When the Landscape Talks Back: Uncanny Heritage and the Armenian Spectre in Southeastern Turkey
It is early spring in Özdilek, a village in the vicinity of Muş known by its Kurdish residents by its old Armenian name—Avzaghbyur. After months of intensive field work with the descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors in the Southern Caucasus I am on the other side of a militarized and hermetically sealed Armenian-Turkish border. Traveling across the Southeast of Turkey I set out to explore the memory narratives shared among those who currently reside in the geography forcefully emptied of Armenians, Assyrians and Yezidis a century ago (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Eastern Turkey as a three-fold contested geography. The Lake Van region between the territorial imaginations of “Western Armenia” and “Northern Kurdistan”. (photo by the author)
When I finished an interview with the male elders of a Kurdish family in the shade of fruit trees right behind the hill known among villagers as the “cemetery of the infidels” (gor-e fellah) a woman of the family in her mid-30s approached me. Visibly churned up, she told me how she had once witnessed strangers appearing right at the site where the Armenian cemetery once had been. The mysterious visitors danced “hand in hand ... singing foreign folk songs in foreign languages” before they vanished without a trace.
Reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin calls in reference to one of his own dream sequences "The horror of non-closing doors" (Den Schrecken nicht-schließender Türen), sites of forcefully disappeared populations like this village resemble "doors that seem closed without being so,” haunted by the specter of its own violent disappearance that "passed through all the walls and always remained on the same level with us."
It is a common fallacy to assume that demolition of a material legacy might analogically cause its erasure. Often the names of places reminiscent of the “disappeared other” persist over years, decades and, sometimes, centuries—long after the material structures to which they owe their names have ceased to exist. The hills to the west of Muş where two Armenian monasteries once stood are still referred as “church hills” even by the younger generations of the surrounding villages. The same is true for other former Armenian sites—referred to as zeviyâ felle (“field of the non-Muslim”) or tepeye felle (Kurmancî Kurdish: “hill of the non-Muslim”). Instead of a smooth undisturbed “monumental landscape” as cherished/mythologized in the national historiography, we encounter a scarred geography, a ruinscape cluttered with the material and immaterial remains of those that had ominously “left” (gitmişler) Anatolia a century ago. Compared with the monumental landscape of carefully maintained sites of national heritage—such as the painstakingly well-maintained cemeteries of Seljuk Turks in the neighbouring town of Ahlat or the meticulously restored Kaya Çelebi Mosque of Old Van, the remains left behind by populations such as Armenians known as Ermeniden kalma appear as not more than an illegible field of ruins, a debris without heirs (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Full-scale restoration of the Kaya Çelebi Mosque, Van, Eastern Turkey. (photo by the author)
Apparently, the existence of Seljuk Turkish cemeteries may elevate a small provincial town in Eastern Turkey to the rank of the “dome of Islam” (kubbet-ül islam) and “resort of the Turks” (Türklerin uğrak yeri). In contrast, the rem(a)inders of Armenians, Assyrians or Yezidis are but irritating obstacles on the way toward inscribing the Turkish narrative into a region’s landscape that—to further complicate matters—has been home to substantial Kurmanji-Kurdish and Zaza-speaking populations as well.
“...national identity (and, possibly, every collective and individual identity) is formed out of what it supresses. But therein also lies its fragility. For what is suppressed is never fully erased.”
In an effort to “remake Turkey’s polity and cultural landscape” and turn a multi-ethnic imperial geography—imagined by Armenians as a lost “Western Armenia” and by Kurds as a future “Northern Kurdistan”—into a homogeneous “Turkish homestead” (Türk yurdu), mythical places such as Seljuk cemeteries or Ottoman places of worship come to be retrospectively interpreted as historic landmarks of the nation. Other sites that are perceived as not fitting with or jeopardizing to one’s own narrative are erased. We may just think here of the War in Yugoslavia where “memory was literally blown up, as monuments, mosques and other concrete manifestations of collective memory were erased, and mnemonic maps were rewritten as normative maps for an ethnically reconfigured future.” The deliberate devastation of a cultural landscape is never only a destructive act of senseless violence fuelled by blind hatred and burning vengeance (that is not to say that they don’t play a role). It is, at the same time, a formative act in the sense that it allows for the nascent nation-state to inscribe its own exclusive story into the freshly cleansed landscape: national identity (and, possibly, every collective and individual identity) is formed out of what it supresses. But therein also lies its fragility. For what is suppressed is never fully erased (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Cross-stone (khachkar) with Armenian inscriptions tossed in the back of the local history museum, Van, Eastern Turkey. (photo by the author)
In Orhan Pamuk’s highly acclaimed postmodern novel The Black Book, the columnist Celâl, one of the central protagonists of the novel, engages in an intriguing thought experiment: if the Bosphorus were to dry up abruptly, what would be found in its place? What historical artifacts—treasures and trash—would resurface from its depths? In the place where one hopes to retrieve the treasure trove of a glorified national myth one finds instead the “pile of debris” left behind by the inexorable forces of time:
Amid the doomsday chaos, among toppled wrecks of old City Line ferries will stretch vast fields of bottle caps and seaweed. Adorning the mossy masts of American transatlantic lines that ran aground when the last of the water receded overnight, we shall find skeletons of Celts and Ligurians, their mouths gaping open in deference to the unknown gods of prehistory …. No longer will we soothe our souls with songs about the birds of spring, the fast-flowing waters of the Bosphorus, or the fishermen lining its shores; the air will ring instead with the anguished cries of men whose fear of death has driven them to smite their foes with the knives, daggers, bullets, and rusting scimitars that their forefathers, hoping to fend off the usual thousand-year inquiries, tossed into the sea.
The Bosphorus serves here not as a picturesque panorama for evening strollers but resemble the “personal journey through the material enmeshment” of a suppressed urban past. The first-person narrator strays through an oneiric cityscape and Pamuk’s chthonic portrayal of Istanbul comes astonishingly close to the “anamnestic intoxication” (anamnestische Rausch) that shines through in Walter Benjamin’s sketches of his unfinished Arcades Project.
“The uncanny thing about the Armenian material heritage, however, is that despite its relative proximity in both a temporal and socio-cultural sense, it stands “outside of history” as conceived in national historiography.”
Intoxicated by memory (in the literal sense of ἀνάμνησις / anamnesis = remembrance) both Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and the columnist Celâl in Orhan Pamuk’s Black Book (1990) encounter historical temporality as bare substance—that is as the mere totality of all that has passed in its unabashed and raw form whose socio-political explosiveness has not yet been neutralized and isolated by the lineal structure of an overarching and singularized history. And in both the arcades of Benjamin’s Paris and at the bottom of Pamuk’s Bosporus flashes up the “objectified dream” (vergegenständlichte Traum) of a society’s collective unconscious. Far from the redemptive light of any national awakening, the “sleeping collective” wanders along the ephemeral paths of an uncanny dreamland towards history’s traumatic kernel. Sigmund Freud in his prominent essay Das Unheimliche (1919) seeks to unpack the uncanny not merely as synonym for the “unfamiliar,” but rather as a composite that encapsulates both the “unfamiliar” and its opposition, the “familiar.”
Accordingly, Freud’s understanding of unheimlich— or the “uncanny”—is that which evokes uneasiness not due to its utter unfamiliarity but, precisely, because it is, au contraire, far “too familiar.” The historical landscape of Anatolia is full of architectural relics that date back not only to antiquity but, as in the case of Çatalhöyük or Göbekli Tepe, even to prehistoric times. The uncanny thing about the Armenian material heritage, however, is that despite its relative proximity in both a temporal and socio-cultural sense, it stands “outside of history” as conceived in national historiography (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Remnants of a ruined medieval Armenian church, Ani, Province of Kars. (Photo courtesy of Mischa Bareuther)
The uncanny lies precisely in this contradiction: although the “Armenian element” (Ermeni unsuru) was a fairly "familiar" part of the social fabric up until the end of the Ottoman Empire, it appears today under the prism of national heritage instead, like the relic of an “alien” civilization that was disappeared from Anatolia by an enigmatic force majeur. In an official(ized) narrative of history in which the disappearance of the region’s Armenian and Assyrian populations and the emergence of Turkish nation-state cannot be placed in any meaningful relation to each other, uncanniness emerges as the symptom of a fissure that cannot be bridged.
On the one hand, Turkish historiography grapples with the question: how to make sense of Ottoman history understood as a reign of tolerance if it ultimately ended in genocidal violence? On the other hand, Armenian official historiography equally proves unable to make sense of the actually lived experiences of the multi-ethnic cohabitation that had preceded 1915. How to make sense of the Genocide if not as the low point of a history of systemic oppression and ongoing violence? The history of the last century has shown us how swiftly communities once regarded as the founding elements (anasır) of the empire—such as the Greeks, Assyrians, Jews and Armenians—could end up being marginalized as alien elements, “the unwelcomed ethnic other” within what was to become a “Turkish Domain.” New political ideas create unprecedented forms of solidarity such as the imagined community of the nation. But they also radically and irrevocably undermine bonds of solidarity that had tied together different communities for centuries.
While national monuments give visitors a sense of reassurance and permanence, the uncanny legacy of what “Armenians left behind” testifies to the fundamental uncertainty and vulnerability that has throughout history characterized the collective experience of being human. However, precisely in its marginalized positionality, as the thing that lies beyond what is tell-able in national frameworks, lies its subversive and challenging potential. As “the-thing-which-shouldn’t-be-there-but-is-there” it challenges collective myths and casts into question the stories we tell and are told on the past.
