The need to return home

I had the good fortune to join the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, NAASR’s, 70th anniversary “Stones and Stories” trip to Cilicia and Western Armenia in August 2025. My traveling companions were my son Luke and my friend Rita from Montreal. About 30 other pilgrims joined the trip — a wonderful group of traveling companions. I have been to eastern Armenia many times over the past 39 years. It has become familiar and beloved, and I have gained so much knowledge about Armenia’s rich history and culture from those trips. I often wondered, however, how the modern day Republic of Armenia differs from historic Western Armenia where my grandparents were born. My paternal grandfather Andon Papelian was from a village called Kotni in Sepastia. His wife, my grandmother Mary Hadidian, was born in Aintab. Her family moved to Smyrna when she was a young girl. She attended school there, leaving for America with my grandfather in 1921. I was always interested in visiting Western Armenia. I didn’t know what I would find there, but I wondered if seeing where my family came from would give me some sense of my roots. When I heard that NAASR was organizing their trip, led by historian Khatchig Mouradian, I excitedly texted Rita, my traveling companion from the first trip to Armenia in 1987, and asked if she wanted to go, which led to an enthusiastic yes! I was pleased that my son Luke, a college student and history buff, decided he wanted to go, too. Luke is somewhat distant from his Armenian heritage. Although he’s visited Armenia twice, he never knew his great-grandparents; we don’t speak Armenian; and he grew up in a place where there are few Armenians. I wasn’t sure what to expect on the trip emotionally. I was prepared to feel anger, sorrow and frustration seeing what was lost during the Armenian Genocide, and I did, but I also experienced joy, pride and awe, sometimes at the same time. One example of this phenomenon was in a small village in Bitlis. Mouradian led us to an ancient Armenian church which is being used by the local Kurdish villagers to store hay. Seeing this graceful stone church filled with hay felt like an insult, a slap in the face. But the residents next to the church were disarmingly gracious in welcoming us. Their front door overlooks what used to be the church yard containing numerous beautiful khachkars, including several of the largest I have ever seen. The residents told us through our translator that they know those objects are sacred to us and that we are always welcome to come and see them. It was evident that they are respectful of the khachkars, as in some places they had braced them to keep them from falling. The village’s children charmed us, having learned that visitors to the church often hand out candy. The Kurds in these villages are poor and live simply. It occurred to me that if Armenians had not been forced to leave in 1915, their lives in those villages might be similar today. In another village, the locals proudly showed us the restored public fountain, along with the ruins of the town’s Armenian church, which they are hoping to restore. They invited us to visit the ruins of the monastery on the hillside. They offered us tea and yogurt and told us, “Almost everyone in this village had an Armenian grandmother.” While this statement was meant to create connection, I also know that their grandmothers’ marriages to Turks or Kurds around the time of the Genocide were not love stories. Nevertheless, the villagers were friendly and urged us to tell our Armenian friends to visit. The mayor posted photos and commentary about our visit on the village’s Instagram page. I made the mistake of reading the comments, most of which suggested that our motives for the visit were to look for our grandparents’ buried gold. We experienced similar mixed emotions when we visited the area around Urfa and towards the border with Iran, where Mouradian and some of our fellow pilgrims pointed out the route taken by Armenians as they were forced to march to the desert. We saw the ruins of the once magnificent St. Bartholomew monastery, badly damaged by the Turkish army, but still dominating the local landscape, a reminder that this is an Armenian homeland. Not far from there, in a region with a strong military presence watching for potentially rebellious Kurds, we saw another ruined church, the only building standing from what was once a monastery. This church was the model for the famous Holy Cross Church at Akhtamar. Khachkars, which presumably once stood in the churchyard, were now incorporated into a farmer’s stone wall — a desecration that felt like a personal insult. But, the farmer and his family were welcoming and invited us into their house, gave us tea and let us use their restroom after our long bus trip. While exploring the dusty grounds of the church ruins, we noticed scattered bones. To our horror we also discovered a small, mostly intact, skull. The three physicians on the trip agreed that it appeared to be the skull of a human child. One local boy who saw us looking at the bones, picked up one of the larger ones and tossed it into the field. I can’t speculate about why bones were there, but the contrast between our friendly host and the careless disregard for human remains was quite shocking. Luke, Rita and I didn’t find any long lost relatives or the houses where they lived on the trip. However, seeing the regions where they lived, what the landscape looks like, what types of trees grow there and experiencing how hot and dry it is in August gave me a better understanding of where we come from. We covered a remarkable amount of territory during the two-week trip. Mouradian has immense knowledge of our history and many contacts through his extensive travel in the region, which enabled us to have some remarkable experiences. Whenever we visited a place where a group member had family connections, we listened to their stories and photographed them to memorialize their connection to the place. I took photos of Avedis Boyamian as he stood on the ancient bridge in Zeytoun telling us stories of his father and grandfather and of Ellen Mugar sitting on the remains of the Armenian water mill in Hussenig village in the shadow of Kharpert Castle. We started the trip in Vakif, the only remaining Armenian village in Turkey, located on the slopes of Musa Dagh, the famous site of Armenian bravery and resistance immortalized in Franz Werfel’s book “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”. We arrived just in time for the weekend celebration of the Blessing of the Grapes. The small Armenian community in Vakif welcomed us like family. We socialized and danced with them all night and prayed with them in their beautiful little church the next day. This celebration has been happening on this mountain every summer for centuries. It’s smaller than it was and has faced many threats, but still it persists. We passed through Sis, which was the seat of the Armenian Catholicosate for hundreds of years until 1920, when it was forcibly ejected and eventually relocated to Antelias, Lebanon. (There is ongoing litigation between the Cilician Catholicosate and the government of Turkey for the return of the Catholicosate’s property in Sis.) My grandfather served in the U.S. Army during World War I. He didn’t talk much about his experiences growing up or his time in Turkey after the war, but one of the few facts we know is that he fought as a gamavor at the battle for Sis, which made the site especially meaningful for me. The ancient mountaintop castle of Sis is in ruins now, but we climbed to the top, and I tried to picture how the Armenians struggled to defend the castle from the Turkish army. As I mentioned, my grandmother was born in Aintab. Mouradian introduced us to a local historian, a Turkish man who has studied the history of the Armenians of Aintab. He gave us a tour of the old Armenian Quarter — where many Palestinian refugees live today — which allowed us to envision how our grandparents’ generation lived. We had dinner in a restaurant that once was the home of well-to-do Armenians. Aintab has amazing food, and Luke wondered how we could possibly return to the frozen lahmejun I typically buy. When we saw the beautiful Armenian cathedral, which is now a mosque, we again experienced those strange contradictions that Turkey presents to Armenians. The mosque’s imam invited us to tour the mosque after evening prayers, recognizing that it was built as an Armenian church. One young member of the group, descended from a prominent Armenian family in Aintab, had an old black and white photo of a huge crowd of Armenians surrounding the church for his great-grandfather’s funeral. Now, our former church is named “the liberated mosque.” This name suggests that it was liberated from the Armenians, who in fact built it, and it was “liberated” with their blood. We visited Diyarbekir, which Armenians call Dikranakerd after our legendary ancient king Tigran the Great, who made the city his capital and built some of the massive stone walls which still surround the old city. We were reminded of the horrors that were perpetrated on the Armenians who passed through Dikranakerd on their way to the deadly Syrian desert. We also found remarkable hope and resilience in the vibrant small local Armenian community who came together with the help of the Diaspora to renovate the 700-year-old Armenian church in the city center. The community invited us for dinner in the courtyard of the church on August 24, Luke’s 20th birthday. We ate and drank and danced, celebrating the past, present and future of Armenia. Some of the too-many-to-recount highlights from the trip include swimming in Lake Van; dancing the night away in Vakif; climbing a steep mountain in Sassoun to the ruins of an ancient monastery, where we prayed, sang and danced a traditional Sassountsi bar; and visiting Gobleki Tepi, an archaeological site said to be the oldest settlement ever found by archaeologists (our ancestors built it thousands of years before the Urartian civilization). We also saw Akhtamar and two other monasteries on islands in Lake Van, Van Castle, Zeytoun, Palu, Kharpert, Malatya, Adana and more. Rita shared these reflections from the trip. “That land connected me to my history. Western Armenia made me feel connected to my ancestors. When we passed by Aintab and walked the narrow streets or visited the beautiful church Soorp Asdvadzadzin, now a mosque, I was certain that my grandmother and her relatives had been there and had been inspired to pray for her people,” she said. “I loved seeing Lake Van and its islands. As we were in the boat navigating towards them and saw the Turkish flags on them, I was emotionally overwhelmed, combinations of sadness, frustration and disgust towards the world. But also about my own people...these lands could have remained within the Armenian borders. Overall, the monasteries and the churches that remain standing, even in ruins, such as Gdouts Island, left a permanent impression on me.” It had long been my belief that a visit to Western Armenia would be a trip to the past, and that eastern Armenia and the Diaspora represent the present and future. I was mistaken. Eastern Armenia, Western Armenia and the Diaspora encompass our past, present and future all at once. As Luke said, “The trip provided me with clarity on what it means to be Armenian. Previously in my mind I viewed the place as having been taken from us. Being there, however, made me feel as though we were the ones taken from the place. There were churches lying in wait, gaps in history, food to be eaten. Each of these places needed us, the people taken from them, to return. Through the tragedy and the grief, my biggest takeaway from this trip was how we were able to bring Armenia back to the place ourselves. Whether it was in the thriving Armenian communities of Vakif and Diyarbekir in the now empty churches and monasteries dotting the countryside, it felt like we brought something which was missing.” I highly recommend a pilgrimage to Western Armenia. You will find so much of your Armenian identity there.

The need to return home

This story is FREE for you...

Jeanmarie Papelian

This story is FREE for you...

Jeanmarie Papelian

Related Articles

A priceless opportunity to connect to our roots

75 years later, we met under the trees

In Armenia, migration is changing the language of daily life

Reclaiming home and heritage