Return to Istanbul - and to stare down the specter of genocide

A Peabody artist travels to Turkey to gain insight on his family's history - and to stare down the specter of genocide

Torosyan with a few of his works from the 'Bread Series' in his home gallery in West Peabody. The series is to travel the Netherlandish Bread Museum and to Ulm, Germany for solo shows next year. (Staff Photos By Robert Branch)

Apo Torosyan recently stood in front of a group of students and told them it was a simple mistake on the part of humanity that led to the brutal killings of most of his family in Turkey in the early 20th century.

Of Armenian origin, once a Turkish national and now an American citizen for the past 30 years, the successful North Shore artist is questioning why and how genocide happens, particularly the slaying of countless Armenians in Turkey in 1915.

Though the Armenians have a strong claim to Christianity, Torosyan finds himself having much in common with survivors of the Jewish Holocaust and their descendants. In search of healing and unspoken apologies, the journey has led him to his homeland and back to tell his story.

Last month the West Peabody resident journeyed to his father's village in Turkey, where he posed as a journalist in order to interview the villagers for a documentary that screened at a forum on tolerance at North Shore Community College last week.

The village of Edincik, where his family lived, was home to Armenians, Turks and Greeks who lived peacefully for centuries, until the beginning of the Armenian holocaust that wiped out 85 percent of Torosyan's family.

"It was a failure of humanity," says Torosyan of the brutal killings of children and the elderly in the streets. "There's a possibility it could happen again, in any time, in any place by anybody."

The Armenian holocaust or genocide has been called the first holocaust of the 20th century, and is considered a model for what most think when they hear the word that conjures Adolph Hitler's attempts to rid Germany of its Jewish population. In 1939, Hitler is said to have referred to the Armenian genocide by saying, "Who now remembers the Armenians?"

Armenians all over the world remember the tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, the poorest of Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

As a result of the holocaust, Torosyan's family spread to the four winds, making their homes in Canada, Europe and America. At the age of 25, Torosyan immigrated to the U.S. in 1968, upon completion of a master's degree from Istanbul's Academy of Fine Arts. He was married with a six-month-old son at the time and spoke very little English. He did not return to his homeland until 1995, then again in 2000 and again last month.

In order to make a living, he dropped his art and started a visual design business in Boston, which he sold in the '80s to pursue art full time. The discovery of an old letter in his garage led him to research his family's history. It was written decades before by his uncle, who was 17 at the time of the holocaust and later fled to Paris.

It took Torosyan a month to translate the long letter from Armenian to English. He then began to read books on the treatment of Armenians and about the three waves of forced marches and exiles.

When he was younger and busy making a living and shuttling incoming relatives from Logan Airport to his West Peabody home, Torosyan did not find the time to think about the tragedy that plagued his family. But now he works to instill it in his son, head of the Critical Thinking department at New School University in New York City, and his daughter, who lives in Melrose and works in the travel industry.

During his first visit to the great, massive city of Istanbul eight years ago, the artist was struck by the increase in traffic and pollution. The aged buildings looked mostly the same, but were covered by a dark, dingy film. Inflation had driven the price of a single fish to 400,000 Turkish lira, or $8. He visited his schools, other artists, old friends and walked past his childhood home and his father's thread shop, now turned into a kabob shop.

Art lovers may know Torosyan's "Bread Series," a body of sculptural paintings started in 1993, where the food that is offered hospitably in his country is petrified and used as the frame for black and white archival photographs of Armenian children during the holocaust. He also uses rope, tied around the loaves, representing the ties that bound his people when they were tortured or drowned. Stark images also include bloody handprints, faces of dictators and golden objects that represent the jewelry buried under stairways and in back yards that saved some of his starving relatives during the holocaust.

The series has been shown throughout the country and will be featured in shows in Germany and the Netherlands next year. It's also part of a permanent collection in the Armenian Library and Museum in Watertown. Another of his works, called "My Father's Letter," was also selected in 1993 by the Museum of Modern Art in Tonneins, Bordeaux, France, for its permanent collection.

As a metaphor for life, the theme of bread has turned up in Torosyan's personal history, time and time again. During the holocaust, when his father was only 5 years old, he saw his relatives tortured and killed and was forced to search for food in trashcans. He came across a relative, hands bound and starving. The child told him he wished he had bread to give. When another relative lay dying of malnutrition - bread was all she had eaten for weeks - she still called out for more bread.

"There are so many bread stories. They died because there was no bread," he says.

He hopes his art can teach a message that has been stifled over the years. Numbers vary on just how many Armenians died during the holocaust. In the past, statistics given by the Turkish government have been lower than those given by Armenians. The Encyclopedia Britannica says 600,000 Armenians were killed or died of starvation or disease around 1917.

"We say, you were right, they were wrong. That's not the point," he says. "The point is crime against humanity should not be repeated. If I can teach that, I'm the luckiest man on the Earth."

When Torosyan began this research three years ago, he traveled by boat along with a friend to Bandirma, a port city on the southeastern part of the Marmarian Sea, before taking a bus to Edincik. On the drive, they passed abandoned vineyards, vegetable fields, olive orchards and mulberry trees. Some had belonged to these "unfortunate" people of the past, Torosyan says.

Concealed within his guise as a reporter from Istanbul, Torosyan posed careful questions about the past to the peasants in this shrinking, once beautiful village, now ruined by polluted water. He was told time and time again that the Armenians always had more money and were able to get out of serving their military service, and that these factors combined to fuel the hatred toward them.

Thirty years in America and now wearing khaki pants and sneakers, Torosyan felt very Western among the Turkish citizens, many of them poor people wearing simple peasant garb. This time, with video camera in hand, he went to the village for only a day, his ears filled with warnings from friends to be careful.

"I can't question about Armenians," he says. "Once I do that, I'm in trouble. I can't do that. They'll break my camera and break my face and throw me in jail."

"I spoke the word 'genocide.' That is a no-no. It's not in the Turkish dictionary."

In the '60s, when Torosyan visited an uncle in Eastern Europe who had played dead in a ditch during the killings in order to survive and later fled to Bulgaria, the aging man met his nephew at the train and gave him a burlap bag filled with bread and cheese. The fear, for Torosyan's uncle, was still very real. Don't go back. They'll kill you, he told his nephew. The memories were too vivid of the rounded-up Armenians who feared if they did not walk fast enough, they would be abused. The men would dig their own graves and be shot one by one.

The artist has heard horror stories. The Turkish-Armenian citizens of Edincik had been given a notice by the government in September of 1915 that they had three days to sell their things, pack up and go.

"This is not a political thing for me. This is my family's story," says Torosyan. "My family was living peacefully. They were good citizens, paying their taxes. They were doing their duties, their good for society. Suddenly, they were just wiped out in a violent way. It was not like a bomb dropped out of the sky and killed them. It was a deliberate movement. And that's what makes it difficult for me."

Torosyan considers the half-hour film a work of art with a message - a poetic documentary. In it, he speaks to the village historian, to his aging aunt who was a child at the time of the genocide and to other locals.

In an essay he wrote about his travel experience in 2000, he relays his father's reaction when he tried asking about the horrific events: "There is no God. If there was a God, what happened would not have happened!" his father would say.

"My father was one of the lucky ones," writes Torosyan. "He was not decapitated. He was not cut in half by swords. He and his mother were not tied together with others and then thrown into a river to drown. He knew hunger, but not enough to die from it."

Along the road, Torosyan spotted a café and wondered if it was the business that once belonged to his grandfather, as it fit the description from the man's memoirs. It sent shivers up his spine.

"I could visualize my grandfather shaving his customers under that tree," Torosyan writes. "Behind the café house, he used to have a beautiful garden, as my uncle says in his memoir, with a pool in the middle that was used for watering the garden. He had small trees, which were green 12 months of the year."

"Even though I could not see a garden, I could just imagine my father 5 years old playing in this yard, picking vegetables and looking at his father's beautiful garden. Probably, this is why my father had the most beautiful gardens in his homes, including our home in America."

"You cannot respond to hate with hate. You make it stronger, bigger, wilder. If you give love to hate, you'll end up with love. Like Christ said, turn the other side of your cheek. Except what I'm doing is I'm not turning. I'm questioning and I'm saying wait a minute, don't you dare to do it again ... as a humanity."

Still empty...

My husband's best friend in school was Armenian. They were the victims of vicious genocide that the Muslim revisionists are now rewriting.

2 posted on 11/21/2003 3:39:43 AM PST by tkathy (The islamofascists and the democrats are trying to destroy this country)

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