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Recovering Armenia
The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey
By Lerna Ekmekçioglu STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9719-1
CHAPTER 1
THE REBIRTH OF A NATION
In 1921, an untitled and unsigned picture appeared on the cover page of the Deacon's Almanac (Sargavakin Daretsuytse) (Figure 3). The image features a young boy and a girl standing next to each other, ready to defend themselves and their nation. The rock in the image, which represents Mother Armenia (Mayr Hayasdan), is protected by the boy's masculine power, his rifle, and his readiness to die for his homeland and his people. The girl, possibly his sister, embodies "the nation," not only because of her location — on the land — but also because she holds the tricolor flag (red, blue, and orange) that the newly founded Republic of Armenia adopted in 1918. The flag signals the identity of the nation in its distinctiveness and history, depicted here as larger than the girl and the boy, and capable of engulfing them both. These two figures complement each other by dividing the national labor along traditional gendered and familial lines. He is in a soldier's uniform; she wears its counterpart, a Red Cross uniform, attesting to her readiness to come to his aid if he falls wounded. She is the caregiver: a future mother, an apprentice in the service of the nation. The color of their outfits, and the girl's headgear, might even allow this picture to be read — however faintly — as reminiscent of a wedding photo. She is dressed in white and veiled, he is in formal black; she touches him, he holds a firearm at the ready; they are capable of reproducing the nation. Alternatively, the girl, who stands above the boy, can be viewed as a miniaturized mother. The determined mother touches a son to pass on to him courage, knowledge, and memory. Even without going into its subconscious layers, however, we can safely assume that in the year 1921 this illustration was accessible to the Armenian public in a certain way: a nation that had just survived a major attack against its very existence belies defeat by relying on its children, who are ever ready to face the future whatever it might bring.
Like their non-Armenian counterparts, Armenian spokespeople had long understood their nation as one big family and told its story through gendered children's bodies. However, at this immediate post-catastrophe moment marked by high hopes for Armenia's territorial expansion, children and their mothers gained even more important roles, literally and metaphorically. The figure of the child instilled an exceptional sense of temporality. He or she symbolized the past (suffering), the present (unity and self-help), and the future (Greater Armenia), all at the same time. Public figures of all standings made strong, persistent claims that the desired sort of bridging from the past to the future could happen only through surviving children's bodies, memories, emotions, and actions; and that women, as carriers of babies and caregivers of children, family, and thus the nation, had the primary role in bringing about that future.
This emphasis on children was part and parcel of a larger political, social, cultural, and affective repertoire in which the Bolsahay elite processed the damage the Great War did to their group and imagined its recovery. They referred to the era in which they lived with a number of terms that expressed recovery. Usually capitalized, these terms were National Rebirth/Restoration/Revival (Azkayin Veradznunt) and National Reconstitution (Azkayin Verashinum and Azkayin Veraganknum). The ultimate goal of recovery was to bring the Armenian people and resources to their prewar levels and to reclaim the western parts of the Armenian historical homeland. These two legs of the recovery project were seen as the ultimate revenge that the Armenians would exact on "the Turk." Despite multiple internal disagreements on the specifics of how to bring about that recovery and what Greater Armenia should look like, Armenian spokespeople were in basic agreement that the institution of the family was to play a fundamental role in national restoration. Turke had attacked the Armenian family, violated mothers, sisters, and wives, kidnapped daughters and sons, and killed husbands, fathers, and brothers. Therefore, National Rebirth had to start by reconnecting the broken pieces of the nation. Remnants had to find each other and form new families. The new families would reproduce new Armenians, who would then inhabit the soon-to-be-established Mother Armenia. This familial vocabulary and imagery — always necessarily gendered — enabled Armenian leaders to make sense of the recent catastrophe, organize for the care of the survivors, and mobilize hope that Armenians as a nation would survive, even thrive, despite recent attempts to destroy it.
While the body of a minor child symbolized the hope for repair, remembrance, and revenge to the Bolsahay elite, the same bodies had different meanings for a subsection of survivors who had been kidnapped into Muslim households during the war. Some of these women did not want to give birth or mother babies conceived during captivity and as a result of rape by the enemy. Given their disempowered state, however, they frequently had to yield to the demands of the Armenian authorities and relief institutions, which typically approached all children, regardless of their (Muslim) fathers, as the future of the Armenian nation. These reluctant mothers were among the survivors who found their way to the capital in the aftermath of the war and depended on Bolsahay relief societies for their everyday sustenance. They did not write their stories and the mainstream press did not report on them. Their perspectives would have remained completely submerged within the hegemonic narratives had the Bolsahay feminist press not highlighted their existence and had individual feminists not included their darapakhd kuyrer (unfortunate sisters) in their memoirs written years later.
The National Government of Armenians in Constantinople
Soon after the Ottomans' acceptance of defeat with the signing of the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918, Armenian survivors who had been dispersed to Mesopotamia and the Levant began to return. However, given that the Allies did not occupy all Ottoman territories, and because the situation was uncertain and potentially still dangerous for Armenians in unoccupied places, most of the survivors went to French-occupied Cilicia (contemporary southern Turkey) and to Constantinople, which the Allies jointly occupied beginning in November 1918. The Armenian leadership and the press referred to the incoming survivors as darakir or darakryal, meaning exiled or expatriated people, usually translated to English as "deportee." Because the genocidal policy primarily (though by no means exclusively) targeted adult males for killing, women and children composed the majority of the survivors.
From 1919 until 1922, approximately 35,000 deportees entered Constantinople and joined the 120,000 Armenian residents of the city. Bolsahays immediately rushed to help these mostly sick, emaciated, and traumatized people. Because the Ottoman capital had not experienced the war years in the same way as the rest of the empire, its Armenian infrastructure — people, churches, schools, orphanages, charitable institutions, hospitals — had remained more or less intact and ready to be put in the service of the needy. In 1912–1913, the city was home to 42 Armenian parishes, 42 neighborhood elementary schools, 10 secondary schools, and a dozen Catholic and Protestant middle and high schools, with a total enrollment of about 25,000. Bolsahays opened thirteen refugee stations (gayan) to shelter and feed the refugees (Figure 4).
Given their experiences as a semi-autonomously governed millet under the Ottomans, Bolsahays knew how to organize for communal self-help and because of the previous massacres in the provinces (i.e., the 1894–1896 Hamidian massacres and the 1909 Adana pogrom) they knew how to organize for self-help even during such emergencies. Although the Great War had wrought damage on an unprecedented scale, they tried and largely managed to provider deportees with shelter, food, clothing, medical treatment, and when possible reconnected them with surviving family members and/or facilitated their emigration abroad. Some of the deportees left almost immediately for other countries, some became self-sufficient after a short time, some stayed with their relatives in Bolis, and many remained housed in orphanages, hospitals, former barracks, schools, shelter homes, and refugee camps. Western aid organizations such as the British Lord Mayor's Fund, the Swiss-Armenian Society, and most important, the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, commonly known as Near East Relief (NER), also provided relief. Among Armenians, while the initial aid efforts were organized at the neighborhood level, the Armenian patriarchate soon managed to centralize the care that the Bolsahays offered to their less fortunate azkayins, nationals or members of the same nation.
Established in 1461 at the request of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II after his conquest of the city, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople had functioned as the administrative and spiritual center of Ottoman Armenians. The patriarch acted as the liaison between the state and his Armenian congregation, almost all of whom were Apostolic Christians until the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century and in response to conversions and the interference of France and Britain, two separate Armenian millets came into being. While the Ottoman government approved an Armenian Catholic millet in 1830 and one of Armenian Protestants in 1857, the overwhelming majority of Armenians continued to practice Apostolicism. Given this history and the demographic differences, when one talked about "the Armenians" in the Ottoman Empire one meant Apostolic Armenians; qualifiers such as "Armenian Catholics" and "Protestant Armenians" were necessary when one referred to these non-normative populations.
During the mid-nineteenth century, as part of the Ottoman state's Tanzimat (Reorganization) modernization program, each non-Muslim community reformed its internal organization by making it more participatory and democratic. In the process, each millet came up with new rules and regulations pertaining to self-administration and legalized these procedures in a written document that had to be ratified by the Ottoman center. The state approved Armenians' Azkayin Sahmanatrutiun Hayots (National Constitution of Armenians) in 1863. The Armenian constitution instituted a National Assembly (Azkayin Zhoghov) of 140 members made up of elected clerical and laymen. In the coming decades, this National Assembly effectively served as a parliament and was understood by the population as such. In the period under study, the Armenian press called the members of the National Assembly yerespokhan, meaning, parliamentarians or deputies. While the clerical members (20 people) were elected by other Armenian Apostolic clergy in Constantinople, the lay members (120 people) were elected by popular (male) vote. The assembly's various duties included the election of the patriarch, who served as the head of the assembly. The assembly also appointed the members of the commissions that dealt with specific issues related to the everyday lives of Ottoman Armenians both as individuals and as a community. These commissions were responsible for finances, education, personal status law, endowments, hospitals, and church buildings, and so on. Ottoman Armenians referred to this whole system as their National Government (Azkayin Ishkhanutiun) or National Administration (Azkayin Varchutiun).
During World War I the Ottoman government exiled the Armenian patriarch, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, to Mosul and ordered the patriarchate closed. The National Assembly, which traditionally convened in the patriarchate building, ceased functioning. The patriarchate reopened only after the war. In February 1919 the patriarch returned to office and the National Assembly resumed its work but with a reduced number. Many of its former members, especially representatives from the provinces (kavar), had fallen victim to the genocide. For the first time in its history, the Armenian patriarchate and the National Assembly unilaterally cut their ties with the Ottoman government. Relying on the Allies' support, the patriarchate openly condemned the government for the massacres during the war. In Allied-occupied Constantinople, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, the ultimate head of the Ottoman Armenian community, cooperated with occupying forces and worked for the partitioning of the Ottoman territories out of which he hoped a new and free Armenia would be born. This post-genocide moment of crisis and the necessity to present a united front in the struggle for the establishment of Greater Armenia led to another unprecedented development. The patriarchate of the Apostolic Armenians together with the All-Armenian Catholic patriarch and the leader of the Armenian Protestant community formed an All-Armenian Assembly (Hamazkayin or Hamahaygagan Zhoghov) and cooperated in finding solutions to the problems that beset all Armenians regardless of their religious affiliation.
One of the first steps taken by the reestablished National Assembly was to command the establishment of an umbrella organization to respond to the refugee crisis. The ensuing Armenian National Relief Organization (Hay Azkayin Khnamadarutiun) was run by twelve members, four from each Armenian millet. Like almost all other Armenian initiatives at this time, the Relief Organization remained an all-inclusive endeavor extending its help to Apostolic, Protestant, and Catholic Armenians alike. In his memoirs, the chairman of the society explained this unity simply by saying that "since the Turk massacred all Armenians without distinction," acting together was essential.
Initially the budget for the Relief Organization was drawn from wealthy donors, but in September 1919 the National Assembly's Civil Council (Kaghakagan Zhoghov) decided to standardize fundraising and share the burden of the relief work with the whole community. Every Armenian, male or female, with a source of income was to pay a new monthly tax. The revenue from the new tax would be used for two purposes: to care for orphans and deportees, and to fund the patriarchate's political and diplomatic efforts among the Allied powers in Constantinople and in Europe. That the new tax was called a Fatherland Tax (Hayreniki Durke) was indicative of how the postwar Armenian leadership understood the terms of their nation's recovery. Rehabilitation of the survivors and the reclamation of territory constituted the two halves of the same project of National Rebirth.
Survival of the Weakest
While the Fatherland Tax created a fund for the care of the deportees, resources never sufficed to meet the demand. Although deportees as a general category received attention, the Bolsahay organizations, press, and the leadership paid the most attention to the care of the orphans. It is not clear what the age limit was for being categorized as an "orphan" (vorp). My reading of the institutional reports, periodicals, and memoirs suggests that unmarried girls and boys, regardless of their age, were considered orphans if they had lost one parent, usually the father, and if they had no male relative on whom to depend. Often women without a male relative were also considered orphans. Armenians have a term for such women: vorpevayri, meaning "orphan and widow." Orphanhood and the disintegration of the known family structure were closely related. To a certain extent, orphanhood meant an absence of the support of a family on whom one depended for everything before the catastrophe.
Armenian orphanages in Constantinople in the immediate aftermath of the war housed about 4,000 orphans. To encourage people to donate money to orphan care and volunteer their labor and time, periodicals frequently reprinted before-and-after photos of orphans. A typical example appeared in the 1922 issue of the famed intellectual Teotig's Amenun Daretsuytse (Everyone's Almanac). Two photos show the same group of orphans at different times. In the first photo, the children look miserable, angry, and sad. Lacking shoes, wearing rags and unattractive outfits, they shiver in the cold. In the second photo, captioned "The same orphans after they have been saved by our efforts," the children have hats and decent, clean clothing, and they look confident.
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Excerpted from Recovering Armenia by Lerna Ekmekçioglu. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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