Turkish, Armenian scholars examine 'common grief' in memories

Turkish, Armenian scholars examine 'common grief' in memories

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Vercihan ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Associate Professor Leyla Neyzi from Sabancı University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Emrah Gürel photo

Scholars from Turkey and Armenia have launched a joint project to record the countries’ perceptions of each other and examine how the events of 1915 are remembered in the collective mind of each society.

While a Turkish scholar said the grief that Armenians suffered throughout the deportation period during the last days of Ottoman Empire was still a topic of discussion in Anatolia, an Armenian counterpart said her colleagues do not have slightest doubt that what occurred in 1915 was “genocide.”

“There is still a nostalgic and warm point of view [in Anatolia] toward the lives of the Turkish and Armenian peoples before 1915,” Associate Professor Leyla Neyzi from Sabancı University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in Istanbul told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review earlier this week. “Stories of being neighbors are still alive and the local memory is extremely strong.”

The perception project was launched at the “Adult Education and Oral History Contributing to Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation” forum in Yereven last year. Turkish and Armenian scholars met in Yerevan without any governmental support and discussed the historical facts concerning Turkish-Armenian relations, especially the events of 1915.

The positions of the Armenian scholars do not differ from the Armenian state’s official view on the controversial period. “Many of the Armenian interviewees have roots in Anatolia and they have listened to a lot of stories about Turks from their elders and many of them are sad stories about the genocide,” said Professor Hranush Kharatian-Araqelian from the Archaeology and Ethnology Department of the National Academy of Sciences in Armenia told the Daily News in an e-mail interview.

Book to be published

The work of Kharatian-Araqelian and Neyzi will be released in an upcoming book, “Speaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past in Armenia and Turkey.” The book will be printed in Turkish, Armenian and English with the support of the German-based Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association, or DVV.

The work will feature memories, stories and photographs of interviewees. The people’s faces will be blurred and their names and addresses kept secret for security reasons.

Although Neyzi said the project was well coordinated and successful, Kharatian-Araqelian disagreed, saying: “The works were sufficient but not perfect. Leyla is an extremely successful academic and a good researcher, but it is my impression that she also shares the dominant point of view of Turkish public opinion. Let her forgive me if I am wrong.”

Kharatian-Araqelian also said she would like to extend her part of the research throughout Anatolia, saying she would like to speak with Circassians and Kurds in addition to Turks.

“Works focusing on historical memories, which form societies’ identities and function as their backbones, do not exist. Besides national history, there are also memories both peoples pass on from generation to generation and they must be recorded,” Neyzi said.

Although history has been silenced in the Turkish public sphere, according to Neyzi, she said personal history in Turkey remains very much alive. “The Kurds also feel shame because of the grief experienced during the deportation as much as the Turks.”

Ordinary citizens in Turkey want to speak out on what has happened in history, Neyzi said. “The precondition of achieving peace is facing the grief.”