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`2012 Declaration': A History of Seized Armenian Properties in Istanbul
by Raffi Bedrosyan
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/12/06/2012-declaration-a-history-of-seized-armenian-properties-in-istanbul/
December 6, 2012
After two years of painfully detailed research through thousands of
documents, the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul has produced a
monumental work on the history and present status of the properties
that once belonged to the Armenian charitable foundations in
Istanbul - properties that were all seized by the Turkish government
during the last few decades. The comprehensive study, some 400 pages
long, for the first time compiles a list of the seized properties,
illustrating the overall picture and enormity of the plunder suffered
by the Armenian schools, orphanages, churches, and hospitals in
Istanbul that were dependent on the property income for survival.
Map 1
The book's title, 2012 Declaration, is a reference to the Turkish
state's 1936 Declaration ordering all minority charitable foundations
to list their assets and properties. During the height of the Cyprus
crisis in 1975, the state arbitrarily legislated that any properties
that were obtained by minority charitable foundations after 1936
through donations, inheritance, wills, and gifts, were deemed illegal,
since they had not been listed in the 1936 Declaration. 2012
Declaration makes reference to this illogical legislation and exposes
the legalized but unlawful seizure, or state robbery, that took place
years ago, and the recent small steps taken to undo the gross
injustice.
The book is not a mere historical document providing an inventory of
physical properties, or statistical records and legal statements.
Rather, it is a story of enormous human suffering, ranging from
children being thrown out of their schools, to orphans no longer being
able to find a home; the most tragic story involves the seizure of a
summer camp complex of buildings literally constructed by orphan
children (including Hrant Dink himself) by the Turkish state, to be
sold to Turkish individuals.
The four members of the Hrant Dink Foundation - Mehmet Polatel, Nora
Mildanoglu, Ozgur Leman Eren, and Mehmet Atilgan - sifted through the
patriarchate, church, and school archives, government deeds and title
records, foundation lawyers' personal archives, old maps and surveys,
purchase and sale agreements, and Hrant Dink's own research files, to
produce this concise history of each charitable foundation, including
the location and type of properties gifted to each foundation and then
seized by the state, and more than 200 photographs. The most
heart-breaking aspect of this historic document are surely the
photographs, some of which are reprinted here. The research team's
attempts to obtain documents from government offices, however, were
mostly unsuccessful, even though they were equipped with the force of
legislation called the Freedom of Information Act; they were told that
the 1915-25 era deed and title records of the Armenians are still not
open to the public, due to the official paranoia that exists, defined
as `threats to state security.'
This article will attempt to summarize the 400-page document and give
some striking examples of Istanbul-Armenian history.
***
First, some excerpts from book's Introduction Section: `This book is
not the story of seized buildings made of stone or cement, but the
story of flesh-and-bone human beings. These seized institutions and
buildings were the cherished belongings of human beings rich and poor,
young and old, men and women, who had worked hard to create or acquire
them. These unjustly seized buildings gave life to the schools,
churches, orphanages, and retirement homes of the whole community. The
social and cultural fabric of the Turkish-Armenians depended on this
economic foundation. It is our wish that similar injustices will not
be carried into the future, as people read in this book the documented
`why' and `how' of the attempts to wipe out the life and culture of
our community. The issue is not only the seizure or return of the
properties, but understanding this dimension of history and passing it
on to future generations. As long as the ancestral people of these
lands are marginalized or defined as `others,' as long as minorities
are not seen as equal citizens, the democratization efforts in Turkey
will be stunted. It is our wish that this study will contribute to
facing history.'
The book then lists the Armenian charitable foundations and their
assets. There were 53 Armenian charitable foundations in Istanbul,
administering 18 schools and orphanages, 48 churches, 2 hospitals, and
20 cemeteries of the Istanbul-Armenian community, supported by the
rental revenue and assets that they owned or received through wills
and gifts. These foundations owned 1,328 properties, of which 661 were
seized by the state for several different reasons. The study could not
determine the fate of 87 properties. After exhausting all legal means
available to get back the seized properties from the state through the
Turkish courts, over the last 10 years some of the foundations have
taken their cases to the European Human Rights Court. As they began to
win all of their cases, and since the European court decisions were
binding on Turkey through European Union accession expectations, the
Turkish state recently decided to amend the 1975 legislation related
to the foundations (which had enabled their legal but unlawful
seizure). With an improved piece of legislation, 143 properties, or
about 10.77 percent of the 1,328 properties, have now been returned to
the Armenian foundations.
Map 2
The types of seized properties were residential apartment buildings,
residential apartment units, house dwellings, vacant lots, orchards,
fountains, stores/shops, warehouses, factories, commercial buildings,
office buildings, office units, hospitals, workplaces, summer camps,
churches, schools, and cemeteries.
The `owner status' of the seized properties are listed as unknown,
municipal government, state treasury, public building, vacant, lost
deed/title, individually owned, owned by other foundation, or owned by
the State General Directorate of Foundations.
The process by which the foundation obtained properties is listed as
follows: donation, will, purchase, by Ottoman Sultan decree. The
process by which the foundation lost properties is listed as follows:
seizure by state, made public by state, sale to individuals or
corporations.
The book explains some of the stories of seizure in great detail. Some
examples are provided below.
Mkhitaryan Bomonti School
This is the tragic story of a 200-year-old Armenian school that ended
up being a tenant in the building it used to own. Nevertheless, it is
a story with a happy ending.
The Armenian Catholic Venice Mkhitarists founded a boys' school in
1830 in the Pera neighborhood. In order to serve the increased student
population in better educational facilities, the school foundation
decided to move the school to a larger building, and in 1958,
purchased the present site at Sisli-Bomonti neighborhood for 710,000
Turkish liras from a woman named Emine Tevfika Ayasli. The school name
was changed to the Private Bomonti Armenian Catholic Primary School.
In 1979, the State Charitable Foundations Directorate started a court
case against the Armenian school; since this school was not listed in
the 1936 Declaration, they argued, the purchase of the new school
building was illegal. The directorate demanded that the purchase be
cancelled and the building returned to the seller, or the heirs of the
seller. The court accepted the argument, and in 1988 the Appeal Court
turned down the Armenians' appeal. The school building deed was turned
over to the former owner, who was deceased; as per the directions of
her will, it was deeded to her brothers and to the Ankara Ayas
Municipality. (It is interesting to note that Ayasli's will was
prepared years after the school building was legally sold to the
Armenian school foundation.) The brothers sold their share of the
building to a construction company specialized in apartment buildings,
named Miltas. In 1998, the Ankara Ayas Municipality entered into a
tenancy agreement with the school and started charging rent. But the
other owner, Miltas, objected to the tenancy agreement and started
court proceedings to have the school vacate the building. In February
1999, Miltas won the case, and the same day the school's contents
(including students' desks, library shelves and books, kindergarden
toys and the school piano) were moved outside into the school yard.
Faced with an incredible situation of suddenly having no school in the
middle of the winter, the Armenian parents, in an exceptional fashion,
resorted to civil disobedience, and start camping out in the school
yard. The public outcry forced the mayor of the Istanbul Sisli
Municipality to intervene, and he arranged to buy the shares of
Miltas, the construction company. He also struck an agreement with the
Ayas Municipality to have the school continue to function by paying
rent to the Ayas Municipality. Naturally, the school lost most of its
students after these disturbances and the student population dropped
to 35. Meanwhile, the school foundation went to court to re-claim the
building. In November 2012, two days before the publication of this
book, the court case ended with victory for the Armenian school and
now, the deeds have finally been returned to the Armenian foundation
and the school has stopped paying rent.
Tuzla Armenian Children's Camp
In the 1950's, the Armenian Protestant Church in the Gedikpasa
neighborhood of Istanbul served as the arrival point for many poor and
homeless Armenian orphans, especially from Anatolian settlements.
These children, numbering in the 60s, received their education at the
Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant School in the winter under tolerable
conditions, but had nowhere to go during the summers. The church
foundation decided to purchase a vacant treed lot near the Marmara Sea
in the Tuzla municipality for a summer camp for these children. In
October 1962, the purchase was completed from an individual named Sait
Durmaz, and registered in the church title, according to all
applicable legal procedures. From then on, every summer, the children,
aged 8-12, were given the task of building camp buildings, supervised
by a builder named Tuzlali Hasan Kalfa. The children first erected the
poles and the canvas tents they would live in during construction.
Then they dug a water well, taking turns pumping the water needed for
construction. Then the foundations were prepared. Since the sea was
only 500 meters away, they carried all the sand and gravel from the
beach by wheelbarrows. Slowly but surely, over three summers, the
vacant land was transformed into a summer camp complex with buildings,
dormitories, dining halls, play areas, a soccer field, pond, and gym.
The children stocked the pond with frogs and ducks. Armenian boys and
girls learned how to talk, sing, play, cook, and clean together in
Armenian. Hrant Dink was one of those boys; his wife Rakel was one of
those girls.
Happy days came to an end when the State Charitable Foundations
Directorate applied to the courts in February 1979, to reverse the
purchase agreement and have the property returned to its previous
owner, arguing that the Gedikpasa Church Foundation had no right to
purchase the property. After four years of trials, the court cancelled
the summer camp deed and returned the property to its former owner,
Sait Durmaz, including the extraordinary facilities that the children
had constructed. The camp, imprinted in the memory of 1,500 Armenian
children, became abandoned, with rusting bed frames, broken windows,
and overgrown weeds. In 1987, the Appeal Court approved the previous
court decision. The owner sold the camp to new purchasers, who in turn
sold it again. Several court applications by the Armenian foundation
in the 2000's, and most recently in August 2011, were all turned down.
One of Hrant's last articles titled `Humanity, I take you to court!=85'
was a solemn cry in the face of this gross injustice.
Kalfayan Orphanage
In 1865, a cholera epidemic in Istanbul left many children behind as
poor orphans. An Armenian nun named Srpuhi Nshan Kalfayan decided to
care of 17 orphan girls, aged 2-10, at her home. She also started
teaching them handcrafts and sewing. These personal efforts led to the
founding of one of the most important Armenian educational
institutions in Istanbul, the Kalfayan Orphanage School. The orphanage
survived until the late 1960's, when the school building was
expropriated without compensation and demolished, in order to build
the expressways leading to the Bosphorus Bridge crossing between
Europe and Asia. The foundation owned a large parcel of land where it
planned to transfer the orphanage school. The State Charitable
Foundations Directorate argued that since this land was not registered
in the 1936 Declaration, building a new orphanage there could not be
allowed, and that the orphans and their teachers should be
redistributed to other orphanages. Repeated applications did not yield
any results and 150 people, the combined total of orphans and staff,
spent the next 30 years in various dilapidated buildings, until a new
arrangement was made in 1999 to share the school building of the
Semerciyan School in Uskudar.
***
In a previous article in the Armenian Weekly, dated Aug. 31, 2011, and
titled, `Special Report: What is Turkey Returning to the Armenians?' I
referred to another significant state seizure of Armenian properties.
The Surp Agop Cemetery lands, which was decreed by Ottoman Sultan
Suleiman to the Armenian community in 1550 as a reward to his Armenian
cook, Manuk Karaseferyan of Van, who had uncovered a plot to poison
the emperor by German spies during the siege of Budapest. The cemetery
was used for 400 years until the 1930's, when the Istanbul
municipality expropriated the lands after years of legal wrangling. At
present, these lands, which have become one of the most valuable and
fashionable districts of Istanbul, are occupied by the State Radio and
Television Headquarters, the Turkish Armed Forces Istanbul
Headquarters, the Military Museum, many expensive hotels such as
Hilton, Regency Hyatt, Divan, and several apartment and office
buildings, as well as the expansive Taksim Park, which has some
walkways made from marble of the Armenian tombstones.
The 2012 Declaration book documents the Armenian properties lost in
Istanbul, mainly during the 1970's, with the illogical but legal
argument that if the charitable foundations had obtained properties
after 1936, they would be deemed illegal because they had not been
included in the 1936 Declaration. But the extent of this gross
injustice would pale in comparison when we consider the amount of
seized or lost Armenian properties after 1915, not only in Istanbul,
but all over Anatolia, especially in historic Armenia. To illustrate
the sheer enormity of the loss, consider these numbers: There were
more than 4000 Armenian churches and schools in Anatolia, each with
its own land, each with its own income generating additional lands,
properties, and assets. The recently reconstructed Surp Giragos Church
in Diyarbakir had over 200 separate deeds and titles to different
properties such as shops, houses, farms, and orchards, which were
taken over by the government and private individuals, erecting
apartment buildings, office buildings, state schools, shops and
houses, even a highway. Thankfully, the process to take these
properties back has already started in Diyarbakir. The above-mentioned
figures are only for Armenian churches and schools, that is, community
owned buildings. Add to those numbers the properties owned by private
Armenian individuals, such as houses, shops, farms, orchards,
factories, warehouses, mines, and so on, and it becomes quite
difficult to grasp the enormity of this wealth transfer.
No wonder there is resistance in facing history or acknowledging the facts.
To learn more about the book, visit
www.istanbulermenivakiflari.org/tr; it is also available for free from
the Hrant Dink Foundation.
Raffi Bedrosyan is a civil engineer as well as a concert pianist,
living in Toronto, Canada. For the past several years, proceeds from
his concerts and two CDs have been donated to the construction of
school, highway, water, and gas distribution projects in Armenia and
Karabagh - projects in which he has also participated as a voluntary
engineer. Bedrosyan was involved in organizing the Surp Giragos
Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd Church reconstruction project, and in promoting
the significance of this historic project worldwide as the first
Armenian reclaim of church properties in Anatolia after 1915. In
September 2012, he gave the first Armenian piano concert in the Surp
Giragos Church since 1915.
by Raffi Bedrosyan
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/12/06/2012-declaration-a-history-of-seized-armenian-properties-in-istanbul/
December 6, 2012
After two years of painfully detailed research through thousands of
documents, the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul has produced a
monumental work on the history and present status of the properties
that once belonged to the Armenian charitable foundations in
Istanbul - properties that were all seized by the Turkish government
during the last few decades. The comprehensive study, some 400 pages
long, for the first time compiles a list of the seized properties,
illustrating the overall picture and enormity of the plunder suffered
by the Armenian schools, orphanages, churches, and hospitals in
Istanbul that were dependent on the property income for survival.
Map 1
The book's title, 2012 Declaration, is a reference to the Turkish
state's 1936 Declaration ordering all minority charitable foundations
to list their assets and properties. During the height of the Cyprus
crisis in 1975, the state arbitrarily legislated that any properties
that were obtained by minority charitable foundations after 1936
through donations, inheritance, wills, and gifts, were deemed illegal,
since they had not been listed in the 1936 Declaration. 2012
Declaration makes reference to this illogical legislation and exposes
the legalized but unlawful seizure, or state robbery, that took place
years ago, and the recent small steps taken to undo the gross
injustice.
The book is not a mere historical document providing an inventory of
physical properties, or statistical records and legal statements.
Rather, it is a story of enormous human suffering, ranging from
children being thrown out of their schools, to orphans no longer being
able to find a home; the most tragic story involves the seizure of a
summer camp complex of buildings literally constructed by orphan
children (including Hrant Dink himself) by the Turkish state, to be
sold to Turkish individuals.
The four members of the Hrant Dink Foundation - Mehmet Polatel, Nora
Mildanoglu, Ozgur Leman Eren, and Mehmet Atilgan - sifted through the
patriarchate, church, and school archives, government deeds and title
records, foundation lawyers' personal archives, old maps and surveys,
purchase and sale agreements, and Hrant Dink's own research files, to
produce this concise history of each charitable foundation, including
the location and type of properties gifted to each foundation and then
seized by the state, and more than 200 photographs. The most
heart-breaking aspect of this historic document are surely the
photographs, some of which are reprinted here. The research team's
attempts to obtain documents from government offices, however, were
mostly unsuccessful, even though they were equipped with the force of
legislation called the Freedom of Information Act; they were told that
the 1915-25 era deed and title records of the Armenians are still not
open to the public, due to the official paranoia that exists, defined
as `threats to state security.'
This article will attempt to summarize the 400-page document and give
some striking examples of Istanbul-Armenian history.
***
First, some excerpts from book's Introduction Section: `This book is
not the story of seized buildings made of stone or cement, but the
story of flesh-and-bone human beings. These seized institutions and
buildings were the cherished belongings of human beings rich and poor,
young and old, men and women, who had worked hard to create or acquire
them. These unjustly seized buildings gave life to the schools,
churches, orphanages, and retirement homes of the whole community. The
social and cultural fabric of the Turkish-Armenians depended on this
economic foundation. It is our wish that similar injustices will not
be carried into the future, as people read in this book the documented
`why' and `how' of the attempts to wipe out the life and culture of
our community. The issue is not only the seizure or return of the
properties, but understanding this dimension of history and passing it
on to future generations. As long as the ancestral people of these
lands are marginalized or defined as `others,' as long as minorities
are not seen as equal citizens, the democratization efforts in Turkey
will be stunted. It is our wish that this study will contribute to
facing history.'
The book then lists the Armenian charitable foundations and their
assets. There were 53 Armenian charitable foundations in Istanbul,
administering 18 schools and orphanages, 48 churches, 2 hospitals, and
20 cemeteries of the Istanbul-Armenian community, supported by the
rental revenue and assets that they owned or received through wills
and gifts. These foundations owned 1,328 properties, of which 661 were
seized by the state for several different reasons. The study could not
determine the fate of 87 properties. After exhausting all legal means
available to get back the seized properties from the state through the
Turkish courts, over the last 10 years some of the foundations have
taken their cases to the European Human Rights Court. As they began to
win all of their cases, and since the European court decisions were
binding on Turkey through European Union accession expectations, the
Turkish state recently decided to amend the 1975 legislation related
to the foundations (which had enabled their legal but unlawful
seizure). With an improved piece of legislation, 143 properties, or
about 10.77 percent of the 1,328 properties, have now been returned to
the Armenian foundations.
Map 2
The types of seized properties were residential apartment buildings,
residential apartment units, house dwellings, vacant lots, orchards,
fountains, stores/shops, warehouses, factories, commercial buildings,
office buildings, office units, hospitals, workplaces, summer camps,
churches, schools, and cemeteries.
The `owner status' of the seized properties are listed as unknown,
municipal government, state treasury, public building, vacant, lost
deed/title, individually owned, owned by other foundation, or owned by
the State General Directorate of Foundations.
The process by which the foundation obtained properties is listed as
follows: donation, will, purchase, by Ottoman Sultan decree. The
process by which the foundation lost properties is listed as follows:
seizure by state, made public by state, sale to individuals or
corporations.
The book explains some of the stories of seizure in great detail. Some
examples are provided below.
Mkhitaryan Bomonti School
This is the tragic story of a 200-year-old Armenian school that ended
up being a tenant in the building it used to own. Nevertheless, it is
a story with a happy ending.
The Armenian Catholic Venice Mkhitarists founded a boys' school in
1830 in the Pera neighborhood. In order to serve the increased student
population in better educational facilities, the school foundation
decided to move the school to a larger building, and in 1958,
purchased the present site at Sisli-Bomonti neighborhood for 710,000
Turkish liras from a woman named Emine Tevfika Ayasli. The school name
was changed to the Private Bomonti Armenian Catholic Primary School.
In 1979, the State Charitable Foundations Directorate started a court
case against the Armenian school; since this school was not listed in
the 1936 Declaration, they argued, the purchase of the new school
building was illegal. The directorate demanded that the purchase be
cancelled and the building returned to the seller, or the heirs of the
seller. The court accepted the argument, and in 1988 the Appeal Court
turned down the Armenians' appeal. The school building deed was turned
over to the former owner, who was deceased; as per the directions of
her will, it was deeded to her brothers and to the Ankara Ayas
Municipality. (It is interesting to note that Ayasli's will was
prepared years after the school building was legally sold to the
Armenian school foundation.) The brothers sold their share of the
building to a construction company specialized in apartment buildings,
named Miltas. In 1998, the Ankara Ayas Municipality entered into a
tenancy agreement with the school and started charging rent. But the
other owner, Miltas, objected to the tenancy agreement and started
court proceedings to have the school vacate the building. In February
1999, Miltas won the case, and the same day the school's contents
(including students' desks, library shelves and books, kindergarden
toys and the school piano) were moved outside into the school yard.
Faced with an incredible situation of suddenly having no school in the
middle of the winter, the Armenian parents, in an exceptional fashion,
resorted to civil disobedience, and start camping out in the school
yard. The public outcry forced the mayor of the Istanbul Sisli
Municipality to intervene, and he arranged to buy the shares of
Miltas, the construction company. He also struck an agreement with the
Ayas Municipality to have the school continue to function by paying
rent to the Ayas Municipality. Naturally, the school lost most of its
students after these disturbances and the student population dropped
to 35. Meanwhile, the school foundation went to court to re-claim the
building. In November 2012, two days before the publication of this
book, the court case ended with victory for the Armenian school and
now, the deeds have finally been returned to the Armenian foundation
and the school has stopped paying rent.
Tuzla Armenian Children's Camp
In the 1950's, the Armenian Protestant Church in the Gedikpasa
neighborhood of Istanbul served as the arrival point for many poor and
homeless Armenian orphans, especially from Anatolian settlements.
These children, numbering in the 60s, received their education at the
Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant School in the winter under tolerable
conditions, but had nowhere to go during the summers. The church
foundation decided to purchase a vacant treed lot near the Marmara Sea
in the Tuzla municipality for a summer camp for these children. In
October 1962, the purchase was completed from an individual named Sait
Durmaz, and registered in the church title, according to all
applicable legal procedures. From then on, every summer, the children,
aged 8-12, were given the task of building camp buildings, supervised
by a builder named Tuzlali Hasan Kalfa. The children first erected the
poles and the canvas tents they would live in during construction.
Then they dug a water well, taking turns pumping the water needed for
construction. Then the foundations were prepared. Since the sea was
only 500 meters away, they carried all the sand and gravel from the
beach by wheelbarrows. Slowly but surely, over three summers, the
vacant land was transformed into a summer camp complex with buildings,
dormitories, dining halls, play areas, a soccer field, pond, and gym.
The children stocked the pond with frogs and ducks. Armenian boys and
girls learned how to talk, sing, play, cook, and clean together in
Armenian. Hrant Dink was one of those boys; his wife Rakel was one of
those girls.
Happy days came to an end when the State Charitable Foundations
Directorate applied to the courts in February 1979, to reverse the
purchase agreement and have the property returned to its previous
owner, arguing that the Gedikpasa Church Foundation had no right to
purchase the property. After four years of trials, the court cancelled
the summer camp deed and returned the property to its former owner,
Sait Durmaz, including the extraordinary facilities that the children
had constructed. The camp, imprinted in the memory of 1,500 Armenian
children, became abandoned, with rusting bed frames, broken windows,
and overgrown weeds. In 1987, the Appeal Court approved the previous
court decision. The owner sold the camp to new purchasers, who in turn
sold it again. Several court applications by the Armenian foundation
in the 2000's, and most recently in August 2011, were all turned down.
One of Hrant's last articles titled `Humanity, I take you to court!=85'
was a solemn cry in the face of this gross injustice.
Kalfayan Orphanage
In 1865, a cholera epidemic in Istanbul left many children behind as
poor orphans. An Armenian nun named Srpuhi Nshan Kalfayan decided to
care of 17 orphan girls, aged 2-10, at her home. She also started
teaching them handcrafts and sewing. These personal efforts led to the
founding of one of the most important Armenian educational
institutions in Istanbul, the Kalfayan Orphanage School. The orphanage
survived until the late 1960's, when the school building was
expropriated without compensation and demolished, in order to build
the expressways leading to the Bosphorus Bridge crossing between
Europe and Asia. The foundation owned a large parcel of land where it
planned to transfer the orphanage school. The State Charitable
Foundations Directorate argued that since this land was not registered
in the 1936 Declaration, building a new orphanage there could not be
allowed, and that the orphans and their teachers should be
redistributed to other orphanages. Repeated applications did not yield
any results and 150 people, the combined total of orphans and staff,
spent the next 30 years in various dilapidated buildings, until a new
arrangement was made in 1999 to share the school building of the
Semerciyan School in Uskudar.
***
In a previous article in the Armenian Weekly, dated Aug. 31, 2011, and
titled, `Special Report: What is Turkey Returning to the Armenians?' I
referred to another significant state seizure of Armenian properties.
The Surp Agop Cemetery lands, which was decreed by Ottoman Sultan
Suleiman to the Armenian community in 1550 as a reward to his Armenian
cook, Manuk Karaseferyan of Van, who had uncovered a plot to poison
the emperor by German spies during the siege of Budapest. The cemetery
was used for 400 years until the 1930's, when the Istanbul
municipality expropriated the lands after years of legal wrangling. At
present, these lands, which have become one of the most valuable and
fashionable districts of Istanbul, are occupied by the State Radio and
Television Headquarters, the Turkish Armed Forces Istanbul
Headquarters, the Military Museum, many expensive hotels such as
Hilton, Regency Hyatt, Divan, and several apartment and office
buildings, as well as the expansive Taksim Park, which has some
walkways made from marble of the Armenian tombstones.
The 2012 Declaration book documents the Armenian properties lost in
Istanbul, mainly during the 1970's, with the illogical but legal
argument that if the charitable foundations had obtained properties
after 1936, they would be deemed illegal because they had not been
included in the 1936 Declaration. But the extent of this gross
injustice would pale in comparison when we consider the amount of
seized or lost Armenian properties after 1915, not only in Istanbul,
but all over Anatolia, especially in historic Armenia. To illustrate
the sheer enormity of the loss, consider these numbers: There were
more than 4000 Armenian churches and schools in Anatolia, each with
its own land, each with its own income generating additional lands,
properties, and assets. The recently reconstructed Surp Giragos Church
in Diyarbakir had over 200 separate deeds and titles to different
properties such as shops, houses, farms, and orchards, which were
taken over by the government and private individuals, erecting
apartment buildings, office buildings, state schools, shops and
houses, even a highway. Thankfully, the process to take these
properties back has already started in Diyarbakir. The above-mentioned
figures are only for Armenian churches and schools, that is, community
owned buildings. Add to those numbers the properties owned by private
Armenian individuals, such as houses, shops, farms, orchards,
factories, warehouses, mines, and so on, and it becomes quite
difficult to grasp the enormity of this wealth transfer.
No wonder there is resistance in facing history or acknowledging the facts.
To learn more about the book, visit
www.istanbulermenivakiflari.org/tr; it is also available for free from
the Hrant Dink Foundation.
Raffi Bedrosyan is a civil engineer as well as a concert pianist,
living in Toronto, Canada. For the past several years, proceeds from
his concerts and two CDs have been donated to the construction of
school, highway, water, and gas distribution projects in Armenia and
Karabagh - projects in which he has also participated as a voluntary
engineer. Bedrosyan was involved in organizing the Surp Giragos
Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd Church reconstruction project, and in promoting
the significance of this historic project worldwide as the first
Armenian reclaim of church properties in Anatolia after 1915. In
September 2012, he gave the first Armenian piano concert in the Surp
Giragos Church since 1915.