Saturday, January 3, 2015

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A family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath.

I. RESURRECTION

When I try to imagine my grandfather, the face that appears to me is a variation of a pencil drawing that hangs in my parents’ house. The drawing captures the earliest image of him that we have in our family. He appears to be in his thirties, and he stares down from the wall with a serious countenance, a sharply groomed mustache, a tall, stiff collar, a tie pin. He seems like a self-possessed man, with an air of formality: a formidable person.

I never had the chance to meet him. I was born in the nineteen-seventies, on Long Island, and he was born in the eighteen-eighties, in the Ottoman Empire, near the Euphrates River. He died in 1959—the year that the first spacecraft reached the moon, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, and Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” though I suspect he would have known nothing of those things. What he knew was privation, mass violence, famine, deportation—and how to survive, even flourish, amid such circumstances.

My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire’s Armenians—“a deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures”—and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.

He guided his family safely through the tumult, and he remained in the city long afterward, enduring the decades of subtler persecution that followed. There was no real reckoning for the perpetrators of the genocide; many of them helped build the modern Turkish republic, founded in 1923. The violence may have been over, but its animating ideology persisted. As İsmet İnönü, the President of Turkey from 1938 to 1950, said, “Our duty is to make Turks out of all the non-Turks within the Turkish country, no matter what. We will cut out and throw away any element that will oppose Turks and Turkishness.” The state cut away Armenians from its history. At the ruins of Ani, an ancient Armenian city near the country’s northeastern border, there was no mention of who built or inhabited it. In Istanbul, no mention of who designed the Dolmabahçe Palace, once home to sultans. This policy of erasure was called “Turkification,” and its reach extended to geography: my grandfather’s birthplace, known since the days of Timur as Jabakhchour (“diffuse water”), was renamed Bingöl (“a thousand lakes”). By a law enacted in 1934, his surname, Khatchadourian (“given by the cross”), was changed to Özakdemir (“pure white iron”).

Diyarbakir became a city of wounded cosmopolitanism, its minorities—Christians, Jews, Yazidis—greatly diminished. Still, my grandfather persisted, until 1952. My father, the twelfth of his children, grew up in Diyarbakir, and I grew up listening to his stories about it. At parties, over glasses of coffee or raki, he described the place in mythic terms, as a kind of Anatolian Macondo, populated by people with names like Haji Mama, Deli Weli, Apple Popo. But my grandfather was always elusive in those stories, his path to survival a mystery. For nearly a century, the Turkish state has denied the Armenian genocide—until recently, you could be prosecuted even for referring to it—and so any inquiry into such things would have been fraught. But not long ago a curious thing happened. Diyarbakir, breaking with the state policy, began to indicate that, once again, its people wanted it to serve as a shared homeland. The centerpiece of the city’s experiment in renewal is a cathedral that once touched all the city’s Armenian inhabitants, my grandfather among them.

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The Church of Sts. Cyriacus and Julietta, named for an early-Christian child martyr and his mother, is a wide, imposing structure, made of carved volcanic rock, that stands at the center of old Diyarbakir. In Italian, the child is San Quirico; in Armenian, Sourp Giragos. The largest Armenian church in the Middle East, it was built in the nineteenth century to a design of ecclesiastical minimalism, with a basilica containing seven altars, and a flat wooden roof supported by sixteen monolithic stone columns and rows of gracefully tapering arches. The church has gone through many cycles of destruction. In 1880, it burned to ashes, and was rebuilt. In 1913, lightning destroyed its bell tower. Its replacement, a semi-Gothic spire housing an expensive eight-sided clock and a bell cast in Istanbul, was destroyed during the genocide—struck down on May 28, 1915, by cannon fire, because the spire surpassed the height of the city’s minarets. Or so one account claims. I should mention a more authentic-sounding story passed down in my family: One day, the spire’s architect turned up at my grandfather’s door with his tools and treasured belongings, urging him to keep them all, relaying a plan to disappear. Days later, one of the spire’s builders turned up, too, full of conflict, explaining that officials had ordered him to dismantle the spire so that its carvings and contents could be repurposed or sold.

After the genocide, the church and the few remaining Armenians of Diyarbakir became locked in a ruinous spiral, diminishing together. For a time, Sourp Giragos served as a warehouse for a state-owned bank, and as a provisional military facility. My father remembers, as a boy, looking into the basilica and seeing recruits line up to be dipped into barrels of insecticide. By the time my grandfather emigrated, the church’s most active members could fit in one photo, which my aunt keeps, carefully annotated, in one of her albums. As could be expected, the great basilica fell into disuse, with the community instead assembling in a small chapel, which my grandfather helped finance. But even this modest chapel was not small enough. People continued to leave. By 1985, there was no longer a priest: Father Arsen suddenly absent, young Kurdish boys no longer teasing him in the stone alleyways (“a monk, a monk, a glass in his rump”). Eight years later, with snow accumulating on Sourp Giragos’s neglected roof, the whole thing collapsed. Eventually, there was just Antranik Zor, a strange old man, the guardian of the ruins, who told visitors, “Everyone is gone, they have become part of the earth, only I am left.”

My sister visited Sourp Giragos at its nadir, about fifteen years ago, and found Uncle Anto, as he was known, sitting on a rock, dishevelled: loose shirt, cardigan tucked into sweatpants. Through a friend, she spoke to him in Turkish, but he just sat there, mute, empty-sighted. Later that afternoon, she returned and spoke to him in Armenian, and he jolted into alertness: Who are you? Where did you come from? We haven’t had a priest for so long. Do you know the Lord’s Prayer? She recited it, and he wept, and then he led her into a shed behind the ruins, a cluttered place illuminated by a single light bulb. He rummaged among his things, telling my sister that he had been waiting for her so she could protect a relic he had been guarding. He emerged with a Bible, its cover torn away, and told her to take the book to where it might be safe. He spoke with desperate urgency of what they would do if it remained, if they found it. My sister took the Bible, of course, and kept it at her house. Shortly afterward, I visited Diyarbakir, too, and went looking for Uncle Anto, but people near Sourp Giragos said he had been hospitalized—in fact, he would never leave his bed again. In the church, Kurdish boys were playing soccer, their ball arcing across the vandalized basilica, passing through the shadows of columns and arches that by then held up only sky.

The news of the city’s changed atmosphere came quietly, five or six years ago, with the unlikely talk that Sourp Giragos was going to be rehabilitated as a functioning church—even though there was no congregation for it anymore. Then, in 2011, an item in the Armenian Weekly (which has arrived at my parents’ house for as long as I can remember) made clear that the talk was real. “Sourp Giragos Opens to the Faithful,” it noted, adding that the structure “stood as defiant as ever to the forces suppressing freedom in Turkey.” Several hundred people turned up for the reconsecration, nearly all of them having flown in, mostly from Istanbul, or from abroad. Diyarbakir’s mayor, Osman Baydemir, told the Armenian visitors, “You are not our guests. We are your guests.” Abdullah Demirbaş, the mayor of the city’s old district, where my family had lived, even made reference to the great taboo—the genocide—saying, “Our grandparents, incited by others, committed wrongs, but we, their grandchildren, will not repeat them.”

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