Turkey’s Islamized Armenians Grapple With Tragic Roots
The descendants of Islamized Armenians who survived the Ottoman massacres during World War I have begun to “come out” in Turkey, braving century-old prejudices and fears to embrace their Armenian roots, reports Sibel Utku Bila from Diyarbakir.
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Abdurrahim Zorarslan’s world turned upside down at age 25 when his Kurdish clan revealed to him he was Armenian. His father, a survivor of the Ottoman massacres, saved and Islamized by a Kurdish couple, had already died — without uttering a word about his real self. After much soul-searching, Zorarslan “listened to something inside” and “secretly” embraced his Armenian identity. Aged 53 today, he boldly speaks out and introduces himself with the typical Armenian name, Armen.
The self-rediscovery, however, has come with a cost. The retired driver is now at odds with his children and Kurdish wife, a devout Muslim wearing the black chador, but still believes that “one can reach nowhere with fear of his roots.”
Zorarslan is among a small but growing number of brave souls in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast who have come to openly embrace their Armenian origins, emboldened by the breaking of the Armenian taboo in Turkey over the past several years and the message of pluralism spread by the Kurdish political movement in the region.
The re-connection is a painful process — not only because of deep-rooted fears over the 1915-17 massacres, but also the distinct fabric of the impoverished, rural southeast, where strict patriarchal norms rule closely-knit clans and Islam remains a powerful social glue.
