Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [42]
Though the following passage is from a novel, Louis de Bernières’s Birds Without Wings, it’s worth keeping in mind: “It is not possible to calculate how many Armenians died on the forced marches. In 1915 the number was thought to be 300,000, a figure which has been progressively increased ever since, thanks to the efforts of angry propagandists. To argue about whether it was 300,000 or 2,000,000 is in a sense irrelevant and distasteful, however, since both numbers are great enough to be equally distressing, and the suffering of individual victims in their trajectory towards death is in both cases immeasurable.”
Most Armenian folktales and stories begin with a rather cryptic phrase: Djamangeen gar oo chagar, or, “A long time ago there was and there wasn’t.” Writer Peter Balakian refers to it as the “Armenian invocation,” and says it is “like the intrusive past, which seemed to appear out of time, like lyric memory that had been activated.” Elif Shafak opens The Bastard of Istanbul with a “preamble to a Turkish tale … and to an Armenian one”: “Once there was; once there wasn’t. / God’s creatures were as plentiful as grains / And talking too much was a sin.…”
Storytelling is a revered Armenian tradition, and so is food. I was rather surprised to come across so many references to food while researching this book. Here are just a few passages I uncovered. From Peter Balakian, in Black Dog of Fate: “Food for us was a complex cultural emblem, an encoded script that embodied the long history and collective memory of our Near Eastern culture. I didn’t know that eating also was a drama whose meaning was entwined in Armenia’s bitter history.” In chapter three of Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul we are introduced to the Tchakhmakhchian clan: “Dikran Stamboulian gazed longingly at the food set out on the table, and reached for a jar of yogurt drink, Americanized with too many ice cubes. In multihued clay bowls of different sizes were many of his favorite dishes.… Though he was still fuming, his heart warmed at the sight of bastırma and entirely melted when he saw his favorite dish next to it: burma.”
Food writer Paula Wolfert, writing for Saveur in 1998, related how she went to southeastern Turkey to learn about Turkish-Armenian cooking from her friend Ayfer Unsal, a renowned food writer in Turkey. “Ayfer may be Turkish,” writes Wolfert, “but there could be no better way for me to learn Armenian cooking than through her.… She is deeply involved with a program that brings the children and grandchildren of exiled Armenians to Turkey, so that they can perhaps find common ground with contemporary Turks while visiting their ancestral land. Often, she entertains the visitors at her home, hoping that if we can cook and eat together, then maybe we can become friends.…”
And lastly, from Black Dog of Fate, Balakian says about his mother: “At certain moments her unacknowledged cultural past became an irrepressible force, a statement of things culinary, in the name of the kitchen, the inviolable sanctuary of a culture that had barely escaped extinction. In the kitchen, my mother really was saying: We are alive and well, things have order, the world has grace and style.”
The piece below, which originally appeared in the April/May 2007 issue of the terrific magazine Culture+Travel (now published as an insert in Art+Auction), explores Armenian culinary specialties when they cross geographic boundaries. Culture + Travel is a beautifully produced