Graves in the Park: Notes from the `Bolis’ Uprising
By Eric Nazarian
June 9, 2013
I haven’t had time to digest what I saw this past week on the heels of
my first journey to the womb of Armenian civilization: Van/Vaspurakan.
Dikranakert. Kharpert, the fabled green villages of Bitlis, and the
hinterlands of Palu and Sakrat. My fellow travelers, now brothers and
sisters for life, trekked across these majestic and cruel roads that
hold many secrets. The stubborn rocks jetting from the earth gave us
anchor. The mud-covered ruins inside the Armenian cemetery in Edremit
in Van, though, put holes in our hearts as we stood before it,
bulldozed and abandoned, next to the fresh asphalt of a curving
street. It was not development. It was erasure. Rest assured that the
bones, now dust, still silently scatter on spirits like us who wander
through these roads seeking ancestral root. Not politics, nor the
millions spent on genocide denial, can change what remains in the
crevices of these stones, where our dead lie buried and anonymous but
never forgotten. Perhaps that is the last defense of a people that has
been erased from its historic cradle – to hold a flame to memory and
preserve what remains of a civilization that flourished once upon a
time in Historic Armenia.
A snapshot from Taksim (iPhone photo by Eric Nazarian)
We had gone in search of our ancestral past and found unbelievable
gifts, including a heartbreaking encounter with the last 98-year-old
Armenian survivor of the genocide in Chunkush. And just days after
these encounters on the road, something happened in Bolis that may or
may not signal a seismic shift in the public awakening and politics of
Turkey. I wish I could be more exact, but it’s a very brittle
transitional phase `over there’; the effects of this uprising have yet
to be defined once the smoke and mirrors clear, and deals start being
negotiated between the powers-that-be and the opposition – saddled with
grievances and proofs of injustice that can surely be stacked as high
as Musa Dagh in the wake of what world news has broadcast this past
week.
I am back in Los Angeles but a part of me is still under the wafting
tear gas clouds that were fired indiscriminately at civilians in
Taksim Square. Protesters, senior citizens, schoolchildren, street
vendors, and tourists were all fair game. Everyone was fodder and none
walked away from these streets unaffected by what they witnessed. On
the heels of returning from the majesty of Historic Armenia, I had
returned to a seemingly business-as-usual Bolis that exploded into a
national movement against the policies of Prime Minister Erdogan and
his administration.
The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
I was there at the Divan Hotel, just off Gezi Park, on the day the
straw broke the camel’s back. The protesters had been kicked out of
the park, and construction fences – stamped with Polis in dark blue – now
cordoned off one of the last patches of green in Istanbul. Behind the
fence were uniformed paramilitary police officers strapped with tear
gas and pepper spray, and giant trucks with water canons where the
turret of a tank would be.
Slowly fumes wafted toward the hotel. Two women dropped from the
smell; even though there was no time to do a Q&A, they were showing
all the signs of asthmatics suffering from asthma attacks no doubt
aggravated by the tear gas. We surrounded the first lady and carried
her in. In a blink, despite the growing number of civilians passing
out by the indiscriminate tear gas, several more projectiles were
fired directly at the crowd. The protesters scattered as a projectile
pounded a well-known investigative journalist, Ahmed Sik, right in the
head. Blood-covered, he was hurried to the hospital.
A simple protest in the park soon went viral and international. The
seeds of the uprising, now spread to cities across Turkey, was sparked
and aggravated by a disregard for civilians by men hired to uphold the
peace. Perhaps we will never know why these protesters were subjected
to such violence. Regardless of what may or may not change the
political dynamics in Turkey, nothing will change the story of the
cook that held claim to this very plot of land now crawling with well
over 200,000 people chanting cries of justice, and expressing rage
against the machine of Erdogan that was slowly eroding their freedoms.
Taksim (iPhone photo by Eric Nazarian)
At the risk of sounding Orientalist, when a friend of mine asked what
Istanbul felt like I could only think of the slabs of meat that in the
U.S. we call shawarma. In Istanbul they call it doner. It’s quite a
sight to behold: a fast-food cook hauling a massive gob of pressed,
ground, and oily chicken or beef, marinated, put on a vertical spit,
and slow roasted. Like the doner slab, Istanbul is nothing if not a
massive mash-up of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman civilizations. At the
center of this historic city stands a park in Taksim, and under it
lies another spicy layer of the city’s labyrinthine history.
The Armenian Cook Who Saved Suleiman’s Life
This story is well known and still often told in Bolis. In the 16th
century, there was a plot to assassinate Suleiman the Magnificent. The
assassins got to the sultan’s cook, an Armenian from Van, with an
offer to kill the sultan. The cook refused, informing Suleiman and
saving his life. For his loyalty, Suleiman asked the cook to choose a
gift, and it would be granted.
The cook asked for land where Armenians could bury their dead. The
sultan officially decreed a sizable plot of real estate in Bolis where
Armenians could build a final resting place for their families. That
real estate became the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which at this
very moment lies buried under the Divan and Intercontinental Hotels
and Gezi Park. In the crowd at Gezi now are Armenians and Turks
standing shoulder-to-shoulder, carrying placards that read, `Nor
Zartonk’ (New Awakening), highlighting through the magic marker that
Gezi was once an Armenian cemetery. A photo posted on Facebook shows a
cardboard grave erected in Gezi with the words Surp Hagop Ermeni
Mezarligi [Armenian Cemetery] 1551-1939. Below it on a yellow sheet
are the English words: `You captured our graveyard, but you can’t
capture our park! Armenians from Turkey NOR ZARTONK.’ This prime
stretch of real estate, which was private Armenian property officially
decreed by Sultan Suleiman, was confiscated in 1939.
Istanbul is ripe with the ironies and cruelties of history. The story
of the cemetery’s confiscation after hundreds of years of existence is
but another example of the forced erasure that my friends and I
witnessed in the ravages of the cemetery in Edremit, overlooking the
timeless Aghtamar Island. In Edremit, there were the weather-beaten
and toppled gravestones. In Taksim, there are the voices of the young
Zartonk Armenians combating oblivion by telling stories, making and
circulating images, and being heard and seen online.
Today in the park stand many different people from all factions of
life who don’t necessarily agree with those who initially stood their
ground to save the park. Will the protesters ever know what’s buried
under Gezi and Divan Hotel? Will it matter to them in the long run?
How will this movement affect Armenian-Turkish relations, and to what
extent when the noise dies down? It’s all too soon to tell.
iPhone Guerrillas
Imagine if Armin Wegner had an iPhone 5 during the Armenian Genocide
that could record video? This past Saturday, we went for a very long
walk on the same boulevard where we saw the pangs of this movement and
the asthmatic woman, whose name, or fate, I probably will never know.
Away from the smoke and chaos, I kept wondering about the questions
that ran through Wegner’s mind when he documented the genocide. The
need to document injustice, atrocity, and the erasure of a cultural
past is also the fundamental role of those who stand on the side of
human rights. In the thick of the parade on the streets, I was
irritated by the sight of vendors selling gas masks and surgical face
masks for the price of an arm, and the newly married couple driving up
and down the street with their video entourage filming as thousands
cheered them on.
My mind wandered back to the soggy graves in Van where we photographed
the abandoned remains of gravestones that will likely not be there the
next time we return. Even if the nameless and faceless powers-that-be
continue to destroy them, any act of resistance we can initiate can
hopefully help preserve that piece of our cultural heritage.
As I watched the wedding entourage cruise through the boulevard where
the late Hrant Dink was murdered, I wrote in my notebook: I want to
not live in fear, come what may. Regardless of landscape or country,
to bear witness to injustice, even if I can’t stop it, is something
worth doing if it can make a lasting difference for the good.
In the morning, the fight was about the park. By late afternoon, it
had spiraled into a conscientious battle for freedom and human rights.
A generation woke up armed with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube against
the guns. The protest continued peacefully for the most part, minus
the jackasses throwing up ugly graffiti on school walls and bus stops.
The well-intentioned protest (to a certain extent) became a bit of a
Mardi Gras-style parade Turkish-style minus the jazz. The boulevard
was peppered with thousands of crushed water bottles, shattered glass,
and youth sipping Tuborg, Efes, or Bomonti beer, mock-saluting Erdogan
in defiance of his ban on the public consumption of alcohol.
En route to Munich, I read a quote in the Lufthansa in-flight magazine
from `Sunshine’ Sonny Payne, an American radio show host, who said of
American blues music, `Real blues should be taken in small sips…it’s
just like learning to drink whisky. Take small sips, or else the blues
will knock you down.’ There are no truer words to describe the feeling
of both bearing witness to the ancient remains of Historic Armenia and
the current political tinderbox in Bolis.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/06/09/graves-in-the-park-notes-from-the-bolis-uprising/