At the Crossroads of my Life

We have spent the past two months traveling across Turkiye, starting in the west and moving, somewhat stochastically, ever eastward toward Armenia.  As most of you, if you have read any of the previous posts, know that I have a heritage of Armenian ancestry in Turkey.  As we moved eastward from the western parts of the country towards the central and eastern regions, I began, oddly enough, to feel "more at home".

 Turkey is a large country.  It's 1,000 miles across, about the distance of Boston to Chicago.  It's 400 miles wide from south to north, about the distance of Boston to Washington, DC.  Just like in the USA, there are different cultural "feels" to specific regions.  Moving into the central and eastern parts of the country brought us into contact with people more similar to my family.  In Elazig and Sivas as well as in Malatya and Erzincan, it seemed like every other person on the street looked like my dad or my grandparents on his side.  Although many foods in any country are universal, regional variations came, as we moved eastward, more into line with what we ate at the dinner table growing up in Boston.

 I know that when I travel, there are times that I would feel homesick.  I am pretty sure that I can speak for you, the dear reader, that this is almost consistently common.  The funny thing is that visiting the parts of Turkiye where my grandparents were from felt like I was already at home.  Even though I have never visited this country before and even though there is a barrier of languages, I felt like I was at home.  This feeling is probably one of the most odd and most weird feelings I have ever experienced.  The culture, the food, the dancing, the lifestyle, all felt very normal and comfortable and familiar. Indeed, this was not expected and has taken a lot of mental energy to process the feelings and emotions associated with these experiences.

 We finally, after two months in the country, arrived at the eastern most city of Turkey near the Armenian border.  The city of Kars was once primarily an Armenian city and was, in the middle 1800's taken over by an advancing Russian army to become part of the Russian empire.  The Russian empire fell in 1917 and the land was returned to Turkey to become, under the rule of Kamal Attaturk, the modern and relatively progressive country we see today.

Near to Kars is the ruined city of Ani.  Ani sits exactly on the Turkish border with Armenia and was once a great and powerful city sitting directly on what would become the great Silk Road.  Surely you have heard of the Silk Road but, if not, let me remind you that it was the great superhighway that saw countless numbers of caravans and traders who moved from as far away in the east as Mongolia to the western European nations. All of our first widespread global trading was along this great superhighway.

 Cities sprung up along this trade route and most were a day or two of travel distance apart from one another.  These were the ancient rest areas on the freeways to stop and refuel the horses and people, get a good meal and some well deserved rest.  It was also a place to exchange both goods and ideas.  They were, effectively, hubs of knowledge, industry, technology, trade and everything that a city with a diverse migrant population might see from visiting foreign travelers who brought novelty as much as they did goods.

 I found myself, as I explored the city, at one point inside an old Armenian Church that sat upon the river dividing the countries of Armenia and Turkey.  There were throngs of other visitors getting their glam shot selfies in the exact same location.  For me, it was a pensive moment as I took the time to sit in the window, looking down hundreds of feet below to the river that separated Armenia from Turkey, and then looking up and into Armenia itself.  I felt the moment of unity and separation at once. My Turkish geography and Armenian heritage were equally separated by an invisible river in my soul.   It was a symbolic river separating my geography from my heritage lands, a river connecting both but also separating each as well.  Attempting to build the bridge in my mind to connect the two was the engineering challenge my mind was facing.  Literally, this place in Ani is the crossroads of a civilization as it is a metaphorical crossroad of my own life and life path.

Turkey on my side, Armenia across the river.  I am literally sitting at the crossroads of my Turkish and Armenian heritages.

Armenian and Turkish.  I am both and one.  I am separated yet together.  I am the engineer of the bridge that I must create to span the inequalities of the past with present.  The struggles, hardships and untold losses of life my grandparents and great grandparents faced strikes starkly in contrast to the amazingly privileged life I have been gifted today.  I sit in the window and stare down into the chasm of time that separates yet connects both at once.

 Separated but connected.  That physically is this border.  That is my history.  That is the essence of who I am.

 Soon we will visit Armenia.  How much more of myself will I find when I arrive?  How will the visions of the memories my grandparents told mesh with the modern revival of a now increasingly modern country?  Will I feel just as at home as I felt in Harput, Turkey and the surrounding regions as I will hundreds of miles away in a new Armenia?  Only the experience will tell.  I have no preconceptions, only questions.  They will be answered in due course and in time.

 Let the adventure of discovery and self discovery continue.