Agos, the Armenian bilingual weekly newspaper based in Istanbul, on the occasion of the 99th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, published a series of letters written by well-known Armenians addressed to the Turkish people.
“Now I know that blood and water flow together in the rivers of life, that grief knows no race and religion.” On the occasion of the 99th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Avedis Hadjian writes a moving letter to the Turkish people.From an unknown past to an unknown future, east and west of AraratBedros Boyadji Hadjian was the oldest ancestor I know about. He was my great grandfather on my father’s side, who worked as a dyer on the marketplace in Kilis, near what is now the border with Syria. He was murdered in the Great Massacre of 1896 and his body was thrown at the doorstep of his house. At the moment, his wife was either pregnant or giving birth to my grandfather, Avedis. When I was a child, my father had told me they had murdered him with an axe, making the sign of the cross on his forehead.We owe him our surname. He had made a pilgrimage to the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, after which he was known as Hadji, or “pilgrim”. Men who believe name determines fate could perhaps make a case that our family was predestined to a wandering life, were it not for the millions of Armenians with an infinity of names who have been traversing the globe in search of a home, with the ingrained hope – that is souring and rotting within us – somewhere in our minds and souls that we need to return home, knowing all too well that the home beckoning us no longer exists.Bedros Hadji’s son Avedis – my grandfather – was raised by his paternal uncle in Kilis. In 1909, he was a seminary student at the Cilicia Catholicosate in Sis, when the Church dismissed all the seminarists and sent them home. Avedis would not stay long at home. His uncle thought it safe to send him away, so Avedis and his older brother, Alexander or Iskender, sailed off to Egypt – whether Alexandria or Cairo we do not know – and opened a coffee store. Avedis and Alexander went to Aleppo in 1919 or 1920, got married and returned to Kilis during the brief interlude of the French protectorate of Cilicia. Alexander and his wife, whom we know by the name of Gelin Baci, did not have children. Avedis and my grandmother, Azniv, had eight children, three of whom died in their infancy. Azniv was from Hromkla, near Urfa, an ancient city where 12thcentury Armenian miniaturist Toros Roslin.Azniv, the wife of Avedis, was six or seven when they were deported in 1915. Before that, she went to school in Hromkla, bringing a cushion with her from home to school to take classes every day. She lost her mother in the desert along with a baby sister. We don’t know what happened to her father but we can make an educated guess. She said she was put on a train with a loaf of bread. A German cavalry officer reprimanded the Turkish gendarmes for mistreating their caravan. I remember her telling me she ate orange skins. At some point they made the long walk to Aleppo across the desert. She scavenged for food in the garbage. At some point she and an older sister got separated from their brother, Garabed, whom they would not find until 1970, when he had already settled in Marseille, France.
Garabed has written his memoirs, now in my posession, locked away at a safety box in New York. He was around 10 or 11 at the time of the Genocide. He remembers arriving at the Karasun Mangants Church in Aleppo. The corpses of Armenians who died from hunger and diseases were piling up every day outside the church and would be carted away. He then went off to Armenia when it became independent in 1918 along with other surviving children, and tried to enlist with the army but they were turned down, and he made his way to Greece and after that to France.As the French withdrew from Cilicia under the cover of night after turning it to Turkey in 1921, Avedis and Alexander, along with their families, settled in Jerablus, or Karkemish right across the border. My father Bedros was born and raised there, where Avedis and Alexander had a coffee store where they served hot milk in the morning and a woman came to dance for the patrons, in the telling of my aunt Eugenie. Then, in the mid-1940s, fortunes soured, the brothers had to shut down the business, and moved to Aleppo. My grandfather started to sell cakes with a little cart in the streets outside Armenian schools. A little before his death, Avedis was attempting to go to Armenia as part of the ill-fated repatriation sponsored by the Soviet Union in 1946, which attracted a lot of credulous and naïve Armenians to a life of hell in a homeland that was and was not home, east of Ararat. But my grandfather was blacklisted by the repatriation committee in Aleppo because of my father’s militancy in the Dashnak party.Contrary to Avedis, my father would never want to live under a Soviet regime. He dreamed off a free and independent Armenia, a dream that became possible as the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And he saw the tricolor flying of Armenia in the east of the Ararat. He never saw, however, the other side of his homeland to the west. In 1970 life had taken him to Argentina, in a faraway and alien South America. He never left Armenia or Aleppo; he had only ceased to exist in there. But he recreated these places in his books and in his classes at schools. As I write this, I’m travelling in Eastern Ukraine in a pilgrimage without maps. Ukraine is a land that has seen horrible amounts of bloodshed and pain as everywhere else in this world. We all now know this, as Turks and Kurds know the truth about the Genocide. Those who do not want to see it or do not care about it. Yet now I know that blood and water flow together in the rivers of life, that grief knows no race and religion. In the lines of Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, “I knew our immense pain was the same.” We – Armenians, Turks, Kurds and everyone on that land – share the trees, the animals and the mountains that know no ideas nor flags. These are common in our home, our history and our immense pain.
