Features \u2014 By Avedis Hadjian on December 4, 2012 8:00 am<\/p>\n Mehmet and Fatih Arkan, Muslim Armenians from Diyarbakir. Ten years ago, he would still fear to admit he was Armenian, \u201cbut now it\u2019s no longer unsafe in Diyarbakir,\u201d Mehmet says.\/ \u00a9 A. Hadjian\n
\u201cWho are you? This is Turkey. Do you know what Turkey is?\u201d a man asked me, his thick glasses magnifying the fear in his eyes. He belonged to the little-known Armenian Gypsy community, in the Kurtulu\u015f district of Istanbul. I was at a teahouse where Armenian Gypsy men usually gathered, trying to interview them.<\/p>\n
And he was right. I didn\u2019t know what Turkey is. But Turkey, and many Armenians themselves, didn\u2019t know who he was either.<\/p>\n
In Turkey, there lives a mysterious minority known as the \u201csecret Armenians.\u201d They have been hiding in the open for nearly a century. Outwardly, they are Turks or Kurds, but the secret Armenians are actually descendants of the survivors of the 1915 Genocide, who stayed behind in Eastern Anatolia after forcibly converting to Islam. Some are now devout Muslims, others are Alevis \u2013generally considered an offshoot of Shia Islam, even though that would be an inaccurate description by some accounts\u2013, and a few secretly remain Christian, especially in the area of Sassoun, where still there are mountain villages with secret Armenian populations. Even though Armenian Gypsies wouldn\u2019t strictly qualify as Secret Armenians, they share many traits with the latter, including reluctance or fear to reveal their identity even to fellow Armenians.<\/p>\n
via A Lost Map on the Tramway in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
more : <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Features \u2014 By Avedis Hadjian on December 4, 2012 8:00 am \u201cWho are you? This is Turkey. Do you know what Turkey is?\u201d a man asked me, his thick glasses magnifying the fear in his eyes. He belonged to the little-known Armenian Gypsy community, in the Kurtulu\u015f district of Istanbul. I was at a teahouse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":60995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[4325],"class_list":["post-60992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-armenians-in-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}