Guestbook is proud to announce the new contribution to our Exchanging Stories – Changing History initiative: Armenian Genocide, an Exchange of Narratives.

In the weeks leading up to the annual Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24) and the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, an Armenian law student and a Turkish scholar came together to discuss their perceptions of and relations to the event in their contemporary lives.

Excerpt from Narine Karapetyan: “My grandparents were not able to speak Armenian well. But on the other hand they spoke perfect Turkish, and I had the sense that Turks were really kind of the bad guys. They used the word ‘Turk’ as an insult. Here I had my grandparents speaking perfect Turkish and yet they were struggling to speak Armenian, my native language, with me. And to me that was always strange. It just didn’t make any sense. But once I finally asked my parents about my own family history, I learned that my family had fled from Turkey, and finally had settled in Syria, where they lived as if they were Arabs, because they were still afraid that if they had spoken Armenian or taught their children Armenian, that people would identify them as Armenian. They saw that as being a target. And so when they finally resettled in Armenia they had to learn Armenian as a new foreign language.”

Excerpt from Emrah Altındiş: “So when they teach us in our school system to be proud of being a Turk in Turkey – At least till the last decade they assumed that anyone who is living in Turkey is Turkish. That is what we were thinking as a young boys, I thought that we were all Turks. So this is how we grew up. Then when I came to 15 or 16 years old, I started to realize that there are some other people around us. There are Kurds, Greeks and Armenians in Istanbul. I started to realize that there were not just one color but there are many different colors. And that there were even more colors before in our history.”

You can watch the original Exchanging Stories – Changing History piece here.
A transcript of the video in English, Turkish, and Armenian is available here.

Visit our media page for more videos from Exchanging Stories – Changing History.