A Ticket Collector instead of a Priest
What happens to a church after a genocide
In the January 5th edition of The New Yorker, I was pleased and surprised to see a long profile of — a church. To be exact this was Sorup Giragos, an Armenian Church in Diyarbakir, a city in south eastern Turkey not far from the border with Iraq. I visited Sorup Giragos when travelling in the region in 2012 and spent a few days in the Diyarbakir, or the black city as it’s also known thanks to the black volcanic stone from which it’s built. Rhaffi Khatchadourian’s piece, along with an encounter I had in the old Armenian quarter of Addis Ababa (of all places!) a couple of weeks ago, brought back some thoughts I had about the region, its history and the mix of ethnic and religious groups who lived there in the past and in the present.
Diyarbakir is in a part of Turkey that’s now identified as Kurdish, but it wasn’t always so. It’s a beautiful, ancient city on the banks of the river Tigris, still bounded by high black basalt walls that can be dated back to the Roman era. Inside those walls you can see the ghosts of Diyarbakir’s multicultural past written on the streets in stone. As well as Sorup Giragos there’s an a Chaldean church, a Syriac Orthodox church and several distinctive mosques, including one that rests on four pillars, and a caravanserai of exceptional quality.
These buildings testify to Diyarbakir’s past as a place where, for centuries up until the end of the Ottoman Empire, many different religious and ethnic groups lived side by side. In times so preoccupied by the problem of Islamic fundamentalism, it’s so easy to forget that most of the Middle East was Christian before it was Muslim, and that sizeable Christian communities persisted there until very recently. Diyarbakir was no exception.
Of course those minorities aren’t there now. Or hardly there. I won’t go into what happened in detail, but Khatchadourian’s New Yorker piece elegantly summarises what is now known as the Armenian genocide that started in 1915 and continued until around the same time as the end of World War One. These atrocities scattered the region’s Armenian community. Other minorities — the Orthodox, the Chaldeans — perhaps less singled out than the Armenians, but still not welcome in the new state of Turkey — moved overseas rather than live under its mono-ethnic, mono-cultural policies. If you’re interested in learning more about the Christians of the Middle East I can highly recommend William Dalrymple’s informative, but now somewhat overtaken by event From The Holy Mountain.
The Kurds filled the gaps left by fleeing Christians, then found themselves victimised in turn by pan-Turkism. The whole area became pretty much a no-go zone for much of the 90s as the Turkish army fought Kurdish separatists. Ironically, if you read Robert Tewdwr Moss’s book about Syria in the 90s, Cleopatra’s Wedding Present, it’s Turkey not Syria that’s presented as the unstable country teetering on the brink of civil war.
Even during a period of relative peace and stability in 2012, travelling in south eastern Turkey was a disquieting experience. Diyarbakir and its surrounding region is gorgeous, and glutted with history. Yet it’s dead history. Diyarbakir has restored its Armenian church, but there are no Armenians left to worship in it. The Syriac Orthodox church clings on, kept in repair (I presume) by remittances from the US, but there are just a few families of worshippers left there. Everywhere I looked I saw the bones of a multicultural society, but none of the flesh.
At the time I looked at Diyarbakir and saw Damascus and Aleppo as I remembered them, from the time Syria’s horrible civil war began. I walked down the quiet streets of Diyarbakir, smelled the varnish drying in Sorup Giragos. And I thought of Aleppo’s Christian quarter, which I’d visited in 2010. Where women could sit in public squares with their hair uncovered. Of the pizza parlour on Straight Street in Damascus that served salads full of artichokes. Of the bar opposite where you could drink a beer on a street that St Paul refers to in the Bible. I thought of how dull Diyarbakir felt, despite of all that wonderful history, because it was a place where different peoples and competing ideas didn’t live beside one another anymore. It was dry, heavy bread: all flour and no yeast.
I looked around Sorup Giragos and thought this is what’s going to happen to Syria. At the end of all the horror, when the people with guns have killed or driven out everyone who offends their narrow ideologies, we’ll be left with this. Buildings restored with UNESCO money that, without the communities that poured their hopes of posterity into them, might as well have been built by the Ancient Assyrians or Martians. Instead of a priest there will be a ticket collector. And if anyone asks ‘what happened to the people who built this church’ or ‘this house’ they’ll be directed to a case of unearthed bones, and a few faded photographs, peopled by dumb strangers.
I’d put this all out of my mind until a couple of weeks ago, when I was in Addis Ababa, and unexpectedly one of those photographs found a voice. We were walking through the city looking for what remained of the city’s own Armenian quarter — a curious anomaly in sub-Saharan Africa — when we found their church. It turned out to be a plain but pleasingly proportioned building made of dark stone, and set inside some of the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen attached to a church building. As I write this I’m bitterly regretting never taking my camera out to photograph them.
We asked the doorkeeper if the church was open and he sent us round into the far corner of the churchyard where the priest lived. He couldn’t have been less than 80: a tiny, old man but with thick, blunt fingers that suggested he’d worked with his hands. He let us into the church and told us his story.
His grandfather, he said, had come to Ethiopia from Palestine. He was an orphan, whose family were killed during the Armenian genocide and ended up in Jerusalem in an orphanage. There he learned music and played in a marching brass band with some other orphans. One of the people who came to see them play was Haile Selassie. The man who went on to become Ethiopia’s last emperor, made a state visit to Jerusalem in 1924. He loved what he heard so much that he invited the band to come and settle in Ethiopia. Here they taught Ethiopians to play brass instruments, founding an Armenian community and at last a church of their own.
We listened as he showed us the church, which was simple but made from the best materials available. It was exactly the kind of building you’d expect of a prosperous but small community, uncertain of their place in a new country. Solid, pretty but not showy: the kind of house you build when you want the respect of your neighbours rather than their envy. Then he told us more about his family. About his father, who had been a car mechanic, while his brother had worked as a goldsmith to the imperial family. We learned that most of the Armenian community in Addis Ababa had now emigrated, mainly to the US, but he still held services in the church.
Then, just out of curiosity, we asked him where his grandfather had escaped from a century ago. He told us. His grandfather had been born in a city a few hundred miles east of Diyarbakir. It was in Turkey now, he said, but then it had been Armenia.
The city was Van. Another place we had visited back in 2012, and somewhere that had fared much worse than Diyarbakir back in 1915. If Diyarbakir is a city filled with ghosts, Van is the ghost of a city. What’s left of its old city is on the edge of a charmless town constructed in the mid-20th century. The old town though, is nothing but ruins. It was destroyed by Turkish forces after a protracted siege and its people massacred.
They even levelled the mosques.
It’s a bleak place. Whatever beauty the site has is overlaid by the knowledge that a lot of people died, not long ago and for no good reason.
Until that moment I’d felt guilty that, whenever someone mentioned the Syrian war, I found myself thinking of the buildings. If seemed effete and even heartless to think of the destruction of Aleppo’s magnificent Umayyad mosque or its Mamluk Citadel. People were dying in their thousands and I was worrying about a caravanserai.
But that Armenian priest reminded me that even when they’re museum pieces a building can be a hopeful thing. That he was still there in Addis Ababa, taking care of his church and tending his beautiful garden said something. That it’s much more difficult to be optimistic about things being better some day when the roof has fallen in. A building maintained is a link to the past, however shaky, and a hope for the future. As opposed to a ruin like Van, which is Ozymandias’ foot standing in the desert.
The restored Sorup Giragos, like the priest in his lonely Armenian church in Addis Ababa, stands.
It wasn’t always like this, it says — and who knows it might be again.
