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

by Meline Toumani

  But ever since we had arrived in Yerevan, Nerses had been avoiding me to farcical proportions. Earlier that day he deliberately crossed the street when he saw me coming toward him, and later, when I cornered him at a coffee shop, he got up quickly and insisted he had to be somewhere. If I was innocent until proven guilty among Armenians from California who knew nothing of me, it was just the opposite with some Istanbul Armenians. While I felt completely at ease with my Kurdish friends, I had not made the same kinds of connections with Bolsahays. I always felt slightly uncomfortable around them, and apparently the feeling was mutual. Some, like Aris, the Agos reporter, were reliably helpful when I needed something, but we didn’t socialize easily. People in the Agos office and at Aras Publishing always greeted me sweetly, but the relationships remained professional.

  Just before that trip to Armenia, Agos had run a long interview with me, Q-and-A-style, about my work and my experiences. They had titled it—to my chagrin—“The diaspora’s ‘bad Armenian.’” This was tongue-in-cheek for them—they meant it as a sort of compliment—but I didn’t like the way it sounded. Still, I hoped the interview would make other Bolsahays more relaxed around me. But for Nerses it seemed to have had the opposite effect. He hadn’t said anything outright, but he was giving me the cold shoulder. He seemed to think I was trying to stir up trouble. He had promised that I could meet some of his players, but now he insisted they were all busy. When I pressed, he finally presented me with Artun, who at 35 was one of the oldest athletes. Artun had attended all four Pan-Armenian Games.

  * * *

  “DO YOU THINK life in Istanbul is better than life in Armenia?” I asked Artun.

  “Yes, of course.”

  I asked him if as an Istanbul Armenian, he felt any discrimination from diaspora Armenians.

  “Well, we are trying to keep our churches and schools in Turkey, and we have a big responsibility,” Artun said. “Armenians in other countries can’t understand the importance of our preserving all this history in Istanbul, in Anatolia, so sometimes they see us as a part of the Turkish people. Because they decided to leave”—he stumbled on the word “decided” and then corrected himself—“were forced to leave, and our fathers stayed.”

  As we were talking it began to rain, a lukewarm, late-summer rain, and we huddled under an archway with hundreds of athletes and coaches. Undaunted, a group of young men in Beirut jerseys started singing a Dashnak revolutionary song, “Arunod Trosh,” which means “bloody flag.” One of our campfire favorites. They hollered atonally through all five verses.

  I asked Artun if he ever learned any Dashnak songs growing up. I had to shout because the noise was so loud.

  “Dashnak songs? No! Never!”

  “This is a popular one,” I told him. The song was so well known among diaspora Armenians that it was strange to realize that it stirred nothing in him.

  “We do not have any relation with Dashnaktsutiun,” Artun said. “We have no songs of Dashnaktsutiun.”

  I sensed he was a bit afraid of me, too, as if I was a Turkish military officer questioning him about ties to the Armenian armed bands of the late Ottoman era. I was sympathetic, especially after what Dikran had told me, how Bolsahays had to be careful about their diaspora connections, but it felt awful to be the cause of so much suspicion when in my heart I was on their side.

  The singing kept growing louder, and the acoustics of the arch made it deafening, but the rain was also gaining force, so Artun and I had no choice but to stay put. We screamed directly into each other’s ears.

  “WHAT KINDS OF ARMENIAN SONGS DID YOU LEARN WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD?”

  “WHAT?”

  “WHILE WE WERE SINGING DASHNAK SONGS IN THE DIASPORA, WHAT SONGS WERE YOU SINGING?”

  There was a pause between verses.

  “We prefer our traditional music. Gomidas Vartabed’s songs, for example. Gomidas’s liturgy is very important for us.” Gomidas, an Armenian theologian and ethnomusicologist, had arranged a version of the church service unique for its distinctively Armenian motifs.

  The Beirut team started up again, this time with “Menk Angeghdz Zinvor Enk”—We Are Sincere Soldiers.

  “DO YOU KNOW THIS ONE?” I asked Artun.

  “NO.”

  “ONE OF THE LINES SAYS, ‘ISTANBUL WILL BE A SEA OF BLOOD.’”

  “OH.”

  The song tells of a letter arriving from the depths of Iran, telling Armenians to join their Caucasus brethren to fight. “The battle is about to start from every direction,” the lyrics say. “We don’t want any limits on our freedom. We’ve sworn to fight, and we’ll die for that cause. We are convinced that Armenian liberation can be won only with weapons.”

  Artun thought this over for a moment. “The diaspora is so weak,” he said. “There is nothing else besides this song.”

  Then he told me about one problem the Istanbul team has at the games: they cannot carry the Turkish flag in the opening procession. “Every other team will hold the flag of their country, but for us it’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just impossible.”

  “Do you want to hold the Turkish flag?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “For us, even at a soccer game, for example, if Turkey is competing against another country, well, of course we want Turkey to win. But we also can’t fully get behind the…” He trailed off because what he might have said next would have been grounds for prosecution in his country.

  * * *

  THE RAIN ENDED just in time for the ceremony to begin. There was a stadium-wide countdown, followed by fireworks, a drum brigade, and a solemn march of men playing the zurna, a festive, double-reed instrument from Anatolia. Armenian president Robert Kocharian was introduced, waving from a box above the stands.

  Then a series of athletes from various countries made speeches in Armenian:

  “I’m Hrant, I’m from Egypt, I’m twenty-one years old. Our uniform is colored black, yes, like the color of our eyes. It’s my first time in Armenia. My little brother’s name is Sevag. Sevag begged me to give, from his heart, his greetings to our country’s president: HELLO, MR. PRESIDENT! HELLO, HOMELAND!”

  “I am Maral, I come from South America; our flag is red. Red is also one of the colors in the Armenian flag, which for me is such a precious symbol. I want for all the world’s Armenians to come live in their native city! HELLO, HOMELAND!”

  “My name is Alisa. I have come from a VERY far place: from Sydney, Australia! Our uniform is green, like the fertile lands of my historic Armenia. Back in Australia, my grandmother told me I am a displaced grandchild of Armenia. I love my homeland. I will never forget you, my native language. HELLO, HOMELAND!”

  “I am Massis, and my team’s flag is golden, like the golden autumns of my beloved Yerevan. I want for my nation to shine like gold; to shine for the Armenian people from all corners of the world. HELLO, MY GOLDEN HOMELAND!”

  An announcer stepped in: “The famous slogan of the Olympics is Citius, Altius, Fortius: faster, higher, stronger! But the slogan of the fourth Pan-Armenian Games is: HELLO, HOMELAND!”

  * * *

  ISTANBUL AND GLENDALE were on the basketball court. The bleachers on one side of the gym were packed with supporters from Glendale. Some had flown with the team specifically for the games, others just happened to be in Yerevan on their summer vacations. Across the court, a few members of the Istanbul delegation sat together, with Yerevantsis taking empty seats here and there.

  I sat alone on the Istanbul side. Both teams were playing hard from the start, and Glendale fans were cheering as if they owned the place, shouting, “Let’s go Glendale, let’s go!” It could have been a high school game in California.

  A man sitting behind me noticed that I was writing in my notebook and leaned over to speak in my ear.

  “What you need to write about is the sorry state of affairs here. Write about these thieves that they call our government. They’ll go all the way to Karabakh to kill a pig f
or our dear president’s dinner, because he must have the best meat every night, even if the rest of us can’t feed our kids. And the way they drive their Jeeps…”

  His name was Vahan, and he was a local, a middle-aged man with hair on the edge of gray, dressed neatly in slacks and a short-sleeved button-down. He had brought his two young nephews to watch the game, just for something to do.

  Vahan moved down a row to sit next to me, and we fixed our attention on the court. I felt a bit silly sitting in the bleachers taking notes; I knew little about basketball, and the only other journalist at the game besides me was a fellow named Onnik, a British-Armenian photographer who had been living in Yerevan for ten years and kept a popular but inflammatory news blog about local politics. Onnik and I had become fast friends a few days prior, when we crossed paths navigating the elaborate and apparently underutilized process of getting press credentials. That we had met each other and could compare notes over the course of the week was the only benefit to having showed up at the Foreign Ministry building to register. Officially, nobody cared who we were.

  The score had been nearly tied all along, but at the start of the second half, Glendale was ahead by one. Both teams were playing like their lives depended on it. Then, halfway through the last quarter, suddenly the court was mayhem. A player from Glendale was chasing the star player of the Istanbul team—and since neither of them had the ball, it was clear this wasn’t part of the game. Within seconds, people poured onto the court from all directions—referees, team managers, the police. Several men struggled to hold the two players apart.

  Just then Onnik ran up to me with gossip. He had been standing among the Glendale supporters before the fight broke out. The Glendale player had made some kind of remark in Armenian about the player on the Istanbul team, and when one of the Glendale fans chastised him for this, he called back, “They can’t understand anyway, they’re Turkish.” Onnik wasn’t sure what the Glendale player had originally said.

  Vahan, sitting at my side, tried to block my notebook. “Don’t write it, don’t write it!” he said. “Write that they were so involved with the game that they just couldn’t control themselves!” When he saw that I was unconvinced, he tried another theory: the Istanbul team actually had a bit of that Turkish barbarism in them, he said, which was why they played so hard. “It’s not their fault! You need to explain! It’s just something inside them.”

  At the same moment, a few rows ahead of us, the father of one of the Istanbul players began waving his arms toward the referees and shouting: “Menk Hay enk, menk Tajik chenk!” We’re Armenian, we’re not Turkish. His face was blazing red.

  The final score was Glendale 74, Istanbul 65.

  * * *

  AFTER THE GAME I asked Nerses, the manager of the Istanbul team, what had set off the fight. He shuddered and said, with uncharacteristic openness, that one of the Glendale players had called the Istanbul player Toork shoon—“Turkish dog.”

  Then I found the Glendale player in the lobby of the gym and asked him what happened.

  “Nothing, you know. It’s just a game. We get worked up sometimes. They were playing really aggressively,” he said.

  “Did the fight have anything to do with their being from Turkey?”

  “No. I don’t know. I mean, they’re half-Armenian, anyway.”

  “Half-Armenian?”

  “I mean, I guess they have some Armenian in them.”

  Outside, I approached the father of the Istanbul player, the one who had been shouting in the stands.

  He told me that the referees were always unfair to Istanbul players. “It’s like this every year. Wherever we go, we’re seen differently by other Armenians.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY I headed to the town of Ararat for a soccer game between Istanbul and Rostov. It was an easy choice from the packed schedule of matches: Rostov was the city in Russia where I had worked for a couple of summers, and Istanbul was the city where I lived now. I figured I could be happy no matter which team won.

  Ararat town is situated at the foot of Mount Ararat, on the border with Turkey. It was an hour by car from Yerevan, and I needed a driver who could wait around for the return trip. Several taxis refused me, but then I found a driver named Saro who got excited at the prospect: he was born in the village of Vedi, close to Ararat. He said he would drive me to the game and then take the opportunity to surprise his elderly parents for lunch.

  Every journalist loves taxi rides for the opportunity to have a spontaneous chat with somebody you wouldn’t otherwise meet. Whatever story you might be on your way to cover, whomever you had just interviewed when a taxi picked you up, you could check in quickly with Joe Driver, who might have been a doctor or a professor or a criminal in his other life, but for a few minutes would be your private sounding board.

  But in Armenia, for a young, single diaspora woman, taxi rides had special amusements. Even on the shortest drives, cabbies always asked if I was married. Although I had been told I should be more reserved, I delighted in their earnest campaigns on behalf of a “very successful” nephew. (Although once, when I lied and said I was engaged to a man in the United States, the driver became angry—not because I was unavailable, but because I was too independent. “What kind of guy allows his betrothed to roam around the world by herself?” he asked, as if my imaginary fiancé had insulted the both of us.)

  There were no right answers where Yerevan drivers were concerned. If you gushed too readily about how wonderful Armenia was, they would huff and tell you that you didn’t know the first thing. Since the end of Communism people have turned “uncivilized,” they often said. As for the government, it was full of crooks. And housing costs were sky-rocketing due to spiurkahays—diaspora Armenians—buying homes they used for only a few weeks a year.

  But if you dared to point out any of these manifest issues yourself, they would snap and say, “There is not a more beautiful city in the world than our Yerevan! I wouldn’t leave this city for anything! You can go to Los, and work all day so you can drive a Mercedes, but that’s not life!” (Los was local slang for the Los Angeles area, which now has as large an Armenian population as Yerevan.) Once, a driver told me that Armenia was the only place in the world he could live with eyebrows like his.

  My driver to Ararat town, Saro, did not ask me any personal questions. He only wanted to know if I was planning to pay my respects at Khor Virap, the ancient monastery near Ararat that is credited as the site of Armenia’s conversion to Christianity. I told him I’d been to Khor Virap on a previous trip and found it very beautiful, but today I was going to a soccer match for the Pan-Armenian Games.

  “Who’s playing?”

  “Istanbul against Rostov.”

  “Istanbul? So they’re Turks.”

  “No, they’re Armenian players from Istanbul.”

  “They’re not real Armenians then,” he said.

  “Well, they all speak Armenian,” I told him, “and go to Armenian schools, and Armenian churches—”

  He cut me off. “Bring me a Turk so I can tear him to pieces.”

  A Turk: when an Armenian in Armenia says “Turk,” he usually means somebody from Azerbaijan. Sure enough, Saro proceeded to tell me that he fought in Karabakh against Azerbaijani soldiers.

  “I cut off a man’s ears,” he said. “Just like that.”

  I found it maddening the way they used the label “Turk” for people from Turkey as well as Azerbaijan. It’s not that it was racist, exactly—Turks and Azeris sometimes did this, too. But for an Armenian to do so was like using an all-purpose word for “enemy.” They were different enemies, specific enemies, and this mattered; each conflict had its own dynamics, its own governmental players, and its own geographic border. Eliding the differences only helped guarantee that nothing would change. I brought this up to anyone who would listen, but so far not a soul had agreed with me that the distinction was important.

  Our conversation was interrupted by a loud clatter. For a moment I t
hought we’d hit something, but there was only open road in both directions. Then we realized that the taxi lamp on the roof had fallen off and was banging against the driver’s-side door, suspended by a wire. Saro braked just slightly, rolled down his window, yanked the lamp free, and tossed it into the backseat where it landed at my feet, smelling of burnt plastic. “It’s the wind today,” he said.

  As we passed through orchards and sunflower fields, I realized that in a relatively short drive we were covering a significant chunk of Armenia. We drove in silence for half an hour, and then, as we neared the Turkish border, Mount Ararat came into view.

  “Sa mern eh,” Saro said—this is ours. “The entire diaspora should come back to Armenia so that we can increase our numbers. Then if we all gather together and put our arms around it and pull really hard, maybe we can get it over to our side.”

  Just then my cell phone beeped with a text message. It was an automated prompt from Turkcell, my Turkish cell phone provider. “We hope that you enjoyed using Turkcell International Services and that you had a pleasant trip. Welcome to Turkey.”

  This same device had been connected to Armenia’s Armentel network all week. Now we were so close to the border that, diplomatic relations be damned, Turkcell thought I was back. It was not the first time the company had been kind enough to follow my travel plans: on a brief trip to France a couple of months earlier, I had turned on my phone upon arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport only to be greeted with a different polite notice: “While you are away from Turkey, if you need help, the Turkish embassy is located at…” with an address and phone number. Always watching out for each other, I had thought. Then there was a follow-up that informed me I had three free text messages while roaming, and that I should use them to let my family and friends know I had arrived safely. It seemed to me incredibly and endearingly Turkish that a private phone company would remind its customers to call their mothers. Meanwhile, the Armenian network was having problems and I hadn’t been able to receive a call for days. I opted not to tell Saro that as far as my phone was concerned, we were in Turkey.