How Many Armenians Live in Turkey? A Comprehensive Look at the Armenian Population in Turkey

The Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul, Mesrob Mutafyan, passed away last month after a protracted illness, just before Turkey’s most recent mayoral elections. Although this was anticipated, what followed was not: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey tweeted a condolence message in Armenian to the Armenian community in Turkey.

Shortly thereafter, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the country’s main opposition party, shared their own Armenian-language message.

This caught people off guard because, for many years, Turkish Armenians who had survived the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire stayed mainly hidden. The Ottomans launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Armenians in 1915, during World War I, on the pretext that they had sympathies with Russia, their adversary. As a result, an estimated 1 5 million Armenians murdered or displaced.

Those who made it out either hid their race or gave their young children to caring Muslim villagers to raise. Scholars estimate that about 200,000 Armenians converted to Islam to survive.

The only city where a cohesive and openly Armenian society persisted was Istanbul, the capital of what would eventually become the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

More than a century later, Erdoğan’s outreach to Armenians prior to the elections verified that Turkey’s Armenian community is once more acknowledged as a legitimate part of Turkish society.

Ultimately, long-held major urban centers like Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir saw defeats for Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The small Turkish Armenian community in Istanbul, which makes up only 50,000 of the city’s 15 million inhabitants, is still in disbelief over this renewed attention during the mayoral elections, as Erdoğan tries to annul and repeat the Istanbul vote.

Turkey’s first Armenian newspaper

When Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink launched the newspaper Agos in 1996, it marked a turning point for the underground Armenian community. It was the first-ever newspaper published in Armenian in the history of the Republic of Turkey, and it was published in both Turkish and Armenian.

Situated in the Şişli district of Istanbul, Agos’ office is housed in an unassuming high-rise and proudly displays its epic history of Armenian heritage. The flowing runes of the Armenian script are a rare sight in the Bosporus city.

The paper aims to educate Turkish society about its still-extant Armenian element, including Turkish Armenians. “A lot of Turkish Armenians are illiterate in the Armenian alphabet,” says Estukyan, adding that the choice to publish in two languages was made with the Armenian community in Istanbul as well as the Turkish people in mind.

As the paper’s stature grew, so did the attention — and not all was positive.

“We were initially threatened when Hrant started releasing passages from the book written by French Armenian historian Raymond Kevorkian, which discussed the Armenian roots of cities like Van, Mush, and Diyarbekir,” says Estukyan. Up until 1915, there was a sizable Armenian population in each of the cities listed, which are all located in the far eastern region of Turkey known as Anatolia (formerly known as Western Armenia).

Dink was prosecuted three times under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code for “denigrating Turkishness.” The largest escalation came in 2004 when Dink released an article claiming Sabiha Gokcen, Turkey’s first female fighter pilot and the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey, had Armenian heritage.

Dink was shot dead by a Turkish nationalist near his paper’s office on Jan. 19, 2007.

Out of the shadows

From tragedy came opportunity. Over 100,000 mourners attended Dink’s funeral, including ethnic Turks who carried placards reading “We are all Hrant Dink.”

“Hrant’s death was a catalyst,” Estukyan says. “After this, people started to come out more openly, to say, ‘I am Armenian. ’” Rather than quash the topic, Dink’s murder ignited it.

Avedis Hadjian, a journalist and author of the book “Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey,” agrees. Hadjian traveled the eastern Turkish countryside in historically Armenian areas, looking for signs of Armenian life. He relied on historical documents that showed more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians had stayed in the area after the genocide.

What Hadjian found astonished him. Almost everywhere he went, there were notable indications of Armenian history and heritage, and the villagers were usually aware of who the Armenians were and how they had been hidden.

Some “crypto-Armenians,” in Estukyan’s words, were aware of their identity and accepted it, while others were unaware of it.

Following Dink’s murder, a 100,000-person march in support of him and Turkish Armenians gave Armenians in the long-cleaned villages of eastern Turkey the impetus to come forward with their hidden identities.

“Their neighbors knew that they were Armenian, that they had converted during the genocide,” Hadjian says. “Everyone in these communities has known each other for generations, even centuries. ”.

This latent awareness provided the background for the reawakening of Armenian identity. But decades of stigma and fear still proved a difficult barrier for many to overcome.

Hadjian notes that the willingness of Armenian self-identification was also significantly influenced by a perceived social liberalization that occurred between 2007 and 2015, which is the midpoint of Erdogan’s AKP rule. “There was a brief window of opportunity,” he says.

For the first time ever, three openly ethnic Armenian candidates were elected to Turkey’s parliament in the general elections held in 2015, the centennial of the Armenian genocide.

Selina Dogan was one of them.

She was the front-runner on the CHP electoral list, the opposition party, for the second of Istanbul’s three electoral districts. She is a lawyer by profession. The moment was “instrumental,” she wrote in an email to The World. “The issues facing all of Turkey’s minority communities—not just the Armenians—became more widely known in the public domain. ”.

Discreet but proud: The Armenians of Istanbul

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