Hurriyet
11.09.2008
by Ýzgi Güngör
The dream of a Turkish Armenian comes true
ANKARA – Serkis Ýmas simply wanted to leave something to the lands
where he was born and he didn’t want to let his memories fade away
when he sought to publish his memoirs, according to his biographer
Bildirici. When Serkis Ýmas penned his memories in his ancestral
homeland Anatolia, he probably didn’t mean to launch a discussion on
the complexity of his community’s distinctive problems or sought a
scientific solution to these problems.
And he probably had nothing to do with political debates over the 1915
incidents at the hands of the Ottoman Empires.
`I am a Turkish Armenian from Elazýð. I have been living in Germany
for some reasons. But it is just in words; my heart always belongs to
my homeland where I was born and lived =85 I just want the two
communities who once lived together in peace to have good relations
again,’ Serkis Ýmas wrote in his recently published memoirs `Serkis
Had Loved This Land,’ by journalist Faruk Bildirici.
As Bildirici said, `He simply wanted to leave something from himself
to the lands where he was born and he didn’t want to let his memories
fade away along with himself.’
Ýmas was an Anatolian Armenian who was born in 1932 and lived in
Turkey until 1961. He was 75 when he died last year in Germany where
he was a German citizen for the last 10 years. His passion for his
hometown Elazýð was so great as to call himself `the son of Murat,’ a
river which runs through Elazýð. His mother Susan, later converted to
a Turkish name Suzan, was adopted by the military doctor Sami Bey to
secure her survival during the 1915 expulsion.
Last message, notebooks
He lost 45 of his ancestors in what he and his family kindly used to
call `displacement’ during the tragic events of 1915, which resulted
in the expulsion of many Armenians from Anatolia. He didn’t witness
the tragedy of the expulsion himself but he was still the victim of
that tragedy. He had much to say about this land anyway.
So, one day Ýmas decided to immortalize his memories and spend his
last years in Germany recording all his accumulated joys and grief in
Anatolia in 15 mini-notebooks. He then contacted Bildirici, known for
his political biographies, by telephone in Germany and sent him the
notebooks, which are the culmination of four years of work.
`He trusted me although I was a Turk and despite the fact that we
didn’t know each other. That imposed a duty on me. I wrote his legacy
and published the book,’ Bildirici told the Hurriyet Daily News &
Economic Review.
`He was so pure, sincere and reconciled in what he said. They are the
human stories in the end that take place in this land, which I believe
will create a ground for us to look at the Armenian issue far from
prejudices.’
They never met. Bildirici solely witnessed the last years of Ýmas
through their telephone conservations and became a real friend and
confidant for him. He promised to publish his story but it was bitter
to receive an e-mail from Germany about Ýmas’ death. But he would
fulfill his promise.
Bildirici had to fill the gaps about his life. He received support
from Ýmas’ children after his death to complete his story. He filled
the gaps and rearranged sentences, as Ýmas didn’t use any punctuation
or follow a chronological order. Ýmas wrote what he remembered from
his past and what his relatives said.
Broken lives
`My aunt was buried in Yerevan, my uncle in America and my uncle’s son
in Paris. Should our lives have ended up this way? Why? I really don’t
understand why this has happened to us,’ Ýmas asked in his memoirs.
It was the same land that granted him the rare pleasures of life but
showed him its dark face as well. His love for this land and common
sense are still generous even as he was retelling the moments of a
gendarme raid during the expulsion.
`My mother Susan, who was just seven at that time, her three-year-old
brother and my grandmother, 70, who took care of them, were all at
home when the gendarme came to our home in Elazýð. The gendarme took
all Armenian women and children in the village with them. The poor
people couldn’t even show a sign of resistance to these men with
guns,’ he wrote. `When my old grandmother was exhausted while
walking, a gendarme hit her with his riffle and plunged it into her
stomach, ignoring her begging and the cries of two little children.’
Ýmas listened to this bitter story from his mother so many
times. Likewise, he himself faced discrimination for his
nationality. Traffic police, for instance, who first found Ýmas in the
right after a traffic accident, then prepared an adverse report
against him once they learned he was an Armenian. The father of his
first love in Istanbul said `If I had daughters as many as the
chickens in my poultry, still none of them would fall for Serkis!’
Facing the history
He thankfully commemorated those Turks who friendly approached him in
Istanbul where he became Kadýköy’s most reputed turner and made a
mini-fortune. Despite challenges, he married his first love in
Istanbul. He then divorced and found himself on a train to Germany in
the 1960s. He remarried and engaged in another trade there. But he
didn’t break his ties with Turkey. He bade farewell to his home
country with a huge yellow envelope that contained 12 mini notebooks,
a historical account of his life, the Armenians and Anatolia.
`If there were some mistakes in this country in the past, it is wrong
to defend them as if they are right. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate
to accept the wrongs and not to let them be repeated? Each individual
born to this land is valuable, the words of whom deserved an objective
eye. Believe me, I love this soil and these people more than you,’ he
concluded.
His story, which began in a small village in Elazýð, unfortunately
ended in Germany, sharing the same fate with that of his
relatives. The worst part is that he never saw his dream come true; he
never read the book.
But for Bildirici, his story had implications about how such
controversial issues were handled at the public level and in politics,
which usually produced deadlocks in such cases. The Armenian issue was
one of the inevitable results of the shift from the Ottoman Empire to
the nation-state. That tragedy took place during the Ottoman period
and the Turkish Republic couldn’t be responsible for a mistake
inherited from its ancestors, according to Bildirici.
`Great men make politics and people live it. But such lives and
messages are lost amidst big statements. His story makes us look at
things with love and peace,’ he said, adding, `We spoke the same
language with Ýmas.
We thought there could be some unwanted tragic events in the past but
we should learn to face the history peacefully.’