A Violin, A Marriage, and a Century-Long Life

TAMAR GÜRCİYAN

Stories from the past are often told in my mother's family. Compared to many Armenian families, I believe that stories were spoken about more frequently in mine. However, as time passes, I realize there is so much I do not know, that these stories contain gaps. The more I learn, the more I want to know. Trying to piece together what has been told sometimes makes me feel like the young family member in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, trying to decipher the secret of a book written in a coded language. The desire to understand and learn about what happened often arises only after time has passed, when that life has completely disappeared and become irretrievable.

I learned the family story I will tell in this exhibition thanks to a violin my grandfather left in our home. The story of this violin began in the 1940s. It is the story of my grandmother, Vartuhi, caught between the old and new world order, and my grandfather, Ganan, who grew up amidst the ashes of a shattered world but never gave up on loving life.

I never met my grandmother, Vartuhi. She passed away at the age of 58, before I was born. Her absence was always felt in the family. Even though she was never physically present in my life, her existence gained meaning for me through her absence. Vartuhi studied at the Republic Girls' Institute and was married to my grandfather, Ganan, just three months before she could obtain her diploma and start working as a teacher. She had planned to escape to Ankara to attend university instead of marrying my grandfather, but when she confided in a friend, that friend informed my grandfather’s family. They decided that if she did not receive her diploma, she would not be able to escape, and thus, she was married to a man she could never love.

Before my grandmother met my grandfather, she had seen his violin. One day, a music teacher from the Girls' Institute where she studied borrowed my grandfather’s violin from his coppersmith shop to use in a lesson. After playing it in class, the teacher remarked, “Even its owner does not know the true value of this violin.” Vartuhi recalled these words when she saw the violin after her marriage, and perhaps, in that moment, she realized that she had been married to a man who was not right for her.

At the time my grandmother studied, was there really no other violin in Malatya that a music teacher could play? How did my grandfather, who had never attended school in Malatya, manage to learn to read and write, speak three languages, and, at just 17 or 18 years old, decide to buy a violin just before he was subjected to the Wealth Tax?

In Malatya, where there was no Armenian school, my grandfather learned Armenian and Turkish literacy and mathematics at home with strict discipline from his father, Agop Derhogapyan, who had graduated from Merzifon American College before 1915. In 1915, Agop's cousin was taken in by a Turkish family, and after much pleading from her, Agop was removed from the deportation convoy to Der Zor and hidden in the home of the Mengüşoğlu family in Malatya. When they discovered he was educated, he began tutoring the homeowner’s child, who later became a prominent philosopher in Turkey. Years later, Agop’s great-granddaughter would take courses from this philosopher at Istanbul University.

Great-grandfather Agop married Maryam, the daughter of Maryam, who had lost her 5-year-old son on the road to Der Zor while looking for water for him. She had survived the death pit in Der Zor by pretending to be dead, and returned to Malatya on foot two years later. She wanted to marry her daughter, whom she had left with a neighbor, to Agop, fearing that someone else would take her daughter and Turkify her. Somehow, in Malatya, where they had lost all their property and possessions, they had to rebuild their lives from scratch.

In a way, it was Agop’s violin-filled gatherings that brought my grandmother Vartuhi and my grandfather Ganan together. Grandfather Agop used to set tables with Kirkor Ansurluyan, who was from one of the oldest families in the city, and had studied at the Malatya Armenian Secondary School before 1915. At these gatherings, they would invite Kör Arekil( Arekil Blind) to play the violin. It was not surprising that the children of two orphans who survived 1915 ended up marrying each other in Malatya, where the Armenian population had dwindled significantly.

My grandfather Ganan remembered Kör Arekil and his father Agop’s violin gatherings and bought a violin when he saw one. But why had he never fully learned to play it or taken lessons from a music teacher? He served in the military for four years, and when he returned, he found his entire family, as he put it, “on a bare wooden plank.” His father, Agop, was too old to be sent to Aşkale for forced labor under the Wealth Tax, but everything they owned was confiscated—except, somehow, for the violin. As the eldest of seven siblings, he worked day and night but never managed to recover financially. When maintaining the violin, the sorrow on his face never faded.

Even though my grandparents spoke Armenian between themselves after marrying, they could not find an environment in Malatya where they could teach it to their children. Due to the “Citizen, Speak Turkish” campaign, they could not use their language in daily life. As part of the new order, Turkish replaced Armenian. My grandfather Ganan sent his siblings and later his son to Tıbrevank school in Istanbul to learn Armenian. However, since there was no boarding Armenian school for girls in Turkey, his daughters received their education in Turkish in Malatya.

Years later, when I learned Armenian not as my mother tongue but as a “grandmother’s language” from my paternal grandmother in Istanbul, I could not understand why my mother did not speak it. Before 1915, their parents had studied at Merzifon American College, Malatya Armenian Middle School, and Malatya Armenian Catholic Girls’ School. Yet, their children either could not receive an education in Malatya, had to be taught at home, or, like my grandmother, were married off before they could even obtain a diploma.

Despite their inability to fully adapt to each other, my grandparents managed to hold onto one another. When my grandfather played dance music on the French radio he had acquired, he would lift my grandmother’s spirits, bringing joy to her and their children. After moving to Istanbul, where bicycles were uncommon, he would ride his white bicycle—his "white horse," as he called it—and sometimes take me along for a ride. He had a joy that defied life’s hardships and did not care what others thought. For my grandmother, however, societal expectations became increasingly important over time, perhaps this clashed with my grandfather’s childlike nature.

As a young woman, my grandmother had wanted to survive in the new Turkey not by marriage, but through education and work, as one of the seven children of parents who had lost their entire family. After marrying, she may have longed for a more stable and socially accepted life. The pain of the life she could not live was soothed by the deep love she felt for her four children. Her last words were: “From a man I could never love, I had four children whom I love deeply.”

For me, this violin is a memory of lives trapped between two worlds, of a woman who struggled to adapt to a new life while carrying the weight of the past, and of my elders, who, despite everything, survived, lived, and loved life. With this exhibition, as I bring to light photographs and the violin hidden under the bed, I hope to uncover the pains, losses, and forgotten stories of the past—while moving closer to hope.