Iconic Armenian church survives war but not plunder in Turkey

Mahmut Bozarslan

 

In the 1950s, the Turkish state returned the centuries-old Surp Giragos Armenian Church in Diyarbakir to the city’s Armenian community, after having used it as a warehouse for years. Armenian writer Migirdic Margosyan, a native of Diyarbakir, describes how ironsmiths, carpenters, painters and goldsmiths from the city’s “Infidel Quarter” joined hands to “revive that wreck” and reopen it quickly to worship, keen to preserve “the legacy of their ancestors.”

Little could the volunteers have known then that the ordeal involving the largest Armenian church in the Middle East was far from over. By the early 1980s, Surp Giragos was a church without a congregation as Diyarbakir’s Armenians dwindled away. Abandoned to its fate, the church fell into decay. When a new restoration began in 2008, only its walls were standing, with the windows broken, the roof collapsed and the interiors filled with soil.

Turkey and the Road to Genocide

Djene Bajalan

On Sunday, April 24, 1915, Ottoman minister of the interior, Talat Pasha, ordered the arrest and detention of Armenian community leaders residing within the empire. On the first night of the sweep over two hundred individuals were picked up by government forces; as the days wore on the number grew to over two thousand. Talat Pasha’s “decapitation” strike against the Ottoman Armenians was part of a broader and more systematic campaign of genocide directed at the empire’s Armenian community — a campaign which left between 800,000 and 1.5 million dead.
It is not necessary here to re-litigate the question of whether or not the events of 1915 — described in official Turkish sources euphemistically as the “relocations (tehcir)” — constituted genocide. Instead, in remembering the Armenian genocide and, more specifically, the arrests of “Red Sunday,” it becomes possible to situate the policies of Turkey’s present-day leaders towards representatives of the Kurdish movement — in particular, the detention of the leaders of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yuksekdağ, on November 4 — in a broader historical context.
While it would be hyperbolic to claim that the levels of violence currently being directed at Turkey’s Kurdish population today have reached the same magnitude as that directed against the Armenians just over a century ago, undeniable and frightening parallels can nevertheless be drawn.

Pretty Amazing, Again

Garen Yegparian



No doubt you read recently that Abdullah “Apo” Öcalan has called on the Turkish government to recognize the Armenian Genocide. You might not have thought much of it, but here’s why it’s so amazing.

Apo is serving a life sentence in the prison on İmralı island. Flyovers or fishing in the vicinity of the island is prohibited. This is the same island prison in which Billy Hayes, the American whose story became the film “Midnight Express,” was kept. (*)

Ocalan Urges Turkey to Recognize Genocide

Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has penned a letter to the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, calling on the Armenian community to support the demands of Kurds in Turkey.
“The Kurdish people’s fight for freedom and the cure for the Armenian people’s sorrows have overlapped in the fight to [be able to] live in this land as citizens who share the same rights,” Abdullah Öcalan said in the letter, published on January 30.