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

by Meline Toumani

  “Are you kidding?” he snorted. “It was straight propaganda. I think they rather drastically underestimated the intelligence of journalists.”

  What a relief that I could speak openly. He asked if I knew of any thoughtful scholars he could call for an interview, and I started to write down names. As we chatted, some other foreign correspondents gathered around us. They had all sorts of questions—about the church, about Armenian history in Van, about Armenian life in Istanbul, and, naturally, about the genocide. Ever since Hrant’s murder and those chants of “We Are All Armenian” reverberating down the streets of Istanbul, Western journalists in Turkey were eager to report progress on the Armenian issue. I had counted myself among them; and I had hoped that Akhtamar was good news. But now I could barely contain myself as I took the opportunity to correct for any excessive optimism they may have wanted to take away from the day’s infuriating spectacle.

  My impromptu press conference continued as we rode the boat back to the mainland, a coterie of European reporters taking notes as I spoke. I told them that everything was off the record. It had become clear that I was, sure enough, the only American-Armenian who had come to the event. Several Turkish reporters had noticed me over the course of the day and had asked to feature me in their articles, too; a story about the renovation of an Armenian cathedral needed to quote at least one Armenian bystander, after all. But I refused. This wasn’t only to avoid exposure; it was because what I saw and how I felt clashed profoundly with what I had hoped to discover. Things were bad. Actually, things were ridiculous.

  I never regretted going, though. Privately, I still felt angry at the Armenians who refused to attend. Despite the day’s indignities, the renovation and the attention it got in Turkey were an important step—marginally better than silence, if more complicated—and an absolutist position against participating was too easy an answer. In an arena already crowded with boycotts and ultimatums that had possibly only made matters worse, I wanted to test the full potential of engagement, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

  That night, I wrote a note in my journal, a note I had no intention of sending, to Harut Sassounian, the writer who warned that any Armenian who went to Akhtamar would be a traitor.

  Mr. Sassounian, if you keep lengthening your list of conditions that must be met before you will set foot on Turkish soil, then you are guaranteeing yourself it will never happen—not in your lifetime and probably not in your grandchildren’s lifetimes. You don’t know what you would do, Mr. S., if that day came, because the anger and pain and negativity in your heart is so frozen, so hardened, that no amount of Anatolian sun, the same sun that scorched your ancestors, could melt it away. How could you set foot on this land now, Mr. S.? Your blood would boil even as you bathed in the cool waters of Lake Van. You wouldn’t be able to taste the delicious food and enjoy it. And when a little rag-clad, emerald-eyed girl with a space in her teeth grinned up at you and waved as your car rambled past her village, you would need to look away instead of waving back. So what would be the point?

  The Akhtamar renovation planted a small seed of possibility—if not in the hearts of most Armenians, then in the logic centers of some Turkish minds, those self-governing reaches of the brain where an unbidden thought might occasionally flicker: Well, if they had been here, and they had this, then where did they go, and why would they leave? In fact, I started to notice, gradually, that some Turks put forward such a line of reasoning when they wanted to say something, but did not want to risk saying too much—to say, simply, something doesn’t add up.

  Other Armenian ruins had been converted into horse stables, restaurants, carpet-weaving factories, and trash dumps. In the town of Gaziantep—Armenian Aintab—I once spent a couple of nights in an extraordinary boutique hotel built from the long-abandoned mansion of a wealthy Armenian family. Since the hotel did not advertise this fact, I was acting on a hunch, and had searched its walls for clues until I found, over a doorway, a keystone carved with the faint but unmistakable Armenian letter “eh,” which is the sign Armenians use for God—a symbolic abbreviation of the phrase “He is.” Akhtamar, a much larger memorial, bore a similar message: they were.

  Or did I have it all backward, then? Turkey already had an abundance of visible evidence of a vanished Armenian population. The rules of “don’t ask, don’t tell” swallowed it all. Maybe Akhtamar was not progress but just an expensive version of more of the same. Maybe this was even worse than silence, an even more insidious form of denial, because of the way an open secret that has been normalized is then frozen in time.

  To deny the truth about a historical event, like a genocide, requires building a raft of justifications, weaving together ideas about the distant acts of unseen players, balancing each component just so, in order that the raft may float under the right conditions. This kind of denial flourishes in books and conversations, in government rhetoric. But such denial has a corollary that is more perplexing—less like statecraft and more like witchcraft, less like euphemism and more like hallucination; the ability to ignore things—tangible objects, even—that are right in front of your eyes. You look at a tree and call it a school bus.

  Long after the restoration ceremony had passed, whenever I found myself debating with a Turk about whether Armenians in Turkey faced discrimination, I came back to Akhtamar to make my point; how was it that throughout the entire, exaggerated proceeding, years in the making, officials had been unable to say that the church was Armenian?

  “But everyone knows it’s Armenian!” they would always reply.

  Exactly.

  13

  How to Be a Turk

  My friend Ramazan took out a pen and grabbed a napkin. He scrawled a map of Turkey on it, drew a large X at each corner, then slid the napkin across the café table toward me.

  “The first thing we learn in school is that we are surrounded by enemies,” he said.

  Ramazan was a photographer for a major Turkish newspaper. He had developed a niche for himself traveling to neighboring countries to photograph ethnic conflicts. A pious Muslim, he had a soft spot for religious minorities, such as the Turks living in the Balkans, but he was also broad-minded enough that he had gone to Nagorno-Karabakh and Yerevan to photograph Armenians.

  Ramazan didn’t exactly look the part of the swashbuckling photojournalist: he was clean-shaven, petite, and as prim and polite as a suitor meeting the family at an old-fashioned courtship visit. His features were strongly Asian; thus alongside his swarthier compatriots, he looked particularly streamlined and compact. And if there were an ideological father for Ramazan’s work and worldview, it was neither Atatürk nor Attila, but someone closer to Mr. Rogers: he hoped that if he could frame the picture just so, we could all get along and the world would be a better place.

  On this level we understood each other; we had met because of his interest in Armenia, and by disposition we were equally unsuited to conflict. On another level, we didn’t understand each other all that well; he didn’t speak English. He was one of several friends with whom I spoke only Turkish. This limitation kept our interactions cushioned by a haze of intuition and goodwill; it infused our relationship with patience. Patience was essential because over time it became clear that we disagreed about many things. I’m convinced that if his English had been better or my Turkish more complete, the full force of expression would have made our friendship impossible.

  Our ongoing but always well-mannered argument revolved around the fact that Ramazan wanted badly for me to believe that Turks did not hate Armenians, and I wanted just as badly for him to see that he was wrong. I should confess that by the time we became friends I had been in Turkey long enough that I was doing the very opposite of what I set out to do: not listening but trying to persuade. In a Socratic style, I prodded Ramazan with questions that I hoped would make him change his mind.

  The question that occasioned his napkin lesson had to do with a popular saying: “Türk’ün Türk’ten başka dostu yoktur.” The only friend
of a Turk is a Turk. What’s that about? I wanted to know. Doesn’t it seem a bit extreme?

  Yes, he admitted. But Turkey’s history was a history of betrayals and disappointments. And to understand anything about how Turks viewed 1915, he said, you had to understand this larger story. It went something like this:

  Turkish schoolchildren learned that Armenians had lived comfortably alongside Turks throughout the Ottoman Era, because the sultan was generous enough to tolerate them, allowing them the official status “millet-i sadıka”—loyal minority. This was seen as something the Armenians should have been grateful for. Loyalty was the main issue, and the Armenians’ downfall was that they were not loyal, you see. In the years leading up to World War I, they became traitors.

  In this story, no mention was made of a host of complexities that shaped the Armenians’ status in Ottoman society: that they were officially deprived of equal rights for much of Ottoman history; that although a wealthy Armenian merchant class inspired envy and suspicion in popular accounts, the majority of Ottoman Armenians were peasants; that they were denied the right to bear arms until late in the nineteenth century; that their testimony in court was unequal to that of a Muslim; that they were charged dramatically higher taxes than Muslims; and that they had to wear different clothes to identify themselves. That this might have made some of them a little touchy.

  In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire was losing vast amounts of territory; by the end of the Balkan War of 1912–1913, it had lost 80 percent of its European land, which was about 16 percent of the total empire. That land had been under Ottoman control for five hundred years. The way Turkish children learned it, in the midst of this tragic dissolution culminating in the First World War, just when the Ottoman Empire needed the loyalty of its subjects the most, Armenians began to form armed bands who terrorized their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors.

  The theme of loyalty cannot be overstated: beginning in 2003, the Ministry of Education called for all schools to hold student essay contests on why the Armenians were traitors, why genocide claims were baseless, and why Turkey needed to secure itself against minority claims to preserve its unity as a nation. Teachers were sent to special conferences where they rehearsed talking points on the matter. These were merely refinements to the existing curriculum. In the lessons students learned, Turkey was always under attack, always in danger of being dissolved.

  This belief is so strong that scholars have given it a name: Sèvres syndrome, after the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. This treaty, a peace agreement between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies after World War I, would have given large sections of what is now Turkey to Armenia and Greece, and would have granted France, Italy, and Great Britain significant influence over various zones of the formerly Ottoman lands. It was a raw deal for Turks, and could explain their modern-day paranoia about dismemberment, but for one detail: the treaty was never implemented. It was a disaster averted—a ghost treaty, a shadow self for a Turkey whose insecurities never quite healed.

  The treaty was annulled in the course of the four-year Turkish War of Independence, in which General Mustafa Kemal brought his nation a decisive victory, kicking out the European occupiers and putting Turks back in charge. Sèvres was replaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, as well as smaller treaties such as the Treaty of Kars, which confirmed the border with Soviet Armenia, and the stakes were shifted completely—in Turkey’s favor. Turkey remained large and intact, and Armenians and Greeks, along with Jews, got the consolation prize of official minority status, a dismal rehashing of what they had had all along. The nation moved forward. Mustafa Kemal became “Atatürk,” and led the way to modernity, and the new Turkey was soon the bearer of every cliché about being a bridge between East and West.

  But the ghost of Sèvres haunted the country still, and no element of that dead treaty’s promises caused more paranoia than the Armenians, who had not gone quietly into the night, but instead popped up again and again, in the halls of governments the world over where they sought to blame Turkey for a so-called genocide, and in a decade-long spate of terror in which they gunned down Turkish diplomats everywhere they could find them, from Los Angeles to Geneva to right there at home, in the Ankara airport (where civilians were murdered, too).

  Until the law was relaxed in 2012, Turkish high school students were required to take a course on national security—a course taught by military officers and enlivened by standing in rank and saluting. Its main themes were Atatürk’s accomplishments, the importance of national unity, and the internal and external threats facing Turkey. Indeed, in every subject, from history to literature to music to science, there are reminders that the state is to be protected and the individual’s main purpose is to help uphold its integrity.

  A social studies textbook for fifth graders tells them: “The principle of nationalism serves to keep our nation in full unity against external hazards.… Certain neighboring countries are attempting to obstruct this aspiration of the Turkish society to develop and modernize rapidly. These countries are striving to expand their lands and to achieve dominance in the seas. Under these circumstances our duty is to eliminate all subversive and divisive threats directed to our country.”

  A high school linguistics textbook uses as an example the phrase, “It is worth sacrificing our life for the motherland.”

  In a science class, a lesson on preventing soil erosion reads: “The purpose of erosion prevention is to know that the soil is the most important element of our motherland.… This is a fight that will be carried out by courageous, militant citizens who love their soil, nature and homeland.”

  As for Armenians, when they are mentioned in schoolbooks at all, they are portrayed as in this high school geography text: “Actually Armenians were neither innocent nor loyal to the state. Their activities concerning the state in which they lived after the end of the nineteenth century were beyond all tolerance, fully treacherous and hostile.”

  Thus it was important to understand that even if some of Turkey’s positions on what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 sounded patently false, if not absurd, to the rest of the world, in Turkey these arguments had real power. They were planted in a field that was already well tilled with suspicion and fear.

  And on a good day, I felt sympathetic. Yes, I was Armenian, but I was also American, and my decisions were generally not caught up in a web of distrust and defensiveness. I did not take it personally if somebody said that America still had not paid its debt to African-Americans for the horror of slavery, and I was perfectly willing to assume that whatever we had done to the Native Americans was probably a genocide, too, even if I knew rather little about it.

  I had the luxury of relative security, if not existential—no nation could guarantee that—then at least geopolitical. And my conscience seemed to function rather independently of anything George W. Bush had stirred up or, for that matter, anything George Washington might have said or done. In short: L’état, ce n’est pas moi.

  * * *

  I am of Armenian origin but I have no information about this topic. How can I learn about my religion, especially how to practice it? I am at a crossroads. I am looking for someone to guide me.

  A young man, barely twenty-one years old, posted this query, in Turkish, in the comments section of a Bolsahay community Web site. This young man had been raised as a Kurd, in the western city of Bursa. As a teenager he had moved with his family to the opposite side of the country, Diyarbakır, where his parents were originally from. Lacking the temperament for university, he found work at the utility company. For his job, he drove to tiny villages all over the Diyarbakır region to read electricity meters. As he worked, he liked to spend time with the elders in the villages, asking them questions and listening to their stories. Little by little, he started to realize that many of the people he spoke with mentioned having Armenian roots. He also sensed they were uncomfortable talking about it.

  One day the young man told his father about his discovery and asked him what had ha
ppened to all the Armenians who used to live in the area.

  “If only you could look into your own grandfather’s eyes,” his father said.

  That was the first time he heard an acknowledgment of what he’d begun to suspect, even to hope: that he, too, had Armenian ancestors.

  His grandfather was no longer alive, and his parents didn’t have any details to offer, but they did not stifle his curiosity. His father had taken a turn as a leftist and understood his son’s burgeoning sense of commitment to a larger cause. His mother was glad to see him enjoying his work, and encouraged him to learn what he could, as long as he didn’t get himself in trouble. They had seldom seen their boy take such an interest in anything.

  There were ruined Armenian churches all over the Diyarbakır region. One of these, the shell of a cathedral that had lost its roof, had intact stairways, mysterious carvings, and even a blue-tiled baptismal bath molded into a wall. The young man began spending time at the ruined church. Soon he was acting as a caretaker of sorts, self-appointed, keeping the grounds tidy and chatting with tourists who found their way to the captivating site. Eventually, he met an Armenian priest who hailed from his grandparents’ village and now worked at the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul.

  With the priest’s guidance, he moved to Istanbul and undertook the steps required for conversion to the Armenian Apostolic Church. For three months, he had daily lessons. He also helped out at the Patriarchate, answering phones and receiving visitors. When people asked where he was from, he liked to tell them Dikranagerd—the old Armenian name for Diyarbakır. Upon his baptism, he accepted a new name for himself, an Armenian religious name. For the purposes of our story I will call him Krikor, Armenian for Gregory.