anything. Then on the fiftieth anniversary, in 1965, one hundred thousand people gathered in Yerevan to demand restitution of historical lands in Turkey. The effect was extraordinary. Many in the Soviet republic didn’t even know of the catastrophe, while in the diaspora the scattered victims and their descendants suddenly found a voice. Thereafter, the cries for recognition grew louder and the sense of grievance became a powerful political force.
The reaction of the Turkish state has been denial – denial that there was ever a systematic campaign to rid the country of Armenians, denial that Armenian deaths were anything more than incidental damage caused by civil conflict. Armenian anger intensified. In the 1970s, extremists conducted a campaign of terror against Turkish diplomats. Many more have been involved in more restrained lobbying of governments around the world to recognise the genocide – which in turn has provoked further dismissal from the Turkish state.
No-one now has any direct memory of what happened in 1915. The survivors I interviewed are long since dead. Although the dissemination of evidence has grown in the intervening years, the entire episode has been successfully muddied by Turkish denial. The debate has revolved around whether or not there was a ‘genocide’, a concerted attempt to eradicate the Armenians as an ethnic group and whether it is possible to describe it with a word that was only coined in 1948. The polarisation of opinion, the fear of Turkish retribution against parliaments who vote to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, have helped to maintain the opacity of the water.
The terminology doesn’t matter. The events remain, casting their shadow over the entire twentieth century. In 2009, Geoffrey Robertson QC trawled the available material and wrote a report entitled ‘Was there an Armenian Genocide?’ ‘No reputable historian,’ he concluded, ‘could possibly deny the central facts of the deportations and the racial and religious motivations behind the deaths of a significant proportion of the Armenian people.’
I am often asked: what interested you in the Armenians? I used to find the question surprising: who could not be interested in the Armenians once you knew their story? But I now realise that what people really meant was this: why did I immerse myself so completely, cut myself off so entirely, in order to travel through the diaspora and down to the southern Caucasus?
That year was the most extraordinary of my life, yet I still find the question hard to answer. I was motivated by the genocide, yes, the shock of discovering its details and the continuing campaign of denial. But it wasn’t just that, nor even mainly that. Nor was it the extraordinary achievements of the Armenians – the perfect stone churches, those miracles of form in the treeless expanse of eastern Turkey, nor the devotional beauty of the medieval manuscripts. It wasn’t the music, the repertoire of traditional laments and marriage songs, the strains of the kamancha or the duduk, which in a few breathy notes can conjure up a yearning for Armenia and its mountains even for those who’ve never even seen them.
All those things are astonishing but they were not what kept my curiosity alive. It was something about the Armenians themselves, their half-hidden role in history, their Zelig-like presence in the Byzantine Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Empire. It was what they knew of the world, of the deep lessons of loss and landlessness, of living among strangers, of how to make light of borders and the obstacles of long journeys. It was the nobility of so many of their lives, the fierce conviction that our mortal endeavours should be pursued always with energy and courage, that to be alive is to be awake, never to be complacent, never to rest, that any sense of belonging on this earth is both fleeting and illusory. Sometimes it seems to me as if long ago, far back in a collective past that pre-dates most of the world’s existing ethnic groups, the Armenians discovered a secret, and swore never to disclose it but hand it down from generation to generation, wherever they happened to be. It’s a secret that’s been so closely guarded for so many centuries, that what remains is less the secret itself than the habit of keeping it.
That would explain their survival, the ceaseless exercise in will and competence that sustains it. It would explain the life of individuals like Joseph Emin, whose roamings took him from the courts of eighteenth-century Europe to the Caucasus to try and liberate his people. It explains too the fedayi I saw that first day in Yerevan, down from the mountains to bury their dead with their black beards and blue-grey eyes, and Janna Galstian, who abandoned a brilliant acting career for war in Karabagh where I met her in 1993 as deputy military commander of the Hadrout region. It explains the life and work of the great musician Gomidas, collector of a thousand Armenian folk songs, who deciphered the medieval notation system but was driven out of his mind by the experience of 1915. It explains the power of the letters of Mesrop Mashtots’s Armenian alphabet and the melismatic chants of the church choirs, and the genius of Armenian masons, photographers and merchants, and of those Armenian priests, stuck in some far-off outpost of the diaspora, in Poland or Transylvania or Iraq who say the liturgy for the last time to an empty church, then lock the door and step outside, into the dangerous world.
Philip Marsden, Ardevora, December 2014
One summer, walking in the hills of eastern Turkey, I came across a short piece of bone. It was lodged in the rubble of a landslip and had clearly been there for many years. I rubbed its chalky surface and examined the worn bulbs of the joint; I took it to be the limb of some domestic animal and dropped it into my pocket.
Beyond the rubble, the land fell away to a dusty valley which coursed down to the plain of Kharput. The plain was hazy and I could just make out a truck bowling across it, kicking up a screen of pale dust in its wake. I carried on down the valley. It was a strange, still place and rounding a bluff, I stumbled on the ruins of a village. A shepherd was squatting in the shade of a tumbled-down wall, whistling. I showed him the piece of bone and gestured at the ruins around him.
The shepherd nodded, wiping together his palms in an unambiguous gesture. He said simply, ‘Ermeni.’ Then he took the bone and threw it to his dog.
Ermeni: the Armenians. The guide books hardly mentioned the Armenians. No one mentioned the Armenians, yet everywhere I went over the coming weeks, every valley of that treeless Anatolian plateau, was haunted by them. Arriving one morning on the shores of Lake Van, I took a boat to the island of Aghtamar. The island had once been the court of an Armenian king, the centre of a tiny realm squeezed between Persia and Byzantium, but now it was uninhabited.
Continuing north, around the lower slopes of Mount Ararat, I came to the ruins of the Armenian city of Ani. Its extraordinary thousand-year-old cathedral, in no man’s land between the Turkish and Soviet borders, was open to the sky, shelter for three ill-looking sheep. A long way up a gorge near Digor, I found an Armenian church so perfect in its design that at first I did not notice its collapsing roof, nor the gaps in its walls.
I left Anatolia with a clutch of half-answered questions. Who were these people, and what had happened? I knew about as much as most – that the Turks had done something terrible in the First World War, that Armenia was the first Christian nation, that it had hovered for centuries on the fringes of the classical world. But it was not an explanation. Everything that I learnt about the Armenians only served to deepen the mystery, to make them more surprising, more enigmatic.
The following year I was travelling through northern Syria and came across an archaeologist in Aleppo. He knew a good deal about the Armenians and one afternoon took me to meet Torkom, an elderly Armenian lawyer with a bony face and deep-set blue eyes. Torkom lived alone, at the top of a set of winding stairs. His room was dark and musty and filled with books. A few glass-fronted cases had been built into the wall for manuscripts and they glowed with a yellowy light; they looked like preserved organs in laboratory jars.
When he heard I was interested in the Armenians, Torkom peered at me suspiciously.
‘Why?’
I said I’d been to eastern Anatolia.
‘Yes?’ I told him about the cathedral at Ani and the church at Digor. I told him about the bone and the ruined villages and he shrugged as if to say: