by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
The Sephardic identity of Sami’s mother is what got him his citizenship, when he submitted birth certificates provided by the Jewish Community of Istanbul. Sami had a secular upbringing but for his Ashkenazi father, ‘one thing was a must: a bar mitzvah’. This required learning Hebrew for a year in preparation at the famous Ashkenazi synagogue in Yüksek Kaldinm in Galata, directly opposite a brothel. ‘I used to look out the window of my Hebrew classroom and see the queues of men waiting outside . . .’
This brothel was one of many belonging to Madame Manukyan, an Armenian businesswoman who made so much money from her vast empire of real estate and government-registered brothels throughout the latter half of the 20th century that she was the top taxpayer in Turkey for several years in the 1990s, receiving an award for her services to the economy. With its synagogue and Armenian-owned brothel, Yüksek Kaldirim is a perfect example of the typically ‘gayrimüslim‘ or ‘non-Muslim’ areas of Karaköy and Galata, where Lady Mary Montagu observed the dizzying array of different Ottoman subjects in the 18th century.
Sami ended up marrying a Muslim. ‘Our parents acted in an incredibly civilized way, and it was quite emotional. Of course, they would have preferred that we both married our own religion, but they did not interfere, and from the very beginning I was a much-loved son to her parents and Leyla was the most-loved daughter to mine.’
My friend Dalya had a much more isolated and religious upbringing than Sami, and has gradually grown to reject her Jewish community – but she is still taking advantage of the Spanish government’s offer of applying for citizenship. Having grown up in a Ladino-speaking family, she found it easy to learn Spanish, and does not fear the language test.
‘I think Ladino [Sephardic Spanish] died with our generation. It used to be the case that all generations lived together in one house, so you would have to speak Ladino to your parents as well as your grandparents; women in particular spoke it because they spent most of their time in the house. My father’s grandmother never really spoke proper Turkish, and she was alive until 1984.
‘But my parents’ generation started living apart from their parents ... We were not taught Ladino exactly but I’ve always had that Spanish sound ringing behind my ears. It was very easy for me to learn Spanish.’
Ladino is still clinging on in Turkey, but in a token way – Şalom, a weekly magazine published for the Jewish community of Turkey, still has one page written in Ladino. Like my friend Ziya, who had memorized the story of his grandmother’s escape from Macedonia in 1912, Dalya relates the story of the hardships suffered by her grandparents with a fluency that suggests she has heard it many times:
‘My anneanne [mother’s mother] lived in Kuzguncuk [a famously diverse suburb on Istanbul’s Asian coast]. It was 6 September 1955 when the Muslims decided to attack non-Muslim minorities [these were the infamous riots that caused tens of thousands of Greek Christians to leave Istanbul]. My grandmother told us that our family stockpiled food in their house, and huge barrels of oil on the top floor. My grandfather came home and locked the women in a room. They started boiling the oil so they could pour it on anyone trying to get into the house. We were always told these stories as children .. . When I was young, I used to ask my parents: “Why do we stay here if we hate it so much?” They had no answer, but I guess we’ve all been born here, this is life as we know it. Also, people love complaining. They are happier living here and complaining, than having the courage to move.’
Dalya is acutely aware of what she perceives as the doublestandards of her community, which have sprung up from deep-rooted insecurities.
‘The Jewish word for a Muslim Turk is vedre which means “green" in Ladino. It has a very negative connotation. We were always told: “We Jews are not welcome here, we are second-class citizens, no one will help us, they’re out to get us" but at the same time we were told “We are the chosen people” – it was very existentially confusing. We were all told the ideal was to move to Israel. In recent years, many Jews have moved out of Turkey, some have been scared about bringing up children under Erdoğan, others left for financial reasons. A few years ago, me and my sister applied for Spanish _citizenship but didn’t get it [the decision to grant requests pre-2015 was discretionary, and candidates had to give up their existing citizenship] but since 2015 it is easier. My sister just did it, it’s simple to prove. There is no marriage outside the Jewish community – if you’re in, you’re in, theoretically at least. The system is Orthodox, even though Jews in Turkey are not really Orthodox – so you just get the paperwork from the synagogue.’
I ask Dalya if her non-Jewish friends envy her.
‘Oh yeah. I think anyone in Turkey would get another citizenship if they could. My Muslim friends were always telling me, “You’re lucky because you can go to Israel,” and now we have Spain too. On my kimlik [ID card, on which a Turkish citizen’s religion is noted – 99 per cent of the time it says ‘Muslim’] it says musevi not yahudi. There is an entire debate surrounding this. Musevi was a term created by Atatürk to denote Jewish Turks, that’s how the story goes. Some Muslim people seem to think yahudi is rude, a bit like “Jew” can sound rude in English, I suppose. But Jews prefer it to musevi, I don’t know why.’
I wonder if this is because Turkish Jews consider their Jewish identity as primary, not to be mitigated by having a nationalist stamp applied to it, as musevi does. Dalya confirms this.
‘When I was a child, I had the extra identity of being Jewish that was much higher than being Turkish. I was a Jew who happened to live in Turkey. I’ve never heard any of my family members refer to themselves as Turkish. They say, “We live in Turkey,” or “We are from Turkey.’”
Dalya’s observation made me think of Turkey-born Kurds who do not refer to themselves as Turkish, and certainly not as Turks’. In March 2013, a statue of Atatürk in the Kurdish-majority town of Batman was defaced in the night; the inscription on the base of the statue – ‘Ne mutlu Türküm diyene‘ [‘How happy is the one who calls himself a Turk’] – was changed to ‘Yurtta sulh cihanda sulh‘ [‘Peace at home, peace in the world’]. The former phrase is more or less the national motto of Turkey, the second another famous quote from Atatürk. The presumably Kurdish vandal was making an important point about imposing on a varied people a national identity which assumes a racial identity: not everyone living in Turkey identifies as a Turk, unacceptable though that sounds to many ears.
‘I became more conscious of being Turkish after I left Turkey,’ Dalya continued. ‘During the last few years of high school I had basically cut all ties with my Jewish community. In college in America, I had international friends but I became part of the Turkish community, half of us were Muslims, half were Jews. We got into the gurbet (diaspora) state of mind. That’s when I felt really Turkish – I was nostalgic and homesick. We would listen to Ibrahim Tatlises a lot [a hugely popular but somewhat passé Arabesque pop singer] – stuff we would never do here.’
I asked Dalya whether she thought her generation was less Jewish than that of her parents.
‘I think the way we live is different. I often wondered as a teenager: why do I have Muslim friends and my mother doesn’t? I think one factor is that our parents are a lot more relaxed than our grandparents, that had an influence on us. My parents were born in the late fifties, just after the riots in 1955. When they were growing up, things were much fresher in everyone’s memory. But my generation, most Jewish families are well off, in good schools, and we feel less isolated, although recently the anti-Semitism has been scary.’
Dalya’s story is double-sided. While the Jewish community she describes is undoubtedly self-protective and even exclusionary, one can see why. Jews suffer the same problem as Christians in Turkey – by identifying publicly as Jews, they face the generally unspoken but ever-present accusation: ‘Why do you describe yourself as a Jew, rather than as a Turk?’ There is no room for a dual identity; at least, that is how Dalya feels.
Talking to Dalya reinforced my bel
ief that in the 21st century, in a nominally secular republic, the Jewish community is less integrated than it was in Ottoman times, when Jews were prominent subjects of an Islamic empire. On some level, they have become more secretive, more closed off, and this change in circumstances made me wonder about their relationship to the country they call home. Can a diaspora have a stronger sense of community than an indigenous people? The Jews of Antakya feel ‘strongly’ Jewish, but they don’t feel secure in a town which is overrun by religious tensions, and no longer naturally heterogeneous in the way it once was. Their home can be an uncomfortable place to be, but it is still their home. The same is true of Armenians, for even more compelling, recent reasons.
1915
In Turkey, the weight of what is euphemistically called ‘the events of 1915’ by Turkish historians and politicians, and ‘the Armenian genocide’ by most of the world, lies heavily on the descendants of those who lived through it – or didn’t. Some Turkish citizens are oblivious of their connection to the genocide; the orphaned or abandoned babies of victims of the massacres were often left with Muslim families who brought them up as their own, with Turkish names. The number of Armenians living in Turkey today is a matter of speculation, with estimates ranging from 20,000 to 60,000. These figures do not include those who will never know of their Armenian roots.
Mount Ararat in the extreme east of Turkey appears in posters on restaurant walls and in churches across the global Armenian diaspora. It is visible in the distance from Yerevan, the capital of the modern state of Armenia: snow-peaked and imposing, it is an ever-present reminder of a lost homeland just out of reach. While modern Armenia represents ‘Eastern Armenia’, the true heartland of Armenians across the world is still Western Armenia’: the eastern region of modern Turkey. This area includes towns like Van, Diyarbakir, Kars, Bitlis and Erzurum, where Armenians and Kurds lived together for centuries. During the wars fought between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the eastern reaches of the empire in 1828 and 1878, local Armenian militias joined the Russian side, which Sultan Abdul Hamid II interpreted as an attempt to establish an Armenian state, perhaps because a similar pattern was playing out west, in the Balkan territories.
In response, Abdul Hamid II encouraged local Kurdish warlords to attack their Armenian neighbours, and in 1915, it was Kurds who committed many of the massacres of Armenians, and who took over the homes they left behind when Ottoman soldiers forced them out of Anatolia on the infamous death marches. Today, Kurdish involvement in the massacres is slowly being recognized in the region, and while ‘the G-word’ is taboo among most politicians in Turkey, one of the few to have used it and encouraged a national recognition of the genocide is the Kurdish co-leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, currently in jail on charges of terrorism (the HDP is accused of supporting the Kurdish PKK group engaged in a forty-year conflict with the Turkish army in the south-east of the country). In a twisted replaying of history, Kurds are now being forced out of their homes in former Armenian towns by the current Turkish government as its conflict with the PKK reignites again.
In 1914 there were, depending on whom you prefer to believe, between 1.3 million and 1.9 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the first figure being the result of the official government census, and the latter one supplied by the Armenian patriarchate on the basis of various calculations. Both figures represented a much-depleted population after the massacres and attendant exodus during the last decades of the empire.
In the widespread panic of the First World War, a general belief among Muslims in the empire that the Orthodox Armenians were supporting the Russian side in a bid to establish an Armenian state within the empire (as indeed some were) tempered sympathy for the roughly 1.5 million Armenian civilians who were murdered or driven from their homes in 1915 (the Turkish government claims a much lower figure – around 800,000 – and denies that the killings were systematically ordered). However, some did try to protect their neighbours, and there were also a few high-profile voices raised in protest. One of them was Halide Edip, a feminist writer and administrator who spoke out against the bloodshed, warning that it would ‘hurt those who indulge in it more than it hurt their victims’. (Later, she changed her tune – ‘I did not know about the Armenian crimes, and I had not realized that in similar cases others could be a hundred times worse than the Turks’ – and oversaw the enforced Turkification of Armenian orphans in special schools in Greater Syria). Another of the voices raised in protest belonged to Ali Kemal Bey, the great-grandfather of the British Tory politician Boris Johnson, whose career makes Johnson’s look conservative with a small c, although there are intriguing parallels between the two men in the fields of both journalism and politics.
As a hearty supporter of the empire, Ali Kemal Bey worked as a spy for the sultan, as a deeply unpopular Interior Minister in the cabinet controlled by British occupying forces in 1919, as a manager of a bankrupt Egyptian farm, and as an outspoken columnist, editor and poet. He lived in exile in Europe and Egypt for much of his adult life, dodging arrest and assassination attempts on his sporadic return visits to Istanbul. At the age of fifty-four, he had accrued an English wife, a Turkish wife, three children, huge gambling debts, several prison spells and a dubious legacy of unfashionable political diatribes. He was reckless to a fault, but also incredibly brave.
In 1919, during his three-month stint as Interior Minister under the British occupation, Ali Kemal Bey issued a circular ordering officials to ignore the demands of Atatürk and his men. Previous to that, in 1915 he had repeatedly condemned in print the Armenian genocide, a position that earned him the displeasure of the public more generally. By the time he was snatched from a barber’s shop by Atatürk’s agents in Istanbul in 1922, he was a known and hated man, marked for death.
His support for the Armenians also played a gruesome part in how he was killed. Atatürk’s men bundled him into a taxi, then on to a motorboat to Izmit, a town on the Asian coast south-east of Istanbul. There, after a rough and ready interrogation during which he was accused of being an infidel traitor, his unhinged captor, the general Nurettin Pasha, decided to take justice into his own hands rather than sending his prisoner on to stand trial in Ankara, the capital of the nationalist government. Having instructed an aide to gather a crowd of several hundred people and whip them into a state of frenzy, the mad pasha forced Ali Kemal out into the street. Within minutes the condemned man had been stabbed and his head bashed in with rocks, while enterprising members of the crowd made off with his gold watch and well-tailored trousers. His bloodied corpse was hung up by Izmit’s railway bridge, with a sign hanging round its neck reading ‘Artin Kemal’ – an Armenian name mocking his sympathy for the victims of the 1915 genocide, and intended as a final insult to his memory.
Today, the Armenian diaspora numbers around 5 million and stretches east and west from Turkey; many live throughout France and Lebanon, while smaller numbers have settled in pockets of the UK like Ealing and South Kensington in London, and in Manchester. A community of Armenian Catholic monks have lived a life of seclusion since 1717 on the island of St Lazarus off the coast of Venice, formerly a leper colony. The original monks fled to Venice from Morea (the Peloponnesian Peninsula) along with many other refugees after it fell to the Ottomans in the Seventh Ottoman-Venetian war in 1714 (an event that Lady Mary Montagu mentions in one of her letters: ‘Many thousands [of slaves] were taken in the Morea; but they have been, most of them, redeemed by the charitable contributions of the Christians, or ransomed by their own relations at Venice’28). Today, there are only a handful of monks left in the St Lazarus monastery, but they guard one of the most significant collections of Armenian manuscripts in the world; 200 years ago, their predecessors taught Lord Byron when he arrived for a crash course in Armenian in 1816.
The largest portion of the diaspora, however, at around 1.5 million, settled in America, most of them in California, which was rumoured to resemble the fertile landscape of wester
n Armenia (modern-day eastern Turkey). William Saroyan was born here, an Armenian-American novelist whose Presbyterian minister father Armenak escaped the increasingly anti-Armenian atmosphere of eastern Anatolia for New York in 1905 and subsequently found himself a parish in California. However, according to William Saroyan’s biographer Nona Balakian, Armenak’s hopes of settling down in the parish were dashed when ‘he discovered that he could not communicate with the Turkish-speaking Armenians there’,29 suggesting a significant difference in Armenak’s eastern dialect, and perhaps a complete failure of Turkish as a lingua franca. The idea of Armenak Saroyan trying and failing to preach to an adopted flock composed of fellow Armenians in his native tongue is a tragic one; even more tragically, he died at thirty-seven of a ruptured appendix, something that haunted his son throughout his life.
William Saroyan wrote extensively about the experience of being first-generation Armenian-American, and of the defiance of the diaspora itself, as in this passage from Inhale and Exhale, a collection of short stories published in 193630:
Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years later, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from-mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them.
