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Smyrna, for all that it represents, ought to appear in the same list of place names that carry the burdens of history: Sarajevo and Yalta, for their failures of diplomacy; and Treblinka, Bosnia, and Rwanda for the scale of the killing.
“On a visit to a mosque that had been formerly been an Armenian church in the town of Antep (now Gaziantep), the current custodian, the imam, happened to be inside. The imam suggested to the bishop that this holy space belonged to both of them and they prayed together. If politicians in Ankara warned that the ordinary population of Eastern Anatolia was still hostile toward Armenians, this was not the impression our group received. On the contrary, many people not only remembered Armenians but seemed to think that their return was a good omen.”
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Correction
― Correction
“German Protestant woodcuts from the sixteenth century depict Luther’s vision of the Antichrist as a beast with two heads—one a mitered pope and the other a turbaned Ottoman sultan.”
― Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
― Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
“Many of those who survived stressed that they did so due to Muslim families like these, or else to the bravery of ordinary “good Turks,” and also Kurds, who protected Armenians. For example, a survivor from Adana said, “We were like brothers. Our Turks said later, ‘Whoever was the cause of this genocide, may God blind his eyes.’ They did not wish our death. In fact if it weren’t for these good Turks, we would all have been killed, too. All the orders came from Istanbul.”38”
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
“The AKP government in Turkey, in power since 2002, while not officially abandoning its predecessors’ denialist approach to the issue, has taken a more permissive attitude, allowing alternative histories to be written and read in Turkey itself. This means that, first, the Turkish nationalist (or “denialist”) version of the Armenian Genocide that took root in the 1950s has crumbled in the face of the new scholarship: None of these Turkish nationalist historians has managed to write a full-length book that sets out a coherent “Turkish version” of what happened to the Armenians.”
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
― Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide
Mustafa’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Mustafa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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