A lifetime of exile in Istanbul

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“Oh doctor!” he said, “Please, quickly save me from this tonsil trouble. Do it swiftly so I can return to my village immediately.”

He had never wanted to leave his village in the first place. If left alone, he wouldn’t have gone to Istanbul for years and wouldn’t have cared at all. Every year from October 15 to April 15, he taught at the village school, and afterward, he would put on his traditional farmer’s outfit —simple shoes and loose white field clothes— and become a full-fledged farmer. He preferred this routine – which gave him more time to write, think, and reflect – over city life. He had managed to harmonize his deep literary curiosity, which he had cultivated at the schools he attended in Istanbul – the Ecole Française, the Getronagan High School, and especially Robert College – with his village life.

Now, he had left his village on the banks of the Euphrates, reached Trabzon, boarded a ship to Istanbul, and, for the first time in seven years, set foot in the capital where he had worked as a baker’s apprentice in the Beşiktaş neighborhood as a child. The journey had taken eleven days; it was November. Just two months earlier, during the Feast of the Cross, his wife, Vogheda, had given birth to a baby boy, whom they named Khacho. His mind was on his village: “I’ll stay no more than two days, I’ll be back in twenty, twenty-five days at most, don’t worry,” he had said when he left.

He cursed the day he had extended his bath in the tiny rock pools called kpcheeg and caught a cold. His tonsils were inflamed. He might have managed elsewhere, but in the regions where he lived, one couldn’t enter winter with inflamed tonsils. If one did, those tiny tonsils would offer no respite, sapping even the strength of the strongest men, confining them to bed.

He was overjoyed when Doctor Oundjouian, whom he visited after seeing advertisements for a “painless tonsil surgery” in the newspapers, told him it was done. It had been easy. He thanked the doctor a thousand times, paid the twenty ghurush surgery fee, and headed out. He was near Bahcekapi, in the vicinity of Sanasarian building. How long could it take to reach harbour at Galata and catch the ferry? He hurried out of the clinic. As he approached the pier, he sped up, running without even apologizing to those he bumped into. He was late. “It’s been twenty-five minutes,” they said, “It’s now somewhere around Buyukdere, up to the Bosphorus. Heading to the Black Sea.”

That twenty-five-minute delay was the reason the man from Armedan found himself stranded in Istanbul on that November day. It was 1914.

Because the next ferry wasn’t for another week, he returned to the shop where his father sold animal feed across the city, in Uskudar. During the days he wandered aimlessly, the criers began to announce the government’s call for mobilization. He was twenty-eight years old and was immediately conscripted. Because he had worked as a baker, he was assigned to distribute bread to the military units on the Asian side of the capital. As he worked tirelessly, his family was always on his mind. News of Armenians being deported from all over Anatolia had begun to spread. After May, he no longer heard from his family, his wife, his grandfather, his mother, and his four children. The waters of the Euphrates, the mountains of Erznga, or perhaps the sands of Der Zor, had swallowed up his entire family.

Hagop Demirdjian, also known as Hagop Mntsouri, lived a long life similar to the long walks he loved, living until 1978. He never left Istanbul, the city he considered a place of exile. He remarried, had more children, and worked as a feed seller, baker, and clerk. He always wrote. Through his books and articles in newspapers, he became one of the most prominent names in 20th-century Armenian literature, vividly portraying the memories of his lost country and its people. For the Armenians who remained in Turkey, it was not possible to talk about the past, the genocide, and the severe traumas experienced. He mourned his lost past, his lost country, his destroyed family, his lost paradise by writing about the places they had lived, and the people of his hometown throughout his life. He only shared what happened to his family towards the end of his life, briefly and quietly:

In April 1915, the deportation of Armenians from Anatolia living in Istanbul began. I was already in the military. In May, no letters came from home. Two telegrams with replies were sent, but there was no response. On the third, it was answered, ‘They are not here, they have been sent to an unknown place.’ My grandfather Melkon was eighty-eight years old. My mother Nanig was fifty-five, my children Nurhan was six, Maranig four, Anahid two, Khacho nine months old, and my wife Vogheda was twenty-nine years old. How did they walk? My grandfather couldn’t even make it to Zvazegh spring. …They kissed the door of their house as if it were a church door and left. If one of your family members died, wouldn’t you die with them? Could you still work? Could you continue with your tasks, inside or outside? I was in the military, under orders. Would they have let me sit? I had to be on the move all day…

I walked so many times from Uskudar, from Selimiye Barracks, to the military bakery at Kavak Pier on the shore, or to our bakery at Devedjioghlu, along the Duvardibi roads of Karacaahmet… Don’t think about yours, push them out of your mind! What did they eat, where did they sleep? Don’t think about it! The fact that I did not die and lived until this September of 1977, I owe this to a ‘twenty-five-minute’, yes, just a twenty-five-minute delay.

In his stories, Mntsouri predominantly depicted daily life before 1915, centered around Armedan (today known as Armutlu in Ilic, Erzincan), portraying Armenians, Kurds, Turks, and Alevis in their natural, unembellished states. His characters are ordinary villagers. Usually, the stories do not focus on prominent figures but rather on humble individuals, sometimes those who have remained on the fringes of society. The characters in the stories are real people whom Mntsouri actually knew. His stories often revolve around the routine tasks of village life and the geography of the region. Sometimes, the geography in his stories is so dominant that the narrative itself becomes a detail, with the setting taking the lead role, as the characters’ understanding of the world is deeply intertwined with the landscape. When it comes to literature, he is incredibly clear about what he does and why:

I presented three things: the village, the days I lived, and chronicles. I mainly presented the village. I conveyed this through tales, village descriptions, and stories. I started with tales. In my village descriptions, I take a panorama from our ancestral home; a hill, a valley, the vineyards, the mountain range, the stream, and I bring it before my eyes as vividly as if I had seen it yesterday; or, say, a summer rain, during the haymaking season, autumn, summer, night, and something that I know very well existed, happened, was done, or was spoken about at that time—a donkey, a tree, a road, a person—I describe them, I take them and work on them. All I want is to present them and revive the memory accurately. These are not photographs. I am within them. In my stories, the village and the villagers again take up a large space. There isn’t only the Armenian villager in these stories; there is also the Turkish, Kurdish, and Kızılbash villager whom I know very well.

In the context of Istanbul Armenian literature, especially after the great destruction experienced during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, he became almost the sole bridge between past and present. His articles were first published in magazines at the beginning of the 20th century, when Krikor Zohrab, Roupen Sevag, Taniel Varoujan, Rupen Zartarian and others, were still alive – all victims, all giants of Armenian literature… His long life enabled him to form friendships and eternal bonds with younger writers such as Mgrdich Margossian, Rober Haddedjian, Zahrad, Zareh Khrakhouni, Onnik Ficician, Vartan Gomikian, and Ikna Sariaslan, and he was revered by all of these figures as if he were a sacred relic, a ‘nshkhar’. He was born in 1886; he really was… Then, when his books were translated into Turkish after his death, they opened doors, this time to Turkish and Kurdish readers, to an unknown, forgotten, and violently destroyed beautiful world.

This great literary craftsman, who recreated through writing the family he lost, the paradise he lost, his homeland, and his village, etched his name in the annals of Armenian literary history in golden letters. On the tombstone of his grave, in Istanbul’s Sisli Armenian cemetery, which I visit at least once every year, it reads, “Writing does not die; writing is immortal.”

May the immortal Hagop Mntsouri live on, through my humble lines as well.