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#161 Yervant1

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Posted 07 June 2017 - 10:42 AM

A1 Plus, Armenia
June 6 2017
 
 
The Children of Vank: Film about Islamized Armenians (video)
  • 14:19 | June 6,2017 | Social
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“The Children of Vank” – a documentary about the Armenian Genocide – will be premiered in Yerevan on June 7. The documentary explores questions of belonging, memory and the long shadow of genocide haunting Islamized Armenians. The film is directed by Nezahat Gündoğan and Kazım Gündoğan who say they tried to approach the issue objectively.

“It is very important to show the Turkish population what happened and why happened. They have to confront the history. The story is presented by people. Everything is presented as it happened. The word ‘Genocide’ is also presented in the film,” said Nezahat Gündoğan.

An hour-long film tells the story about Armenian family that survived the Dersim Massacre in 1938. All members of the family were driven away and lived in different cultures and beliefs. They tell about the brutality and violence exerted against them and their relatives.

The film was shot in Vank village in the territory of Surb Karapet Monastery.

http://en.a1plus.am/1261045.html



#162 Yervant1

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Posted 01 October 2017 - 07:42 AM

Armenpress News Agency , Armenia
September 29, 2017 Friday


'Armenia means homesickness to me' – Turkish girl's identity quest
leads to the other side of Ararat



YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 29, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Genocide committed by
the Ottoman Empire destroyed the lives and destinies of millions of
people. Thousands of Armenians were forced to spread all over the
world, while others were forced to go on with their lives already in
the Republic of Turkey – by hiding their origin and identity. On this
path, they also tried to distance their own generations from the
painful past and its heavy burden, by hiding from them the truth on
their roots, origin and identity.

Some of the representatives of these generations didn’t figure out
that they are the generations of Armenians, rather Turks or Kurds,
those Armenians who were somehow able to stay alive during the years
of the Armenian Genocide. There were people however, who after nearly
a century began digging in their own past to understand where they
come from and discover their true identity.

23 year old Dilara Atesh is one of them, this is her first visit to
Armenia- and our meeting with her took place in the Tsitsernakaberd
Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex in Yerevan. In the first years of
her conscious life the girl from Dersim couldn’t even imagine that she
has Armenian roots.

Many features of her family household life indicated that they differ
from others around, she said.

“In school, where we were being educated under the Sunni-Kemalist
system, I was having problems with identity. I was noticing that the
households of the other students’ families differed from ours. Already
from these years I started asking myself – why are we different?”,
Dilara told ARMENPRESS in the Yerevan Memorial.

She says her first discovery happened in high school. “I was 15-16
years old, I was living in Istanbul with my mother. My relatives came
to visit us from Bursa, including my great grandmother from my
mother’s side Fintoz and my uncles. An ordinary conversation led to
our roots. One of my uncles said that we are actually Armenians, and
that my great-grandmother had told him. This was news for me, and I
began thinking about it. Afterwards I began researching who I am”, she
said.

With a bit surprise she mentions that although there were always many
mosques in their neighborhood, she has always been drawn to churches
since childhood. “There was an old Greek church near our house, one
day I went there. I felt something strange, it was some kind of
another feeling. Since then, I began wearing a cross. Although I’m not
baptized yet, but I am wearing one since those days. I was wearing it
at school also, which caused my schoolmates to call me names, such as
atheist, gavur [Turkish derogatory term meaning faithless]……..When I
told them that I am Armenian they began to defame me”, Dilara said.

It was during these years that Dilara clearly decided to study and
learn Armenian. “I began learning the alphabet with the help of a
friend. For almost one and a half week I tried to learn the letters
for day and night. I succeeded”, Dilara recalls with joy on her face,
mentioning that if you are doing something with love, then you will
definitely succeed.

Today, Dilara is a 2nd year student at the faculty of Armenian
language and literature of the Erciyes University in Kayseri, Turkey.
She had to miss the first classes of the new academic year because of
her visit to Armenia, however she says she has no regrets, mentioning
that she has learnt a lot more here.

After enrolling in the university she began to look into her lecturer
staff, and found out that she has three Azerbaijani lecturers. “There
are many soldiers in the faculty where I study, they are studying
Armenian. Of course, studying the language isn’t their main goal –
there is a law in Turkey whereby graduate soldiers are paid more. Many
of them study simply for the diploma, while others seek to join the
ranks of the national intelligence service”, she said.

Dilara’s interests for Armenia have already managed to get her into
trouble in the university – the rector’s office carried out a special
investigation into her activities and possible association with the
PKK. Nevertheless, this didn’t hold her back from visiting Armenia.

Speaking on her visit, Dilara stressed that the most emotional moment
for her was in Khor Virap – when she say Mount Ararat for the first
time. “When I saw Ararat on the way to Khor Virap I didn’t understand
what happened to me and tears began pouring down my eyes. When I came
out of the church and wanted to take a picture, I began to cry, it was
the first time that I saw Ararat from such a close distance. The
people around me approached me and began calming me down, of course it
lasted for around 1 and a half hours.

You see, my one foot was on the Turkish border, while the other on the
Armenian. I read a book once, Hrachya Kochar’s Karot [trnsl.
Homesickness/Longing]. I had the Turkish translation of that book in
my Dersim home. I was very impressed and moved by Arakel’s character.
He was looking at Ararat from the Soviet Armenia’s border and
reminiscing about his home: at that moment, he was on my mind all the
time”, Dilara says wiping tears from her eyes.

We entered the Armenian Genocide Museum: Dilara immediately approached
the picture of Aurora Mardiganian. She says many people liken her to
Aurora, and she herself sees similarities. She mentions what an
incredible story this girl has, after seeing and surviving so many
things, she settles in the USA and makes a film…..

The conversation reached to the present-day Turkey. “A single complete
state doesn’t exist in Turkey today – there are different peoples,
different ideas, different faiths. And no one likes one another – they
call the Circassians thieves, they call the Greeks liars, and
Armenians – traitors. They themselves create enemies. The system is
like this, they are implementing an assimilation policy”, she said.

She was upset to mention that the time has come to depart from Armenia.

“Initially I told myself – I’ll come here and see for one time, it
will be enough, but now I am thinking about returning here every year.
I hope that I will come here again for a longer time. In addition, I
am thinking about continuing my post-graduate studies here after
graduating the university. I hope my desire will become reality with
time.

I feel calm here, but the fact of leaving saddens me. To some extent I
am from there, although my people are from here. Let’s put it this
way, I will go to the other side of Khor Virap”, Dilara said.

Before leaving the Armenian Genocide Museum she stopped at the
guestbook. After signing it for a long time, she concluded her
thoughts in Armenian – “Armenia means homesickness to me”.

Interview by Araks Kasyan

Photos by Tatev Duryan



#163 Yervant1

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Posted 22 February 2018 - 11:50 AM

AL-Monitor.com
 
 
TURKEY PULSE
Turkish genealogy database fascinates, frightens Turks
 
 
Fehim Tastekin February 21, 2018
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ARTICLE SUMMARY
The government has made Turkey’s population registers public for the first time, identifying ethnic Armenians and other minorities, and excited Turks immediately crashed the system.
 
 
Image by Hugo Goodridge/Al-Monitor
 

During the days when Turkey still hoped to join the European Union, its people were becoming willing to question their ethnic and religious ancestry. Since then, the country has reverted to a time when people were disgraced and denigrated, with the government’s blessings, as “crypto-Armenians."

Hrant Dink was the editor of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos in 2004 when he wrote that Sabiha Gokcen, the first female military pilot of the Turkish Republic, was of Armenian parentage. Because of this and other articles he penned, Dink found himself the subject of investigation by the Justice Ministry. He was assassinated in 2007 for reasons thought to be related to his strong support for Armenian causes.

Dink's story illustrates why population registers in Turkey were kept secret until recently. The topic has always been a sensitive issue for the state. The confidentiality of data that identifies people's lineage was considered a national security issue.

There were two main reasons for all this secrecy: to conceal that scores of Armenians, Syriacs, Greeks and Jews had converted to Islam, and to avoid any debate about "Turkishness.” Its definition, “anyone who is attached to the Turkish state as a citizen," was enshrined in the constitution as part of the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic and its first president.

For a long time, the official policy was that Turks formed a cohesive ethnic identity in Turkey. But less than two weeks ago, on Feb. 8, population registers were officially opened to the public via an online genealogy database. The system crashed quickly under the demand. Some people who had always boasted of their "pure" Turkish ancestry were shocked to learn they actually had other ethnic and religious roots.

On the darker side, comments such as “Crypto-Armenians, Greek and Jews in the country will now be exposed” and “Traitors will finally learn their lineage” became commonplace on social media.

Genealogy has always been a popular topic of conversation in Turkish society, but also a tool of social and political division. Families often acknowledged in private that their lineage was Armenian or that a long-dead relative was a convert to Islam, but those conversations were kept secret. Being a convert in Turkey carried a stigma that could not be erased.

Ethnic Armenian columnist Hayko Bagdat told Al-Monitor, “During the 1915 genocide, along with mass conversions, there were also thousands of children in exile. Those who could reach foreign missionaries were spirited abroad. Some were grabbed by roaming gangs during their escape and made into sex slaves and laborers. The society is not yet ready to deal with this reality. Imagine that a man who had served as the director of religious affairs of this country [Lutfi Dogan] was the brother of someone who was the Armenian patriarch [Sinozk Kalustyan].”

He went on, “Kalustyan, who returned to Turkey from Beirut in 1961, was remembered as a saint in the Turkish Armenian Patriarchate and as someone who had served in the most difficult times after 1915. During the genocide, his mother sent the children away and converted to Islam. Later she married [a man called] Dogan, who was of high social standing, and had two girls and a boy. The boy was Lutfi Dogan. When the mother, who was then with the Nationalist Action Party branch in Malatya province, died, his uncle came in priest garb from Beirut to attend the funeral. Nobody could say anything.”

The mindset of society was starkly clear when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once complained, “We are accused of being Jews, Armenians or Greeks.”

There were those who feared that data obtained from population registers could be used to stigmatize the famous and used for political lynching campaigns. After the database went down, they spoke out against its restoration. One of them was Tayfun Atay, a columnist for Turkey’s daily Cumhuriyet.

“I was advised in a friendly manner not to admit that I am a Georgian. That was the lightest form of pressure. What about those who risk learning they are of Armenian ancestry or a convert? Just think: You think you are a red-blooded Turk but turn out to be a pure-blood Armenian. Imagine the societal repercussions,” he wrote Feb. 12.

As the debate raged, the system suddenly came back online Feb. 14.

Many Turks are questioning the timing of making this information available.

“If they had done this a few years ago when we were [becoming more tolerant], conspiracy theories would not have been as strong as today, when the state behaves as though we are in a struggle for existence. This is how Turkey reinvigorates the spirit of the Independence War” to inspire patriotism and pro-government thinking, journalist Serdar Korucu told Al-Monitor.

Those who oppose the system fear that a society already in a morass of racism will sink into it even further. Others, however, say that though reality might be shocking, couldn’t it be useful in eradicating racism?

“Yes, definitely. Everyone in Turkey is curious about their ancestry. That is a fact,” Korucu responded. “Why is facing reality so hard?" He said of the Sabiha Gokcen story, "That turned the country upside down."

Korucu believes data confidentiality is essential to prevent population registers from being misused as instruments of political defamation, but warned, “The state organs already know everything about us."

In 2013, Agos reported that the government was secretly coding minorities in population registers: Greeks were 1, Armenians were 2 and Jews were 3. The covert classification of religious minorities was met with wide outrage.

"What's worse is these facts emerge when it is time for a young man for report to military conscription. In short, there are those who know us better than we do. So why not tell us about it?” Korucu asked.

“Population registers are dangerous. That is why Hrant Dink was murdered," the columnist Bagdat noted. "The director of the Genocide Museum in Yerevan told a delegation from Turkey [about] the three most-discussed issues by those who were able to escape. Armenians first tell us about the Muslims who helped them escape the genocide, then the Armenians who betrayed them and only then do they narrate their catastrophe. If we make public the names of Armenians who were forced to convert to Islam, their grandchildren will be in danger today.” 

He added, “This is how the situation is after 100 years: The Turkish state asked us to accept being Turks. Fine, let me say I am a Turk. Will I be given a public job? No. When I say, ‘No, I am an Armenian,’ I am treated as a terrorist. Nothing has changed. Opening of the population registers means nothing to me. How can we forget Yusuf Halacoglu, the director of the Historical Society of Turkey in 2007, who had bluntly threatened, ‘Don’t make me angry. I have a list of converts I can reveal down to their streets and homes.’ These words, by this man who later became a politician in the Nationalist Action Party, were a threat to Turkish politics.”

Is the information in the now publicly accessible registers complete?

Another ethnic Armenian, journalist Yervant Ozuzun, has doubts. ”We don’t know if anything changed. We know ethnic origins were marked with different codes in the register. We as Armenians were code No. 2. Has this changed? I don’t think so."

Government officials aren't saying one way or the other. 
Found in:HRANT DINK, MINORITY RIGHTS IN TURKEY, TURKISH NATIONALISM, MINORITIES, MINORITY RIGHTS, TURKISH SOCIETY, ARMENIAN ISSUE, ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
fehimtastekinBW.jpg

Fehim Tastekin is a Turkish journalist and a columnist for Turkey Pulse who previously wrote for Radikal and Hurriyet. He has also been the host of the weekly program "SINIRSIZ," on IMC TV. As an analyst, Tastekin specializes in Turkish foreign policy and Caucasus, Middle East and EU affairs. He is the author of “Suriye: Yikil Git, Diren Kal,” “Rojava: Kurtlerin Zamani” and “Karanlık Coktugunde - ISID.” Tastekin is founding editor of the Agency Caucasus. On Twitter: @fehimtastekin



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#164 Yervant1

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Posted 02 March 2018 - 11:06 AM

The Independent, UK
March 1 2018
 
 
Erdogan has released the genealogy of thousands of Turks – but what is his motive?

In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers

 

by Robert Fisk

Only in Turkey is the identity of a citizen a matter of national security. That’s why the population registry in Ankara was until now a closed book, its details a state secret. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s definition of “Turkishness” was “anyone who is attached to the Turkish state as a citizen”. Turks came from a clear ethnic identity, untainted by racial minorities or doubtful lineage. That’s one reason why the Nazis lavished praise on Ataturk’s republic, their newspapers mourning his death in black-bordered front pages.

After all, as Hitler was to ask in several newspaper interviews – and to his generals before he invaded Poland – who now remembers the Armenians? Ataturk had supposedly inherited an Armenian-free Turkey, just as Hitler intended to present his followers with a Jew-free Europe. The Armenian genocide of 1915 – denied by the Turkish government today – destroyed a million and a half Christian Ottoman citizens in the first industrial holocaust of the 20th century. Almost the entire Armenian community had been liquidated. Or had it?

For the stunned reaction of Turks to the sudden and unexpected opening of population registers on an online genealogy database three weeks ago was so immediate and so vast that the system crashed within hours. Rather a lot of Turks, it turned out, were actually Armenians – or part-Armenians – or even partly Greek or Jewish. And across the mountains of eastern Anatolia – and around the cities of Istanbul, Izmir, Erzurum, Van and Gaziantep and along the haunted death convoy routes to Syria, ancient ghosts climbed out of century-old graves to reassert their Armenian presence in Turkish history. For the registry proved that many of them – through their families – were still alive.

Until now, for at least two decades – at least before Sultan Erdogan’s post-coup autocracy – thousands of Turks spoke freely, albeit in private, about their ancestry. They knew that amid the mass slaughter and rape of the Armenians, many Christian families sought sanctuary in conversion to Islam, while tens of thousands of young Armenian women were given in marriage to Turkish or Kurdish Muslim men. Their children grew up as Muslims and regarded themselves as Turks but often knew that they were half-Armenian. Tens of thousands of Armenian orphans were placed in Muslim schools, forced to speak Turkish and change their names. One of the largest schools was in Beirut, organised for a time by one of Turkey’s leading feminists who wrote of her experience and was later to die in America.

The Armenian diaspora – the 11 million Armenians living outside Turkey or Armenia itself, and who trace their ancestry back to the survivors of the 1915 genocide – were the first to understand the significance of the newly-opened population registers, noting that some information dated back to the early 1800s. Up to four million Turkish citizens were reported to have sought access to their family tree within 48 hours – which is why the system crashed – and in the days since it was re-established, according to retired statistician and Armenian demographer George Aghjayan, eight million Turks have requested their pedigrees. That’s 10 per cent of the entire Turkish population.

The documents can be vague. And they are not complete. There are examples of known Armenian ancestors listed as Muslim without reference to their origin. The names shown for those known to have converted during the 1915 genocide are Muslim names – but the Christian names of their parents are also shown. There will always be discrepancies and unknown details. Many Ottoman registrars did not give accurate details of birthdays: Turkish officials might travel to a village once a month and simply list its newborn under the date of their visit. There are still centenarians alive in Lebanon and Syria, for example, who all possess the same birth date, whatever their origin.

So why has Turkey released these files now? Erdogan is quoted to have once complained that Turks were “accused of being Jews, Armenians or Greeks”. Tayfun Atay, a columnist for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, wrote that he was “advised in a friendly matter not to admit that I am a Georgian…What about those who risk learning that they are of Armenian ancestry or a convert? Just think: you think you are a red-blooded Turk but turn out to be a pure-blood Armenian.”

Journalist Serdar Korucu told Al-Monitor that “if they had done this a few years ago when we were [becoming more tolerant], conspiracy theories would not have been as strong as today, when the state believes we are in a struggle for existence. This is how Turkey reinvigorates the spirit of the Independence War” – to inspire patriotism and pro-government thinking.

In 2003, the Armenian newspaper Agos, whose editor Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in 2007, reported that the Turkish government was secretly coding minorities in registers: Greeks were one, according to the paper. Armenians were two. Jews were three. Korucu recalled how the director of the Turkish Historical Society threatened minorities in 2007. “Don’t make me angry. I have a list of converts I can reveal down to their streets and homes.” The director later became a politician in the rightist Nationalist Action Party.

http://www.independe...y-a8234346.html



#165 Yervant1

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Posted 23 June 2018 - 08:47 AM

The Independent, UK
June 21 2018
 
 
In the land of the massacres, the very last Armenians have been finally been found
 
Avedis Hadjian, author of “Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey”, sometimes appears out of breath, exhausted by his attempts to find his people’s ancestors and descendants
 
Robert Fisk
 
 
Following journalist and writer Avedis Hadjian across the mountains of eastern Turkey, through the snows and winds and those high villages which clasp to the rock of what was western Armenia before the Armenian genocide, is a bit like roaming the lands of Ninevah if Isis had won. Imagine the converted Christians clinging to their land under the clothes of Islam if Isis had not been destroyed, the Yezidi sex slaves sold into marriage but still passing on to their future children and grandchildren the fragments of a past life and an ancient language. For what was discovered by Hadjian in the fastness of Mush and Bitlis and Urfa and Erzerum and Marash was the bottom of the pond of history: the very last Armenians to survive in the land of massacre.
 
 
So deep is the pond that the author of this newly published book – “Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey” – sometimes appears out of breath, exhausted by his attempts to find his people’s ancestors and descendants, sometimes bravely failing because they will not talk or because they have just died. Perhaps it is because the light in the depths of the pond is of such cathedral-like gloom that historians have largely ignored Hadjian’s work; scarcely a review of this book has been published in Europe or America. Like the Armenia of the killing fields, it is as if it has never been.
 
In truth, we in the West have known of these “secret Armenians” for at least a decade, ever since Fethiye Cetin wrote of her Armenian-Turkish grandmother – inevitably the old lady was given a Muslim funeral for she was, as a Turk, a Muslim – and we all remember Hrant Dink, assassinated outside his newspaper office in Istanbul in 2007 because he remembered the Armenian genocide rather too much. But what Hadjian has done is to climb the tired old roads to the ancient villages of an unknown Turkey – to Garin, Van and Cilicia, where the survivors of the survivors, so to speak, of the first genocide of the twentieth century still exist.
 
They speak a kind of Armenian, those who remember the language of their race, and one of them even writes down the sounds of Arabic in Armenian script – he is quoting the Koran – which he does not understand. There may be up to two million of these souls, their identity as complex as their nationality; for who knows what identity is. Your religion? Your race? Your customs? Geography? A Turkish girl climbing a Christian Armenian holy mountain, Mount Maruta, frightened because her bag has flipped open to reveal an embroidered Armenian cross? Hadjian includes a coloured photograph of the girl in her long skirt, but with her light brown hair uncovered, the ghost of a lost people.
 
 
I’m still not quite sure why Hadjian, an Aleppo-born Armenian who has been an Argentinian Armenian since the age of two, traipsed up so many mountainsides. The Palestinians may dream of returning to lost lands, but the comparatively wealthy, cosmopolitan Armenian diaspora – most of the 11 million Armenians who are alive, descendants of those who survived the genocide of one and a half million of their people at the hands of the Turks (and of the Kurds, let us remember) – have no desire to re-settle in the old killing fields. For the places of massacre are well known to those forlorn people who still live there but who sometimes have only the memory of grandparents speaking in “a strange language” to hint at their family history.
 
 
In most cases, of course, it was the women who survived. And we know why. They were raped by Turks or Kurds or sold into marriage to Turks or Kurds or Arabs. The men were butchered with knives, roped together and thrown into rivers, tossed into gorges. So there is the mist of ancient dishonour over womanhood, although Hadjian does not speak of this in so many words. He finds a Muslim Imam of Armenian origin whose grandfather was killed in the genocide but whose uncle, a seminarian, converted to Islam. The imam speaks Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic but no Armenian, although he knows his history and claims he was not forcibly converted.
 
“The descendants of the people who massacred our family are still around,” he tells Hadjian. “We know them. We know the descendants of the people who murdered our grandfather Sahin. We lived among them. I would see them every day. We would see a dishonourable man like the one who killed Sahin every day. And yet, there was nothing we could do.”
 
Yet although he understood no Armenian, the imam knew the name of Sahin’s killer: Divan Erat.
  
At Argat, Hadjian visits the Ermeni Deresi, the “Armenians Gorge”, which is what it sounds like: the crevasse in which Armenians had been thrown to their deaths in 1915. There are no bones left. But there are memories of the dead, and Ibrahim, as he walks up the gorge, recalls what his parents said of his great-grandmother Zara, who was five when “she saw bandits decapitate her parents and her seven siblings”. Zara then fled through the mountains – a five-year old child, remember – to the village of Bahro, “seeing huge piles of corpses along the way.” Yet the descendants of the dead are kaleidoscopic. One family Hadjian meets are Armenian by ethnicity, Assyrian Orthodox Christians or Sunni Muslims by religion, Turkish by citizenship. Like the onion, he says, “peeling it to the end leaves you with nothing, for it is the aggregate of layers that makes the whole.”
 
Hadjian even finds one village, high in the sierras, where the enmity between Armenian-origin villagers and their neighbours continued into the 1960s with occasional shooting battles, even killings, completing a genocide that lasted – for them – half a century.
 
Hadjian has no final conclusions for his readers in this book, save for the observation that the survivors – including the frightened young Armenian girl on Mount Maruta – are not alone.
 
I’m not sure what that means. Survival keeps history alive, but I’m not sure it guarantees life in the future.
 


#166 Yervant1

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Posted 28 June 2018 - 10:53 AM

The Irish Times
June 27 2018
 
 
The ‘hidden’ Armenians of Turkey In the land of the fortresses: why they may still feel compelled to conceal their identity
                                   
Avedis Hadjian

 

image.jpg

A dramatisation recalling the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Several thousand protesters in Ankara’s Kizilay Square chanted “We are all Hrant Dink” and “Murderer state will account for this”. Photograph: Tumay Berkin/ Basin Foto Ajansi/ LightRocket via Getty Images

image.jpg

Two issues had been dogging me as I began my travels in Turkey in search of “secret Armenians”, those that had concealed their original identity behind Turkish names and an allegiance to Islam, sometimes genuine, but often feigned too. They were descendants of survivors of the 1915 Genocide. Most of them still lived in the historical Armenian regions that had later been conquered by the Ottomans, in Asia Minor (or Anatolia, as is commonly called nowadays). That was Turkey’s interior and, in some places, their reluctance to be exposed as Armenians was warranted.

My first concern was timeliness. As I began to write Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey, I felt that, by the time the book was published, these Armenians would have freely revealed themselves as such, in a newly tolerant society. Courageous voices in Turkey had been challenging official dogma for the last few years. Hrant Dink had been toppling taboos for a decade from the pages of Agos, the Armenian newspaper of Istanbul he was the publisher of until January 19th, 2007, when a nationalist Turk gunned him down outside his office.

But the collective response to his assassination had been stunning. A crowd took to the streets of Istanbul with signs that read, “We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant”. Surely not all of them were Armenian. When a few years later I asked the staff at Agos how it was possible to print all those signs less than 24 hours after the murder – if only to put to rest conspiracy theories that had been swirling until then – they told me that a Turkish printer of progressive views had undertaken the job on his own initiative. And yes: most in the 100,000-strong crowd that took part in Hrant Dink’s funeral procession were non-Armenians. They were Turks, Kurds and people of all ethnicities, religions and walks of life in Turkey.

That was a watershed. It led to a major change of perception especially among Diaspora Armenians, mostly descendants of Genocide survivors, for many of whom the name of Turk or Turkey was unmentionable. The outpouring of sympathy and grief over Dink’s assassination was auspicious for a possible dialogue between Armenians and Turks, at least at the grassroots level.

My second concern was about the very people I wanted to write about. Who would qualify as an Armenian after a century of genocide, mixed ancestry, conversion to Islam, and assimilation? And who was I to judge? At a conference on Islamicised Armenians in Istanbul in 2013, Ishkhan Chiftjian, an academic based in Leipzig, referred to this dilemma with an analogy to another poignant ignominy in the very long aftermath of the 1915 massacres: were the ruins of Armenian churches all over Turkey still Armenian? Could an Armenian church turned into a mosque still be considered Armenian, or a church?

image.jpgThe Armenian Genocide: victims of the Ottoman empire hanging on tripods. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

An unrelated conversation a few months later with Alina Aghajanian, a microbiologist from Los Angeles, offered me a clue. There were, it dawned on me, no pure species or specimens in nature. No rose in the world is true to the archetype of the rose.

That is also true of identity. No man is the man, and no Armenian is the Armenian. Identity is a variable quality. And people may acquire or shed identities over a lifetime.

Indeed, in some regions of Turkey, where Armenians feel safer under the many guises of national, ethnic or religious dissimulation, original and acquired identities may coexist like the layers of an onion. An extended Armenian clan I became acquainted with, originally from the province of Adiyaman in southeast Turkey but scattered all over the country, seemed to encompass all the possible strands of political and religious identity present today in Turkey.

Among them, there were members of the Apostolic Armenian Church. Others, in a town that used to be part of the ancient kingdom of Commagene, were affiliated with the Assyrian Orthodox Church, with cousins who were observant Sunni Muslims. The clan included at least one high-ranking official in the HDP, the Turkish acronym for the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party; there were also sympathisers of the ruling AKP, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, of Islamist and right-wing tendency. One in the family died in combat against the Turkish army fighting for the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a guerrilla group. A relative of his in this endogamous family – with marriage among cousins, a common practice in Anatolia – was said to be a member of Hizbullah, a far-right, Sunni Islamist armed group in Turkey (not to be confused with the homonymous Shia militant group of Southern Lebanon), even though I was unable to confirm this. Armenian and Turkish, as well as Kurmancî Kurdish and Dimi or Zazaki, are all spoken in this clan.

The genocide was the immediate cause for the multiplicity of religious and political currents in this clan. Yet their province had been the quintessential land of dissimulation since antiquity. In the 1st century BC, king Antiochus of Commagene had added the epithet of philoromaios philhellene (“friend of the Romans” and “friend of the Greeks”) to his title, while he claimed descent from the royal houses of Armenia and Persia for himself.

Arsen (not his real name), a member of this clan, accompanied me to see the grandchild of Ramazan, the Kurdish man that had saved his grandfather, Minas, during the genocide.

What was already a horrific situation in 1915 turned into a harrowing nightmare for Minas: Turkish soldiers forced him to strangle his younger brother, Garabed, who was 10 at the time, while they were wandering by the Euphrates in the days following the massacres in their hometown of Olbi, Adiyaman, the only survivors in their immediate family. Minas threw Garabed’s body in the Euphrates and fled, maddened. He then found the protection of Ramazan in a nearby town, which the onslaught of history has reduced to a village, now almost a hamlet, under the shadow of the unassailable ruins of a Commagenian fortress.

image.jpgPeople hold portraits of Armenian intellectuals, who were detained and deported in 1915, during a rally in Istanbul in April to commemorate the 103rd anniversary of the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

But this fortress was fundamentally different from the Turkish military bases to be found all over the country, as I wrote in Secret Nation:

Sometimes those bases are separated by only a short distance. Deep inland, these fortified outposts are not against any external enemy. Unlike the citadels and fortresses from antiquity and the Middle Ages that dot the land, the contemporary ones do not protect it from invaders, but assert the power of the state, by the state and for the state, but not necessarily for the people. These bases are potentially or actually against the people.

Our talk with the grandchild of Ramazan turned to the question of why there was still a sense of latent violence in Turkey. As the conversation progressed it became clear that the Turkish state had the capacity to withstand bloodletting on a massive scale. Moreover, the grandchild of Ramazan suggested, it was the Turkish state’s demonstrated capacity to unleash unsparing violence on its own population – Armenians yesterday, Kurds today – that held the country together. Turkey, he implied, was bound by fear.

Only then I understood why some hidden Armenians I met in villages of historical Armenia – now the scene of Kurds’ protracted guerrilla warfare and Turks’ counterinsurgency – would caution me not to take it all at face value when I expressed my incredulous joy at the freedom to discuss the genocide and history openly in Turkey.

Then I read a historical document that helped me understand the anxiety I noticed among those Armenians in the liberal atmosphere of Turkey in the first half of this decade. In August 1908, Mihrdat Noradoungian, an Armenian intellectual from Constantinople, described a sense of collective perplexity at the freedoms that the Young Turk revolution had brought about only a month earlier:

Though during 15 years a lot of blood has been spilled, there was the fear of greater bloodshed which did not happen. One should know that this [bloodshed] has become a natural law and that natural laws are unavoidable. Whatever did not happen in the beginning could still happen. Whatever the revolution did not do, the counterrevolution will be able to do […]

Perhaps it was too awkward to confess, but it was the abnormal absence of violence what was making the Islamicised and hidden Armenians so uneasy at the time I was travelling undisturbed in Turkey. They felt as Armenians and others did in 1908, as Noradoungian noted in his premonitory article. It could not last then, and it did not. It could not last a century later, and it did not either.


Secret Nation by Avedis Hadjian is published by IB Tauris, at £25

https://www.irishtim...urkey-1.3544496



#167 Yervant1

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Posted 16 February 2019 - 01:03 PM

https://massispost.com/2019/02/turkeys-islamized-armenians-do-they-matter-to-you-an-interview-with-raffi-bedrosyan/
Turkey’s Islamized Armenians – Do They Matter to You? An Interview with Raffi Bedrosyan
By Anoush Melkonian, London (14 Feb. 2019)
 
Do Turkey’s Hidden or Islamized Armenians matter to you? They do to Raffi Bedrosyan, an intrepid Canadian-Armenian, who spent over a decade championing the rights of these little known, and much misunderstood, Armenians. His foray was chronicled in several dozen articles which are now included in a full length book, disclosing details of his tumultuous journey. Congratulations Mr. Bedrosyan on your new book, Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey – Hidden, Not Hidden and No Longer Hidden.
Q. How did you embark on your journey to discover Turkey’s Islamised Armenians?
A. It was Hrant Dink who triggered my interest in the hidden Armenians. He was obsessed with them, kept on saying: ‘We always talk about the dead and the gone after 1915, it is time to start talking about the living and the remaining’. In conversations with him, when I asked: ‘How do you know they are hidden Armenians?’, his response really got to me as he said: ‘I know them from their eyes, and they know that I know’. Then, when I got involved with the reconstruction of the Diyarbakir Sourp Giragos Church, I saw hundreds of hidden Armenians with my own eyes, and I did connect with them. I decided that the existence of large numbers of hidden Armenians is a reality which must be shared with other Armenians in Armenia and the Diaspora.
Q. Did you have any ethical guidelines as when you started probing the issue of Islamised Armenians?
A. In my opinion, if someone has an ethnic origin as Armenian, regardless of religion as Christian, Moslem, agnostic, or atheist, that person is Armenian. People may choose or change their religion, but they have no choice to choose their own ethnic origins, and if they have decided to return to their original roots, language and culture, no one has the right to prevent it, or pass judgment against it. I would, therefore, welcome those Islamised Armenians who wished to return to their Armenian roots and identity, regardless of their religion. We must remember that these people are making a conscious decision to come out as Armenians, despite all the dangers and risks of losing their livelihood, facing discrimination and threats from their friends, neighbours and even their own family members.
Q. You have written around 50 articles on Turkey’s Islamised Armenians. What kind of feedback did you get from your Armenian readers?
A. Many readers are surprised when they find out about this new reality of hidden Armenians. Their feedback is mostly positive, and they are moved reading the incredible survival stories or the desire to return to Armenian roots, but there is also suspicion that the hidden Armenians are not real Armenians, or should not be accepted as real Armenians until and unless they renounce Islam and convert to Christianity.
Q. What has been the reaction of Turks to your work?
A. Apart from the normally negative reaction of the majority of Turks who are conditioned by the denialist version of state history, there were surprisingly large numbers of Turkish readers who were thankful to hear about new facts about Armenians, or hidden Armenians, especially well known Turkish artists, authors, architects or politicians who turned out to be Armenians. I also received many many confidential letters from Turks who opened up to me to reveal their hidden Armenian identities.
Q. How have you changed in the course of your journey? Did you re-examine some of your own thoughts?
A. My first contact with the hidden Armenians was limited to the Diyarbakir area, triggered by the Sourp Giragos Church reconstruction. But soon after the opening of the church, my first concert there and a few articles that I wrote related to these events, hundreds of hidden Armenians started contacting me from various other regions of Turkey. It was such a revelation to realize that the hidden Armenians are spread across east, southeast and northeast Turkey in large numbers, as well as in major cities in the west. I decided it was not enough just to write about the hidden Armenians, but we must plan to help the ones who wish to return to their roots. I started by helping organize Armenian language classes in Diyarbakir, Dersim and Istanbul. Then came the planning of trips to Armenia, in cooperation with the Armenian Ministry of Diaspora. As these activities and my articles describing these activities became well known, more and more hidden Armenians from different regions started ‘coming out’, establishing contacts with me, but more importantly with one another across Turkey. I decided to formalize our activities by naming the initiative ‘Project Rebirth’, which established a vast network of hidden Armenians, providing interaction, communication and support among the hidden Armenians.
Q. You have not been back to Diyarbakir since the fighting in the region in 2015. Do you have any plans to go back soon?
A. Unfortunately, the clashes between the Turkish state and Kurdish militants drastically affected the entire population in the east and southeast Turkey, including the hidden Armenians. Thousands of buildings and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, several buildings were seized and expropriated by the Turkish state, including the Diyarbakir Sourp Giragos Church and all the properties belonging to the Church Foundation. The beautifully reconstructed church was converted to military headquarters for the state security forces, resulting in much damage and plunder of the church. Thankfully, the Church Foundation officials were able to overturn the expropriation legislation, and we are hopeful that in the very near future, the government will restart the repair of the church at its expense. I am not planning to go back to Turkey until peace and democracy is restored.
Q. What is the status of the city now and its hidden and not-so-hidden Armenians?
A. Diyarbakir is still a city under siege. Certain neighbourhoods are no-entry zones, including the area around Sourp Giragos Church. The hidden and not so hidden Armenians have suffered along with the rest of the local population. Some have lost their homes, others have lost their jobs. It is impossible under these circumstances to think of any Armenian social activities, language classes or trips to Armenia, as people are back into survival mode. Instead of organizing such activities, Project Rebirth now provides a support mechanism arranging for relocations, contacts or legal help.
Q. What do you hope to do next?
A. Although conditions are not favourable at present, my hope is to be able to restart our work with the hidden Armenians, to help those who wish to return to their Armenian roots, language, culture, or in some cases, to Christianity. I know many hidden Armenians also have the same hopes, as they still keep on learning the Armenian language online in their homes, keep in touch with one another across many regions of Turkey, marry one another, give Armenian names to their newborn, and travel overseas to get baptized. I fully expect the Sourp Giragos Church to be repaired in the near future, where the hidden Armenians again will gather for monthly breakfast meetings, concerts, language classes, social events, baptisms and weddings. I also expect to resume our trips for the hidden Armenians from various regions of Turkey to Armenia, bringing back hope for dialogue between Turks and Armenians, based on historic facts towards a peaceful future.
Raffi Bedrosyan, Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey – Hidden, Not Hidden and No Longer Hidden, with introductions by Fethiye Çetin and Taner Akçam, London: Gomidas Institute, 2019, xx + 226 pages, maps, photos. ISBN 978-1-909382-46-6, paperback, Price: UK£20.00 / US$25.00 / CAN$35.00. For more information, see www.gomidas.org. To order, just send your request with your mailing address to books@gomidas.org.


#168 Yervant1

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Posted 11 July 2019 - 09:02 AM

ANF News
July 9 2019
 
 
The Hidden Cross: Documentary about the Armenians in Amed

 

A documentary about survivors of the Armenian genocide who had to convert to Islam was shot in Amed. ANF talked to the directors.

The documentary film "The Hidden Cross" (Saklı Haç) tells the story of Armenians in the northern Kurdistan province of Amed (Diyarbakır), who have converted to Islam after the genocide. The directors see their film as a work-up in the form of a confrontation with what everyone knew but was not talked about.

The genocide of the Armenians in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire has killed about one and a half million people. A not insignificant part of the survivors has converted to Islam. For over a century, they have kept their identity, their culture and their faith hidden. Especially in rural areas with a predominantly Sunni population, Armenians changed their names and began performing Muslim rituals. Many felt the need to be more Muslim than the Muslims. The Egil district in Amed is home to Armenians who had to hide themselves and their identity. Altan Sancar and Serhat Temel have made a documentary about them. They told ANF what motivated them to write this documentary.

A hidden story

"The Armenian genocide has many facets, including Armenians converted to Islam. They cannot really express themselves and do not speak. We thought that by giving voice to these people, we came one step further in 1915. The title of our documentary summarizes the lives of Armenians converted to Islam. It was created in an interesting way. In the first week of shooting, we visited a woman. She said she wanted to show us something and got a cross out of a chest. It was her grandmother's cross that passed it on to her mother, and finally to her. She herself will pass it on to one of her daughters. So we got the idea for the title "The hidden cross". It's not just about the cross, it's about identity, culture and beliefs that are hidden. Hiding is not just a symbol, but also a part of the story," says Altan Sancar.

Gala in Amed

The gala of the documentary took place in Amed on 16 June. More screenings are planned in Istanbul and other cities, according to Sancar: "Our biggest dream would be a gala in Armenia. There will also be screenings in Europe. At the same time, we expect performances at film festivals. Afterwards, the film will be freely accessible on the internet. Our goal is for everyone to see and know what has been done to Armenians, Kurds and other discriminated peoples in the region. We will continue to work on this topic."

Important is the confrontation

Serhat Temel, the second director, says that he had played as a child with many of the children and grandchildren of the main characters of the documentary: "We grew up with them. We realize how much we hurt them as a child. It is a story we know. We found it necessary that it be worked up and a confrontation with it takes place. There have been many topics that require an apology. However, we are not concerned with a superficial apology, but with a confrontation with reality. What will save and clear us is to confront with what we have done ourselves. Already in our childhood, we knew what it was all about, how these children grew up and how the people who have spoken in the film suffered. And we wanted everyone to see it. It is supposed to be a confrontation for all who lived there and remained silent until today."

Generational trauma

Although more than a century has passed since the genocide, the people in the film are still traumatized, Temel says: "Actually, we did not talk to the first generation, but to the second and third generations, who did not experience the genocide themselves. In their stories it becomes clear that the trauma has not been overcome. Actually, this is the story of our shame. We first wanted to process the topic in writing, but then we thought it would be more widely used as a documentary. Our main concern is that the stories of these people become known. We've been working on the film for about a year, of which we spent three months filming."

Altan Sancar, who himself is a grandson of converted Armenians, adds, "Perhaps the basis for what Turkey is experiencing today was laid in 1915. If we can deal with the truth of 1915, maybe something can change today.”

saklihac.jpg

 

https://anfenglish.c...Lc2EYLQlFlleI6A

 


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#169 Yervant1

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Posted 01 August 2019 - 08:30 AM

Panorama, Armenia
July 30 2019
 
 
f5d406fd471d2a_5d406fd471d68.thumb.jpg
Culture 20:30 30/07/2019 Region
Documentary about Islamized Armenians to premier in Istanbul

A new Turkish documentary about survivors of the Armenian genocide who had to convert to Islam will be premiered in Istanbul on August 4. The documentary film "The Hidden Cross" (Saklı Haç) tells the story of Armenians of Diyarbakir province, who have kept their identity, their culture and their faith hidden for over a century after the Armenian Genocide.

Erminhaber reports that after the screening, the audience will have a short discussion with the film directors. 

The gala of the documentary took place at the cultural centre of Diyarbakir last month. The film is directed by Altan Sancar and Serhat Temel. The authors traced the Armenian survivors of the Genocide in Egil district in Diyarbakir and conducted interviews with them. The documentary details the traumatic lives of the heroes and their children.

https://www.panorama...stanbul/2147696



#170 MosJan

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Posted 24 December 2019 - 12:51 PM



#171 MosJan

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Posted 24 December 2019 - 01:51 PM

new year resolution 2020 taking a DNA test 


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#172 MosJan

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Posted 26 December 2019 - 07:42 PM


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#173 onjig

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Posted 26 December 2019 - 10:30 PM

Terrible , breaks my heart ```


Edited by onjig, 26 December 2019 - 10:31 PM.


#174 Yervant1

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Posted 03 August 2020 - 08:00 AM

DuvaR (Turkey's Independent Gazette)
Aug 2 2020
 
 
Islamized Armenians are a women’s issue
 
Nilüfer Bulut writes: Forced Islamization was one of the methods of survival during what Armenians call “Medz Yeghern,” the great catastrophe. Professor Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin says that by complying with the imposition of Islamization, these Armenians (mostly women and children) were assured their biological existence, but their cultural and social connections were ripped away.
 
   August 2 2020 11:26 am (+03)
 
armenians.jpg
Nilüfer Bulut / IZMIR
 
The issue of forcibly Islamized Armenians* has been talked about and written about much more in the 2000s. The Hrant Dink Foundation, founded in the name of the slain Armenian journalist, and Agos Newspaper, an Armenian bilingual weekly newspaper published in Istanbul, have conducted studies that have increased the visibility of Turkey’s Armenians. These studies opened a new chapter on the forcibly Islamized Armenians who were known to the Muslim society but whose presence was no more than another “other” to them, while within Armenian society, they were regarded as the “losses of the genocide.”    
 
hrantayakkab%C4%B1.jpg
Journalist Hrant Dink was killed to avenge the death of Talat Pasha
 
A conference was put on by the Hrant Dink Foundation on Nov. 2 and 4, 2013 at Bosphorus University in Istanbul on this topic. Agos Newspaper issued a special edition on forcibly Islamized Armenians on November 11, 2013. Fethiye Çetin wrote a book about her Armenian grandmother, titled “Anneannem” (My Grandmother) and printed in 2004. She co-authored the book “Torunlar” (Grandchildren) with Ayşe Gül Altınay in which grandchildren narrate the stories of their Armenian grandmothers and grandfathers. Through these books, the issue was brought to the attention of the society through the eyes of the Islamized Armenians.
 
This forced Islamization was one of the methods of survival during what Armenians call “Medz Yeghern,” the great catastrophe. We interviewed Professor Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin, a scholar of philosophy and one of the Academics for Peace. We discussed this topic, its position within Armenian identity, how Islamized Armenians perceive their own identities in relation to the viewpoints of Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks, and where this subject is positioned in terms of confronting the Armenian issue in Turkey.
 
zerrinkurto%C4%9Flu.jpg
 
Question: In what kind of an environment and under what conditions did the forced Islamization of Armenians take place?
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: Actually, the concept of “Islamization” gives a picture of the atmosphere and surrounding circumstances. The concept already expresses that Armenians did not convert to Islam of their own free will, they were forced to do so. The policy of Islamization was a key component of the genocide. Thus, certain Armenians, mostly women and children, were spared their lives on the condition that they became Muslims. Their lives were spared, but their ancestry wasn’t. By complying with the imposition of Islamization, these Armenians were assured their biological existence, but their cultural and social connections were ripped away and their souls were stolen and destroyed. They were transformed into atomic individuals who were culturally dead.
 
This phenomenon also shows us how identity was imagined in this period. Identities were apparently defined through religious references, not ethnic ones. The conversion of an Armenian to Islam also meant the cleansing of their ethnic identity. This situation, first of all, necessitates the reconsideration of the Turkism policy of the İttihat ve Terakki, the Party of Union and Progress, a political movement in the early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire. As far as it can be gathered, the key founding factor of the Turkish identity is Islam! This conception does not change in the Republican era, either. Currently, Islam is also one of the essential components of the Turkish identity as well as a protective shield. On the other hand, the situation is no different for Armenians either. A large portion of them also have identified their ethnicity with their religion. From my point of view, it is a more understandable situation that Christianity is an inseparable part of the Armenian identity. This is because the government has wounded the Armenians from precisely that angle, and so wherever the government injures you, that becomes your identity. In the book “Sessizliğin Sesi” (The Voice of Silence) by Ferda Balancar, a young Armenian whose paternal family had converted to Islam said, “What is most important for me is not being Armenian, but being Christian. I am already an Armenian. This is the natural state anyway, but being a good Christian is more important to me than anything else.”
 
Q: When was the Islamized Armenians topic first brought up, and why did it take so long for this topic to be brought forward?
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: As you can imagine, this is a tough subject. First of all, the trauma one undergoes should be considered, as they were forced on the threat of their lives to change their religious beliefs. Religious belief isn’t like that, it’s about determination to believe. The Islamized women (very few men were Islamized) were Islamized individually or in groups under the supervision of administrative, political or religious representatives of the dominant religious belief by reciting the kalima shahadah, as the first step toward the implementation of faith in Islam is to declare it.
 
These women were exposed to dual oppression. The first was the oppression stemming from the enormous split, the fracture between the heart, which is the venue of belief, and one’s life. The process of Islamization of Armenian women has immersed the majority of them into extreme loneliness and silence. This was also due to marrying or being made to marry a Muslim person. In the case of Fethiye Çetin’s grandmother, who was able to convey the truth about herself only at her deathbed, this was possible only by whispering.
 
The second oppression stemmed from being women living in a patriarchal society. Because ancestry was determined only through men, not women, the Islamization policy was practiced toward women especially. Due to this, it could be said that the issue of the Islamized Armenians is a women’s issue. As a matter of fact, Armenian women who had children by Muslim men had to keep their secret from even their own children.
 
Even though Islam presents itself as a universal religion and even though Armenian women were forced to become converts by being Islamized, being a convert was not a respected situation in society. When you add being a woman to this, you can understand that silence was the product of this major alienation and withdrawal. The second phenomenon that needs to be considered is the relation of this issue to the Armenian genocide. Without discussing the Armenian genocide, it is impossible to discuss this subject. When we started talking about the genocide, then this topic entered the horizon, and Hrant Dink was the architect of this horizon. What Hrant built was expanded by oral history projects such as  “Nenemin Masalları” (My Grandmother’s Stories), “Anneannem” (My Grandmother), “Nenem bir Ermeniymiş’ (My Grandmother was an Armenian), “Ermeni Kızı Ağçik” (Armenian Girl Ağçik), “Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermeni Kadınların Dramı” (The Drama of the Islamized Armenian Women), “Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi” (The Issue of Armenian Women and Children in Turkey), “Hoşana’nın Son Sözü” (The Last Word of Hoşana) and “Torunlar” (Grandchildren). Now, many people are discussing their own Armenian grandmothers. I can say that the layers of this reinforced and multiplied silence are being opened.
 
In addition, the position of the Armenians who were Islamized before Armenians started resisting Islamization should also be considered.
 
Q: Can we talk about a collective memory or a collective culture formed through Islamized Armenians’ former identities, related to or as a result of what they experienced?
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: I don’t think the first generation was able to do this after so much trauma. On one hand, the men in your family have been massacred and you have lost most of your family members during the deportation; on the other hand, without even being able to mourn your losses, you have been asked to kill your own God yourself, the one you would have prayed to about your losses, the one to whom you would have begged for mercy… The fact that Armenian grandmothers were able to whisper their stories only while they were dying shows their loyalty to their old identities, I think.
 
Q: What are the effects of the Islamization of Armenians on the next generations? That is, in relation to the fact that this was a forced denial of their identity.
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: It is different for the subsequent generations. This is because they were protected from this secret for a large portion of their lives and they do not know of the former identity. Moreover, a huge portion of them, even after they have learned this secret, perhaps because they were born into the Muslim faith or maybe because there was still the need for the protective shield of Islam, they looked as if they did not experience a clash with their new identity. An Armenian grandchild I know referred to his maternal grandfather as “the last Armenian in our family.” Others re-associate with their old identity and choose Christianity. If what you call collective memory is collective historical awareness, then no child or grandchild is indifferent to the history within the memory of their parents. This is indeed the correct approach. However, despite that, they show the will to live peacefully in their own land with other citizens. I also need to say this: the Turkification of the ensuing generations is still continuing. For instance, our educational institutions, through the textbooks written by quite official, national and militarist history writers and put through the filter of Turkishness and Islam, are continuing to Turkify and Islamize.
 
Q: How do Christian Armenians and Islamized Armenians see one another?
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: As I said a short while ago, this is also one of the reasons for the silence on this topic. Being a convert is also not a respected situation for Armenians who have remained Christian. Armenians who have been Islamized have been subject to a serious loss of reputation. But, moreover, Islamized Armenians are counted among the losses of the Armenian genocide.
 
Some Islamized Armenians, on the other hand, still keep their identities as a secret anyway. This may be related to different fears. Those who are able to reveal their former identities, I believe, can overcome the estrangement with Christian Armenians as long as they cling on to this former identity. But I will repeat what I said a short while ago, for those who live on this land: the majority of Islamized Armenians and those Armenians who have remained Christian, as people who have been subjected to all kinds of cruelties of religious or ethnic nationalism, are demonstrating the will to live together with other citizens with a memory of their own identity that is cleansed of nationalism.      
 
Q: What is the importance of debate on this topic? How do you think this topic being brought forward would affect the political environment of this country?
 
Zerrin Kurtoğlu Şahin: All kinds of confrontation is good; it is healing. All together, we need to be able to “look into our souls,” as Zamyatin said. Talking and coming face to face is crucial to recovering from our political and moral schizophrenias and paranoias. When you bury your head into the sand, three things happen: 1) You cannot breathe inside the sand, 2) You remain as a headless and brainless body, and 3) Everybody except you continues to see everything. This topic and the related topic of the genocide should be able to be debated without being criminalized by the state. It is very important both for democratic values and for our maternal and paternal grandmothers and grandfathers who have been forced into silence. Also, we owe it to Hrant Dink, for the sake of humanity, who brought their stories to our attention.  
 
Moreover, there is a wounded community that is trying to live in this country through silencing, fearing and by introversion, that is harassed almost every day through official and unofficial channels, whose pain has multiplied, whose wounds have not healed, who are present but at the same time lost, who are nomads in their own land. We all need this confrontation in order to immunize ourselves against the fatal microbe called nationalism.
 
*The phrase “Forcibly Islamized” is used to leave room for other Islamization experiences, according to Ayşegül Altınay in her Armenian Conference Papers book.
 
 

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#175 Yervant1

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Posted 06 June 2021 - 07:21 AM

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June 3 2021
 
 
Is the Turkish Identity Threatened by Genealogy Discovery?
 

06/03/2021 Turkey (International Christian Concern) –  The Turkish DNA project, created to help Turks learn more about their genealogy, called for a boycott of Ancestry.com. In a now-deleted tweet, the group claimed that Ancestry.com “demonized” Turks.

The original tweet included screenshots from the website that outlined how Pontian Greeks were forced to assimilate, including learning Turkish and adopting Islam to gain better opportunities. Greeks and Armenians, in particular, were forced to assimilate, denying their Christian heritage and often facing ethnic cleansing under the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey’s persistent refusal to recognize the historical persecution of minorities in its borders often causes more suffering for those same groups. Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut said in a tweet responding to the Turkish DNA project, “Why are Turkish nationalists so terrified of the truth? Because if they face it, the lies they’ve come up with will be shattered to the ground. Through these lies, hatred has grown which made them commit so many crimes against Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, and others.”

And yet, companies like Ancestry.com have led many Turks to discover their own heritage and that they are in fact Islamized Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. These Turks then often explore Christianity again as they delve into their cultural and religious backgrounds.

 

https://www.persecut...logy-discovery/



#176 Yervant1

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Posted 01 January 2023 - 09:51 AM

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Dec 28 2022
 
 
A conversation with an Armenian imam: “If we’re looking for a hell, it’s been with us for a long time now.”
Aris Nalci
 
“It’s like I am living my life harboring two souls in one body.”

“If we are looking for a hell, it has been with us for a long time now.”

These words are not my own. They belong to M.O. who has been living in Switzerland since August and who is a former imam, Imam Hatip alumnus, and, up until a few months ago, a religious education teacher. On his mother’s side, he is Armenian; on his father’s, a religious Kurd.

He is one of the many that have had to leave Turkey and move abroad. But his story is fairly distinctive. You know already from the title that he was an imam. But he was an Armenian one. At first, this surprised me. From what we knew of the world, we were always told that an Armenian could not be a police officer or a professional or a career military man. But he had become an imam, and even a religious education teacher. And so, I knew that I should be paying close attention as he relayed his story, especially as he is someone who is a good conversationalist, who has received a sound theology education, and who speaks eloquently. As such, I wanted to be even more careful, which is why we spoke over a video call.

We talked at length. At times, he got emotional. At other times, I did. I pressured myself to ask the right questions in the right manner to elicit the most straightforward answer. In some parts of the conversation, I realized that he got teary-eyed, and I changed the topic. Later, we decided to put our conversation down in writing.

I will share with you the contents of our conversation and his perspective on Armenian identity, imamhood, Islam, and Christianity.

In the interview, we will be using the name he adopted for himself abroad, Sevan Terziyan, as opposed to his real name, M.O. Since he comes from a religious family and his father still operates in those circles, the last thing we wanted was to add another burden to his already heavy heart. As to why he chose Sevan Terziyan for a name, you will understand as you read the interview. Come listen to our conversation with an Armenian imam.

Let’s start with your story… Where are you from? What is your family background?

I opened my eyes to the world in Sason. My mama was the daughter of a later Islamized Armenian family, who were referred to by the public as “converts,” and who worked in a factory in the district center. My dear father was the member of a fairly renown Kurdish tribe. My mama spent her formative years in the central district, while my father was raised in the village. Though we were yet children, from time to time, even we could see the differences in opinion caused by their upbringings. In the face of my mama’s perpetually distant attitude towards religious issues, my father always maintained a serious and meticulous stance.

What, if any, is your relationship to matters of nationalism and faith? Is Armenianness an identity kept alive in the family?

Just like everyone else, I became aware of my ethnic identity in early childhood. My childhood years tragically coincided with periods when separatist Kurdish groups engaged in violent clashes with the state and these conflicts were on the rise especially in the region in which we lived. We were caught in an endless spiral of violence between the state’s official ideology and harsh repression, and the intense propaganda of Kurdish groups. The alternative to the language of hatred the state perpetrated against all those it othered was the Kurdish movement’s harsh rhetoric, partly as a consequence of the violence it was subjected to, formed within the confines of a rigid cult of personality. Relegated to one corner in this narrative was a grayish story about my mother’s Armenianness. This story was carefully hidden from me and my sister. It took us a long time to penetrate this gray area. In this sense, Armenianness remained a mystery box for me for a long time.

“I found myself in being an imam and teaching religious education.”

Can you tell us of the journey that started in religion and faith and led to imamhood?

In retrospect, there is a lot that can be said about such a journey, but when I take a critical glance at my life, I see that the formation of my personal story was more affected by environmental factors than by anything else, just as it is for everyone else. Within the context of the setting I presented, as the half-Armenian half-Kurdish protagonist of a story set in the countryside, perhaps the only safe shore I could conceive of was faith. That force pushed me into an Imam Hatip high school, which channeled me into theology school. After graduating from theology school, I naturally found myself as an imam and then a religious education teacher.

What is your perspective on Christianity and other religions? Detailing this for our readers will allow them to better understand you.

This question is truly a challenging one for me. I will do my best to respond with sincerity. I will disclose more of myself, than I ever have before. I have been trying to evade this question my entire life. Perhaps I shall try to evade it again. I might even, as the French say, ‘raise my hand as I escape,’ if you’ll excuse me.

Without a doubt, religious experience has a distinct role in human life. In the disciplines of art, architecture, poetry, music, and many others, mankind has produced its most profound works through the inspiration of religious experience. Yet that is not what I seek to emphasize here. Had there been no Hagia Sophia, no Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, no Florence Cathedral, no Baalbek Temple, no St. Sarkis Cathedral, nor even an Akdamar Church, that is, even if the relationship man forms with the sacred did not make him capable of producing magnificent artistic works, nothing would have changed for me.

It is necessary to take the issue slightly more seriously; the matter at hand here is a deep intuition and an inexhaustible world of meaning to which we are dragged by the pains of existence. This carries a tremendous meaning for me. We are talking about a world as old as nature, as objects, as our conceptualization of everything we encounter, thus a world at least as old as ourselves. Having said so much already, let me go a little further, ahparig.* Is there a God? I do not know, with all my sincerity and to the fullest extent of the word, I do not know. Yet there is a colossal thing inside of me, pressuring me to recognize an almighty Creator. There must be a God, ahparig; for if there is not, nothing has meaning. I fear this nothingness; I fear a nothingness in which our sufferings have no echo.

The genocide is a tremendous catastrophe, but if there is a tragedy greater than that, it is a nothingness in which pain has no correspondence. To me, the existence of God is an unshakeable foundation and if God does not exist, a great nothingness awaits us on a plane that does not even exist. I do not desire nothingness, ahparig! Nothingness has never been something to which I aspire.

CHRISTIANITY

Here, let me discuss my thoughts about Christianity. For me, Christianity is the name of the thing that characterizes the Creator in whom I want to believe as a benevolent, infinitely compassionate, solid foundation. There are deep metaphors here that have affected me from the very beginning; the Virgin Mary and Jesus’s self-sacrifice being among them. The followers of Christianity, not unlike all other religions which institutionalized over the course of history, naturally made some mistakes and were the perpetrators of evil. But to me, Christianity still maintains at its core a meaning of purity and cleanliness.

Where you lived and spent your childhood and youth, how were religious identities and Armenianness experienced?

A religiosity influenced by the rural context and suited to the local class structure was predominant where I was born. We can also add to this the religious institutions in Kurdish cities, although not as strong then as it is now which were outside the bounds of a centralized government, that provided a traditional education. The clergy raised by these institutions tended to be close-minded and traditionalist. The local people heeded the word of these mullahs from these institutions more than they did any member of the clergy appointed by the government. We can compare these to Taliban madrasahs, in a sense. So, what we were actually living was a sort of peasantry, a rural life molded to be close-minded, reactionary, primitive, and formalist by both traditional beliefs and by the religious men educated at these institutions comparable to monasteries but which I call madrasahs. On the topic of how Armenianness was perceived; frankly, people had a reductionist and othering mentality, as they do almost everywhere in Turkey.

Though Sason is an ancient residential place, it has no people native to the area. More precisely, it is a place of which natives have been “scraped.” Unfortunately, not once have I witnessed the new owners of the town demonstrating anything akin to loyalty to the memories of the previous owners. Not even the name of this people — who not that long ago created the stone and the soil, the fountains and the fields, who gathered the grapes from their beautiful vines and who left behind precious structures on the hills — was mentioned by the public anymore. As for those who remained and those Armenians who were Islamized, they never demonstrated any desire to live as Armenians. Since most of them could not escape their “criminal” pasts, they lived under the purview of some in the state and among the local people.

Q&A

History has its odd twists. When the social and political events taking place somewhere come to a threshold at which a person’s dignity and honor can no longer tolerate it, the people living there consider going to other lands to continue writing their life stories. Putting aside this general principle to talk about specific reasons, the first question I asked should have been: What were the reasons that pushed you to stay here for all this time?

We were the actors in stories that appear to be distinct yet are intertwined, in which a myriad of paradoxes was forced upon our little bodies. We had to live with this reality. The early years of my adolescence were spent in a very different manner than the political atmosphere that we are living through today. And I think unlike the generations before us, it was the first time we were thrown a bone.

JULY 15 AND INVESTIGATIONS

For a long time, we did not want to wake ourselves from this sweet dream. Unfortunately, the peace process surrounding the Kurdish issue failed, and with the coup attempt that followed, we were thrust into a series of events comparable to the infamous Reichstag fire which burnt down the parliamentary building and which was the first step in the formation of Nazi Germany. Just as Hitler and the Nazis used the social democrats, communists, and Jews as scapegoats following the Reichstag fire to persecute them, so too did the Erdogan regime in Turkey. Millions of people were investigated, tens of thousands were dismissed from their jobs based on decree-laws, thousands of people were taken into custody and arrested.

Intellectuals and journalists were thrown into prison. A state of emergency was enforced throughout the country. I resisted accepting this for a long time. I do not know why I resisted for so long, but perhaps being Sasonian has some role in this. As you know, ahparig, our folks can be a tad obstinate.

Unfortunately, while all this is going on right next to you, you also feel pressured and threatened. I was investigated, alongside my other dissident friends, after the coup attempt. Though most concluded over time, I was constantly experiencing problems with the administrators at the institutions at which I worked. I assume that meant that we had been tagged. At a few demonstrations, I had problems with police officers in plainclothes. The threat that awaited me was not because I was simply a dissident. I could predict the extent of the violence I would be subject to should my cover be “blown” because I was considered an “insider.” The straw that broke the camel’s back was the personal information, down to my house number almost, disseminated on social media. These posts, made by a considerably large religious group, accused me of being a crypto-Armenian who mocked Islamic values. The moment I saw these, I chose to leave the country without wasting any more time.

During the time that you worked as an imam, did you experience any problems due to the Armenian identity in your family?

I hid this for a long time, but it eventually came out, how I do not know. The mufti where I worked one day called me to his office and told me that he had received a complaint regarding me being seen at a church. He was surprised when I told him it was for a funeral in the family. He was even more surprised when I told him my relatives were Armenian, and when I finally said my mama was Armenian, he was shocked and transferred me to a different mosque. This knowledge is enough to make you uncomfortable. It hangs over your head like the sword of Damocles.

“I AM LIKE TWO SOULS IN ONE BODY”

During our conversation, you told me that you felt you had two souls living in one body. Can you elaborate on this?

In a therapy session I attended years ago, my psychologist had asked me, “How do you feel?” to which I had responded “It’s like I am living my life harboring two souls in one body.” The first: the one I show others, the one assigned to me and shaped by society. The other soul: the one I hide away from everyone else and which I covet dearly. I was sharing a name with a secret identity, someone who was different from what everyone saw and witnessed, but this had the potential to hurt me. It is a wearisome thing indeed to live with a secret knowledge that one hides in one’s bosom and knows will cause him harm if disclosed. This is why I describe the situation as harboring two souls in one body.

HOUSE RAIDS

The breaking point could have been that I was made the target of the hate speech of religious groups. This was something that I had feared since time immemorial, and yes, I see now that fear was pointless for it did not change the outcome. Consider that you are being accused of being a crypto-Armenian who mocks the sacred values of Islam and insults the Turkish nation. In short, the situation is ripe for a lynching. Throughout this process, my sister Emine T. especially tried to discourage me, but she was also shocked to her core by the police officers who raided my home shortly after I left. This incident caused her to change her mind. The police were constantly throwing around threats and insults. I presume that they were conservative police officers strategically placed into the force in the last years.

“I WAS HASTILY DISMISSED”

When did the complaints about you being? What were the reasons? What are the allegations and the investigations around you?

To be honest, I do not know when exactly the complaints were made, though my lawyer is trying to access the necessary documents. The fact that a complaint was called in is certain, but we only know what crime I allegedly committed based on the indictment prepared by the prosecutor.

For a long time in Turkey, there have been some laws that functionally target dissidents and especially non-Muslims. One of them, which you would be rather familiar with, is Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, on the basis of which the indictment claims that I denigrated the state and nation of the Republic of Turkey. In addition there is Article 216 of the Criminal Code. Mr. Prosecutor thus claims that I incited the people to hatred and enmity. The prosecutor accused me of two more crimes: that I mocked the sacred and that I insulted the president. The thing that constitutes evidence for "the crimes I have committed" is, in the words of the prosecutor's office, "social media posts of an unknown date." They do not even know when I made these posts. I was hastily dismissed from the institution I worked at as the judicial process was ongoing at the police force and the courthouse.

What are your thoughts on the religious culture and moral studies education in Turkey? What do you think should be done to ameliorate this system?

The problem of compulsory religious education has been a chronic source of debate in Turkey since September 12.** The relevant provision of the Constitution is as follows: “Instruction in religious culture and moral education shall be compulsory in the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Other religious education and instruction shall be subject to the individual's own desire, and in the case of minors, to the request of their legal representatives.” This anti-democratic practice, dropped into our laps by the junta constitution brought with it a litany of problems.

Those who wish can conduct a small scale research on Google under the heading of mandatory religious education. My approach to the question is guided by my belief that the state should have no intervention in the freedom of religion and conscience of its citizens. The state has no right to impose its own views on religion, faith, sexual orientation, and in short, any and all matters that concern the individual. That is an intimate matter relegated to the individual and which concerns no one, let alone the state, unless it causes a disturbance to someone else. If today we dictate what religious education should look like, tomorrow we can express an opinion on how people should dress, and the next day we can involve ourselves in a person’s sexual orientation. Before long, you will find yourself in the dark days of the Middle Ages in which people’s honor and dignity were trampled on by bigots with black flags and bands in their hands.

You changed your name. We are conducting this interview with you as Sevan Terziyan. Can you explain the reasoning behind this choice of name?

There is a special reason for my selection of this name. Prior to the genocide, my grandfather was in the cloth business. That’s where the last name comes from. Sevan, on the other hand, is the name of my folks’ youngest brother who was lost in the genocide.

1915 WAS NEVER AN EVENT THAT ENDED

Every family has a 1915 memory and a story that is told and retold. What is yours?

The first quarter of the 20th century was as deep and painful for us as it was for anyone else. The first generation who escaped the genocide, so my grandfather and his sibling, do not want to talk of it, and unless someone asks, they say nothing. What remains for us of what little he has relayed is that, as said by the great Marc Nisanyan, they became the “witnesses of their own deaths.” We can say that the brutality they witnessed as children during that time have shaped their statements which consist of ambiguous descriptions. For our folks, that is for “the remnants,” 1915 has never been an event over and done with. I do not think we emphasize this enough.

After 1915, there is a period from the dark depths of the nineties to our present day that accompanied the establishment of the modern republic, from the September 6-8 incidents to the September 12 coup. A hell for Armenians is not something that existed in the past. No, nor is it something that will come to be in the future. If we are looking for a hell, it has been with us for a long time now. This is a hell that we live in each day, and we breathe in its air. It is a hell that renews itself each moment. Living in this hell requires constant focus and education. To live writhing around in this hell, feeling the breath of its maker on your neck… If you can call this living at all…

What will you do now?

Truthfully, I do not know. This is a place of new beginnings for me. I believe in hope. We are living through a period in which war, bigotry, fascism, and totalitarianism have run amok. At this point, everyone needs to contribute and do their part. To my mind, the most important aspect of this is activism. Here, I will continue to be active, to be an opposing force, and to write bad poetry.

*Ahparig is an Armenian word meaning “brother.”

** September 12 is the date of the 1980 military coup in Turkey.

*Aris Nalci: He began to work at Agos in 1998 with Hrant Dink and his colleagues. He took on various roles as news director, editor, and editor-in-chief. He presented programs on IMC television and for some time took on the position of news director. In the same period, he worked as the editor and presenter of Gamurc – Kopru, Turkey’s first program about minorities which continues on ARTI TV. At various civil society organizations, Nalci worked in the field of minority rights, created exhibitions, and wrote reports. He is one of the editors of the book “1965.” He is also the translator of the book “Paramazlar,” published by Evrensel and Kor publications.

 


#177 Yervant1

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Posted 01 January 2023 - 09:59 AM

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Dec 27 2022
 
 
 
Islamized Christians of Turkey (1)
Orhan Kemal Cengiz
 
In order to remain whole, to survive, or even to simply exist in Turkey, minority members had to assume other identities.

In Turkey, the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and their descendants are sometimes called “remnants of the sword.” The use of this phrase admits that a mass killing has occurred with some survivors having escaped the genocide. Besides this phrase, which has been used for many years, other phrases describing descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors have proliferated in the last two decades.

In her book “The Story of the Armenians in Purgatory,” Vercihan Ziflioglu notes that phrases such as “Crypto-Armenians,” “Muslim Armenians,” and “Islamized Armenians” are also in use. These terms all refer to the same social phenomenon: The genocide caused some Christian Armenian citizens of Turkey to hide their religious identity, with the result being that their descendants have continued to conceal this identity, may know very little about it, or may even have become unaware of their religious and ethnic heritage.

A similar phenomenon, though not as well known, has occurred among the survivors of the 1914—1923 massacres targeting the Greek community, and among those Greeks who remained in Anatolia after the 1923 Turkish-Greek population exchange. Gercek News recently published a piece about a parallel of this phenomenon experienced by Alevized Armenians in the Dersim region. The Gercek News article shows that the Armenians living in Dersim and the ones who escaped the genocide and took refuge in this region became Alevis to protect their lives and their integrity.

In order to remain whole, to survive, or even to simply exist in Turkey, these minority members had to assume another identity. Some adopted their new Muslim identity with sincere belief, becoming Muslims even to themselves. Others saw their former identity as the true one and never abandoned it, but hid it carefully. Some who secretly remained Christian passed on this “inner knowledge” to the next generations, while others avoided telling their children about their family origins to protect them.

In the Turkish nationalist narrative, the prefix “crypto,” attached to a religious identity, is used as a pejorative. It insults the holder of the identity, implying that he or she is unreliable. This use of “crypto” implies that though the identity holder had the choice to live openly and honestly as a member of a particular religion, he or she deliberately chose to deceive others instead.

On the one hand, the concept of “secret Christians” can be viewed as a component or a subtopic of Turkey’s failure to face its past. The burden of horrific events in Turkish history is displaced from the perpetrators and their heirs to the victims and their descendants. Instead of confronting the sins of our grandfathers and grandmothers, we point the finger at the victims of those sins and accuse them of freely choosing secrecy and deception.

On the other hand, this great tragedy of forced hidden religious identity merits an analysis of its own as a unique problem that cannot be fully addressed under another topic. This problem is the denial of a right to identity. I frame the concept in this way because when these hidden Christians became known, neither the wider Muslim community nor the representatives of Turkey’s minorities accepted them.

These individuals’ right to identity and Turkey’s need to confront its past intersect and overlap. If Turkey had confronted its past, its relationship with all its minorities would have undergone a profound change. If we imagine an atmosphere in which the Armenian Genocide has been fully confronted, we see that Armenians in Istanbul would be regarded as the grandchildren of genocide victims. However, the identity of “hidden Armenians” is more nuanced and complex than simply being the grandchildren of genocide victims. “Hidden Armenians” are victims not only of the genocide but also of another grave violation of rights that is not included in the acknowledgement of 1915. Their identities—whether destroyed or merely hidden—have been denied them. They lost family members to the genocide and somehow survived themselves, but this survival came at the cost of all ties to their ancient culture and identity.

The right to identity is recognized under international human rights law as an autonomous, independent right that includes the right to one’s name, family, and culture. From this perspective, it is evident that the right of Islamized (or Alevized) Armenians and Greeks to their own names, families, and cultural identities is subject to severe, ongoing violation. For had these Islamized minorities not found themselves forced to convert, had they had an uninterrupted connection with their ancestry and heritage, they would have had different names and different family histories, and would have inherited a different culture. Although it can be said that such losses occur during any assimilation, the word “assimilation” is inadequate to describe the intensity and destruction of the loss at play in Turkey where there has been a complete erasure of identity.

We do not know exactly how many Armenians remained in Anatolia after the Armenian Genocide or how many Greeks remained in Turkey after the population exchange. However, some estimates have been made using existing data. According to estimates by the Armenian Patriarchate, an estimated 100,000 Armenian women and children remained in Anatolia following the genocide. No such comparable data exists regarding the Greek minority.

The Greeks and Armenians who remained in Anatolia after the massacres, population exchanges, and genocide experienced further social fracturing. Taking Armenian families as an example, we see that some remained Christian, some truly became Muslim, and some split, with part of the family maintaining a Christian identity and the other part becoming devout Muslims. It is also known that some Armenian families adopted a Kurdish-Alawite identity, especially in the Dersim region. Still others, though they converted to Islam, intermarried only with other Islamized Armenian families, and saw themselves as Muslims of Armenian ethnicity.

These Anatolian Christians were, in a way, absorbed by the social structures surrounding them. On the one hand, they produced new forms of existence within the wider Muslim community, while on the other hand, they kept alive the beliefs and cultures they carried from the past in various forms. For example, as researcher Mert Kaya points out in “The Islamization of Anatolian Greeks between the years 1919-1925: A study of memory,” the Christian tradition of egg painting continued until recently in these Islamized families. And although Islam generally forbids the consumption of alcohol, among these families were liquor and wine producers. Likewise, many traditions unrelated to Islam, mostly in accordance with the Christian faith, continue to live on in Turkey’s Black Sea region. These include customs such as using coffins to bury the dead and participating in activities that reflect the church calendar.

The stories of Islamized Greeks and Armenians learning their true identities differ greatly. For some, this identity is something they had always intuited from clues in their environment. For example, some secret Armenians living in southeastern Turkey say they were referred to by their neighbors as “Mıslimeni.” This Kurdish word literally means “Muslim,” but according to Ziflioglu, was used to denote converts to Islam. In other cases, older family members were aware of their past and origins, but kept this knowledge from other individuals within the family.

When it comes to this knowledge of identity, the state is undoubtedly in the greatest position to recognize Islamized Christians who are unaware of their own background. Turkey has kept detailed demographic statistics of the family histories of its citizens and thus has access to everyone’s genealogy, including those of so-called “secret” Greeks and Armenians.

In the upcoming part, we will discuss the developments that helped these “Islamized Christians” reclaim their identities.

https://www.gercekne...turkey-1-218084



#178 Yervant1

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Posted 01 January 2023 - 10:04 AM

Islamized Christians of Turkey (2)
After a century of forced secrecy, hidden Armenians and Greeks have begun the painstaking process of reclaiming their identities.

A few incidents, especially those involving hidden Christians coming out into the open, claiming their identities, and reckoning with their reality, seem to have served as a catalyst for others to do the same. As writer Vercihan Ziflioglu points out in her book, “The Story of the Armenians in Purgatory,” the January 19, 2007 murder of Hrant Dink was one of the most important turning points in Christian self-recognition: “Dink’s death broke a century of silence, and bit by bit the Crypto-Armenians began to emerge.”

Although Hrant Dink’s murder was understood to be the murder of an Armenian who was too outspoken and too bold in claiming his identity, the enormous public outcry against his killing cascaded into a powerful expression of Armenian identity and solidarity with that identity. Tens of thousands of people attending Hrant Dink’s funeral chanted “We are all Armenians,” and carried banners and placards bearing this proclamation in Armenian, Turkish, English, Kurdish, and other languages. Such a social reaction was unprecedented in Turkey.

This monumental public reaction to Dink’s murder transformed Armenianness from something to be ashamed of to something to be claimed, encouraging Islamized Armenians to come out in the open. According to Ziflioglu, another factor accelerating the reclamation of Armenian identity was the restoration and reopening of historical Armenian churches in Diyarbakir, Van, and Kayseri. For example, the restoration of the Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakir was a cause of great excitement among secret Armenians. These Armenians began to “be involved in the restoration process, even taking on duties, protecting, and watching over the church.”

Likewise, that the Ministry of Culture undertook reparations of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Akhtamar Island in the 2000s created the perception that the state had a newfound openness to minority identities. The flow of Armenian tourists and worshippers from other parts of Turkey and from abroad to the churches in Van and Diyarbakir, and the contacts made between hidden Armenians and these visitors also hastened their reclamation of Christian identity.

However, the hidden Greeks and Armenians who have done the work of publicly reclaiming their historical identities have not been warmly embraced by the Greek and Armenian Churches. On the contrary, the Armenians of Istanbul and diaspora Armenians have excluded formerly hidden Armenians from the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate has only expressed a “cautious welcome” to formerly hidden Greeks. In this context, it is important to remember that the Patriarchate’s interest in Islamized Christians could be negatively viewed in Turkey as a form of missionary activity. Contact with Greeks who have reclaimed their identity may also be seen as a security issue for the Patriarchate.

While for Greeks the process of acceptance and reclamation has occurred mostly on an individual basis, for Armenians this process has sometimes taken a collective form. Formerly hidden Armenians have founded organizations such as the Association of Dersim Armenians, the Association of Bitlis Armenians, and the Association of Sivas Armenians. Most recently, in November 2022, Armenians in Adiyaman formed an association called HAYDER. The establishment of these associations seems to have facilitated and accelerated hidden Armenians’ self-recognition and reclamation of identity. For example, these associations facilitate the proof of Armenian identity required by the Armenian Patriarchate before baptism. Armenians who prove their roots through these associations are admitted to the Armenian Apostolic Church after updating the religion entry on their state identity cards and completing six months of training.

The Greek Orthodox Church has also set conditions for ethnic Greeks who wish to belong to their ancestral church, including religious education. Some candidates are also required to learn Greek.

The steps taken by Turkey’s hidden Armenians and Greeks to recognize their heritage and reclaim their identity undoubtedly represent an advancement in human rights. After a century of secrecy, this recognition and reclamation is a tremendous achievement. However, we cannot say these citizens of Turkey are able to fully exercise their right to identity until Turkey confronts the history and conditions that caused that identity to be buried and inaccessible for so long.

In my recent articles, I have consistently emphasized the importance of coming to terms with the past for Turkey. Evidently, facing past wounds is a multidimensional process. Islamized Christians are one such unique aspect of Turkey’s past, and healing from wounds such as these requires a complex sociocultural transformation as well as changes in the state’s main policies on these matters. It is clear to see, however, that Turkey has not made any meaningful progress in this regard.



#179 onjig

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Posted 23 March 2023 - 02:42 AM

This happened and is happening in turkey???

#180 Yervant1

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Posted 23 March 2023 - 07:18 AM

This happened and is happening in turkey???

Yes for a long time now.






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