Opinion
Aktar: Heterogeneous Memory vs Homogeneous Nation
Memory Revisited in Turkey
Special for the Armenian Weekly
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Would someone please tell him that “Medz Yeghern” does not mean “Great Catastrophe”? Does Vartan Matiossian have to write another 77 articles before someone gets the message?
Medz Yeghern DOES mean “Great Catastrophe”, and all the attempted distortions of history by Vartan Matiossian will not change that.
It is more than unfortunate that what Aktar defines as “Religious and cultural discovery” now poses the greatest threat to the survival of Armenian monuments in Turkey. We see project after uncontrolled project of “destruction by restoration”. That “meaningful restoration project in the ancient Armenian capital city of Ani” in reality just means more devastation, and those “abandoned fountains in Habab” were in superb condition until they were vandalised beyond repair by the Hrant Dink Organisation’s “restoration”.
Paragraph 11: “To qualify the genocide with the term “Great Catastrophe” (Medz Yeghern in Armenian)aims to give a name to and express the common catastrophe that all of Anatolia had to endure after the genocide.”
There is no excuse for Dr. Aktan, with all the resources and contacts at his command, at this late date
to persist in mistranslating “Medz Yeghern” as “great catastrophe”. He should respect and apply the fact that it means Great Crime in Armenian, even if it conflicts with his “common disaster” idea.
My apologies for misspelling Dr. Aktar’s name. A typo. But Stan is absolutely right. How many times do the ignorant have to be blasted with the truth before they acknowledge it? Yeghern means crime, not
catastrophe. As Dr. Matiossian has reminded us: there is an ancient word in Armenian for catastrophe:
aghed. Certain people seem to think that hitting the CAPS LOCK key on their computer gives authority
to their totally misguided ideas. Hitting the CAPS LOCK key on a computer will not erase the testimony
of all the dictionaries of modern Armenian in the world nor of Dr. Matiossian’s authoritative exposition.
Let those who have brains between their ears take notice!
I think many of the posters here are picking nits and overlooking the man and his work.
First and foremost, Dr. Aktar, like many other Turkish intellectuals, operates in a society which is unremittingly hostile to him. Each time he writes something that calls into question the Kemalist hagiography, or affirms the Christian Genocide, his inbox fills with death threats. Just as Hrant Dink was threatened. Ditto for Ayse Gunaysu.
You are castigating him for tiny things that don’t fit your orthodoxy, not realizing that he is trying to liberate his nation at the possible cost of his life. He stands in the finest tradition of intellectuals who risk all for truth.
His writings absolutely affirm the AG. How many people threaten us when we speak the truth?
Please appreciate how difficult it is for Turks to learn, speak and argue the truth.
It is not nitpicking to correct Dr. Aktar’s persistent mistranslation of Medz Yeghern as “great
catastrophe”. His practice is a serious usurpation of the Armenian language which is employed as a vehicle for conveying his “shared Anatolian catastrophe” model. There was undoubtedly an Anatolian catastrophe which affected all the people who live there–and the entire world. But Medz Yeghern, which literally means Great Crime, is the Armenian name for the Armenian Genocide, and that should not be lost in some great conflation of suffering. Once Dr. Aktar knows its true meaning, he has an intellectual obligation to respect it and the choice of dropping its use from his writings, rather than assigning it a false meaning in pursuit of his favored model of events.