March 11, 2008
Samsun Journal
A Patchwork Land Confronts a Lie of Whole Cloth
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

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SAMSUN , Turkey – When the word spread that they were coming, they were
suspected of being missionaries. Then fugitives. But when the small
band of Turkish intellectuals finally arrived at this Black Sea city
in February, people seemed to understand that they really wanted only
to tell stories.

The group – a feminist (Kurdish), a writer (ethnic Armenian), an
academic and a photographer (both Turkish) – were presenting a book of
photographs of people >From Turkey.

The book counted 44 different ethnicities and sects across Turkey and
captured their members dancing, eating, praying, laughing and playing
music. If that sounds innocuous, it is not. For its 85-year history as
a nation, Turkey has a very specific line on cultural diversity:
Anyone who lives in Turkey is a Turk. Period.

Attila Durak, a New-York-trained photographer born in Turkey, compiled
the book, traveling around Turkey for seven consecutive summers,
living with families and taking their portraits.

His intent was to show that Turkey is a constantly changing
kaleidoscope of different cultures, not a hard piece of marble
monoculture as the Turkish state says, and that acknowledging those
differences is an important step toward a healthier society.

"People see themselves in the photographs, and they realize they are
no different," said Mr. Durak, whose book, "Ebru: Reflections of
Cultural Diversity in Turkey," was published in 2006. He said viewers
reacted with: "Those Kurdish people have kids who play together like
ours. Look, they dance the same kind of wedding dance." Ever since
Turkey became a nation in 1923, it has been scrubbing its citizens of
identities other than Turkish. In some ways, that was necessary as a
glue to hold the young country together. European powers were intent
on carving up its territory, a patchwork of remains from the collapsed
Ottoman Empire, and Muslim Turkishness was a unifying ideology.

But it forced families from different backgrounds, who spoke different
languages – Armenian, Kurdish, Greek, Georgian, Macedonian – to hide
their identities. Family histories, like the crushing events of
Turkey’s genocide against Armenians in 1915, were never spoken of, and
children grew up not knowing their own past or identity. "Memories
like that were whispered into ears behind closed doors," said Fethiye
Cetin, a lawyer who learned only in her 20s that her grandmother was
Armenian. "There was a big fear involved in this, so the community
itself perpetuated the silence."

It is that locked past that Mr. Durak and his colleagues seek to
open. Their method is telling their own stories to audiences across
Turkey as an accompaniment to exhibits of Mr. Durak’s photographs, to
open a conversation about the past and to chip away at stereotypes.

The academic, Ayse Gul Altinay, an anthropology professor from Sabanci
University in Istanbul, is a kind of national psychiatrist,
identifying the most painful points from the country’s past and
offering a new way to think about them as a route to healing.

She points to the regional art form, Ebru, the process of paper
marbling that produces constantly changing interwoven patterns, as a
metaphor for multiculturalism.

"We’re not a mosaic, different from one another and fixed in glass,"
said Ms. Altinay, who earned her doctorate from Duke
University. "Ebru is done using water. It is impossible to have clear
lines or distinct borders."

In Samsun, a bustling city with a nationalist reputation, and the
fifth in Turkey to see the exhibition, the audience was small but
interested. The writer in the group, Takuhi Tovmasyan, talked about
how she was gruffly banished from a piano recital hall after winning a
competition, when teachers learned her last name, which is plainly
Armenian. "I hid this feeling for a long time," said Ms. Tovmasyan,
who has published a book of family recipes and stories as a way to
open up a conversation about the past. "But when I saw these
photographs, I decided I needed to talk about it."

The discussions have hit a nerve. At a presentation in Kars, in
eastern Turkey, a man in his 50s in a suit spoke through tears about
discovering that his family had been Molokan, also known as Russian
Old Believers. It was the first time he was speaking publicly about
it, he said.

Others have apologized emotionally to Ms. Tovmasyan. In Samsun, a
young man in a white sweatshirt said, "I personally apologize for ‘Get
out,’ on behalf of all my friends," eliciting applause. "It’s really a
terrible thing." Mr. Durak’s subjects look into his camera with a
directness that is startling. A Jewish man sits in a chair in
Istanbul. A gypsy in a flowered shirt plays the saxophone. A woman
from the Black Sea coast stands in a doorway, her fingers touching her
collarbone.

Each is labeled for ethnicity and sect, a categorization that
initially struck local authorities here in Samsun as something close
to seditious.

"They said, ‘We have to investigate; maybe they are wanted by the
police,’ " said Ozlem Yalcinkaya, an organizer from a student group,
the Community Volunteers Foundation, who arranged the exhibit. "I
said, ‘If they are fugitives, why would they be putting their names on
the exhibition posters?’ "

In the end, authorities relented, and the municipality even allowed
the use of its lecture hall. "The genie is out of the bottle,"
Ms. Altinay said.

She added, "Too many people are interested in looking into who we are,
who lived on this land before us," for the healing process to be
stopped.

A young woman in the audience echoed that thought, as she apologized
to Ms. Tovmasyan. For as gloomy as the past was, the future was more
hopeful, the woman said, because young people are much more flexible
and accepting than the older generations.

"In a few years’ time, a lot of people will be doing a lot of
apologizing," she said.