The world the characters inhabit in Alice Ketabgian’s newly released novel, The Mayor of Inebolu (Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, 2025), written with her daughter, Dr. Tamara Ketabgian, is an uplifting world, even if never-ending wars, separations and exile are an inextricable part of the characters’ existences. Verjin, Sarkis, Yevkine and thirty members of the extended Balyan family are uprooted from their ancestral home in the town of Kastamonu near the Black Sea, in present-day Turkey, and moved to Scutari/Constantinople (currently Istanbul) to only be further transplanted to Saint-Etienne and Lyon in France, eventually immigrating to New Jersey, the United States.
Ketabgian’s resolve to convey a message of forgiveness and of hope amidst the disruption and the chaos of a life of permanent exile is unwavering.
The setting of the novel is May 1915, Inebolu, a scenic port town on the Black Sea coast in the Kastamonu Province. Ulvi, the handsome young Turkish mayor of Inebolu, falls in love with the beautiful 17-year-old Verjin Balyan on seeing her in the fish market of Inebolu. The kind and generous mayor offers to give the Balyan clan safe passage to Constantinople in exchange for Verjin’s hand in marriage. Verjin would be making “a huge sacrifice,” we are told, to save her family from being deported into the Syrian desert, in accordance with the government’s deportation orders for the entire Armenian population of Turkey. Yet, Verjin spends nine years with Ulvi as “a happy family,” to borrow her own words to “Dear Mom and Dad,” until she and her little girl Emine — later Yevkine — are abducted by her brother Sarkis to save them from a life among infidels: “Verjin and Emine belonged in an Armenian family.”
The Mayor of Inebolu is a historical novel, notes Ketabgian in her Afterword to the book. The Hamidian massacres, the Death Marches, the Gallipoli war, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s attacks on the Allied Forces in the Second World War, and the ensuing displacements, are indeed all in the background at one point or another. Besides these truthfully presented “facts,” however, the reader is offered little that connects her emotionally to the young Armenian girl’s “sacrifice” of having to live with an “infidel” in “permanent separation” away from her family — “after all, I’m a Turk, she’s a Christian and a great gap separates us,” says Ulvi — or that explores the larger tensions of living in Turkey as a member of a repressed minority.
One yearns for scenes that would show Verjin’s reputation being “irreparably stained among the Armenians of Scutari,” once she moves to Constantinople.
Some 45 years later, at the conclusion of the novel, through her Turkish half-brother Adnan Demirel, Yevkine finds out that her father is a Turk. The initial shock is there, to be sure, but a glimpse into her father’s life leaves Yevkine “exhilarated and proud.” She, in fact, plans to visit Inebolu with the hope that Adnan’s wife and children will have started to appreciate their “father’s impartial approach to history,” earning her brother’s praise of “my optimistic sister.”
