Sarkis Seropyan (Photo: Today's Zaman)
26 May 2013 /SEVGI AKARÇEŞME, İSTANBUL
Sarkis Seropyan, an Armenian citizen of Turkey who was born in İstanbul in 1935, told Sunday’s Zaman about what he called the “exile” stories of 1915.
Although he has family members on both his mother and father’s sides who have “tehcir” (the forced migration of Armenians in 1915 within the Ottoman Empire during World War I) stories, his maternal grandmother’s story stands out as the most painful one.
“My grandmother used to call it exile when she told us about 1915,” states Seropyan, who says that he does not like the term “genocide.” His maternal grandmother, Zaruhi, was one of many daughters of a well-off family from İstanbul.
Her father enjoyed his “rakı table” and listened to the gramophone every night on the balcony of his house overlooking the Golden Horn while his daughters served him as in any traditional family in Turkey.
When a military doctor from İzmit, Paronak Avedisyan, wanted to marry Zaruhi at the age of 15, the family agreed since a son-in-law who is a doctor has always been desirable for families, although the groom was 31 years old. Zaruhi was born in 1884, got married in 1899 and gave birth to her first child, a son, just a year later.
Sarkis’s mother was born in 1908. The family was first posted to Akçaabat on the Black Sea and then to Gümüşhane, where they first encountered the events of 1915. The military doctor, who had a soldier assigned to assist him because of his rank in the military, worked for the Ottoman army and had friendly relations with the bureaucrats in town.
One day, in 1915, he was called to duty to treat a patient and, two days later, Zaruhi was told that her husband had been slaughtered and thrown into a creek at the exit of the city. Zaruhi told her grandchildren later that she knew who gave the order for the murder of her husband: the mutasarrıf (local governor), who was later executed for involvement in a plan to assassinate Atatürk.
A couple of months after Paronak’s murder, the Armenians in town were forced into exile on foot when the Ottomans declared martial law. “My grandmother was only 31 and alone with 4 kids, the youngest of whom was only an infant who was carried by the older siblings on the road,” says Seropyan. “They did not know where they were heading, but walked along the Euphrates.” The convoy stopped in Erzincan’s Eğin district to rest. Zaruhi’s son made friends with the local officers at the police station. One officer told them that Greeks were exempt from exile.
“Both my grandfather and mother went to Greek schools because they had the best education and had learned Greek,” says Seropyan. When they had company at home, they spoke in Greek so as not to be understood. When people in Gümüşhane asked Paronak whether his wife was Greek, he did not say no, and such information had registered in the minds of the bureaucrats there.
To save her family from exile, Zaruhi told the police that she was Greek, but the officers said that they needed confirmation from Gümüşhane. “My grandma paid for the telegram and the response in advance and they stayed in Eğin to wait for the answer while the rest continued on,” says Seropyan. In the meantime, different convoys came and went to Eğin because they all followed the same route along the Euphrates to Deir ez-Zor in present-day Syria, which was an Ottoman province back then.
A response from Gümüşhane confirming that Doctor Paronak Avedisyan’s family is Greek probably saved their lives because they were allowed to stay in Eğin unlike the others. Zaruhi’s outgoing son got a job assisting with small tasks at the local police station and was even given a uniform. He found a lighter that became a treasured belonging, allowing the family to light a fire when they began to live under trees in Eğin.
Women unable to walk begged soldiers to shoot them
Seropyan shared the story of two elderly women who accompanied Zaruhi and her kids during the march into exile but died on the road: her mother-in-law and sister-in-law from İzmit who were visiting them in Gümüşhane when the exile was ordered. They left their homes without any belongings but money.
Zaruhi’s mother-in-law grew tired of walking and became sick; she begged the soldiers supervising the convoy to shoot her. She fell before they arrived in Eğin and was eventually shot. Zaruhi heard the gun shot and asked the woman next to her, “Who did they shoot this time?” The woman replied: “It was your mother-in-law. She was sick anyway. Do not look back and keep walking.” So they kept walking. Seropyan says that the dead were not even buried. “I have driven along the same route several times and got tired of driving,” says Seropyan, adding, almost in frustration, that “people would have rebelled if they were shown how long the road was.”
“The elder aunt wanted to bribe the soldiers to shoot her,” says Seropyan, based on the story that he was told over and over by his grandma instead of fairytales during his childhood. However, the soldiers said that they cannot kill anyone who is able to walk and that bullets are expensive. When she wanted to pay the price of the bullet, a woman next to her suggested to the soldiers that she stand directly behind the aunt so that they could both be killed with one bullet. In the end, the elder aunt jumped off a bridge on the Euphrates. Her nieces saw her floating down the river with her skirt ballooning above the water. The younger one thought that she was swimming, but Seropyan’s mother, who was 8 years old and thereby old enough to understand the situation, realized that her aunt was dying. They waved at each other before she drowned. The adults in the convoy believed that she had been saved from further suffering.
When asked why they did not try to go to İstanbul after they were allowed to stay in Eğin, Seropyan says that not only was it prohibited, but also there were no roads and Anatolia was not safe to travel back then.
Zaruhi and her four children got tired of eating the walnuts and mulberries that grow aplenty in Eğin as the winter approached. Her son broke the lock on one of the houses that belonged to Armenians who had been sent into exile. He first brought food and kitchen utensils to his mother and then they moved into the abandoned Armenian house. Years later, Sarkis Seropyan went to Eğin with a friend of his, sociologist Müge Göçek, who is also from Eğin, and stayed there overnight in memory of his grandmother. “I found the fountain and the church my grandma used to tell us about,” says Seropyan.
The family next traveled to the nearest American orphanage, which was in Malatya. However, before they left, Zaruhi gave her youngest daughter, who might not survive the walk, to a family in Eğin, the Başgedikli family. “We searched for that little girl years later through radio ads when radio first began to broadcast from İstanbul, but we could not find her,” says Seropyan. He also said that the current radio houses and Hilton Hotel in Harbiye, İstanbul, were constructed on top of the Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery. “The stones paving Taksim are indeed the gravestones of Armenians, but the stones are flipped over so you can’t see the names,” says Seropyan.
Zaruhi took care of the children at the Malatya American orphanage along with her two daughters. Her son, who was 15 at the time, ran away because he was too old to stay there. He walked to Trabzon with a friend to take the ferry to İstanbul. When they realized that documentation was necessary for the ferry, they came up with a scheme. They cut the rope of the ladder used to climb up into the ferry and when everyone who had fallen into the sea when the ladder was cut was rescued, they also got on board.
Zaruhi’s son looked for his rich grandpa on the Golden Horn, but he had already died of natural causes. After living under bridges for a while, a captain helped him and he began to work on a ship with the British, who had occupied İstanbul. He went to Greece with them when the occupation ended because it might have been dangerous for him to stay in İstanbul because he had cooperated with the British.
In the meantime, Zaruhi adopted a girl from the Gürün district of Sivas who was at the orphanage. The girl said that if Zaruhi did not adopt her, the Americans would take her back to the US with them. When Zaruhi and her children left the orphanage for İstanbul, they stopped in Sivas. There, the adopted girl married an Armenian craftsman named Vahan. According to Seropyan, Armenians working in certain professions were allowed to remain in their hometowns despite the forced exile because they would be needed. These Armenians showed great solidarity with those who had been sent into exile, such as Zaruhi’s family. The few Armenians remaining in Anatolia moved to İstanbul in the following years. Seropyan says that his family is still in touch with his adopted aunt’s children, who now live in France.
Zaruhi and her daughters arrived in İstanbul in 1918, found jobs and lived in Gedikpaşa. Zaruhi worked as a maid for a Jewish family in İstanbul until her grandson, Sarkis, grew up and started to support his family. “I took good care of my grandmother, who lived under the impact of exile her whole life,” says Seropyan.
According to him, the fact that his uncle -- whom he met in Armenia in 1965 -- told the exact same stories as his mother is proof that they spoke the truth. “Two people cannot have the same dreams,” comments Seropyan.
Adopted Armenian girl turns into devout Muslim bride
Seropyan considers his family a lucky one to have survived the forced exile. Unlike his maternal relatives, those on his father’s side were able to pursue a more normal life since his father’s father moved to İstanbul in 1896 from the Zara district of Sivas. He was from a well-known family in the region that was called the “Hotozots” because of the big caps they wore. However, when his relatives in Zara died during the forced exile, almost nobody was left from his family except those who migrated to the US in the 1800s. Seropyan says that they went to the US in large numbers due to the influence of foreign missionaries.
Among his few remaining relatives, Seropyan tells about the niece of his grandfather, who converted to Islam after she was adopted by an imam in Sivas. Her Muslim name is Hesna. Sarkis’s aunts learned about her story years later. When Hesna’s family was forced into exile, the imam of the local mosque adopted her. This imam was nicknamed “gavur” (infidel) by the local people because of his friendly attitude towards Armenians. However, when the imam’s wife died and Hesna grew up, the imam married her.
Hesna’s maternal uncle, Sarkis’s grandfather, was a devout Orthodox Christian. He volunteered at the church in the Balat neighborhood of İstanbul. He therefore did not even mention he had a niece who had converted to Islam. Seropyan’s grandfather’s sisters later learned that Hesna has a daughter named Edibe who married a soldier named Kaşif. “When I went to Sivas for my military service, I found Kaşif and his family,” says Seropyan. He also met Hesna there.
“Hesna was dressed like a devout Muslim woman and when the Muslim prayer call was made, she took out her prayer rug and prayed in front of me,” says Seropyan. Although Hesna shed tears when she saw Sarkis, she never talked about her own story or about being Armenian. “I stopped going there so as not to cause Hesna sorrow,” says Seropyan.
Hesna’s grandson, Edib Eren, became a governor years later, Seropyan explains. However, he preferred not to keep in touch with Seropyan because an Armenian relative in the family would hurt his career in the government. According to Seropyan, the state allowed Eren to become a bureaucrat because they had not realized he had “an Armenian mother-in-law” in his family history.
Seropyan says that he learned the details of Hesna’s story from an Armenian writer, Kirkor Ceyhan. Murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink helped Ceyhan publish his books about the history of Zara, Sivas. Ceyhan’s family was among who remained in Zara during the forced exile. “After the exile, Kirkor used to try to go to school, barefoot, to get warm, but the school was off-limits for Armenians,” says Seropyan.
“Armenians in big cities like İstanbul were not forced into exile, except for intellectuals, because the foreigners would react,” states Seropyan. “It would have caused a lot of noise.” According to him, people in İzmir were also saved from exile because they bribed the governor with large sums of money. However, he shared his appreciation for the governor of Kütahya in 1915, Ali Faik Ozansoy, who resisted the order for forced exile from the central government and protected the Armenians in the city. The governor of Konya in 1915 also protected the Armenians, notes Seropyan.
Sarkis Seropyan, who currently edits the Armenian pages of the Agos newspaper, says that he is planning to write his family’s memoirs.
“My grandmother used to call it exile when she told us about 1915,” states Seropyan, who says that he does not like the term “genocide.” His maternal grandmother, Zaruhi, was one of many daughters of a well-off family from İstanbul.
Her father enjoyed his “rakı table” and listened to the gramophone every night on the balcony of his house overlooking the Golden Horn while his daughters served him as in any traditional family in Turkey.
When a military doctor from İzmit, Paronak Avedisyan, wanted to marry Zaruhi at the age of 15, the family agreed since a son-in-law who is a doctor has always been desirable for families, although the groom was 31 years old. Zaruhi was born in 1884, got married in 1899 and gave birth to her first child, a son, just a year later.
Sarkis’s mother was born in 1908. The family was first posted to Akçaabat on the Black Sea and then to Gümüşhane, where they first encountered the events of 1915. The military doctor, who had a soldier assigned to assist him because of his rank in the military, worked for the Ottoman army and had friendly relations with the bureaucrats in town.
One day, in 1915, he was called to duty to treat a patient and, two days later, Zaruhi was told that her husband had been slaughtered and thrown into a creek at the exit of the city. Zaruhi told her grandchildren later that she knew who gave the order for the murder of her husband: the mutasarrıf (local governor), who was later executed for involvement in a plan to assassinate Atatürk.
A couple of months after Paronak’s murder, the Armenians in town were forced into exile on foot when the Ottomans declared martial law. “My grandmother was only 31 and alone with 4 kids, the youngest of whom was only an infant who was carried by the older siblings on the road,” says Seropyan. “They did not know where they were heading, but walked along the Euphrates.” The convoy stopped in Erzincan’s Eğin district to rest. Zaruhi’s son made friends with the local officers at the police station. One officer told them that Greeks were exempt from exile.
“Both my grandfather and mother went to Greek schools because they had the best education and had learned Greek,” says Seropyan. When they had company at home, they spoke in Greek so as not to be understood. When people in Gümüşhane asked Paronak whether his wife was Greek, he did not say no, and such information had registered in the minds of the bureaucrats there.
To save her family from exile, Zaruhi told the police that she was Greek, but the officers said that they needed confirmation from Gümüşhane. “My grandma paid for the telegram and the response in advance and they stayed in Eğin to wait for the answer while the rest continued on,” says Seropyan. In the meantime, different convoys came and went to Eğin because they all followed the same route along the Euphrates to Deir ez-Zor in present-day Syria, which was an Ottoman province back then.
A response from Gümüşhane confirming that Doctor Paronak Avedisyan’s family is Greek probably saved their lives because they were allowed to stay in Eğin unlike the others. Zaruhi’s outgoing son got a job assisting with small tasks at the local police station and was even given a uniform. He found a lighter that became a treasured belonging, allowing the family to light a fire when they began to live under trees in Eğin.
Women unable to walk begged soldiers to shoot them
Seropyan shared the story of two elderly women who accompanied Zaruhi and her kids during the march into exile but died on the road: her mother-in-law and sister-in-law from İzmit who were visiting them in Gümüşhane when the exile was ordered. They left their homes without any belongings but money.
Zaruhi’s mother-in-law grew tired of walking and became sick; she begged the soldiers supervising the convoy to shoot her. She fell before they arrived in Eğin and was eventually shot. Zaruhi heard the gun shot and asked the woman next to her, “Who did they shoot this time?” The woman replied: “It was your mother-in-law. She was sick anyway. Do not look back and keep walking.” So they kept walking. Seropyan says that the dead were not even buried. “I have driven along the same route several times and got tired of driving,” says Seropyan, adding, almost in frustration, that “people would have rebelled if they were shown how long the road was.”
“The elder aunt wanted to bribe the soldiers to shoot her,” says Seropyan, based on the story that he was told over and over by his grandma instead of fairytales during his childhood. However, the soldiers said that they cannot kill anyone who is able to walk and that bullets are expensive. When she wanted to pay the price of the bullet, a woman next to her suggested to the soldiers that she stand directly behind the aunt so that they could both be killed with one bullet. In the end, the elder aunt jumped off a bridge on the Euphrates. Her nieces saw her floating down the river with her skirt ballooning above the water. The younger one thought that she was swimming, but Seropyan’s mother, who was 8 years old and thereby old enough to understand the situation, realized that her aunt was dying. They waved at each other before she drowned. The adults in the convoy believed that she had been saved from further suffering.
When asked why they did not try to go to İstanbul after they were allowed to stay in Eğin, Seropyan says that not only was it prohibited, but also there were no roads and Anatolia was not safe to travel back then.
Zaruhi and her four children got tired of eating the walnuts and mulberries that grow aplenty in Eğin as the winter approached. Her son broke the lock on one of the houses that belonged to Armenians who had been sent into exile. He first brought food and kitchen utensils to his mother and then they moved into the abandoned Armenian house. Years later, Sarkis Seropyan went to Eğin with a friend of his, sociologist Müge Göçek, who is also from Eğin, and stayed there overnight in memory of his grandmother. “I found the fountain and the church my grandma used to tell us about,” says Seropyan.
The family next traveled to the nearest American orphanage, which was in Malatya. However, before they left, Zaruhi gave her youngest daughter, who might not survive the walk, to a family in Eğin, the Başgedikli family. “We searched for that little girl years later through radio ads when radio first began to broadcast from İstanbul, but we could not find her,” says Seropyan. He also said that the current radio houses and Hilton Hotel in Harbiye, İstanbul, were constructed on top of the Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery. “The stones paving Taksim are indeed the gravestones of Armenians, but the stones are flipped over so you can’t see the names,” says Seropyan.
Zaruhi took care of the children at the Malatya American orphanage along with her two daughters. Her son, who was 15 at the time, ran away because he was too old to stay there. He walked to Trabzon with a friend to take the ferry to İstanbul. When they realized that documentation was necessary for the ferry, they came up with a scheme. They cut the rope of the ladder used to climb up into the ferry and when everyone who had fallen into the sea when the ladder was cut was rescued, they also got on board.
Zaruhi’s son looked for his rich grandpa on the Golden Horn, but he had already died of natural causes. After living under bridges for a while, a captain helped him and he began to work on a ship with the British, who had occupied İstanbul. He went to Greece with them when the occupation ended because it might have been dangerous for him to stay in İstanbul because he had cooperated with the British.
In the meantime, Zaruhi adopted a girl from the Gürün district of Sivas who was at the orphanage. The girl said that if Zaruhi did not adopt her, the Americans would take her back to the US with them. When Zaruhi and her children left the orphanage for İstanbul, they stopped in Sivas. There, the adopted girl married an Armenian craftsman named Vahan. According to Seropyan, Armenians working in certain professions were allowed to remain in their hometowns despite the forced exile because they would be needed. These Armenians showed great solidarity with those who had been sent into exile, such as Zaruhi’s family. The few Armenians remaining in Anatolia moved to İstanbul in the following years. Seropyan says that his family is still in touch with his adopted aunt’s children, who now live in France.
Zaruhi and her daughters arrived in İstanbul in 1918, found jobs and lived in Gedikpaşa. Zaruhi worked as a maid for a Jewish family in İstanbul until her grandson, Sarkis, grew up and started to support his family. “I took good care of my grandmother, who lived under the impact of exile her whole life,” says Seropyan.
According to him, the fact that his uncle -- whom he met in Armenia in 1965 -- told the exact same stories as his mother is proof that they spoke the truth. “Two people cannot have the same dreams,” comments Seropyan.
Adopted Armenian girl turns into devout Muslim bride
Seropyan considers his family a lucky one to have survived the forced exile. Unlike his maternal relatives, those on his father’s side were able to pursue a more normal life since his father’s father moved to İstanbul in 1896 from the Zara district of Sivas. He was from a well-known family in the region that was called the “Hotozots” because of the big caps they wore. However, when his relatives in Zara died during the forced exile, almost nobody was left from his family except those who migrated to the US in the 1800s. Seropyan says that they went to the US in large numbers due to the influence of foreign missionaries.
Among his few remaining relatives, Seropyan tells about the niece of his grandfather, who converted to Islam after she was adopted by an imam in Sivas. Her Muslim name is Hesna. Sarkis’s aunts learned about her story years later. When Hesna’s family was forced into exile, the imam of the local mosque adopted her. This imam was nicknamed “gavur” (infidel) by the local people because of his friendly attitude towards Armenians. However, when the imam’s wife died and Hesna grew up, the imam married her.
Hesna’s maternal uncle, Sarkis’s grandfather, was a devout Orthodox Christian. He volunteered at the church in the Balat neighborhood of İstanbul. He therefore did not even mention he had a niece who had converted to Islam. Seropyan’s grandfather’s sisters later learned that Hesna has a daughter named Edibe who married a soldier named Kaşif. “When I went to Sivas for my military service, I found Kaşif and his family,” says Seropyan. He also met Hesna there.
“Hesna was dressed like a devout Muslim woman and when the Muslim prayer call was made, she took out her prayer rug and prayed in front of me,” says Seropyan. Although Hesna shed tears when she saw Sarkis, she never talked about her own story or about being Armenian. “I stopped going there so as not to cause Hesna sorrow,” says Seropyan.
Hesna’s grandson, Edib Eren, became a governor years later, Seropyan explains. However, he preferred not to keep in touch with Seropyan because an Armenian relative in the family would hurt his career in the government. According to Seropyan, the state allowed Eren to become a bureaucrat because they had not realized he had “an Armenian mother-in-law” in his family history.
Seropyan says that he learned the details of Hesna’s story from an Armenian writer, Kirkor Ceyhan. Murdered Armenian journalist Hrant Dink helped Ceyhan publish his books about the history of Zara, Sivas. Ceyhan’s family was among who remained in Zara during the forced exile. “After the exile, Kirkor used to try to go to school, barefoot, to get warm, but the school was off-limits for Armenians,” says Seropyan.
“Armenians in big cities like İstanbul were not forced into exile, except for intellectuals, because the foreigners would react,” states Seropyan. “It would have caused a lot of noise.” According to him, people in İzmir were also saved from exile because they bribed the governor with large sums of money. However, he shared his appreciation for the governor of Kütahya in 1915, Ali Faik Ozansoy, who resisted the order for forced exile from the central government and protected the Armenians in the city. The governor of Konya in 1915 also protected the Armenians, notes Seropyan.
Sarkis Seropyan, who currently edits the Armenian pages of the Agos newspaper, says that he is planning to write his family’s memoirs.