THE HEMSHIN: A COMMUNITY OF ARMENIANS WHO BECAME MUSLIMS
asbarez
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
A Book Review by Aram Arkun
The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of
Northeast Turkey Edited by Hovann H. Simonian
Armenians love nothing more than to debate what constitutes an
Armenian, but nearly all Armenians would insist that one of the major
components of Armenian identity is Christianity. Yet today more and
more is heard about Muslim Armenians and crypto or secret Armenians.
The very existence of Muslim Armenians in particular raises interesting
questions about what is fundamentally Armenian, especially when
there are Muslims who speak Armenian and preserve and practice various
elements derived from Armenian culture and tradition. The Hemshin, also
called Hemshinli, include both Muslims and Christians, and speakers
of dialects of Armenian as well as those who only speak versions of
Turkish or other non-Armenian languages influenced by the Armenian
language. They have a long and complicated history, during much of
which they lived in isolation from mainstream Armenian society and
faced great oppression, and they themselves have conflicting notions
concerning their identity. Today numbering as many as 150,000 according
to some estimates, they live in Turkey, Russia, and Georgia, as well
as in some diaspora communities in the west. Not much has been written
about the Hemshin in English, so the volume edited by Hovann Simonian
provides a welcome introduction.
This book, focusing on the Hemshin living in Turkey, consists of
chapters written by writers from a diverse group of disciplines and
nationalities. A second volume is projected for publication on the
Hemshin in the Caucasus and the rest of the former Soviet Union,
and that volume will include a general bibliography.
Anne Elizabeth Redgate’s introductory chapter examines Armenian
historical sources on the origins of the Hemshin. The seventh-century
Arab invasions of Armenia led to a period of harsh treatment of
occupied Armenian territories in the subsequent century. According
to the Armenian writer Ghewond’s History, part of the Armenian
leadership, including the Amatuni clan, rebelled, leading to the
emigration of Shapuh Amatuni, his son Hamam, and many companions circa
A.D. 790. They founded a new principality in the Byzantine-controlled
Pontos, northwest of Armenia proper. Its capital was named Hamamashen
after Hamam, and this word was later transformed into Hamshen, and
used for the whole area.
Historical Hamshen lies between the Pontic mountain chain in the south
and the Black Sea to the north, today part of the Turkish province
of Rize. Hemshinli also live further to the east in Artvin province
of Turkey in the region around Hopa. Unlike their Laz neighbors, the
Hemshin tend to live among the higher mountains, not immediately around
the coast. Thanks to the Pontic mountains overlooking the Black Sea,
Hamshen is not only fairly inaccessible, but also one of the most
humid areas of Turkey, with an average of 250 days of rain per year
creating a semi-tropical climate. A quasi-permanent fog covers the
area. The Armenians there were always in close proximity to the sea,
even when their political borders did not quite reach it.
Hovann Simonian, both editor and contributor, in the next chapter
quickly reviews the same Armenian historical sources as Redgate,
and dismisses two alternate hypotheses concerning the origins of
Hamshen–that refugees from the fall of the Armenian capital of Ani
in 1064 were its founders, and that after the initial arrival of the
Amatunis, a sparse local Tzan population was Armenized by migrants
from Ispir and Pertakrag to the south.
Much of the history of this area lies in obscurity. Between the
late eighth and early fifteenth centuries, there are only two
extant mentions of Hamshen, so that one can only suppose that the
principality of Hamshen survived as a vassal of the larger powers
around it, Armenian, Byzantine, Georgian, and Turkic. Armenian
manuscripts from the fifteenth century reveal that it had become a
principality subservient to the Muslim lord of Ispir to the south,
as well as to an overlord, Iskander Bey of the Kara Koyunulu Turkmen
confederation. Ispir, exclusively Armenian until the seventeenth
century, was Hamshen’s only neighbor sharing a population adhering to
the Church of Armenia. The other Christians in the area were Orthodox
Chalcedonians. Hamshen fell to the Ottomans in the late 1480s, with
its last ruler, Baron Davit (David) exiled to Ispir. The most famous
member of the Armenian ruling family of Hamshen was the vardapet
Hovhannes Hamshentsi, an eminent scholar and orator who died in 1497.
Hamshen became called Hemshin in early Ottoman documents, where it
was noted as a separate district or province. It was subject to the
devshirme, or child levy, in the sixteenth century.
In the third chapter, Christine Maranci examines manuscript
illumination in Hamshen, which, together with scribal activity,
extended from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. A wide
variety of texts were copied, demonstrating that Hamshen was a
significant intellectual center even in the sixteenth century, often
considered a “Dark Age” for medieval manuscript illumination.
In his second chapter for this volume, Hovann Simonian traces the
process of Islamicization in Hemshin to the end of the nineteenth
century. Simonian does a good job of utilizing at times contradictory
or obscure Armenian and Turkish sources to better understand how
this process.
Ottoman records show that Hemshin was overwhelmingly Christian
until the late 1620s. Starting in the 1630s the Hemshin Armenian
diocese entered a decline, while one of the first mosques in the
area was built in the 1640s. Conversion to Islam seems to have
progressively taken place, not abruptly and at once. However, it is
not known whether there were particular episodic periods of crisis in
which conversion accelerated. The need for equality with Laz Muslim
neighbours, the desire to avoid oppressive taxation of non-Muslims,
increasing general Ottoman intolerance of non-Muslims in a period of
weakness for the Ottoman Empire, and anarchy created by local valley
lords are some of the causes of Islamicization. Islam took root in
the coastal areas first, and then advanced gradually to the highlands.
Emigration of Armenians also took place during this period of pressure
on Armenians from the 1630s to the 1850s, though fugitives who fled to
other parts of the Pontos were still often forced to convert. Simonian
looks at the killings, violence, and other difficulties faced by the
Hemshin Armenian communities of Mala, Karadere, and Khurshunlu.
Christians still persevered, though small in number, in Hemshin at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Members of the new Muslim
majority produced a large number of Islamic clerics, civil servants,
and military leaders for the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth
century. These emigrants to large Ottoman urban centers all bore the
epithet Hemshinli. During the centuries of conversions, odd situations
were created. Mothers in some families remained Christian in belief,
while fathers became Muslim; one brother might have converted
to Islam, and another remained Christian. Furthermore, a type of
crypto-Christians called gesges (half-half) was formed. These Hemshin
Armenians only outwardly converted, but privately kept practicing
various Christian customs, even sometimes including attending church
services. This category of Armenians largely died out by the end of
the nineteenth century.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman proclamations
of religious equality as part of the Tanzimat reform efforts led
some Muslim Hemshin in the broader area to try to convert back to
Christianity. This in turn led to a reaction by Muslim preachers and
the opening of Turkish schools in the area. The pressure by local
authorities, combined with new opportunities in Muslim Ottoman society
for economic and social advancement, led to the loss of the ability
to speak the Armenian language for most Hemshin Armenians. However,
Armenian influenced the type of Turkish spoken by the Hemshin through
vocabulary, phrase structure, and accent. The Muslim Hemshin developed
their own unique group identity, and managed to maintain this to
the present.
By 1870, according to Ottoman statistics, confirmed by the British
consul in Trebizond, there were only twenty-three Christian Armenian
families in Hemshin, and the remaining 1,561 families were Muslim.
Alexandre Toumarkine writes about the Ottoman political and religious
elites among the Hemshin from the mid-nineteenth century until
1926, with information about specific individuals and families. The
Hemshinli, like the rest of the people of their area of the Black
Sea, supported Ataturk initially, but entered into the camp of the
opposition during the early years of the new Turkish republic. The
chief organizer of the failed 1926 plot to assassinate Ataturk
was a Hemshinli named Ziya HurÅ~_id, and four other Hemshinli were
also accused of being involved. In an epilogue, Toumarkine notes
that a number of contemporary politicians have Hemshinli origins,
including Mesut Yılmaz, prime minister between 1997 and 1998, and
Murat Karayalcın, deputy prime minister from 1993 to 1995.
In his third chapter, Simonian focuses on the 1878-1923 period and
the interaction of Muslims of Armenian background and Armenians. The
district of Hopa, adjacent to Hemshin, was occupied by the Russians
as a result of the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War. The approximately 200
households of Islamicized Hemshinli Armenians in Hopa proved their
complete adherence to Islam by not reverting to Christianity under
Russian Christian rule, unlike other Armenian converts.
Part of the responsibility for the distancing between Christian and
Islamicized Armenians was due to Armenians themselves. The Armenian
Church did not attempt to actively work with the Muslim Hemshinli,
perhaps fearing problems with the Ottoman state authorities. However,
even in the Russian Empire, the Armenian Church made no effort to
try to proselytize among converted Armenians, and, in some cases,
actually created new obstacles in the path of those Islamicized
Armenians who wanted to revert to Christianity. At the same time,
even relatively progressive secularist thinkers like Grigor Artsruni
could not accept as Armenians any Muslims like the Hemshin unless
they first converted their religion.
Muslims of Hemshin were hired by the Catholic Armenians of
neighbouring Khodorchur to the south, the last district of Ispir
still populated by Christians, as guides for travelers, guards, and
as seasonal workers. Despite these generally friendly relations,
some Hemshinli Muslims who engaged in banditry also periodically
attacked the Khodorchur Catholic Armenians. During World War I,
some Hemshinli and other Muslims of Armenian descent robbed their
Khodorchur Armenian neighbors and took over their properties. The
last Christian Armenian village in Hemshin, Eghiovit (Elevit) was
destroyed, with its population deported and killed. After the war,
Khodorchur was partially repopulated by Hemshinli.
In Hopa and more particularly in Karadere Valley and regions closer
to Trebizond, Islamicized Armenians helped Christians instead of
robbing them.
Some Hemshinli during the war were mistaken for Armenians because of
their language and killed. During the Russian occupation of the area
from 1916 to 1918, there were no recorded instances of reversion to
Christianity among the Islamicized Armenians and Greeks.
Hagop Hachikian has a chapter on the historical geography and present
territorial distribution of the Hemshinli, examining toponyms and
historical sources to ascertain where and when settlements were
established. Interestingly, Hemshinli Armenians settled in areas
around the western Black Sea in various waves of emigration beginning
immediately prior to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Emigration
to this area continued in the period of the Turkish republic, with
Hemshinli usually either settling in separate quarters of villages,
or establishing monoethnic villages. Hemshinli continued to migrate,
with diaspora communities of thousands now existing in Germany and
the United States
Meanwhile, thousands of village names that were found to have
non-Turkish roots were changed by 1959, adding to the changes in names
taken from the start of the twentieth century under the Young Turks.
This eliminated many of the originally Armenian names of the Hemshinli
villages.
Erhan Gursel Ersoy writes about the present-day social and economic
structures of the Hemshin people living in CamlıhemÅ~_in in Rize
province from the perspectives of cultural ecology. Houses are
in the middle of agricultural land, so that villages have no real
center and houses are dispersed over wide expanses. Ersoy looks at
recent attempts at modernization of infrastructure in the region,
including the building of some roads and the advent of telephones and
electricity in the 1980s and 1990s. Emigration of men in the Hemshin
area took place in the early nineteenth century to the Caucasus and
Balkans, as well as to the large Ottoman cities. Within the Republic
of Turkey, this continued in modern times, with Hemshinli owning
a large number of the patisseries and bakeries in large cities and
towns such as Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir, as well as many tea houses,
coffee shops, restaurants, taverns, hotels and cafeteria. Though it is
a patriarchal society, because so many men migrate to the towns, a high
number of women serve as the de facto heads of their households. The
rural extended family structure has been breaking up. Locally most
households still subside on agriculture and the keeping of livestock.
The women do most of the agricultural work and keeping of livestock.
Gulsen Balıkcı examines western Hemshin folk architecture in three
villages of the Rize area. Like many traditional Armenian homes, the
stable for animals is located at the ground floor at the back of the
house. People live on the second floor, and there is a third floor
too. An outdoor toilet is near the stable. Baths are taken either in
the stable or near the oven inside the house. A fountain is built near
the back entrance, and water is brought into the house through a hose.
Food that will be used shortly is hanged in cloth bags from the
ceiling to protect against mice and insects. A number of auxiliary
buildings or structures are placed next to the house. Most important
of these is a raised storage platform on posts called the serender,
in which food was kept for long periods.
Bert Vaux explains that the language of the Armenians of Hamshen
depended on their location. The western Hemshinli living in the
Turkish province of Rize speak Turkish peppered with Armenian words,
while the eastern Hemshinli in the province of Artvin speak a dialect
of Armenian they call Homshetsma. Non-Islamicized Hamshen Armenians
who live in Russia and Georgia speak the same dialect. Homshetsma,
never a written language, developed in isolation. Thus, it preserves
various archaisms, along with developing some idiosyncrasies.
Homshetsma belongs to the Western Armenian family of dialects. Vaux
provides some short texts in eastern and northern Homshetsma dialects
as appendices to his overview. Uwe Bläsing, the author of two
monographs concerning the Hemshin dialect, provides an overview
of the Armenian vocabulary still used by the now Turkish-speaking
western Hemshinli.
Hagop Hachikian examines aspects of the Hemshin identity. Two distinct
Hemshinli identities exist–Rize and Hopa, or west and east, with
both geographical and linguistic separation. Aside from differences
in language, the Hemshinli of Hopa do not use the traditional head
covering of those of Rize. Those in the west still observe a festival
of Armenian pagan origin known as Vartevor or Vartivor (Vartavar in
Armenian–transformed through Christianization into a celebration
of the Transfiguration of Christ) and have a richer repertoire of
traditional dances. Their level of literacy and education is much
higher than that of the east. The Rize Hemshinli, whose members have
achieved high office, thus manage to preserve their distinctiveness
while proclaiming a Turco-Muslim identity. Both branches of the
Hemshinli still have some Armenian-derived family names.
In public, many Hemshinli reject an Armenian origin, and some even
insist they were descended from Turks from Central Asia who founded
the “Gregorian” denomination of Christianity. They are upset by Lazi
and others who call them Armenians.
Erhan Gursel Ersoy in a second chapter also examines aspects of
identity. The western Hemshinli follow a very pragmatic version of
Islam, and still drink alcohol, sing folksongs, and dance in mixed
company. Ersoy looks at the Vartevor festival. Today it is organized
by a committee with a chairman. Money is collected from each household
in the highland pastures to pay a bagpipe player, buy alcohol, and
pay for any other expenses. Drinking, fireworks, and folk dancing are
the main attractions. Ersoy looks at a second festival with Armenian
roots, the Hodoc festival, which takes place during haymaking time,
but is not as widely celebrated as Vartevor. It too includes food,
drink, and folk dancing.
Ildikó Bellér-Hann explores Hemshinli-Lazi relations. The Lazi (Laz
in Turkish), converts to Islam from Christianity during Ottoman times,
live in the same areas as the Hemshinli, and number perhaps around
250,000. They have preserved their Caucasian language, related to
Georgian, orally, and so are bilingual like the eastern Hemshinli.
Lazi and Hemshinli are locally often contrasted with each other. The
Lazi stereotypically are represented as agriculturalists, as opposed
to the pastoralist Hemshinli. The Hemshinli are considered pacificists
and calm, compared to the nervous, hot-blooded, and violent nature
of the Lazi. The Hemshinli is said to be a planner, and the Lazi are
entrepreneurial and ambitious but live for the day. Hemshinli consider
the Lazi mean and inhospitable, and also point out their large noses,
while Lazi complain of the odor and lack of hygiene of the Hemshinli
(a result of work with large numbers of animals).
Intermarriage between the two groups has been limited. Traditionally,
it has been asserted that Hemshinli brides were taken by Lazi men, but
no Lazi women married Hemshinli men. However, statistics from the 1940s
and 1950s, and the late 1980s and early 1990s, belie this pattern.
Rudiger Benninghaus examines the methods and consequences of
the manipulation of etnic origins by both western Hemshinli and
non-Hemshinli, especially Turks. Attempts to prove the Hemshinli
to have Turkish origins fit in with broader historiographical and
linguistic approaches in Turkey, which in the 1930s went to the
extreme of proclaiming that all languages derived from Turkish, and
all civilizations were either Turkish in origin or influenced by the
Turks historically.
Simonian’s volume contains a wealth of information on the Hemshin, but
may be a little difficult for general readers who are not familiar
with Armenian and Turkish history. Part of the problem is due to
the complicated nature of the topic, and part due to the disparate
approaches of chapters common to many multi-author works. There is some
overlap between chapters which perhaps could have been avoided. A
general map of the region would have been useful for readers in
the early part of the volume. It may be hard to keep track of the
different towns that are in the original Hemshin territory, versus
those to which the Hemshin later spread.
Most of the captions of the photographs of manuscripts and bindings
pertaining to Christina Maranci’s chapter have been matched to the
wrong image, forcing readers to guess at the correct ascriptions. An
errata insert would alleviate this problem. Some of the black-and-white
illustrations in other sections of the book appear a bit faint.
Overall, this is an excellent resource book, and it is obvious that
Simonian and the authors have put in much effort to use inaccessible
primary sources in a variety of languages. Hopefully, Simonian’s
second volume will soon appear, and the two volumes in turn will lead
to new monographic studies.
From: A. Papazian