the oil lamp & kilim carpet

... The lamp comes from my grandfather – it’s from his studio. My grandfather survived the genocide, but I don’t know how, and I know very little about his life... I know he was an 'odlewnik' he worked with bronze, he cast bells for temples. Stalin melted the bells down to make artillery shells... Maybe my grandfather objected... When my father was four months old Stalin made sure that he would never remember his father, my grandfather. I have no concrete details – nobody talked about things like that during communism. When I asked questions I got short answers. So all I know is he was purged by Stalin... My father kept this oil lamp in his studio. My father was an artist and artistic families keep these objects as symbols. This lamp is the symbol of my grandfather. Now these symbolic objects have a life of their own – you see this lamp has moved to Poland and it’s in my studio. The function has changed – now it’s like a sculpture, a living symbol with the other symbols in my studio.

... behind the lamp is a kilim that has been passed down through the family. My father was born under it, and so was I...

shoes

I dug them from the earth near my family’s village in the countryside. They were typical village footwear, before people had what we would call proper shoes. They could be two hundred years old. I don’t know. There was also a pistol – I used to have it in my studio, but I couldn’t really bring it to Poland...

spoon

It’s my grandmother’s spoon. It’s a very specific spoon for stirring Harissa, a very thick soup. They’d cook it in a huge pot and so they needed such massive spoons... My grandmother was 14 when the genocide happened. Somehow she escaped, but she was orphaned and eventually ended up in a communist orphanage... My other grandmother, on my mother’s side was a classic example of a hardcore communist because she had been brought up in a communist orphanage... That’s what they did you see, indoctrinated them young. My maternal grandmother prayed to Stalin and strutted around as a director in her adult life...

In 1915 the massacre of Armenians began in Turkey. Until the time of Hitler, it was the greatest massacre in world history: 1.5 million Armenians perished. Turkish soldiers dragged Komitas up on a cliff from which they were going to push him, at the last minute his pupil, the sultan of Istanbul’s daughter, saved him. But he had already seen the abyss, and this made him lose his mind.

He was forty-five years old then. Someone took him to Paris. He did not know that he was in Paris. He lived on for twenty more years. He did not make a sound. Twenty years in an institution for the mentally ill. He hardly walked, said nothing, but he watched. One can assume that he could see; those who visited him say that he observed faces.

Questioned, he did not answer.

They tried various things. They sat him down at the organ. He got up and walked away. They played records for him. He gave the impression that he did not hear. Someone placed a folk instrument on his knees, the tar. He carefully laid it aside. No one knows for certain whether he was ill. What if he chose silence?

Perhaps that was his freedom.

He had not died, but he no longer lived.

He existed-did-not-exist in that limbo between life and death, the purgatory of the insane. Those who visited him say that he grew more and more tired. He became stooped, gaunt; his skin blackened. Sometimes he tapped his finger along the table, in silence, for the table emitted no sound. He was calm, always serious.

At this time, about forty thousand Armenian men were serving in the Turkish Army. In the fall and winter of 1914, all of their weapons were confiscated and they were put into slave labor battalions building roads or were used as human pack animals. Under the brutal work conditions they suffered a very high death rate. Those who survived would soon be shot outright. For the time had come to move against the Armenians.

The decision to annihilate the entire population came directly from the ruling triumvirate of ultra-nationalist Young Turks. The actual extermination orders were transmitted in coded telegrams to all provincial governors throughout Turkey. Armed roundups began on the evening of April 24, 1915, as 300 Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy and dignitaries in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were taken from their homes, briefly jailed and tortured, then hanged or shot.

Next, there were mass arrests of Armenian men throughout the country by Turkish soldiers, police agents and bands of Turkish volunteers. The men were tied together with ropes in small groups then taken to the outskirts of their town and shot dead or bayoneted by death squads. Local Turks and Kurds armed with knives and sticks often joined in on the killing.

Then it was the turn of Armenian women, children, and the elderly. On very short notice, they were ordered to pack a few belongings and be ready to leave home, under the pretext that they were being relocated to a non-military zone for their own safety. They were actually being taken on death marches heading south toward the Syrian desert.

Most of the homes and villages left behind by the rousted Armenians were quickly occupied by Muslim Turks who assumed instant ownership of everything. In many cases, young Armenian children were spared from deportation by local Turks who took them from their families. The children were coerced into denouncing Christianity and becoming Muslims, and were then given new Turkish names. For Armenian boys the forced conversion meant they each had to endure painful circumcision as required by Islamic custom.

Individual caravans consisting of thousands of deported Armenians were escorted by Turkish gendarmes. These guards allowed roving government units of hardened criminals known as the "Special Organization" to attack the defenseless people, killing anyone they pleased. They also encouraged Kurdish bandits to raid the caravans and steal anything they wanted. In addition, an extraordinary amount of sexual abuse and rape of girls and young women occurred at the hands of the Special Organization and Kurdish bandits. Most of the attractive young females were kidnapped for a life of involuntary servitude.

The death marches, involving over a million Armenians, covered hundreds of miles and lasted months. Indirect routes through mountains and wilderness areas were deliberately chosen in order to prolong the ordeal and to keep the caravans away from Turkish villages.

Food supplies being carried by the people quickly ran out and they were usually denied further food or water. Anyone stopping to rest or lagging behind the caravan was mercilessly beaten until they rejoined the march. If they couldn't continue they were shot. A common practice was to force all of the people in the caravan to remove every stitch of clothing and have them resume the march in the nude under the scorching sun until they dropped dead by the roadside from exhaustion and dehydration.

An estimated 75 percent of the Armenians on these marches perished, especially children and the elderly. Those who survived the ordeal were herded into the desert without a drop of water. Others were killed by being thrown off cliffs, burned alive, or drowned in rivers.

The Turkish countryside became littered with decomposing corpses. At one point, Mehmed Talaat responded to the problem by sending a coded message to all provincial leaders: "I have been advised that in certain areas unburied corpses are still to be seen. I ask you to issue the strictest instructions so that the corpses and their debris in your vilayet are buried."

An eyewitness to his death reported that a group of Armenian soldiers was collectively shot. The witness was among those shot, but he pretended to be dead and crawled out from under a pile of bodies hours later...

Sivas was deported with very little warning. Aghavni said that they had a two-day’s supply of bread in the house, which they took with them as they started the deportation journey. At the time, she was twenty years old and had two children: a nine month old boy and a three-and-a-half-year-old girl. Together with her uncle’s wife, Aghavni rented a donkey, and they put their children and a few provisions on its back. They had only gone three days, however, when the donkey tired and refused to move. So Aghavni and her mother-in-law took the children down and began carrying them.

Aghavni’s mother was leading another donkey with some of their possessions. However, she lagged behind the rest of the caravan, and from some distance, Aghavni observed a gendarme shoot her. Immediately, Aghavni rushed to her mother, but when she approached the body a gendarme threatened to kill her also, so she was forced to return to her children and mother-in-law. Together, the mother-in-law and Aghavni alternated carrying her three-year-old on their backs, while the baby was carried in one of their arms.

For seven months they walked. Her grandmother was drowned by gendarmes in the River Euphrates. Along the route, two of her aunts were also killed. Her uncle and a neighbour had their throats slit by Turks. Her brother fled from the caravan and was presumably killed; she never saw him again. Food and water were extremely scarce... At night they slept in the open, without any protective covering. She remembered women in the caravan being raped by gendarmes at night. But her mother-in-law kept comforting her by saying, “My son was good, and no one will enter his bed.”

While being deported, Aghavni observed hundreds of young women commit suicide by drowning themselves in the Euphrates. She said the rivers were awash with bodies of people who had been killed by the Turks, as well as those who had drowned themselves. At one point, in despair, she left her children on the river bank and threw herself in the river, but a relative saw her and solicited the assistance of a kind gendarme who pulled her out of the water. As she had lapsed into unconsciousness, the next thing she remembered was the gendarme slapping her on the back trying to revive her, and her young daughter crying in a thin voice, ‘Gendarme, don’t hit Aghavni. Don’t hit Aghavni.” This gendarme was an older man with a real conscience, she said. In fact, he gave Aghavni three gold pieces and instructed her, ‘Take it and don’t throw yourself in again.’

Her good fortune was short-lived, however. They had traveled for barely three hours the next day when the caravan was attacked by Kurds. The three gold pieces were stolen, as well as a shawl that she had folded inside of her son’s diaper; it had been a prized wedding present. Stripped of everything but their lives, Aghavni and her mother-in-law continued to carry her children as they were herded toward Der-Zor: “We went by way of the mountains, we did not go by the correct routes from town to town. We went up and down mountains. Up and down. I had an apron and I used to wrap my baby in it and hold the other end with my teeth, and climb the mountain that way.” Both of her children died on this journey, and perhaps because it was too painful, she did not give the details of their deaths. Her mother-in-law also died, but not until the two of them had almost reached Der-Zor.

All alone on the outskirts of Der-Zor, her resources - physical, mental and spiritual – were spent. Exhausted, she lay down naked on the bank of the Euphrates River, ready to die. But as she lay there, two elderly Turks came upon her: “[One of the Turks] took his stick and poked me with it. You know, even when you’re dead, you still don’t want to die. So I turned when he poked me. When I moved, he said ‘Tabour, take this girl home. She is a sweet one. Bring her up, and when your son returns from the army, give her to him.’ ... I was lying down, dead. I got up, but I could not walk ... Also, I was all naked. And I was embarrassed.”

One of the men took Aghavni home. While his wife bathed her, he went out and bought her clothes. She lay in bed for three weeks, and after that she was sent to live with a servant and his wife who continued to nurse her back to health. When she remarried several years later, she named her firstborn son Bedros in memory of her deceased husband, and her second son after her brother who had escaped the caravan and was presumed dead.