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Board director of the Hrant Dink Foundation: “Nothing can force us to forget”

The life of Rakel Dink, widow of the late Turkish journalist and founder of the Agos newspaper Hrant Dink, has been continuously shaped by the past 100 years of Armenians’ history in the Ottoman Empire and present-day Turkey.

Rakel Dink was born in 1959 in an Armenian family in Silopi (southeastern Turkey), close to the borders with Iraq and Syria. Her grandfather, Vartan, was a native of Van. Fleeing the Armenian Genocide, Vartan resettled his family on the slopes of Mt. Joudi in the Şirnak Province in southeastern Anatolia. To survive, the family was forced to hide in a mountain grotto. “They say such a cave didn’t exist, but that God opened it up for us. That’s the story. They lived there for a long time,” says Rakel, recounting a family legend passed down through generations.

“In 1915, while in hiding, my grandmother’s sister had a child. She couldn’t stop the child from crying during that dangerous time. The mother-in-law took the child’s hand to stop the crying, so that the family wouldn’t be discovered, and…I can’t say the word. The child was lost,” Rakel remembers the horrific decisions the family was forced to make to survive.

Rakel’s father Siyament Yağbasan and mother Delal had six children. Their second, Rakel, was just eight years old when her mother passed away. Rakel’s father remarried and had seven more children. The family spoke only Kurdish and was mainly engaged in farming.

When Rakel was eight and a half years old, a group of clergy visited her village at the behest of Constantinople Patriarch Archbishop Shnork Kaloustian. At the time, Christian clergy from Istanbul traveled throughout Anatolia looking for Armenians and other Christians who survived the Genocide. Hrant Güzelyan and Orhan Younkesh, representatives of the Armenian Evangelical Church, took several groups of Armenian children back to Istanbul in order to give them an education. Rakel Dink and her two brothers were in the second group of kids. “We got to Bolis in order to learn Armenian, to read and write. There was no school near our village. No one knew how to read,” Rakel remembers. The new arrivals were housed at the Tuzla camp for Armenian children (Camp Armen), just outside Istanbul.