Hagop Demirjian was born a hundred years ago, in October 1886. His literary name, Mndzuri, which sounds a little unfamiliar to our ears, is borrowed from his native Mndzur mountains; the dictionary of synonyms gives “scorched, singed, reduced to ash, charred.” Incidentally, precisely such scorched mountains rise from his stories, which he himself described as “river landscapes” or “field landscapes,” those splendid views of nature. The fruits weighing down his orchards are precisely those of a dry, hot land, and his women, his young daughters-in-law, cut with sickles and gather grass handful by handful from precisely those old, worn, scorched, stony slopes.
He named one of the books published in his lifetime, together totalling about a thousand pages, after his native village of Armtan, which “is the Armatana of Khayasa, or Hayasa, mentioned in Hittite tablets of the second millennium before our era, while Mndzur is Muzuri, likewise mentioned in those same tablets.” The title of another book, Blue Light, has not even an approximate connection with the colours and symbols of any literary or artistic movement: it is the name of their mountain. The third collection of these pictures-stories, Crane, Where Do You Come From?, itself points directly to the true homeland of songs of longing and exile, the homeland of Kuchak, of the rippling Armenian dialect, of the hayrens, of Metsarents: “The Turkish name of my district is Guruchay; we say Ghuruchay. Ghuruchay is a small district on the left bank of the Euphrates, between Kemakh and Akn, with deep sandy ravines; it has sixty-six villages, the best known being the two Armtans… Now the trains coming from Divrigi cross to the opposite bank over the bridge across the Euphrates; from there, below Binkyan, the village where Metsarents was born, they go to Lichk, that is, Ilich, which lies opposite my native plateau and is its station. From Lichk they head towards Kemakh, Yerznka and Kars.”
The district is a sunny valley of crops and plenty, of clean living, if we judge by the ways of the Armenian villages. Over this gorge and its surroundings even the light of letters and education shimmers: in the bags of children tending lambs, primers lie beside their bread. Always reverent before the light of the thirsty ancestors and of the future, before letters and knowledge, these villages pluck the still unripe pupils of Erzurum’s Sanasaryan school straight from the upper classes. And it is a valley of filth, cave dwellings and bottomless poverty if we proceed from the picture of the Kurdish and Qizilbash villages. Mndzuri himself does not set these images, juxtaposed in the same field, the same fertile river valley, against each other: history has done so. The reason is not at all that the indigenous community settled on fruitful land from the outset, leaving waterless drylands to the neighbours who would come later. The reason is that the ruling ideology of military-feudal domination reserved for the indigenous community only the right to toil, while granting its Turkish community exclusively the privilege of a striking force: to conquer and rule. This discrimination had to exist so that the warrior state would have a steady taxpayer and a permanent striking force.
The privileged community is not yet an army, of course, and an army does not consist only of pashas; especially not its groups who are not strictly Turkish, the Kurds and Qizilbash. But the subject community’s neighbouring presence imposes upon them precisely the condition of an army and a pasha: even within the humblest member of the village farthest from the sultan’s and pasha’s residences sits a pasha. All those pashas together are the sultan’s unmustered troops; at the first signal they will form an army, which will of course be not the army of the country’s temporal lord but of its spiritual lord. Yet spiritual and temporal lords, caliph and sultan, are embodied here in one and the same Turkish monarch: the caliph rouses his community against the unbelievers, the sultan “restrains” it. The shepherd here is called not to hide, not to conceal his nature, but to possess and rule. And here is the result: in the subject community’s part, the same stream becomes a millrace and irrigation channel; in the ruling community’s part it vanishes into chasms. The same stretch of ground becomes an orchard terrace by terrace, fields sway apronful by apronful, and at the rulers’ boundaries suddenly turn to barren stone. The community of subject Armenians fills its granaries so that it can enter even an eleven-month winter without anxiety, and want will not kneel at its door. The “lawful” owner of those cellars, the Fourth Army stationed in Yerznka, looks upon them with satisfied contentment; their “semi-lawful” owner, the privileged community, the caliph’s troops, that is, the sultan’s unmustered troops, looks upon them with the open hostility of a shareholder denied his portion. It looks with the resentment of the deprived, because, Mndzuri testifies, “during the first and second plunderings, the mob did not enter our villages. The first time, the Bakhtiars and Ghureshans came with flintlock rifles and curved swords and settled by the Euphrates; we took gifts to their chiefs, and they drove off the mob until cavalry arrived from Yerznka. The next autumn, in the second plundering, they struck Akn and Binkyan; again they could not touch our five villages, because our kaymakam, a milk-brother of Zeki Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army, had brought in cavalry beforehand.”
For the moment they managed with gifts: “thirty silver mejidies, ornamental gold coins, rupies and mahmudies, linen, cloth, henna, silk.” For the moment they were restrained and turned to peaceful neighbourliness, asking for pickles or brine for their sick person, henna for their mother, hiring themselves as labourers and herdsmen in the subject community… But the times of rushing in and striking to the zurna and nagara would still come, and their evil signs had long been stamped upon the face of the land: “Qizilbash villages with Armenian names,” abandoned monasteries, Armenian villages without men, of women and children alone.
Mndzuri testifies: the government could not collect taxes in kind; the country had no roads, and if it had collected them, the mountainous country’s mule paths could not have carried so much produce to the coast. Taxes were collected in money, while the district had no money because it had no buyers. In pursuit of that money the village sent its man to the city, to Constantinople, Europe, Odessa, distant America, when the journey from Ghuruchay to the port of Kirasun alone took seven days, to work as a porter, a maker of pack saddles, in general at the jobs a peasant could do in a city. The people of Armtan were bakers, owned bakeries in Constantinople, operated mills and bakeries. Many were rewarded handsomely for their toil by day and night, and Mndzuri has evoked a picture or two of their return laden with goods. Some were already renowned in the province and the empire, and a picture or two is evoked from their triumphant feasts. Many others remained hostages to the city generation after generation, giving it their enterprise, their fresh provincial vigour, cleaning and polishing it, keeping the city alive, but never becoming city dwellers themselves, because the city was not their homeland. Their homeland was the distant village and house, their stretch of river, a field or two, two patches of orchard, the goat with delicate ears, the red ox the colour of the red cliffs.
Sons of a nation that had lost its statehood, they saw their homeland, country and statehood in their community, their village; the house was their state. At foreign freight stations and markets they vanished underfoot, but they kept the house in that distant land flourishing. From their place of labour in the city they hired a labourer in the village. Themselves city refuse collectors, charcoal workers and stable hands, they did lower work than their own village labourer, perhaps earned less than they paid him to plough their lands and mow their fields, but they had the ploughing done, had the mowing done. Perhaps it would have been more practical to bring the family to the city; mental and bodily suffering would have been less, but they did not do so: the village house had to exist, it was a homeland, they were that homeland’s sons and masters. Without it they would be bourgeois or a mass, a mob, lumpenproletarians; the Turkish military elite would call them jingyana, Gypsies, bosha. As it was, they were Armenians abroad, and care for the distant homeland forged them into knights of morality.
“If in your country you possess fortresses or villages and are their lord or prince, do not surrender yourself to dreams of office and wealth or to the temptation of high royal rewards. Do not hand your country to the king for his gold and accept in return the administration of royal domains, even if they are four times broader than your borders. On the contrary: however small and insignificant it may be, cling to your homeland, which, raising you to the condition of an independent ruler, brings you close to the king rather than lowering you into the class of his servants and subjects, however wealthy.” This Greek general’s counsel was of course sent to other people, but over ruined fortresses and bowed princely heads it now calls from its eleventh century to entirely different people: Armenians abroad who have never even heard the names of the Bagratunis, Artsrunis or Cilician Rubenids, and do not know that they are their fragments, yet whose conduct, whose stance towards the world, is precisely that of a prince who has grasped history’s counsel.
It is at least interesting that they granted neither themselves nor their fathers and grandfathers, returning still safe and sound from foreign lands, even with gold and “rights,” the right of ownership of the house, the right to sell or bequeath it. They considered themselves not homeowners but guardians appointed over those houses in the present by past and future generations. Word for word, this is how they answer fathers who sometimes “strut like cockerels,” claiming rights: “Who are you going to throw out of the house? How is the house yours, how are the fields, orchards, livestock, possessions yours? Our grandfathers, who knows which of our grandfathers how many hundreds of years ago, left them to us, and you talk as if you earned and bought them.” And from anyone who nevertheless acted so they turned away as a whole village, a “country,” as their community abroad, as from a robber who had stolen himself from the homeland, from them, their future grandchildren and long-departed grandfathers, and handed himself over to other masters. And in the country of the monarch who was caliph and sultan, and then of the slogan “Turkey for the Turks,” this firm union of homeland and sons would of course have to be destroyed not through “the temptation of royal rewards,” but only by razing the native houses to their foundations and smashing the sons’ heads.
Rich and poor all together, everyone kin and friend to everyone else, they gathered each time in some harbour café to welcome someone arriving from the homeland and see off someone returning there. From the newcomer they received a thousand pieces of news and letters; with the departing traveller they sent a thousand instructions and errands. One of the Shnorhalis would sing a line or two of a hayren, whose source Mndzuri considered neither ancient Ani nor whose author he considered Kuchak: those hayrens were the murmuring songs of their village’s young women.
Thus that community of Ghuruchay people, that unnamed association of compatriots, received twelve-year-old Hagop at the port of Constantinople and perhaps sent his grandfather Melkon home on the same steamship. Grandfather and grandson thus exchanged places: the grandfather went to occupy the man’s place in the village house, and the grandson came to stand beside his baker father; as before, father and son would run the bakery. If life followed its old channel, years later that exchange of grandfather and grandson would be repeated: Grandfather Ignatios would go to the village, and Grandson Melkon would bake bread with his father Hagop, who was contemplating literature and the literary name Mndzuri.
Those places—baker, porter, pack-saddle maker, coal merchant, fodder merchant, stable hand on one side, and the man of the village household on the other—are not equivalent. All or almost all the village work falls upon the women; here there is a peculiar matriarchy, and the returning grandfather, particularly if he has come with earnings, is in fact called to an honorary presidency, while the grandson brought to the city is harnessed to sixteen or eighteen hours of work. But that is the established order: by it and thanks to it the extended family has endured for a full century, forging precisely such industrious, resilient girls and boys. Otherwise those girls would go begging from the homes into which they had married, and those boys would become beasts of burden beneath their porters’ packs. As it is, with this tempering, they are mistresses of flourishing hearths and creators of hayrens, weave carpets and rugs, reap fields, milk cows, plaster roofs with pale clay, and pity the beggars who have emerged from their winter caves, because they themselves possess means and can afford compassion. Is it not beautiful that the baker, grandson of a baker, enrolled his son not only in the Getronagan elementary school but also in a private French school, adding study in French, and then in English, to his assistant’s heavy work? “My French was very strong; my English was not as strong, and I strengthened that too, understood without a dictionary as though reading an Armenian book.” Is it not beautiful that this baker’s apprentice, this same Robert College pupil, quenches the coals from his father’s bakery, sells them and spends the money on books: Hippolyte Taine, Flaubert, Renan, Zola, the Goncourts? In every free hour he rushes to the Armenian students’ library to devour Tiflis’s Mshak and Murch, Paris’s Anahit; in the college library he leafs through Anglo-American literature: “I would pick them up and put them down… William Faulkner’s America did not yet exist; even its seeds were not yet in the soil.” He finds a new “mine” of books: the Jewish second-hand dealers’ old, read books, gathered into a heap from people of different preferences and tastes, affordable to the pocket of “an apprentice coal seller,” and reads so much that he is already able to read selectively. Of course it is a familiar story, a repetition of the difficult adolescence of many, many writers who rose from ordinary people.
“Every two or three weeks, when I had gathered twenty kurush—the fare to the bridge was seventy para from Hisar, fifty from Bebek—I would take the boat from Bebek and go up to Galdirim from the bridge. I would buy a book or a magazine and my money would run out; even if I had a boat fare left, I often chose the land route. My first stopping place was the trees at the foot of Gyumush. Those stops were not to rest, but to leaf through the books and read a page or two. I did not tire. In the village, when I was eleven or twelve, had they not made me carry the harvest on donkeys from fields farther away, twice a day?” He reads, and alongside, as though along the white margin of the book, flows a succession of familiar village images. Grigor from Tsornik has crossed the Euphrates bridge and reached the villages of Akn, said good evening and stood among the people at the church door. The rest this community of Armenian Christians will do: take him in and feed him, ask his homeland and purpose, consult among themselves and find a widow for this idler rejected in all the villages of Ghuruchay, “under forty but not over thirty-five,” and so on. Is it those images that make the pages which recall them noticeable in that book of myriad leaves, or is it the great book of thousands of pages that selects, outlines, colours and fixes those images from village everyday life?
Those hayrens, that Armtan speech, that laughter and compassion of the people of Armtan, those lilting trills of Qizilbash girls, those rancours and secret misgivings, that longing and fulfilment, hidden rebellion and quiet acceptance, those young wives and grandmothers, fields, orchards, calls, scorched earth, donkeys, snakes, crows, fresh and salt waters had always been, existed, still existed. Their own effort to come into being from non-being and endure in the mind of their son, their apostle, their meaningless meaning, that beginningless, endless course of self-existent being, drew aside from the parade of great culture as from a procession of people of another faith. It did not enter the splendid robe of Greek marble and the words and costumes of the great tragedians. Conversely, like a thirsty aspen in the desert, as the desert aspen absorbs manna from heaven, it absorbed from world culture the little that was about it, or almost about it. “Flaubert shaped me most, made me myself,” Mndzuri writes in the brilliant introduction, with its clear definitions, to his Balance Sheet, which would have been worth making the preface to this collection too. (“This summer, these three months, I did not write a single line. My illness stopped me. I lived a vegetative life. I resembled a statue that seems to have been placed on its pedestal.” That is how this introduction begins, written by a man no less than ninety, when even in his own country people handed house and household over to their sons at forty-five or fifty and turned to peaceful conversations of old age.)
If we forget all the programmes and undertakings of his “revolutionary” time and consider only the existence of the party Ittihad ve Terakki, a party that made Germany’s iron chancellor Bismarck its idol and aimed to turn a multinational, multilingual, multireligious country into a homogeneous, monolingual one like Germany, it will still be clearly visible why the young author, who has already managed to publish a village picture or two, would entrust, among all the world’s cultures, the possibility of “shaping him,” of “making me myself,” to French culture, and within its literature to Flaubert.
The culture of that people, which in its centuries of fanatical wars between and within religions, between and within nations, had fired its idols with the blood of its own masses and armies, was now dissolving the masses into individuals and cherishing the timid tremor of existence within every creature. In the cadences of its language and song, the rise and fall of its brush, pen and chisel, even if the provincial woman and parish priest disclosed none of the qualities of steely cardinals, knights of revolution or deified maidens, the inalienable humanity of the innately vulnerable and wounded human being nevertheless made them tolerable. That culture already valued precisely that faint tremor of human existence between the articulate god and the speechless beast. This outlook, if not loving the human being, then at least tolerating him, sought through the people’s daily bloody effort to acquire the stable structure of law and social order, to become the government’s domestic and foreign policy. It was nevertheless the country of a people that tolerated the autonomous existence around it of small countries of other peoples and its own, did not swallow them, and whose culture tolerated within itself the coexistence of opposing ideologies and perceptions.
And Mndzuri’s view, like that of all the Western Armenian intelligentsia of his time, of that culture and country is a view from a country that for centuries had tolerated no small country or principality around it. For it, the wearing away and complete eradication of religious and cultural differences among the nations and peoples under its dominion, the homogenisation and destruction of all that constitutes humanity’s wealth, were merely a matter of time. The liberation of any nation or nationality from its suffocating restraint, every stirring towards government by its own national law within the empire’s borders, was met with sharp hostility not only by the padishah himself and the Turkish factions supposedly opposed to him, but even by the humblest “true believer.” It was as though the one freeing himself were taking away their freedom, as though they were losing ancestral estates, as though the others’ autonomy were an affront to their person and family. Respect for one’s fellow being, compassion for him, tolerance of him, God’s light called conscience, placed from the beginning in every human creature and meant to flower and unfold under a little prosperity, is condemned here not to flow forth but to suffocate in hopeless darkness, because the very source of prosperity is blocked: the free labour of each and all.
The intellectual and material poverty of his community has become a burden even upon the padishah’s shoulders, and he writes in his diary: “The root of all evil is that no Ottoman works at creating material value. The Ottoman is accustomed to being a master and leaving work to others; our young people think they cannot be anything but officials and officers.” That is, they are born with an epaulette grown into them and a seal in their hands. Yet the padishah himself knows well that this evil is a blessing for him: without it his military strength would not have so reliable a rear. The padishah himself has blocked the source of the community’s prosperity so that the human unit does not become an individual, does not possess a name, family, property, so that within the monarch’s realm that human unit too does not become an autonomous state and turn away from the banner of pan-Turkism raised by the monarch. Popular poverty has always ensured the success of conscription, while the chief, final, joint mobilisation of Turkish troops and Turkish militia is still to come here. The active European and the progress of all his national countries are a dreamed-of shore for the sultan and the Turk too, but Turkey can reach those shores only by crossing seas of blood. When the multireligious, multilingual country becomes a single-faith, single-language one, then the flourishing of each individual will become Turkey’s flourishing, as the German’s or Frenchman’s flourishing becomes Germany’s or France’s. Those will be blessed times, but before then one must pass through the hell of our time, must stifle the human being’s divine capacity within everyone without exception, stifle Mozart within each and all, while the people’s activity reveals a non-Turkish character, while a person writes musical notation and a non-Turk’s song flowers, writes history and a non-Turk’s history is written, speaks and a non-Turkish language sounds, takes pride and threatens, and on the horizons of time the homelands of other nations arise. Here it is prescribed from the outset: “Any pasha who worships his own god worships our same god, since god is one, and let him worship; but when this same pasha gives himself to the desire to serve the Cilician kingdom, he must be expelled.”
In the summer of 1907 Mndzuri comes to the village on sila and does not wish to return to Constantinople. Sila apparently means the return, the leave of those living abroad: they returned with money for government taxes and household purchases, and did not leave the homeland until need pressed them. “What would I do in Constantinople, bake bread? Give them bread to eat, then wait for them to give you money.” According to Hovhannes Tumanyan’s notes In Borchalu and Mndzuri’s indirect indications, the Armenian village teacher’s condition was no better than the Constantinople bakers’: roughly, “Teach them so they learn, then wait for the parents to send the payment.” But Mndzuri’s circumstances here differ from the usual: he teaches in his own Armtan, has a home and farm, works in the fields and orchards for seven months from April to October, is a peasant, and teaches in the months when the villagers fill their idle days with conversation and feasting. Apparently he was a good teacher; in any case, for seven years, from October to April, the village children listened to a young man of great knowledge who loved them dearly. That love is spread over trees and birds, crops and stubble, Armenians and Kurds, women and men, over everything and everyone; but this love, approaching maternal tenderness, embraces no one and nothing in its warm gaze as it does children. It must at least have been interesting to sit cross-legged and listen to a man who had spent many years in the fairy-tale city of Istanbul, knew four literatures in four languages, and was one of their own: maternal uncle to two of them, another’s sister’s husband; a third child’s grandmother and the teacher’s grandmother were sisters. He could imitate the speech and gestures of all the gorge’s Kurds and Armenians, and the children would instantly recognise them and laugh. The villagers, of course, would not remain without a response either: he was an avid reader, and on a donkey or mule “both went and read.” He had a donkey afraid of everything, brought by Mullah Eomer, especially afraid of its own reflection in the spring. There it is, backing away by the water for hours, while the rider notices nothing, absorbed in reading.
Those were fortunate years, or ordinary years of days filled with the cares, anxieties and hopes of a young Armenian intellectual and peasant, but his later life darkened so greatly that from the height of ninety those distant seven years seemed a sunny valley. Here, for example, he stands before his grandfather Melkon, and to his grandfather and grandmother his Metsarents, Srvandztyants, Khrimian Hayrik, French and Flaubert have no value. “Hey, Hagop,” he said, “you have no pity for animals, no love or inclination for livestock, for cattle. They get lost, fall, break something, fall ill, and you do not care.” From the head of the table, beside Grandfather, Grandmother echoes: “Go with your mother, look for them and come back.” Before grandmother and grandfather they are simply children, both the college graduate and literary pupil of Artashes Harutyunyan, who already has a wife and three children, and the mother with grandchildren, sons-in-law and a daughter-in-law. Mother and son set out, enter gorges, climb hills, ask from slope to slope and mountain to village in Armenian, Kurdish and Qizilbash: “Where are Armtan’s oxen—where are the oxen—of Armtan, of Armtan?” His “educated foot” treads the native paths anew, his young writer’s being fills anew with his native region. From those heights that have left the Metsaturyans’ Binkyan and its orchards in the blue mist below, perhaps his soul, like an eagle, marks out the region which Metsarents’s poetry did not enter, which Srvandztyants’s ethnography also avoided, and which only he, Hagop Demirjian, will portray. In any event, those seven years were a time of thoroughly absorbing village life. With his eyes shut he can say which flowers weave this scent; looking at the washing on the distant riverbank, he can say who is bathing there: Armenian, Kurdish or Qizilbash women, though all colours and fabrics come from the same Aleppo and Arabkir. If, as though by chance, his path led along the bathers’ bank, how would they receive a man’s appearance within their territory? The Armenian women silently blushing and lowering their eyes; the Qizilbash women rushing at him in a flock like noisy geese; the Kurdish women looking sharply, knife-sharply, straight into the depths of his eyes. He can be the exact cartographer of a whole district, can also, after a brief course, be that district’s geologist. The scope and depth of his knowledge can secure him the office and place of its chief agronomist, chief veterinarian, builder-engineer, dialectologist, ethnographer, historian, zoologist-botanist, recorder of the rises and falls of popular feeling. Conquering states establish an institution to map and describe the peoples, plants and animals of the country to be conquered: what plants grow, how long summer lasts, which trees form forests, what waters exist, what signs of wealth the depths reveal, what open and concealed hostilities and ties exist within and between clans, and so forth. Afterwards that institution answers to the state for every surprise in the military and economic offensive. The young writer named Hagop Mndzuri can replace just such an institution, all the more because his handsome thirty-year-old figure stands before so trustworthy a commissioner as the future of Armenian culture, the Armenian tomorrow, more broadly the future of the peninsula’s peoples.
No one knew precisely what that Armenian future would be, but that it would be unmistakably a national future was openly visible to everyone: to the Armenians themselves, the country’s Turkish rulers, the German, French and English directors of Middle Eastern affairs. At least six million people forming a national union had broken away from the Middle Ages and were advancing on the twentieth century across the whole front, from Egypt to Paris and London to Isfahan. Some were craftsmen and industrialists, some doctors and engineers, some workers and peasants, some clergy, teachers, lawyers, generals; some were Persian subjects, others Turkish… And all were Armenian, even if they did not or would not wish it, lest the “desire to serve the Cilician throne” deprive them of the real cushions of a pasha’s rank; even if they were within a different linguistic and religious shell, nationality nevertheless united them and stamped them Armenian: it was their human attribute unfolding. Some presumed to think they were the begetters rather than the begotten, that the powerful march of those six million towards self-knowledge began with them, and therefore they would be able to rule that force. The enemy thought so too, seeking and finding the guilty; so did those forces called friends, whose interests still led them alongside that Armenian march. Everyone thought they would grant a day to that nationwide awakening, thought that in one way or another, restraining or encouraging it, they would be able to govern the people’s march.
It is quite possible that tomorrow this national union too would be restrictive for the human being, and that on his millennial journey he would leave this union too, as another old dwelling. But that was tomorrow’s question. Today, on their path of progress, these individuals were coming towards national unity, which sought the form of national autonomy, and that form was no one’s will or whim: it arose from the phenomenon’s nature, was recognition and acceptance of, and movement towards, the law of society’s development. Until human activity had brought the human being into wholly different, entirely new and unfamiliar spheres, that form of the national state, even if it did not help, minimally checked, distorted, sullied, transformed or diverted his course, in any case a thousand times less than domination, which poisoned the rulers’ kinsmen with the disease of power and other peoples with serfdom, even if their economic condition was not such. In such a country, social protest, instead of civil struggle, grew into interethnic massacres. This dominion, which for centuries had crossed seas of blood, had not once yet seen the pure blood of class war. The peasant’s eternal hatred of craftsman and merchant became here the Turk’s hatred of the Armenian; in the suburbs of its contempt for village and peasant, the country’s bourgeois society had permanently settled the Kurds and assigned hanging and burial to Gypsies, reserving, of course, the clean tasks of trial and death sentence for itself.
That Homeland, keeping the human being himself apart from and above the distortion of human relations, existed. It had neither its own border and border guard nor state and constitution: the border was the same Ottoman one, the guards the Hamidiye regiments, the administrators the sultan and the effendis. But that Homeland existed, its sons, the citizens of that nonexistent state, existed, their culture existed. That Homeland was within each of its sons, the Cilician, the Thracian and the easterner, the city dweller and villager, bourgeois and labourer, intellectual and revolutionary, conservative and advocate of independence, worshipper of weapons and hater of weapons. In all this, the most certain thing was the real presence of the Homeland’s sons.
Then came what would require the overwhelming strength of a great power to extract from the peninsula state’s secret repositories, clarify, recount, and above all compel the world to hear and see: volumes of documents and testimonies, historiography, literature and art, press, radio, diplomacy, a hundred years’ work by a hundred thousand people, and behind it all an army of anything but white angels. Despite our rich national press, our “world press” turned out to be the blackboard of a boy named Angut Grigor: the wall of the Armenian church in Aleppo, where he chalked news from exiles to exiles. Our diplomacy was seated and made to wait in the anterooms of negotiations in Lausanne and Berlin, and our army of a few boys struck wall after wall and went mad.
But from the beginning it was written that our people would carry their own crosses to their own Golgotha, that no memorandum or embassy would rescue our condemned from beneath their gallows, and that among us the king’s will and the poet’s light would be mingled in one and the same individual: a Mkhitar Sebastatsi, a Hovhannes Tumanyan, a Zohrab, a Saroyan or Saryan, a… thousands upon thousands. The renowned are the clarified expression of us nameless ones. Here among us and in the diaspora, in Armenians’ Armenian and their English, French and Italian, in painting and music, in every sphere of human activity that can reveal a national stamp and cannot bear such a stamp, for seventy years now, and therefore for ever, no work has existed or been done that would betray the absence of that old Homeland within its sons.
Hagop Mndzuri, no, could not share the ordinary fate of either his great figures or the “ordinary people.” In the summer of the genocide he was not in the village to be deported with his mother, that same mother, a forty-seven- or forty-eight-year-old young daughter-in-law, with whom he had gone up and down the slopes to visit their red ox, with his grandfather, wife, three children, his school pupils, the Demirjians and non-Demirjians, the district, the whole Armenian people, to be removed from the sight of the neighbouring Qizilbash and Kurdish population and given into the jaws of the frenzy of other Qizilbash and other Kurds. Nor was he renowned or a party member, to be abducted from before the eyes of Constantinople’s embassies, sent ostensibly for trial before military courts and secretly killed on the road by supposedly “Armenian” bands. That was how it was: the Turkish friend did not touch a hair of his Armenian friend, and the Turkish village did not muster an army against its Armenian neighbouring village; their property and blood were haram to these true believers. In the holy war the Turkish friend discharged his sacred duty to the vatan, the homeland, by spilling the blood of an Armenian who was not his friend, and the Muslim villages poured their frenzy, unleashed by war and poverty, upon Armenian refugees who were not their neighbours, caravans torn from their own lands, hostile and frightened on these foreign roads.
The worst happened to Mndzuri. The dying died and were released; far beyond the peninsula’s borders, the souls of the living blackened with rancour. Mndzuri was destined to be neither among the dying nor among those impotently clenching their teeth from their distances in Yerevan, Paris, America and the Arab lands. He did not have that possibility, not even the chance to sigh an alas. For another sixty-four years he lived in Constantinople, only Constantinople, never once left that city, was a baker, a hotel bookkeeper, a fodder seller, a church attendant, and saw the draining away of the once flourishing great community, particularly the withering of cultural Constantinople.
He had been saved by chance. He writes that in August 1914 he came to Constantinople for a tonsil operation and would return to Armtan in twenty-two or twenty-four days, but conscription and military registration bound him there. Yet it was not so: he had a manuscript novel, wanted to show it to Artashes Harutyunyan, “the most balanced writer of our pre-war Western Armenian literature, the most literary by European standards,” but could not say at home that he was taking a manuscript novel to Constantinople. In that village August it would have been a shameless demand; even if mother and wife quietly agreed as was their way, Grandfather would rage with the anger of the household’s elder: “Hey, Hagop, you have no love for field or threshing floor; leaving these summer tasks to the women, why are you going to Constantinople?” And the young writer chose inflamed tonsils as his reason. On the road Armtan—Shabin-Karahisar—ah, Andranik, Toros Toramanyan, Aram Haykaz!—Tamzara—the Greeks’ Saarjug—Kirasun, which in his first years abroad had been the road of his incessant return, and which he now saw for the last time but would see with his returning characters another thousand times, he told none of those he met that in his bread bag he carried a manuscript novel to the Constantinople of Armenian poets; he said, “My throat, my tonsils.” His poet’s soul saved his body, and Mndzuri put that resilient, industrious, long-lived body of a man of the Euphrates at the service of the poet’s soul.
He wrote amid the still-hot hatred and contempt of an enemy that had lost its capacity to relate to morality. Otherwise it is impossible to understand the long silence around Hagop Mndzuri’s name in the Armenian diaspora, the beloved, unbreakable, indestructible diaspora, which managed to turn massacre and deportation into migration and even undertook both the cherishing of cultural monuments and the nurturing of new songs, something often a luxury even for great powers. That estrangement was hostility towards a Constantinople shattered and disfigured by genocide, which had crushed its children, Varoujan and the others. Some of that hostility existed in Mndzuri too; he was simultaneously in two conditions: his hostility of yesterday, and, on the other hand, Constantinople was the mast to which shreds of his colourful native land had clung after the simoom.
Ignatios’s father was there; perhaps father and son never looked into each other’s eyes, or perhaps looked and said nothing of village, house, country, past and present. Sometimes a Kurdish boy appeared, saying he was the son of Maro of the Taghlu family, and Hagop was his maternal uncle; the Taghlus were a branch of the Demirjians, and their Maro had run away to marry among the Kurds in the year of the first plundering. Sometimes, in the teahouse, someone from a group of Turkish boys who had come from the eastern provinces to work on the city’s construction sites played the violin and drew out “the long, melancholy, oriental Urfa” that Misak of Divrigi had sung at Nuhbek’s table back home. He turned out to be Misak’s son; Misak was alive, shepherding at the doors of the bey’s sons, with a Kurdish wife. Sometimes women who cleaned pavements and entrances spoke to “Master Hagop” in their Kurdish and eastern “melodious Turkish”; often the bakers, who “had no other subject: they spoke of the homeland, of the past. Constantinople, current life, did not interest them; the present seemed not to exist for them. Every night they brought old people, old days to life, telling all of it like fairy tales, which indeed they had become. One finished, another began. Illusion was their reality. Sometimes they sang too. Bent over long troughs, side by side in one row, as they used to do in their villages in the harvest days, they both cut the dough and sang.”
They are his friends. They are what remains of the splendid Armenian capital of Ormanian, luminous Zohrab, parties, charities, associations of compatriots, newspapers, printing houses and theatres. This is the reality that does not allow him to confuse his possibilities as a son of the Armenian people with those of others and surrender to idle dreams, self-lacerating curses or threats, but makes him look reality straight in the eyes. For the shreds of Armenianness, in fact the whole world is Constantinople, but only Istanbul presents the state of things to them with clear mercilessness. This one “contribution” by the Turks to Armenian literature and to the thought of all Armenians is truly tangible.
It is inconceivable to imagine culture without its people, the hearth’s fire without its householders. Tumanyan’s poetry is renewed every day on the Armenian child’s tongue; the diamonds of Teryan’s Land of Nairi shine their noble light anew with every renewed Armenian, and even the most indigenous, most Armenian monastery, without an Armenian pilgrim’s footfall, grows alien and comes to an end, as though it stood not on columns and arches but on smoking candles. It is inconceivable, yet one can somehow imagine it: written, printed, recorded, they sleep in some repository of books; built, they stand silently somewhere in desolation. They have been written and recorded from the people’s lips, erected for pilgrims and caravans; the people are gone, but culture exists. What is unimaginable is what Hagop Mndzuri did.
After the genocide, to choose the literary name Mndzuri so confidently, train himself in the genre, and after the fodder seller’s dirty work and the baker’s sweat-soaked, draining work, write without having a reader, speak as though in empty rooms; disregard his condition of a daughter-in-law who has come laden with belongings to her parents’ home, but the village is gone, deported; his confusion as a messenger bringing good news of reinforcements, but the army’s camp is abandoned and ruined. To write as though Armenian, Kurdish and Qizilbash girls and young wives from the distant Euphrates did not once come to Istanbul to see their one and only husbands, but are coming now; as though Armenian Constantinople were not past but future; as though he would show the manuscript to Artashes of Malkara; as though Armenian literature’s great future were still to come; as though the great Armenian reality demanded of its culture the most detailed investigation of all its fields and spheres. This is, of course, madness equal to heroism. When Mkhitar Sebastatsi raised his Venetian torch, he knew its light would find six and sixteen million believers at least a century later. Let us not surrender to parallels; one does not enter the same water twice, but here there is one and the same spirit of resistance.
Mndzuri lived long, almost a hundred years, and died in Constantinople in 1978. Let us not say that his life emerged from the age of subsistence farming and burst into the age of space travel: he had only one time, the destruction of a nation. During his lifetime, across the enormous span of 1890–1970, the human being’s animal fear of his fellow, suspicion of his fellow, intolerance of another language and faith, burgeoned in the Ottoman land and blossomed into the red sultan. He begot the partisan multitude of Ittihad ve Terakki; from it Mustafa Kemal emerged, and from him sprang the Grey Wolves’ assault detachments. Through all their demagogic efforts the country was cleared of Armenians, then Greeks; the Ottoman land became Turkey, the monolingual, homogeneous country of dreams, as Germany was Germany in Germany and France was France in France. Turkey expelled the memory of other languages and peoples from Turkish. It was a glorious advance foretold by the great cynic Machiavelli: “For any conqueror it will be difficult to advance against the Turk: the subjects there are the monarch’s captives; the conqueror cannot place hope in their rebellion against their monarch. But in the event of victory, governing that country will be easy for the conqueror, because those same subjects will not rebel against him either.” Thus among themselves, and all together within chauvinism’s magnetised pan-Turkic field, they took turns both conquering, managing their “revolutions” each time with a hundred or a hundred and fifty gallows, and governing the country with more than ease. For they had crushed and expelled, in the person of the Armenians, the possibility of rebellion granted by the greatest conqueror, civilisation, from the multitude of subjects. They had made the country an indivisible homogeneous mass, where dissent, instead of the fluid notions of “traitor to the homeland” and “enemy of religion,” had been recast into the clear brand “traitor to the nation.”
This hell of destroying a nation and inventing a nation is absent from Mndzuri’s work, the work of one who should at least have been its most reliable witness. What is this? The devouring of the cry along with the victim?
Without your knowledge of all this, the work of this humble labourer in the peaceful fields of great Armenian culture is a hymn to the goodness of the mystery of human existence.
With your knowledge of all this, Hagop Mndzuri’s substantial legacy in your hands is an accusation against ambitions of domination, which set peoples against each other, destroy peoples and poison peoples with the disease of chauvinism.
Hagop Mndzuri, Works.
Sovetakan Grogh publishers, 1986.