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Turkey and the Armenian Ghost

On the Trail of the Genocide

McGill-Queen's University Press

Marseille: Little Armenia

Rows of tiny houses are crammed together along the sunny slope of Verduron Hill in Marseille, offering a magnificent view of the sea below. Beneath them, beyond the high-rise towers of Cité de la Castellane, lie the quays of the self-sustaining port, where Panamanian cargo ships and ferries from Corsica and Algeria occasionally tie up. It was here, in Cap Janet, ninety years earlier, in 1922, that the Hürriyet Pacha, a Turkish ship from Constantinople, docked. On board were hundreds of Armenian refugees. "My grandparents and their little boy – my father – were on that steamer," says Patrick Chéguérian, contemplating the scene from his kitchen window. "In the beginning, they lived in a little hotel near the quays. But when they heard that small plots of virgin land were for sale up here, they came to build a new life. At the time, they had nothing. This area was called 'Strawberry Harvest.' My grandparents came up here on weekends to build their house."

The hilltop was soon covered with small houses built in the Anatolian style: low two- or three-room homes built in step formation with small vegetable gardens. Seen from below, Verduron resembles one of those little villages nestled in the mountains such as you see in the Turkish countryside. In Patrick's kitchen, the weathered floor tiles in geometric patterns are reminiscent of those found in the entrances to Istanbul buildings. "In the garden, there was a walnut tree, an apricot tree – the trees they had in the old country – and vines to make dolma, stuffed vine leaves," he recalls. "My grandparents disembarked in Marseille with the idea of continuing on to Argentina, but in the end they stayed. Grandpa Calouste was a cobbler – he had learned his trade in Istanbul. My grandmother was a devout woman, totally devoted to the church. She embroidered the priest's robes with gold thread. No doubt it was her last refuge after the trauma of the genocide."

The entire hill became home to a small Armenian colony with a church, shops, and community life. Most of its residents were families from Sivas, a province in the centre of modern-day Turkey, where the raids left few survivors. Some 2,600 kilometres from their homes, the refugees came together. "They traded figs for hogweed. But those days are long gone," Patrick notes ruefully. One by one, the bakery, the cafés, Manouk the barber "who sold groceries" all closed their doors. In the 1960s, there were still twenty-five Armenian shops. But property values skyrocketed – the Armenian shacks are now worth &8364;300,000 to &8364;400,000, and with the mixing of the population, Marseille residents of all backgrounds have moved into the area. At the top of the hill, the St Garabed church, where no one comes to pray anymore, is all that remains of the community's Armenian roots – along with the house where Patrick lives, the last depository of the neighbourhood's memories.

The maritime transport line that had linked the ports of Istanbul and Marseille since 1830 became a route to exile. In just a few years, thousands of Armenians set sail for France. In November 1922, the first ship, the Tourville, unloaded four hundred refugees. One year later, Marseille had already accommodated eleven thousand newcomers. The first refugee camps were quickly opened. The Oddo military camp, originally built to receive White Russians, opened its doors to Armenians fleeing Kemalist Turkey on 27 November 1922, followed by Camp Victor near the Saint-Charles railroad station. The Armenians soon occupied the open areas on the city's outskirts. A steady influx of refugees continued until the late 1920s.

Hostility rapidly bubbled to the surface. In October 1923, Le Petit Provençal published a letter by Dr Siméon Flaissières, the socialist mayor of Marseille, clearly illustrating the city's feelings:

For some time now, there has been a seemingly endless stream of immigrants from the East – particularly Armenians. These poor wretches assure us they have good reason to fear the Turks. As a result, more than three thousand men, women, and children have already descended on the quays of our port. After the Albano and the Caucase, other ships will follow, and we hear that forty thousand more of these uninvited guests are on their way, meaning that smallpox, typhus, and the plague are also headed to our shores, if they have not already arrived in the form of germs carried by these immigrants: destitute, resistant to Western ways and basic hygiene, immobilized by their resigned, passive ancestral lethargy ... Exceptional measures are called for, and they are beyond the scope of the local authorities. The citizens of Marseille urge the government to vigorously deny these immigrants entry to French ports and immediately repatriate these pathetic hordes, who pose a huge public danger to the entire country.

It was a difficult adjustment for the new arrivals, most of whom had to rebuild their lives from scratch. The uprooted Armenians were discovering France and, with it, a racism for which they were unprepared. "We inherited the idea that we mustn't make waves, that we must play the part of the eternal victims – it's part of our genetic code," says Patrick. "Our parents were naïve and promoted the fantasy that the French had to be good people because they had taken us in. At school, they automatically separated the Armenian children from the 'good French boys and girls.' The local kids were told, 'Don't sit next to them. They're crawling with lice.' Cries of 'Dirty Armenians!' could be heard on the main street." The refugees' strange traditions were the object of ridicule. Patrick's cousin Françoise cites one example: "Our grandparents made basturma" – smoked dried beef covered with tchemen, a layer of paste prepared with cumin, garlic, and paprika. "My grandmother made the strong-smelling paste in a large bucket that she left out on the windowsill. And she told us that the French liked to say that the Armenians ate their own excrement."

Françoise's sister Nicole remembers their grandmother, just nine years old at the time of the genocide, who, seven years later, disembarked with her younger brother on the quay in Marseille. She ended up living in a shack next to the small Saint-Jacques church (Sourp Agop) on Arthur-Michaud Boulevard. The place was spartan, but she was happy in her two tiny rooms under the protection of a priest, and she lived there for many years. Nicole Matta recalls games of hide and seek in the church and hours spent playing in the small courtyard – where a monument to the victims of the genocide now stands. "When we were young, my sister and I would spend hours brushing our grandmother's long hair while she told us stories of her village, Khorkhon, near Sivas. The stories always ended in tears," Nicole recalls sadly.

"Before being deported, her mother had had no choice but to entrust her two children to the care of a Turkish farmer to save their lives. But her final words to her daughter were these: 'Remember who you are. Don't forget your language!' At night, in the barn where they slept, my grandmother would teach her little brother to speak Armenian and make him recite his multiplication tables. During the day, they worked like beasts of burden on the farm. The years passed until one day in 1918, Red Cross workers came to the village searching for Armenian orphans, and, ignoring the protests of the Turkish family, my grandmother went to speak to them in Armenian. 'My little brother also works in the fields,' she told them, and he too was freed." So many thousands of broken, violated, and traumatized lives; so many thousands who arrived in Marseille without a penny to their name.

In Marseille, porte du Sud (1927), Albert Londres describes the hordes of immigrants, or "human wrecks," "carried by the sea" to the quays of Marseille. Among this flotsam were the Armenians:

The Armenians are inhabitants of Marseille, no more, no less. And Camp Oddo is their private corner of this shipwrecked kingdom. The camp represents the old corks, the discarded slices of lemon and orange, and the fistfuls of hair seen floating along the quays. It's the last place in the world you would want to end up. But I must take you there. Escapees from Smyrna, from Constantinople, from Batoum, from Adana, Armenians, always Armenians, still more Armenians disembarked and disembarked in Marseille. They first lined up in tight formation and set off to conquer the older neighbourhoods. Then they targeted the suburbs. But they had second thoughts. They returned to the city. Armenians are plants that thrive only between the cobblestones of city streets. Fresh air holds no attraction for them. They just catch cold. So the Armenians took over the public gardens, the avenues, the public squares, and the staircases. When all that was occupied, another 2,700 Armenians arrived. They took over the city. Nothing was left unoccupied – not a single bench or curbside, not even a basin, which makes a fine home once you tip out the water. The 2,700 Armenians began to get angry. Fortunately, the municipality understood that it was time to begin negotiations.

"Greetings, foreigners!" it said. "Not too far from here, I have a large piece of land."

"Let's go see it!" cried the Armenians.

The troops set out. They arrived at Camp Oddo. A dozen old army barracks came into view.

"They'll do," said the sons of Asia. "Now leave us!"

That was three years ago. They were left well alone! There are two hundred of them in each of those barracks. Nothing but a rag separates one family's cubicle from the next. They sleep there – their heads with their neighbours on the right, and their feet with those to the left. They sleep with their neighbour's daughter thinking it's their wife.

Oh, my! Marseille, a word to the wise. You have forgotten them but, if you do nothing, their numbers will soon double – not counting twins! It's true that cholera may not be far away.

Upon arrival, the Armenians were sorted on the Frioul Islands. Once on the mainland, they went directly to the Patriarchal church on Stanislas-Torrents Street, which served as the consulate. There they applied for a marriage or baptismal certificate – anything, as long as it bore the seal of the French Republic. They were considered to be "stateless": in Constantinople, next to "Purpose of travel," the words "Cannot return" or "No possible return" had been systematically stamped on their passports.

This is what had been written on one such document that came into our hands – that of Achod Malakian, alias Henri Verneuil, born in Rodosto, now Tekirdag, Thrace, on 7 December 1920. He landed in Marseille in late 1924 and arrived at Camp Oddo in 1926. Thousands of other such identity papers preserved in the archives of ARAM (Association for Research and Archiving Armenian Memory) bear similar stamps. "The birth records were kept by the church," says Jacques Ouloussian, the association's president. "There was a strong desire to document, to record, an identity the authorities had tried to erase." The documentation centre, located in the Saint-Jérôme district of Marseille, not far from an Armenian church, is the only one of its kind in France. ARAM is a veritable Noah's Ark for French Armenians, both a library and an archive centre. It is a treasure trove of documents, registers, maps, newspapers, photos, and letters, all bearing witness to the exodus, reconstituting the memory of a people out of thousands of individual stories. In one corner, a box overflowing with old portraits of families in their Sunday best is labelled with a Post-it note: "To be sorted." Every week, new boxes arrive – gifts, bequests, slices of life in black and white.

Founded in 1997, the association "embodies our father's desire to preserve the memory of everything that had been passed down to us by word of mouth, to keep the Armenian memory alive," says Varou Christian Artin. Since his father's death in 2012, Varou has taken up the cause with his sister Astrid, a historian. From early childhood, their father, Garbis, had heard the story of his family's odyssey. His deported grandfather, Sahag, had learned Armenian in the deserts of Syria and Iraq by tracing letters in the sand. When he arrived in Marseille, Sahag began collecting "hundreds of photos and souvenirs. Anything written in Armenian could not be thrown away." His son Garbis by age twenty had opened a small carpentry shop that, many decades later, allowed him to retire in comfort. His workshop was then converted into a documentation centre.

Varou pulls out two large bound registers and opens them on the table, revealing the names of the five thousand Armenians who passed through Camp Oddo. In clear, round handwriting on fine paper, the camp secretary meticulously recorded the arrival of each person in surprising detail: age, place of birth, date of arrival, family ties, profession. Marseille natives with Armenian roots can now find here a condensed history of their ancestors and their arrival in this country. The first point of entry, Camp Oddo, was also a point of departure for the building of an Armenian community in France, rendered strong by the shared experiences of genocide and exile. The camp quickly took shape with a church, then a school and a scouting and fitness organization – the uGA Artziv. Its football team is still a cornerstone of the community.

In a period of labour shortages, factories around the camp were happy to hire Armenians: steel mills, soap works, cookie factories, the Saint-Louis sugar refinery, the Rivoire et Carré pasta plant. Women were employed at the Tapis France-Orient carpet weaving company, which did special orders for the ocean liner Normandie and Paris's luxury hotels. Some Armenians travelled up the Rhône to settle in the Lyon region, where they worked in the silk factories, as they had done in Turkey. Elsewhere, Armenian hairdressers, shoemakers, and grocers assumed their place in the city's mosaic. Near Camp Victor, a stone's throw from the Saint-Charles train station and the Porte d'Aix triumphal arch, was "the Terras," a five-storey building housing a multitude of small, windowless shops. It quickly acquired the ambiance of an Oriental bazaar, where Armenian craftsmen sold leather and leather products. "My father would come here to buy his shoes," Nicole Matta recalls. "As a little girl, I was amazed by all the noise, the smells, and the activity in this building."

When they left the refugee camps, the Armenians tried to acquire plots of land: as described by Albert Londres in 1927, the Verduron, Beaumont, Saint-Jérôme, and La Valbarelle districts were quickly sectioned off. "Schools and churches sprang up in each neighbourhood," says Varou. "Most of them were built in the early 1930s under the guidance of Bishop Grigoris Balakian." The bishop played a key role in structuring the nebulous Armenian community and consecrated seven Apostolic churches, all of them still active.

As soon as they set foot on French soil, the Armenians began organizing themselves by place of origin. More than simply being Armenian, what shaped the identity of these genocide survivors was their region, their town, their village: their stolen lands. Along with their memories of Turkey, they passed down their traditions, their language – Western Armenian – their recipes for bureks and lentil patties. The first community structures were naturally regional associations whose statutes were recorded with the diocese. "There were the Armenians from Adana, those from Angora [Ankara], and those from Césarée [Kayseri]," says Varou. He pulls from a thick binder a few yellowed pages: the associations' founding documents. "The rural people from Sivas headed straight for the countryside and didn't mix with the city folk. The scholars came together and started recording the history of their region, throwing in a little hero worship of the resistance fighters along the way. Their identity was transmitted through those organizations. That was a consequence of the genocide."

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Excerpted from Turkey and the Armenian Ghost by Laure Marchand, Guillaume Perrier, Debbie Blythe. Copyright © 2013 Actes Sud. Excerpted by permission of McGill-Queen's University Press.
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