Eylem Daş/JINHA

ISTANBUL – As the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide approaches, the Turkish government continues its policy of denial—but the story of women who survived the genocide remain. JINHA's series on women's experience of the genocide will explore these stories. Today, we follow the story of genocide survivor Arshaluys, told by her granddaughter, Anais Martin.

The Armenian Genocide, which will be remembered this year on its 100th anniversary on April 24th, was not the first massacre of Armenians. In the late 19th century, the Hamidiye Regiments founded by Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II initiated a range of massacres against Armenians in their historical homelands.

The sultan, who pushed for a pan-Islamic ideology, recruited local Kurds into the Hamidiye, a force that killed over 100,000 Armenians in Van, Erzurum, Sason, Sivas and Bitlis between the years of 1894-1986. The Adana Massacre of 1909 killed tens of thousands more. Property seizure and forced conversions accompanied the wave of massacres.

The period leading up to the genocide was marked by the rise of increasingly nationalist ideology in Ottoman politics. The Committee of Union and Progress, founded in 1889 based on the emerging pro-Turkish ideology that saw Armenian citizens of the Empire as traitors to the Ottoman cause, rose to power in the beginning of the 20th century, consolidating their power electorally in 1912.

On the night of April 24, 1915, one-time CUP member and Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha issued the order to raid the homes of around 700 Armenian intellectuals, mainly in Istanbul—the night that began the genocide. With the passing of the Tehcir Law, a decision to deport Armenians, in late May of that year, Ottoman forces began the slaughter of millions of Armenians. Women, children and the elderly were sent on a death march to the barren deserts of Syria's Deir ez-Zor.

Anais Martin, a retired opera artist and writer, is one of the many Armenians who have devoted themselves to unearthing the stories of the genocide—in her case, the story of her grandmother, Arshaluys. She first published Arshaluys' stories in the book "Pumpkin Stories."

When Anais was growing up, 1915 was simply not spoken of.

"I was always hearing the word 'aksor,'" she said—the Armenian word for "the exile." "One day I asked my grandmother about it. She said 'don't you get involved with those things.' I think she saw it as taboo.

"My grandmother was someone who was always crying," she said. "She would say her siblings' names and cry. I knew there was a story." When Anais refused to give up her questioning, her grandmother told her the meaning of the word "aksor."

Anais learned that during the Ottoman Empire, her family had a farm on the border of Sakarya and Bahçeçecik, in the Black Sea region. The local farms had no walls around them, so one night, when a group came to raid the Armenian household, there was nothing to stop them from slaughtering the entire family. Arshaluys managed to escape, waiting out the massacre in a tree in the garden.

The neighboring family, who cultivated pumpkins, found Arshaluys in the tree. They hid her under a shipment of pumpkins headed for Istanbul, where she was placed in an Armenian orphanage in the Şişli neighborhood. There, Arshaluys found herself among girls from Tokat, Hemşin, Kayseri and Adana fleeing similar experiences. Most of the girls were dispersed, taken in by families—some Istanbul Armenians, some Muslims. Arsaluysh was sent out as a servant to local Armenian families.

Arshaluys grew up and married. Her husband passed away—he had a heart attack when tax collectors came to his shop, presumably to ask for the taxes that would ruin him. Arshaluys was left a widow with four children at a young age.

Much later, the women, now adults and married, found each other again through the Armenian Church. The women began to remark that Arsaluysh lived in a "house without men," as her two adult sons were frequently traveling. Thus began the period when women would gather in Arshaluys's house to talk and sing dirges.

Several of the women had been hidden in Muslim families during the genocide and converted to Islam. Anais recalls that one of the women, Grandmother Naciye, would tell her, "we're Hemşin Armenians, but we're Muslims." Arshaluys had a prayer rug, hidden behind the cabinets, set aside so that Naciye never had to miss her daily prayers. Many Muslim Armenians still remain in the Hemşin area of the Black Sea.

Another of the women, Maryam, was placed in a Muslim family, who married her off to their least successful son. He quickly took to physical abuse, particularly when Armenian words slipped into her prayers.

Although each of the women who gathered in Arshaluys's house came from a different part of Anatolia, they all knew the same folk songs, Anais recalls. Anais still remembers the verses Maryam would recite every time she saw Arsaluysh again:

"The mountains branded me,
Those who see me cry for me.
What did I do to fate
That it bound me without rope?"

(zd/mg/cm)