By Paul Salopek
Ani, Turkey 40°30'41" N, 43°34'06" E
“It was a—how do you call it in English?—a genocide? Yes? It
was a genocide,” says Murat Yazar. “My grandmother told my mother about it.” My walking guide and I are wandering through Ani. What is Ani? It is the ruin of a vanished world in modern
Turkey: the remote and beautiful site of a forgotten civilization—the
1,100-year-old capital of a once powerful empire. (Eight-hundred-year-old laments: a church fresco in the proto-Armenian capital of Ani, Turkey.)
Relics of this Silk Road city
lie scattered across the sky-hammered mesas of far northeastern Anatolia.
Broken cathedrals. Rotting ramparts that defend nothing from nothing. Empty
boulevards that go nowhere. We roam this colossal diorama of stillness, of
eerie silence, Murat and I, as if painted into a Dali dreamscape. We are
talking about the disappearance of Armenians from the region.
Broken arch: a relic of ancient Ani on the closed
Turkey-Armenia border. Photograph by Paul Salopek.
In 1914, about two million Armenians lived in what is today
Turkey. They were a Christian minority under Muslim rule. Their history reached
back thousands of years. By 1922, just 400,000 remained.
What happened to more than 1.5 million people? Most were
killed, historians say. They were targeted for extermination. They were marched
into waterless deserts at bayonet point. They were slaughtered.
“My grandmother said they locked all the Armenians near the
Euphrates River into some houses,” Murat tells me. “Then they took them out at
night and pushed them into the river. They drowned them.”
It was eight months into World War I. Europe had begun to
cannibalize itself. The multicultural Ottoman Empire was dying in terrible
spasms. The Ottoman Turkish majority—whipped up by nationalist leaders and
enraged by the mass deportations and massacres carried out by former Christian
subjects against fellow Muslims in the crumbling fringes of the state—wreaked
revenge on their ancient neighbors: minority Assyrians and Greeks, but mostly
Armenians. They accused the Armenians of being infidels. Of disloyalty. Of
siding with the empire’s encroaching foes (the Russians and colonial
Europeans). The knife hand in this enormous crime? Local Kurds. Kurds shot and
hacked Armenians to death en masse. Kurdish gangs tore into refugee columns of
starving Armenian women and children. Kurdish villagers seized Armenian
property—abandoned farms, flocks, and homes.
We have been walking through the dim echoes of this
calamity, Murat and I, all the way across Anatolia. We seek shade in derelict
houses of Armenians—homes overgrown with trees, with weeds. We pass sturdy
churches converted to mosques. We skirt walnut orchards planted long ago by the
victims. Murat broods about this. He is a Kurd. I see him grappling with
history, with a legacy he cannot imagine, with the haunted landscape.
“Once, I apologized to an Armenian man in Istanbul,” he
tells me. “I told him I was sorry for what my ancestors did.”
And how did the man react?
“What could he say?” Murat says, shrugging. “He said, ‘Thank
you.’”
We stand in a cold wind. A big sign at the entrance to the
archaeological ruins of Ani describe its long story. The text states that the
ancient and sprawling metropolis flowered under Bagratian kings. The Bagratians
were Armenian. Nowhere is the word “Armenian” written.
* * *
It has been dangerous for many years in Turkey to describe
what occurred in 1915 as a genocide. Turkish judges have deemed this term
provocative, incendiary, insulting, a taboo. Turkish writers and journalists
who deploy those three syllables can face charges of slander against the
Turkish state. One has been assassinated by ultra-nationalists.
There is an official version of events. It goes like this:
The Armenians suffered, this is undeniably true. Yet they were just one of many
ethnic groups who felt the heavy blows of the imploding Ottoman Empire. Their
destruction was neither extreme nor systematic. It was a war. And violence
coursed both ways: Armenians perished, but so did Turks, at the hands of
rebellious Armenian mobs. Yet this narrow reading of history has begun to show
some cracks. In April, Turkey’s then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
became the first Turkish leader to express formal condolences to the
descendants of Turkey’s Armenians, who today live scattered across the globe.
He spoke, carefully, of the two peoples’ “shared pain.”
Walking through the Kurdish hinterlands of Anatolia, one
senses that ordinary citizens are far ahead of him.
“We fought the Armenians, and many died,” says Saleh Emre,
the white-haired mayor of Kas Kale village. “I think this was wrong. They
belonged here.” Emre pauses. He sweeps a gnarled hand over the houses of his
tiny community. “This land used to be owned by an Armenian trader. My father’s
uncles bought it cheap.” He allows this detail to sink in. Then he ticks off
the names of nearby Turkish towns that once were dominated by Armenians: Van,
Patnos, Agri. No Armenians live there now. He stops short of using the word
genocide.
The old man peers east across rolling sunlit plains, across
brass-colored pastures, across grassy paradise blighted by memory, toward the
nearby country where some survivors fled. “I would like visit to Armenia,” Emre
says. “Armenians were our neighbors.”
* * *
The scene: a church courtyard in Diyarbakir, the cultural
capital of Turkey’s Kurds.
Sourp Giragos is the largest Armenian church in the Middle
East. It is newly renovated, mostly with donations from the remnant Armenian
community in Istanbul. It is a monument to hope, to reconciliation, one of a
few such gestures taking root in the Kurdish zones of Anatolia in a hundred
years. (In a distant town called Bitlis, the Kurdish mayor has named a street
after William Saroyan, the Armenian-American writer.) People bustle about under
a massive bell tower. They are sweeping fallen leaves. Serving coffee at
outdoor tables. Chatting. Some light candles. A few are Muslim. Most are
Armenian Orthodox Christians. Aram Khatchigian, a caretaker, has been both.
Custodian of memory: Aram Khatchigian in the rebuilt Sourp
Giragos Armenian church in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish cultural capital in Turkey.
Photograph by Murat Yazar.
“Until I was 15, I believed I was a Muslim, a Kurd,”
Khatchigian says. “After that, I started to feel a change in my heart.”
He explains how he excavated his hidden past. How he learned
that his grandfather, a boy of 12, and his grandfather’s younger sister, a girl
of 9, were actually Armenian—the only ones in their immediate family to survive
the killing fields around Diyarbakir, where a “pungent smell of decaying
corpses” filled the air. The boy and girl hid under a bush until a Muslim
Kurdish farmer took them in, saving their lives, caring for them as his own
children, giving them his name. They converted to Islam. “All Armenians still
living did this,” Khatchigian says. “They would be killed otherwise.” Then a
man stalks up to our table. He has been listening.
“Do you recognize the genocide?” he demands. He looks into
my eyes.
I am conducting an interview, I tell him.
“I don’t care,” he says. “Do you or don’t you recognize the
genocide?”
For some Armenians, this consuming question has become
everything—the lynchpin of a national struggle, almost of a modern identity:
Turkey and the world must finally acknowledge that a true genocide, legally
defined, unfolded in Anatolia. Vast amounts of energy and money are poured into
this lobbying campaign by millions of Armenians in the diaspora. (At least 21
countries now officially accept the Armenian genocide as fact. The United
States and Israel, valuing diplomatic ties with Turkey, aren’t among them.)
Armenian-American author Tomani Meline describes the
suffocating effect of this bitter political debate on her life:
“To some Armenians, recognition means reparations from
Turkey: to the true zealots, land; to the slightly more pragmatic, money. To
most, it simply means the official usage of the word genocide. To me, it came
to mean that I could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because
it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting
match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide.”
At the church in Diyarbakir the stranger sits down at our
table.
He repeats his question again. And again. Khatchigian stares
down at his shoes, embarrassed. I lay down my pen. We wait.
“I don’t care. Tell the world I’m Armenian.” But she changed
her mind, and here in Dyarbakir she did not want her face to be photographed.
Photograph by Murat Yazar.
* * *
A giant red Turkish flag flutters above the archaeological
site at Ani.
The city’s ancient ruins toe the ledge of a canyon. On the
other side, within easy walking distance, lies the small Republic of Armenia.
Nobody ever crosses. The border between the two nations has been shut for years
by mutual suspicion and hostility. Ani is a dead end.
We strike out, Murat and I, heading due north.
We tug our brave cargo mule across sodden winter fields
around Kars, a Turkish city that in the 1890s was 85 percent Armenian. Murat
asks its startled residents if any Armenians yet remain. A Turkish citizen, and
a minority Kurd wrestling with his own questions of cultural endurance, Murat
always asks. I watch him plod head, interrogating the past for answers. A lanky
man, wistful, questing. With a camera slung over his parka. Black Anatolian mud
cakes under his boots. I can only shake my head in wonder.
Killers or victims, there are no chosen people. There are
simply people. And the dead. And what you do with your pain tells the world who
you are.
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