There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  Next I tried to get an assignment to write about the trip for a magazine, pitching it as a covert mission with a radical Turkish historian and a courageous Armenian newspaperman. Each editor I spoke to had the same response: interesting, but where’s the action?

  “We’re not convinced enough is going to happen,” a Waspy young editor at Harper’s wrote to me, propping the last word up on double asterisks.

  This was difficult for me to understand, since I was expecting that nothing less than a seismic shift in my internal universe would happen.

  Eventually, the editor of a new literary magazine was intrigued enough to ask me for a dispatch. Even if the only funding would come from my American Express card, now I had something that passed for a reason.

  * * *

  “SO I HEAR you’re going to Bolis,” an Armenian acquaintance said to me as I was preparing for the trip. Bolis was the Armenian name for Istanbul, short for Constantinopolis.

  “I’ll start out in Istanbul, but then I’m going to Van,” I replied.

  “Oh,” she said. “You mean you’re going to Western Armenia.”

  “Actually, Van is in Turkey,” I said.

  But she knew that.

  * * *

  IT WAS MIDDAY when I reached my hotel in Istanbul. Müge had recommended the place, an airy, marble-clad little building on the edge of the old city, and I had reserved a budget room—priced lower than all the other rooms, it turned out, due to its window being mere inches from the loudspeaker of the adjoining mosque. I had been up until three a.m. the night before with last-minute preparations, and had stayed awake through the entire overnight flight, so before I did anything else, I put down my bag, took off my shoes, and lay down on the pristine white bedspread. Labile with fatigue and uncertainty, I wept until I fell asleep, then dreamt wildly until I was awoken at dusk by the call to prayer, its volume so deafening that it sent me into a private giggling fit. Behind these manic emotions was the discovery that all these years, nothing but an ordinary airplane ride and a hotel reservation had separated me from seeing Turkey.

  I sat up on my bed—it was the width of a cot and higher than normal, like a doctor’s examining table—and for several minutes tried to decide how to deal with the fact that I had to eat. The restaurants immediately outside the hotel were gaudily desperate for tourists. And although I probably knew less about Turkey at that point than the average backpacker, I had a strong urge to seem like I belonged. Exiting the lobby, I walked into a tiny market across the street, tried to indicate with a forceful turn toward a particular shelf that I knew what I was doing, and in less than ten seconds selected a miniature can of Pringles and a peach yogurt. When the man at the register said something short and incomprehensible, I did not have to speak a word before he held up from under the counter a plastic spoon. I only nodded, relieved, and carried my small white plastic bag back to my room with still more feigned assurance. As if anybody cared what I was doing except me.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, I called Müge on her cell phone to tell her I had arrived, and she surprised me with the news that she had arranged a meeting for me with an old family friend of hers, a man named Nihat Gökyiğit, the founder of one of Turkey’s largest corporations. After building a business empire that had made him very wealthy, he had started an environmental protection fund. He was also a patron of the arts and had created a multicultural music group called the Black Sea Orchestra. Müge knew that I sometimes wrote articles about classical music, so she suggested I interview Nihat Bey about his orchestra. He had attended college in the United States and spoke good English.

  “I think you will find him very interesting,” said Müge.

  I felt awkward arriving at the office of someone I’d never heard of, without any specific purpose, but it seemed rude to refuse Müge’s offer, so I went. Everything I saw in Turkey, after all, I took as data: this is how roads look in Turkey; this is a Turkish breakfast; this is a brand of Turkish soap; this is the upholstery on the seat of a Turkish car. This will be a Turkish millionaire, I told myself, and handed the driver a slip of paper on which the concierge at my hotel (“this is a smiling Turkish woman who deals with tourists”) had written directions.

  Thinking back on that first, naive morning, and the weight of the trust I immediately had to hand over to so many strangers, Turkish strangers, I get a fragile, porous feeling in my chest. I recall the white brightness of the day’s light, the surprisingly modern buildings, the taxi ascending a hill, and the driver’s unspoken understanding that it was up to him, not me, to confer with the security guard and find the appropriate entrance to the large corporate compound where that slip of paper had pointed us.

  * * *

  NIHAT BEY, WHO was nearing eighty, had white hair, a white mustache, and bright blue eyes. We sat in his palatial office, facing each other on velvet armchairs, with a vast, square coffee table between us. An assistant brought in cups of Turkish coffee on a tray, and Nihat Bey told me that his Black Sea Orchestra brought together Iranians and Iraqis, Greeks and Turks, Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azeris.

  “Why should these civilizations, East and West, ever clash?” he said. “They can get together and share their talents! You see that painting?” He pointed to one of the forty or so canvases covering his walls. “I got that at the outdoor market in Yerevan.”

  When Müge told me about Nihat Bey, I had resisted asking her the main question on my mind: had she told him I was Armenian? I was playing it cool; I didn’t want Müge to think she’d brought an amateur along on this expedition, and it seemed unsophisticated to let on that I was still basically afraid of any Turk other than her.

  Now it was clear that she had indeed told Nihat Bey. The painting he indicated was of Mount Ararat, the twin-peaked mountain that Armenians consider their own. Mount Ararat, which Turks call Ağrı, lies on the Turkish side of the border. In Yerevan, it is how the locals assess the weather: on a clear day you can see Ararat; when it’s hazy, you can spy only a bit of the peak. New condos in Yerevan go for a premium if their windows face Ararat.

  I examined the painting. When one looks at the mountain from Armenia, the smaller peak is on the left. From Turkey, the smaller peak is on the right. Nihat Bey’s painting looked from Armenia. This seemed like a good sign, so although I hadn’t expected to talk about politics with Nihat Bey, I suddenly found myself asking: “Do the Armenian and Turkish musicians in your orchestra ever discuss the Armenian issue?”

  He regarded me for a moment.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “I came from the town in Turkey called Artvin, near the Black Sea. About 1921, the Armenians started leaving for Batumi, in Georgia. My grandfather told me that he wanted to buy a store in town from an Armenian. He wanted it for his two sons. So he went to the Armenian and said, ‘I want to buy this store,’ and the Armenian said, ‘Sixty golds.’ My grandfather gave him the money. But later my grandfather thought about it and he said, ‘That was not the proper price for this store.’ It was not enough. Probably the Armenian wanted to be sure that he could sell it because he had to leave anyway. So he went back to the Armenian and said, ‘I have changed my mind. I do not want to buy this store.’ ‘But why?’ the man said. And my grandfather said, ‘You did not ask for enough money. I do not want my two sons to live with this on their hearts. I have brought thirty more golds. If you take this, I will buy. Otherwise the deal is off.’”

  Nihat Bey waited, to let his message sink in, then he asked me, “How could such people make harm to each other? Impossible!”

  “That’s a nice story,” I said, but I was annoyed by it. His grandfather was the hero, and the Armenian guy was a poor schmuck. The fact that the Armenians “had to leave” did not seem to have troubled Nihat Bey’s imagination.

  I tried again. “Did you know all your life that there was this question—this issue about what happened to the Armenians?”

  “In my family it was not an issue,” said Nihat Bey. “We alwa
ys talked about how good the Armenians were.”

  “Really?”

  “All of the woodwork in my house was done by an Armenian. Very talented woodworkers.”

  I nodded appreciatively as he motioned to a finely carved molding along the doorway.

  I would have to be more direct. “Do you believe that the Turkish government is being honest about the information they have?” My English had already taken on a stilted, simplified quality, recalibrating itself to maintain some kind of polite subordination to my host.

  “It is my sincere belief.”

  “So, what do you think is motivating the Armenians who say that it was genocide and ask for recognition?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why do you think they would—”

  Nihat Bey cut me off. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. If they want to be friendly with their neighbors, they shouldn’t bring up old issues and go into every parliament in Europe and the United States and always try to push it. Why? I’m asking the question to you now. Why repeat these sad stories over and over? The Turkish side never makes an issue of this with the Armenians.

  “It’s history,” he went on. “So what do the Armenians want to do? They want the Turkish government to accept that we have done such a terrible thing, and that we are going to pay for it? They will never have that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They will never have that,” he repeated.

  And then he talked about Armenian terrorists and Armenian assassins, and how there are two sides to every story.

  “So you are a bit mixed up now,” Nihat Bey concluded.

  And I was. Nihat Bey’s words weren’t so far off from my own. I had written that the genocide recognition campaigns were hindering diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey. I had started to question the value of repeating the same sad stories over and over. But coming from him, the message sounded very different.

  Nihat Bey had been educated in the finest and most liberal schools in Turkey and in the United States. He was elegant, generous, and unusually well rounded. He had used his tremendous business success to fund initiatives to protect the environment—his ecology foundation had reforested half of Turkey and was the engine behind the country’s new environmental standards. With the orchestras he sponsored, he promoted peace through music. The man had built a sprawling botanical garden on the outskirts of Istanbul, an extraordinary haven for quiet reflection, in memory of his late wife. He had been alive in the world since 1925. He had even been to Armenia. But none of this meant he believed that what had happened was a genocide.

  Did it matter? He was a good person, and he was doing remarkable work. I didn’t enjoy meeting Nihat Bey, and I wouldn’t so much as break the seals on the publicity DVDs he gave me for his various projects. But there was some kind of relief in this meeting—like losing one’s virginity, an experience not pleasant but not as bad as one feared it could be, a first time whose chief virtue was that it was over and that I had survived it.

  * * *

  WHEN I FINALLY met Müge in person, at the airport gate for our flight to Van, she was exactly as I had pictured her during our phone conversations: her easy smile, wavy golden brown hair, bronzed skin, and broad frame made for a powerful physical presence that matched her bold personality.

  Sarkis Bey, on the other hand, was not as I had envisioned him at all. In my imagination he was a gentle old man bent over a cane; a sage who had seen things, who dispensed wisdom with a patient glint in his eye. Instead he was a thickset fellow wearing a Yankees cap (a gift from Müge) over his curly though thinning hair, and a fanny pack stretched over his ample belly. He had a jowly, ruddy complexion, and his default expression was something between grumpy and bored.

  When Müge introduced us, Sarkis Bey nodded, unsmiling, then handed me a package of cookies he had been powering through.

  “Take these,” he said to me in Armenian. “The rest of us don’t need them.”

  Sarkis Bey’s son Vagharshag was also along for the trip. At thirty-five years old, Vagharshag was in training as a deacon at the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul, and he already sported the long, kinky beard of an Orthodox priest. The irony was that I had imagined Sarkis Bey himself as a spiritual figure of some sort; but despite his obsession with the whereabouts of churches throughout the southeast, Sarkis Bey was not among the devout. Later in our trip, when I asked him if he was religious, he did not answer my question directly but said that in Turkey, “atheist” was the worst thing you could call yourself—worse than being Christian or Jewish. He added that he considered a church service to be a wonderful concert. Müge, less circumspect, told me that Sarkis Bey had warned the Armenian Patriarch that if he were to ordain Vagharshag, Sarkis Bey himself would convert to Islam.

  * * *

  AFTER A THREE-HOUR flight to the other end of the country, we would spend the next eight days wandering in and out of abandoned Armenian churches. We drove a span of six hundred miles, through Van, Bitlis, Muş, Elâzığ, Malatya, Süleymanlı, Adana, and Antakya, our chariot a white minivan caked in dust, driven by a shy-mannered local Kurd named Refik. Half-collapsed monasteries and chapels seemed to appear around every mountain pass, and much of our work, under Sarkis Bey’s direction, was simply to find them. Once we found them, our further purpose became vague. We climbed around their broken walls, took a few pictures, and moved on.

  Sarkis Bey was an amateur archaeologist of sorts who for years had been collecting old maps, books, postcards, and photographs to help him track down and identify Armenian sites. In reaction to a massive body of literature produced by the Turkish state to retell centuries of history with no mention of the Armenians, there had arisen a kind of volunteer brigade of enthusiasts working to record evidence of the former Armenian population. Their efforts were not exactly coordinated, but in his office at Agos, Sarkis Bey acted as a one-man clearinghouse. People wrote to him with bits of information—the partial name of a village or an old document in Armenian that they couldn’t read—and he wrote back.

  There was an awkward paradox here. It turned out that finding the Armenian sites did not exactly require detective skills. On the contrary, southeastern Turkey was like a giant, open-air museum. In all the ramshackle towns and remote villages, hints of the Armenian past were there like a thousand elephants in the room. Locals were always willing to point out a nearby Armenian structure—occasionally for a fee—even if they knew little else about its origins. In some villages, salvaged gravestones carved in Armenian script held up the sides of homes, reduced to the function of building materials and ornaments. The stones were frequently mortared into place upside down or sideways, their particular hieroglyphics meaningless and irrelevant to the Muslim villagers who had heaved them into position.

  But at the same time that Armenian ruins were everywhere if you looked for them, sorting out precise names or other details was nearly impossible. Maps and booklets about the region—glossy freebies from the Turkish Ministry of Tourism piled high in every hotel lobby—told of Anatolian relics and Byzantine-era churches without ever using the word “Armenian.” The names of Armenian kingdoms and dynasties were transliterated into Turkish spellings and mentioned with no context, as if they were science fiction galaxies that had never really existed at all: “ASOT III FROM BAGRATS” built the walls at the citadel of Ani, one learned from a sign at the entrance to the ruins near Kars; that would be Ashot the Merciful, king of Armenia during its golden era in the tenth century, who made Ani the capital of the Armenian Bagratuni dynasty.

  The Van Museum, like those upside-down gravestones in village walls, turned history on its head. An airy “Massacre Section” on the second floor contained displays describing how Turks were killed by Armenians. Thus the Armenian genocide became the genocide committed by Armenians against Turks. One exhibit included a lengthy pseudoscientific statement about the contents of various mass graves, detailing how Turkish skull shapes would have differed from Armenian ones (the bon
es in question were said to be Turkish, naturally). The museum gave no indication that any Armenians were ever killed at all.

  Despite a lifetime of the words “Turkish” and “denial” being linked together in the deepest center of my brain, I found the brazenness of all this incredible.

  Adding to the cognitive dissonance was the fact that the entire southeast was populated by Kurds. The hand of the Turkish state was omnipresent, but there were no ethnic Turks anywhere. Everywhere we went, people spoke in Kurdish, while banners, monuments, and texts carved into buildings and hillsides offered reminders in Turkish from the government: How Happy Is He Who Calls Himself a Turk. The Motherland Cannot Be Divided. A Land Is Not a Nation Until Blood Has Spilled There.

  And yet the mood in our car after each day’s discoveries betrayed little of the gravity of what we were taking in. Sarkis Bey told us stories about various sites, and Müge kept up a running commentary on the political significance of everything we saw, but none of us ever so much as said out loud, “This is crazy.” And as the days went on, I worried that the editor in New York who had doubted that anything would “happen” on this trip was right. My seismic shift had yet to take place. In fact, at times I felt that I was simply on a wonderful vacation.

  We sang songs as we drove, pulled peaches from trees that lined the road, cut up a watermelon every afternoon, and every night we sat down to platters of kebab or fresh lahmacun—a savory flatbread my family often bought in batches from the Middle Eastern grocery store under the label “Armenian pizza.”

  The countryside had the kind of beauty that made you wish you could hold back every modern encroachment—the entire Internet, if not the telephone or even the automobile. In every village, gaggles of smiling children surrounded me, bringing me wildflowers or a circle of fresh bread, and it was only in such moments that my nonchalant demeanor failed. The kids’ gap-toothed grins and blameless curiosity left me with a lump in my throat each time we got back in our van. One little girl, an eight-year-old named Ayfer—her name meant “moonlight”—followed me with a gaze of such complex wonder that even Sarkis Bey was moved out of his usual reticence to comment on her old-soul aura. Then again, it was probably just that my uncovered arms and legs made me seem to her like an alien.