By Chris Bohjalian,
A woman I met last month in southeastern Turkey is going to die, probably sometime soon. Asiya’s death will not be covered by any news service, and for all but a few people in her small village of Chunkush, she will not be missed. Even the relatives who love her will probably think to themselves, well, she was 98 years old. Or 99. Or, if she survives until 2015, somewhere in the neighborhood of a century. She will have lived a long life.
George Aghjayan -
Asiya is what some people call a hidden Armenian, thought to be the last
surviving Armenian in Chunkush, a small village in southeastern Turkey.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 16 books. His new novel,
“The Light in the Ruins,” comes out on July 9.
A woman I met last month in southeastern Turkey is going
to die, probably sometime soon. Asiya’s death will not be covered by any news
service, and for all but a few people in her small village of Chunkush, she
will not be missed. Even the relatives who love her will probably think to
themselves, well, she was 98 years old. Or 99. Or, if she survives until 2015,
somewhere in the neighborhood of a century. She will have lived a long life.
When I met Asiya in May, her daughter brought me strong
Kurdish tea and fresh strawberries from their yard, and when I return to her
village someday and find that she has indeed passed away, I suspect I’m going
to weep.
Why cry for a woman I met but once, who lived a long life
and who couldn’t understand a word I said? Who spoke only Turkish, a language
in which I know how to say only “please” and “thank you”?
Because Asiya is what some people call a hidden Armenian,
and she is the last surviving Armenian in Chunkush.
I met her when I was traveling with six Armenian American
friends through a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to as
Historic Armenia. We were in a region that today is largely Kurdish but as
recently as 98 years ago was a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Assyrians and
Armenians. We were making a pilgrimage to view the ruins of Armenian churches
and monasteries, the remnants of a culture obliterated from this corner of the
Earth in the Armenian genocide. During the First World War, 1.5 million
Armenians were systematically annihilated — three out of every four living in
the Ottoman Empire.
On our fifth day, we visited Chunkush, where until 1915
there was a thriving community of 10,000 Armenians. The ruins of the church
loom over you. The town was almost entirely Armenian. Over a few nightmarish
days that summer, Turkish gendarmes and Kurdish chetes — killing parties —
descended on the village and marched almost every Armenian two hours away to a
ravine called Dudan, where they shot, bayoneted or simply threw them into a
chasm of several hundred feet. One of the gendarmes pulled Asiya’s mother from
the line at the edge of the ravine, however, because he thought she was pretty.
He decided he’d marry her. And so she was spared — one of the very few
Armenians who were saved that summer day in 1915.
My companions and I hadn’t expected to find Asiya when we
journeyed to Chunkush. We simply wanted to see the ruins of the church. Most of
the villagers acknowledged that once upon a time Armenians had lived in
Chunkush, but they were quick to add — whenever we asked what had happened to
them — that at some point they had all “moved away.”
The truth was, they were still there, whatever remained
of their bones deteriorating at the bottom of the Dudan chasm. We didn’t think
there were any living Armenians in the town.
But as we were leaving, a thin fellow in his 60s, with a
deeply weathered face and a ball cap, raced up to our van and banged on the
door. We had been there an hour, and word had spread that Americans were in
town. We had to meet his mother-in-law, he said.
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