Mother, let’s imagine there is a wonderful fairy tale, a very good one famous all over the world. But it is Turkish, the Turks have wrote it and tell to their children. Will it be translated into Armenian?
I was around three years old, quite a conscious age to remember myself how I came to this question:
-Mother, let’s imagine there is a wonderful fairy tale, a very good one famous all over the world. But it is Turkish, the Turks have wrote it and tell to their children. Will it be translated into Armenian?
I don’t really remember what my mother answered and how she reacted in this heavily delicate political situation. But I remember what triggered the interest of my inquiry: to understand how deep the hatred between people can go and to understand whether it can stop at the threshold of children’s innocent world. Surely this is my retrospective interpretation of the mute and intuitive judgements of the three years old me. But I remember well this questions hovering silently in my brain back to some thirty years ago. Actually, I have been carrying these questions inside ever since that moment.
Anahit Azatyan and Souren Baghdasaryan on their wedding day, late 1940s
My mother says that she was mostly surprised to hear this question if not because in our family there had never been any ideological propaganda of any kind. In our family there has never been any instilling of hate towards anybody, not even Turks, who I knew had been very cruel to the family of my grandfather. I must have calculated myself that there should be such a notion as hate, revenge and that it should have some practical implications as well.
My mother had told me earlier the story of her father.
-He was around two weeks old when the whole village of Khastur where your grandfather was born fled leaving behind their homes and lands and headed towards Eastern Armenia, where we currently live. The Turks are a nation like us Armenians, and they had decided to kill Armenians that were living there, so people wanted to escape that destiny. They had to save their families and children. So did the family of your grandfather. His mother, your grand grandmother named Seyran had other children but your grandpa was very small then and she had to carry him all the time on her hands. They had to be very careful not to be seen or heard of while escaping through the settlements of Turks. If seen they would be caught and killed. But your grandfather was small and he was crying all the time putting them into danger. So, at one point his mother’s brother, his uncle asked her to give him the child so that she could take a bit of rest. She refused; she did not want to give her child not even to her brother. But she was exhausted. So she succumbed to his proposition. After some time when she gained her strengths back she asked her brother to give back her child. “I don’t have him any longer, my sister, I have left him many miles away, you have to understand that. We cannot survive with him. But if he is to survive than God will take care of him.”
Anahit Azatyan, 1940s
He had left the two weeks old on the road, in a torn stomach of a dead donkey to keep him safe and warm. Quite a surrealistic thing to be grasped by our minds but in those times, at that moment any slight chance of survival was taken as granted. This is what my grandfather was told about his family’s survival and had passed the story to my mother and she on her turn had told it to me when I was very young and had retold the story many times later.
-His mother started to scream and cry and refused to move any further until her brother brings her child back to her. The people that were escaping with them were puzzled. So, they decided to hide and wait until his mother and uncle went back to get your grandfather back. When they returned with the little baby in his mother’s arms the village people continued their way towards the Eastern Armenia and upon the arrival to eastern Armenia they settled in Yeghvard village where your grandfather grew up.
The memory about my grandfather Suren who had survived with his family the massacres in their homeland has been a sacred memory in our family since I remember myself. Not because he was a survivor, not only because of this. But mainly because of the kind of a person he was, because of what he became afterwards. I did not have the happiness of knowing or enjoying him. All my three elder nephews and sister had seen him and were lucky to enjoy his wisdom and kindness for many years. My mother was three months pregnant with me when he passed away in February 1983. But the funny thing is that I remember him as if I knew him for years. I see his deep blue eyes, wide open and glittering, not sad or angry but radiating with wisdom instead of anger and full of gratitude instead of sorrow. But I also know that he could not overcome the intolerance towards the Turkey as a generalized character of the evil that had happened to him and his people. Wise and kind as he was this was too much a cruel and tragic thing to be completely rationalized and set beyond emotions. My grandmother told me that when they were cruising the Mediterranean and visited Turkey in 1960ies the first things he did as he stepped the Turkish land is to spit on it. Politically incorrect? Perhaps. But he was also too just a person to be tolerant and neutral towards the injustice and evil that that land was personifying for him.
Souren Baghdasaryan right after demobilisation
My grandfather, Suren Baghdasaryan was born into a family of peasants in the village of Khastur near the town of Alashkert which is situated in what is called today Western Armenia or Turkey as an official name of those lands. Unfortunately we don’t know much about his family. But we know that they were simple, uneducated people who had survived the massacre and through a difficult and dangerous journey finally settled in the lands of Eastern Armenia. After settling in Eghvard village they kept on leading their lives as peasants while my grandfather was getting his education at school. Afterwards he got accepted into the Yerevan State University and graduated it with a degree in philology. Ever since he had devoted his life to literature leading a very silent life of a translator and publisher. Such was his character. My grandmother told me that he was living in the world of his books, in the world of German literature, philosophy and poetry that were apparently his favourites. He was writing his own books which were never published as he never liked to ask for favours according to my grandmother’s explanations. The times were different then, in the world of Soviets things were done differently and my grandfather was tough to be compliant with many things that were happening in the country then. And because of his straightforward and honest character, because of justice as the unquestioning value for him (perhaps as a trauma caused by the historical injustice happened to his nation and concealed by the Soviet government) he was not afraid time to time to go against the system. By using the modest powers that he was enabled with as being the literature censor and editor of a major publishing house back to Soviet times he was promoting and publishing writers and poets who were banned as anti-Soviet writers. Due to his courage books of those writers have been published and promoted which otherwise would not have the chance to come to life.
Suren Baghdasaryan was a veteran of WWII. He had been fighting among Soviet army against the Nazi Germans from 1941 till its end in May 1945. He was among the troops that had entered Berlin. During the war he was three times heavily wounded, advised to go back but never succumbed to those calls. My mother remembers him telling her that he was sure he would survive. He was saying that he would walk through the shooting bullets with a confidence that it would not strike him. And it didn’t. Except the heavy diabetes that he was granted with as a result of the war hardships. The rest of his life he spent under constant treatment against diabetes being forced to endure three times insulin injections on daily bases. Grandmother and mother remember that he used to lose his consciousness frequently whenever his diet or treatment was slightly deranged. Nevertheless he was stoic and never mourned his destiny and never complained.
Straight after being demobilized from the army he married Anahit Azatyan, a local beauty from the medical university who later became one of the most famous paediatricians in the country. She gave birth to two wonderful daughters Susanna and Ruzanna who, according to my grandmother’s story, were named by grandpa after her (both daughters have the name Anna-Armenian Anahit in the structure of their names). Susanna continued my grandma’s line and became a doctor. Ruzanna, my mother, went after her father’s steps, she became a philologist like him and transmitted his literary genes to my sister and me. Today my sister, Lilit Sargsyan is an art critic, and I am myself an architectural critic. Our grandpa’s affection for text, writing and philosophy is continuing in us.
From left to right: Anahit, Souren, Rouzanna, Sousanna
Today due to circumstances I am living only a part of the year in the Republic of Armenia. I am a contemporary and open minded person also considering myself as Christian. So I am trying to cultivate tolerance and rational attitude in me towards the various ambiguous expressions of this bizarre world. I have very good Turkish friends and try to make a strict distinction between the people and the government. I even attempt to understand the position of some Turkish people to whom I have talked to who have been educated an alternative truth about the events back to the end of the 19th beginning of 20th century. They have been brainwashed. This is an official politics in their country nowadays. I don’t get angry with them or overwhelm them with the emotions that attack me at such moments of denial of their ancestors’ responsibility towards everything that had happened to my people a century ago. I share with them what I know and call them to question and investigate the history themselves. Many confess that this twisted alternative history is the official history taught at schools. But anybody who is interested to learn the true history himself and construct his own judgements regarding those events has every possibility to do so.
I have no hatred towards the Turkish people. I don’t want to have an enemy in this world, although considering my straightforward character inherited from my grandfather and the specificities of my job, I must say this becomes a bit difficult. So I am thinking, what should my attitude be towards those Turks who deny both their personal responsibility for their ancestors’ crime and the fact of the Genocide at all? I might not hate them personally (tough job being a Christian, ah?) but I can’t help thinking that such people are my enemies. My historical, my political, my personal and my moral enemies. And what do I demand from them? A conscious acceptance of that responsibility, honest regret and official apology for their actions. What else? Is that all I need? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. In the course of time I have become a bit less sentimental and started to question such things as the call of ancestral and historical lands. I am getting annoyed of the sentiments that are evoked in me simply by reminding of the lands, of the world that is captured on the other side of the border. But I can’t help feeling that is where I belong, that is where my homeland is. My origin is. My roots are. My philosophy denies the validity and importance of earthly and material connections and belongings. I am on the verge of announcing myself a cosmopolitan and I am learning the art of taking control over illogical emotions. But should I suppress this call of the land? Should I rationalize the emotions that that part of the world evokes in me, the turmoil that the music brought from those people creates in me? Is this the result of my family’s highly emotional attitude towards the memory of my grandfather, his well hidden but fragile personality? Is this a result of an obtained cultural education or this is some kind of genetically decoded memory? Who am I and where do I belong? What is my anthropological, physiological, psychological and mental construct’s historical belonging? And why should I ask such questions to myself? Why this should be an issue for me, as if I have been taken away from myself? And what is the role of my grandfather’s history in such musings? I don’t know yet.
This is how the Genocide has shaped my family’s and my personal history. My grandfather survived. Moreover from a family of simple peasants he grew into a highly educated person, created a beautiful family, raised two wonderful daughters and served his country to the best of his abilities. We have not discussed the issue of Genocide much in our family except as an epic life story of my grandfather and few occasional conversations around politics and history. I have grown into a happy wife and mother, a successful specialist who enjoys her life every day and is grateful to the God for every single instant of her life. But since my childhood sometimes I hear some vague sound in my mind, a sound of voices. First time I understood what it was around the age of eight or nine. I had a dream, a nightmare. After that I could name that sound. A sound of panic. I hear voices of people screaming in panic. I carry a deeply hidden fear of a disaster. As if something is going to happen. Or is that a memory of a disaster? A fear of the past, rather than future? I don’t know. But this sound and feeling is haunting me since decades and with years it becomes more clear and clear. What does it want from me? Should I battle it? Cure it? Does it call me for an action? I don’t know yet.
Such is the story and manifestation of a hundred years old history.