Armenie Najarian (b. 1916) of Belmont, MA.
A veteran of three pilgrimages to Historic Armenia (April 1992, September 1993 & September 1998).
At the entrance to Surp Krikor Lusavorich Monastery of Malatia (1992).
By Armenie Najarian
Belmont, MA
I took three separate tours (April 1992, September 1993 and September 1998) to Eastern Turkey with Armen Aroyan, our knowledgeable tour guide. My parents came from Malatia but I was also interested in seeing the town of Agin where my husband's parents were born but I was not sure that it existed anymore. Most of all I was hoping to confirm fascinating "stories" my mother had told me.
The most intriguing was about her yearly trips to the “Vank”. Friends and family would pack food and blankets and walk all day to the Vank. It was not only a religious experience but also a fun trip. She told me that near the Vank there were stones with strange writing -- not Armenian, Arabic, Greek, Latin -- nor anything that educated people could identify.
She also told me about 40 underground chapels near the Vank. I asked her how she could know this and she said, "If you stomped your feet, you could hear an echo below. Also, she said a man had dug up the ground and found a room underneath with an altar and a priest in his robes. When the man touched the priest, he crumbled into pieces. These sound like fantastic, unbelievable stories but I know she was not making them up.
On my second trip with Aroyan, we met an Armenian woman, Sara, in Malatia. She entertained us in her home, and joined us in our drive up to the nearby mountain. I admired the beautiful hand-embroidered headscarf she wore. After a few miles, we reached the Kurdish village of Venk. On top of a hill we saw the ancient structure -- Surp Krikor Lusavorich Vank. I looked around for stones with strange writing and stomped on the ground -- with no success. The door to the Vank was small. I wondered if in those days Armenians were very short. Armen explained to me that they built them this way to prevent Turks on horseback from rushing inside to desecrate or to kill. My mother also told me that before Christianity, Armenians worshiped the sun.
On my third trip to Turkey with Aroyan, we visited Surp Nishan Vank, also a walk from Malatia. I had seen a drawing of this Vank in the Project SAVE files of William Chad (born Wilhelm Chaderjian). He was my mother's cousin and stayed at our house for a while when he first arrived in the U.S. His mother was a director of a German Bethel Mission for children. In 1915 when Turkish soldiers came to take away the Armenian children, she stood at the door and said "You can't come in -- this is German property." This Vank had certainly changed since 1915. It was just a pile of stones with just one shattered part of a wall standing.
Again I could not find any stones with strange writing. A student from Europe who had hitched a ride with us that day also became interested. Armen asked some Turkish neighbor who seemed interested in our group if he knew of any stones with strange writing. To my surprise, he led a few of us a short walk away to a house and pointed out a large stone lying on the ground with strange writing on it. The student took a photo of it. I never did find out what kind of writing it was. Were these people who left that inscription our ancestors?
I do believe we Armenians are a mixture of many ancient peoples.
My mother also used to tell me you could tell an Armenian by his flat head in the back. One day as a child we visited a museum at Harvard. We were walking by an exhibit and she stopped and said “look at his flat head, he is Armenian.” The sign said “Hittite.”
My mother also talked about a period of time when a man discovered oil coming out of the ground not far from the city. Pretty soon a lot of people were going there to bring oil home. Unfortunately the government found out about this discovery and covered up the place. My mother said the Turks were afraid the Europeans would find out about the oil and would come and take their land away from them.
Outside of Istanbul, almost all Armenian cemeteries have been dug up.
However in Malatia there still is an Armenian cemetery and also a small Armenian community. I found a gravestone with the name Kirkor Boyaci inscribed on it. Birth date was in old Armenian style of dating but the date of death was in European style. I wonder if that was the grave of my paternal uncle who did not come to America. We never received any letters from him after 1915. I often wonder if he survived the calamities, but was not allowed to write to us.