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

by Meline Toumani

  Instead of a seismic shift, I was undergoing a kind of exposure therapy. In the same way that people who are afraid of flying might be led by a skilled therapist onto a grounded airplane, sitting back in its quiet seats for several minutes, walking up and down its empty aisles to get comfortable with the environment before taking an actual flight, I was developing the beginnings of a sense of comfort with Turkey. Simply being there in the country’s most forgotten reaches, under that sky and sun, eating the food, hearing the music, had a normalizing effect.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, WE set out to visit Çarpanak Island, a distant spot on Lake Van where an obscure church was said to stand. At the dock, a group of men and boys turned up to help us. The oldest, a reserved, white-haired fellow, I assumed to be some kind of boat-hand, but I found out a few hours later—when we were sitting around his dining table—that he was a member of the Turkish parliament representing the Van region. This is how my days went: I scrambled after Müge and Sarkis Bey, trying to understand what was going on, but sometimes—too often—I understood wrong. The parliamentarian was ethnically Kurdish, like everyone else in the area, and I was told his family controlled much of the region in one way or another.

  After a leisurely glide across the water in a rusty motorboat, we reached Çarpanak, and I found myself talking to the parliamentarian’s twenty-eight-year-old nephew, Renas, who told me he had learned English while studying in Ankara. Tall and thin with pale skin and hair the same almost-black shade as mine, he could have passed for my twin brother. It was a relief to speak to a local person in English, but I had the uneasy feeling that our afternoon-long acquaintance was going to make too great an impression on Renas. In the course of several days, I had not seen one woman out in public. We had encountered them only when we were invited into village homes or yards, and then they were draped in layer upon layer of skirts, often over loose pants, further covered up by aprons or long tunics and vests. The closest we came to seeing an actual female in town was when we found a garish white wedding dress for sale at a convenience store, hanging from the rafter of the shop’s porch, in the open air, like a headless bride.

  Renas led me through the abandoned church. It was dark inside, but streaks of light sliced through from cracks and windows to reveal that the dirt floor was covered with hundreds of dead birds. The island was nicknamed “Bird Paradise,” Renas said, chuckling, as we inched around rotting seagull carcasses. Apparently bird-watchers took boats to the island now and then, but the church itself, an impressive structure from the tenth century, was completely deserted.

  As we emerged from the cool interior to the sun outside, my chat with Renas was interrupted by a shout from Müge, who stood on the sand.

  “Meline, I’m going for a swim! Come in!”

  It had been over one hundred degrees every day, and everything from my toes to my eyelashes was powdered in dust. A swim sounded wonderful. Lake Van, ringed by volcanoes and said to have medicinal waters rich in saline, was as dazzling as any Armenian patriot might have hoped; the lake was mythologized in Armenian literature, and one of its islands, Akdamar, had briefly been a seat of the Armenian kingdom. Of all the things we saw in Turkey, Lake Van was the one sight that impressed me in the way it was supposed to, made me want to be able to say that I had been there and felt its waters on my skin. Hoping we’d get our chance, Müge and I had put on our swimsuits that morning under our clothes.

  At the same moment that Müge announced her intention to take a dip, Renas asked me if I was married. I almost said yes, but it seemed like bad karma to lie, so I shook my head no while I watched Müge pull her long sundress over her head, revealing her swimsuit, and jump into the water.

  With the sound of the splash, the men on the dock turned their heads and stopped their conversations.

  “You like swim?” Renas ventured, grinning.

  Swim? I was frozen, stunned by the boldness with which Müge had bared her limbs in front of a group of provincial Muslim Kurds. It was her country, so I could only assume that she knew what she was doing. But I suddenly saw that there was no way I could follow her lead. I could not bring myself to step out in a bikini in front of a group of men who might have only ever seen that much skin on the Internet. No way, I could not do it. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I imagined swimming in Lake Van.

  Müge called out again, “Meline! It’s amazing in here! You have to come in!”

  I watched her frolicking in the water, and I could not move.

  Ten men and two little boys stood in a line, beaming, their gazes now fixed on me.

  Oh no, this would not do. I was not about to fulfill anyone’s fantasies about trashy Western women prancing around half-naked. I was a proper Armenian girl. This role that I’d grown to resent was remarkably easy to reclaim.

  But then I worried that if I didn’t go in, I’d be insulting Müge herself—Müge, without whom I wouldn’t be standing on the edge of Lake Van at all—by making her look like the lone hussy while I blushed sweetly from the shore. It was Müge’s bravery, after all, that had drawn me to her in the first place. Maybe this was just another front in the battle.

  I walked quickly to the edge of the water, stepped out of my sandals, pulled off my top, dropped my skirt, and ran into the cold, beautiful lake.

  Müge splashed playfully as I approached her. Once I got close, she lowered her voice and said, “Let me tell you something, Meline.” She dunked her head under the water and came back up, shaking out her hair. “You’ve got to let them know who’s calling the shots.”

  * * *

  I THOUGHT ABOUT her words for a long time. It could not be said, by any definition, that I was calling the shots. A trip that had started as an act of defiance had so far involved a minor steamrolling by an eighty-year-old Turkish millionaire, a leisurely jaunt through the countryside, and, a few moments after our Lake Van swim, the relinquishing of my e-mail address to a satisfied Renas (he would send me short missives for months to come).

  The problem was, I could hardly call the shots when I could not so much as ask someone their name in Turkish. For the most part I trailed behind Müge and Sarkis Bey like an overgrown child, smiling benevolently whether someone was describing last year’s grape harvest or the way the next village had been torched in a PKK battle. I had questions to ask and could not find a way to ask them. I worried that I was wasting my only chance.

  I wanted to know whether the people we encountered—anyone would do—had ever suspected Turkey’s position on the genocide was false. Did they ever feel uncertain? Did they think, maybe, they would be more open to another point of view if it weren’t for the Armenian diaspora’s protests? Did they know any Armenians? Didn’t they think it was strange that a whole nation would carry on for so long if they didn’t, ultimately, have a reasonable case to make? Did they spend any time thinking about such things at all?

  Sarkis Bey kept asking me to write an article for Agos about what we were finding. He used the request as a kind of gentle blackmail: if I tell you about this village, if I tell you about this church, you have to write something about it in Agos, he would say. And I kept promising I would, but I knew I wouldn’t. Although he himself betrayed little sentimentality, I had a sense that he wanted me to play the role of the awestruck diaspora Armenian returning to lay eyes on the ancestral homeland. But I couldn’t write about an awe I didn’t actually feel. I thought of some famous lines from an Armenian poem, “Speak, Mountains of Armenia,” by the poet Hovhannes Shiraz:

  Asek lerner, khosek lerner

  che vor Vana liche mern er.

  Go on, mountains, tell them:

  Lake Van was ours, after all.

  I was having the opposite impulse, though. I knew, and it didn’t bother me, that the lake and the mountains were there for whoever needed them, no more mine than the sky or the sun could be.

  * * *

  NOW AND THEN I asked Sarkis Bey, in Armenian, to pose a question for me or translate a remark, and he tended to
wave me off. “It wasn’t important,” he snapped after a village security guard at Süleymanlı, formerly Zeytun, tried to recite to us a poem he had written about the disappearance of the Armenians.

  If that wasn’t important, what was? I was interested in people, not churches. For that matter, I was interested in Sarkis Bey, but how could I write in Agos that what I discovered on this trip was him?

  When Müge described to me this passionate protector of Armenian history, his love of architecture and his penchant for literature and music, I had envisioned somebody easygoing and open—somebody like Müge herself. But Sarkis Bey’s enthusiasms seemed tightly controlled. And although he was sometimes visibly angry about the way Armenian traces in the villages were being erased, his outbursts came in private, when we were back in the car. Even then, he was a man of few words. In contrast to the brash, boisterous Armenian men I was used to at gatherings back home, holding forth on any subject, dispensing opinions as facts, this was like discovering a new phenotype. Armenians living in Turkey among Turks nearly a hundred years after the genocide: what had they seen, and what did they have to teach us?

  * * *

  ON SOME LEVEL I had always known that there were Armenians still living in Istanbul; now and then we referred to someone as Bolsahay, which was a contracted version of the words “Istanbul Armenian.” Still, by calling them Bolsahay, we never had to say the word “Turkey”; this encouraged a kind of dissociation.

  In fact, there were about fifty thousand Armenians remaining in Istanbul, and not one but three Armenian newspapers. Agos was the newest of them, created in 1996, and the only one that was explicitly political. Its mission was to expose the problems of the Bolsahay community to the rest of Turkish society. Its name meant “furrow” in Armenian, as in the trench drawn by a plow; something priming the field for new growth. Agos was founded after the ASALA era, when Armenians in Istanbul faced extreme suspicion and pressure. Unlike the two other Armenian papers in Istanbul, which were printed in Armenian script, Agos decided to use Turkish, with only a small Armenian-language insert, so that it could reach a wider audience. It gradually earned respect from a particular circle of Turkish intellectuals, the radical liberals who tended to be anti-state and pro–minority rights; a few prominent non-Armenian figures were Agos columnists.

  By the time I got to Turkey, Agos was at the heart of the country’s minority-rights debate—a debate that was itself something new. Since 1923, when General Mustafa Kemal—later called Atatürk, which meant “father of all Turks”—had come to power, the country had been run according to Atatürk’s decree that every citizen of Turkey was Turkish. This was heralded as an inclusive vision, but in practice it was a rationale for squashing any expression of ethnic or religious difference. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne had recognized only Armenians, Greeks, and Jews as official minorities, but about 20 percent of Turkey’s population considered itself Kurdish. Kurds were not acknowledged in the treaty because they were Muslim—religion, rather than ethnicity, was the distinction that mattered—and as a result it had been illegal until the 1990s even to use the label Kurd; the acceptable term was “mountain Turk.”

  More than eighty years after Lausanne, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews (the latter two groups by then almost extinct in Turkey) were still living under separate-but-equal rights that were not actually equal at all. Armenians were allowed to operate grade schools that taught their language, but they were required to hire non-Armenian administrators and history teachers; their curriculum was mandated from above, such that Armenian children in Istanbul were taught from an early age that they were traitors and that the state had merely deported some of their ancestors during World War I to protect itself from their betrayals.

  The Armenian community also faced restrictions in managing property holdings—churches and school buildings, mostly—a bureaucratic snarl of discriminatory regulations that recalled earlier hardships, such as the 1944 wealth tax in which the country’s property owners were taxed to raise funds for national defense. Minorities were taxed disproportionately and arbitrarily, and those who could not pay were sent to labor camps. These misfortunes, it should be noted, were hardly acknowledged in Turkish society; they were not entirely unknown, but rather stored in a deep, collective unconscious along with a handful of other taboos—the Kurdish issue, the power of the military, any criticism of Atatürk—that, according to Taner Akçam, were part of the very foundation of the post-Ottoman-era Turkish Republic.

  * * *

  THE EDITOR OF Agos, a man named Hrant Dink, was a well-known figure in Turkey. He had become “that Armenian guy” who spoke on television anytime there was a controversy relating to Armenians. He and his paper had created havoc in 2004 when they printed a scoop whose degree of scandal for Turkey would be hard to overstate: they had evidence, they said, that a woman named Sabiha Gökçen, one of several children that Atatürk had adopted after World War I, had been Armenian. Apparently orphaned during the genocide, Gökçen had been taken in by a Muslim family before becoming Atatürk’s little girl.

  This would have been bad enough in itself, since one of the most offensive insults you could levy in Turkey would be to say that someone had Armenian origins—the accusation was used casually and metaphorically to complain about bad politicians, naughty children, or even the Kurdish PKK chief, Abdullah Öcalan. In 2008, President Abdullah Gül threatened to sue a Turkish parliamentarian for libel because she had asked, in a fit of pique over some disagreement, whether his grandmother had been Armenian. It was not an accusation befitting the president, and certainly not befitting the daughter of Turkey’s immortal leader Atatürk, even if it were true. But to make matters worse, Sabiha Gökçen was a national hero in Turkey in her own right; she was the world’s first female fighter pilot, and the subject of classroom reports, school plays, and the namesake of Istanbul’s newest airport.

  The claim, which was never independently investigated although Dink had offered up his evidence, had shifted Agos from being a marginal ethnic paper in Istanbul to being the target of Turkish nationalist wrath. At times the paper’s detractors stole whole piles of issues from newsstands, and they once left a black wreath at the office door.

  * * *

  AFTER THE SOUTHEAST, I had just a few more days to spend in Istanbul. While there, I paid a visit to the office of Agos. The newspaper was housed in a small, unmarked building in Istanbul’s central business district. A stone staircase curved up to the second floor, where Sarkis Bey welcomed me and showed me his workspace: a large room filled with paintings and posters of important Armenian sites, historical figures, and events. A black-and-white photo taken in the 1920s showed orphans at an Armenian hospital that was still functioning in Istanbul, where Sarkis Bey was a volunteer. He had a collection of crumbling old atlases, which we paged through using a magnifying glass. I saw, now, how he had planned our trip. He had postcards, catalogs, calendars, hand-drawn maps—anything that showed an image or a name could provide a helpful clue to match historical sites with current ruins.

  Then Sarkis Bey introduced me to Hrant Dink, the paper’s editor. Several people I’d met in Istanbul in the course of two days—mostly journalists and academics that Müge connected me with—had told me I should meet him; he was known for welcoming all sorts of unexpected visitors to the newspaper: reporters who needed information, European anthropologists, and once, I was told, a young Turkish fellow who wanted to marry his Armenian girlfriend and needed advice on how to win her family’s support.

  Hrant ambled out into the hallway looking like a middle-aged teenage boy: at fifty-one, he was taller than any Armenian man I knew, with an athletic frame and an enviable head of hair that could still be called black. Instead of sitting in his large office, which was lined with stacks of old Agos issues, he told his assistants to continue working in there; we went to a small empty room. A young woman rushed in with chairs, and a much older one appeared offering tea. The goofy, faux-modest smile Hrant wore throughout these preparations
seemed to hint at an underlying bravado.

  Although it was summer, and much of Istanbul was vacationing on the coast or the Prince’s Islands, Hrant was working long hours. He apologized if he seemed distracted. He was busy dealing with a lawsuit for something he’d written. He explained that in 2003 and 2004, as part of his regular column, he had written a series of articles called “On Armenian Identity.” The series focused on the psychology of the Armenian diaspora. Hrant wrote that diaspora Armenians hated Turkey so much that this hatred had become like a poison in their blood. Rather than waiting for Turkey to change, he said, they should work to rid themselves of hateful feelings toward Turks; they should put aside the genocide recognition campaigns and focus their efforts on helping the country of Armenia. For his series, he had been accused of violating the Turkish penal code by insulting Turkish identity.

  “It’s just a misunderstanding.” He laughed. “They thought I was saying that Turkish blood is poisonous.”

  I asked him several times to repeat this story. I thought I must have misunderstood something. It was easy to see why his argument would inflame the diaspora, but I couldn’t understand why he would be in trouble in Turkey for writing such things.

  Hrant said he wasn’t worried; an expert commission had been appointed by the court to analyze his articles, and he was confident that when they read the complete text, they would understand that the group he had meant to criticize was the Armenian diaspora.

  Changing the subject, Hrant told me he had read and appreciated the essay I had written in the Nation. I learned only at that moment that it had been translated into Turkish and published in a local journal. I was mildly disturbed by this flagrant copyright violation, but flattered that Hrant had liked my piece. After several days spent trailing around after Sarkis Bey, trying with little success to figure out what was going on in his mind, now Hrant made me feel as if I had gotten something right after all. At the same time, my argument in the Nation seemed to have missed an important point: it wasn’t just Armenia that was suffering because of the diaspora’s attitude toward Turkey; it was people like Hrant and Sarkis Bey and the entire Istanbul Armenian community.