CORRESPONDENCE 1

Dear Prof. Moumdjian:

I am a Turk and my name is Mehmet. I am amateurishly interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the history of Republic of Turkey. Nowadays, my interest and focus are on the last decades of the Ottoman State and the single-party period.

I read your work titled "Cilicia under French Mandate."

[My paper regarding Cilicia can be read at the following URL: http://armenian- history.com/Nyuter/HISTORY/G_Moumdjian/Garabet_M_Cilicia_under_French_mandater_1918_1921.htm].

I congratulate you for this work, though I do not share all of the official Armenian arguments. I don’t support the historical thesis of Turkish nationalists either. Because I grew up with the accounts of my grand fathers and grand mothers (good and ordinary people born in small and poor villages in Anatolia), and because I read different historical sources, I asked questions to old people sharing the same land with Armenians and received their sincere answers.

The ancestors of my father come from Artvin. Originally, they were Georgian Muslims. As far as I learned from their accounts, bandit groups, formed from local ferocious criminals, some of them land lords as well as war and prison deserters, used by the government of Ittihat ve Terakki [Union and Progress, the Young Turks Party-GM], who also persecuted Turkish, Laz and Georgian Muslims, assaulted and killed poor Armenian villagers who were our neighbors. They took their money and pillaged their houses. Some Armenian armed groups (especially Tashnaks and Hnchaks) did the same things to Turks and other Muslim population, both to take revenge and to clean their motherland from Muslim ethnicities. Unfortunately both of these bandit groups/militias are glorified as national heroes or freedom fighters by Armenians and Turks. I do not claim that all of the Tashnaks or Turkish nationalists are bloody psychos and responsible for all that happened. That would be an injustice. But both nations should admit their crimes committed during World War I and the civil war during this period. Both of them planned to clean their motherland from "others". It is a pity that many people who had nothing to do with politics and who thought these lands are common the home of local peoples, suffered a lot. I will tell you the story of one of them.

In 1918, when the Russo-Ottoman war and invasion of Russia, which devastated our homeland in Artvin, finished, bandits used by Ittihat ve Terakki for ethnic cleansing, had already began to persecute local Christians (and local Muslims also, though not to the same extent). I don’t know the real dates for this. It should be sometime between 1918 and 1921, when villagers heard that Armenians have escaped and left their houses and went their neighbors’ houses, to pillage the remaining. The effects of war, pressure of different armed groups and bad governance of the Turkish nationalists was so awful that many children and weak persons died because of starvation and bad health conditions in Muslim villages. So they pillaged the homes of their neighbors, who were killed by these bandits, militia and regular troops, or who escaped from them, without thinking about the values which make them human. They were starving; they were not human any more...

My paternal grand-grandfather was the prominent man of our poor village that depended on forestry and cattle breeding. He was also there. He was there to take advantage of the remnants of the deserted Armenian homes in order to feed his family.

In this abandoned village they found an Armenian old lady who was so ill and old that nobody from her village had even thought about taking her with them. She was 80 to 85 years old. Bearing in his mind the bad experiences he had had with armed bandits and regular armies of different states, my paternal grand-grandfather decided to save this old lady. "Do not be afraid,” he told her; “you'll be my mother and will live with us". He brought the old lady on his horse to our village.

The old Armenian lady was adopted by my family not as a refugee but as a grandmother. They treated her with high respect, the traditional treatment towards elders. She recovered her health and lived till she was 100 years of age. Our village and my family called her "Gyavur Nine" (Infidel Grandma). I do not know her real name (I am sure she had a beautiful name), but she became one of our grandmothers, and a member of our family. Her grave is in our village. After urbanization pulled many of our villagers to the cities, only very old people remained in our village. Thus, only my father’s aunt knows the place of her grave. I will never ask which one is the grave of "Gavur Nine". It is sufficient to make me happy to know that she lies in her grave in the same tomb with men and women who cared for her with love.

My maternal ancestors come from the western part of Turkey. They are originally Turkish Muslims. I heard almost the same stories from my grandma and grandpa.

I am sure one day historians will not write only the stories of brutal struggles of greedy politicians and harsh soldiers but they will also write the beautiful stories of mercy, love and kindness. We need this in order to restore peace within our minds and hearts. On the day that peace comes, “Gyavur Nine,” my Armenian grandmother, will reach peace in her grave, where she sleeps with her family in the tomb of our village, in deep forest of Artvin .

Peace be with you
September 16, 2008
Mehmet


ANSWER TO LETTER 1

Dear Mehmet:

Thanks for the email. I agree that talking with each other is the best remedy. Please continue to do so with me. I am a good listener. By the way my Ph.D. thesis is about “Armenian-Ittihad ve Terakki Relations.” I am still working on it, because I was finally able to visit the Ottoman archives in Istanbul [since it finally reopened in 2005-GM] to do research there. I visited Istanbul 3 times and was able to get a lot of documents. I am now incorporating them into my thesis. By the way, I was fascinated by the city and its people. It was as if I was walking down the street of memory and imagining the events that happened on those streets toward the end of the 19th century. Although Istanbul has the biggest Armenian concentration now, in those times it was bustling with Armenian presence.

With many thanks,
Garabet K Moumdjian