Akh parig, Hrant

Ten years to the date, I was at a candlelight vigil in London, co-hosted by SOAS university’s Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Societies in remembrance of Hrant Dink. Before the sun set and the crowds arrived, I stood beside my friends and held up two letters: R-A. 

In a line, we wrote, Buradayiz, ahparig. “We are here, little brother.” The first word in Turkish, the second in Armenian (from akhpar/akhper), had become a chant — a way for the Turkish populace to show deference to the memory of the man who stood when others ran.

Akhpar is the colloquial way that Western Armenian speakers call each other “brother.” When waves of repatriates arrived in Soviet Armenia post-World War II, it was the first time since the genocide that they were in a “homeland” with their brothers. Akhpar, they greeted their compatriots.

But soon, the locals began mocking them. “Brother” became a pejorative — akhpar as another wedge between diaspora and homeland, carved into the tongue.

Growing up as the child of an akhpar’s son and a “local’s” daughter (my mother’s family arrived from Sasun one generation earlier), I often heard my parents’ arguments devolve into dad calling mom a ch’tes (“one who doesn’t see,” as in, “ignorant”), and mom calling dad an akhpar. Nothing would get dad so riled up.

The aftermath of a Hrant Dink commemoration in Istanbul last year. (Photo from a source who asked for anonymity)

So, when 100,000 Turks marched at Hrant’s funeral procession in Istanbul chanting, we are here, Ahparig, my initial reaction was that this was mere theater. It seemed like the Turk’s “I Have a Dream” — a once-a-year performance through the ghettos and graveyards built off the blood of our dreams and presence/ts. 

But on those university steps, I watched my Turkish and Kurdish friends wipe their tears for this brother, whose murder wasn’t just ours to mourn. For the first time in my life, I made friends with this community, who knew Hrant in life, not just in death. 

I learned about Hrant Dink only after his passing. Later, I would learn how truly revolutionary he was. He was a man of contradictions— championing truth and peace, but radical and uncompromising in that truth. No other Armenian on “Turkish” soil, in diaspora, or in the dwindling republic had penetrated the heart and mind of the everyday Turk so effectively.

A decade later, many of those Turkish and Kurdish friends are now in exile, unable to return to the land that Hrant never gave up believing in. We’ve lost friends and loved ones to battle, to borders, to bombs. My Turkish and Kurdish friends lost them to prisons — one by one, Hrant’s vision, diluted. We continue to re-member Hrant from a time and distance — in diaspora, as the years barrel on.

Last month, Yetvart Tovmasyan, another prominent member of the Bolsahye community, passed away. His roots were from Sasun, and he lived there before moving to Istanbul in the 1970s to make a career in publishing. He was a friend and collaborator of Hrant’s, cofounding Aras Publishing together. 

One of my friends — a hidden Armenian, also from Sasun, who now lives in Diyarbakir — wrote to me that the local villagers are trying to take the property of Tovmasyan, or Brother Tomo as he’s affectionately known. As the community prepared for his funeral, they also prepared the paperwork to save his ancestral home. 

Like Brother Tomo, Hrant was a product of both communities — a “lost” Armenian who became a Bolsahye. He was born in Malatya and (like another prominent Armenian, Komitas) learned Armenian later in life.

In an interview shortly before his death, in impeccable Western Armenian, Dink shared his earliest memory: after a routine brawl between his parents, Hrant and his siblings ran away from home and were found days later, in a fisherman’s basket. The children were sent to the Badenagan Doon, or its more euphemistic name, “Camp Armen” — a boarding house where lost identities were rediscovered.

Its story begins with Hrant Guzelian (his name meaning “beautiful”), a priest from the Armenian Evangelical Church of Gedik Pasha, who did not give up on the Armenians of the east. Guzelian sought to re-turn this group — the lost, the orphaned, the disowned — back (in)to the Armenian community, re-humanizing the ghosts. 

“Armen boys, Armen girls, welcome to Camp Armen”

In 1962, Guzelian founded the Doun/Camp, which became Hrant’s introduction into Armenianness as we’d define it — an unusual trajectory for a man of his generation. In this way, Hrant’s status connected him to the orphaned generation of the genocide, offering him a unique window as a Bolsahye and, in a sense, a survivor — until he wasn’t. 

Last year, Turkey released Hrant’s murderer — the half-life who pulled the trigger — but it was the state who loaded and handed the gun. At the time, I raged in a poem.

Today, I rage quietly with a letter. 

****

Eighteen years without you, Hrant. 

Our loss has now come of age. It can vote, it can fight, yet it remains forever marked by the absence of your voice. 

There’s been more loss, Hrant. A stench of blood in the carpet threads — history’s unraveling. Soon, it will be five years since the 44 days that turned a land into memory, like before. Only, that loss is now on its last breath, a supercentenarian. This loss is a kindergartener’s loss. Instead of reading, we’re stuck, our eyes glued to a paper we can’t recognize anymore, akhparig.

It is strange to call you that, as mom is older than you now, graying and fraying in all the ways you weren’t allowed to. You once described your mother as “a fragrance.” “I’ve never encountered another scent like hers,” you said. Her story was tragic, too, a parallel end to what would soon await you. You rushed home from work one day to find her splayed on the sidewalk, a crowd gathered around the-after — like they would for you.

Your mother’s corpse was covered in newspapers, and yours, in a white tarp. Perhaps you hoped that paper would shield you, too. 

In all your words, you never searched for home. You claimed it, unlike us, who long from afar. You refused to give up on your home. “Armenians had been living on these lands for 4000 years,” you wrote. “[We are] the land itself.”

In your final interview, you told us how you grew up in the church but veered away from the institution as your politics radicalized. And yet, you said, you never lost faith. Then, you recited Psalm 23, “The Lord is My Shepherd.” 

“May mercy, justice and goodness await me for all the rest of my days,” you said aloud. Oozh gudagor intsi. “It gives me strength.” 40 days later, you’d be shot.

Every year, I watch you recite this prayer as the Badarak organ plays behind you — a poetic insertion by the director, after you were already gone. There was no music in the room when you said it, but a silent dread, knowing what would come next, as they tailed and hounded you in your final months. 

Just before your prayer, you told the interviewer of the threats to your life. Then, you quietly mumbled, “I will never leave.” 

In your last piece, you wrote that you felt like a dove, and that they would never hurt a dove in that country. But I watched the fur-coated “protestor” at the Lachin/Berdzor Corridor in the early days of the Artsakh blockade, who squeezed peace so hard, it plunked dead in her hands. That’s what they do to doves, Hrant. 

You believed that dialogue could heal. But what is peace in a country that silences doves with violence? What is justice when the dove is shot and the murderer walks free?

Eighteen years later, we are still left with the same questions you asked us. Do we choose the ballot box or the battlefield? Do we pick up the pen or the sword? You have shown us that the path to justice is not easy, and peace is always paid for in blood.

To us, you were the link between loss and reclamation. Now, we speak your name, as if to summon you from the silence of a world that has only grown more unjust. You tilled the plow — made the destroyer learn this word, agos — and line by line, loosened the threads.

Tell us, Akhparig, what are we to plow now? 

Lilly Torosyan

Lilly Torosyan

Editor
Lilly Torosyan is editor of the Armenian Weekly and a member of the Armenian Nutmegger community. (That’s Connecticut nutmegs by way of Sasun walnuts). Her writing focuses on the confluence of identity, cultural continuity and language – especially within the global Armenian communities. She previously served as the assistant project manager at h-pem, an Armenian cultural platform launched by the Hamazkayin Central Executive Board, and a freelance writer in Armenia.
Lilly Torosyan

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3 Comments

  1. I think you were spot on and right on point when you said it was the state that loaded and handed the gun to the killer, Ogün Samast a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist, who murdered Hrant Dink in broad daylight and at point blank range right outside his office on January 19th 2007. Two years prior to his assassination in 2005 when genocide denier Erdogan was prime minister the Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code was enacted into law which made it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation, or Turkish government institutions. This ad-hoc law was used to prosecute journalists, intellectuals, academics, and publishers for questioning sensitive issues, among them the Armenian Genocide. This law practically gave Hrant’s killers the green light to silence him for good. All this man wanted to do was to start a peaceful dialogue between the two nations because he believed only they and through dialogue can address and resolve this issue. Hrant’s murder further proved the legitimacy and historically accurate accounts of the Armenian Genocide the Turks had worked so hard to conceal and that mostly through threats and blackmails of and against individuals and states who dared to challenge Turkey’s fabricated and false narratives.

    Interestingly in 2011 a few years before becoming president, the same Armenian Genocide denier Erdogan admitted and apologized for the 1937-1938 Dersim (renamed Tunceli) massacres of the Alawites they had swept under the rung and have been denying all along. But as it turned out, Erdogan (AKP) was aiming for presidency and this was a political move on his behalf to denigrate rival republican (CHP) candidate calling them out for the massacres since at the time Turkey was a single political party state led by CHP and this way Erdogan could discredit their candidate and get the votes!

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