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HIDDEN ARMENIANS


Arshak1946

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http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/10/turkey-armenian-kurds-minorities-forced-to-be-turkish.print.html

 

Hello Hye Forum Members;

Here is the link if you interests this article about Hidden Armenians in Turkey

 

My best regards.

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Armenian massacres: Descendants emerge from the shadows in Turkey Only now, 100 years after the mass murders of Armenians, are their nervous descendants in eastern Turkey daring to declare their ancestry and explore their roots

 

6:30PM BST 23 Apr 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/template/ver1-0/i/share/comments.gifComment

A century after their forefathers were murdered, a hidden people are coming out of the shadows. Descendants of the Armenians killed in their hundreds of thousands as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the First World War, they are revealing themselves to their neighbours and startled historians, encouraged by the ever-changing shifts of Middle Eastern politics.

Virtually all grew up as Muslims, after their grandparents converted from the Armenian Orthodox faith or married to escape persecution. Hardly any speakArmenian, and in many cases it was only on reaching adulthood that their parents even dared to pass on the knowledge of their ancestry.

“Until I was 18, I didn’t know anything about anything Armenian,” said one such woman, Güzide Diker, who grew up speaking Kurdish in a village in eastern Turkey. Like the rest of the family, and everyone else in the area, she was brought up to be Muslim. Knowledge of the region’s long Armenian history in some places disappeared within two generations.

“When I was 18, my older brother called me and with my mother told me I could choose what religion I wanted,” she said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/11556559/Armenian-massacres-Descendants-emerge-from-the-shadows-in-Turkey.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03277/armenia-1_3277608b.jpg

Güzide Diker (David Rose/The Telegraph)

On Friday, the world will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, as descendants insist on calling it, despite fierce opposition from the Turkish government. April 24 1915 was the date the Ottomanauthorities rounded up Armenian leaders in Istanbul, accusing them of conspiring with the Western allies and Russia.

There followed an onslaught of proportions unprecedented in modern history as the empire tried to expel the entire Armenian population, numbering several million. In the east, where most lived, soldiers and Kurdish gangs – many of them bandits released from prison for the purpose – ambushed the long trails of humanity being herded into the Syrian deserts to the south, shooting and bayonetting as many men as they could, with countless women and children, too.

“My father was four, and saw five men spear his mother to death in front of him,” said Aydan Tüt, a taxi driver, who still carries with him his father’s identity card showing his grandfather’s Armenian name. “He was saved by two Kurds on horseback who came and rescued him, saying the child should be spared.”

Those Kurds brought up the Armenian orphan as their own.

The diaspora’s historians say 1.5 million died. Those who survived the killings and the starvation that followed scattered, some to Syrian cities, where they remain, suffering new attacks in the civil war, some to what became Soviet Armenia, some to the West.

A handful of families remained fearfully in the larger cities of eastern Turkey, like Diyarbakir, but in an atmosphere of hostility both between Turks and Kurds, and towards Christian minorities, they gradually dissipated, too.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/11556559/Armenian-massacres-Descendants-emerge-from-the-shadows-in-Turkey.html

Edited by onjig
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