Erin Banco
YEMIŞLIK, Turkey -- The mosque in the center of this
village in eastern Turkey looks new compared to the buildings around it.
Sporting a fresh coat of green paint, it overlooks a group of crumbling
houses, most of them abandoned, made of stones, sticks and steel
sheets. There is virtually no trace of the once-famous village that
Armenians view as one of the holiest places on earth.
Thousands
of Armenians this week will travel to Turkey, including the picturesque
Lake Van region where many Turkish Armenians lived before 1915, to
visit some of these sites in their ancestral homeland to commemorate the
100th anniversary of the genocide, when 1.5 million people were
systematically killed by Ottoman government forces. Today the Turkish
government still denies the genocide -- sometimes referred to as the
Armenian Holocaust -- even happened, a denial mirrored here.
In the 1950s, Turkish police forces demolished what was
left of Narek. Since then, the Turkish government has removed all the
stones of the old monastery and built a mosque in its place. The
demolition and subsequent restoration are representative of a wider
phenomenon occurring in eastern Turkey: the altering and erasing of
Armenian antiquities.
“For centuries [Narek] was a place people imagined and
thought about going to, and was a place of national pilgrimage until the
beginning of the 20th century,” said James Russell, a professor of
Armenian studies at Harvard University. When he visited here in 1997,
Russell recounted, the last stones of the monastery had been taken by
the police “to destroy all evidence that Armenians had been there.”
The village is rarely visited or even spoken about in
Turkey; its name was changed in the 1990s to the Turkish Yemişlik.
Nothing about it is Armenian anymore. Traveling through this region, one
meets no Armenians. The 70,000 Armenians still living in Turkey are
concentrated almost entirely in Istanbul. For most people who pass by
this cluster of houses on a hillside, it’s just one of the many Turkish
mountain villages on the coast of Lake Van.
Although there are no Armenians left in this area, the
Kurdish residents of the village, some of whom moved here decades ago,
say they know what happened to the monastery.
“This is the place of the monastery, but it is not here
anymore. The government built us a mosque,” a Kurdish woman in the
village said, pointing to the center of town, where the mosque sits.
To be sure, the Turkish government has restored some of the
Armenian antiquities and religious artifacts in this area, but its
restoration policy is scant, at best. The Ministry of Culture and
Tourism has taken on several restoration projects of Armenian
antiquities, but those sites are rarely promoted and are open only for
tours, not for use. On the ministry’s website, Van is not listed under
destinations to visit in Turkey. There is one section on the website
that highlights the Van museum, but it describes the Armenian section of
the museum as dedicated to the “Armenian massacres” -- those carried
out by Armenians on Turks.
The Armenian Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island,
visible from the Narek mosque, is one of the main restoration projects
undertaken by the government, which does promote it as a tourist
destination. But there’s no mistaking the message: A seven-story-high
pole with the Turkish flag sits on the point of the island. On the
mountain range that surrounds the lake, a giant Turkish flag is carved
into the green hills.
Armenian religious sites dot the landscape, holding a
mythical significance for a people that describes itself as the world’s
oldest officially Christian nation.
This was the birthplace of St. Gregory of Narek, who wrote a
book of 95 psalms, also known as the Book of Lamentations or the Book
of Narek. Historians say that many Armenians keep the book in their
homes.
“St. Gregory of Narek, in Armenian legend, could fly or
travel underwater from his village to Akdamar Island and to little
islands in Lake Van,” Russell said. “It's the locus of what I would say
is the imagination of the culture.”
Of the dozens of Armenian antiquities around Lake Van, some
have been destroyed, others are barely standing, and just one or two
have been restored, Russell said.
One of the places in near-ruins is Varakavank, also called
Yukarı Bakraçlı in Turkish, the site of the “Seven Churches,” an
Armenian monastery built in the 11th century that was once the seat of
the archbishop of the Armenian Church in Van. The roads leading to the
church, at the top of Mount Erek, are not paved completely. There are no
signs pointing to the monastery, which was sacked by the Turkish army
during the genocide in the spring of 1915. To find the church one has to
ask local villagers, who today are Kurds.
The church is crumbling from the roof and the sides.
Branches from nearby trees hold some of the stones together. It was also
damaged during the Van earthquake in 2011. Inside, paintings of the
apostles are fading on stone pillars.
Local tourist guides say the Turkish government is considering renovating the church, but the discussions are ongoing.
There are dozens of Armenian antiquities that activists say
should be restored. Over the last five years teams of experts have
traveled through the Lake Van area to try and document all of the
remaining Armenian sites. But for those that have been through what the
government calls “restoration,” including the village of Narek, there is
no way to bring them back to their former Armenian self. They have been
altered to represent the Turkish identity.
The restoration process is "taking away the memory of
Armenians,” said Ara Sarafian of the Gomidas Institute, an Armenian
research organization based in London. “What you see is what the state
wants you to see. Not one of the ancient sites has a sign that says they
are Armenian. The word Armenian does not exist there.”
"International Business Times" (www.ibt.com), April 21, 2015
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