Anchoring the Hosts of Ghosts: Istanbul and the Armenian Pilgrimage Itinerary By Carel Bertram, San Francisco State University This paper was given at the Middle East Studies Association MESA 2005 Annual Meeting Sunday, 11/20/2005 as a part of the following panel. Istanbul Neighborhoods: Minority Identities in Place, in Practice, and in Memory Organized by Amy Mills Chair: Christine M. Philliou, Yale Center for International and Area Studies Christine M. Philliou, Yale Center for International and Area Studies A New Piece for the Mosaic: Building a Bulgarian Community in Istanbul, 1830-1850 Amy Mills, University of South Carolina From 'Little Paris' to Historic Mahalle: The Place of Kuzguncuk in Jewish Community Identity Carel Bertram, San Francisco State University Anchoring the Hosts of Ghosts: Istanbul and the Armenian Pilgrimage Itinerary Anna Secor, University of Kentucky Identity and Difference in the Everyday Production of Neighborhood Space in Istanbul My paper is a reconnaissance venture and a sequel to my older work on how memory and place get stuck together. Some of that work was on how memory became attached to the Turkish House in the service of nationalism. But memory has a partner in forgetting ----or amnesia. And as that project was being written, the voices that a nationalist rhetoric was trying to silence kept piping up. There were Greek voices, Jewish voices, Armenian voices. It was becoming a very noisy project. It’s the Armenian voices that I am beginning to investigate now, and as I tell you of my project, I am eager for your comments and assistance. So this paper is as much about my project as about my results. As the Ottoman world slipped away, Turkish citizens could name their old houses Turkish; Bulgarians called the same house Bulgarian; Greeks called it “traditional.” But the Ottoman world that slipped away from Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek citizens was ripped away from its Armenian minorities. Most of the Armenians who escaped massacre left Anatolia forever, becoming part of the great Armenian Diaspora, where memories are of a place far away, and divorced from real life activities. But beginning about twelve years ago, Armenians from the American and European Diaspora began to return to Turkey in organized groups--- looking for the houses, and if not the houses, the streets, villages and towns that were landmarks of their spaces of memory. These tours were inaugurated and are still led by a man from Los Angeles named Armen Aroyan, a self taught historian of great knowledge. And they are referred to as pilgrimages, --and rightly so. Diasporic Armenian pilgrims travel heavily, for they are carrying heavy stories that they have heard from their families, their parents, and their grandparents, some living, some now gone. They carry stories of atrocities and of pain. But along with the dark stories of how they left, and how some survived and some did not, they also carry stories of sweetness and wholeness, allowing them to enter a past that has a sweetness and wholeness in it. Armen Aroyan has documented the pilgrimages he has led over the past decade, and with his permission I hope to review these videos to see if, and how, pilgrims are in search of this. For the pilgrims, then, a pilgrimage into a place that is still alive ---and still theirs--- allows the massacres not to be the beginning of their history, not their national birth moment; instead, the pilgrimage intervenes into a genocide that has acted as a “Myth of Beginning”, with no memory before it. In fact, the pilgrimage interrupts the success of genocides, with its goal of erasing not only a people, but the fact of their existence, ---their past. So the stories that they bring, both individual stories, and those shared through memoirs, novels and other texts, are almost always double edged, with horrors and wholeness. And that is one thing that makes these journeys into true pilgrimages, for testimonials and interviews suggest that the pilgrims are seeking a healing that can come from confronting the past and making it human. By looking at pilgrimage-ing, and at how one can inscribe oneself on the ground through movement and experience, I am taking space very seriously ---including both the way that space is used and the way that it is thought. Thoughts and memories fill spaces with images, and images guarantee that certain things do not disappear from the human landscape. Perhaps I will draw on Pierre Nora, with his concept of “sites of memory,” suggesting that these pilgrims are seeking commemoration, as that is all that is left when the real world, the world that created memories, is gone. But Nora does not address the individual and the personal as part of this process, or the performative aspect of making the past sacred for individuals. Nor does he address ghosts. But what is operating in these pilgrimages is always the personal and the particular, as well as the collective. And these diasporic Armenian pilgrims, at the level of the personal, are always serving dual roles. They travel alone, and yet they bring a host of ghosts. Along with an image of wholeness, the image of home also makes these journeys into true pilgrimages because the goal, the home, is a holy place. The visitors who find their ancestral houses sanctify them spontaneously, by lighting candles, saying prayers, or acknowledging the sacred character of the place by picking up rocks and soil to bring back as sacred gifts. With the concept of pilgrimage, then, I have been looking, --among other things, --for a mental remapping of Turkey in the diasporic Armenian imagination as it is revised and revisualized through pilgrims’ journeys and journeying. It is this mental map that takes us to Istanbul. When I reviewed the itineraries of these pilgrims, two things were clear 1. that there were two thematic parts to the Anatolian journey: • First, there were visits to major sites of Armenian history, such as churches and monasteries and cemeteries, • And second, there were visits to villages where individuals on the trip had ancestral and emotional ties, as Armen Aroyan tailors itineraries to personal histories. • But the second aspect of these trips is that they begin and end in Istanbul, with its Armenian sites, due to the actualities of air travel and the ease of planning. A neat package entered my mind. Istanbul would be the anchor that would anchor my hosts of ghosts! The priest of the Armenian Orthodox Church in Washington DC, traveling on one of these pilgrimage, spoke to the group when they got off the plane in Istanbul and said: 'Whatever you think you are, culturally and ethnically, and in terms of your overall identity, it comes from this city.' And it is true that, on reaching Istanbul, the pilgrims experienced a shock of familiarity and a sense of home-coming , which certainly has roots in the assimilation of Turkish cultural traditions into Armenian life. But even though this emotion was felt in Istanbul, the pilgrims had no desire to stay, as they were focused on heading east, on home-finding and home-coming. This is an odd reversal, for the historic desire of Anatolian Armenians, was to move West ---from Anatolia to Istanbul--, to places of education and to a successful life, that could be, perhaps, be found farther west still. But these western, diasporic Armenian pilgrims, with collective and personal memories of Anatolia, and ghosts in their suitcases, turned their back on Istanbul, and cut it off from their mental map. But, take note: None of these pilgrims were pilgrims to Istanbul anyway;, they were diasporic Anatolian Armenians. The experience of the genocide by Istanbul Armenians differed in degree to that of Armenians from Anatolia in that many Istanbul Armenian families managed to survive and remain; and there is a significant Armenian presence in Istanbul today. Because of this continuity, diasporic Istanbul Armenians do not imagine their homeland in an image-less haze, and there is no sense that they have been cut off from the imaginative topography of their history. Their history can still “take place”, and reach back before the genocide. Furthermore, there are few social or political impediments for diasporic Istanbul Armenians to just get on a jet and go there, and many do. In terms of Istanbul then, it seems that I had two groups of useless Armenians –at least in terms of how to draw a new mental map of what I have come to call western Armenian Turkish Anatolia; Ah, but Istanbul, it seems, is not cut off from this pilgrimage map, because, as I began to learn, there is a counter pilgrimage, or at least a parallel one that does serve to make Istanbul an anchor for Armenian Anatolia and some of its ghosts. This mental re mapping is being done by some, actual, real life not diasporic Istanbul Armenians through their own acts of pilgrimage into Anatolia; this is because some of them are “diasporic” too…but in a different way. I will call them----- relocated Istanbulites. Perhaps 200,000 to 250,000 Armenians lived in Istanbul around the turn of the 20th century. Today the Istanbul the community is between 60,000 and 65,000. In all of Turkey, the total is about 80,000 to 82,000, not counting the crypto Armenians or the converted communities of Muslims who speak Armenian. Many Istanbul Armenians are from families that had been in Istanbul long before the massacres had begun. But many Istanbul Armenians, probably at least half of them, are relocated to Istanbul; they are from families that came to Istanbul in or after the great massacres and marches of 1915. However, many did stay in Anatolia. Most of these Armenians were Turkish speaking, and knew very little Armenian, as was already common in the late 19th century. There were, of course, few religious leaders and no Armenian schools. Ah, but, the Patriarchate in Istanbul had a plan for these Anatolian Armenians, and that was to educate their children in Armenian language and religion by bringing them to Istanbul and to the Armenian schools there. To relocate them. They would learn the Armenian language and religion (but not history and culture, as this is illegal in Turkey)(The position of minorities in Turkey is a larger issue.) This great ingathering project began in the 1950s, but it got a real boost with the three earthquakes of the 1970’s that left many families homeless. This second wave of relocation continues today. And what is interesting here is that these relocated Armenians are also making pilgrimages, in fact in ways that parallel the American or European group. Certainly this group travels with their own ghosts. But they also bring the patriarch himself, or at least a priest from Istanbul. Although I don’t yet have the wealth of material that I have for the western pilgrims, I do know where they go. • They visit their ancestral homes • They visit the small Armenian communities who live in Anatolia now, sometimes even their own relatives, giving them recognition and support from the capital. • They visit the local church ---if there is one, and • They visit the local cemetery, to pay respects to the dead, for which a service is always held, Thus, they visit personal and collective commemorative sites. In 2001, one of these pilgrimages was joined by the Armerican group at the invitation of the patriarch. This pilgrimage was called "In the Footsteps of St. Gregory the Illuminator" a name that removed it from any current or political associations. In central Anatolia, however, the Istanbul Armenians broke off with the American group, and, in two busloads led by the Patriarch, visited the Armenian communities in Antakya, Adana Musa Dagh, Mersin, and Iskenderun. Although a part of the huge American pilgrimage, the Patriarch’s detour actually marked one of the Istanbul Armenians’ annual group pilgrimages to Armenian communities in the Hatay. There is also an annual pilgrimage of relocated Istanbul Armenians to single sites. For my purposes, perhaps the most important of these annual pilgrimages goes to the Kayseri area to visit the community that still lives there and to pray at the holy site of the ordination of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, considered the first Patriarch of the Armenians --from 301 A.D. On this major Istanbul led pilgrimage, pilgrims come not just from Istanbul but all Anatolian Armenian settlements. On a pilgrimage last July, there were 110 pilgrims from Istanbul, from Musadagh, from Adana, and from Sivas Pilgrimage then, can actively integrate Anatolian and Istanbulite Armenians, and create a connection to Istanbul that the Armerican and European pilgrims seemed to sever. In fact, these Istanbul-originating Pilgrimages are not “at cross purposes” with the American diasporic ones, but do different cultural work. Instead of sacralizing the personal and quotidian history associated with houses and villages, they sacralize or lay claim to communal sacred and historic sites, often in a way to mark a cultural and topographic heritage without mentioning it. For example on the pilgrimage to the town of Develi, pilgrims visited the former Armenian Quarter and the Saint Toros Armenian Church which is now the Fatih Mosque. Armenian cemeteries are, of course, always on the pilgrimage, another way to maintain ownership of the past and the landscape of the heart. And this landscape will be at the heart of my real research. For the performative aspect of pilgrimage is one that changes the pilgrim and the land and the ghosts, which are memory, all together, all within a shared space. Pilgrimages are memories on foot. And memory, ironically, or even sites of memory, is what gives life to the present. The sentimental Armenian poet Bedros Tourian, buried in an Armenian cemetery in Istanbul, would be satisfied by these pilgrimages, for he wrote that he was still alive for only just as long as people visited his grave, --and no longer. But when my grave forgotten shall remain In some dim nook, neglected and passed by, - When from the world my memory fades away, That is the time when I indeed shall die! And so, I offer you my work so far, standing, or walking, as it does, somewhere between Istanbul and Boston, and somewhere between theory and poetry. * the term “host of ghosts” was used for the Armenian pilgrimages by the wonderful writer Mary Terzian in her “ The Call of the Land” article.