Secret Nation

The Hidden Armenians of Turkey

Avedis Hadjian

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786723710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It has long been assumed that no Armenian presence remained in eastern Turkey after the 1915 massacres. As a result of what has come to be called the Armenian Genocide, those who survived in Anatolia were assimilated as Muslims, with most losing all traces of their Christian identity.
In fact, some did survive and together with their children managed during the last century to conceal their origins. Many of these survivors were orphans, adopted by Turks, only discovering their `true' identity late into their adult lives. Outwardly, they are Turks or Kurds and while some are practising Muslims, others continue to uphold Christian and Armenian traditions behind closed doors.
In recent years, a growing number of `secret Armenians' have begun to emerge from the shadows. Spurred by the bold voices of journalists like Hrant Dink, the Armenian newspaper editor murdered in Istanbul in 2007, the pull towards freedom of speech and soul-searching are taking hold across the region. Avedis Hadjian has travelled to the towns and villages once densely populated by Armenians, recording stories of survival and discovery from those who remain in a region that is deemed unsafe for the people who once lived there.
This book takes the reader to the heart of these hidden communities for the first time, unearthing their unique heritage and identity. Revealing the lives of a peoples that have been trapped in a history of denial for more than a century, Secret Nation is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide in the very places where the events occurred.

X.

The Black Sea and Hamshen

Twenty-Nine

Hamshen I

“And this is the sister of the sun,” said Ihsan, pointing with his cigarette, the forest around us lush and verdant in the rain, while further away a thick curtain of fog obscured the view of the mountains. “Aakagin kuyrı.” I plucked it. Its five petals fell apart in the palm of my hand, and the raindrops washed them away.

The star-shaped flower, yellow and wild, resembled a sketch I had made in my notebook to represent the five elements: air, fire, water, the earth, and the ether. “And here we have a mayir,” Ihsan said of another wild flower as he went on to name the botanical universe around us in Hamshetsnak, his eighth-century dialect, one of the oldest variants of Armenian still spoken.

The road to Xigoba, the largest Hamshen village, was blocked by a tall heap of earth and stones, either because of a mudslide or construction work. We all stood indifferently under the rain that weakened to a drizzle before intensifying into rain again and, briefly, a downpour. It was the usual weather of this corner of the Pontos, the land of the Hamshentsis. In the locals’ reckoning, it rained 300 days a year, and it did feel that way. After a while it no longer mattered, as umbrellas did not matter either and which anyone here seldom carried. A car had eventually come to pick us up, and at intervals between the showers we had managed to grill the abundant meat cuts. Shortly after seven, a collective howl went up from the mountains in the distance, amplified by the wind, as if an enormous pack of wolves were lamenting some collective disaster.

“It’s jackals, they cry under the rain,” said the home owner. “We call it the jackal’s wedding.”

Hamshen was in a confine of the Armenian World, the Hayots Aşxarh. Their language, fantastically archaic, was an invitation to bond, even though their conversion centuries ago set them apart from mainstream Armenians. The Genocide had come to deepen the divide, for unlike the Christian Hamshentsis and the other Armenians, they found themselves on the other side: a few even took part in the massacres. Yet the internet and social networks, as well as growing secularization, were beginning to sweep differences away. Still, over the centuries the Hamshentsis have evolved into a distinct group. Alongside those who had begun to embrace their origins, there were those that did not feel part of a broader Armenian world, even when they recognized a common ancestry. At the other extreme there were also rabidly anti-Armenian Hamshentsis. These rifts also played out among the Islamicized Hamshentsis.

Their example only confirmed that identity was a variable value. Fewer of us in the current world preserved the same national identity for a lifetime. The Hamshentsis were no exception. They too had a sense of dislocation, that the recent rapprochement with Diaspora and Istanbul Armenians had awakened or deepened. They were living on lands that had been theirs for 1,300 years but were reminded not only by the Laz, the indigenous population that preceded them, but also by the police, that they were Armenians come from elsewhere.

If a notion as fickle as a nationality must include the elements—the earth, for the land; water, for the blood or the origin; air, for life; fire, for the common will; and the ether, for the culture—the Hamshentsis, like the Diaspora Armenians, displaced from the ancestral lands, were also missing something. Like the sister of the sun, the metaphor for the five elements, the petals fell apart but they still existed separately in the mud. Nothing was lost and everything was transformed. Yet the flower was no longer its former self. Perhaps the spirit behind the name of an aboriginal nation in Chile had universal value: Mapuche meant “people of the land.” As a Mapuche leader once told me in Temuco, “Without our land we are not a people.” If history was any guide, that seemed to be the rule rather than the exception.

The first contacts on the internet had felt like a leap across centuries, when I slowly deciphered obscure words that came from a time when Armenia was under the rule of the armies of a new religion that had been created in the Arabian desert only a century earlier. Some words were incomprehensible and yet others sounded so magically ancient, such as Hayk, as my first interlocutor in a chat box, Nejdet, called Armenia by a name it has not had since the fifth century.

Osman was the first Hamshentsi I saw in Turkey, in Kadıköy. He was fluent in Hamshetsnak but as he was a graduate from a British university we had settled on English. His self-discovery had begun some 15 years earlier at the age of 15, when together with his younger brother he began to do research on the origin of Hamshentsis and put together the information they managed to obtain from family stories and books in Turkey. They had soon realized their people were of Armenian descent. On his social network page, he had written a slogan in a number of languages, including in Armenian, and in the Armenian alphabet, which the Hamshentsis have not used since their Islamicization began in the sixteenth century: Ազատ Սեւ Ծով, read “Azad Sev Dzov.” It meant “Free Black Sea,” which he had also written in Turkish, Kurdish, and English.

It was a remarkable, if harmless, act of intellectual subversion. In the summer of 2011, we met at Lusnika Lus, a café ran by Hamshentsis that catered to the growing Hamshen community of Istanbul. Its name in Hamshetsnak meant “Moonlight.” He backpedaled on the bolder messages we had exchanged over the internet, saying “nothing is fully what it is purported to be, neither the bread nor men, so you cannot really say that Hamshentsis are Armenian, or even fully Hamshentsis: we keep changing.”

Osman’s mother was cousins with Müjdat’s father. A journalist and a writer, Müjdat had published possibly the first honest article by a Hamshentsi in Turkey about his people’s relations with Armenians. It was about his uncle, who was beside himself with fury when rumors circulated in Hopa about some strangers taking blood samples from Hamshentsis to prove genetic links with Armenians. “Mek Ermeni çik!” the enraged man would say: “We are not Armenian!” But a couple of years later, with the border with Georgia open after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, traffic from the new republics increased along the Black Sea corridor. They would set up what came to be known as “Russian bazaars.” Müjdat had accompanied his uncle as he was checking out items one day, until he started haggling hard in the local tradition to the point of exasperating the merchants, who started complaining in their own language about the difficult customer. But Müjdat’s uncle had understood what they were saying. “Ağpar, tu hay es?” he asked the dumbfounded salesmen: “Brother, are you Armenian?” and then begged for a discount.

Osman was born in Hopa. When he was three his father moved for work to Istanbul, so he grew up with his mother and grandmother in Ardala, their village, learning Hamshetsnak from them. Turks would call them Laz, he said, because their accents were so similar and because the Hamshentsis, or Hemşinli as they were called in Turkish, were until a few years ago even more of an obscure group for the Turks, an inconspicuous tiny minority that in any case avoided the limelight.

His maternal grandfather, Zia Şişman, had shared a story about Armenians that had passed down to him. When Zia was 15 in the early 1900s an Armenian ağa on horseback came riding through Ardala with his escort and captured him to bring him as indentured labor to his lands. “Armenians could grab anyone they wanted with impunity,” Osman said. The story was strange as there were no records of Armenian ağas in the area, but more so because a Christian citizen of the late Ottoman Empire could attract disproportionate reprisals from the aggrieved Muslim party with the connivance of the state. And yet there were records of Armenian farmers hiring Hamshen hands for seasonal work in Erzurum in the nineteenth century. Class resentment combined with conversion to Islam by many Hamshentsis may have contributed to the alienation between the two branches of the same people.

Zia was made to work for the Armenian ağa for three or four days and then he managed to escape back to Ardala through shortcuts and paths he was familiar with.

A young woman of striking beauty, with sea-blue eyes and the delicacy of glasswork, was having lunch a few tables away from ours. She was not Hamshentsi, and had not even heard of the minority, yet when told about them she inquired if she looked Armenian: “My grandmother was an Armenian from Elazığ.” Her curiosity about the Hamshentsis was making Osman a little uncomfortable, and he engaged in the gymnastics of explaining who his people were while refusing to call them “Armenian,” while she was careful too, inexplicably for me, avoiding describing herself as a Turk, which conveyed the sense of ethnicity, opting instead for “Turkish citizen.”

As we left, Osman offered to walk me to the Surp Takavor Armenian Church, a couple of blocks down the street. Inside the reception cabin, the porter was portentously reading the Nor Marmara newspaper, his face buried behind the broadsheet, one of the three Armenian dailies of Istanbul. So rare was the sight of anyone reading a newspaper in Armenian in Turkey, or anywhere in the world outside of Armenia and perhaps Lebanon, that I took a picture. “Who are you?” screamed the porter, running out of the cabin, on the verge of a more violent reaction. Osman was more taken aback than I was.

Then he accompanied me to the ferry terminal at Kadıköy for my boat ride across the Marmara back to the European side of Istanbul. I never met with Osman again. A few weeks later he had deleted from his social network page his multilingual slogan about the Free Black Sea.

* * *

The reflections in the glass distorted the color of the Black Sea as I peered out of the bus window, wondering if it was perhaps Homer’s “wine dark sea,” or if perhaps we should expand our chromatic concepts to account for richer nuances under each name. Under the overcast sky of the coast more than two hours past Trebizonda and on the outskirts of Hopa, the sea could be said to have earned its name. Yet the reasoning was contrived and unpersuasive. Nothing was as impermanent as the color of the sea, disputed by light and the elements in it.

I got off at the Hopa bus station and started walking toward the city center. A tall young man in a red T-shirt, his expression unreadable in the dying light of dusk, was looking at me, his overgrown black beard covering his neck and giving him priestly portent as he stood there like a sentinel on a tower. We made brief eye contact, and exchanged knowing silences, as I had recognized the oval face, sharp eagle nose, and almond-shaped eyes, features that were common among the Hamshentsis, many of whom bear a remarkable resemblance among themselves after almost 12 centuries of inbreeding. Many, in fact, are related as cousins in different degrees; I sensed he had recognized me as a Diaspora Armenian, the sight of whom had become less uncommon in this untouristy city along the Black Sea corridor. It took a few seconds to add up the available data, physical traits, outfits, and circumstance, to tell anyone from the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus next door from a Western visitor of the same descent. Next to the man in red there was someone else, shorter and gray, at the blurry edge of my field of vision. This gray figure was now hovering in the corner of my eye, first on my left, and then on the right.

The store blinds were down on the main commercial street in Hopa, suffused in the gray of the sky and the concrete walls. I was walking down it in the hope of finding a cell phone store to have my phone repaired, and somehow look for Ihsan’s number on the internet for I had lost it. He was to host me on this, my second trip to Hamshen. I remembered this stretch from my first time in the city, when Kiram had walked me to his cousins’ grocery store to leave my bags there. We had then visited his political party’s offices and had ambled around town, and Kiram had introduced me to some of his friends.

Three summers later, in 2014, the street was completely empty after business hours, with only a few stores left open. The gray blur had now come into focus: he was a disheveled man, with a long mop of gray hair, and I saw him following me. Then he started to walk by my side, staring at me with wide eyes. “Merhaba,” he greeted me in Turkish, to which I responded with a grumble as I was now becoming nervous. I turned briefly to look over my shoulder on the right and could get a glimpse, in thick and hurried brushstrokes, of someone with an angular face observing me attentively. The police had already found me, I thought, and I had only myself to blame with my camera and photographer’s vest. The deserted street added to my unease.

“Avedis?” I stopped in my tracks, astounded that they would care so much about me as to deserve their personalized attention.

But it was Ihsan. “Where were you, dağa?” he asked in Hamshetsnak, calling me by a dialectal variant of “boy,” as Armenians do among friends. We only knew each other from social networks and telephone conversations, and it felt strange.

He had the worn demeanor that settles after 50 on men who read a lot and are alone, with a remarkable facial resemblance to a dear friend of mine of Italian origin, who had been classmates with Barack Obama at Harvard Law School; yet he had been driven out of New York’s corporate world first into journalism and then off the face of the internet, achieving his goal of becoming untraceable on Google. I had never managed to find him again except for a telephone call to a number in the Bronx that went unanswered. Like him, Ihsan, also unmarried, had a pointed nose and eyes with a slight downward slant that enhanced the disappointed stare of the idealist after half a century of life. And yet the idealist’s eyes still queried and hoped against hope, because it was all they could do.

I had become friends with Ihsan on Facebook a year earlier. He had agreed to host me months before but I was unable to reach him by phone, and I needed to find a place with WiFi to get in touch with him. Chance has a way of arranging things that prevision does not. Or maybe it was its opposite, destiny, which enabled the encounter. For the believers of the latter, accepting it is wise and challenging it is futile: everything happens because it must. Where chance is random, destiny is necessary.

The immediacy created by a language like Armenian, almost a secret code for a small nation, had dispelled in seconds the separation between mainstream Armenians and the Hamshentsis that had begun more than a millennium ago. It was a long time, but the bridges had not been burned. “We have been waiting for 1,200 years,” Ihsan said. The phrase would have sounded conceited in a different context, but that evening in the empty commercial district of Hopa, he was rendering almost verbatim in Hamshetsnak the thought that was traveling in Western Armenian through my mind. And he let out one of his nasal, sad laughs that I would hear for so many weeks, and we hugged.

* * *

Ihsan and his friends Resûl and T.—whose full name earned him a number of jokes for being the same as that of the Genocide mastermind—took me to a fish restaurant in the forest of Lome, in a Laz village near Arhavi. The restaurant owner was a red-haired man with a profuse beard on a large, Mingrelian round head with a body matching in size and shape. He was a man of communist convictions (which did not bear much relation with the menu’s prices), I was told in reassuring tones by my companions, reflecting more on the true state of the Hamshen and Laz communities’ relations rather than my ideological convictions. “The Laz were Islamicized too, we were Christian Mingrelians,” he told me when Ihsan introduced me and told him about my book project. In the polarized reality of Hamshen and Turkey, my friends would often assume that I was a Marxist as well, for it was impossible that as an Armenian in Turkey I could be a fascist. The restaurant was almost a secret place set in a small forest clearing bounded by rosebushes, their perfume mingling with the fragrance of 1,000 plants and trees. The darkness of the vegetation was the first thing that had impressed Hetoum of Korykos, an Armenian monk, in his travels in the region in the fourteenth century, mentioning obscure lands above the cloudline.^[1]

My fellow diners praised the Turkish historian Taner Akçam for his pioneering work on the Armenian Genocide, saying he had been their party’s leader, but they did not say which one in the large and contentious hive of leftist groups. Turkey’s hardcore left had been riven by internecine fighting in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, during his exile in Germany, Akçam had been the intended target of an assassination gone awry, in which the wrong man had been killed.

“You came 1,200 years late,” repeated Ihsan, addressing me and summing up in his language, which was that old, the feeling that was hovering over the table, of time travel, of a reunion among long-separated and lost family members. And they were avid for news about the Armenians of Syria as the war was raging in Aleppo. “Our people are still there,” Resûl said, confusing me for a moment with the word he used, Meronk, normally reserved for a close or tightly bound group. Yet I realized he was talking about Armenians, banding Hamshentsis together with them. And as the drinks started to take hold, T. began to damn Atatürk and his izar, the shroud in which the Muslim deceased are wrapped.

* * *

“Aspadz for us is a bad word,” said Onur, speaking of God in the Hamshetsnak variant for the Armenian name, Asdvadz.

“He has caused us a lot of suffering,” he continued in his breathless monologue, as if trying to make up for all the lost time, explaining the many uses of God among the Hamshentsis, not all of them necessarily as a curse. In one interpretation, the Armenian word for the Creator had become a profanity among them after their conversion. “We have suffered a lot at the hands of the state and the Laz, a people like wolves, since we came down to the coast: it’s been barely 50 years that we have begun to come to the cities by the sea, we were on the mountains of old.” Onur recited Hamshetsnak phrases by their elders invoking God:

Aspadz asdeğits herru e.

Aspadzit madağ linim.

Aspadzı tsavıt arrnu.

Ellahı tsavıt arrnu.

God is far away from here.

Let me be a sacrifice to your God.

May God take your pain away.

May Allah take your pain away.

In the past, he said, they were afraid to speak in Hamshetsnak on the phone for fear of being discovered by Turks. “Outside Hopa and Kemalpaşa we used to say we were Turks.” Then he added a phrase that came across as disingenuous, confirmed by the sardonic smile of the other Hamshentsis under the gazebo taking cover from the torrential rain: “Aspadza vordağ ar? İnçi hayin mortadza?” (“Where was God? Why did he butcher the Armenians?”).

But there was a residue of attachment to God in Armenian or the Armenian God among the older generation, who still invoked him in their pleas. And a memory of violence in their conversion had survived in a saying:

Xeça aşxarh, xeça!

Turke vordağ a,

azo guda.

Woe unto the world, woe!

Wherever the Turk is,

he gives the ezzan.

“My grandmother said it secretly because they knew about the Genocide: ‘The Turk massacred us, butchered my grandparents, if I tell my grandchildren they will massacre them as well,’ was their reasoning.” The saying was known by many Hamshentsis, who repeated it with some slight variations. In two different versions I heard, they would add at the beginning or end: “The Armenian old woman said …” Three years later after I first heard it from Onur, a businessman born in the village of Dzağrina in the Hopa area, who often went to Armenia and spoke excellent Eastern Armenian in addition to Hamshetsnak, told me the phrase came from the times of the Russo–Turkish war of 1877–8.

The open-air movie festival at Makrial (Kemalpaşa in Turkish) had been suspended due to rain, as only the most improvident organizer could have relied on the local weather for such an endeavor. A crowd of young people from the internal diaspora of Hamshentsis, all members of socialist parties, were gathered under the gazebo. There were activists from Ankara, Bursa, and Izmir, as well as Erzurum, where there was a Hamshen village. At best, a few of them spoke broken Hamshetsnak. But one of them, who was fluent in the dialect, chimed in on the conversation with Onur. A few years earlier, during a political party conference in Van, he had scalded himself with some tea and had exclaimed “Aspadz!” as a curse. A surprised comrade had asked him if he was Armenian: he was a hidden Armenian from Van, who, remarkably, had recognized the Hamshetsnak name for God.

“Isa vova?” the amused voice of Kiram, Onur’s cousin, had queried when I had telephoned him a little earlier: “Who is this?” He would become my host when I arrived unannounced in the summer of 2011. Within my first six hours in Hamshen, I had been introduced to their popular theology, and the faint echoes of forced conversion, as well as their enduring fear even centuries after Islamicization.

Had they thought about opening a newspaper or a publication in their own dialect? “Devletı mezi caş g’ana,” responded Onur with a laugh, echoed more loudly by Kiram, sitting next to him: “The state has us for lunch.” Kiram estimated that there were up to 20,000 Hamshentsis in Hopa and Makrial.

Our first stop with Kiram after he picked me up from the Hopa bus station was a gathering in memory of Metin Lokumcu, a teacher who had died during a protest against Erdoğan when his election campaign bus had driven through the city in May 2011. The demonstrators were all Hamshentsis, except for the only Laz, who became the martyr, Sırrı the poet had said. Fifteen Hamshentsis were arrested. Police came to Kiram’s family home to arrest him too, but he had fled to the mountains and stayed there for a couple of months: he had also disappeared from social networks.

“The Turk slaughtered the Armenian because he was stronger, but if Armenians were stronger they would have massacred the Turks,” Sırrı believed. But Armenians had lived under Arab, Persian, and Russian rule too, yet annihilation had only happened under the Turks, I retorted. He was using the “genocide” word in a very lax way, in the Turkey of the extremes where anything was a genocide and nothing was. “The United States is powerful now and it is carrying out a genocide in Afghanistan, ...