Armenian orphans’ fate from 1915 to 2007 – Turkish historian

Turkish historian Ayshe Hyur has devoted a column in the Radikal daily to Hrant Dink, and other Armenians orphans who grew up in orphanages from the 1915 Genocide period until 2007 (the year Dink journalist was murdered).

He describes the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist as not only a loved husband, a good Armenian and a skilled propagandist and analyst, but also as a an intelligent and well-known person whom the Turkish intelligence and Public Prosecutor’s Office commonly referred to as a “potential enemy” or “alien citizen”. Hyur also notes that many in the Turkish society considered Dink an internal foe.

He then addresses Dink’s very last article, in which the editor-in-chief of the Agos weekly said every single remark about his being the “Turk’s enemy” made him more and more popular.


“But when his breathless body was lying there on the ground, the hole in his shoe gave a clear hint that he was an ‘orphanage child’,” Hyur says.

Dink was eight when he appeared in an orphanage where he 20. It was in there that he met he met his future wife, Rachel, whom he considered a “reward of life”.

“Demanding the disclosure of those who masterminded the murder of Hrant Dink, the man who compared himself with a pigeon on his final days, I find it my duty to remember the thousands of children kidnapped from their families by the ruthless people in this ountry and forced to suffer grief. The murder of the Armenians (which I characterize the Armenian Genocide), a process that took root with the message ordering “a systematic annihilation and extermination” of the Armenian nation, left at least 300,000 Armenians killed, the figure being available even in official records. But the victims were probably saved in a sense because those who remained alive, especially the women and children, were threatened with facing the threat of griefs,” says the Turkish historian.

He further refers to a remark by Halide Edip, the Turkish novelist who visited an orphanage after travelling to Syria and Lebanon upon the instruction of Cemal Pasha. In a letter to Javid Beyi, a friend from the Istanbul “institution”, she said, “After filling their stomachs with grass in the deserts, some lost their mothers or fathers; yet many who appeared there had lost children … From 1915 until 2007 the Armenian children use signs to make outcries of the disasters that fell to their lot,” he adds.