Small Istanbul Publisher Sustains Armenian Literature

The spirit of inclusivity has extended to Homshetsma, a dialect of Western Armenian that is spoken by fewer than 1,000 Muslims near the town of Hemsin in Turkey’s Black Sea highlands. In 2014, Aras published Turkey’s first collection of short stories in the archaic tongue and followed two years later with a Homshetsma translation of the Antoine de Saint-Exupery classic The Little Prince.

But most of Aras’ readers are Turkish, and the early Republican writers it has revived include Zaven Biberyan and Hagop Mintzuri. “We believe everyone would want to read the great writers of their land, and until Aras began, neither Armenians nor Turks could find many of these works,” Sari said.

Zabel Yesayan is the greatest Istanbul-born writer most Turks never heard of. She became the first Armenian woman from the Ottoman Empire to study at university — and the only woman on the list of intellectuals to be rounded up on April 24, 1915, an event that ignited the genocide. Yesayan escaped arrest and found refuge in the Soviet Union, only to perish in the Great Terror campaign in 1943. An antiwar activist, Yesayan tackled inequality in her novels, short stories and journalism, including in the 1918 novella “The Last Cup,” now available in Turkish for the first time.

Aras’ only foray into English is Margosyan’s Infidel Quarter, published in 2017 with the Gomidas Institute. Margosyan first penned the bittersweet reflections on growing up one of the last Armenians in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in 1984 in Western Armenia before writing the Turkish version, which has sold more than 40,000 copies. His admirers translated it into Kurdish in 1999.

Margosyan said he invests those earnings back into Aras to keep producing in Western Armenian. The publisher celebrated its doyen’s 80th birthday in 2018 with Fillaname, a complete anthology of his work. The title is a play on the Kurdish word for “infidel.”

The medieval neighborhood where Infidel Quarter is set has largely disappeared, its narrow streets the center of fierce clashes between security forces and Kurdish militants in 2015 and 2016. Authorities razed swashes of the district to flush out the fighters and rubble from stone houses built by Armenian masons was dumped into the waters of the Tigris River that twists below the city.

“The area within the old city walls, what we once called the infidel quarter, was flattened. On the street that was given my name, not a single house was left standing,” Margosyan said. “The book took on a different value when the places it described were suddenly lost.”

Dozens of fans lined up for Margosyan’s autograph at a 2018 Istanbul book fair, pulling out worn copies of “Infidel Quarter” in Turkish and Kurdish. For readers from Diyarbakir, Margosyan is more than a favorite writer. He is a living connection with a city and a past that has been all but lost.

(This article originally appeared on February 10.)