armenian orphans and converts during and after the war

War in History19(2) 173 –192

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Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1923

Ugur Ümit ÜngörUtrecht University The Netherlands and Center for War and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam

AbstractConsiderable research has been conducted on the relationship between the First World War and the persecutions of Ottoman Armenians. So far, little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, in particular the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best as they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this hiatus and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the war and the genocide on Armenian women and children during and after the war. It examines how the violence generated innumerable orphans, and how these orphans became a battleground between Turkish and Armenian political elites. It reviews how the Young Turk regime dealt with the unforeseen phenomenon of Armenians converting to Islam to circumvent deportation orders, and focuses on the government’s orders and decrees issued to confront this issue. Finally it briefly canvasses the hitherto neglected problem of prostitution by Armenian women as a strategy for survival during the war.

KeywordsArmenians, conversion, First World War, genocide, orphans, Ottoman Empire, prostitution

I. Introduction

In the process of Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian imperial collapse, spanning roughly the decade 1912–23, millions of soldiers were killed in regular

Corresponding author:Ugur Ümit Üngör, Utrecht University, Department of History, Drift 10, 3512 BS, The Netherlands Email: [email protected]

430579WIH19210.1177/0968344511430579ÜngörWar in History2012

Article

174 War in History 19(2)

wars.1 But hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians were also victimized as a result of expulsions, pogroms, and other forms of persecution and mass violence. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 erased the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and marked a devastating blow to Ottoman political culture. During the First World War, the Young Turk dictator-ship (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) organized the destruction of approxi-mately a million Anatolian Armenians. The Russian occupation of Anatolia in 1915 and the Greek occupation of Anatolia in 1919 saw violence against Muslim civilians in the eastern and western imperial borderlands, respectively. The period 1917–23 is also of great significance for the history of the Caucasus, both north and south, as it witnessed wars of annihilation and massacres of civilians. All three processes occurred amid a criti-cal depacification of inter-state and social relations, as well as a profound crisis in inter-ethnic relationships between and within states.2

The Armenian genocide was a major part of this wider crisis of state and nation in the Near East. It developed out of several phases of radicalization. The first phase was the threat of invasion by the British in the west and the Russians in the east. It is no exaggera-tion to state that the effect of these threats on the Young Turk political elite was nothing short of apocalyptic. They fuelled a fear of their own disappearance and also spurred persecutions in the winter of 1914–15, when – for example – all Armenian civil servants were dismissed from their positions.3 The second phase developed out of the mistaken fear of an organized Armenian insurrection, which reached boiling point when Allied forces launched the Gallipoli campaign on the night of 24 April 1915. That same night Talaat Pasha ordered the arrest of the Armenian elites of the entire Ottoman Empire. In Istanbul some 270 Armenian clergymen, physicians, editors, journalists, lawyers, teach-ers, and politicians were rounded up and deported to the interior, where most were mur-dered.4 Other provinces followed. This effectively decapitated a community. A third phase followed, when the regime orchestrated the murder of Armenian men and ordered the general deportation of the community’s remnant to the Syrian desert. Recent research

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the European Research Council, the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin, the University of Amsterdam, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, Utrecht University, the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, the Gomidas Institute, and Sortedam Antikvariat.

2 For four recent and different attempts to situate the violence of the period between 1870 and 1923 within a broader framework of modern mass violence as a result of disintegrating European continental empires, see: Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), and The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Cathie Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

3 For a discussion of the early stages of the genocide, see: Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: the Processive Nature of Genocide’, Genocide Studies and Prevention I (2006), pp. 173–96.

4 Mikayel Shamtanchian, The Fatal Night: An Eyewitness Account of the Extermination of Armenian Intellectuals in 1915 (Studio City, CA: H. and K. Majikian, 2007).

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has demonstrated how, despite provincial differentiation, the end result was remarkably uniform and cost the lives of about a million Armenians.5 What made the massacres genocidal is that the killings targeted the abstract category of group identity, in that all Armenians, loyal or disloyal, were deported and massacred. By the end of the war, the approximately 2900 Anatolian Armenian settlements (villages, towns, neighbourhoods) were depopulated and the majority of the inhabitants dead.

Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between the war and the persecutions, and the organization of the mass violence. But little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, and particularly about the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this gap and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the war and the genocide on Armenian women and children during and after the war. The core of the article is organized in three parts. The first examines how the violence generated innumerable orphans, and how these orphans became a battleground between Turkish and Armenian political elites. The second reviews how the Young Turk regime dealt with the unforeseen phenomenon of Armenians converting to Islam to circumvent deportation orders. It focuses on the government’s orders and decrees that were issued to confront this issue. The third and final part briefly canvasses the hitherto neglected problem of prostitution by Armenian women as a strategy for survival during the war.

The central focus of this article is not the Ottoman conduct of the First World War per se but the social and economic destruction that the war generated in the Ottoman Empire. Coupled with half a decade of disastrous Young Turk rule, this crisis reverberated throughout time and space and left scars on social life across the region. Although the war and the genocide had ended by 1918, social problems were rampant. Entire networks of economic and familial ties had now been severely disrupted. Young Turk mass vio-lence augmented certain categories of people seen as social outsiders in Ottoman culture. The number of orphans, converts, and prostitutes had greatly increased as an intended and unintended result of the regime’s policies. Their experiences offer a complex and valuable insight into the lasting impact of the First World War and Young Turk rule.

II. Orphans

The genocide produced innumerable orphans across the empire. But rather than roaming the streets and begging for food or money, most orphans were taken by the Young Turk government. During and after the war the identity and future of Ottoman orphans became a battleground between relief organizations and missionaries, on the one hand, and the Young Turk regime, on the other. From the Young Turks’ nationalist perspective, children constituted a precious form of national property, and were to be instilled with nationalist ideas and given a purely Turkish identity. Non-Turkish orphans would be subjected to differential treatment: in addition to food and shelter, they would receive a transformation of cultural identity. The Young Turk regime pursued as one of its goals

5 Raymond H. Kevorkian, Le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006).


the ‘Turkification’ of ‘valuable’ Armenian children as its educational activists attempted to create a political culture in which children belonged to national communities, and in which the nation’s rights to educate children often trumped parental rights. Furthermore, the CUP’s treatment of Armenian orphans strongly suggests its policies were not a purely philanthropic endeavour but a constitutive element of the process of destruction visited on the Ottoman Armenian community.6

In anticipation of hard times to come, early in the First World War the Young Turks assigned the general director for tribes and migrants, Şükrü Kaya (1883–1959), the task of opening new orphanages. (Kaya would go on to become a powerful interior minister after the war.) The existing Ottoman orphanage system, already filled beyond capacity as a result of years of war, was unprepared for another large war and became even more overburdened. But that system was expanded not only to cope with the inevitability of children becoming orphaned in future warfare. When the general deportations of all Armenians were initiated from 23 May 1915, a second form of population politics com-pounded the persecution. Armenian children were distributed in the Muslim population and sent to state orphanages. As early as June 1915, Armenian children younger than 10 were ordered to be ‘collected’ and placed in orphanages, some of which were yet to be established.7 On 10 July 1915 Talaat amplified this policy of absorption of Armenian children into the Muslim community by ordering ‘children to be given as adoptees to notables living in villages and towns where there are no Armenians’. Those who could not afford another child would be eligible to receive an allowance of 30 cents per month per child. Records were to be kept of which families had adopted the children.8 Two days later, on 12 July 1915, Talaat issued a similar decree to all provinces: ‘Children likely to become parentless during the transportation of Armenians’ were to be placed in govern-ment-run orphanages as soon as possible.9 This formulation reveals a form of intent through the tight veil of secrecy surrounding the organization of the genocide. Members of the Young Turk elite were apparently aware of the possibility that many children would become orphaned as a result of the policies they knew were likely to be organized in the near future. Put more strongly, this quote reveals that the destruction of Ottoman Armenians was not accidental but based on foreknowledge and therefore intentional. Thus they acted in advance of the developments yet to happen.

When these policies towards Armenian orphans had been in process for almost a year, the same order was repeated, this time by raising the age of targeted children to 12 years

6 For an overview: Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case’, Journal of Genocide Research V (2003), pp. 421–7.

7 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Ottoman Archives, Istanbul: BOA), DH.ŞFR 54/150, Ministry of Education to provinces, 26 June 1915.

8 The official document is reproduced in: Kâmuran Gürün, Ermeni Dosyası (Ankara: Bilgi, 1988), p. 287. There is evidence that later in the war, when the government was unable to produce even the 30 cents a year for the maintenance of the children, the Muslim foster-parents no longer saw any reason to keep the children, and sold, evicted, or even executed them. Interview conducted with Y.A. in Elazığ, July 2004.

9 BOA, DH.ŞFR 54/41, Talaat to provinces, 12 July 1915.

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and with the explicit clause that the children were to be ‘raised and assimilated’ (terbiye ve temsil) according to Muslim traditions.10 Much like the deportations, these policies too were closely monitored in the coming years. From time to time, Talaat sent empire-wide requests for detailed data on how many orphans were living in each province, broken down by gender and ethnicity, never neglecting to ask how many of these had been placed in orphanages.11 The campaign was accompanied by cultural prohibition on a large scale: besides the burning of libraries and books,12 Talaat ordered the prohibition of the Armenian language for all communication, imposing Turkish in its stead, the prohib-ition of Armenian schools throughout the empire, and the prohibition of all Armenian newspapers with the exception of those in Istanbul.13 He also organized a cordon sanitaire around the many American and German schools so that Armenian children could no longer study there. The order read: ‘The homeland needs to be saved from organizations open to foreign influences.’14 By the end of the war, the Ottoman Armenian educational system was ruined. The targeting of children, the cultural persecution, and educational prohibitions were a coherent attack to purge the public space of difference, in particular in relation to Armenian culture.

In January 1916 a new orphanage with a capacity of 1000 beds was established in the south-eastern city of Diyarbekir.15 The staff immediately began collecting Armenian orphans whose parents had been lost, killed, or deported the year before. When, in the second week of March 1916, a Danish missionary nurse, Hansine Marcher, travelled to that city, most Armenian orphans had already been taken into the orphanage. Some of these children were forced to work for a living. Walking into a cafe, Marcher saw many Armenian boys working as waiters. She also noticed many Armenian girls living as maids, ‘not to say as slaves’, among Turkish families. All the orphans by that time spoke Turkish and had been given Turkish names.16 Around the same time, Armenian deportee Hagop Der-Garabedian was incarcerated in the central prison of Diyarbekir, and witnessed Christian orphans selling food:

Children congregated in front of the prison gate daily to sell us bread, yogurt, and sweet cookies. Many of them spoke Armenian. From talking to them we found out that they were Assyrian and Armenian orphans trying to eke out a living selling whatever they could get their hands on.17

10 BOA, DH.ŞFR 63/142, Talaat to provinces, 30 April 1916.11 BOA, DH.ŞFR 78/204, Talaat to provinces, 25 July 1917.12 Young Turk cultural policies are discussed in: Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern

Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 237ff.

13 BOA, DH.ŞFR 54/261, Talaat to provinces, 1 July 1915.14 BOA, DH.ŞFR 55A/155, Ministry of Education to Mamuretül-Aziz, Sivas, and Diyarbekir, 9

September 1915.15 İbrahim E. Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni kadınları ve çocukları meselesi, 1915–1923 (Ankara:

Babil, 2005), pp. 51, 54–5.16 Hansine Marcher, Oplevelser Derovrefra (Copenhagen: KMA, 1919), p. 16.17 Hagop S. Der-Garabedian, Jail to Jail: Autobiography of a Survivor of the 1915 Armenian

Genocide (New York: iUniverse, 2004), p. 34.


The orphanage system only functioned in the cities. In the countryside, the assimilation of orphans was subject to popular responses as the children were dispersed into Muslim families.

One of the most detailed accounts of an orphan’s life is that of Heranush Gadarian (1905–2000) from the northern district of Palu. Her family was living in the village of Havav (Ekinözü) when in the spring of 1915 Young Turk special militias raided the village, murdered the village chief in the village square, tied all the men together two by two, and took them away to the bridge over the Euphrates, where they were killed and thrown into the river. The ten-year-old Heranush fled to a neighbouring village with her mother and two sisters, but the militia soon swept through that village as well, and took the women and children to the Armenian church in Palu, from where they were all deported southwards. The deportation gradually proved fatal for many of Heranush’s family members, especially pregnant women, the elderly, and younger children. When the convoy arrived in Çermik, local Muslims arrived to take away the remaining children. There was no consensus among the older women about this traumatic event: whereas some vehemently opposed being parted from their offspring, others argued this was the only way for the children to survive. Heranush was taken by a Corporal Hüseyin, who took her home to his wife, and registered her in his identity card as ‘Seher’. Her foster-father treated her as his own child, insisting she call him ‘daddy’, but his wife was not charmed by Heranush, and saw her as a servant girl. From then on Heranush lived with her new family, and she married a Muslim and bore him several children. She never saw her family again.18

In an age which linked mass politics and demography, nationalists everywhere were obsessed with the quantity and quality of the nation’s children.19 During the armistice (1918–23) the fate of Armenian orphans, too, became a political battleground between Armenian community activists, western relief agencies, and Young Turk social engi-neers. At the end of the war there were many Armenian orphans still in state orphanages. According to statistics put forward by the Armenian patriarchate in 1921, the bulk of Armenian orphans and children were living in the countryside with their new Muslim families.20

Some figures provided by the Armenian patriarchate are shown in Table 1, but it is difficult to assess the accuracy of this table with any certainty. That the patriarchate may have inflated these numbers to accentuate Armenian victimization is likely, but

18 Heranush’s grandchild Fethiye Çetin later located her Armenian relatives in the United States and wrote a family memoir. Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem: anlatı (Istanbul: Metis, 2004); for an English translation of this book see: Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2008).

19 Sarah Fishman, The Battle for Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Tara Zahra, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945’, Central European History XXXVII (2004), pp. 501–43.

20 Hikmet Özdemir et al., Ermeniler: sürgün ve göç (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2004), pp. 120, 122–3.

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not certain. Why the number of orphans for some provinces soars above the others is even more difficult to explain. Possible reasons are that survival rates of children were higher, that the practice of taking orphans into one’s household was more widespread, or that there were more orphans simply because some provinces were hubs in the deportation apparatus.

There is contradictory evidence to the effect that the rehabilitation of Armenian children during the armistice period was abused by Armenian nationalists who used the opportunity to take Muslim children into their custody as well. This followed the same nationalist logic, namely that children were blank, raw ethnic material that could be culturally transformed to the benefit of one’s own nation. According to one newspaper report, 200 Muslim children, including many girls, were kept at the Armenian patriarchate and taught the Armenian language, religion, and culture.21 It is unclear whether all these children were Armenian orphans forcibly converted to Islam during the war or Turkish children. The scope of child kidnappings during the geno-cide suggests that the former theory is nearer to the truth: most of these children who were Muslims in 1918 had in fact been Armenian children three years before. Whereas most Muslim Turkish nationalists adhered to the motto ‘Once a Muslim, always a Muslim’, most Armenian nationalists for their own purposes asserted the opposite: ‘Once an Armenian, always an Armenian’. For Armenian nationalists it did not matter whether the children had been converted and brought up as Turkish Muslims for years. Their Turkish counterparts, on the other hand, saw the children’s identity change as an irreversible fait accompli that the Armenian community simply had to

Table 1. Armenian orphans in the Ottoman Empire, 1921.

Der ez-Zor 3,800Resulayn 2,000Istanbul and surroundings 6,000İzmit, Bursa, Balıkesir 2,000İnebolu 1,500Eskisehir and Konya 3,000Kastamonu 500Trabzon 2,500Sivas 3,500Kayseri 3,500Erzurum 3,000Diyarbekir and Mardin 25,000Harput 3,000Bitlis and Van 3,000Total 63,000

Source: Hikmet Özdemir et al., Ermeniler: sürgün ve göç (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2004), pp. 120, 122–3.

21 İleri, 27 May 1919.


accept. And so, the wrangling over the children’s ‘real’ ethnic identity and national membership continued.22

The few surviving Armenian, Syriac, and other Christians were destitute and trauma-tized after the 1918 Ottoman capitulation. Their land had been seized, their stores had been pillaged or demolished, their churches had been sacked, and their children had been kidnapped. The new government in Istanbul was hostile to the Young Turks and did not persecute the Armenians, and senators promised to bring justice to the ‘brutally mas-sacred Armenians, the deported Arabs, the orphans and widows’.23 The liberal press of the armistice exposed the crimes against women and children. The newspaper New Istanbul, for example, published an article decrying Young Turk war crimes: ‘The Ittihad ve Terakki bandits, who have spilled blood by tyrannizing the Armenian people and engaging in embezzlement against them without accounting for the assets they pilfered, have even extended their reach to innocent orphan girls left here and there.’24 This moral outrage against child abuse pressured the new government to put its words into practice. It immediately allowed all deported Armenians to return to their homes and tried its best to remedy the wrongs of the past. Ahmet İzzet Paşa (1864–1937), ex-commander of the 2nd Army and now minister of the interior, ordered all local authorities ‘to deliver Armenian orphans to Armenian community organizations’.25 In the spring of 1919 the government ordered female Armenians younger than 20 years and Armenian children to be delivered to their parents.26 Where organized community life was weak, relief was offered by the League of Nations, and the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which was later renamed Near East Relief.27 In various cities of the country, orphanages were set up where Armenian and Syriac orphans were cared for.28 At that point, only cynics could imagine that within a year or two the Young Turks would regain strength and reappear as the government, again disbanding non-Turkish orphanages and expelling their staff.

Meanwhile, the moderate armistice government also attempted to help the kidnapped girls and women who were held against their will in Muslim households. An Armenian survivor named Ohannes complained that his wife, Populu (who had been converted to

22 For an article that problematizes but largely decontextualizes the genocidal ramifications of Young Turk policy towards Armenians orphans: Yavuz Selim Karakışla, ‘Savaş yetimleri ve kimsesiz çocuklar: “Ermeni” mi, “Türk” mü?’, Toplumsal Tarih XII, no. 69 (1999), pp. 46–55.

23 For excerpts of Senator Ahmet Rıza’s speech in the Ottoman senate: Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de siyasal partiler (Istanbul: İletişim), p. 199.

24 Yeni Istanbul, 9 November 1918.25 BOA, DH.ŞFR 95/163, Ahmet İzzet to provinces, 18 January 1919.26 Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni, p. 136.27 Near East Relief, Annual Report (New York: Near East Relief Headquarters, 1920). The

organization was later renamed Near East Foundation.28 Robert L. Daniel, American Philanthropy in the Near East, 1820–1960 (Athens, OH: Ohio

University Press, 1922), p. 169. Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review CXV (2010), pp. 1315–39.

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‘Fehmiye’ in the genocide), was being held in the house of a butcher named Halil in Nusaybin against her will. Ohannes accused Halil of having massacred his family and kidnapped his wife, demanding his wife return to him.29 An Armenian girl named Lucia Alyanakian had been living in the house of the Mardin notable Hacıgözüzâde, who had either saved her from death or forcibly married her as an additional wife. The Istanbul government discovered that her mother, Zaruhi Tomasian, was alive in Diyarbekir, and ordered Lucia to be delivered to her mother.30 The Armenian patriarchate in Istanbul often complained, and lobbied the government to retrieve the orphans from the Muslim families, including individual children. For example, in February 1919 it complained that an Armenian girl named Verjin was living under her Muslim name, Hayriye, with a Mustafaoğlu Nasır in Mardin.31 Another girl was Alice Chekmian, who was discovered by Near East Relief workers in the household of Diyarbekir’s court examiner. The girl was retrieved and taken to Aleppo, where she was reunited with her aunt.32 Many others were not so fortunate.

III. Converts

During the First World War the Young Turk regime tolerated or organized the forced conversion to Islam of countless numbers of Armenians and Syriacs. One scholar char-acterizes four types of such conversions: ‘voluntary’33 conversions of individuals in the initial stages of the 1915 persecutions; selection of individual Armenians by individual Muslim hosts for absorption into Muslim households; distribution of Armenians to Muslim families by government agencies; and the use of government-sponsored orphan-ages as a direct means of assimilating Armenian children. As a consequence of this quadripartite policy, many Armenians were more or less forcibly converted to Islam.34 Another aspect of this strategy was launched when, in the early winter of 1915, Talaat initiated a policy of forcibly marrying Armenian girls to Muslim men.35 The categorical, violent, and gendered nature of the anti-Armenian persecutions notwithstanding, these

29 BOA, DH.EUM.AYŞ 27/10, Governor of Diyarbekir Faik Ali to Interior Ministry, 26 November 1919.

30 BOA, DH.ŞFR 92/209, Directorate for General Security to Diyarbekir, 15 June 1919.31 BOA, DH.KMS 50-2/54, Ministry of Interior to Diyarbekir province, 8 July 1919.32 BOA, DH.KMS 50-2/35, Ministry of Interior to Diyarbekir province, 23 June 1919.33 ‘Voluntariness’ is a highly disputed concept in the history of conversion, as it seems that

most converts that converted ‘voluntarily’ were always under a certain degree of pressure, although more often socially than administratively. Maria Todorova, ‘The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans’, in Carl Brown, ed., Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 45–77, at 49.

34 Ara Sarafian, ‘The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds, In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 209–21.

35 BOA, DH.ŞFR 59/150, Talaat to Niğde, 30 December 1915.


strategies denote the absence of biological and racist definitions of the target group. The conduct of the deportations, too, showed that the apparent indelibility of Ottoman Armenian group identity could be tampered with and forged into another identity. One analyst provides a cultural explanation for this porousness:

Traditional society in the Middle East still looked upon women and children as chattel, persons lacking political personality and of transmutable ethnic identity. The cultural values of children and females could be erased or reprogrammed. Genetic continuity was a male proposition.36

The CUP’s official directives disclose how the everyday conduct of the process of conversion was implemented. Through his orders, Talaat Pasha authorized the conver-sion of untold numbers of Armenians. Besides specific instructions steering local elites, Talaat issued several national decrees categorizing those to be persecuted and those deported. In June 1915 he excluded the Armenian converts to Islam from deportation to the south.37 Most converts were not persecuted any more and, provided they kept their silence, were allowed to continue living in their homes. A secretary close to Talaat noted in his memoirs that the regime had established a committee to enforce the mass conver-sion of Armenians. The committee convened in his house several times and discussed whether Armenians could even be given farmland if they converted, but this idea was quickly abandoned.38 The main reason for the policy shift was a new development: some Armenians used this window of opportunity outwardly to convert to Islam, but secretly continued to practise Christianity. When this news trickled back to the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior, two weeks after his first directive authorizing conversions to Islam, Talaat reincorporated the converts into the deportation programme. In other words, at times the dictatorship found conversion to Islam not satisfactory or trustworthy enough. Therefore, to follow up on the previous persecutions, on 22 February 1916 Talaat issued an empire-wide decree to the Ottoman police to monitor closely converted Armenians with new identity cards.39 Well into 1918 he maintained his grip on converted Armenians and Syriacs by having their names, manners of conversion, and lives after conversion registered.40

The Armenian response to the government’s conversion policies was ambivalent. It ranged from fearful acquiescence to adamant resistance. Some Armenians were flexible about the prospect of changing their identity. Danish missionaries witnessed how desper-ate women deportees shouted to them in the street, ‘We want to become Muslims. We want to become Germans, whatever you want, just save us, they are about to take us to

36 Rouben Adalian, ‘The Armenian Genocide’, in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel Charny, eds, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 41–64, at 52.

37 BOA, DH.ŞFR 54/100, Talaat to provinces, 22 June 1915.38 Falih Rıfkı Atay, Zeytindağı (Istanbul: Bateş, 1981), p. 66.39 BOA, DH.ŞFR 61/71, Talaat to provinces, 22 February 1916.40 BOA, DH.ŞFR 86/45, Talaat to provinces, 3 April 1918; DH.ŞFR 87/259, Directorate for

General Security to Elaziz province, 23 May 1918.

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Kemagh and slit our throats.’41 The young Armenian boy Henry Vartanian, whose father had been murdered, was offered shelter by a Turkish acquaintance, who demanded he renounce Christianity and convert to Islam in a ceremony attended by an imam. The young Henry testified the Islamic statement of faith ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet’, was ritually circumcised, and from then on went through life as Esad, son of Abdurrahman.42 But having to abandon one’s identity was unacceptable and humiliating to many others. The forced changing of names was humiliating and confusing as well. Khachadoor Pilibosian was a child survivor of the Armenian geno-cide, and was also kidnapped by a Kurd during the deportations and taken to live with him as a slave. In his memoirs he writes how he was absorbed into a Kurdish household and that the Kurds renamed him ‘Mustafa’. After the war he managed to escape to Aleppo and contact his father in America, whither he fled in 1920.43 Other Armenians persevered in their faith even in the face of drawn guns and swords. Kerop Bedoukian was a young deportee who survived the bloody summer of 1915:

My mother was saying that we had an offer from the Mayor via my aunt, a teacher who had established six Turkish kindergartens, the first in the city. The offer was that my aunt and forty-two of her relatives could be saved from deportation if they turned Mohammedan. My father’s answer still rings in my ear as he said, while he fixed my belt: ‘You will go and die on one mountain and I will go and die on another but we shall not deny our Christ.’ I still feel his goodbye kiss on both my cheeks. We parted. No-one shed any tears.44

An elderly Kurd from the small eastern town of Ergani recalled that his father told him the story of an Armenian man who converted to Islam and was then sheltered and hidden in a stable by friendly villagers. After the bloodiest momentum of the summer of 1915, thinking the coast was clear, he reconverted to Christianity and practised his faith. The Kurdish villagers, distraught at this risky act, since helping Armenians was punishable by death, tracked him down and killed him.45

Contemporary western observers, whether neutral towards, allied with, or hostile to the Ottoman Empire, quickly realized that this policy of forced conversion was one of the methods used to secure the disappearance of the Ottoman Armenians as a community. As with all other aspects of the genocide, the Germans in particular were very well informed about the nature of the forced conversions and assimilation campaign. In the summer of 1916, when the campaign was in full effect, the German ambassador, Paul Wolff

41 Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt (German National Archives, Berlin: PAAA), R14087, Schuchardt to Auswärtiges Amt, 21 August 1915, appendix 1. All German archival materials are quoted from: Wolfgang Gust, ed., Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16: Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswärtigen Amts (Hamburg: Zu Klampen, 2005).

42 Donald E. Miller and Lorne Touryan-Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 146.

43 Khachadoor Pilibosian, They Called Me Mustafa: Memoir of an Immigrant (Watertown, NY: Ohan, 1992).

44 Kerop Bedoukian, The Urchin: An Armenian’s Escape (London: John Murray, 1978), p. 8.45 Interview conducted with M.Ş. in Diyarbekir city, August 2004.


Metternich (1853–1934), wrote to the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921):

One should not see in the forced Islamization (zwangsweisen Islamisierung) of Armenians a measure prompted by religious fanaticism. Such feelings are unknown to the Young Turk powerholders … they hold true inasmuch as the leading motive is not religious fanaticism, for example like the forced conversion of Jews and Moors in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the purpose is to amalgamate (amalgamieren) the Armenians with the Mohammedan inhabitants of the empire.46

The ambassador had provided what seemed to be an accurate assessment of the motives underlying the conversion policies: the dilution of Armenian demography. Through this particular historical lens, the CUP’s forced conversion campaign was a breach of traditional Ottoman population policies, despite continuities in patriarchal structures. The levels of coercion and threat of mass violence towards Ottoman Christians were unprecedented, and symbolized the shift from Ottoman imperial rule over a religious minority to a Young Turk nationalist one.

Much like the fate of the orphans, the fate of the converts too became a bone of con-tention during the armistice. Again, the liberal government led by Grand Vizier Ahmet İzzet Paşa had to reverse the damage done by Young Turk religious oppression. On 8 February 1919 he sent out the empire-wide order that ‘because of the fact that conver-sions of all Armenian men and women under 20 years of age are not acknowledged, their identity certificates immediately be corrected as Armenians’. Those converts over 20 years of age were ordered to be left free ‘to return to their true religion’ (dîn-i aslilerine rücu).47 All state officials were ordered to obey closely and follow these directives, but it seems that in practice the local genocide perpetrators were visibly too powerful for the terrified converts to step out from the anonymity of their hiding places in public and disclose themselves as Armenians. The British agent Keeling passed through north Mesopotamia in 1919 and wrote:

On the following day a number of Armenians called upon me, mostly in the Mussulman garb which they have adopted as a protective measure. Three hundred of them, survivors of the massacres and deportations of 1915, wished to return to their homes at Kharput, Sivas, and Erzerum. I advised them to wait until the spring, when the journey would be less arduous and the British government might be able to arrange for their protection, both en route and at their destinations. This hope was, unfortunately, never to be realised … More urgent than repatriation was the release of the thousands of Armenian women and children living with Kurds, Turks, and Arabs. There was scarcely a girl over twelve who had not been a wife to some Moslem. A decree that Christians were free to leave Moslem houses had been received from Constantinople, but the officials were inactive, and the men with whom the refugees were living were not inclined to surrender them . . . Many children were separated from their mothers,

46 PAAA, R14092, Wolff Metternich to Bethmann Hollweg, 10 July 1916.47 BOA, DH.ŞFR 96/100, Interior Ministry to provinces, 8 February 1919.

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and wives from their husbands, simply through ignorance of their whereabouts. Some of the children in Moslem hands were, indeed, unaware that they were of Christian parentage.48

After the fledgling Young Turk movement defeated the Armenian state in the east and the Greek invasion in the west, the converts kept a low profile, living either as so-called ‘crypto-Christians’ or fully silencing their Armenian identities and living as Muslims.49

Besides individual conversions, some families or villages had converted collectively. They converted to Islam to survive the genocidal persecution and often managed to live in Turkey for several decades before migrating to Istanbul or western Europe. The later life of these Christian families merits attention not only for the study of the genocide itself. The existence of these people has also been important for the postwar history and economy of eastern Turkey: some converts stayed in their villages and ignored their Armenian past, whereas others lived as crypto-Christians. Openly living as an Armenian Christian was out of the question, because in later years practising Christianity in the hinterland was made impossible by the regime. But the converts suffered persecution as well. There is evidence that the regime had intimate knowledge of Armenian converts in the eastern provinces. In a sweeping decree the prime minister’s office ordered, ‘from the perspective of order and security’, that all families who were known converts should be deported from the border provinces. At this point the Young Turks’ anti-Armenian sentiments acquired an essentialist, racialized character: Armenians were now seen as unchanging in their supposed disloyalty. In the Young Turk mind, even sincere conver-sion could not shake this conviction.50

Those who survived the persecutions had fully suppressed their Armenian identity by then. The Armenian family K. from the south-eastern Şırnak district converted to Islam for a while but reconverted to Christianity, partly as a result of the efforts of a Syriac priest roaming the countryside in the 1960s in a search for Armenian converts.51 One woman from the same region recalled in an interview:

I always knew that my father’s father was Armenian. We all knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Everyone knew, and a lot of people used to say to my grandfather that he was Armenian by origin, but we didn’t talk about it in our family. My uncles are fanatic Muslims, there are religious officials – imams – among them, who don’t want to talk about it.52

48 E.H. Keeling, Adventures in Turkey and Russia (London: John Murray, 1924), pp. 213, 225.49 Maurus Reinkowski, ‘Hidden Believers, Hidden Apostates: The Phenomenon of Crypto-Jews

and Crypto-Christians in the Middle East’, in Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart, eds, Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 409–33.

50 Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi (Republican Archives, Ankara), 030.18.01.02/102.54.17, decree dated 8 July 1943.

51 Interviews conducted with S. family in Amsterdam, 15–16 October 2005.52 Liana Sayadyan, ‘A Wound That Wouldn’t Heal’, Hetq Online: Investigative Journalists of

Armenia, http://archive.hetq.am/eng/society/0603-gender.html, accessed 21 December 2011.


The fate of the notable Armenian family M. is a telling example of these strategies of ‘doubling’, a psychological vehicle that has allowed them to live with two fundamentally conflicting identities. During the genocide the M. were spared upon conversion and saved. When they migrated from Turkey to the Netherlands in the 1970s they recon-verted to Christianity. Now, whenever they visit their remaining family members in Turkey, their flights back and forth between the Netherlands and Turkey also represent shifts between Christianity and Islam. The women scarf up during the flight, Muslim names are used instead of their Armenian ones, and they behave like Muslims.53 These families survived the Armenian genocide through a mainly coincidental combination of conversion and rescue.54

IV. Prostitutes

The genocide took the form of the patriarchal culture in which it was executed: much like other material possessions, the women (and children) were also considered to be property, and property was to be distributed:

Women have seldom participated directly in genocide, though this has begun to change in the twentieth century (e.g., in Nazi Germany and Cambodia); women have been victimized in ways different from men to a large extent (rape and enslavement); and the consequences of genocide (incorporation into the perpetrator’s society; or ostracism of victims of rape, as in Bangladesh) have often been different as well. All these differences can be explained in terms of: (1) the specific biological attributes of women (sexuality, reproductive capacity, and maternity) that historically made them both vulnerable and valuable; and (2) the assumptions of patriarchal society that women are weak, dependent, and the sexual property of males, who may appropriate their bodies, labor, and reproductive power.55

Sexual relations in patriarchal Middle Eastern societies have historically articulated and reinforced social hierarchies and dominant and subordinate social positions: adult men at the top, with women, boys, and girls lower, and prostitutes at the absolute bottom. In this tradition, ruling authorities often saw prostitution as a socially useful alternative to potential male sexual violence and a welcome source of official or unofficial tax rev-enues. In the words of one expert, ‘institutional prostitution forms part of the secret equilibrium’ of Middle Eastern societies, necessary to their social reproduction.56 This precarious sexual equilibrium was disturbed when, largely as a result of the First World War, prostitution boomed in the Ottoman Empire. The growth of the number of widows,

53 Interview with D.E. (from Piran/Dicle district) conducted in Amsterdam, May 2005.54 Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘Strategies de survie au cours du genocide des armeniens’, in Jacques

Semelin, Claire Andrieu and Sarah Gensburger, eds, La résistance aux génocides: de la pluralité des actes de sauvetage (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008), pp. 221–32.

55 Roger W. Smith, ‘Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies VIII (1994), pp. 315–34, at 316.

56 Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 193.

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whose male family members had perished at the front or elsewhere, added to the trend that the Ottoman population had come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women. Many of these desperate women often saw no other choice than to resort to prostitution. Some were tricked or forced into it, but most had no other means of supporting their families. The impact of this process was most profound for the Armenian women who had survived the deportations.57

Kidnapping and forced marriages were a common practice during the genocide. The war caused a moral lapse, if not collapse, for surviving Armenian women, many of whom were unable to sustain themselves and therefore ended up in prostitution. According to one study, in 1919 out of 140 prostitutes in Mosul, 100 were Armenian.58 The social stigma associated with prostitution was virtually impossible to overcome for these women, especially because their clients had been Turkish perpetrators of the genocide. This was an acquired stigma, one that is earned by conduct rather than congenital.59 Even though this was an open secret among Armenians, foreign observers also knew of it. For example, a German journalist personally knew Turks who had been organizing the forced prostitution of Armenian women.60 The American consul in Aleppo reported that ‘accord-ing to reports from reliable sources the accompanying gendarmes are told that they may do as they wish with the women and girls’.61 Armenian women’s literary responses to this perceived moral catastrophe revolved around themes such as fears of assimilation and identity loss, the alienation caused by intermarriage, and psychological trauma, as well as occasional compassion for these desperate women.62

Yervant Odian (1869–1926), an Armenian intellectual deported from Istanbul, encountered an Armenian prostitute, ‘quite beautiful and well educated’, in the train on the return journey at the end of the war. When Odian expressed his disapproval and disgust at her, the woman responded:

Is it only me, living this life? All the deported Armenian women in Konia, whose husbands are missing, massacred or dead, are in the same state. Either they went to brothels or took lovers. How else would you have liked us to live? If, for example, I wasn’t linked to this policeman, who knows how many times I would have been sent to Der Zor and died on the road or massacred there. This man has kept me for a whole three years.

57 Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘‘‘A Fate Worse Than Dying”: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide’, in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), pp. 16–59.

58 Vahe Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide’, Nations and Nationalism XV (2009), pp. 60–80, at 71.

59 Gerhard Falk, Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2001).60 Harry Stürmer, Two War Years in Constantinople: Sketches of German and Young Turkish

Ethics and Politics (London: Gomidas Institute, 2004 [1917]), p. 49.61 Ara Sarafian, ed., United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide (Watertown,

MA: Armenian Review, 1993), vol. I, The Lower Euphrates, p. 15.62 Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1921 (London: Cambridge

Scholars, 2003), pp. 187–8.


When Odian pointed out that the war was over now and the threat of deportation had passed, the woman responded:

It is much too late … After living this life for three years, who’ll look at me …? Look, I was the daughter of a respected family from Bandirma, but now I don’t dare to go home, because I am ashamed to look my relatives and friends in their faces. Many of them have heard what sort of life I’ve led in Konia.63

One of the most telling examples of the prostitution of Armenian women was the case of Fahriye Yıldırım, Fexo for short. She was an Armenian girl from Diyarbekir who was saved from a certain death in the genocide and absorbed into a Kurdish family. Because of her low social status, being an orphan, a girl, and of Armenian descent, she was con-tinuously denigrated. In order to sustain herself she saw no other option than to prostitute herself from a young age. In the late 1940s and 1950s she became a phenomenon in Diyarbekir when she eventually assumed control of the city’s brothel and employed other women there, many of whom were orphans like herself. The business thrived under the supervision of ‘Patron Fexo’, as she was nicknamed, and she amassed a small fortune through her brothel.64

Armenian women deportees were not the only ones affected by the war. So were Kurdish deportees. Among Kurdish peasants and nomads, prostitution was practically unheard of until the war. As the British agent Noel wrote, ‘In Kurdish there is no word for a prostitute. In the Eastern districts she is euphemistically referred to as a Persian, in the North as a Russian, in the south as an Arab, and in the West as a Turk.’65 Among this population too, prostitution blossomed in the aftermath of the war, albeit less than in the Armenian case. An Ottoman army officer testified that, out of dire helplessness, many Kurdish women saw no other option than ‘selling their bodies’.66 A Kurdish politician, Memduh Selim Bey (1880–1976), lamented after the war that many lonely Kurdish women resorted to ‘alcoholism’ (müzkirat) and had no choice but to engage in ‘prostitu-tion’ (fuhşiyat).67 Part of this strong moral rhetoric was to inflame the sentiments of a conservative population, but the fact remained that the ravages of the First World War directly imposed prostitution as a socially sensitive problem in the eastern provinces. According to Ottoman belief patterns, these women became ostracized the moment they engaged in prostitution. The problems they encountered as social outcasts then compounded their problems in the aftermath of mass violence.

63 Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914–1919 (London: Gomidas, 2009), pp. 300–1.

64 See the memoirs of a Kurdish intellectual who met her: Naci Kutlay, ‘Acı Gerçekler – 2’, Özgür Politika, 5 November 2003.

65 Edward Noel, ‘The Character of the Kurds as Illustrated by Their Proverbs and Popular Sayings’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies I (1917–20), p. 85.

66 Rafiq Hilmi, Yaddasht (Tehran: Mohammed-i Saqiz, 1987), pp. 30–1.67 Memduh Selimbegî, ‘Hewar! – İmdad!’, Jîn, 22 May 1919, p. 5.

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A hitherto ignored or airbrushed aspect of the Great War was the world of these inhabitants of the demi-monde: the warlords, the habitually unemployed, the excom-municated, the petty criminals, the social bandits, the pimps and prostitutes at or beyond the margins of ‘respectable’ society. Within this pre-existing social environ-ment lived groups of Kurds, Armenians, Turks, and Syriacs whose contact with the authorities had traditionally been minimal. These social constellations emerged as opportunity structures for protection in terms of the cover they offered from the state. These structures were less susceptible to nationalist propaganda and thus permitted a greater degree of association with Armenians. That this social constellation produced ‘rescue’ from Young Turk persecution was a largely coincidental response of ordinary social structures adapted to a changed set of circumstances.

V. Conclusion

This article has addressed some of the social transformations that took place within the Armenian community under Young Turk rule. These were relatively autonomous pro-cesses of social change resulting from ongoing developments and historical events, as well as authoritarian top-down policies aimed at intentionally engineering social change. The article has focused on how the war created new categories and augmented old categories of social outsiders. In the aftermath of the war and the genocide, the Armenian community had become a collection of orphans, converts, and destitute women. These social outcasts had one thing in common: they were for a large part products or by-products of Young Turk persecution.

During the First World War, mass murder, deportation, and forced assimilation were three faces of the same process of destruction organized by the Young Turk regime. All these three vectors of violence pointed towards one objective: the demographic disap-pearance of the Ottoman Armenian community, especially from the Ottoman heartland and the eastern provinces. Whereas Armenian men were massacred, Armenian women were deported and absorbed into Muslim households.68 Armenian children became specific objects of population policy as well. Those children who did not remember their biological parents became Turks and, given that they were not confronted with their past by outsiders, lived as Turkish Muslims ever after. But after a certain cut-off point such an identity change was no longer possible, and therefore many orphans who were kidnapped ‘too late’ ended up in deep crisis with no prospect of therapy or return, and as a result most of them languished in suffering. These orphans were earmarked to become Turks, not Armenians, at least not in the way that an intact Armenian family and village life in the countryside would most likely have made them. The troubling legacy of being an Armenian orphan suggests that aggressively assimilationist policies designed to integrate minority groups are most likely to fail, for two reasons. First, the

68 Eliz Sanasarian, ‘Gender Distinction in the Genocidal Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies IV (1989), pp. 449–61.


failure was due not to resistance to the culture or language itself, but to resistance to aggressive and violent methods. Second, after a certain age, the possibility of com-pletely abandoning the cultural identity one has been born into and of socialization into a new one becomes relatively limited.

To many Armenians the genocide came as yet another Ottoman pogrom. They knew little of the true nature of the genocidal deportations when they were first launched. However, there were limited if real possibilities of ‘behavioural escape’ in the Armenian genocide – conversion being the main one. Escaping or being rescued was closely related to conversion, even though without help (from Muslims) those chances were still very slim. Resistance against conversion to the religion of the feared and hated Other may have been typical and characteristic of the era and the region but, in the face of violence, even the most devout could reconsider their principles. No matter how fluid, hybrid, and entwined identities were in the peasant society that eastern Turkey was (and is), a certain form of sectarian religious identity persisted, especially among nationalists and the more pious people. These subjective experiences of conversion to Islam clash with objective observations of it. Even though most deportees experienced conversion as a breach of moral and social codes as well as an infraction of their religious identity, the fact remained that their chances of survival were at their highest if they converted to Islam and lived inconspicuously, whether under Muslim domination or not. The Young Turks’ changing attitude towards the converts demonstrates that conversion did not remove their suspicion. Rightly so, perhaps, since it did not seem to guarantee the converts’ loyalty to the govern-ment. Paradoxically, even though the Young Turk regime imposed forced conversion upon many Christians (Armenians and Syriacs), it lacked the perceptiveness to take into consideration that, presumably because it only added to notions of secrecy and mythifi-cation, ‘forced conversion usually entails a stronger rejection and distrust of the convert group by the dominant society’.69 Consequently, one can see highly traumatic identities in the afterlife of converts, often expressing above-average piety to compensate for and mask the obvious lack of Islamic ‘pedigree’.70

The legacies of the forced identity changes in this period have played an important role on the longue durée. The case of Fethiye Çetin, a lawyer from a Muslim family in eastern Turkey, is instructive. The memoir she wrote disclosed her Armenian grandmother’s roots and offered a textbook example of conversion, rescue, and survival during the genocide. Çetin notes that her grandmother was saved because she accepted conversion. Muslim villagers were only interested in sheltering Armenian

69 Mercedes Garcia Arenal, ‘Conversion to Islam in the Mediterranean-Muslim World’, in Randi Deguilhem, ed., Individual and Society in the Mediterranean-Muslim World: Issues and Sources (Paris: European Science Foundation, 1998), p. 15.

70 The story of Behçet Cantürk (1950–1994), one of Turkey’s most notorious Kurdish mafia bosses, who was ultimately assassinated, is also the story of his mother, Hatun Demirciyan, an Armenian woman from the northern Lice district. It is very possible that Cantürk supported the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) out of rebellion against a state which he perceived was the victimizer of his maternal family. Soner Yalçın, Behçet Cantürk’ün anıları (Ankara: Öteki, 1996).

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children who either had already converted or were willing to convert.71 In a later interview Çetin noted she lived in the twilight zone between Turkishness, Kurdishness, and Armenianness, in the margins of ethnicity and nationality. She also remembered that, having found out about her roots, she now understood why her grandmother used to bake a special sweet bread during spring with other women outside the family: they were female genocide survivors, celebrating Easter.72 The converts were often sup-ported in their solidarity: after the 1915 genocide it was common for Kurdish chief-tains to invest effort in locating and finding Armenian converts, in the hope they could find spouses among each other and continue their custom of endogamy. For Kurds and Armenians alike, this represented the established tradition and securities of the ancien régime.

After the publication of Çetin’s book in 2004, the fate of converts or so-called ‘crypto-Armenians’ in Turkey became politicized even further. Both Armenian and Turkish nationalists compete for the loyalty of this group of people, which finds itself besieged by identity politics.73 Whereas the former wish to ‘wake them up’ from Islam and urge them to reclaim their dormant Armenian identity, the latter have intransigently declared that if they wish to ‘return’ to their Armenian roots they are no longer welcome in Turkey.74 Ostensibly 30,000 to 40,000 crypto-Armenians currently live in Turkey, with varying degrees of awareness of and interest in their past.75 Although most of them fear that exposure to society would make them vulnerable to nationalist pressures and threats, the Internet has provided a convenient and, above all, anonymous platform for assembling information and reaching out to family members abroad. On the website www.hyetert.com, for example, aimed at the Armenian community of Istanbul, one can frequently observe messages such as the following:

I have a request for you. Nigar Metin, born 1894, mother’s name Hilito, father’s name Casper, registered to Hizan district in Bitlis province is my grandmother. I just found these records. With your help I would like to reach my family members. – Haydar Y., 1 November 2005

I live in Mut district in Mersin province. My grandmother is also here. Her mother is an Armenian from Kayseri. Her name is Sofia and it is known she moved to Istanbul. Where can I find information about her? – Ulaş Ş., 3 October 2005

71 Çetin, Anneannem.72 Frederike Geerdink, ‘Advocaat Fethiye Çetin: “Mijn identiteit is nooit puur Turks geweest”’

[interview], May 2006, www.frederike.nl/cgi-bin/scripts/db.cgi?&ID=403&ww=1&view_ records=1.

73 Dorian Jones, ‘Armenian Quest for Lost Orphans’, BBC World Service, 1 August 2005; ‘Ma grand-mère turque etait armenienne’, Le Monde, 26 February 2007.

74 The crypto-Armenians have even been openly threatened by the Turkish Historical Society, the Young Turk official organ for the production of nationalist historical narratives. The direct or of the Turkish Historical Society, Yusuf Halaçoğlu, went as far as implicitly threat-ening that he had in his possession a ‘list’ of names, ‘house by house’, of crypto-Armenians living in Turkey, claiming he would not hesitate to ‘make it public’. Radikal, 22 August 2007; Zaman, 25 August 2007.

75 Millî Gazete, 28 December 2005.


I am descended from our fellow Armenian citizens who used to live in the Niksar Cedid neighbourhood in Tokat between 1900 and 1915 and have migrated elsewhere. My grandmother’s name was Oski, her father’s Mevzik, and her mother’s Anna. My grandmother had 3 siblings. We don’t know her sister’s name. Her brothers were named Karapet and Murat. Unfortunately we don’t know their last name. We know they were involved in trade and they owned a store with a depot. I would like to request anyone who is related to the above persons, or knows them, or has information to please write me an e-mail and contact me. – Nihat S.E., 15 February 200576

Although generations have passed since the genocide, traumatic family memories seem to persist, and apparently many of these people feel the need to fill in the gaps in their self-narrative.77 The most common interpretations of the forced assimilation of Armenian orphans, forced marriages of Armenian women, and forced conversion of Armenians in general have approached the problem from the perspective of national alienation. The conversions and assimilations are seen as loss of identity and absorption into the Other’s identity. But sociologically, they were constituent aspects of the geno-cide, aimed at the destruction of the most basic social ties of the victim group: kinship. They were also survival mechanisms: if one had to pretend to be a Muslim in exchange for one’s life, the choice may not always have been unanimous, but was definitely made by many.

76 Erhan Başyurt, Ermeni evlatlıklar: saklı kalmış hayatlar (Istanbul: KaraKutu, 2006), pp. 30–1.

77 For a collection of life stories: Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis, 2009). Habermas argued that people ‘can develop personal identities only if they recognize that the sequences of their actions form narratively presentable life histories; they can develop social identities only if they recognize that they maintain their membership in social groups by way of participating in interactions, and thus that they are caught up in the narratively presentable histories of collectivities.’ Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon, 1987), vol. II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, p. 136.

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