Ottoman Odyssey

by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)

  Recognition of the Armenian genocide by Turkey would be of monumental importance – it seems to be the ultimate goal for Armenians, yet, as the centenary has come and gone, it seems increasingly unlikely to happen. I also wonder how Armenians would feel without this constant goal needling them, like the desire of a murder victim’s family for a guilty verdict. Would an apology really help? Will the Armenians ever really forgive the Turks, or feel at peace? The genocide is so engrained in the Armenian psyche that it almost defines both the country and the diaspora, although many members of the younger generations are trying to move beyond this lasting burden, sometimes with tragic consequences.

  Western Armenia

  Hrant Dink was a figurehead for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation and was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007; 100,000 people marched at his funeral. An inquest four years after his murder revealed that police intelligence had ‘deliberately not prevented’ the murder, which happened in front of the offices of Agos, a newspaper he launched in 1996 in both Turkish and Armenian as a gesture of compromise that angered some in the Armenian community. Before he launched Agos, Dink had run an Armenian children’s camp in Tuzla, near Istanbul, that had been seized by a court in 1979 and partially demolished in 2015. Now, an award in his name honours human rights activists across the world.

  I returned to Istanbul with a new appreciation for how hard it must be for the Armenian community in Turkey to honour their history in a country that denies its very existence. I discovered that, while the Armenian diaspora at large have the relative luxury (also a burden) of cherishing a story that has been preserved with distance, it is easier for many Turkish-Armenians to simply step away from the claims of both countries on their identity.

  Cenk Zakarian is an architect-turned-project manager at the Istanbul branch of a global consulting company. His Armenian father is a jeweller, a traditional profession for Armenians in Turkey, and his mother is Turkish. His father was the first of his family to marry a non-Armenian, and Cenk’s paternal grandparents still have not accepted his mother – They do not spend time together’ – but his mother’s family is more open-minded about having an Armenian son-in-law.

  ‘The Armenian community is defined by their church,’ he told me when we meet for coffee near his company’s office in Istanbul’s commercial district. ‘My extended family of Istanbul-based Armenians do not think of Armenia as our “homeland” – Turkey is our homeland. We Armenians keep community together via intermarriage and church attendance, and to a lesser extent, language.’

  Cenk did not speak Armenian until last year, when he started taking classes. I ask him why.

  ‘Because the language is disappearing. The western Armenian dialect is very different from the eastern dialect by the way, we have trouble understanding each other.’

  One of Cenk’s two brothers changed his name to Zakar because he encountered racial abuse from a Turkish colleague at work in a big multinational office in Istanbul (the patronymic ‘ian’ or ‘yan’ ending on Armenian surnames is distinctive). His other brother is a jeweller and lives abroad. Although his brothers were never baptized, Cenk was and occasionally goes to church ‘out of curiosity, to observe people’ at Easter and Christmas. He’s only been to a mosque once – the famous Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul – to look at the architecture of the famous 16th-century imperial architect Mimar Sinan, originally a janissary of (probable) Armenian origin. Now, Cenk realizes his decision to become an architect was perhaps based on a sense of a traditional Armenian métier.

  Cenk does not think racism against minorities is getting any better in Turkey today. ‘The nationalist roots are still there,’ he tells me. ‘I keep a low profile – I do not usually hand out my business cards or tell people my last name when I first meet them, particularly in Anatolian towns. I could expect a similar attack to my brother any day.

  ‘The worst time for me was when I did my twenty-day military service in Antalya. It was the short service for people who live abroad [Cenk has lived in Africa, the US, Russia, and the Balkans] so the army shook off their nationalist dust on us – it was twenty days of opportunity for propaganda, making sure Turkish workers living in Germany and Holland got a good dose of nationalism. I formed a little group with other minorities – some Kurds and Alevis – for solidarity.’

  Cenk prefers being abroad; he says he feels more at home. But he has come to terms with his identity as a melez (‘mongrel’) – he says he is ‘indifferent’ to the efforts of both Turks and Armenians to claim him. I ask him whether he is genuinely happy with his dual identity or whether he has merely decided to ignore it. He answers that he is content, and in fact grateful because ‘without this dual identity I would have no question marks, I would not have been pushed to go beyond the claims of Turkish or Armenian identity, to explore my identity.’

  When I ask him how he defines himself, his answer is ‘a hundred per cent millennial’.

  ‘I define myself by my achievements. They are who I am.’

  Cenk is convinced that the Armenian community in Turkey is becoming diluted as religion loses its importance. ‘People are getting more secular and open-minded, like my father marrying a non-Armenian. He never felt the need to attend church or marry another Armenian in a church. The Armenian community define themselves by the church so that [loss] is having a big impact.’

  If Cenk is right, perhaps recognition of the genocide has become more important than either language or religion as a rallying call to keep the Armenian community together. As I thought of both the Jewish and the Armenian diasporas mourning and honouring their historic wounds as symbols of identity, I also found myself thinking of more joyful symbols: the pomegranate seeds scattered by Armenian brides at their weddings to symbolize future children and happiness, and William Saroyan’s celebration of Armenian language and laughter:

  And the Armenian gestures, meaning so much. The slapping of the knee and roaring with laughter. The cursing. The subtle mockery of the world and its big ideas. The word in Armenian, the glance, the gesture, the smile, and through those things the swift rebirth of the race, timeless and again strong, though years have passed, though cities have been destroyed, fathers and brothers and sons killed, places forgotten, dreams violated, living hearts blackened with hate.31

  Ghosts of Troy

  ‘Nowhere in this region can be fully understood or appreciated except in the context of a perpetually shifting symbiosis between Greeks and Turks’

  Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger

  ‘I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts’

  Laocöon of Troy (in modern Turkey), Aeneid

  Cyprus

  As a child, I spent my summers in Northern Cyprus, where my mother grew up. I remember an apolitical holiday atmosphere – humid heat, the smell of jasmine flowers and the sea, adoring relatives in cool, marble apartments who fed me enormous quantities of baklava – but I also remember a sense of unease. In those days, the border was closed and patrolled by soldiers, and I never met any Greek Cypriots, who lived in the south: the mysterious ‘Greek side’ sounded menacing to my child’s ears. I absorbed the excitement and pride of my mother when the Turkish soldiers marched out of the army base near the medieval village of Bellapais where we often stayed. Over time, I realized we had to fly from London to Ercan airport via Istanbul, because Turkey is the only country in the world that recognizes the existence of Northern Cyprus as a republic, rather than as occupied land. There are no direct flights from anywhere else, and my elder sister and I joke that the only reason we know for sure Northern Cyprus exists is because we’ve been there.

  Shakespeare’s Othello has immortalized the Venetians’ and Ottomans’ struggle over Cyprus in the 16th century; the castle named after the Moor still stands in the northern harbour of Famagusta (incidentally where, aged six, I rode ‘the only camel in Northern Cyprus’). The castle failed to do its job in 1570, when the Ottomans seized the island, divided the inhabitants into millet groups and taxed them accordingly.
The Linobambaki are a relic of the Ottoman takeover: rumoured crypto-Catholics who, like the dönme, pretended to convert to Islam after the Ottomans took over, partly for self-preservation (they were treated more harshly than the resident Greek Orthodox population because the Ottomans feared their allegiance to the recently defeated Venetians), but also to avoid the non-Muslim taxes. Allegedly, they remained secretly Catholic for hundreds of years. My mother’s memory of them, however, is that they were ‘more Turkish than the Turkish’, fighting so fiercely in the 1974 civil war that they retained their area which encroached into the Greek side of the island. When I suggested to my mother that, while excellent fighters, they may not have actually been practising Muslims, she disagreed with some force.

  Like the Linobambaki, the Maronites (Eastern Catholics, named after St Maron of Syria) of Cyprus are a relic of a more pluralistic past. Only one Maronite village remains in the north of the island: Koruçam, or Kormakitis, near the western Mediterranean Forest. It is a strange pocket of Arabic-speakers; the residents are descendants of those who escaped here during the Islamic conquests of modern-day Lebanon and Syria starting from the end of the 7th century. Every weekend, ever since the border was partially opened in 2003, hundreds of Maronites who live in the south of the island cross over to attend Sunday service in the church in Koruçam, a pilgrimage that treats the Turkish-Greek political quagmire as incidental to a much older religious ritual.

  In 1878, Sultan Abdul Hamid II signed a secret deal with the British to allow them control of Cyprus in exchange for their support for the empire (and fabled ‘bags of gold’ that were in fact simply taxes taken unfairly from the co-owned Cypriots), an agreement that was terminated with the outbreak of the First World War. However, British interference has lingered, and there are around 3,500 British soldiers in military bases on the island today; refugees from the Middle East and North Africa occasionally land on the beaches of these bases, choosing to claim asylum on British rather than Cypriot soil.

  The 20th century forced the Muslims and Christians of Cyprus into ‘Turkish’ and ‘Greek’ contingents as Turkey and Greece fought bitterly over the island like a divorced couple over a child. Nationalist outbursts in both countries in the 1950s stoked tensions between their respective Cypriot communities, in particular fuelling the Greek political movement of enosis, which holds that Cyprus should be part of Greece, and is masterminded by the Greek and Cypriot Orthodox Churches. The island achieved a troubled independence in 1960, on the condition that Britain be allowed to maintain military bases. Archbishop Makarios III became the first president, leading a mixed parliament of Greek and Turkish Cypriots; shortly afterwards, a wave of violent attacks by Greek Cypriots led to the displacement of tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots and the destruction of scores of villages. In 1963, Turkish Cypriot MPs withdrew from parliament in protest at the violence, the capital city of Nicosia was divided between north and south, and in 1974 there was a short but fullblown war. As I got older my mother began to tell me stories about this war that she had lived through as a young woman – horrible, violent stories of mutual hatred, the loss of loved ones and family homes, land severed by conflict and a botched political ‘resolution’ in the form of a dividing line across the frying-pan-shaped island.

  On 15 July 1974, the Greek military staged a coup d’état, enacting the political movement of enosis. Turkish troops landed five days later and the bloody war that followed was ended by a ceasefire on 16 August 1974, after thousands were killed and hundreds went missing on both sides. A ‘Green Line’ fixed by the UN divided the island in two, confining Turks to the north of the island and Greeks to the south, so that people were cut off from their homes if they were unlucky enough to be Turks living in the south, or Greeks in the north. Today, land disputes still rumble on. In 2004, there was a UN-organized referendum on the unification of the island which failed when the south rejected the proposed ‘bi-communal’ state.

  My mother’s own house was targeted by Greek soldiers in 1974, and she volunteered for the local Red Cross and UNHCR units helping Turkish victims in the aftermath of the war; one of her saddest memories is writing letters on behalf of illiterate mothers to their missing sons, who were almost certainly dead. I sensed from her that Greeks could never be our friends; this border was final, the only solution to terminal hatred.

  But something didn’t quite fit in these narratives. I spent a lot of time as a child with my mother’s mother, and I remember her chatting happily in a strange language – Greek, I later discovered – to an old lady she had befriended at our local park in London. Granny Şifa was born in 1918 in Korakou, a village south of the modern border in the Troodos mountains, when both Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived there, and when the third-last sultan, Murad V, was still on the throne in Istanbul. She had lived in Cyprus for fifty years before the partition, and had many Greek Cypriot friends; when she moved to England with my mother after the 1974 war, she was lonely and homesick. Unable to speak a word of English, she made friends where she could – anyone who would speak Turkish or Greek with her. According to my mother, she got on much better with Greek-speaking Cypriots than she did with Turks from the mainland. Her best friend was a depressed Greek Cypriot woman called Maria, who would summon my grandmother to her home in Muswell Hill to cheer her up when she felt low.

  Granny Şifa was a sporadically religious woman – in truth, her interpretation of Islam was a kind of pragmatic superstition. Back in Cyprus, whenever she had been moved to pray for something, she would ask her Greek Cypriot friends to go and light candles for her in the church for the Virgin Mary (she would pray herself in the mosque too, of course, to double her chances). But when my grandmother was angry with the Greeks, she would curse them freely, and with no sense of hypocrisy. Indeed, she had a legitimate grudge – when she was a child, she had been stoned by a gang of Greek Cypriot boys and received a wound in her head that left a bald patch for the rest of her life. My mother was also routinely bullied by Greek Cypriot boys as a child, particularly by two brothers who used to try to feed her ham sandwiches knowing she could not eat them, and impersonate the muezzin calling her to prayer. Bizarrely, their father Spiros and my grandmother were great friends.

  My grandmother was the living epitome of people’s natural desire to live together, profit from each other and pursue friendships, and also of people’s mistrust of ‘the other’ – when they remember to look through the lens of otherness. I sometimes wonder if my grandmother noticed this paradox in herself, the moments when her personal and national identities collided. As a child, I wasn’t quite sure whether my grandmother was being a traitor when she chatted to that Greek lady in the park, or whether she was above the rules.

  Foreign Soil

  Two decades after those days in the park, on a hot September day, I visited Kayaköy, the ruined ‘rock village’ near Fethiye on the south-west coast of Turkey which was the inspiration for Louis de Bernières’ novel Birds Without Wings. This book tells the story of an ordinary Anatolian community of Muslims and Christians, set in the fictional village of Eskibahçe in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. In those years, most Ottoman citizens could not foresee the impending national identities about to be foisted on them; they identified simply as Muslims and Christians, all subjects of the sultan. Though they were taught by their priests and imams to regard each other as infidels, they were still colleagues, friends – even spouses, sometimes. One passage in the book in particular made me think of my grandmother in Cyprus, just a few decades later – a scene in which a Muslim woman, Ayse, asks her Christian friend, Polyxeni, to pray to the Virgin Mary for her.

  ‘Polyxeni went into the church and crossed herself. She kissed the icon, placed Ayse’s coins in the box, and collected a wax taper, which she lit from another before she pressed it into the sand-filled silver bowl [. . .] “Sweet Mother," she began, “intercede for Ayse in her troubles, even though she’s an infidel, but she’s a good one, and she trusts in you, so that’s not bad,
is it?”32

  This proxy praying was two-way. Polyxeni asks Ayse to return the favour by tying a rag to the tekke (religious lodge) of a Muslim saint in the village, and praying for her in turn.

  "You can tie a rag yourself," said Ayse. “Everybody does. I even saw one of the Jews doing it [. . .] It might even be a Christian saint for all that anybody knows.”33

  My visit to modern-day Kayaköy was something of a shock. Once a prosperous village, bustling with merchants, artisans and farmers, it is now a ghostly sprawl of tumbled-down stone houses overrun by fig trees and lizards. The Muslims and Christians who lived there have all gone, the Orthodox Greek Christians in 1923, and then the remaining Muslims, reclassified as ‘Turks’ at the dawn of the Republic of Turkey, in dribs and drabs over the next few decades as the village crumbled into oblivion. The Christian families were the craftsmen and teachers, and when they left it began to suffer economically. Encouraged by rabidly religious imams, the remaining Turkish residents pulled the valuable wooden roofs from empty houses, desecrated the icons in the churches, and slowly the village began to collapse. An earthquake in 1957 finished it off. Now, there are few signs of its former, diverse community – some patchy frescoes in the gutted churches, and a Greek inscription above an old marble fountain.

  Kayaköy is a reminder of both the physical and social destruction wrought by the population exchange of 1923, during which Greece and the newly formed Republic of Turkey swapped their respective minority populations of Muslims and Orthodox Christians to create homogenous nation states. In total, 1.2 million Christians were ‘exchanged’ for 400,000 Muslims – almost the totality of each minority population residing in each country, with the exception of the inhabitants of Istanbul, the two islands of Bozcada and Gökçeada, and the Thracian area of Greece, who were allowed to remain where they were. Ruined villages like Kayaköy are proof that a multi-layered community stripped of its foundations struggles to survive. Worse, the population exchange created a legacy of heartbreak – after the initial, brutal uprooting and forced exile of these minorities, they suffered years of social ostracism in their adoptive countries. In Greece today, the exchange is referred to simply as ‘The Catastrophe’.