Arsen Okmez, an Armenian man born in the Vartu village, 5km of Iraq, near Van, lived there until 1978.

Arsen Okmez (Okmezyan, with the suffix ‘yan’ cut off during a census conducted by the Turkish authorities in 1960) has for the last 20 years been living in Brussels with his wife Belinda and four children.

Three generations of this family had different surnames. The family had had their grandfather’s surname, Miroyan, before 1915. The surname of Arsen’s father Tigran was Okmezyan, and Arsen himself is Okmez.

Arsen told Tert.am that Vartu had been an Armenian village before 1915. Five Armenian Genocide survivors, including his grandfather, repurchased it from the Turkish authorities after the Armenian massacres.

“In summer we would shepherd sheep in the mountains and return home in winter,” says Arsen. Turkish and Kurdish were spoken in the village, but Armenians spoke only Armenian at home.

“Before 1967 we had not known if other Armenians lived in Turkey. We could not speak Armenian, they would have cut our tongues off. One nice day a clergyman came from Istanbul with an instruction to find out if there were other Christian people there. He came to our village and began talking with young people in Armenian. But they did not understand well. But older people knew the language and they began to talk with him. I did not remember the clergyman’s name, but he told us that about 70,000 Armenians lived in Istanbul. We thought we were alone in Turkey, but he said ‘no, we are going to see people in Istanbul’.”

Four or five young people went to Istanbul with the clergyman and returned. Twenty-eight people went the following year, and Arsen’s elder brother was among them. In 1978, the Armenian village of Vartu emptied.

While in Istanbul, Arsen’s father suddenly decided to settle down in Armenia.

“Daddy said we had to go to our homeland. We arrived in Hoktemberyan and lived for two years there. We were a 10-member family. Daddy worked for a collective farm to keep his family. He did not want to leave, but two of my elder brothers did not want to stay in communist Armenia,” Arsen says.

The family returned to Turkey, but four years later, following the father’s advice, went to Marseilles and then to Belgium.