My father, Rafayel Ishkhanyan, was born on March 9, 1922. He was eight when he lost his mother. His parents had separated. My father was raised by an uncle and grandmother. He was fifteen when he lost his father.
Cemil Aksu – Born in the Başoba (former Khigoba) village of Turkey’s Hopa region in 1977. Spent eight years in a Turkish prison for his political convictions. Editor of the Bir Yaşam magazine since its founding in 2008. President of the Bir Yaşam (One Life) Cultural and Environmental Organization.
Who went and squealed to the police that some Armenians were staying at the Pension Fortuna? Maybe it was the old man I bumped into in Çinçiva, a village in the Rize district. Seeing me, he approached in high spirits. “Don’t tell me we are strangers. Your face is very familiar,” he laughed, shaking my hand. “Can’t be,” I said. “Please don’t deceive me.
The time had come to take the bride, Julya Karabajakov, from the village of Çamurlu, but her native home is in the Kyzyl-Kiya town in Kyrgyzstan, To uphold the wedding tradition, the house of Hizir Yılmaz, a relative of the Karabajakov’s, was used instead. Hizir is one of the last shepherds of Hamshen with a flock of 2,000. Julya’s father didn’t come to the wedding. Her mother, Hediye and a sister did.
Harun is surprised. The word mashk is no longer used in the Hamshen dialect, only appearing in the word for “bat”.
The Hayteh Bar in Hopa is one of those rare places where you won’t see a portrait of Ataturk. “He’s my Ataturk,” says a communist Hamshentsi pointing to a photo of an old man, the communist Nuri Yasataghis; nicknamed “Doctor”.
On the way up through the village, Harun stopped the car and picked up Mehmed who was returning from namaz prayer. “Yeah, he’s a good man but goes to the mosque to pray,” says Harun. Mehmed didn’t respond.
“I feel uncomfortable conversing through a translator. We can speak that language fairly well, but sadly we’ve been subjected to assimilation and various pressures. That’s why we have difficulty understanding each other,” says Yılmaz Topaloğlu, the former mayor of Hopa.