Identity Crisis: Journalist Explores the Roots of Hamshen Armenians

Gayane Mkrtchyan

 

“Who were they? Were they actually Armenian? Did they look like us? Were they different, very different? What an exotic thing – people who are Muslim, but speak Armenian,” these were the questions and thoughts that prompted journalist Vahan Ishkhanyan to search for answers in the land of disputed identity and present it all in his lengthy new commentary about Hamshen Armenians.

Ishkhanyan’s grandfather was from Hamshen, as the reporter learned when Hamshen expert Hovan Simonian took a gene sample from Ishkhanyan for his Armenian gene project.

Losing the Core

Historian Hovann Simonian, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, has written a thought-provoking article in the July 26 issue of Hetq Online (http://www.hetq.am/), the publication of the Investigative Journalists of Armenia. Simonian argues that the fashionable topic of Turkified, Kurdified, and Islamicized Armenians deals around a few thousand people who may want or may not want to reintegrate into the fold of the Armenian nation. Meantime, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are on the verge of being lost, because of both diasporan processes and exodus from Armenia over the past two decades. The core of the Armenian is on danger (the demographic decline of Armenia, including Mountainous Gharabagh, is a case in point), while we play around third- or fourth-generation citizens of Turkey, for instance, who have started to realize that they have some kind of Armenian ancestry forcefully imposed on their identity after 1915. The challenge needs strategic thought at the level of leadership. Some passages from Simonian's essay are excerpted below: