An Artist’s Journey along the Trail of Tears

As a European, she had to recognize the tragedy of war as part of her personal history, and consideration of the violence of man against man in that process led her back to the earlier world war. “In my youth,“ she recalled, “I often heard the phrase, ‘something like that must never happen again.’ This sentence referred to the Second World War, to the Shoah. The time before that,” she went on, “the First World War, was actually never dealt with. Only in recent years have we begun slowly to deal with this.”

After learning about the genocide, she travelled to Yerevan and began to work on the theme in earnest. In the course of her extensive reading, she learned about the German involvement and the questions raised as to its extent: the Germans, as wartime allies of the Ottoman Empire, knew what was being done to the Armenians; they have been accused of neglecting to intervene in their behalf, even of being complicit. “I do not understand this,” she wrote in 2014, “and am upset that the question of guilt and responsibility has not yet been clarified in this respect.”

She found it most difficult to define an appropriate way to deal with such a difficult theme, and turned to biographies of genocide survivors for inspiration. She decided to strike out on her own, to travel to those places where the genocide occurred. Armed with a map of Turkey and accounts, both biographical and historical, of the deportations, she went to Turkey in 2014, and moved from one city to another, all sites along the deportation routes of 1915. At each location, she sought out representative monuments — places traversed by the deportees on the death marches, or sites of mass executions, and literally lifted the image of the historic space onto paper. In some areas, like Ankara, where there had been an Armenian church, she did a rubbing of the bronze door. In another place, in Istanbul (then Constantinople), the Hydarpasa station (built by German architects) was the place where Armenians were sent on trains to the interior whence they would not return. She would reproduce a piece of the pavement or a wall, with pencil rubbings of the surface. The single images resulting from the rubbings are abstract in form, though some, like the one from Istanbul, seem to reproduce in stylized form an actual place, or event, like the railway lines.

With each work in the exhibit, framed and hanging against a white wall, there is another frame, containing a photograph of the site, and/or a depiction in words of the subject. This may be a quote from literature of the genocide, for example, the description of the Armenian carnage in Ankara given by Grigoris Balakian in Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918. Or, an account of how Armenians were rounded up and packed into railway cars, as published in a German collection of eyewitness reports. Other accounts come from Pailadzo Captanian, from Johannes Lepsius, and others. She brings images and citations from Ankara and Konya, Samsun and Sivas, Malatya and Kayseri, as well as Harput, Adana and Diyabakir.

In one particularly painful episode, it is the artist herself who provides the verbal narrative. This refers to her journey along the road from Kemah to Erzincan. She writes: “After having arrived at the railway station I heard that the train to Kemah would not leave until the evening. A very friendly railway official took me in his car to the next bus stop, but the bus had already left. A short time later a taxi stopped and drove me to Kemah. The taxi driver did not speak English or any other language I understood. So we drove about fifty kilometers along the Euphrates in total silence, along a road without cars or people through an idyllic landscape. It must have been here on this road that the deportees were sent a hundred years ago. All of a sudden I saw through the silence these human beings, tattered and ill, continuing their way in pain, or falling down, collapsing. I heard their screaming and moaning. And they did not stop; the crying and suffering accompanied me till the taxi driver arrived at Kemah.”

When describing the experience to attendants at the finissage, Stybor said she tried in vain to convince the taxi driver to take her up to the heights of the Kemah gorge, that is, to the place from which, she knew from written accounts, Armenian men had been bound two by two, stabbed and then thrust to their death in the river hundreds of meters below. The taxi driver did not know, or feigned ignorance. The only sign of demarcation was a plaque on the road they travelled, which commemorated a number of Turkish soldiers who had reportedly perished there in an automobile accident some years earlier.