Keghi: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
By Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill
The Armenian Weekly
September 30, 2006
Ever since I was a child, I had heard about Garin from my mother: the
Russian cannons bombarding in the distance; my grandfather pounding his
brass and copper vessels; my pious grandmother stirring the congregation of
Sourp Astvatsatsin with her ethereal voice. But it was Keghi that had fired
my imagination: my father mesmerizing us with stories of village life,
slapping his knee, clapping his hands and triumphantly exclaiming, "Hassoin
hashiva makrivav," as he described how he and his friends chased off the
Kurdish bandit Haso and his gang of cut-throat sheep thieves. My father told
us about the fragility of life in Keghi at the hands of outlaws, tribal
warlords and corrupt government officials, and the valiant efforts of
Armenian villagers to defend their families and their properties. And
always, the life-giving mountains figured in his stories: the waters gushing
from the mountainsides in spring and the high verdant pastures offering
sustenance to the villagers’ sheep in summer.
I had long hoped to visit these places, to throw a kiss to the mountains
that had formed so much of my childhood lore, and to shed a tear in the Kyle
River as its waters rushed to replenish the great Euphrates. So in 2004, my
husband and I embarked on a pilgrimage to Garin, my mother’s birthplace,
and to Jerman village in Keghi, my father’s birthplace. Luckily they are
not far apart, as Keghi is a county in the Garin province.
We traveled to Garin first and found it a relatively modern industrial city
with paved roads, automobiles, public transit, busy streets, billboard
signs, apartment dwellings, factories, pollution-all the hustle and bustle
of modern urban life.
By contrast, Keghi was still shambling along in the early 20th century.
Here, time had all but stood still since my father had left his beloved
mountains for Canada in 1912 as a migrant worker to earn money to improve
his family’s properties in Jerman.
Today, Keghi is still a rural place, strewn with many villages and one
small-very small-town, the county capital of Keghi-Kasaba (Kgi). The
principal economic base of the region is still agriculture-primitive
agriculture at that. Peasants still live in stone and mud-brick hovels, farm
small plots of land, and care for their goats. As in the days of the
Armenians, there is some business activity in a few of the bigger villages:
small coffee shops, little stores selling food, tobacco, clothing and
hardware supplies, and a few shoemakers, barbers, lawyers, doctors, and some
schools. But we saw no major industry, no tractors or harvesters. And
everywhere we went, our van caused a big commotion-a novelty among the
local inhabitants.
We also observed anachronisms in this glorious Shangri-la. A massive dam
spanning the Kyle or Wolf River (now the Peri Su) that cuts through Keghi
has brought a stroke of modernity to this slow-moving part of the world.
Here, a man harvested his grain with a scythe, then stopped to telephone his
son on his cell phone. There, women baked bread in a tonir, dug into the
open earth, next to a house with an indoor toilet, running water and a TV.
People drove automobiles and trucks on roads that were still mostly dirt and
gravel, still dangerous and often impassable with potholes and bumps at
every twist and turn. The area seemed in transition-somewhat
disjointed-perhaps struggling to retain its old ways and customs, and
stepping ever so carefully into the modern era. A place, I thought, that was
suspicious of innovation and change.
Since my teenage years, I have been proud of my mountain stock; and like my
ancestors, I have valued my independence. As if to prove a point, I used to
sing the Dalvorig song, to my father’s unmistakable delight and my
mother’s feigned disapproval. When I finally saw the awesome mountains of
Keghi, a supernatural force seemed to take hold of me. My spirits soared to
the summits. I wanted to embrace the mountains.
Since ancient times, an aura of sanctity has hung over the mountain of Sourp
Luis ("St. Light"). When I saw the mountain, etched against a cloudless
blue sky, I felt that its rocks were part of me and that I was part of the
mountain. As if aware of my turbulent emotions, the mountain thundered in
response: "Come to me and I will shelter you and give you peace. Use my
stones to rebuild your churches and monasteries in my lofty heights and I
will defend them against your enemies. As steadfast as I stand here, so
steadfast will be your resistance to tyranny and murder."
For centuries, the mountains of Keghi protected the Armenians: the Bingol
Mountains to the east, the Der Sim to the West, and the Sheitan mountains to
the north. The Sheitans hid the villages from the lame but wily destroyer,
Tamerlane (Lengtemur), and for that reason, the villages of Jerman,
Melikan, Shen, Amarij and Arins are known as andress, or unseen. But
Tamerlane ravaged and pillaged the rest of Keghi, looting, burning,
killing. The Persian Shah Abbas II also wreaked his vengeance on the area.
Villagers fled to the Der Sim Mountains. Here they remained until reason and
calm ruled the land once again. Then they descended to the valley below and
reconstructed their villages and repaired their churches.
According to Keghi legend, Der Sim was named after the Armenian priest Der
Simon. The Kurds of Der Sim, so the story goes, invited two Armenian
builders to construct houses for them. During their work, the Armenians
discovered a gravestone marked "Der Simon, Vartabed." Immediately the
Armenians asked the Kurds for the precious stone, saying it should be placed
in the St. Kevork church in the village of Hertif. The Kurds, however,
refused, on the grounds that in times past, they too were Armenians and had
escaped to the mountains during the Arab invasions. Der Simon, they
emphasized, had been loved by all the inhabitants.
The language of the Der Simtsis was a mixture of Armenian and Kurdish, and
their religion combined Christianity and Islam. During the Genocide, these
same mountain clans helped Armenians find refuge in the Der Sim Mountains,
safe from Turkish rampage.
As we drove along the main Keghi road, I gazed at the Peri Su and marveled
at its beauty. All the while, another vision kept haunting me-the same
river almost 100 years ago. Was it here that my father’s first wife,
running away from a Kurdish pursuer, panic-stricken, threw her young self
into the raging water? Was it there that my aunt’s mother, bereft at the
murder of her husband and brother, tried to drown herself and her four young
children? Their screams and those of their terrified people surely rose up
to the mountain tops and the mountains, outraged, and echoed their cries
over and over and over again. It is eerie how stories from our past lurch
forth, and how, unsummoned, they jostle to the front of our forehead and
stand firmly next to our own djagadakeer [destiny].
Along our way, we visited many villages. We were hospitably received by the
Kurds who now dominate the region. They offered us tan and madzoon, tea,
bread, and even Keghetsi beorag. In village after village, we saw ruined
churches and monasteries. Some had been converted to mosques; others,
partially standing, served as stables or garbage dumps. Still others were
totally laid waste, their stones littered about as if being reclaimed by the
mountains.
Some stones were reused for other buildings. Where the lovely St. Giragos
monastery once stood, we found only rubble, overgrown with weeds. The abbey
had been pillaged in the 1890s and much of its lands confiscated. The year
1915 saw the completion of the plunder. As I looked at the stones of the
nearby house, I noticed one with a number of crosses carved in it by
pilgrims. How much faith and devotion had gone into that stone! How many
sharagans and prayers it had heard! How much joy and pain, how much laughter
and tears it had witnessed over the centuries! I comforted myself by saying
that at least this stone had not been shattered by Turkish artillery nor
defaced by a wild, angry mob. At least it still remained as evidence of my
father’s world. So intensely was I staring at the stone that the little
crosses seemed to turn into tears. The stone was weeping. "I am still
here," it sobbed, "All alone, forsaken. When will you return to restore me
to my rightful place in your sanctuary?" With tears welling, I said a
little prayer and slipped away carrying with me the spirit of the stone.
Keghi seemed peaceful enough. Men farmed, goatherds tended their flock,
women sewed their vermags [blankets], washed their laundry in the mountain
springs. All seemed idyllic in this radiant valley. All appeared
normal-normal as in the past, for if we stripped away the layers we would
find a region still marked by violence, insecurity and fear. Here, the
military is everywhere, keeping constant vigilance on travelers and on the
Kurdish population. Were Kurdish insurgents roaming the mountains, carrying
on their clandestine struggle for autonomy? Did the peasants own the land
they so assiduously tilled or were they sharecroppers exploited by large
absentee landlords? What was the relationship between these rural settlers
and their husbands and fathers working in western European cities? Would the
Turkish government deport these villagers as it had done with the Der
Simtsis, or destroy them as it had tried to do with the Armenians?
As we waved goodbye to the children of Jerman, renamed Yedisu, who had
gathered to see us off, devouring the chocolates and clutching the little
toys we had given them, I felt neither disheartened nor depressed. I was
thinking only of history. I recalled the many old churches, abbeys, castles
and medieval towns I had visited in Europe, and thought how wonderful it was
that 10th and 11th century structures were still standing. But if we read
their history, every single one of them has been destroyed or decayed and
rebuilt again and again. Caen in Normandy, for example, the seat of William
the Conqueror, suffered during the Hundred Years War and again during the
wars of religion, when the Huguenots went so far as to scatter William’s
old bones to the winds. The city was again ravaged during the French
Revolution and yet again during World War II when Allied bombs leveled 85
percent of the city. Each time, Caen has been resurrected and today it
stands resplendent, worthy of the powerful conqueror and his prestigious
queen.
I thought of how the Republic of Armenia is conserving and renovating a
precious heritage. And I thought of the current political and religious
conditions that thwart all efforts at restoration and preservation in our
ancient homeland in present-day Turkey. But, if anything, history reveals,
time and time again, that regimes change, priorities change, empires rise
and fall.
How many times have Armenians been driven from their homeland and how many
times have they returned? How many times have they reconstructed their
castles and their fortresses, restored their churches and monasteries and
made them even more beautiful than before? Some day, the stones will find
their rightful place in St. Giragos, Aghtamar and Ani. Once again the
villages and towns will repossess their Armenian names. Once again Sourp
Luis will stand as the sacred symbol of Keghi. And once again the mountains
will yield their stones to build our sanctuaries, which will rise like peaks
to the heavens, extensions of the mountains themselves.
–Boundary_(ID_49r6ZFFP3UAZa9bSAYfZhQ )–
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