Time to consider the hidden Armenians of Turkey
by Raffi Bedrosyan
Published: Friday May 24, 2013
Family members of Abp. Aram Atesyan reclaimed their Armenian identities
just several years ago. Photo via Hurriyet newspaper
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During the endless Turkish arguments and Armenian and international
counter-arguments about the number of massacred Armenians in 1915, Hrant
Dink would repeatedly remind both sides about a more critical topic: `We
keep talking about the gone dead, let’s start talking about the remaining
living…’
The remaining living meant the unknown number of Armenians remaining in
Anatolia, remaining not as Armenians, but as Turks, Kurds, Alewis, Moslems,
and other identities. Ninety eight years after the attempted destruction of
a nation, it is time to talk more about the hidden Armenians, mostly
orphans of 1915 assimilated into identities other than their own
Armenianness.
Hrant had the courage to reveal the real identity of one of the most
well-known Turkish heroes as an Armenian orphan. Sabiha Gokcen, the first
female military pilot and Ataturk’s adopted daughter, was in reality Hatun
Sebilciyan, an Armenian girl orphaned in Bursa in 1915. We all know that
this revelation was the beginning of the end for Hrant, triggering a
massive hate and threat campaign against him by the government, the
military and the media, resulting in his assassination three years later.
But Sebilciyan/Gokcen was only one of tens of thousands of Armenian girls
and boys torn away from their parents during the 1915 events. What happened
to these orphans? How many were there? This article will cite some examples
from different parts of Anatolia.
The horrors of Trabzon
It is a well-documented fact that during the deportation of the Armenian
population from all corners of Anatolia to the Syrian desert, as the
convoys approached their towns or villages, local Turks and Kurds snatched
Armenian children from their parents to take them home as servants or
wives. Many children were sold as slaves by them or the gendarmes escorting
the convoys. There were also a few children entrusted by their parents to
Kurdish and Turkish neighbours before starting on the deportation route.
There were some children initially rescued by European or American
missionaries or Pontian Greek religious leaders, but inevitably they were
also later seized and sent away or murdered.
We can cite one of many documented tragic incidents in Trabzon, where 600
Armenian orphan children were taken to the Greek monastery with the
government’s permission after their parents were massacred by drowning in
the Black Sea. But after three months, by the order of the Trabzon governor
Jemal Azmi, the police forcefully removed the orphans from the monastery
and handed them over to a Turkish boat captain, Rahman Bayraktaroglu, who
placed each child in a flour sack, securely tied the top and dropped them
one by one into the Black Sea. It is documented Governor Jemal later joked
saying that: ‘Harvest of smelt (hamsi) will be plentiful this season with
all the drowned as fish feed’.
But as I said previously, the focus of this article will not be the
hundreds of thousands murdered orphans in 1915, but instead, the surviving
orphans, who were perhaps subjected to much worse suffering than the
murdered victims.
Since I already mentioned the Trabzon Governor Djemal Azmi, I will continue
citing his dealings with the surviving orphans. He selected about 450 of
the best looking girls from the Armenian community of Trabzon, and
converted the local Red Crescent Hospital to a whorehouse for the selected
Turkish elite and visiting dignitaries, even sending some of the girls as
treats to his superiors in Istanbul.
The supply of the orphans got replenished as needed. He kept a supply of 15
Armenian girls for himself but also gave one to his 14 year old son, Ekmel,
as a present. Most of the girls were forcefully Islamicized; few eventually
escaped or committed suicide.
A Turkification program
These experiences came to light from witnesses during the trials of the
Ittihat Terakki leaders after the war, but also were told in 1921 by Djemal
Azmi’s son himself to his close friend, alias Mehmet Ali, who happened to
be an Armenian named Hratch Papazian, disguised and even circumcised as a
Moslem. Papazian succeeded in infiltrating the Ittihad Terakki circles
hiding in Berlin, in preparation for assassination of Djemal Azmi and
Bahattin Shakir, head of the Special Organization (Teskilat-i Mahsusa), on
April 17, 1922, right in front of the bewildered widow of Talat Pasha, a
year after Talat himself was brought to justice.
The Ittihat Terakki government had special plans for the surviving orphans.
In an organized operation, most of the surviving orphans were rounded up
and sent to orphanages set up in multiple locations, with the objective of
converting them to Islam and to be assimilated as Turks.
One of these special Turkification orphanages was in Ayn Tura, near Zouk,
an hour’s drive from Beirut in Lebanon, where 1000 Armenian orphans were
kept, etween the ages 3 to 15. By the orders of Djemal Pasha, governor of
Syria and Lebanon, and under the supervision of Turkish intellectuals and
teachers, including the newly appointed principal, well known Turkish
novelist Halide Edip Adivar, these orphans were converted to Islam and
Turkified. The boys were circumcised, and were given Turkish names, but
preserving the initials of their Armenian names and surnames, so that
Haroutiun Najarian became Hamid Nazim, Boghos Merdanian became Bekim
Muhammed, Sarkis Sarafian became Saffet Suleyman.
The orphanage was converted from a Christian school after expelling the
Lazarist Catholic priests. While famine prevailed everywhere in Lebanon and
Syria during the war, abundant food was provided to the orphanage, with the
objective of raising well fed and healthy newly Turkified children.
Based on the memoirs of one of the orphans, Harutiun Alboyajian, the
children were expected to speak Turkish only; if the supervisors heard any
Armenian spoken, the boys would be beaten severely. They were dressed as
Turkish children and were taught Islam. It was Djemal Pasha’s firm belief
that the Armenians had superior intellect and capabilities, which would
help the Turkish nation immensely through the Turkification of thousands of
Armenian children. Despite efforts to keep the orphanage sanitized, about
300 Armenian orphans died from leprosy and other diseases until 1918. Some
of the orphans were placed with Moslem families in towns where there were
no Armenians left, and some were distributed to other orphanages. At the
end of the war, when Near East Relief took over the orphanage, there were
670 orphans, 470 boys and 200 girls, who still remembered their Armenian
names.
Another example of Turkification experiment was in Eastern Anatolia,
successfully implemented by Eastern Front commander Kazim Karabekir. He
estimated that there were about 50,000 desperate orphans after the war in
his regional area of operations. It is documented that about 30,000 of them
were circumcised and Turkified. He rounded up about 6,000 Armenian children
in Erzurum, 2,000 girls and 4,000 boys, and placed them in an army camp.
Some were given training similar to a military school; others were taught
trades essential for army supplies such as sewing and boot-making. These
orphans had become completely Turkified and named ‘The Healthy Children
Army’.
The real talented ones among these boys were later sent to higher military
academies in Bursa and Istanbul. Without going into the psychology of the
assimilation and conversions, it is alleged that these converted military
officers became the most fanatical ultra-nationalists in the Turkish army,
with some of them participating in the May 1960 military coup which toppled
the civilian government of Adnan Menderes.
20th century slaves
Apart from the orphanages, tens of thousands of young girls and boys became
slaves after 1915, bought and sold in bazaars and markets. Although slavery
was officially abolished in the Ottoman Empire in 1909, slavery markets
re-opened after 1915 in order to trade Armenian women and children.
Kidnapping Armenian children from the deportation convoys not only supplied
the Turks and Kurds with servants, free labour or sex objects in their own
homes, but also a marketable commodity that could be sold for profit in
these markets. The markets were set up in Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Cizre, Urfa
and Mardin. It is reported that the Mardin market had the lowest prices.
After being branded and tattooed as a slave, Armenian children aged 5-7
found buyers for 20 cents, similar to the price of a lamb. Girls or boys
aged 14-15 went for 50 cents, whereas an adult Christian woman was worth
about one Turkish lira. But if the slave came from a well-known wealthy
family, the price went up significantly, as owning the slave could also
bring the future potential of claiming the wealth of the slave’s family.
There are several documented cases from the later Turkish republic era when
Kurdish and Turkish families attempted to legalize the ownership of many
real estate properties, previously owned by their ‘wives’ or ‘daughters’.
Needless to say, all these wives and daughters were forcefully Islamicized
and Turkified.
There are also documented cases when kind-hearted Assyrian priests or
European or American missionaries purchased several Armenian children from
these markets, with the objective of rescuing them by placing into
Christian orphanages.
Assyrian Archbishop Tappuni of Mardin purchased and saved nearly 2000
Armenian children in 1916. While some Moslems treated the Armenian slaves
humanely, most owners savagely beat them, as they believed ‘Christians only
deserve beatings’. The women and girls ended up being second wives for the
Moslem owners, who received harsh treatment not only from their husbands
but also from the other Moslem wives of their husbands. But eventually they
all got absorbed into the Moslem households, bearing children, learning the
Quran, praying piously as Moslem women, however always hiding their
Armenian roots.
According to a post-war report of the League of Nations Rescue Commission
for Armenian Women and Children, at least 30,000 Armenian girls were sold
in the markets to be placed in the ‘harems’ of Moslem homes, or to be used
as slave labour. Documented histories of some 2,000 Armenian girls, boys
and young women rescued from Turkish and Kurdish households after the war
are archived in the League of Nations offices in Geneva. Rescuing the
Armenian orphans became one of the first tasks of the League of Nations
after the armistice in 1918.
Following pleas of the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate, the Allied Forces
and the League of Nations representatives organized the transfer of most
Armenian orphans from Anatolia and Syria to Istanbul, and started searches
of Armenian orphans kept in Moslem homes. As there was no room to place all
the orphans in existing orphanages in Istanbul, several schools were used
to house the Armenian children, including the French Notre Dame de Sion, St
Joseph, the Italian school, the Russian monastery, and Turkish Kuleli
Military Academy.
As some of the orphans were circumcised and already had Turkish names,
there started heated discussions between the Armenian Patriarchate and the
government authorities as to the real identity of the children. In fact,
some of the orphans were already transferred to Turkish homes in Istanbul
as maids and servants; among them, 50 orphans sent to the farm of Ittihad
Terakki leader Enver Pasha. The children were conditioned and intimidated
not to speak Armenian, nor to reveal their Armenian identities during the
war years. They were ‘observed’ by neutral third party experts to determine
whether they were really Armenian or not. Documents show that between 1920
to 1922 there were about 3,800 Armenian children brought to Istanbul, 3,000
sent to Cyprus, 15,600 taken to Greece, and 12,000 transferred to Syria
from Marash, Urfa, Antep, Malatya and Harput. Significantly, the Istanbul
Patriarchate records indicated that there were still at least 63,000
Armenian orphans documented as ‘Not Rescued’ in Moslem Turkish and Kurdish
households.
Two million hidden Armenians?
In recent years, genocide scholars have stated that genocide perpetrators
not only aim at the ‘destruction’ of the oppressed group but also the
‘construction’ of the oppressor group. The 1915 events and the consequences
clearly show that the Armenian orphans became a source of pro-creation for
the Turkish nation by enriching their genetic pool. There are now tens of
thousands of Turkish and Kurdish families, with a hidden Armenian
grandmother.
It is remarkable that, even ninety eight years after attempts of forced
Turkification, assimilation and conversion, there are signs of hidden
Armenian identity in various places in Anatolia starting to emerge. There
is a somewhat graphic term defining these people in Turkey – ‘remnants of
the sword’ (kilic artigi).
Hrant Dink’s lawyer Fethiye Cetin’s life story in her book ‘My
Grandmother’, Aysegul Altinay and Fethiye Cetin’s book ‘The Grandchildren’,
and many other books, documentaries, movies have come out in recent years,
describing the existence and emergence of the hidden Armenians in Turkey,
carried from one generation to the next, all originating from the 1915
Armenian orphans.
It is of course very difficult to estimate the number of hidden Armenians
in Turkey today. One can assume that perhaps up to 100,000 Armenian orphans
survived but got Turkified, converted and assimilated. Scholars estimate
another 200,000 adult Armenians avoided deportation in various Anatolian
villages by converting to Islam. It is therefore conceivable that 300,000
Armenian souls survived the 1915 events. The population of Turkey increased
seven fold since then. Using the same multiple, one can extrapolate that
there may exist 2 million people with Armenian roots in Turkey today.
In closing, I would like to share one of my own personal experiences with a
hidden Armenian, albeit indirectly. When I was in Armenia in 1995 as a
voluntary engineer inspecting Hayastan All Armenian Fund financed
construction projects, I also visited Spitak where the church destroyed in
the 1988 earthquake was being rebuilt. I was informed that the financing
came from Turkey from a still confidential unidentified donor, as specified
in the will of a grandmother of a very wealthy Turkish family, who had only
revealed her Armenian roots at her deathbed.
In recent years and especially after the reconstruction of the Surp Giragos
Armenian Church in Diyarbakir, there has been a resurgence of the hidden
Armenians in revealing their identities. It is hoped that the Turkish
government sees this as a positive consequence of the recent steps of
liberalization and not as a threat, and eventually finds the courage to
face its past.
*Selected Sources:*
Sait Cetinoglu, ‘1915 Soykirim Surecinde Ermeni Gen Havuzuna El Konmasi ve
Seks Koleligi’ (The Capture of the Armenian Genetic Pool and Sex Slavery
During the 1915 Genocide), Seyfo Center, 09.04.2013
Ayse Hur, ‘1915ten 2007ye Ermeni Yetimleri’ (Armenian Orphans from 1915 to
2007), Radikal, 20.01.2013
Eren Keskin, ‘Soykirimin Ortaklari’ (Partners in Genocide), Ozgur Gundem,
22.01.2013
Ruben Melkonyan, ‘Attitude of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul Towards
the issue of the Forcibly Islamicized Armenians’, Noravank Foundation,
09.03.2010
Ruben Melkonyan, ‘The Islamization of Armenian children at the period of
the Armenian genocide’, Miacum,11.08.2007
Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide
Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927′ , American
Historical Review, December 2010
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