There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  His reaction was only one in a vast collection of responses I collected and sorted over time, like a scientist on an expedition; on good days I saw these reactions as butterflies with fascinating patterns; on bad days—more often—I saw them as strains of a virus. As it turned out, I was forced to reveal I was Armenian constantly, without the benefit of preambles or introductions, and the reason was simple: on appearance, I could pass for Turkish, so people spoke to me in Turkish. When I opened my mouth to reply and they discovered that I was foreign, they always wanted to know more.

  “Come on, you don’t seem American! Is your mother Turkish? Is your father Turkish?” Their sense of recognition was primal in its enthusiasm and had to be gratified with a commensurate explanation. Inevitably, I would end up confessing the truth.

  Like Mehmet Bey, many people reacted by ignoring what I had said altogether, or they changed the subject in a farcical manner.

  “I’m Armenian!”

  “The weather’s been beautiful lately, hasn’t it?”

  But the most complicated response consisted of just one word, a word I learned in level one Turkish but whose nuances blossomed over time: the word was olsun. A conjugation of the verb olmak, to be, olsun is the third-person subjunctive: let it be; so be it. But it’s not a defiant “so be it,” and not entirely a resignation either. It is the sort of thing you say if a waiter tells you that he’s sorry, there’s no lentil soup today, but he can offer you tomato soup. “Olsun,” you reply. You had hoped for lentil soup, but you’ll make do. Or if a friend calls to ask whether your meeting can be postponed by an hour: “Olsun,” you tell her; you’re not in a big rush. Depending on the context, olsun can mean “no problem,” or it can mean, “fine, if you must.” Over and over, when I told people I was Armenian, they said, simply, “Olsun.” Olsun, we’ll manage. Olsun, it’s not your fault. Olsun, so you were born into a traitorous and unpleasant people, what can you do? Olsun, it’s not as if I’m some kind of racist and am going to treat you differently because of this unfortunate new information.

  * * *

  WORDS HAVE SPECIAL power in Turkey. So many of them need to be used precisely a certain way or not at all.

  In 2009, the mayor of Diyarbakır, a Kurd, got a ten-month prison sentence for referring to members of the PKK as guerrillas. The allowed term was “terrorists.” Countless others were investigated for calling the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan “Sayın Öcalan,” because sayın, an honorific one step more formal than bey, seemed to give him too much respect.

  Any journalist who failed to refer to a fallen Turkish soldier as a “martyr,” or şehit, risked his job—and just to be clear, this was martyrdom for the idea of Turkey, stripped of religious meaning (soldiers who went so far as to pray on the job had been charged with lacking discipline).

  The letters Q, W, and X had long been against the law, officially because they were not a part of the Turkish alphabet. Strangely, this law was invoked only when the letters appeared in Kurdish words. Kurdish lawyers spent their breath in court pointing out the double standard: “But your honor! Every Web site address uses the letter W at least three times! So should the entire Internet be illegal, too?”

  Actually, large swaths of the Internet were illegal. From 2008 until 2010, all of YouTube was inaccessible through Turkish Internet providers because a Greek user had posted a video calling Atatürk a homosexual. Wordpress was off-limits for much of that time, too. By 2013, some thirty thousand sites—touching on everything from pornography to the theory of evolution—had been blocked. And, although Prime Minister Erdogǎn lifted the embargo on Q, W, and X in September 2013, early in 2014 he banned Twitter for a few days and threatened to prohibit other social media sites if their users did not behave. All things considered, it was no surprise that a multitude of Armenian-related Web sites could not be loaded; in their place one would reach a few lines of text explaining that the site was banned by order of the telecommunications ministry.

  The word for genocide, in Turkish, is soykırım; its etymology is plain—“soy” meaning race, and “kırım” meaning destruction. But in Turkish, soykırım was first brought into widespread use to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. Some Turks, meaning to be helpful, argue that this is part of the problem with applying the word to the Armenian case. They know all about Hitler, and there’s no way they can accept the possibility that the word for what Hitler did can be applied to the events of 1915. Nothing could share a label with a tragedy as monstrous as the Holocaust, the soykırım of the Jews, they reason.

  Unfortunately, this argument falls apart regularly, often on television, because Prime Minister Erdoğan has a habit of referring to every occasion of violence that he personally finds offensive as soykırım. Throughout the war in Iraq, he referred to a US-led soykırım of the Iraqis. During the Gaza War in 2009, he decried the soykırım of Palestinians by Israelis. Later that year, when protests in northeastern China started by the Uighur population—a Muslim group with Turkic roots—turned violent, resulting in some two hundred deaths (many of these Han Chinese, although details on the death toll are disputed), Erdoğan immediately accused China of soykırım against the Uighurs and called for an apology.

  * * *

  OLSUN. DESPITE A stressful beginning, I thrilled to studying Turkish and took language classes daily for over a year. Whereas I had always been shy about speaking Armenian, in Turkish I became irrepressible. Nothing was expected of me. Anything I managed was a bonus. And if learning the language only expanded my awareness of Turkey’s darker struggles, it also gave me access to the particular sweetness of Turkish manners.

  My favorite expressions were the ones that had an established two-person script, a call and response, like welcome, hoşgeldiniz—“it’s nice that you came”—and its reply, hoşbulduk, “we found it nice.” Sure, the word “welcome” had the same underlying meaning in English, but in a new language such deadened phrases come back to life, vital as if crafted by a poet. For me, the unique greetings and expressions of Turkish never ceased to mean exactly what they said: bidding good-bye, for example, the person who is leaving says hoşça kalın, “stay well,” while the person staying behind responds with güle güle—“go smiling” (literally, “smiling, smiling”). When somebody sneezes, you say çok yaşa—“live long”—and they respond with sen de gör, “may you also live to see it.”

  Turkish is full of affectionate expressions for strangers. When encountering people busy with work, whether crossing the path of a ditchdigger or upon entrance to a law office, the thing to say is kolay gelsin—“may your work come easily”—and after a meal, to the cook, elinize sağlık—“health to your hands.” To a fortune-teller or any speaker who has said something memorable, ağzına sağlık—“health to your mouth.” In Turkish, it seemed to me as if everyone was always fussing over everyone else.

  Everyone was always keeping tabs on one another, too. This was best captured in the simple expression afiyet olsun, a phrase heard countless times every day. Beginning students of Turkish are taught that afiyet olsun means something like “bon appétit.” The meaning sticks easily because of the wholly coincidental resemblance of the Turkish word afiyet to the word “appetite.” The words are not related; afiyet means welfare, not appetite, and a more technical translation of the phrase would be “may it be sustaining.” But the key is in usage, and in this afiyet olsun is far more expressive than bon appétit, as any American chowing down on a pastry or a sandwich in public will soon discover. “Afiyet olsun,” a man on the train may say, with a merry face but an undertone of the slightest judgment, if he spies you so much as eating an apple on your way to work—something a Turk would have taken care of before leaving the house. “Afiyet olsun,” says a woman in a café, raising an eyebrow, as you tuck into a decadent dessert at the table next to hers. Underlying these weird intrusions, it seemed to me, were complex layers of meaning, telling a person not to be greedy, not to take what they had for granted, not to be too certain that they deserved thei
r pleasure.

  Once, a German classmate named Kai came to our morning lesson with a sack of fresh simit, nibbling on pieces he broke off under his desk, apparently oblivious to the way its doughy fragrance was filling the room.

  “Afiyet olsun!” said the teacher, a fastidious woman named Sibil, striding directly to his desk.

  “Thank you!” Kai replied, and continued nibbling.

  But Sibil Hanım didn’t move; “Afiyet olsun,” she said again, this time separating out each syllable to make her point.

  “Thanks?” Kai said again, now uncertain.

  Finally Sibil Hanım explained that it was very rude to bring simit to class unless you planned to share it with everyone. The poor fellow reached into his bag and extended a simit in each hand to the students around him, sending a shower of sesame seeds to the floor but finding no takers.

  Afiyet olsun and all the other expressions that passed between strangers were more than communication; they were random acts of linguistic codependency.

  * * *

  LEARNING THE LANGUAGE was my one pure love in Turkey. Its obvious function was to help me connect with people—to say to every new Turk I met that I was trying to understand them; that I came in peace. But it also sustained me by bringing to life a private Istanbul of my imagination, an Istanbul of sound and music, a place where nobody cared who I was or what I was doing. I got to know this Istanbul, less seen than heard, while lying in bed every morning, and every morning this Istanbul convinced me to stay a little bit longer.

  The music began at five a.m. with the ezan, or call to prayer. My apartment was within earshot of four different mosques. Their calls came staggered by seconds, a gentle competition five times a day, until I knew every nuance and faltering pitch of each muezzin, and the precise moments when the rise of one and the fall of another would cross in a moment of aggressive dissonance or, occasionally, exquisite harmony.

  Shortly after the five a.m. call, all the shopkeepers on my street, their morning prayers finished, got ready for work, yanking up the metal grates that protected their storefronts through the night. One could adjust, after a while, to sleeping through the muezzins’ early chants; for the first ezan of the day, the speakers were softened just slightly, a small municipal concession. But nobody could sleep through the harsh rattle of the security grates rising up on the shops; one after another they jolted through me every morning, a momentary rasp and then silence, followed by another rasp, and another, until all the neighborhood’s unpious were likewise wide awake.

  By eight a.m. the street was a carnival of merchants, circling with their wares and their songs, swooping shouts that entered my head and threatened never to leave. Each street porter had refined his unique call, and often these had evolved to the point where they barely resembled words so much as jingles to be recognized.

  Every neighborhood had a simitçi, who trucked his rings of bread at breakfast time with only a utilitarian cry of “Simit! Simitçim!” But each neighborhood also had its special porters. There was the man who sold socks, çorap, and called “Çoraaaaap! Çoraaaaap! Bayın, bayanın çorabıııııı!” Socks, socks, men’s and women’s socks! There were people who sharpened knives, others who alloyed the inside of copper pots, guys who hauled junk, sometimes specifying a kind of metal or other material that was their stock in trade. Most of them pushed wooden carts piled with their products, and a few came in pickup trucks, parking on a corner and shouting intermittently for ten minutes or so before driving farther on.

  My favorite porter had no cart, and gave a call that I never managed fully to decipher, but I could see what his business was just by looking: over each shoulder rested a bundle of seven or eight brooms and mops; on one side, a bundle of plastic dustpans hung from the broomsticks on a length of twine; in his right hand he carried another mop to which was clipped a plastic pail; and in his left hand he had two rainbow-colored feather dusters with long handles. He was like a department store on feet. Broomstick man, as I came to think of him, did not come daily but perhaps twice a week. While some of the porters depressed me with calls that sounded desperate or heavy with resignation, broomstick man seemed to take joy in his rhythmically complex song, a little number in six-eight time. The only two words I managed to catch after months of listening were silgi, which meant “duster,” and arastak, an obscure word for “roof” or “covering” (I deduced this one because it was similar to the Armenian word for ceiling). In my imagination, broomstick man’s anthem translated to something like this: “I-am-the-broomstick-man-with-brooms-mops-and-dusters-for-your-ceiiiiiiling!”

  But I worried about him because it seemed to me that brooms were not the stuff of brisk business; didn’t everyone already have a broom?

  One day when I heard broomstick man’s call, I got up and went to the window, watching him for a while, wondering whether anybody ever actually popped out on a moment’s notice to buy a cleaning implement. Sure enough, as he passed by a shop that sold mirrors and picture frames, a man appeared in the doorway. Thank goodness! They chatted for a moment and then broomstick man put down his mop-and-bucket set, and from some additional storage place on his body that I could not discern, produced a small squeegee. The shopkeeper took the squeegee, examined it for a moment, handed over some cash, and broomstick man walked on, singing his song.

  A few minutes later, as if in mockery of broomstick man’s complex operation, another merchant strutted down the street carrying nothing but a bundle of garlic bulbs on long, rough stems, like the bouquet of an unwilling bride. “Sarımsakçı geldi sarımsaaaaaak!” The garlic seller has come, garliiiiiic!

  The porters had their seasons. In winter, a man pushed a small serving tray on wheels, holding a coal-fired samovar from which he doled out little plastic cups of sahlep, a hot, creamy drink made from orchid root. Although his song consisted of only one word, “sahlep,” he fashioned it into something extraordinarily expressive, jumping from the first to the second syllable with an interval of an augmented fourth—known in Western music as the devil’s interval because it is so atonal—and then descending in halftones, a lament, as if to say: it’s cold and gray, but at least there’s sahlep.

  Like the passing seasons, my understanding of Turkish, and so of Turkey, moved through phases, cold and warm, fruitful and barren, each tempting me through to another. Every discovery birthed a litter of new mysteries, and before I knew it, the two months I had planned to spend had turned into two years.

  12

  Knowing and Not Knowing

  There was and there was not, two months after Hrant Dink’s death, a development that looked like it could be a real sign of progress in Turkey’s modern history: the completed restoration of a tenth-century Armenian cathedral on Akdamar Island in Lake Van. The project was meant to show that Turkey could embrace its multicultural history. Not a secret or any kind of discreet initiative, this was a major, national event, its most central feature the media blitz surrounding it. Perhaps some of the problems might have seemed inevitable to critics less hopeful than I: the sanctimony, the mix of bombast and evasion, and the Potemkin Village–style parading of the press corps before one renovated church that distracted from the presence of a hundred abandoned ones. But who could have been cynical enough to imagine that this entire pageant of televised ceremonies and statements would end without the word “Armenian” once being uttered by a single Turkish official?

  * * *

  THE SIGHT OF an Armenian church is itself a history lesson. Churches built in the ninth and tenth centuries—years when Armenian religious life flourished in what is now southeastern Turkey—are known for bringing innovation to earlier forms. Often hewn from volcanic tuff rock, pinkish or tan in color, they have an asymmetrical aspect, with arches of differing heights topped by gabled roofs of varying widths, all clustered around the main feature, a straight-sided, sharply pointed dome. The church at Akdamar, Cathedral of the Holy Cross, built in 915 by the Armenian king Gagik I Artsruni, featured all these elements, as w
ell as exterior walls that told biblical stories in elaborate bas-relief. For twenty years it served as the primary seat of the Catholicos, or supreme bishop, of the Armenian Kingdom, and from 1113 to 1895 it functioned as a regional outpost under a succession of bishops.

  Armenians have thousands of churches around the world, and scores in need of restoration, but the one at Akdamar—Akhtamar in Armenian—is special, due in part to a folk legend immortalized by the writer Hovhannes Tumanian in a long, metered poem published in 1891. As the story went, a maiden named Tamar lived on the island in Lake Van. She was madly in love with a young man who lived across the water. Each night, Tamar lit a fire so that her sweetheart could swim across the lake and find her. In Tumanian’s telling, the stars and the waves took to gossiping about the couple’s shamelessness, and soon the locals became angry and extinguished Tamar’s fire. That night, when her suitor swam to find her, he got lost in the dark. He drowned in the waves, calling out for her until the end: “Akh, Tamar, akh, Tamar!” When I was a child, my mother liked to read me Tumanian’s Akhtamar now and then, and each time she reached the climax, she wept as if she had only just learned of the lovers’ fate.

  As it happened, the poem’s themes of longing and helplessness eerily presaged the fortunes of the island in real life. In 1895, one thousand years after King Gagik’s men laid the first stones, the last Catholicos of Akhtamar died, never to be replaced. In the wake of the genocide, the diocese he had governed was gone, too. Thereafter, the cathedral fell into ruin, and its walls were used for target practice by locals and soldiers.

  The state of this church was one of Hrant Dink’s pet issues. A decade before he died, Hrant had made a prediction: if the Turkish government would one day restore the ruined cathedral at Akhtamar, Armenian youth from all over the world would come to lend their energy to the rebuilding effort. It was already a rite of passage for diaspora Armenians to spend a summer during their college years rebuilding churches in the countryside of Armenia. Surely they would also want to help preserve ancient Armenian sites in Turkey, he reasoned.