Armenians and Other Armenians in Turkey

Hrag Papazian

The Christian Armenian community

The number of Christian Armenian citizens of Turkey today is estimated to be between 60,000 and 70,000. More than 90% of them reside in Istanbul, where they have numerous acting churches, primary and secondary schools, and a few newspapers and periodicals. One of the most important elements in the Armenian Identity of the members of this group seems to be their allegiance to Christianity, mainly through the channel of the Armenian Apostolic Church. In fact, one might even argue that Armenianness is an ethno-religious identity for the members of this group, rather than a purely ethnic one. For many people I met and conversed with, being Armenian automatically implies being Christian. Many use the two terms interchangeably. To the question “Is he a Muslim?”, I’ve heard people answering: “No, he’s Armenian.” Others when being asked about their religion, have answered “I’m Armenian.” Some, but few, didn’t even hesitate to classify Armenianness as a religion, while many others who found that it should be counted as a national or ethnic category, have nevertheless stated that “in our case it’s difficult and even incorrect to separate the two notions from each other”.

Hidden Armenians of Turkey Seek to Reclaim Their Erased Identities

Tim Arango

 

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — For the first 25 years of his life, Armen Demirjian thought he was Kurdish. Then the elders in his village told him his family’s secret: His grandfather was Armenian, a survivor of the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks a century ago.

“I was completely confused,” said Mr. Demirjian, 54. “I was very sad as well. I was raised with the Kurdish culture and history.”

Mr. Demirjian, whose grandfather was sheltered by a Kurdish family as a child, held on to his secret. In recent years, though, as Turkey has allowed minorities to identify themselves more freely, he has embraced in full his family’s truth.

The Islamized Armenians and Us

Raffi Bedrosyan

 



In early November, the Hrant Dink Foundation held a conference on “Islamized Armenians” at the Istanbul Bosphorus University, breaking one more taboo in Turkey. Islamized Armenians were hitherto a hidden reality, a secret known by many, but which couldn’t be revealed to anyone, whispered behind closed doors but filed in government intelligence offices, and it finally broke free into the public.

The late Hrant Dink would have been elated to see this conference become a reality, eight years after the first conference on “Armenians during the late Ottoman Empire era and the 1915 events” was held at Istanbul Bilgi University, when protesters hurled insults at the conference participants and government ministers, labeling them as “traitors stabbing Turks in the back.” That conference had also broken a taboo, but Hrant was already a marked man for revealing the identity of the most famous Islamized Armenian—Sabiha Gokcen, Ataturk’s adopted daughter and the first female Turkish combat pilot, who was an Armenian orphan named Hatun Sebilciyan.

"Bastards of the Infidels"

Eric Nazarian

 



“Bastards,” “infidels,” “remains of the sword” were the derogatory words directed at Armenian survivors of the genocide in Turkey as well as their offspring. Under this same umbrella was another set of “bastards” who were Christian Armenians forcibly or willingly converted to Islam in the wake of the genocide.

This was one of the many topics covered over the course of three eye-opening days at the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Conference on “Islamized Armenians” on the Bogazici University campus in Istanbul. We heard lectures and panels comprised of international scholars presenting a myriad of oral and academic histories about forcibly Islamized Armenians, as well as the histories of the willingly converted that bridge and divide these communities. The conference was a platform for these unofficial minorities, a sort of “People’s History of Islamized Armenians,” to borrow half of Howard Zinn’s title. This percentage of the Turkish population is the resurfacing “remains of the sword.”

Islamized Armenians: Coming to Grips With a New Reality

Hrant Gadarigian

 

Over the centuries, untold numbers of Christian Armenians have converted to Islam. The vast majority have done so under various degrees of pressure and given the exigencies of the time.

While relatively subtle on occasion, the imperative to convert to a religion mostly regarded as the faith of the “enemy” was often clear-cut – convert or perish.

Over the past decade or so, a new sub-grouping of Armenians, either called Islamized of Muslim Armenians, has come to the fore.