Read the book: «The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians»

PREFACE TO 2015 EDITION

On a cold grey morning in January 1991 I stood beneath the departures board at London’s Victoria Station, waiting to catch the boat-train to Paris. A rucksack leaned against my shins and a crowd of commuters – blank-faced and winter-wrapped – flowed past me. I was in my late twenties, and I was going to Armenia.

In my pocket I had a black oilskin notebook with a list of Armenian sites and contacts in places from Venice to Nicosia, Damascus to Sofia, Aleppo to Cluj, Istanbul to Bucharest. I had arranged them by country, and the last page was headed USSR – still in existence, just, with names in Odessa, Tbilisi and Yerevan. I was wearing new boots and a new coat. In my rucksack was a change of clothes, a towel, books, two maps (one ‘Turkey and Western Asia’, the other ‘Osteuropa’), a short-wave radio, a Nikon F3 camera, a lot of transparency film, a letter of introduction from the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem and $2,000 in cash. I also had two passports, one with Israeli stamps and one without. In neither of the passports was a single visa.

I felt neither prepared nor unprepared; the uncertainty of the journey was too great to be nervous. I had developed an idea of the traditional Armenian diaspora as a powerful and secretive network of communities spread across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. If I locked into that network, and was accepted, all would be fine. Visas would appear, borders would open before me. At least that was what I hoped: proving it was part of the point of the journey. My two main fears were being kidnapped in the Levant and being turned back, anywhere. I was determined not to fly.

From Paris my plan was to carry on by train to Venice, then to Athens, and by ferry to Cyprus. That was the easy part. From then on, I would need visas and luck and the help of my contacts. The first decision would be whether or not to go to Lebanon. The bombing phase of the First Gulf War was already underway; Western hostages were still being held in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.

For months before, I’d been living in a single-room flat in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. I took daily lessons in Armenian with the charming Father Anooshavan, who was alleged to speak thirty-six languages. I spent a great deal of time with the poet and historian George Hintlian, who acted as mentor to my planned odyssey. I talked to monks, scholars and seminarians. I met recent refugees from Karabagh, second-generation refugees from Iran, and third-generation refugees from Turkey. In 1915 the entire Armenian population had been driven from Anatolia; many were massacred there, on the edge of dusty towns; many more were driven down into the Syrian desert. Over a million died. In Jerusalem, there were a few very old survivors who, in darkened rooms, laid their stories before me.

At that time the Old City was more than usually tense. On to the first Palestinian Intifada were heaped the war-fears that had followed Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. I recall the cheek-sting of tear gas, the fear of walking in the alleys at night, of a stone to the head or a street stabbing. I recall the Al-Aqsa massacre of 8 October and watching an Israeli settler standing in the Ghawanima minaret, shooting down at Palestinians in the concourse of the mosque.

That morning at Victoria station, I carried a couple of other things with me, things I’d picked up in Jerusalem. One was a particular strain of anger that is unavoidable if you spend any time in the Middle East. I had arrived in Jerusalem with an outsider’s view of the Palestinian conflict. But as the months passed and I saw the reality of day-today life, I found myself with a visceral reaction to the Israeli occupation. A similar indignation, overlaying any attempt at neutrality, had grown to colour my Armenian studies. In 1915, under threat from enemies on all sides, the Turkish authorities had every right to be nervous of Armenian loyalties. But what they did to the Armenians overshadows any political context. This book is not an attempt to explain the events of 1915; it is the record of my own experience of travelling among the Armenians, at a particular moment in world history, at a particular moment in my own life. Re-reading it now, more than two decades on, I can see how partisan I’d become, and remember how natural that position felt.

The other piece of baggage was something that would grow sharper over the coming months, that would stay with me for years afterwards. It was the idea that violence and disorder were the way of the world, and that at that time in the early 1990s, with the Middle East in chaos and the Soviet Union fracturing, they were both on the rise. I was, I recall now, in that state of mind that sees everywhere the signs of imminent catastrophe.

Two months later I reached the Syrian town of Deir ez Zor. After days in the desert, visiting the massacre sites, I crossed the Euphrates on a bus. It was late afternoon and a dusty light hung heavy over the town, as if the sun had lost its vigour. Down a side alley, I knocked on a door and an Armenian let me in swiftly and locked it behind him.

I don’t remember much of that evening, except his ninety-year old mother sitting still and silent on a stool. But in the morning he took me to see something remarkable. Amidst the boxy concrete buildings, the overhead tangle of wires, stood the Armenian Martyrs’ Memorial church – only just completed.

It wasn’t only a church but an entire complex of buildings – a museum, an archive, community rooms. The sunlight glowed on walls of fresh-cut, butter-yellow limestone. Into the stone were carved khachkars, those crazily intricate Armenian crosses that mark places of note. Down in the crypt of the church was a gallery of black-and-white photos of the massacres – beheaded men and naked starving women and, like members of a lost family, the Anatolian towns from which the Armenians had been driven. Full-length silk robes and silverware stood in glass cases. It was all that was left.

In the middle of the room were more glass cases, but these ones were set into the floor. Under the glass lay the pale bones of victims. Some of them had come from the cave at Shadaddie, where several thousand people had been burnt and suffocated. From the middle of the ring, rising from the bones like a tree trunk, was a marble pillar. Its stocky girth pushed up out of the crypt, through a hole in the floor above and into the main space of the church. I leaned in to gaze at its light-tinted top, probing the interior as if it was another world. It was named the Column of Resurrection.

The church was consecrated just a couple of months after I visited. The Armenian Catholicos of Cilicia came up from Beirut to conduct the ceremony. Over the years since, tens of thousands of Armenians have made the journey across the desert to visit the Martyrs’ Memorial church. Until the recent Syrian civil war, a vast gathering took place there each year on the day of commemoration, 24 April. The memorial site is often compared to Auschwitz, built at one of the places where the Armenians were concentrated after their long march, and where they died in such numbers. It is a site that for Armenians offers a hint of solidity amidst the perennial loss – stone buildings to offset the villages and towns that were gone, the centuries-old way of life, the abandoned cemeteries and ancient khachkars, the generations that might have been born.

In the summer of 2014, the town of Deir ez Zor fell into the hands of ISIS. The Armenian priest received a phone call inviting him to accept their authority. He refused. The Armenian Church of the Holy Martyrs was dynamited. Its treasures and mementoes were destroyed, its archive burnt. The charred bones from Shadaddie were buried once again, in tons and tons of rubble.

The story of the Armenian massacres did not begin in 1915, and nor did it end then. Persecutions stretched back through the centuries, flaring into periodic pogroms and forced exile. The Armenian communities set up elsewhere have proved often just as frail, just as vulnerable. When I was in Aleppo in 1991, refugees from the civil war in Beirut had pushed the Armenian population in the city to one hundred thousand; from 2012, the tide turned and the Armenians fled the opposite way.

The collective memory of 1915 has followed its own precarious and unpredictable path. For decades, the Armenians were almost silent, as if a combination of shock and shame prevented them saying 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