Sirnak’s Armenians

Sirnak’s Armenians had relatively few problems until the 1915 Genocide when most of the local population and Armenians living in a number of other villages in the area were wiped out. Some were forced to convert to Islam while others escaped across the border to Iraq.
Those who made it to Iraq settled in the Kurdish town of Zakhu, where 70 Armenian families reportedly still live. While no Armenian is being taught, the Armenian school and St. Mary’s Church are still open.
Zakhu and Sirnak are only 50 kilometers apart, but in a sea of Kurdish population and with the long-standing feud between Turkey and Iraq, communication between the two Armenian minorities has been minimal.
“We were kept apart because of a multitude of complex demographic and geo-political reasons. We lived in a cocoon,” a Sirnak elder said.
Those who survived the 1915 Genocide and somehow remained in Sirnak under the tutelage of local Kurdish chieftains did not know if there were any other Armenians left on the face of the earth.
They were alone, isolated, and surrounded by Kurds in the region of southeastern Turkey which the Kurds call “Kurdistan”.
They lost their language, took on Kurdish surnames to “camouflage” their identity and for more than 50 years struggled against total assimilation into the Kurdish landscape.
“I was born in Sirnak and the only Armenians I knew were those in and around our small town. We did not know if other Armenians had survived the massacres,” Afshar said during a recent interview conducted partly in fragmented Turkish or through interpreters — other Kurdish-speaking Armenian immigrants who had learned Armenian since leaving Sirnak nearly 15 years ago.
“We could not go around trumpeting our heritage. You might find it difficult to understand, but for all practical purposes, we lived quietly as Kurds of Armenian descent by adhering to our Armenian Christian faith. It was this faith that kept us together as Armenians at a time when we had lost everything else. We were cut off from other Armenians. Our language was gone, so was our literature and history, but our faith was intact.”
An Assyrian Orthodox priest came to Sirnak from nearby villages under the cloak of darkness to baptize the newborn, sneaking out before daybreak to avoid attracting the attention of the town’s Kurdish population.
Weddings and funerals were done in the same way.
“Among ourselves, we were Armenians. As our children were baptized, we gave them Armenian names like Sarkis, Tavit, Noubar, Kevork and Saro but out on the streets we were like the rest of the town’s population. We had Kurdish surnames like Euz, Yalik, Odemish, Yajir, Birgin,” Afshar said.
One fateful day in 1965, however, the isolation of the small Armenian population of Sirnak was broken. As if by fate — or sheer accident — an Italian missionary working with the region’s Assyrian Christian minority was informed of “these other Christians” in Sirnak.
“This papaz (priest) came and talked to us and later went to Istanbul and briefed the late Patriarch Shnork Kaloustian of our existence.
“It was not much later that we saw the first Armenian priest since the Genocide. In time, his visits became more and more frequent. Our teenagers were taken to the Armenian Patriarchates first in Istanbul and then Jerusalem for education and finally, thanks to Patriarch Kaloustian, the entire population of Sirnak and Silope began evacuating in 1980 to Belgium, France and a small group to Holland,” Afshar said with an emotional voice.
By 1986, the entire population of Sirnak and Silope were out ... saved from imminent annihilation as Armenians.
Today, this peculiar “branch” of the greater Armenian family numbers several thousand citizens clustered around Armenian churches in their adopted homelands.
Testimony by first generation Armenians in Brussels and Marseilles is overwhelming. “Their faith in the Armenian church is very strong. For them, the church is not folklore or tradition. It is treated as a national treasure and that’s why the presence of these Kurdish Armenians has given a new lease to our religious life,” says one Marseilles resident.