Nancy Kricorian
Before I leave home, I come up with a title for the Armenian Heritage
Trip to Turkey: Twenty Armenians on a Bus, or The Thirty Handkerchief
Tour. Our guide calls it a pilgrimage, and refers to us as pilgrims, as
though we are on a religious or spiritual quest. What do I hope to find?
Almost one hundred years have passed since my paternal grandmother and
her family were driven from their home in Mersin in 1915, just a few
months into the Ottoman government’s genocidal campaign that resulted in
the deaths and exile of the vast majority of its Armenian citizens. Of
her immediate family, only my grandmother and her brother survived the
death march. They were among eight thousand Armenian orphans in a camp
in the Syrian desert at Ras al-Ain.
***
Everek/Develi
The Saint Toros Church in Everek is now a mosque. There is a fresco
of the Virgin Mary on the wall between the left and central apses near
the altar. When our guide had last visited, there was a moveable plywood
board over the fresco. The painting had been whitewashed many times,
but the portrait of the virgin bled through again and again. Now the
plywood panel is screwed into place so it cannot be moved. The mayor of
the town arrives at the mosque while we are there. He asks if we have
any information about the church because he knows nothing of its
history.
Remnants—that word floats up in my mind as we leave the mosque and
walk towards the home of the last Armenian in Everek, the old Armenian
Quarter of the town of Develi. He died
in 2000 and left the property to his nephew in Istanbul. We peer in
the windows at the dusty rooms of a once-grand house. These buildings
are remnants, and we are remnants, like scraps of fabric from a torn
curtain. We are searching for ghosts, and we ourselves are ghosts come
to haunt this land.
***
Gümüşhacıköy
The last Armenians in this town are an elderly sister and brother
named Hayganoush and Kegham. Their ramshackle wood frame and plaster
house features an inner courtyard that is jammed with logs, pots, broken
furniture, cats, stacks of newspaper, fragments of stone with Armenian
inscriptions, and balled-up plastic bags. Hayganoush says, “My house is a
mess, but my soul is orderly.”
The rest of their family lives in Istanbul and Germany, but they stay
here as guardians of this property: a crumbling house, a jumbled
courtyard, a large walled garden next door with fruit trees, vegetable
beds, chickens, more cats, and piles of matted wool.
Hayganoush and Kegham lead us to the local grade school. Kegham says
it had originally been an Armenian school, and the parking lot next to
it is where the Armenian church once stood. A local official who
disliked Armenians had ordered the demolition of the church. When the
town held the groundbreaking for a mosque to be erected on the same
spot, an earthquake hit and a stone fell on the official and he died. Or
maybe, says Kegham, a lightning bolt hit him; he can’t remember which.
In any event the man was killed, and the mosque was never built.
***
Mersin
My grandmother always said, “We came from near Tarsus. You know Saint
Paul of Tarsus? I was born in Mersin, and your grandfather in Adana.”
She was a devout Armenian Evangelical and this proximity to the
birthplace of Paul the Apostle was a source of pride. It wasn’t until
after my grandmother died, however, that I even bothered to look for
these towns on a map.
As we drive south through the Toros Mountains, we start seeing signs
for Mersin, Tarsus, and Adana. The landscape changes dramatically. There
are pine trees along the roads, which give way to orchards, and then we
begin to see pink oleander and tall thistles. Our guide has warned me
that there are no traces at all in Mersin of the Armenians who once
lived there—everything is gone.
When we arrive in Mersin, we drive to the marina where there are
boats docked and beyond them, the Mediterranean Sea. My grandmother saw
these skies, and walked along this very shore. She loved the flowers in
her New England garden, and how much she must have loved the ones here:
pink and white oleander, lantana, bougainvillea, and red hibiscus.
***
Adana
We go to the old Armenian quarter, where the main market street has
recently undergone a renovation, replacing its rundown charm, still
evident in the side streets, with a gentrified sameness. We walk to the
Great Clock Tower, which was designed in the late 19th
century by two Armenian architects, but is now shrouded for renovation.
Our guide tells us that it was at this tower that Turkish crowds were
incited to murder Armenians during the Adana Massacres of 1909, during
which over 2000 Armenians were killed. My grandfather left for America
in 1911.
None of the Armenian churches and schools of Adana are still
standing. This is another place where we have been erased, a word that
one of the women on the bus keeps using. Erased. Effaced. Rubbed out.
We go to the Stone Bridge, which dates to Roman times, over the
Seyhan River. My grandfather died when I was three, so I have few
memories of him, but I imagine the young man from a faded photo. He is
wearing a charcoal gray suit, and his moustache has just been trimmed.
He strides across the bridge, a folded newspaper under his arm.
***
Mezireh/Elâzığ
One of the men on the bus, Dikran Fabricatorian, tells us his family
story as we drive towards Mezireh, now known by its Turkish name of
Elâzığ. Dikran’s great grandfather, Krikor Ipekjian—ipek means silk in Turkish—founded a textile factory in Mezireh in the 19th
century. The silk produced by Ipekjian was so fine that it attracted
international acclaim, and in recognition of this renown, the Sultan
changed the family name to Fabricatorian.
Krikor Fabricatorian had five sons who took over the company after
his death in 1902, and they expanded its operations to two large
factories. The five brothers built five townhouses side by side. In
1915, the five brothers were shot on the outskirts of town. Their wives
and children were deported. One of the children was Dikran
Fabricatorian’s father.
The townhouses were pulled down and replaced by apartment buildings
in the ’50s, but the name “The Five Brothers” survived. We walk down the
hot, crowded street, all twenty of us following Dikran and our guide,
until we find the signs: the Five Brothers Apartments and the Five
Brothers Passageway. On the ground floor of one of the buildings, we
enter an Internet café, whose owner tells us he was born in one of the
houses. He shows us an old photo of the houses hanging on the wall. He
tells us to go next door to his brother’s pharmacy to see more pictures.
We find there also, hung somewhat incongruously and off center, a brass
chandelier, salvaged from one of the townhouses.
Dikran’s son asks the pharmacist if they might purchase the
chandelier. He replies, “I wouldn’t sell it to you even if you offered
me a million dollars.”
Aghtamar/Akdamar
We begin the morning, which happens to be the first day of Ramadan,
with a ferry ride to Aghtamar Island on Lake Van. It is breezy on the
blue lake, and not too hot on the island. The 10th-century
Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Cross is beautifully preserved, as are
the bas-reliefs on its exterior. Inside the church there are frescoes
depicting the life of Christ, sections of them still in good condition.
The church is now a state museum, and when people in our group start singing the Hayr Mer
prayer, a Turkish guard approaches, saying that singing is forbidden.
We are the sole visitors in the museum, a museum that has a cross on its
roof and an ornate altar. Adi explains that we are singing a universal
song for peace. Then someone starts the Der Voghormia prayer
while the guard motions with his hand to keep the volume down. The
voices rise, and he rakes his thumb across his throat, telling us to
kill the music. The Armenians keep singing. Lord have mercy, Lord
have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, All Holy Trinity, give
peace to the world, and healing to the sick and Heaven to those who are
asleep.
With the music echoing after me, I leave the church to sit outside
behind a tall metal candle stand, weeping. As a very-much lapsed
Armenian Evangelical, I think of religion as a tool of oppression. But
here a prayer has, for a moment, transformed this so-called museum—a
state-controlled space concerned as much with forgetting as
remembering—into the host of something radically incarnate. Here, where
Armenian churches have been razed, ruined, turned into barns, made into
prisons, wedding halls, cultural centers, mosques, and museums, we sing
this prayer as an act of pure resistance: Lord have mercy, Lord have
mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, All Holy Trinity, give peace
to the world, and healing to the sick and Heaven to those who are
asleep.
"Guernica Magazine" (www.guernicamag.com), November 14, 2014
"Azad Alik" (azadalik.wordpress.com), January 4, 2015
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