In the heart of Istanbul, a few meters from bustling Istiklal Avenue, an unassuming black doorway serves as the entrance to the courtyard of the 19th-century Church of the Three Altars (“Uc Horan”), standing proudly but discreetly—just like the estimated 60,000 Armenian Christians of Anatolian origin living in Turkey today.
One by one, the faithful join the Divine Liturgy that has already begun on a Tuesday morning in February. The voices of the choir resound in the building. A place of prayer and music, the church is also a gathering point for a community that embraces, against all odds, its culture, language and religion.
After the liturgy, the faithful gather in an adjacent room to talk over a meal prepared by the local Armenian association. Around the table, suspicious looks are directed toward a visitor, but they soon soften as church members begin to talk about their lives in Turkey.
A tiny population of about 60,000 Armenian Christians remain in Turkey today. Most, uprooted from villages in eastern Anatolia, now live in neighborhoods in Istanbul.
The family of one of the Armenians gathered here in Istanbul is originally from Cappadocia, while another’s family originally comes from Dersim—both places that were once part of a multicultural Anatolian territory rich in Armenian communities. They are among the descendants of the survivors of death marches into the Syrian desert and large-scale massacres before and during the First World War, events that are considered one of the first genocides in history by the international community—except by the country of most concern to the people gathered here: Turkey.
Today, two-thirds of all Armenians live in a vast diaspora across Europe, and in Russia, Iran and the United States. From the estimated 1.5 million Armenians present in the Ottoman Empire before the genocide, only a tiny population of about 60,000 remain in Turkey today. Most, uprooted from villages in eastern Anatolia, now live in neighborhoods in Istanbul like Kurtulus, Bakirkoy, Yesilkoy, Samatya and Kumkapi.
Armenians living in Turkey still live in fear more than a century after the genocide. On the margins of a society where socio-political tensions are high, many are preserving their 1,000-year-old culture in the churches, while some are trying to break the silence and open a dialogue for reconciliation.
“We were taught to keep quiet,” an Armenian woman said about life in Istanbul before hastily ducking out of the porch of an Armenian Catholic church in Yesilkoy and away from the conversation. She is not the only Armenian woman who has learned to keep a low profile. Many people of Armenian descent in Turkey avoid talking about their origins or their religion. Many have adopted Turkish names. According to some estimates, as many as 200,000 Armenians survived the genocide through forced conversion to Islam, which means their contemporary descendants could number in the millions.
This group of Armenian Christians represents a minority within a minority. Perhaps fewer than 4,000 members of the Armenian Catholic Church now live in Turkey; members of an Armenian Rite church that is in union with the Roman Catholic Church.
“The genocide is not really over,” said a Turk of Armenian ancestry. He can list a series of massacres in Turkey targeting ethnic minorities including Armenians and Alevi Kurds.
With their identity shrouded, many contemporary Christians in Turkey become crypto-Armenians—Turkish citizens hiding or ignoring their Armenian ancestry. The civic spaces where their ancient culture is still freely expressed have been reduced to Armenian churches, schools and associations in Istanbul.
Denial and ultranationalism
“The genocide is not really over,” said Deniz Karakaya, a Turk of Armenian ancestry now living abroad. He can list a series of massacres in Turkey targeting ethnic minorities including Armenians and Alevi Kurds, who practice a mystical form of Islam not considered authentic by the Sunni majority, that have extended throughout the 20th century, like the Sivas massacre in 1993, in which radical Islamists attacked and set fire to a hotel in Sivas where Alevi intellectuals and artists were gathered.
“The murder of Hrant Dink is also part of the genocide,” he said. Hrant Dink was the prominent editor in chief of the newspaper Agos, which advocated Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human rights. After receiving numerous death threats from nationalist Turks, Hrant Dink was killed in January 2007 by a 17-year-old ultra-nationalist.
After the murder, the young assassin reportedly shouted “I killed the infidel.” A photo surfaced following his arrest, showing him posing with the Turkish flag and embraced by policemen who received him as a hero.
After the murder of Hrant Dink, Mr. Karakaya believes many Armenians “closed in on themselves,” perhaps believing, “If they don’t make noise, the politicians will leave them alone.” Unsettled by the continuing hostility to ethnic Armenians, he said, contemporary Armenians still choose to move abroad if they have an opportunity to do so.
“A great trauma is still present,” he said.
In 2015, the centenary of the Armenian genocide put a spotlight back on the terrible events before and during World War I that also claimed the lives of thousands of Assyrians and Pontic Greeks who had long-established communities in Anatolia. In 2010, when the United States and Sweden considered formally designating these events as a genocide, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current president of Turkey, threatened to expel 100,000 Armenian workers from Turkey before withdrawing his ambassadors from both countries in retaliation.
The young assassin of Hrant Dink reportedly shouted “I killed the infidel.” A photo surfaced following his arrest, showing him posing with the Turkish flag and embraced by policemen who received him as a hero.
In 2021, President Joseph Biden of the United States formally recognized the mass killings and expulsions of Armenians and other ethnic minorities as a genocide. Some 30 countries to date have recognized the Armenian genocide in defiance of the wrath of the Turkish government.
Despite the clear historical evidence, the Turkish government continues to deny that the Ottoman Empire’s 19th-century rampage against Turkey’s Armenian community constitutes a genocide. The Turkish Foreign Ministry maintains its own version of events to justify the violence, arguing that “the violent political objectives [of the Armenians] made them susceptible to displacement” and that “Armenian terrorists engaged in a war of self-defense that continues today.”
A recognition of the genocide would have to be accompanied by reparations, Mr. Karakaya said, which explains in part the continued official resistance by Turkey. Many Turkish fortunes were built on businesses, land and property that were looted at the time, he said.
The state narrative of the events in 1915 is uncritically echoed by Turkish media. Its pluralism and independence have been greatly eroded in recent years, and the contemporary media in Turkey more often than not merely acts as a megaphone for Mr. Erdogan’s policies.
In 2019 alone, more than 4,000 articles and opinion pieces targeting ethnic or religious minorities in Turkey were identified in local and national newspapers, according to a report about hate speech published in 2019 by the Hrant Dink Foundation. The report found that hate speech in Turkish media targeted mostly Armenians, followed by Syrians, Greeks and Jews.
In 2021, President Joseph Biden of the United States formally recognized the mass killings and expulsions of Armenians and other ethnic minorities as a genocide.
The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, that was reignited in 2020 and still smolders, fanned the embers of ultranationalist hostility against Armenians in Turkey. A day after the start of the conflict, a convoy of vehicles waving Turkish and Azerbaijani flags paraded in support of Azerbaijan through a largely Armenian neighborhood in Istanbul. Many Armenians then told local media how concerned they had become because of an increase in hate speech in the country.
Preserving identity
In Turkey, is it possible to turn the page on the genocide and see true reconciliation? Despite the challenges, many Armenians continue to nurture their culture while seeking to open the door to dialogue.
“Tradition is a cultural treasure, the memory of a people. It is my mission to perpetuate it,” says Murat Iclinalca. A graduate of a music conservatory in Istanbul, he sings in the choir for the Church of the Three Altars. After the Divine Liturgy, he drinks a quick coffee before going to a school for Armenian children next door. This afternoon he is teaching music to a younger generation of Armenians.
In the same room, adjacent to the Surp Yerrortutyun Armenian Church, Avedis Cakmak, the choir director, displays portraits of Armenian patriarchs and Komitas, the famous ethnomusicologist who collected and saved thousands of traditional Armenian songs.
Mr. Cakmak pulls a huge book from the shelves filled with century-old books. Melodies are written in the Armenian annotation system; it is the repertoire sung by the choir members during the Divine Liturgy, he proudly explains.
Signs of the influence of Armenian culture are everywhere in Turkey, he said, noting that the architecture of Istanbul has been shaped by the Balyan family, court architects during the Ottoman Empire who for generations built palaces, mosques, public buildings and churches in the city. Unfortunately this heritage is often erased from Turkish school books.
Signs of the influence of Armenian culture are everywhere in Turkey. Unfortunately this heritage is often erased from Turkish school books.
“I’ve done a lot of guided tours in the city, and sometimes there are Turks who are very curious and surprised to learn [of the Armenian influence],” he said. “There are new generations, the level of education is greater—that gives me hope.”
A few blocks away, the Hrant Dink Foundation is working to improve human rights in Turkey. Downstairs, journalists and columnists from the Agos newspaper continue to highlight issues affecting minorities and Armenians in the country. Since the death of Hrant Dink, threats continue to target the newspaper. In the newsroom, the paper’s Turkish editor, Altug Yilmaz, corrected some texts on his computer on a Friday afternoon in March.
“Because the genocide has not been acknowledged by the perpetrators and their descendants, the trauma continues,” he said. There is a social and political responsibility to make amends for the genocide, he argued, starting with recognition and compensation.
Especially after the death of Hrant Dink, many people have learned about how the past and present are interconnected, he said. “People should be able to talk about these issues. The least we can do is to clean up the discriminatory and hateful discourse [in Turkish media] towards non-Muslims.”
On the avenues of Istanbul, life passes by without much attention to these simmering issues. Armenian communities continue to organize themselves around associations, schools and churches, guarantors of their culture, their history and their faith.
At Divine Liturgy this week Armenian hymns will once again fill the people’s churches and hearts, looking in hope toward what remains an uncertain future in Turkey.
