Thoughts from Xancepek

(and Beyond)

“Xancepek” is what the Muslim population of Diyarbekir used to call “Gavur Mahallesi,” that is, the neighborhood where the infidels lived. I’m standing in the middle of the ruins of the Armenian Saint Giragos Church in Xancepek, looking at what remains of the exquisite examples of beautiful, refined masonry, and the arched columns and walls where only tiny bits of vividly colored tiles have been left, here and there. Only curious and caring eyes can see them. Above my friends and I, the sun shines, as there is no longer a roof. With the densely populated environs of the church in sharp contrast to its desolation, the place is like a scene from a science fiction movie. The irrationality of having such an unattended historic place in the middle of an overpopulated city, with an absolute lack of any care, is evidence—and very painfully material—of a tragic interruption in Diyarbekir’s social history.

We enter one of the old Armenian houses. In the courtyard, a young girl is lying on a matress laid on the ground, obviously very ill, with her head on the knees of an elderly women who sits with crossed legs, resting her head on her hand, eyes shut. In another corner three young girls sit around a big pot, doing some kitchen work. They greet us, curious about who we are and where we come from.We talk to them, take pictures. Throughout the day we wander around Xancepek, welcomed by the Kurdish families, mostly women, many of them not speaking Turkish at all.

There are two worlds living side by side in Xancepek: a lost world, with dilapidated churches silently standing witness to a reality denied, and the present-day world, seemingly unaware of the other one but falling victim to the same deeply rooted culture of violence.

For us, the absence of the Armenian world is so material that it has an existence of its own. You can feel it every moment.

It is even more disturbing by the fact that the present-day people don’t know anything about the fellow countrymen of their ancestors. They know nothing about the exquisite craftsmanship they once practiced, the beautiful products of a wide variety of professions and the works of art they created. They know nothing about the vivid intellectual life, the newspapers and periodicals published, the cultural riches. The objective reality is simply non-existant here; it has no meaning, no content for the present inhabitants. The mission to bury the entire civilization was successfully accomplished.

How many people now carry in their inner selves the unbearably heavy memory of June 1, 1915, the day when the Diyarbekir governor, Dr. Resid, "had his militia evacuate 1,060 Armenian men and women of the Armenian neighborhood Xancepek and escort them to the Diyarbekir plain through the Mardin Gate. The people were gathered and a proclamation was read out loud, offering the Armenians their lives in exchange for converting to Islam. Although the decision was not unanimous, the victims refused, whereupon they were stripped of their clothes and belongings. The militia and local Kurdish villagers then massacred them with rifles, axes, swords, and daggers. Many women were raped, some were sold as slaves. The corpses were either thrown in wells or trenches, or left on the plain to rot, ‘the men on their stomachs, the women on their backs.’"(1)

There is another, very grave aspect of this “not-knowing” that lies in the fact that one’s ability to remember and one’s perception of reality is quite fragmented, as all the ruins of the very near history of the Armenian civilization in Asia Minor have been destroyed in search of gold and hidden riches thought to be left by the previous owners. In other words, they do know or did know that there had been people living there, that they were forced to abandon their homes abruptly, and that they could have hidden their wealth somewhere in the church or in their homes or in the wells. They knew that many of them had been killed, but they made themselves forget the painful truth, or buried it deep within themselves; many did not tell the truth to their children and grandchildren. The human mind is frightening in its ability to remember pleasant facts and ignore unpleasant ones. It is the terrifying capability of a human being to manipulate his or her own mind. So, thanks to the successful engineering of the heart and mind and also one’s ability to manipulate his or her own mind, generation after generation the truth gradually ceases to be the truth. Knowledge ceases to be knowledge. And the crime ceases to be the crime of the decision-makers alone and the perpetrator ceases to be the only one actually committing the crime. The people collectively perpetuate the forgetfulness.

Turkey to a great extent—and not only the new inhabitants of Xancepek—is unaware of the facts about the Armenians, one of the oldest and most productive peoples of Asia Minor.

Here, too, the mechanism of knowing and not knowing is at work. In the collective subconscious of Turkey, there is the vague awareness of the existence of an Armenian, the musician, the architect, a neighbor making delicious food, a jeweler, read about in a memoir, or heard about from an elderly relative, or seen in a movie. However, curiosity and willingness to learn the whereabouts of these people, their roots in this country, is somehow blocked. Ignorance, then, is partly the responsibility of those who conceal the truth, but also partly of those who choose not to be curious.

This is the process whereby people who have fallen victim to a genocide are killed twice, first by a weapon, second by the denial of the truth. A genocide is even more of a genocide when you are not only condemned to death but also condemned to be non-existent in the minds of the people that remain, wiped off not only from the landscape but also from the hearts and minds of the children and grandchildren of your once-fellow country people, once your neighbors. It is because of this reason that denial is the continuation of the extermination spiritually, emotionally and intellectually—a fact refused to be acknowledged by those who still place denial within the scope of freedom of speech.

EndNotes

1) Ugur Ungor, master’s thesis, “CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province 1913–1923,” University of Amsterdam, department of history, June 2005.