Kurdified - Turkified Armenians

Yervant1 · September 28, 2015

Baptism Matters

Editorial, 22 September, 2015

Two recent Keghart articles about the refusal of priests in Armenia to
baptize several hidden Armenians visiting the country from Turkey this
summer drew a huge and mostly negative response from Keghart readers.

By early September `Moslem Armenians' (Aug. 19) article by Souren
Seraydarian, head of the National Congress of Western Armenians and
Raffi Bedrosyan's `Church Refuses to Grant Baptism to Hidden
Armenians' (Aug. 18) had a combined 1,500 hits, not counting the
additional number of 2,500 hits tracked through the distribution
software and Facebook, which do not appear on the website. Together,
the two pieces received 28 comments. Readers overwhelmingly supported
facilitating the baptisms and many condemned Echmiadzin for its
perceived intransigence. The clergy were dismissed as Pharisees,
ignorant, archaic, holier-than-thou¦ The Church was called
preposterous, dysfunctional.

Keghart readers also argued whether being part of the Armenian
Apostolic Church was mandatory for someone to call himself/herself
Armenian. Pagan King Medzn Dikran was exhumed to assert that one
doesn't have to be Christian to be Armenian.

While oligarch-Catholicos Karekin II brings little honor or decorum to
the Armenian Church or to the Nation, in this instance the attack on
Echmiadzin was a tad harsh.

Judging by the Armenia clergymen's improvised response and transparent
excuses for refusal, it's obvious Echmiadzin'and perhaps the Armenian
Church'is unprepared to tackle this new challenge. The Church is
unprepared because the situation has not been an issue in the Church's
history. As well, the Armenian Church isn't a proselytizing
institution.

The uncertainty and inconsistency of some clergymen is also manifested
by the fact that several hidden Armenians were baptized last year
while visiting Armenia.

Baptism is an elaborate sacred ritual. The Armenian Church takes it
seriously as it should. It is one of the sacraments. It's not a matter
of dunking the person in water or spraying water on him/her and,
saying `Hail Mary' pronouncing the candidate instant Christian.

There's also another issue which discourages the Church from baptizing
helter-skelter. It's not known to most Armenians that a number of
Kurds in Syria have asked the Armenian Prelacy of Aleppo (of the
Cilicia See) to be baptized. Their intent wasn't to adopt Christianity
but a ruse to claim `persecuted minority' status at the Western
embassies and thus be granted a visa to emigrate. The Church,
obviously, has to be careful not to be hoodwinked by these insincere
candidates.

There are also concerns about Turkish secret agents assuming Armenian
identity through baptism so as to infiltrate Armenian communities,
particularly the Patriarchate in Istanbul.

Yet another challenge is the diversity of the global Armenian
communities. There are Armenians in roughly 80 countries. Some
Armenians live in `liberal/progressive' societies while others live in
`traditional/conservative' regions. A radical change in Armenian
Church baptismal procedures has to be acceptable to a rainbow of
communities from Armenia to Uruguay.

The fact that Echmiadzin takes the issue seriously is indicated by its
refusal to give in to the intervention of the minister of diaspora
affairs. Since the minister represents Catholicos Karekin's
fellow-oligarch President Serge Sarkissian, one would have assumed
Minister Hranush Hakobyan would have found a friendly ear in
Echmiadzin.

In a rapidly changing world, the Church'like other institutions'has to
evolve to meet the changing needs of the faithful. In this instance,
what's a trickle can become a deluge if an increasing number of hidden
Armenians or Hamshens decide to become Christian. There are hundreds
of thousand Hamshens in Turkey and in the Caucasus. When some/many of
them decide to become `100% Armenian' they might decide becoming a
member of the Armenian Church an essential aspect of their revived
identity. Other Armenians'particularly in the West'might not consider
Church membership essential to their Armenian identity and might
glibly cite that pagan Medzn Dikran, Argishti were as Armenian as St.
Vartan. But the fact is the hidden Armenians of Turkey or the
Hamshens, who want to return to our nation, don't share this
mostly-Western perspective.

The Catholicos and his Synod must convene ASAP and resolve this
quandary. It's not just of paramount importance to the Church but also
to the Armenian Nation. Considering the shrinking population of
Armenia and the rampant assimilation in many Diasporan communities, we
need Armenians to return to the fold. This is a God-sent opportunity
for our Nation. It's also a God-sent for the unpopular ecclesiastical
leader in Echmiadzin to shine for a change.

Armenians who demand hasty or `compassionate' baptisms for hidden
Armenians would probably scoff at the notorious storefront `wedding
chapels' of Las Vegas. Like a wedding ceremony, baptism is a sacrament
which should be approached with seriousness and deliberation. It also
should be conducted in a proper ecclesiastical framework.

By next summer, when (hopefully) more hidden Armenians head to their
homeland, their National Church should have comprehensive baptismal
rules and procedures in place. No excuses; no improvisation; no
pushing the junior clergymen to take the flak as this past summer.

http://www.keghart.com/Editorial-Baptism

Yervant1 · February 18, 2016

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND ISLAMIZED ARMENIANS ARE DISCUSSED IN GERMANY

00:15, 18.02.2016
Region:World News, Armenia, Turkey
Theme: Politics, Society

Seminars devoted to the Armenian Genocide and Islamized Armenians
were held in Hamburg, Germany, according to Akunq.net.

The events were organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a
Germany-based transnational alternative policy group and educational
institution.

Coordinator of the seminar entitled "Islamized Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire and in Turkey" was German Turkish writer Dogan AkhanlÄ±,
who has been persecuted by Turkey for years, and for recognizing and
condemning the Armenian Genocide.

The event brought together around 150 people, including well-known
Genocide Studies specialist Wolfgang Gust.

In the seminar entitled "Yozgat 100 Years Ago," the speakers delivered
presentations on the displacement of Yozgat Armenians, the trial
of the Armenian massacres, and on the culture of remembering and
confronting history.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__news.am_eng_news_312155.html&d=CwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=f31Tpx5aeMCIePqw_cDNjRqxLyHxm69P9BNUUQ7bY-I&s=lyjiSdUdrR_TO3F4KYYb_XCSNngwluC7F8cjOHdfqoA&e=

Yervant1 · March 3, 2016

RETURN TO IDENTITY: A STORY OF DERSIM ARMENIAN FAMILY

17:01, 02 Mar 2016
Siranush Ghazanchyan

The documentary "Pure State of the soul" by Turkish Armenian director
Ugur Yusuf Ires will screen at the cultural center of the Yerevan State
University tomorrow. The film presents the story of the director's
family, namely his grandfather Harutiun Ires, who regained his identity
at the age of 71, regained his 'pure state of the soul after he was
baptized as Christian Armenian.

The constant arguments between the director's grandparents lie in
the basis of the documentary. "Although they were speaking Zazaki,
we could understand from some Turkish words that all disputes were
about religion," Yusuf Ires told reporters in Yerevan.

"For ten years grandma was trying to persuade her children and
grandchildren that they were Turkish and Muslim. She was confident it
would be easier for them to live with that consciousness. But there is
a reality called genetic memory. This is what motivated the creation
of the film," the director said.

Harutiun's daughter Karin Gulteki returned to her Christian roots
three years ago. She was baptized in Germany, as the tax for baptism
in Armenian Churches of Turkey is too high. "I'm glad to have found
my true identity and individuality," the Dersim Armenian woman said.

"Turkey does not miss any opportunity to pressure Armenians," said
Mihran Gulteki, founder of the Union of Dersim Armenians. He said
"Turkey is implementing a special policy of repatriating Turks from
foreign countries and settling them in Western Armenia, where an
estimated 3-4 million hidden Armenians live. According to him, the
number will even grow if it becomes safer for Armenians to live there.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.armradio.am_en_2016_03_02_return-2Dto-2Didentity-2Da-2Dstory-2Dof-2Ddersim-2Darmenian-2Dfamily_&d=CwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=kXG2I6qjhTrK29SPqyxyOjRjW0SmfCT5NUmN4GI6C58&s=DORH1tgY-dvDwvLHEb1cxuuOYoZyBzY76xjtHoLGTyc&e=

Yervant1 · March 3, 2016

DERSIM ARMENIAN: TURKEY TARGETS ARMENIANS EVEN IN ITS STRUGGLE AGAINST KURDS

17:09, 2 March, 2016

YEREVAN, MARCH 2, ARMENPRESS. Dersim Armenian Mihran Gultekin Savior
thinks that Turkey's policies have not changed; it continues expelling
Armenians and Kurds of Turkey and replaces them with Turkmens living
abroad. "Armenpress" reports Mihran Savior who returned to his
Armenians roots years ago, told the journalists about the aforesaid.

"Today Kurds and Turks fight in Turkey, but Armenians are always under
focus. Under those conditions hidden Armenians try to keep their real
identity more covert. The Turkish state regularly tries to speculate
the Armenian factor in this struggle. In fact, Armenians are always
to blame", the Dersim Armenian said.

As for the number of hidden Armenians in Turkey, Mihran Gultekin
Savior mentioned that, according to some opinions, it reaches 3-4
millions. "The reason of such a great number of hidden Armenians in
Western Armenia is conditioned by the fact that they are oppressed
there, and when they decide to unveil their identity, they encounter
difficulties. That is why they keep it in secrecy, but when we conduct
private conversations, they easily unveil their identity and say that
they are Armenians", Mihran Gultekin said.

He converted to Christianity 6 years ago and his wife, Karin Gultekin,
was baptized 3 years ago in Germany. They plan to settle in Armenia.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__armenpress.am_eng_news_838067_dersim-2Darmenian-2Dturkey-2Dtargets-2Darmenians-2Deven-2Din-2Dits-2Dstruggle-2Dagainst-2Dkurds.html&d=CwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=ru2xNggubGGnR-B7r8Czt7XLQQk3F_WLrCKYbz62YKU&s=FgHOTjIWLh-2VByxsACJPGI1vWJdIdmestGzWSQssh4&e=

Yervant1 · March 3, 2016

DERSIM-ARMENIAN FAMILY DECIDES TO MOVE TO ARMENIA

13:48, 2 March, 2016

YEREVAN, MARCH 2, ARMENPRESS. Founder of "Union of Dersim Armenians"
Mihran Savior and his wife Karin Gyultekin plan to move and settle
in Armenia. Tor the purpose, they will apply for Armenian citizenship
today, on March 2.

In an interview with "Armenpress" Karin, who was baptized in Germany
3 years ago and converted to Christianity, explained their reasons to
make such a decision. "We live in a country where we were massacred,
forced to accept a religion that is alien for us. We do not wish
to live in Turkey. After this interview I and Mihran will apply for
citizenship", she said.

Karin told how they were continuously targeted in Turkey. Even when
they were still Muslims, everybody pointed at them saying "Look, she
is Armenian". After being baptized she had to relinquish her job in
a restaurant where she used to work for 15 years as they said they
are not going to "eat from the hands of a gavur (non-Muslim)". "What
is the difference? You are Muslim and I am Christian. I do not want
to live an enforced life. I want to be saved from all these", Karin
mentioned with great anxiety.

Karin and Mihran have two sons who hail the decision of their parents
to move to Armenia. "Both of my sons are baptized. One of them now
studies in Germany and the other one is a journalist. Both call me
and often say "mother, do what you want, do not be afraid". I finally
made up my mind to do that", Karin said.

The day before she, accompanied by her family members, visited
Armenian Genocide memorial complex and museum. It was difficult for
Karin to speak, saying, "it is impossible to display the grief or talk
about it. Of course, we knew about the genocide, we had read and seen
much. My mother used to tell about the massacres... The grief cannot
be forgotten. It is the only thing that cannot be swiped away from
one's memory".

Though Karin has not yet decided what she will do after moving to
Armenia, but she confidently says, "I am a hard working woman, I will
do any job", and added with a smile, "I will come for sure".

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__armenpress.am_eng_news_838024_dersim-2Darmenian-2Dfamily-2Ddecides-2Dto-2Dmove-2Dto-2Darmenia.html&d=CwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=tgrosINrFi9tJ4FwzePK4c0HrZ8qmtnk1hMh1VqPULs&s=ltvHqwYqded4OJceAUsikYzpBNzU5lAJ44T-NnfoHCE&e=

Yervant1 · March 3, 2016

"HIDDEN ARMENIANS" OF "AZATUTYUN-TV" IS IN THE FINAL OF THE NEW YORK FEST

March 1 2016

"Hidden Armenians" documentary film presented by "Azatutyun-TV"
passed to the final round of the prestigious Film Festival in New
York. The Director of Radio Liberty Armenian service, Hrayr Tamrazyan,
in an interview with "Aravot", considers it an achievement in the
Armenian journalism as the festival was attended by the most powerful
TV channels and TV stations with more than 300 films from 50 countries
all over the world. Among them are: CNN, RUSSIA TODAY and BBC.

In March, it will be clear what prize will be awarded to the "Hidden
Armenians" film telling about the Armenian families who have forcedly
converted their belief and nationality as a result of the Genocide.

Hrayr Tamrazyan and his team have meticulously worked 50 hours to
make the material a film. He has personally selected the music that
uniquely supplemented the saying in the film.

He says that shooting a film is like a poem and its birth is
difficult. Incidentally, the "Hidden Armenians" film was highly
appraised by the Turkish well-known historian Taner Akcam and has
posted it on his Facebook page.

Gohar HAKOBYAN

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__en.aravot.am_2016_03_01_174570_&d=CwIFaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=FWZ2-mZdEFvKVHoxPZRIfA4JBo2eWQmtkytUrOkcDWI&s=UJayaBFSl0gk56w1Tb2AKXDuO8TUtvXu3xFPpdvg7nk&e=

Yervant1 · August 25, 2016

Armenian translation of Taner Akcam’s book on forced Islamization of Armenians released

18:00, 24 Aug 2016

Siranush Ghazanchyan

http://www.armradio.am/en/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Taner-Akcam-Islamization.jpgThe Armenian translation of Turkish historian Taner Akcam has been published in Yerevan, Akunq.net reports.

The book titled “Forced Islamization of Armenians: Silence, Denial and Assimilation” consists of three parts. In the first part the author speaks about the impossibility of an unbiased study of the Armenian Genocide issue in Turkey, about the difficulties and persecutions he has passed through.

The second part presents the story of discriminatory and biased discussions on the Turkish edition of Armenian Officer Sarkis Torossian’s Memoires, which raised a second wave of criticism against Taner Akcam, who tracked down Torossian’s family in America.

In the third part the author presents the policy of forces Islamization and assimilation of Armenians between 1915 and 1918. Taner Akcam describes this as a structural element of the Armenian Genocide.

The book has been translated and prepared for publication at the Research Center on Western Armenian Studies. Meline Anumyan has translated the book from Turkish, Haykazun Alvrtyan is the managing editor.

The book published under the sponsorship of the Jerair Nishanian Foundation is dedicated to the memory of the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide.

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Yervant1 · October 1, 2016

Armenian Interview News

Interview: The Identity Awakening of Islamized Armenians in Diyarbakir

September 29, 2016

Repairfuture.net: In this interview, Gafur Türkay provides an update on the recent destructions committed by the Turkish army in the historic downtown of Diyarbakir, a city which, before 1915, was home to many Armenians. He also stresses the importance the the restoration of the Armenian church of Surp Giragos in 2011, which is considered as a haven of peace for visitors and has been immediately made their own by the small community of Islamized Armenians in the area. The ” Infidel Quarter” has now been annihilated. Is only left standing the Surp Giragos church whose interior has nonetheless suffered important damages. Gafur Türkay also discusses the question of Islamized Armenians in Diyarbakir and around, as well as the many identity issues they are faced with today. Finally, he lists the difficulties met by some Islamized Armenians who decide to get baptized.

REPAIR: How would Islamized Armenians living in Diyarbakir and the region describe their identities?

Gafur Türkay: For us to understand this we need to look at who those Islamized Armenians are. We are talking about third, forth generation that survived accidentally the Armenian genocide. These people who were a community with their own culture were disconnected from it, their religion changed. They were Islamized, they had no ground where they could keep their language alive and they kept living with other languages. What we call Islamized Armenians are the third and fourth generation. They were unfortunately part of assimilation for centuries. These people had to live a life that didn’t belong to them, all fragmented. They felt the need to hide their Armenian identity due to difficulties they had to face up today. The Armenian word had always been used in this country in a pejorative sense to humiliate people. They never had a chance to live with their own identity nor their own culture. In order to get rid of that “bad” Armenian opinion of people, some tried to mask their identity by praying and worshiping more than would worship a Muslim. They had to continue their lives on these territories under Muslim identity in agony and difficulty and this for centuries.

Gafur Türkay

REPAIR: Did this situation started to change after a certain point?

Gafur Türkay: Of course when you talk of a community assimilated for three-four generation, there is some type of acceptance. One feels obliged to continue life with familiarization with this religion, language and culture that don’t belong to them. When you are resigned to live in another culture, be it by force or without force, it is not that easy to consider going back to the culture of their grandfathers after a century. But there is a fact: while these people were hiding themselves, Muslims didn’t allow them to forget their identities. Let’s say in a neighborhood, there is a disagreement between an Islamized Armenian and a Muslim, the Muslim would not abstain from reminding the other one his/her identity, just for tyrannizing them. Therefore these people were Islamized and they disconnected from their own culture and they never let them forget they were Armenians. Now there are some people accepting their Armenian identity within Islam and some other fully integrated Islam. Some are in a situation where they are ashamed of being Armenian and don’t talk about Armenian identity and react whenever the subject is on table. But among those who have higher education level and those who are from left wing, there are recently some groups facing their own reality. Some of them re-appropriate or want to re-appropriate their own identity and some say “I am a Muslim but Armenian”. The assimilation process was so strong during the century that people are devastated. How many are those who got back their Armenian identity? When they ask me this, I say, “It is a drop in the lake”.

REPAIR: Did the renovation of Saint Giragos church in 2011 to become a place that can be visited by people change anything?

Gafur Türkay: Gafur Türkay: There were many historical building that belonged to Armenians centuries ago in this region. The assimilation continued with the destroying of the cultural texture. When you place a structure belonging to Armenians such as Saint Giragos at its own place, you create a huge positive atmosphere among the Islamized Armenians. People came and visited it many times; they embraced it.

REPAIR: This was a place for people who were in search of their identity. There were no such other places before the renovation right?

Gafur Türkay: In the region and in Diyarbakir, there were no places where they could find a piece they could relate themselves with, there is a huge destruction in that sense. Saint Giragos is the biggest Armenian Church in the Middle East region. Here we talk of a place that had a serious mission in the past. During the Armenian Genocide in 1915 all Diyarbakir Armenians were killed. Those who survived from the surrounding cities found shelter in Saint Giragos. In that sense Saint Giragos is not only a church. When it was renovated, people came a lot; they embraced it.

REPAIR: According to your observations, what were the main needs and requests of those who went to the church, among those who got intouch with you?

Gafur Türkay: Those who came there were before anything else, people who were injured with this century long devastation and we felt that they found themselves there. We heard a lot this during our conversations: “I feel very peaceful here.” When we asked them what they meant by that, they said they didn’t perceive this in a religious sense, that they found themselves there, that that was a place that belonged to them and that they made peace with themselves. When I asked them why they cried, I saw people saying, “My grandfather was baptized here, such person got married here” and grieving, remembering their roots and past.

REPAIR: I remember you organizing breakfasts once a month at Saint Giragos.

Gafur Türkay: Some Muslim Armenian friends would not come and pray so we were organizing events with more social aspect. Once a month people would come together, a breakfast table was set. Those who were coming were not attending the religious ceremony but they were attending the breakfast. Saint Giragos was more than a church. We had a piano recital for example. Why piano? Well in the past Armenian community used to have piano concerts once a month. And also when you look at the inventory list of Saint Giragos in 1915, you’d see a piano belonging to the church. Because of such a past of the church we wanted to organize piano recitals in memoriam. A century ago they carried society’s social needs to the church. That’s what we tried to do in order to come together with the Islamized Armenians; we organized breakfasts and lunches.

REPAIR: You were also organizing some cultural and historic trips and started Armenian language courses. But you were saying you didn’t have enough information sources while you did those activities.

Gafur Türkay: As you would appreciate, we are people that were disconnected from that culture for a century. That devastation and assimilation created such an atmosphere that on one hand we were trying to do something and on the other hand we were learning. In the past, there were in Diyarbakir many Armenian schools teaching until high school level. A century later we opened Armenian language course in Diyarbakir. We tried to learn Armenian. We organized picnics and trips. We went to Harput for instance. Why Harput? Not because we wanted to travel there, we went there because we wanted to discuss, think about the link of this place with the past. We organized another tour to Çüngüs. We visited a canyon where people were massacred during the genocide in Çüngüs. We went two years in a row to Armenia with a group of 50 people. We had the opportunity to see in person the structures in Armenia and meet with people.

REPAIR: Did you organize these activities according to the demands?

Gafur Türkay: Let’s say we initiated it. There were some demands and some common points during the discussions, but it was mainly about what we could bring to those people disconnected from their culture, what they could see or read or experience.

REPAIR: Those activities have stopped as of last September 2015. Due to conflicts and curfew, you didn’t even have access to the church until recently. What is the actual situation?

Gafur Türkay: We have not been able to go there or organize any event since last August. There was a program foreseen for August 15, 2015, but couldn’t be done. Due to the incidents, people from abroad could not come for the program so we had to cancel it. Since that day, due to the region’s situation we haven’t organized any activity. We are talking about a region where the curfew had been on for almost 6 months and Saint Giragos is at the heart of that region. I, myself, have been able to go inside the church for instance. But of course what we have seen there was very significant. The city was all destroyed. There were no streets, no neighborhood. All destroyed, houses, shops… We came upon a flat area. The church’s shops were destroyed. There were no damage at the main block, the roof or the bell tower; they only drilled the wall from one side. But inside the church the damage and loss are significant. For instance the place where we were selling souvenirs is devastated. Other objects, accessories, materials were either broken or disappeared or damaged. Inside the church was used as a base, they installed a stove.

REPAIR: The church was used as a base by the security forces?

Gafur Türkay: Probably, but as it is a closed book, we can’t know who used it, who damaged it. For the moment it is entirely under the security forces control.

REPAIR: Can the church be reached right now?

Gafur Türkay: There is still no access. We were able to go inside with a dispensation.

REPAIR: What kind of feelings you have when you see the neighborhood destroyed?

Gafur Türkay: We have this feeling of devastation. This neighborhood was a place where Armenians lived a century ago; maybe 95% of the population was Armenian. With the church’s renovation that lifestyle was no more a memory but part of their conscious. Unfortunately nothing is left now. The church is there but all the houses that are destroyed were Armenian stone houses. Migirdiç Margosyan has a book named “Infidel Neighborhood” talking about this place. A friend of ours used to joke with us before all these incidents started, “The infidel has gone leaving behind the neighborhood” he was saying. Yes the infidel left already but now there isn’t any neighborhood either. People were killed a century ago and now their place had been destroyed.

REPAIR: Is there a development regarding the expropriation in the district of Sur including the Saint Giragos Church also as published in the Official Gazette last march?

Gafur Türkay: Applications for the cancelation of expropriation have been placed and are presently being processed by the court. Various institutions made applications and as the foundation we have also applied. The court is not yet finalized. No actual action has yet been taken, so all stay as it is. However when the ministers and high officials visit Diyarbakir, they all verbally announce that the district will be restored and no party will be victim. Actually the district is totally ruined so it is hard to tell what will be restored. Again it has been verbally declared that the church will not be expropriated. When the prime minister and the ministers come to Diyarbakir, they verbally announce that places of worship cannot be and will not be expropriated.

Destruction in historic downtown Diyarbakur

REPAIR: However all these are only verbal declarations and therefore are non-binding, right?

Gafur Türkay: Verbal, of course. From a legal point of view the picture is very clear, they took possession of it through the process of “urgent expropriation”.

REPAIR: Some shops that were owned by the church which you said were demolished, were being illegally occupied by people and you were planning to take action or were already taking action to retrieve them. Now they are non-restorable and ruined let alone retrievable?

Gafur Türkay: These properties were already under occupation. Now there is physically nothing left to retrieve. As it is, its land is owned by the state. The government says that they will not victimize us regarding this issue. But as of this moment we do not know what will be done.

REPAIR: We talked about the search of those who wanted to return to their Armenian identity. Those who want to become priests for example, what kind of difficulties awaits them?

Gafur Türkay: There are some formalities and rituals demanded by the patriarchy one needs to follow. There is a 6 months religious training process. In the past, we have done two baptism by consulting the Patriarchate in Armenia. The Patriarchate has some rules. They say, “nobody needs to get baptized in Armenia beyond our knowledge”. ” “If there is demand”, they say,” We will do here what needs to be done”. A person with such a request is first required to go and change the section about his/her religion as written on the ID, s/he needs to get written Christian on the ID’s religion section. In the past, a court decision was necessary for this however now it can be done at the civil registry office. These rules are normal. Patriarchate says “Why baptize someone I do not know, furthermore that person might even not be Christian?” They are right from that point of view. On the other hand, the person with such a request can sometimes also be the member of a family that has been Islamized four generations ago, a family whose identity is well known by everybody. So if a person has such a request to return to his/her original identity, this can be through following some formalities.

REPAIR: Can it be the problem that the faith cannot stay within the boundaries of private life in Turkey? A person, in Turkey, cannot say ” let me not change the religion section of my ID but be a Christian faith in my own private life”.

Gafur Türkay: In the past, in the religion section of IDs it used to write ” Armenian” or ” Syriac”. That is no more the case, now it is just written ” Christian”. The Patriarchate is right from their own point of view, however it is a distressed process for the people who have been disconnected from their identities for a century.

REPAIR: If you can have access again to the church and restart your activities, would you again consider organizing activities such as Armenian language courses? And are you getting any support from Armenian institutions in Istanbul?

Gafur Türkay: We will most probably organize again such activities. We want to learn our language, our culture and everything. This issue has two aspects; first is the economical aspect. Organizing such an activity is a costly issue. However the most problematic part is to find a teacher who can live in Diyarbakir or who is available to travel regularly to teach. We are having a hard time with resolving this issue. It is difficult to bring a teacher who grew up and lives in Istanbul to Diyarbakir. The situation of the Armenian schools in Istanbul is also not very bright; the number of teachers is already not sufficient. But having such problems does not mean we will give up. We will strive to re-start the lessons.

Gafur Türkay is a member of the board of the Surp Giragos Church administration in Diyarbakir

https://massispost.com/2016/09/interview-the-identity-awakening-of-islamized-armenians-in-diyarbakir/

Yervant1 · May 31, 2017

Armenian Weekly

May 30 2017

Documentary on Islamized Armenians of Dersim Screened at Columbia University

By Lilly Torosyan on May 30, 2017 in Books & Art, Featured, Headline // 0 Comments // http://armenianweekly.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-email/images/email_famfamfam.png // http://armenianweekly.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-print/images/printer_famfamfam.gif

Special for the Armenian Weekly

NEW YORK (A.W.)—In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of, and interest in, exhuming the stories of Islamized Armenians in Turkey. Though filmmaker Nezahat Gündoğan did not initially seek to portray the account of this “hidden” community, after researching the project for four years, she determined that it absolutely had to be told. Her documentary, The Children of Vank (“Vank’in Çocuklari”), weaves together the stories of an Islamized Armenian family who survived both the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Dersim Massacre of 1938, unraveling the truth behind their lost Armenian identity.

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The English poster of The Children of Vank (Courtesy of Kazim Gundogan)

On April 26, Columbia University screened the film to a diverse audience. A discussion then followed with Gündoğan, Oral Historian Eylem Delikanli, and demography and Armenian village history expert George Aghjayan. Dr. Khatchig Mouradian moderated the discussion, which centered on the importance of unearthing the stories of Islamized Armenians in Turkey and accepting their experiences as intangible contributions to our collective and ethnographic history. “I want to welcome [islamized Armenians] into the family and remove them from the column of the dead,” said an impassioned Aghjayan. The event was sponsored by the Armenian Center at Columbia University, Research Institute on Turkey, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues.

The Children of Vank adds to the discourse of Islamized Armenians in an understated way. After conducting exhaustive research on the subject matter, the filmmaker assumed the backdrop to the stories of these individuals. Though the film’s structure is mainly in interview format, the viewer never sees or hears the interviewer. Each “set” of family members speak separately to the camera about their broken memories, with only their first names listed against a black screen. Eventually, all of the stories come together in this arduous campaign to unmask the truth.

The film begins with Zeynep, a schoolteacher who lives in Izmir. About a decade ago, she inadvertently discovered that her mother was born in Dersim as an Armenian, and, following the 1938 Massacre, was forcibly adopted, her name changed from Aslıhan Kiremitçiyan to Fatma Kiremitçi, and lived the rest of her life as a Sunni Turk. This leads Zeynep on a journey to find her lost relatives—namely her mother’s sister. The film then traces the stories of several other members of the family as they discover their Armenianness and connection to their lost relatives and lands.

After losing contact for over 70 years, the family attempts to find each other and reconnect, despite living in different parts of the world, ascribing to differing ethno-religious identities, and even after their immediate relatives have passed. They speak about their lost Armenian identities, raising themes of ethno-religious belonging, the fragmentation and politicization of memory, and the painful legacy of genocide that continues to haunt Islamized Armenians today.

Prior to the Dersim Massacres, the Surb Garabed Vank (or St. Garabed Monastery) served the village’s Armenian inhabitants for centuries. The 9th century church was the only Christian place of faith in Dersim that was not destroyed during the Armenian Genocide. Sadly, this fortuitous fate was short lived, as bombings in 1937-8 completely destroyed the once-proud structure, and its last monk was exiled; most of the Armenian and Alevi communities of Dersim were either killed or uprooted. There were, however, instances of Armenians surviving—mostly by acquiring a new identity as a Kurd or Turk. The ‘new’ family represented in this documentary—Fatma, Zeynep, Sultan, Cevahir, Ahmet, Kadriye, Meryem, and Haydar—stand as a testament to the latter group.

Gündoğan calls her film ‘the children of the monastery’ because St. Garabed played such an immense, foundational role in the lives of pre-genocide Dersim Armenians that it served as an allegorical parent for Armenians of the village. The rediscovery and ‘homecoming’ of the Islamized Armenians of Dersim is very much tied to the historical legacy of the vank and what it has bequeathed generations of Armenians.

At The Children of Vank’s premiere in Istanbul in February, Gündoğan stated, “It is hard to be a Kurd, an Alevi, a woman, a homosexual, a child—to be the ‘other’ –in these lands…But being an Armenian is even more difficult. Armenians are seen as ‘the other of the other.’” Much of the same sentiments were echoed at the Columbia University screening.

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(L to R) George Aghjayan and Eylem Delikanli at the screening

The current demographic makeup of Dersim (now called Tunceli) is almost exclusively Kurdish, but some experts estimate that well over half of the local population today has Armenian roots. Mihran Prgiç Gültekin, the head of the Union of Dersim Armenians, estimates that about 75% of the village’s population are “converted Armenians.” Just four years ago, Aram Ateşyan, the acting Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, claimed that 90 percent of Tunceli’s population is of Armenian origin.

The Children of Vank is part of a larger effort that Gündoğan and her husband Kazim (who was also a researcher for the film) made to uncover the horrific truth of the Dersim Massacre, which includes two groundbreaking documentaries, Two Locks of Hair: The Missing Girls of Dersim (2010) and Unburied in the Past (2013), and a book, The Missing Girls of Dersim (2012).

The documentary was also screened in Yerevan as part of the Golden Apricot Film Festival last year, and will be screened in different cities in the coming months. The trailer can be viewed below:

The screening of the documentary and the panel discussion that followed it concluded a series of successful lectures and discussions organized by the Armenian Center at Columbia University during the Spring 2017 Semester. Other events included a lecture by Dr. Khatchig Mouradian—who served as visiting professor at Columbia in the spring—on the Armenians in China, and a conversation between artists Eric Nazarian and Eric Bogosian moderated by Nicole Vartanian.

http://armenianweekly.com/2017/05/30/documentary-on-islamized-armenians-columbia/

Yervant1 · June 1, 2017

Armenian Weekly

May 31 2017

Karanian: Building Bridges in Western Armenia

By Matthew Karanian on May 31, 2017

From the Armenian Weekly 2017 Magazine Dedicated to the 102nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

Thursday was a school day in Chunkush. The children who normally filled its streets with laughter were instead busy with their lessons.

In the village center, a shopkeeper sold yarn to a customer. A few young men lingered outside a dry goods store. And a pair of mostly even-tempered state security agents shadowed me. Otherwise, the streets were empty.

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Ulash Altay plays on a tree in the garden in front of his home in Chunkush. Ulash is a descendant of the only known genocide survivor of Chunkush (Photo: Matthew Karanian)

It would have been easy to bypass Chunkush. I suspect that most travelers don’t give this village a second thought. But most travelers in this part of the world aren’t interested in Armenians, either. I was traveling with a small group of Armenian scholars for whom Chunkush is a gem among the treasures of Armenian history.

Chunkush sits in the remote hard scrabble landscape between Kharpert and Diyarbakir. This village was, until 1915, part of the fabric of Western Armenia. Today, it’s largely unknown to outsiders.

Armenian Chunkush had existed almost since forever and was destroyed in a moment in 1915. Ten thousand Armenians—the entire population of the village—were killed. The region around the village became a mass grave.

It has now been 102 years since the start of the genocide known to many as the Armenian Holocaust, and identified by most Armenians as the Medz Yeghern, or Great Crime. After all this time, Chunkush still exists. But today it is a Kurdish-populated village in Turkey. Chunkush has been mostly cleansed of its Armenian identity.

I had first visited Chunkush in 2014 to see what was left of our Armenian cultural heritage. I saw the ruins of a monastery, two churches, and a centuries-old neighborhood.

I returned in 2017 to see who was left. Chunkush is home not only to the ruins of ancient Armenian buildings. Chunkush is also home to a family that is descendant of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

This is how I met Ulash Altai.

Ulash Altai is an 11-year-old boy who lives in Chunkush with his mother and grandmother. His father had been part of the household, too, until his death a few months ago.

When I met Ulash on that Thursday morning in March, he told me that he would celebrate his 12^th birthday the very next day. He was supposed to be in school, but on this day, the day before his birthday, he had left school early. He had learned that a group of Armenian Americans was visiting his grandmother. He wanted to be home to meet us.

Ulash isn’t a teenager yet, and he didn’t quite have the maturity to say this. But I would like to suppose that Ulash wanted to meet us for many of the same reasons we had wanted to see his family. I would like to believe that he wanted to learn about his past, that he wanted to start building a bridge to his future.

For the past two decades, I have traveled throughout Western Armenia to document the remnants of our homeland. I’ve recorded our churches, our forts, our ghost towns. But it was not until I met young Ulash that I really appreciated how bridge building has also been a significant, even if unintended, part of my research trips.

When we Armenians visit Western Armenia, we don’t go as tourists. We don’t go to have fun. Instead, we go to learn about our past and to see where our grandparents were from. But we accomplish much more than this. We also build bridges to the future with the people who today live in our homeland.http://armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chunk-528x1024.png

These people, sometimes Kurds, sometimes Turks, are some of the people who use our churches as barns and warehouses. These are the same people who might be tempted to see Armenian ruins as quarry material or as the locations of phantom buried treasure.

And sometimes the people we meet are the so-called “Hidden Armenians” of Turkey. These Hidden Armenians may be full-blooded Armenians who have converted to Islam. Or they may be Turks and Kurds who recall that they had a grandmother who was Armenian.

Our presence, even if brief, is a reminder that we care about our homeland and that we care about the welfare of the Armenians who still live there—whether they are Christian or not, and whether they call themselves Armenian, or not. Our presence in Western Armenia, even if for only a day or a week, is a reminder to the local residents of our shared past.

In Chunkush, this shared past includes Sirahayats, an Armenian monastery, and its surviving church, Sourp Astvatsatsin. The English language translation of Sirahayats is “the monastery that looks out lovingly.” This monastery is located on a hilltop just a few hundred feet from the home of Ulash. I imagine that the ruins of Sirahayats do indeed look out lovingly on Ulash’s modest home.

It was near this monastery a few years earlier that members of my group of Armenian American scholars had first met Ulas’s father. While in the nearby town square, a middle-aged man from Chunkush had approached them. “I see that you’re interested in old Armenian history,” he observed. He said this in Turkish, or at least he said words to that effect. “Well then, you should meet my mother in law.”

This man’s name was Recai. He was a stranger and he could have been many things, but he wasn’t a liar. He really did have a mother-in-law. Her name was Asiya. And, it also turns out, she really was old and she really was Armenian. Her role in the history of the Armenians of Chunkush was more than we could have imagined.

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Asiya pauses with her grandson Ulash, during a visit from the author. Ulash is the sole surviving son
of Recai Altay, a Kurdish activist who was killed while incarcerated in Turkey last year.
(Photo: Matthew Karanian)

Asiya had been born in Chunkush in 1920.

At the time of Asiya’s birth, her mother was a 15-year-old genocide survivor—she was born in a town near Chunkush and was the only known survivor of the genocide who was still living in Chunkush. Five years earlier, during the summer of 1915, when the appointed time for killing the Armenians of the Chunkush region had been reached, Asiya’s mother had been 10 years old.

This little girl was standing alongside her neighbors, at the edge of a precipice, waiting her turn to be bludgeoned and pushed into the seemingly bottomless pit known as the Dudan Gorge. Locals today recall the Dudan Gorge, which is located a short march from Chunkush, as the place were 10,000 Armenians fell to their deaths.

This 10-year-old girl waited, but her turn to die never arrived. Instead, she was spared by a Turkish soldier who took pity on her, and who snatched her from death. He took her as his child bride.

Within just five years, roughly the time it took for that 10-year-old Armenian girl to mature, that Turkish soldier would become Asiya’s father.

Asiya’s long life has been marked by two traumas: first from the fear that she would be victimized because of her Armenian heritage; and second from her knowledge that her father had participated in killing every Armenian in Chunkush—every Armenian except for the girl who would become her mother.

Asiya is nearly 100 years old now, and for almost a century, her Armenian heritage has been perhaps the worst-kept secret of Chunkush.

Her son-in-law Recai—Ulash’s father—was killed last year. Sources describe him as a political prisoner who had been serving time for his support of Kurdish issues. A bomb—some say an ISIS bomb—struck his holding cell.

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Asiya with her late son-in-law Recai (Photo: Matthew Karanian)

Now his son Ulash is his family’s bridge back in time to the world that existed in 1915, the time when Ulash’s great grandmother stepped back from the abyss, literally, to survive the genocide.

Sirahayats, the ancient Armenian monastery that looks out lovingly at Ulash’s home, is today at risk of destruction.

So also is Sourp Garabed, the grand cathedral that is close to the center of the village.

http://armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/MatthewKaranian_3_DSC_7891-1024x683.jpg

Asiya pauses with her grandson Ulash, during a visit from the author. Ulash is the sole surviving son of Recai Altay, a Kurdish activist who was killed while incarcerated in Turkey last year. (Photo: Matthew Karanian)

Is it reasonable to expect that Ulash’s appreciation of his ancestry, encouraged by his grandmother, and also by visits from Armenians, may inspire him to take a stand to protect these sites? I believe it is.

People such as Ulash may even take a stand to protect the Armenians in their midst. If this happens, then we Armenians will have helped to build the most important bridge of our time.

http://armenianweekly.com/2017/05/31/karanian-building-bridges-in-western-armenia/

Yervant1 · June 7, 2017

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

Yervant1 · October 1, 2017

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

Yervant1 · February 22, 2018

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

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

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/02/turkey-turks-become-obsessed-with-genealogy.html#ixzz57nuLcbKR

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/02/turkey-turks-become-obsessed-with-genealogy.html

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Yervant1 · March 2, 2018

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.independent.co.uk/voices/turkey-race-armenian-recep-tayyip-erdogan-generlogy-family-trees-ethnicity-a8234346.html

Yervant1 · June 23, 2018

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.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/armenia-genocide-secret-armenians-robert-fisk-massacres-graves-bodies-turkey-a8411476.html

Yervant1 · June 28, 2018

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

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

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?

The 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.

People 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.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-hidden-armenians-of-turkey-1.3544496

Yervant1 · February 16, 2019

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.

Yervant1 · July 11, 2019

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.”

https://anfenglish.com/culture/the-hidden-cross-documentary-about-the-armenians-in-amed-35860?fbclid=IwAR2fyZxiBT1mOF2m50cd2F8OCTVfNDlgQU5svop3oh_fLc2EYLQlFlleI6A

Yervant1 · August 1, 2019

Panorama, Armenia

July 30 2019

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.am/en/news/2019/07/30/Documentary-about-Islamized-Armenians-to-premier-in-Istanbul/2147696

MosJan · December 24, 2019

MosJan · December 24, 2019

new year resolution 2020 taking a DNA test

MosJan · December 27, 2019

onjig · December 27, 2019

Terrible , breaks my heart ```

Edited December 27, 2019 by onjig

Yervant1 · August 3, 2020

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)

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.”

Journalist Hrant Dink was killed to avenge the death of Talat *****

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.

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.

https://www.duvarenglish.com/human-rights/2020/08/02/islamized-armenians-are-a-womens-issue/

Yervant1 · June 6, 2021

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.persecution.org/2021/06/03/turkish-identity-threatened-genealogy-discovery/

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