain,” recalls Cetin.

After the opening of the springs people started telling about their grandparents who were Armenian by birth. Cetin is convinced that the Turks should gradually accept the tragic events of the past. It won’t happen immediately, it won’t be easy at first, because it’s been denied for almost a century, however the path they have paved, they hope, will make the process easier.

“I believe that all this will have political consequences. True, right now we are unable to change the state [policy], but I value highly any change that has come forth in the society. Even if the government apologizes, it won’t mean much if the citizen of that country does not share that pain. I value when people apologize for themselves,” she says.

A Lost Map on the Tramway in Istanbul (Features — By Avedis Hadjian – Story of hidden Armenian in Turkey)