It all started when a mother in Istanbul tried to enroll her child at an Armenian school. Like so many other Armenians who wanted to save themselves from the 1915 massacre, this woman's family had converted to Islam. Now she wanted to assume the identity of her ancestors. She underwent baptism, and her identity card was changed to show she is a Christian.

She thought her identity as a Christian would be enough to enroll her child at an Armenian school, but she soon found that it would not be so easy. There were bureaucratic steps to be taken. She was told, “You must get an official certification from the National Education Office attesting that there is no impediment to your [child's] enrollment in this school.”

The family went to the local National Education Office and requested a document allowing the child to be enrolled at the Armenian school. The written response of the Istanbul-Sisli District National Education Office was a shocker: “It is required to know whether the parent of the student to be enrolled had changed religion, name and sect by a court decision. Therefore her confidential ancestry code must be extracted from the population register [maintained] since 1923. The said student can be registered if his parent’s confidential code is 2 at the relevant population and citizenship directorate register.”

Research by the daily Radikal and interviews with officials following the news reports confirmed a century-long saga of discrimination. Registering populations using “ancestry codes” dates back to the 1923 Lausanne Treaty. According to Radikal’s findings, the Population Directorate codes Greeks using the number 1, Armenians 2 and Jews 3.