I sit in my room, in Diyarbakir’s old Deliller
Kervansaray. I draw the curtains shut, and lay down on my belly. I am content
in my temporary seclusion, hidden from the bustling city’s distractions. I feel
the warmth pour in from the cracks around the window, and from beneath the dark
wooden door.
***
The Turkish version of the following article appeared in
the July 20, 2012 issue of Ozgur Haber, a daily newspaper published in
Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd.
I sit in my room, in Diyarbakir’s old Deliller
Kervansaray. I draw the curtains shut, and lay down on my belly. I am content
in my temporary seclusion, hidden from the bustling city’s distractions. I feel
the warmth pour in from the cracks around the window, and from beneath the dark
wooden door. I know at some point while exiting or entering this room I will
bang my head against the low-hanging stone that frames the top of the doorway,
like I did in the morning, and several times the day before. How many others
have hit their heads against that stone, I wonder. I smile with sympathy, and I
feel a momentary closeness to the ghosts of those who slept here before me over
the centuries. The inescapable past creeps up like a shadow to consume my
thoughts.
The overturned graves, the piles of soil, dead grass, and
thorns, the broken pieces of the gravestones, and those bones—it felt as if
someone had punched me in the gut. (Photo by Nanore Barsoumian)
I touched human bones just the other day in the Armenian
cemetery in Diyarbakir—soil-stained fragments of your neighbors. The overturned
graves, the piles of soil, dead grass, and thorns, the broken pieces of the
gravestones, and those bones—it felt as if someone had punched me in the gut.
Will the dead ever find peace on these lands, I wondered.
As workers smoothed out the dark gray stones at the Surp
Giragos Armenian Church, I contemplated what we had lost. As I walked through
the welders’ street, I heard my co-traveler’s voice. “Don’t look at the men
with the torches,” he said. “The light will hurt your eyes.” The welders,
shielded by heavy masks, torched away, sending bright sparks—like fireworks—my
way. I looked away. “My great-grandfather was a welder,” he said. One of these
shops belonged to him at one time, before those dark days came, before they
bled to death outside these city walls. Do they tell you about those days, when
you lost your neighbors, and your neighbors, we, lost everything: homes,
fields, schools, churches, the water, the air, and life itself?
I wish these city walls could speak. No, I wish you would
speak. Tell me, what happened here? Tell me what you’ve heard. Tell me you
understand that what we have lost cannot be bought by gold—that gold they dig
for under every Armenian rock, house, and grave on these lands.
I walked through the winding dirt roads of Havav
(Ekinözü) to a fountain located at a spot where the road dips and opens into a
large dirt field. Music was playing and men were dancing. An Armenian man was
crying. He had traveled thousands of miles to his grandfather’s village. They
restored two fountains here—from the time of the Armenians, they say. It was a
symbolic gesture, but the symbolism fell on that man’s heart like the massive stones
at the crumbling Armenian monastery just a few hundred feet away.
I walked through the winding dirt roads of Havav
(Ekinözü) to a fountain located at a spot where the road dips and opens into a
large dirt field. Music was playing and men were dancing. An Armenian man was
crying.
(Photo by Nanore
Barsoumian)
Who am I exactly? Why am I here? Why is there a fine
string—like the one a spider weaves—extending from my hip to this land where I
am seen as a foreigner, a tourist or, at best, a guest? The questions flashed
through my being each time I saw the ruins of a church, and the stones that
bore the squiggly letters of my alphabet in monasteries or on the sides of
village homes. The questions persisted, as though someone etched them on the
backs of my eyelids, and I felt like a fish deprived of water. I come here
armed with a camera, a pen, and a notepad—to trap the proof of our past that is
perpetually under siege.
Thank you for helping restore Surp Giragos—really! It’s a
beautiful flower in our forest of dying plants. But I do have to ask you,
what’s next? What is a church without its congregation? “You’re constantly
faced with choices,” said a good friend of mine, as I sat fractured on this
city’s wall. So, let me ask you again, where do we go from here?
—Diyarbakir, May 29, 2012
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