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

by Meline Toumani

  Hrant’s article, “Akhtamar Labor Battalion,” was an open letter to the Ministry of Culture. “Rather than creating monsters in an attempt to draw tourists”—he was referring to the giant green and yellow statue of the mythical Lake Van Monster, Turkey’s answer to Loch Ness, erected to ludicrous effect in the Van city center—“try to take care of the artifacts that are right before your eyes.… What you call Van is an ocean of historical artifacts. Why is it that no one thinks of sitting down properly and restoring the region in its entirety? They say, ‘but then the Armenians would come.’ So let them come. Let them see the places where their ancestors lived. Let them satisfy their longing. So what? If there is any need for help or labor … [Armenian] youth from Turkey, Armenia and even the diaspora are ready to volunteer.… Come, do not let the Akhtamar restoration be solely the restoration of a building; let us also restore our dilapidated spirits.”

  The letter did not inspire the Turkish authorities to spring into action, but a few years later, in 2005, a European Union committee proposed that the medieval church should be a UNESCO heritage site. It also suggested that Turkey show some goodwill toward its minority populations in order to bolster its EU membership bid. In short order the Turkish government embarked on a restoration that would cost two million dollars.

  It was only a matter of bad luck that the two-year-long project was ready for the cameras mere weeks after Hrant’s assassination—or ideal timing, if you were a Turkish politician looking for a way to mitigate criticism. Invitations were sent to Armenia’s officials, diaspora leaders, the entire Turkish press corps, and a long list of European Union dignitaries. But Hrant had miscalculated: when he waxed poetic about the healing that could come from a renovation of Akhtamar, he did not account for his own murder or the fact that Armenians worldwide would boycott the event.

  “No Self-Respecting Armenian Should Accept Turkey’s Invitation to Akhtamar.” This was the headline of an editorial written by Harut Sassounian, publisher of a weekly Armenian newspaper, the improbably named California Courier, which reached a devoted diaspora audience. Sassounian called the renovation a “cynical ploy” by the Turkish government to distract from its genocide denialism on the eve of yet another April 24. In fact, the opening was originally planned for April 24, but then the Armenian Patriarch informed the authorities that no Armenian would attend if it were held on that date. Turkish nationalists were enraged by the choice, too—better not to draw attention to that date—which led to a fight in parliament. The date was changed twice more, finally landing on March 29.

  As the big day approached, problems multiplied. First, news got out that the church was going to be opened as a museum rather than as a house of worship. This made some Istanbul Armenians question the sincerity of the effort, and a debate ensued as to whether a cross would be placed atop the dome.

  “The pictures we used as a guide for renovation did not include a cross,” said the minister of culture, “but if you show us evidence that there was a cross we will put a cross.” Photographs showing the cross were duly provided.

  “But if we add a cross it might be struck by lightning,” said the lead architect, despite having learned his science in a nation of ten thousand minarets. Armenians provided technical suggestions involving lightning hazard lines.

  “But isn’t it disrespectful to put a cross on a building that will not be used for services?” said the head of the Turkish Historical Society.

  “Then let us use it for services,” said the Armenians.

  Every last detail was subject to argument; even the spelling of the name of the island became controversial. An Armenian-American from the Dashnak Party pointed out that in the Turkish rendering, Akdamar, the first syllable, “ak,” means white, as in pure, while “damar” means vein; did the name secretly have racist connotations?

  * * *

  WHEN I HAD traveled to the southeast with Müge and Sarkis Bey two years earlier, we had visited Akhtamar to check on the progress of the renovation, then in its early stages. The architect in charge, a Kurd from Van, had spent an entire day showing us around the area.

  Now I wanted to attend the opening ceremony, but covertly. As word trickled in that every diaspora leader had rejected the invitation, the Turkish authorities were scrambling to find diaspora Armenians who would show up for the ribbon cutting. After all, what was the point if not good PR? A delegation from Istanbul would attend, and a small group from Yerevan, too, but no community leaders from the United States or Europe. I worried that if I wound up being the only diaspora Armenian on hand, I might be turned into some kind of unwitting poster girl for Turkey’s great strides toward reconciliation. I had come to Turkey to seek out and describe such efforts—to contribute to them, even—but if I was optimistic, I was not entirely naive. I would have to pass as a local in order to evade notice and participate on my own terms. So I called Sarkis Bey for help, and in short order he made me an Agos press card and hitched me to one of his reporters, a young man named Aris.

  “Finally, we’ll get you to write for the paper,” Sarkis Bey teased.

  He himself was not planning to go. He offered a variety of reasons—he had concerns about how the work was handled, he was busy, he was no great fan of the Armenian Patriarch, who would be speaking at the event—but I had a feeling that at the heart of the matter was the fact that Sarkis Bey had no interest in visiting Van as anything but an intrepid explorer. A press conference at Akhtamar, even if it counted as a major event in his life as a Turkish citizen, threatened to diminish his private relationship with Van’s Armenian treasures.

  Aris, my new colleague, had been one of Hrant’s protégés, a fixture at the paper since he started there as a teenage intern. Now, at only twenty-seven, he was the news editor of Agos and assumed responsibility for much of the action in the office. He didn’t look the part; wearing slouchy jeans and a hoodie nearly every time I saw him, with a perpetually burdened, sleep-deprived sag to his eyes, he could have passed for a kid trudging to first period in his senior year. His role at the paper—and as a representative of the Armenian community in the wake of Hrant’s murder—was evident in the number of calls he fielded. All the Turkish journalists who used to phone Hrant for information or quotes about minority politics now pestered Aris. He had a reasonable command of English and a dutiful if not quite enthusiastic attitude about helping me navigate the Akhtamar ceremony.

  “Will this really get me in?” I asked Aris, studying my press card, a rectangle of paper on which I’d handwritten my name and contact information.

  He nodded. “Since Hrant died, if you show you’re with Agos, nobody can say anything.”

  * * *

  SURE ENOUGH, FROM the moment we arrived in Van, everybody treated Aris like a VIP. About fifty journalists waited outside city hall for the arrival of the press secretary, who then ignored the clamoring reporters and strode directly to Aris to thank him for coming. When the other journalists realized Aris was from Agos, they approached him to shake hands or offer words of acknowledgment. And before anybody else was allowed onto the bus chartered to carry the press corps to the event, Aris and I were ushered aboard.

  As the bus filled up, a clerk walked down the aisles dowsing our hands with kolonya, a lemony ethanol perfume traditionally offered at the start of any bus journey. Moments later we were given a choice of Fanta or Coke in small plastic cups. The drive was less than half an hour, but no detail had been overlooked in a day that relied entirely on ceremony.

  * * *

  ONLY TWO YEARS after my first visit to Van, everything looked different. The entire city was covered in posters bearing the slogan “Respect the history, respect the culture.” Hundreds, maybe thousands of these posters were tacked up on storefronts, in hotel lobbies, restaurants, and walls all over town. Sometimes twenty or thirty of them were pasted in a row, each one bearing a photo of the beautifully restored cathedral. This seemed promising at first. The Ministry of Culture had also produced a thick, glossy booklet expla
ining how the renovation was done, telling about the features of the church, how the architects had adhered to its original style, and how much money had been spent on the project.

  But some things had not changed at all: the booklet managed to detail the renovation endeavor at the length of twenty pages without using the word “Armenian” once. Instead, heavy usage was made of the term “Anatolian,” a mealy, general word without any agreed-upon definition, a label that offended not because of anything specific it meant but because of what it didn’t say. Anatolian culture, the peoples of Anatolia, Anatolia’s climate, geography, richly diverse past. Carpets, textiles, pottery designs—all Anatolian. I looked through the booklet again and again. No Armenian. Just those other words: Respect the history, respect the culture.

  Meanwhile, a few new kinks had surfaced. An ultranationalist group, the Great Unity Party (BBP), had brought in members from all over the region to protest the Akhtamar opening; they were planning a demonstration in front of our hotel, because the Patriarch’s delegation was staying there. The hotel manager had to hire extra security. In the lobby, I watched him, a round, balding man pacing from one telephone to another behind the reception desk. How did he feel, I wondered, being thrust into the position of protecting a group of Turkish-Armenian visitors, bound by the requirements of commerce and hospitality to take care of them even as nationalists threatened a riot?

  There had also been some last-minute administrative changes: the governor of Van had been transferred just days before to a post in a distant city, despite having been involved in the restoration all along—before it had gained such a high profile. A new governor, one more likely to uphold Ankara’s expectations, had been installed. Similarly, the authorities had appointed a new mayor of Gevaş, the district responsible for Akhtamar.

  * * *

  THE EVENING BEFORE the ceremony, Aris and I had watched a special broadcast on CNN Türk about the church renovation. It had been promoted as the big event on television that night, treated with the kind of importance that the American media gives, say, the State of the Union address. This seemingly minor event was in fact a matter of great curiosity in a country where Armenian history was seldom mentioned at all.

  The program featured a panel discussion with the architects, the Armenian Patriarch, and the Turkish minister of culture. This was a cast of characters if ever there was one. The minister of culture, Attila Koç, variously nicknamed Sleeping Beauty or Sleepy Smurf, was narcoleptic; people watched his TV appearances eagerly, in hopes of seeing him nod off midsentence, and he often obliged.

  Then there was His Beatitude the Archbishop Mesrop Mutafyan, officially still titled the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople. Since Ottoman times, the state had treated the religious leaders of minority groups as governors of a sort. They were invited for discussions of political developments and concerns—concerns of the state, that is. And they were expected to keep their communities under control. As the closest thing the Armenians of Istanbul had to official representation, Mutafyan also had to answer the calls of journalists, domestic and foreign. No, he told them, one after another, there is no problem, Armenians live peacefully in Istanbul. No, there is no discrimination. No, we don’t think it’s necessary to talk about 1915. We should focus on the future. No, we do not approve of the way that diaspora Armenians talk about Turkey. The same diaspora Armenians disparaged him nastily for this kowtowing rhetoric.

  Meanwhile, he was constantly under fire from Agos for behavior that was seen as cronyism; the Patriarch had a small circle of trusted confidantes, mostly wealthy Istanbul Armenians who donated to the church, but he was opaque to everyone else. I had interviewed him on my first trip to Turkey, and was struck by his failure to project any of the warmth one might hope for from a man of the cloth. His was a cold, realpolitik sort of diplomacy, an affectless response to the no-win situation in which he found himself. Generations of Armenian Patriarchs of Constantinople before him had had similar problems.

  As Koç delivered official banalities and the architects eagerly discussed their technical standards, one could only wonder how Archbishop Mutafyan would handle the following day’s high-stakes spotlight.

  * * *

  IT WAS A gorgeous morning at the tail end of winter. When our bus pulled up to the boat landing on the edge of Lake Van, hundreds of people were trying to gain entrance to the event. Strings of pennants and bundles of balloons encircled the area. The pennants, with their random stripes and symbols in various colors, seemed designed to lend some ambiguous international spirit, but they reminded me of a used-car dealership. The hills behind the dock had become a kind of amphitheater where throngs of townspeople squatted and watched the festivities. It was not every day that crowds of people from Istanbul and Ankara descended on Van. Buses filled with politicians and other dignitaries arrived, and disgorged their well-dressed passengers. These visitors had likely been to all the capitals of Europe, but probably 90 percent of them had never before been more than a few miles east of their own capital. From the dock, we could see across the rippling water to the island, where an enormous Turkish flag blanketed the sloped shore, appearing nearly as large as the church itself.

  As we entered the boat, our hands were doused with more of the reeking kolonya. Aris was approached by a friendly fellow who introduced himself as the president of the Van Association of Turks Who Were Killed by Armenians. Aris smiled politely and chatted with him. Aris was a pro. Meanwhile, women in colorful, nebulously ethnic dresses (“Anatolian costumes”) served tea and mezze-style appetizers. Just like our overtaxed hotel manager, all of these people—tea girls and boat captains, bus drivers and security guards—had been drafted into this celebration, and no matter what they called it or didn’t call it, this felt significant. Everybody knew that in some basic sense, their labors today were on behalf of the country’s Armenian history.

  When we disembarked at the island, a line of people two or three deep had already formed a long, zigzagging procession up the hill toward the church. Aris darted away for a minute with his camera. He shifted from one spot to another to capture this cortege from the best angle. Watching him, I had the feeling I knew what he was thinking.

  “You know what this looks like?” he said when he returned to show me his photos. Yes. The people may have been wearing suits instead of rags, heels and oxfords instead of bare feet, and they were walking toward the church instead of away from it. And they were Turkish. But there we were in Van under an intensifying sun, and the shuffling queue of humans appeared to any Armenian eye like the lines of deportees we had seen in photos of 1915.

  At the top of the hill, a few hundred people were gathered under a tent pavilion facing the church. On one side of the church’s entry arch, tacked up against the blush-colored stone, hung a picture of Atatürk and a Respect the History poster. On the other side of the arch? A Turkish flag and an identical poster. A giant video crane hovered over the entire setup.

  Then came the Turkish national anthem. Until that moment, I had tried to withhold judgment, and I stood from my seat when everybody else did. But suddenly my throat tightened and my face burned. With the Atatürk poster, the flags, and now the national anthem, the question of whose history was being respected had been answered loud and clear. Next, a Turkish pianist played some self-consciously modernist compositions. That there was no Armenian music in the ceremony—and wouldn’t it have been the easiest possible concession?—was intolerable to me.

  Several speeches followed. Attila Koç gave a long, unctuous address about vibrant Anatolian cultures living side by side for centuries. By now I should not have been surprised by the absence of the word “Armenian” in his speech. But I was. It was surreal how much effort had to go into speaking about something without naming it, like an elaborate, geopolitical game of $20,000 Pyramid.

  Then came Archbishop Mutafyan’s turn. After thanking the authorities and praising this step toward improving Armenian-Turkish relations, he went on to say something more fort
hright than anybody had expected from the famously self-censoring Patriarch. “This building is a church,” he said. Well, of course it was. But under the circumstances the statement was momentous. For weeks, debate had gone on about whether this building, this stone house of God that had sheltered Armenian bishops and monks for nine centuries, was still, indeed, a church, if it was no longer being used as a church, and here the Patriarch whose deference had seemed to have no limit had finally reached his bottom line.

  “According to our tradition, church buildings have special days.” He went on to suggest that if the church were allowed to have an annual festival on one of these special days, it would be “a very good occasion for people who would like to pray here but have been scattered around the world.” And with that he was back to the usual euphemisms. Scattered around the world; it sounded almost peaceful, like the fluff of a dandelion bobbing on the wind.

  Another Disney-in-Anatolia woman emerged holding a silver tray bearing several gleaming pairs of scissors. The ministers of culture, the architects, and the archbishop each selected a pair, and then, in unison, snipped the red ribbon as a hundred flashbulbs captured the moment.

  * * *

  I NEEDED A break. At the edge of the crowd I noticed a reporter who looked European. He saw me, too, and beckoned me over; he needed help with the wireless headset through which we were receiving simultaneous translation. The reporter was from Denmark, it turned out, and he had come as part of a press junket sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Apparently the authorities had rounded up journalists from all over Europe, flown them to Istanbul, and taken them to meet a series of historians and officials for lessons about Turkish-Armenian relations. Tensing up at this news, I asked him, as calmly as I could, if the talks had seemed balanced.