Water fountain of Darman village near Kghi
The Armenian Church in Old Palu
At the Circular Church of Banak
The Circular Church
The Circular Church
Dersim
The village of Peri in Charsanjak
Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill
July, 2004
Published in The Armenian Weekly on September 30, 2006
Ever since I was a child, I had heard about Garin from my mother: the Russian cannons bombarding in the distance; my grandfather pounding his brass and copper vessels; my pious grandmother stirring the congregation of Sourp Astvatsatsin with her ethereal voice. But it was Keghi that had fired my imagination: my father mesmerizing us with stories of village life, slapping his knee, clapping his hands and triumphantly exclaiming, "Hassoin hashiva makrivav," as he described how he and his friends chased off the Kurdish bandit Haso and his gang of cut-throat sheep thieves. My father told us about the fragility of life in Keghi at the hands of outlaws, tribal warlords and corrupt government officials, and the valiant efforts of Armenian villagers to defend their families and their properties. And always, the life-giving mountains figured in his stories: the waters gushing from the mountainsides in spring and the high verdant pastures offering sustenance to the villagers' sheep in summer.
I had long hoped to visit these places, to throw a kiss to the mountains that had formed so much of my childhood lore, and to shed a tear in the Kyle River as its waters rushed to replenish the great Euphrates. So in 2004, my husband and I embarked on a pilgrimage to Garin, my mother's birthplace, and to Jerman village in Keghi, my father's birthplace. Luckily they are not far apart, as Keghi is a county in the Garin province.
We traveled to Garin first and found it a relatively modern industrial city with paved roads, automobiles, public transit, busy streets, billboard signs, apartment dwellings, factories, pollution-all the hustle and bustle of modern urban life.
By contrast, Keghi was still shambling along in the early 20th century. Here, time had all but stood still since my father had left his beloved mountains for Canada in 1912 as a migrant worker to earn money to improve his family's properties in Jerman.
Today, Keghi is still a rural place, strewn with many villages and one small-very small-town, the county capital of Keghi-Kasaba (Kgi). The principal economic base of the region is still agriculture-primitive agriculture at that. Peasants still live in stone and mud-brick hovels, farm small plots of land, and care for their goats. As in the days of the Armenians, there is some business activity in a few of the bigger villages: small coffee shops, little stores selling food, tobacco, clothing and hardware supplies, and a few shoemakers, barbers, lawyers, doctors, and some schools. But we saw no major industry, no tractors or harvesters. And everywhere we went, our van caused a big commotion-a novelty among the local inhabitants.
We also observed anachronisms in this glorious Shangri-la. A massive dam spanning the Kyle or Wolf River (now the Peri Sui that cuts through Keghi has brought a stroke of modernity to this slow-moving part of the world. Here, a man harvested his grain with a scythe, then stopped to telephone his son on his cell phone. There, women baked bread in a tonir, dug into the open earth, next to a house with an indoor toilet, running water and a TV. People drove automobiles and trucks on roads that were still mostly dirt and gravel, still dangerous and often impassable with potholes and bumps at every twist and turn. The area seemed in transition-somewhat disjointed-perhaps struggling to retain its old ways and customs, and ... stepping ever so....carefully .intQ~ the mode!:n_er~~_~ placElL I th0t:!9ht!_"!:l1at was suspicious of innovation and change.
Since my teenage years, I have been proud of my mountain stock; and like my ancestors, I have valued my independence. As if to prove a point, I used to sing the Dalvorig song, to my father's unmistakable delight and my mother's feigned disapproval. When I finally saw the awesome mountains of Keghi, a supernatural force seemed to take hold of me. My spirits soared to the summits. I wanted to embrace the mountains.
Since ancient times, an aura of sanctity has hung over the mountain of Sourp Luis ("St. Light"). When I saw the mountain, etched against a cloudless blue sky, I felt that its rocks were part of me and that I was part of the mountain. As if aware of my turbulent emotions, the mountain thundered in response: "Come to me and I will shelter you and give you peace. Use my stones to rebuild your churches and monasteries in my lofty heights and I will defend them against your enemies. As steadfast as I stand here, so steadfast will be your resistance to tyranny and murder."
For centuries, the mountains of Keghi protected the Armenians: the Bingol Mountains to the east, the Der Sim to the West, and the Sheitan mountains to the north. The Sheitans hid the villages from the lame but wily destroyer, Tamerlane (Lengtemur), and for that reason, the villages of Jerman, Melikan, Shen, Amarij and Arins are known as andress, or unseen. But Tamerlap.e ravage.d and pillaged the rest: of Keghi, lootj,pg, purning, killing. The Persian Shah Abbas II also wreaked his vengeance on the area. Villagers fled to the Der Sim Mountains. Here they remained until reason and calm ruled the land once again. Then they descended to the valley below and reconstructed their villages and repaired their churches.
According to Keghi legend, Der Sim was named after the Armenian priest Der Simon. The Kurds of Der Sim, so the story goes, invited two Armenian builders to construct houses for them. During their work, the Armenians discovered a gravestone marked "Der Simon, Vartabed." Immediately the Armenians asked the Kurds for the precious stone, saying it should be placed in the St. Kevork church in the village of Hertif. The Kurds, however, refused, on the grounds that in times past, they too were Armenians and had escaped to the mountains during the Arab invasions. Der Simon, they emphasized, had been loved by all the inhabitants.
The language of the Der Simtsis was a mixture of Armenian and Kurdish, and their religion combined Christianity and Islam. During the Genocide, these same mountain.clans helped Armenians find refuge ,in the Der Sim Mountains, safe from Turkish rampage.
As '~e drove along the main Keghi road, I gazed at the Peri Su and marveled at its beauty. All the while, another vision kept haunting me-the same river almost 100 years ago. Was it here that my father's first wife, running away from a Kurdish pursuer, panic-stricken, threw her young self into the raging water? Was it there that my aunt's mother, bereft at the murder of her husband and brother, tried to drown herself and her four young children? Their screams and those of their terrified people surely rose up to the mountain tops and the mountains, outraged, and echoed their cries over and over and over again. It is eerie how stories from our past lurch forth, and how, unsummoned, they jostle to the front of our forehead and stand firmly next to our own djagadakeer [destiny].
Along our way/ we visited many villages. We were hospitably received by the Kurds who now dominate the region. They offered us tan and madzoon, tea, bread, and even Keghetsi beorag. In village after village, we saw ruined churches and monasteries. Some had been converted to mosques; others, partially standing, served as stables or garbage dumps. Still others were totally laid waste/ their stones littered about as if being reclaimed by the mountains.
Some stones were reused for other buildings. Where the lovely St. Giragos monastery onc'e stood, we found only rubble, overgrown with weeds . The abbey had beeq pillaged in the 189Qs and much of its lands confiscated. The year 1915 s~vithe completion of the 'plunder'. As I looked at the . stones of the nearby house, I noticed one with a number of crosses carved in it by pilgrims. How much faith and devotion had gone into that stone! How many sharagans and prayers it had heard! How much joy and pain, how much laughter and tears it had witnessed over the centuries! I comforted myself by saying that at least this stone had not been shattered by Turkish artillery nor defaced by a wild, angry mob. At least it still remained as evidence of my father's world. So intensely was I staring at the stone that the little crosses seemed to turn into tears. The stone was weeping. "I am still here," it sobbed, "All alone, forsaken. When will you return to restore me to my rightful place in your sanctuary?" With tears welling/ I said a little prayer and slipped away carrying with me the spirit of the stone.
Keghi seemed peaceful enough. Men farmed, goatherds tended their flock, women sewed their vermags [blankets], washed their laundry in the mountain springs. All seemed idyllic in this radiant valley. All appeared normal-normal as in the past, for if we stripped away the layers we would find a region still marked by violence, insecurity and fear. Here, the military is everywhere/ keeping constant vigilance on travelers and on the Kurdish population. Were Kurdish insurgents roaming the mountains, carrying on their clandestine struggle for autonomy? Did the peasants own the land they so assiduously tilled or were they sharecroppers exploited by large absentee landlords? What was the relationship between these rural settlers and their husbands and fathers working in western European cities? Would the Turkish government deport these villagers as it had done with the Der Simtsis, or destroy them as it had tried to do with the Armenians?
As we waved goodbye to the children of Jerman, renamed Yedisu, who had gathered to see us off, devouring the chocolates and clutching the little toys we had given them, I felt neither disheartened nor depressed. I was thinking only of history. I recalled the many old churches, abbeys, castles and medieval towns I had visited in Europe, and thought how wonderful it was that 10th and 11th century structures were still standing. But if we read their history, every single one of them has been destroyed or decayed and rebuilt again and again. Caen in Normandy, for example, the seat of W~l~ia~ the Conqueror,' suffered ,during the Hundr~d Years War and agGtin during'the' ,. wars of religion, whe;nt-h~ Huguenots went so far as to scatter William's old bones to the winds. The city was again ravaged during the French Revolution and yet again during World War II when Allied bombs leveled 85 percent of the city. Each time, Caen has been resurrected and today it stands resplendent, worthy of the powerful conqueror and his prestigious queen.
I thought of how the Republic of Armenia is conserving and renovating a precious heritage. And I thought of the current political and religious conditions that thwart all efforts at restoration and preservation in our ancient homeland in present-day Turkey. But, if anything, history reveals, time and time again, that regimes change, priorities change, empires rise and fall.
How many times have Armenians been driven from their homeland and how many times have they returned? How many times have they reconstructed their castles and theiJ:" fortress_es! restored their churches and monasteries and made them even more beautiful than before? Some day', the stones will finddtheir rightful place in St. Giragos, Aghtamar and Ani. Once again the villages and towns will repossess their Armenian names. Once again Sourp Luis will stand as the sacred symbol of Keghi. And once again the mountains will yield their stones to build our sanctuaries, which will rise like peaks to the heavens, extensions of the mountains themselves.