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

by Meline Toumani

  “Is there anybody who would know?”

  “Office.” He pointed.

  But the office door was locked. For the next half hour, I circled the area in front of it, then became paranoid that the souvenir shop clerk had alerted the office staff not to come back because there was a strange woman asking about the Armenians.

  A tourist had overheard my question, though. He was a lanky man with a trimmed gray beard and a camera around his neck. He might have been Danish or Norwegian—his accent in English was almost imperceptible in that Northern European way. He stepped over to help me. “Well, it doesn’t look like it, according to this map,” he said.

  The billboard-sized map took up an entire wall in the museum lobby; it showed all the civilizations that had graced Anatolian soil over the past twenty thousand years. A map legend listed each civilization, and you could press a button next to any of the names to make the map light up with red dots showing which peoples had lived in what areas over the course of many empires.

  “No, Armenia doesn’t seem to be here,” he confirmed after another moment of examination. “You see, this would be Armenia,” he said to me—pointing to the eastern border of the billboard, where the electronic portion of the map gave way to present-day bordering countries that had not been a part of the Anatolian swath—“but there are no lights there.”

  No lights indeed, I thought, suppressing a snort as I recalled the daily power outages when I visited Yerevan a few summers before.

  “That’s today’s Armenia,” I told him. My question, if it had put the museum shop clerk on guard, had aroused no suspicions about my ethnicity in this European tourist. “But ancient Armenia took up about half of this map. In the second century BC, this”—I swept my fingers from the northeast edge of the Mediterranean across the entire picture, to where it ended, near the Caspian Sea—“was the Kingdom of Armenia.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Well, maybe you could ask for one of the tour guides who is a local Turk. They seem to be pretty well-informed.”

  PART FOUR

  Armenia

  15

  Country on Maps

  “Sister dear, what are you waiting for? Move ahead or let us pass!” A burly, middle-aged woman with a beehive of dyed hair that had faded to violet was nudging one of her several checkered, plastic bazaar bags, the square kind, as big as an old-fashioned television set and packed until it was as solid as one, against the back of my knees.

  “Eh, who does that guy think he is? We’ve been waiting much longer than he has!” called another matronly woman from behind me, as a man tried to squeeze into the front of the line.

  One fellow, in his thirties, appeared different from the rest—less desperate. He wore a polo shirt and creased khakis, and refused to obey a fellow passenger’s insistence that he unhook the rope that was supposed to keep the line in order. As I watched him, reflecting on the fact that he seemed more sophisticated than the others, he turned on the crowd of his shoving, whining kinfolk and shouted, “Have you become Africans? Great, now we’re Africans.”

  They were Armenians, all of them. Armenians from Yerevan, clustered together in Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport, less resembling passengers in a check-in line than practiced Soviets jockeying for the last loaf of bread.

  The airport screens showing arrivals and departures made no indication of a flight to Armenia. A clerk at the information desk had not been able to help me, either. But I found them as if by some deep internal radar, circling the queues of a hundred check-in counters until I heard the jocular plaint of the Yerevan dialect, awakening in me instantly a feeling of comfort and familiarity—of safety?—that I had not realized I was missing in all these months of straining to follow the music of Turkish. It was like taking off an ill-fitting shoe and realizing only then that it had been too tight all day.

  The Yerevan group was an island among the Turks and tourists. Instead of head scarves, puffs of blue-black and purple-gray hair were in abundance, an androgynous, chemical hairdo favored by older Armenian women of the working class. Many of the Armenian merchant women who made this trip on a regular basis had gold or silver front teeth and were huskier than Turkish women on the whole, but even so there was a certain effort in their appearance: they wore calf-length skirts and smooth blouses, armored bras aiming their hefty bosoms at ninety degrees, challenging anybody to dare block their path. Standing apart from the merchants, there were usually also a few slender Armenian girls in skintight jeans, amply rouged, with silky long hair, wearing stiletto heels and tank tops, fake breasts distorting fake logos and suggesting a different kind of goods for sale.

  Yes, here they were, my people.

  This was a charter flight: a mysterious allowance of transit crossing a border that was officially sealed shut. There were no diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia; but somehow, for the past several years, without grand pronouncements, with minimal advertising, and lacking even an entry on the airport monitors or the Web site for Atatürk Airport, this charter flight had been carrying a specific subgroup of Armenians from Yerevan to Istanbul and back again. They were overnight entrepreneurs who gathered goods at Turkish bazaars in the Laleli district, stuffed them into plastic bags embalmed with clear packing tape, and shipped them home to Yerevan, where they would get stacked up in clothing shops and beauty stores, “Made In Turkey,” for purchase by the consumers of Armenia. This work was done mostly by women—their husbands gone, lazy, or too proud to visit enemy territory.

  Armenians could not afford to boycott everything made in Turkey the way their diaspora brethren did. Their border with Azerbaijan was also closed, and the hostility along that frontier was newer and more volatile. Between 1991 and 1993, more than thirty thousand people, soldiers and civilians on both sides, died in the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, and without a resolution to Karabakh’s status, the cease-fire remained tenuous. The war had also set off a refugee crisis in the early 1990s, a de facto population exchange: hundreds of thousands of Armenians left Azerbaijan, and an even larger number of Azeris had to flee Armenia and Karabakh, each group leaving behind generations of history.

  With blockades to the east and west, Armenia’s import and export cargo had to travel across rough mountain passes from Iran, in the south, or via the Georgian border to the north, where goods were exploitatively taxed. Inevitably, when charter flights were established between Yerevan and Istanbul, some intrepid traders were ready to make the trip. In the early days, one might have seen an entire car bumper presented as checked luggage. Now, a few years on, the system had smoothed itself out; larger items procured by Armenian merchants went by trucks driven from Turkey, detouring through Georgia and on to Armenia. The trucks were manned by a special force of drivers who could communicate with everyone involved: they were Hemshin people, inhabitants of a small chunk of Turkey’s Black Sea region, where clusters of Armenians and Georgians had long ago converted to Islam and now spoke their own dialect, inscrutable to outsiders, combining Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, and Russian. The Hemshin were said to be a closed community, suspicious of outsiders, but in their way they were also unofficial diplomats.

  * * *

  IT WAS ANOTHER unofficial diplomat who had made the flights possible in the first place. His name was Dikran Altun, and he was an Armenian from Istanbul, a Turkish citizen. For many years, Dikran was the closest thing Turkey and Armenia had to a shared ambassador: he was a travel agent.

  I met Dikran by accident. I wanted to get to Yerevan, and after weeks of trying to figure out how to buy a ticket on this semicovert direct flight, I finally found his office, Tower Tur, a speck among the hundreds of travel agencies crowded along a single boulevard in Istanbul’s Harbiye district. I had many questions about the enterprise. Who was making use of the flight? Why was it allowed to function? But the woman who processed my ticket would give only one-word answers. Suddenly a loud male voice came from across the room: “I’ll tell you about the flights. First tell me who
you are.”

  Dikran and I talked for an hour that day, and again on future occasions when I would drop by for another ticket and another conversation. The story of how he came to establish the route was a long and convoluted tale that revealed much about the small details—chance connections, good or bad interpersonal relationships—that could give rise to significant geopolitical changes.

  Dikran was born in Erzurum and grew up in Istanbul, but he left to complete high school and college in Cyprus and Beirut, then lived in Los Angeles for several years. By 1991, he was back in Istanbul, married with children, and working as a gold dealer in the city’s Grand Bazaar. One day he received a group of unexpected visitors—three Armenians from Armenia. They were delivering a letter from a relative of Dikran’s who lived in Yerevan. And one of these visitors, it turned out, was the brother of Levon Ter-Petrossian, who had just been elected president of Armenia. Ter-Petrossian’s term coincided with a brief, critical window of time—the immediate post-Soviet years—when diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey seemed possible. Talks were under way, and members of the Armenian administration traveled to Istanbul for meetings. Because of the connection made at the bazaar, Dikran became a kind of fixer for them, translating and helping them get around. Soon he was going to Armenia as well. Powerful people in both countries came to trust him.

  After a few years of serving as an ad hoc envoy, Dikran was asked to help with a new initiative, the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). With eleven member countries, it was to be headquartered in Istanbul. Since Armenia was the only member without a consulate in Turkey, its BSEC representative didn’t have an office. As Dikran told it, none of the Bolsahays wanted to help; they were afraid to get involved with Armenia on any level. By then, Dikran had left the Grand Bazaar and started a travel agency. He allowed the Armenian BSEC representative to use an extra room at the agency, sponsoring this arrangement for two years. He did so, he said, not only for Armenia’s sake, but for his own; with an official delegate from Yerevan based in Istanbul, he could hand off the role of middleman.

  Serving as an intermediary, Dikran said, had been “a very, very difficult task.” Like Hrant and the Armenian Patriarch, Dikran was one of the few people to whom the authorities went for insider information, or whom Turkish journalists called for comments on anything related to Armenia.

  “Every night I had to think that tomorrow morning somebody will phone me and ask for my ideas. Sometimes they came from the TV stations for an interview, wanting me to say that nothing happened in 1915, or there was no genocide.” There was no way he could talk about the subject while being true to himself and avoid being sent to prison for fifty years, he said.

  Dikran presented a sample answer from his repertoire: “I would tell them, ‘I’m not educated enough to evaluate the meaning of a genocide against a people. But go look in any museum in Turkey and see that you cannot find anything from the Armenians. You are always saying that Armenians are the best, let’s say, goldsmiths, or carpet makers, and so on. So why don’t we have anything? Were we so foolish that we couldn’t make even one pot?’” He was relieved to put such rhetorical contortions behind him.

  He believed that he developed the courage to handle such challenges by living outside of Turkey for a spell. “The difference for me, compared to other Istanbul Armenians, was Cyprus and Lebanon and the United States. It’s whatever was given to me by those countries I lived in.”

  This appreciation for his time in other countries seemed a bit ironic when Dikran told me what happened when he moved from the United States back to Istanbul in the mid-1980s. In those years, most Bolsahays were moving in the opposite direction. Tens of thousands of them were leaving Turkey because of the backlash they faced during the ASALA era. Those who stayed bore the brunt of Turkey’s growing fear of Armenians; Bolsahays suddenly became suspect of crimes large and small, and many were framed or threatened.

  Dikran, returning from California, was put under arrest, accused of all sorts of illegal activities. While living in Los Angeles, he had become involved with the local community there. He had helped start a choir at one of the Armenian churches, and then, when a school linked to the church needed a new building, he put up money to help—twenty-five thousand dollars, in his and his late mother’s names. Someone—Dikran believed it could only have been a fellow Istanbul Armenian trying to stay on the right side of the authorities—told the Turkish police that Dikran had given money to a school that was linked with ASALA. In fact, the school was not even Dashnak-affiliated, much less ASALA; it was a school run by the less-political Armenian General Benevolent Union, like the one Dikran himself had attended in Cyprus and remembered so fondly.

  Dikran landed in prison without trial as investigators mined his history for nefarious connections. He was tortured with electric shocks—voltage from an old crank telephone, he said—and also knifed by an inmate who found out he was Armenian. Seven months later, he was released without a charge.

  The Dikran before me now looked like a model citizen, a family man. Later, when I searched news archives and other records for corroboration of what he described, I found a mess of bizarre details that contradicted each other and made me wonder for a moment if I’d been hoodwinked, welcomed by someone with a legitimately unsavory record who was eager to clear his name. Seeking some insight, I told the story to a Bolsahay friend, and she nodded as though there was nothing surprising—neither about the confusing news coverage nor about the possibility of a fellow Bolsahay being framed. “That’s why Istanbul Armenians had to be so careful about having any kind of relationship with Armenians in other countries, even with family.” Anything could and would be used against them.

  Dikran summed it up the same way. “It seems very normal to be in these situations when you are living in Turkey,” he said. “And I believe that they want us to leave Turkey. So I never will leave.”

  To make the point, he pulled out an old, expired identification card, showing his city of registration as Yozgat. “I have never seen Yozgat,” said Dikran. “Even my father never saw Yozgat. But my grandfather was from Sarıkaya village there.” Dikran’s father had forced him to put down the old city as his place of origin. “He said, ‘If you don’t, one day they will say Armenians never lived in Yozgat.’” Dikran waited until his father had passed away before he changed his registration to Istanbul—too many logistical problems, he explained. But he kept the old card in his wallet just the same.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I met Dikran in 2007, his company owned two planes and ran flights at least twice a week, in cooperation with Armavia Airlines on the Armenian side and Atlas Airlines from Turkey. The Turkish government had allowed Armenian carriers to land in Turkey starting in 1995 but would not let Turkish carriers fly to Yerevan until 2003, when Dikran got what he described as a quiet nod from Ankara. He wasn’t sure what ultimately convinced officials to give him permission, but he believed it was the magic words he used: “I told them it would make Turkey look better to foreign countries.” He knew there was a risk. “I was sure that if anything went wrong, they would not admit they gave me permission to do it.”

  More than 80 percent of Dikran’s customers were Armenians participating in what was known as “the suitcase trade.” They had a strict routine, he said: they came from Armenia once or twice a month, preferring his Monday flights over the Thursday ones so they could avoid paying for a fourth night of lodging. They all stayed in the same hotel in the Laleli district. It had to be that hotel because most of their business happened on one side of a particular street, and they didn’t even want to have to cross to the other side. In the hotel basement, a cargo company had set up shop to transport goods by truck to Armenia via Georgia. Traveling back and forth, the Hemshin drivers improved their Armenian. The entire routine had its own perfect logic. It was a Rube Goldberg–style detour around a 166-mile stretch of barbed wire and bad faith.

  Other than the merchants, Dikran had some passengers who came to
Istanbul to work as maids or nannies—Armenians were reputed to be good cooks, and Turks apparently liked hiring them for household work because they could not understand family conversations. Dikran estimated there were several thousand such temporary workers, many staying illegally. The Turkish authorities had largely looked the other way, but anytime there was renewed tension with Armenia, they issued threats to track down and deport the laborers. Typically, these people overstayed their visas by a few years and then, knowing they probably couldn’t return to Turkey again, paid a fine and flew home. The really bold ones changed their names and tried to reenter Turkey. This was a problem for Dikran, because as the air carrier, he was responsible for sending back travelers who arrived without valid papers, and if there was no seat available on the next plane, he had to pay a huge fine himself.

  * * *

  MY FIRST TRIP to Yerevan was four years earlier, in 2003. I had spent the summer teaching journalism at a university in southern Russia, and one day it occurred to me that I was too near to Armenia not to go. Nobody in my immediate family had visited, even though both of my parents had several first cousins who were born and raised in Yerevan. Branches of the family took root there in the 1930s, when my father’s aunt arrived from Georgia to study medicine, and in the 1950s, when my mother’s aunt moved from Iran to Yerevan with her husband, who was appointed to a post in the national archives. But throughout the Soviet era, ordinary travel in and out of Armenia was restricted, so although we exchanged Christmas cards and family photos with many of these relatives, we had never met most of them in person.

  For that trip from Russia to Yerevan, I invited an American journalist colleague, Gretchen, to join me. For her the visit was a novelty, a funny story to be told even before it had happened. Armenia? Why not! For me the company was a buffer against going alone. I had no idea what I would find there.