The Byzantines knew Diyarbakir as ‘the Black’, and it has a history worthy of its sinister fortifications. Between the fourth and seventh centuries it passed back and forth between Byzantine, Persian and Arab armies. Each time it changed hands its inhabitants were massacred or deported. In 502 A.D. it fell to the Persians after the Zoroastrian troops found a group of monks drunk at their posts on the walls; after the subsequent massacre, no fewer than eight thousand dead bodies had to be carried out of the gates.
Today the city retains its bloody reputation. It is now the centre of the Turkish government’s ruthless attempt to crush the current Kurdish insurgency, and indeed anyone who speaks out, however moderately, for Kurdish rights. In Istanbul journalists had told me that Diyarbakir crawled with Turkish secret police; apparently in the last four years there have been more than five hundred unsolved murders and ‘disappearances’ in the town. One correspondent said that shortly after his last visit, the editor of a Diyarbakir newspaper who had given him a slightly outspoken interview had an ‘accident’, tumbling to his death from the top floor of his newspaper offices; after this the political atmosphere became so tense that local newspapers could only be bought from police stations. No one, said the journalist, dared to speak to him, other than one shopkeeper who whispered the old Turkish proverb: ‘May the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years.’
As we drove, I wondered if my taxi driver would prove equally tongue-tied, so I asked him if things were still as bad as they had been. ‘There is no problem,’ he replied automatically. ‘In Turkey everything is very peaceful.’
As we passed along the black city walls, I noticed a crowd gathering on the other side of the crash-barrier. Armed policemen in flak jackets and sunglasses were jumping out of jeeps and patrol cars and running towards the crowd. I asked the driver what was happening. He pulled in and asked a passer-by, an old Kurd in a dusty pinstripe jacket. The two exchanged anxious words in Kurdish, then he drove on.
‘What did he say?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the driver. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Something must have happened.’
We pulled up in front of a huge green armoured car that was parked immediately in front of my hotel; from the top of its glossy metallic carapace protruded the proboscis of a heavy machine gun.
‘It’s nothing,’ repeated the driver. ‘The police have just shot somebody. Everyone is calm. There is no problem.’
That evening I found my way through back alleys to Diyarbakir’s last remaining Armenian church.
In the mid-nineteenth century the town had had one of the largest Armenian communities in Anatolia. Like the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Armenians ran the businesses, stocked the shops and lent the money. Like the East European Jews, their prominence led to resentment and, eventually, to a horrific backlash.
In 1895, during the first round of massacres, 2,500 Armenians were clubbed to death, shut up in their quarter like rabbits in a sealed burrow. When the English clergyman the Rev. W.A. Wigram visited the town in 1913 he reported seeing ‘the doors still splintered and patched in the houses which were stormed by the rioters … and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day’. He warned that further massacres were an ever-present danger; and his prophecy was proved horribly accurate only two years later. During the First World War the sadistic Ottoman Governor of Diyarbakir, Dr Reşid Bey, was responsible for some of the very worst atrocities against Christians – both Armenian and Syrian Orthodox – to take place anywhere in the entire Ottoman Empire: men had horse-shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped. One Arab source close to those who carried out the 1915 massacres in Diyarbakir Province estimated the number of murdered Christians across the governorate as 570,000: a high, but not entirely unbelievable, estimate.
Yet despite all this, a handful of Armenians were said still to cling on in the city, and my architectural gazetteer, written in 1987, said that one Armenian church was still functioning. I found the compound easily enough, and was astonished by the size and magnificence of the church: it was inlaid with fine sculptural panels and looked large enough to contain maybe a thousand people. It was only when I looked through the grilles on the window that I realised the church was now a ruin. Holy pictures still decorated the walls; a gilt iconostasis still separated nave from sanctuary; a book stand still rested on the high altar. All that was missing was the roof.
I found a family of Kurdish refugees huddled in the lee of the west porch, cooking a cauldron of soup on an open fire. I asked if they knew what had happened, but they shook their heads and explained that they had only been sheltering there for a few days. They directed me to the door of a house at the back of the compound.
Inside lived two Kurdish brothers, Fesih and Rehman, and in a little annexe to one side, a very old lady called Lucine. Lucine was an Armenian. One of the brothers went to get tea, and I tried to ask the old lady what had happened to the church. She didn’t reply. I asked again. It was Fesih who answered.
‘It fell in last winter,’ he said. ‘There was no one left to look after it. A heavy fall of snow brought the roof down.’
‘Does she not like to talk about this?’ I asked.
‘She can’t speak,’ said Fesih. ‘She hasn’t said a word for years. Since her husband was killed.’
Lucine smiled absent-mindedly and fingered a cross around her neck. She rearranged her headscarf. Then she walked off.
‘Her mind is dead,’ said Fesih.
‘We look after her now,’ said his brother, returning with three glasses of tea. ‘We give her food and whatever else she needs.’
‘What about her family?’
‘They are all dead.’
‘And other Armenians?’
‘There are none,’ said Fesih. ‘There used to be thousands of them. Even when I was small there were very many. I remember them streaming out of here every Sunday, led by their priest. But not now. She is the last.’
We talked for twenty minutes, but Fesih would not let me stay to finish my tea.
‘You must go now,’ he said firmly. ‘It is not good to be on the streets of Diyarbakir after nightfall. It’s getting dark. You must hurry. Go now.’
Seeing what had happened in the last few months to the Armenian churches of Edessa and Diyarbakir – one in the process of being converted into a mosque, the other collapsing into a state of roofless ruination – reminded me of my first encounter with the increasingly rapid disappearance of Turkey’s Armenian heritage.
In the summer of 1987, a year after following Marco Polo’s route from Jerusalem to Xanadu, I returned to eastern Turkey to fill out my notes on the region, before setting about writing a book on the journey. The previous year I had spent a happy afternoon in Sivas, admiring the old Seljuk colleges there, and had noticed that in front of the Shifaye Medresse there lay a most unusual graveyard where tombstones inscribed in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian and Greek were all jostled together side by side.
On reflection I decided it must actually have been a lapidarium, or sculpture garden, rather than an ecumenical graveyard, for at no period have Muslims and Christians ever been buried side by side. But whatever it was, when I returned the following year the Armenian stones had all disappeared. The removal of perhaps fifteen heavy slabs and memorials would have been a considerable operation, and it had clearly taken place very recently, for the grass was still depressed and discoloured where they had rested; but when I asked the custodian where they had gone, he resolutely denied that any such stones had ever existed. I could probably have persuaded myself that I was mistaken and that the stones were my own invention, had I