William Armstrong -
In the spring of 1909, Zabel Yessayan journeyed from
Istanbul to Adana, after the massacre of up to 30,000 Armenians around the
Mediterranean city. She was part of a group sent by the Armenian Patriarchate,
assigned to survey conditions after the killings and provide assistance to
orphans and refugees. Born in Istanbul, the 31-year-old Yessayan had also lived
in Paris, where she published articles, stories and translations. But her
experiences around Adana far exceeded anything she had seen before.
“Among the Ruins” was published on her return to Istanbul
in 1911. It is a vivid testimony full of gruesome details, depicting the
hellscape that Armenian districts had become and the trauma endured by the
locals. “Our race’s veins had been slashed open once again, and our blood,
still pulsing with joy over our newfound freedom, had been spilled once again
on soil fertilized by our sweat,” she writes.
The massacres occurred in 1909, in the weeks after a
countercoup in Istanbul saw Sultan Abdülhamit II returned to power. The
sultan’s authority had been seized the previous year by the Young Turks, a
cadre of young military officers who pledged to restore the constitution and
protect the rights of all Ottoman subjects. The Christian-minority Armenians
generally supported the coup against the paranoid sultan, who had inspired
earlier pogroms against Ottoman Armenians. When Abdülhamit wrested back control
from the Young Turks, he again mobilized popular support by identifying himself
with the historically Islamic character of the state, promising to eliminate
secular policies and restore the sharia. This precipitated a new wave of
anti-Armenian raids in Adana carried out by local Muslims.
“In the Ruins” describes the aftermath of the bloodbath.
It is full of purple prose but many of the descriptions are still shocking over
100 years later. “The devastated city stretches outward like a cemetery without
end,” Yessayan writes upon arrival in Adana:
Nothing has been spared; all the churches, schools, and
dwellings have been reduced to formless piles of charred stone, among which,
here and there, the skeletons of buildings jut up. From east to west, from
north to south, all the way to the distant limits of the Turkish quarters, an
implacable, ferocious hatred has burned and destroyed everything.
The pages are full of visceral descriptions of the
traumatized orphans and miserable survivors left behind. Everywhere she goes
Yessayan finds locals bearing the physical and mental scars of torture and
attempted lynching. At times there is a kind of stunned numbness in the
aftermath of a cataclysm: “On their dark-skinned, somber, gloomy faces, you
could sometimes read, as in an open book, all the terror of hours that defied
description; but at other times, everything clouded over, and then the children
were impenetrable. And that was even more unsettling.” Elsewhere the suffering
is more clearly on the surface, and it is detailed in unforgettable, haunting
passages.
The familiar theme of Armenian survival and resistance
against all odds, often invoked today, can be seen in Yessayan’s work even back
in 1911. As she writes towards the end: “The voice of my battered, bloody race
was singing its imperious refrain in my veins. The enemy’s designs had once
again proven fruitless, and I could sense, despite the desperately sad
impressions we had gathered as eyewitnesses, that something immortal and
indestructible … had eluded the criminals.” Such passages make for melancholy
reading in the knowledge of what would happen in Eastern Anatolia six years
later.
There are also chilling contemporary echoes. Adana is
barely 100 km from the Syrian border, where today a human tragedy continues to
unfold with no end in sight. Yessayan paints a pitiful picture of the surviving
Armenian children of Adana:
When they saw anyone at all, they shivered like someone
in the grip of a fever. In the imaginations of those tender innocents,
grown-ups all looked alike. They saw a criminal in every adult male, were
deluded by terrifying resemblances, imagined ghastly scenes ... Their young
minds were deranged, because for days on end they had seen criminals
brandishing knives or rifles, eyes burning with a lust for evil, mouths
contorted by curses and threats.
It’s hard to read such descriptions without thinking of
terrified Syrians displaced on the border today.
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March/24/2016
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