Ayla Jean Yackley
Turkey’s sole remaining Armenian
village endured an onslaught by the Ottoman army a century ago and a
rebirth in a staunchly nationalist republic. Today, the inhabitants of
Vakifli battle far different pressures that threaten the community’s
survival.
Set atop a remote hill in Turkey’s Hatay province,
Vakifli has seen its population dwindle in recent decades as younger
generations depart to pursue employment, education or marriage
elsewhere. The village, about 13 miles from the Syrian border, also has
weathered the fallout from the seven-year conflict there.
These earthly concerns are put aside for three days
each August when more than 1,000 pilgrims and tourists descend on
Vakifli to mark the Christian holiday of Asdvadzadzin,
or the Assumption of Mary, and the blessing of the grapes, an ancient
rite that celebrates the first fruit of the harvest. This year,
Archbishop Aram Atesyan of Istanbul presided over the mass and
sanctified the feast on August 12.
The event also pays homage to the six other
Armenian villages that once occupied the slopes of Mount Moses, or Musa
Dagh in Turkish, which stands north of Vakifli. The night before the
mass, villagers light fires beneath seven cauldrons to prepare harissa, a
stew of beef, wheat and salt that evokes the provisions their forebears
survived on during exile to the mountaintop to escape the Armenian genocide in 1915.
The extraordinary story of the Musa Dagh
resistance, and Vakifli’s perseverance a century later, are rare
examples of survival among Turkey's Armenians. Subject to massacres
during World War I in which up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed,
Armenians have mostly disappeared from the lands in Turkey they occupied
for millennia. Scholarly consensus holds that the killings amounted to a
genocide, a judgment the Turkish government continues to reject.
For the descendants of the Musa Dagh rebels,
honoring their memory each year represents their own form of resistance
against the inexorable forces of demographic change.
“We grew up with these stories,” said Garo Bebek,
22, who spent the night during this year’s Asdvadzadzin festival
stirring the cauldrons with a group of friends and relatives. “We are
the last of the youth here, and if we go, we know that soon there may be
nothing left.” Bebek’s great-grandfather was a small child when his
family and 5,000 others scaled Mount Moses in the summer of 1915. News
of attacks on Armenians elsewhere in Turkey had already reached the
villages when they received the government’s deportation order. Rather
than submit to the long march to the Syrian desert and near-certain
death, about 150 armed men fended off 4,000 or more Turkish troops for
53 days until their evacuation to Egypt on Allied battleships.
Their saga was memorialized in Austrian novelist Franz Werfel’s 1933 “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” The book
also served as a forewarning of the menace that would soon befall
European Jews, who passed around copies of the novel in the ghettos of
Poland and Lithuania during the Holocaust. Over the decades, Turkish
officials have “argued that [Armenians] rebelled and they did what was
necessary,” said Yektan Turkyilmaz, a visiting fellow at the Friedrich
Meinecke Institut at Freie Universitat in Berlin, who studies the period
leading up to the genocide. “What Musa Dagh shows us […] is Armenians
were killed not because they resisted, but because they succumbed. In
most areas, there was no resistance, and that’s where we have
catastrophe.”
These days, there are few hints of those past
horrors in idyllic Vakifli, a collection of stone houses nestled among
poplars, Judas trees and olive groves, the scent of laurel infusing the
air. A converted silk factory houses the town’s only church. Turkish
authorities shut the Armenian school, where children once learned their
endangered local dialect, eight decades ago.
Elderly denizens gather at the former school’s
courtyard or a cafe down the road for a chat or game of backgammon.
Below the town is a hilly blanket of green that gradually gives way to
the Mediterranean Sea.
Vakifli’s 130 residents farm 50 acres of land,
raising citrus fruits, walnuts, and honey. Women jar fruit and sell
homemade jams and pomegranate syrup to tourists who flock here for the
cool breeze in summer – and a window into Turkey’s multicultural past.
Hatay, which sticks out like a thumb along Turkey’s
eastern Mediterranean coast, escaped much of the forced assimilation
during the early years of Turkey's republic and remains unusually
diverse, home to various denominations of Christians, a small Jewish
community and Alawites, Alevis and Sunni Muslims.
After the war, Armenians returned to the province, which was then part of the French Mandate for Syria. A controversial 1939 referendum
ceded the land to Turkish control, prompting most of the area’s 10,000
Armenians to leave for Lebanon and Cyprus, Turkyilmaz said. “All that is
left that has remained wholly Armenian is Vakifli,” he said.
Only 20 or so of the villagers are under the age of
25, and whether they will make their lives here “is the question on
everyone’s mind. Our elders implore us to stay,” said Levon Capar, 20,
who studies computer science at a university an hour’s drive away. “If I
stay, the most I can do is tend to my father’s gardens, and it’s
impossible to survive on that. After I finish school, I will go wherever
I find work.”
Vakifli celebrated just one wedding this year, and
the bride moved to her husband’s home in the nearby city of Mersin, said
Berc Kartun, 55, the village's mukhtar, or leader. “It is hard to get
married and start a family here. Most everyone is related.”
Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city with an estimated
15 million people, is home to about 1,000 Vakifli natives, among a total
population of 60,000 Armenians. Others have moved to Europe, Canada and the United States.
“In Istanbul, people from our village take a
second, Turkish name to do business. Here we have one name. We don’t
hide. Different cultures live side by side here,” Kartun said.
That coexistence is now endangered by a new threat:
Syria’s sectarian war. Hatay has sheltered hundreds of thousands of
refugees and was forced to close its border to trade with Syria. Earlier
in the conflict, borderlands were reportedly used as a staging ground
for Salafist fighters.
In years past, Armenians from Syria and Lebanon
with roots in Hatay took buses back every year to celebrate the
Asdvadzadzin feast, but the trip is no longer possible. Kartun said the
conflict had set back his region’s economy “by a decade,” as other
tourists feared traveling to Vakifli and nearby historic sites. The
village’s farming cooperative struggles under debt and cannot turn a
profit, he said.
“Earlier in the war, we would listen to the sounds
of Russian artillery fired from the sea, and sometimes the walls of our
houses would shake,” he said. “For two or three years, no one came to
the festival, afraid fighting would spread here.”
The war hit even closer to home in the spring of
2014, when a few dozen elderly Armenians from the Syrian town of Kessab,
13 miles to the south, fled opposition fighters
who had captured their town from government forces. Most were
eventually evacuated to Lebanon, though one man died 20 days after
reaching Vakifli, Kartun said. He is buried in the town cemetery.
In recent years, Turkish soldiers patrol roads to
the village to prevent any violence during the festival. “They want to
ensure that not even the smallest incident happens in a village like
this again,” Kartun said.
Behind the soldiers looms Mount Moses, where a
monument, in the shape of the ship that rescued the Armenians, stood
before soldiers dynamited it in the 1980s following a military coup. The graves of 18 fighters who perished defending Musa Dagh were also destroyed.
Now the village plans to open a museum with artifacts the villagers have kept from the century-old battle.
After the 1980 coup, Kartun’s family burned the
only photograph of his grandfather on the mountain, fearful its
discovery by the authorities would incur retribution. “He was just 18 or
19 years old, a soldier with his first whiskers,” he said. “If I still
had it, it would have gone in the museum. There’s nothing to be done,
it’s lost. That’s kismet.”
"Eurasianet" (eurasianet.org), August 30, 2018
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