Mascots and Flags: Thoughts from a Genocide Amusement Park

Can I make a few belated clarifications, perhaps for anyone wanting to visit these places. There are no churches “retrofitted with minarets” at old Van and that “new mosque” is actually an old Ottoman mosque given the Turkish destruction-by-restoration treatment. There are the ruins of five Armenian churches, plus a destroyed by restoration sixth church. The “fortress gate” entracne to the old city site is entirely new: a stageset in front of which Kurds do folk dances for TV shows. A real medieval gateway was demolished to make way for it. There are next to no tourists at Harput, they are almost all day-tripper locals from Elazig. The Harput fortress is not well preserved, 90% of it is rebuilt new. There are no “mosques potentially churches” in Harput. There are two very ruined Armenian churches still visible and one over-restored and always locked Assyrian church that the Turks point out to prove their multiculturalism. Plus there is a hill opposite the castle covered in Armenian graves – but almost no gravestones are left, the rest were smashed up sometime in the recent past for stones to make the monumental inscription that is laid out on that hillside and which reproduces one of Ataturk’s slogans (it is now hard to read but is something about why Turks should plant more trees). I don’t find the USA comparisons convincing. For example, African Americans exist in a shared space – so what right do they have to want to obliterate the monuments and the history that others who share that space find important?