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.

Diyarbakir's Christians suffer in margins of Turkey-PKK war

Amberin Zaman

 

The peal of church bells mingles with children’s laughter. The Muslim call to prayer floats through the air. In the cobbled courtyard of the Surp Giragos Armenian Orthodox Church, young lovers sip wine and plan their weddings and lives. It’s a typical day in Sur, the ancient heart of the Kurds’ unofficial capital, Diyarbakir.
So it was until armed teenagers with the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the urban youth branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), declared “self rule” over large swathes of Sur, erecting barricades and digging trenches to keep state authorities out. The pattern is being repeated in towns and cities across the Kurdish-majority southeast, part of the escalating war between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK that was reignited following the collapse of a two-year cease-fire in July. Over 150 civilians, including dozens of children, have been killed, most of them by the security forces, claim rights advocates.
In Sur, Turkish special forces teams backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and armored personnel carriers have laid virtual siege to the district, which now lies in ruins.

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.

A Century of Silence

Raffi Khatchadourian

I. RESURRECTION

When I try to imagine my grandfather, the face that appears to me is a variation of a pencil drawing that hangs in my parents’ house. The drawing captures the earliest image of him that we have in our family. He appears to be in his thirties, and he stares down from the wall with a serious countenance, a sharply groomed mustache, a tall, stiff collar, a tie pin. He seems like a self-possessed man, with an air of formality: a formidable person.

I never had the chance to meet him. I was born in the nineteen-seventies, on Long Island, and he was born in the eighteen-eighties, in the Ottoman Empire, near the Euphrates River. He died in 1959—the year that the first spacecraft reached the moon, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, and Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” though I suspect he would have known nothing of those things. What he knew was privation, mass violence, famine, deportation—and how to survive, even flourish, amid such circumstances.

The Armenian Obsession with Churches

Raffi Bedrossyan

 



When someone visits Armenia for the first time, the tour itinerary invariably includes a multitude of churches and monasteries. Modern Armenia is the land of churches.

Historic Armenia in Anatolia was also a land of churches, with nearly 4000 churches and monasteries. The Van Lake region alone had over 300 churches. The ancient City of Ani, dubbed the City of 1001 Churches, contained 40 churches.

We are proud of our churches, awed at their architectural beauty and intricate construction techniques, amazed at their settings perched on inaccessible mountaintops.

Seventeen Properties Returned to Armenians in Diyarbakir

The Diyarbakir Regional Directorate of Foundations has decided to return seventeen properties in Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir to the Armenian community as a result of an initiative launched over the past year by the Diyarbakir Surp Giragos Armenian Church Foundation.

The Sabah daily reported on Monday, July 15, that during a restoration project for the historic Surp Giragos Armenian Church in 2009, the Diyarbakir Surp Giragos Armenian Church Foundation discovered a document listing the properties owned by Armenians before they left Diyarbakir between 1910 and 1921. The document reportedly lists 190 properties in twenty neighborhoods. After the discovery of the document, the foundation filed a petition with the Diyarbakir Regional Directorate of Foundations demanding the return of these properties after it found the current real estate listings of the properties.