Uzay Bulut
Yet another plague has recently shaken Turkey: the purges of academics from Turkish universities. According to the BIA news network, 4,811 academics from 112 universities have been discharged by five statutory decrees declared during the state of emergency. Fifteen universities have been closed.
One of the universities, from which many academics have been
dismissed or even detained by police, is Firat University in the city of
Elazig (Kharpert), which has a long history of persecution of Armenian
students and educators.
According to Matthew Karanian, the author of the 2015 book Historic Armenia After 100 Years,
Kharpert is one of the oldest areas of Armenian habitation. “Some
scholars believe that Kharpert may even be the cradle of the Armenian
nation,” according to Karanian.
The author Robert Aram Kaloosdian, whose father comes from the
village of Tadem in Kharpert, writes about individual stories of the
Armenian villagers of Tadem, which was continuously inhabited by
Armenians since its founding until the early 1920’s. His 2015 book Tadem, My Father’s Village: Extinguished during the 1915 Armenian Genocide also elaborates on the great importance the Armenian community of the village attached to education and learning.
