The Hemshin

[Joseph]

Archive Copy) LONDON, England - Of all the fascinating and interesting subjects offered by the open-ended series, "Living in Diaspora," probably the most intriguing title for a talk was the recent "Muslim Armenians or Armenian-Speaking Turks? The Hemshin of Northeastern Turkey" -- a subject about which very few Armenians know much.

In the end, Hovann Simonian, a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Southern California (USC), didn't answer the tantalizing question in the title. . .

This series, funded by the AGBU London, and under the direction of Dr. Susan Pattie, who presided over the evening, has heard two basic types of speakers. One reads an academic paper and often loses his audience in the structured language used; the other speaks extemporaneously and knows his subject so well that he speeds on like an Olympic sprinter, leaving his audience to catch up.


Simonian was the latter. A master of his subject, he told the absorbing story as if he were recounting an experience having occurred only the night before. Thus, as names and places and events were mentioned, he often left the audience -- or, at least, this member of the audience -- wondering "where did he/they come from? "where is that?" etc.

The Hemshin story begins in 791 when 12,000 Armenian families left Oshagan to escape "the oppressive harsh" regime of the Arab Abbasids and, with the support of the Byzantine emperor, settled around the town of Tampour in the Pontic region of the Black Sea. Today, they are divided into three Areas -- the "eastern" in the Hopa area, the "central" around the city of Erzeroum, and the "western" around the city of Trabzon.

During their remarkable history down through the centuries, the Hemshin have gone through many trying periods after they apparently absorbed the area's native peoples - the Kartvelians, ancestors of the Georgians, among others. Tampour became Hamamshen ("built by Hamam") which became Hamshen which became Hemshin. Because of the geography of the area, very little was heard about the Hemshin, over the centuries, except that they were obviously a vassal of the Byzantine Empire, then of the Trebizond empire, then of the Bagratids, and finally (around the 1480s) the Ottoman Turks. Despite the succession of "masters," their extraordinary isolation served to protect them from horrors of invasions and troubles from the outside -- until the 20th century. There is no written history or word-of-mouth stories until the 13th century.

Just as the Hemshin are geographically divided into three areas, so, too, is their "Amenianness." The eastern Hemshin have not kept any Armenian customs but they have kept the language. But, they are not Christians. The middle-area Hemshins do not speak Armenian, but they have kept some Armenian traditions (such as Vartevar) and had baptized their children until the 1890s. These two groups apparently suffered little during the Genocide, and some of them even participated against the Armenians. The western group retained their Christian religion and their Armenian heritage and were caught up in the Genocide -- most of the survivors left for southern Russia and Abhazia, in Georgia.

The three groups have little contact with each other, and there is, apparently, little feeling of kinship with each other and virtually no intermarriage. Among their differences is that the "middle" group -- the Bash-Hemshin -- have a higher level of education and a higher, almost professional, range of jobs. The eastern group -- the Hopa-Hemshin -- "tend to be truck drivers."

But, are they "Armenian"? Generally, the Hemshin, Simonian says, accept the "official" line that they are descended from Central Asian Turkic tribes;

some even claim to be of Arabic descent, though there is no record of any Arab migration so far north. Thus, the Armenian elements are supposed to have come from the period when the Hemshin were under the Armenians, and retained the language, customs, traditions. etc., after the Armenians left. To add to the confusion, some Hemshin survived the Genocide because they were Muslim; some were killed because they were Armenian -- which recalled the very old story of the two nuns walking through a town in the Deep South followed by several small black children who, when asked if they were Catholics, replied, "No, Ma'am, it's bad enough being colored!"

An interesting aspect of the Hemshin is that they have made a larger contribution to the Turkish state than their size and number would normally warrant, including a former Prime Minister (Mesut Yilmaz), a mayor of Ankara, members of Parliament, judges, and the Grand Admiral Mehmet Ali Pasha.

Answers about their origins differ, Simonian said, during the question period. "People," he stated, "are more likely to admit Armenian connections when they are in the pastures than when they are in town." Some regard themselves as of Armenian ancestors but are now Turks. And some answers, he concluded, "vary according to the age, the gender, and the geographic location of the discussion." Thus, older women recognize the Armenian connection, middle-aged men deny it, "and the young people are confused." Those young people weren't the only ones.

Simonian, who lives in the US and Switzerland, earned his BA from Lausanne University, and his two MAs from USC and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. The Hemshin, which Simonian has edited as part of the Curzon Press's "People of the Caucasus" series, will be published in 2001.

By Andrew Kevorkian
Exclusive to TAR Int'l



History and Identity among the Hemshin

By continuing to speak Armenian, the small community of Hemshin in northeastern Turkey has become the only community of Armenian-speaking Muslims. Furthermore, by developing after their conversion to Islam a group identity distinct from that of its neighbours, they have constituted an exception to one of the more typical paradigms in the Ottoman Empire, whereby Armenian converts to Islam were assimilated completely into the surrounding Muslim environment. Yet, while maintaining Armenian components in their culture, a majority of Hemshin dissociate themselves from their Armenian ancestry. The rural exodus has emptied many of the villages, but among the younger generation, including those born in the cities, a growing number seeks to preserve Hemshinli traditions.
The Hemshin or Hemshinli people live in the foothills and mountainous areas of the eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. The Hemshinli constitute a unique group, even within the context of the Eastern Black Sea region, which differs by its geography and ethnic and linguistic diversity from the rest of the country. One circumstance that sets the Hemshin apart from other groups of this region, such as the Lazi and the Georgians, is that they are divided into two communities almost oblivious to one another’s existence, and separated by language, culture and territory. The districts of Caml?hemsin and Hemsin in the highlands of the province of Rize are the heartland of the western Hemshinli, or Bash-Hemshinli. This group is isolated by the exclusively Lazi district of Arhavi from the eastern Hemshinli, or Hopa-Hemshinli, who are mostly settled in the Hopa and Borcka districts of the Artvin province. Moreover, these two Hemshin groups are unaware of the ex-istence of yet a third related community speaking a close if not identi-cal dialect, the Christian Hamshen Armenians of Abkhazia and Krasnodar in Russia.

The Hemshinli constitute a truly fascinating phenomenon. They have preserved, centuries after their conversion to Islam, a sense of identity distinct from that of their neighbours, as well as, for part of them, their spoken Armenian dialect Homshetsma. By continuing to speak Armenian, they have reversed one of the more typical para-digms in the Ottoman Empire, whereby Armenian converts to Islam were assimilated completely into the surrounding Muslim environ-ment, and Christian Armenians often became monolingual Turkish-speakers. The Armenian language did disappear around the middle of the nineteenth century among the Bash-Hemshinli, to be replaced by a local Turkish dialect containing a large number of Armenian loan-words, but it has survived to this day among the Hopa-Hemshinli. Fur-thermore, given the ongoing decline in the Diaspora of the use of the Armenian language, the ironic possibility that these Muslim villagers may well be the last speakers of Western Armenian cannot be exclud-ed.

The Bash-Hemshinli approximately number between 15,000 and 23,000 individuals in the Rize province, while the Hopa-Hemshinli are estimated at around 25,000.1

To these figures must be added the dozen or so villages in the northwestern provinces of Düzce and Sakarya, settled by the Hemshinli during the last decades of the nine-teenth century. Large communities of Hemshinli can also be found in regional centres such as Trabzon and Erzurum and in the large cities of western Turkey. A total figure of approximately 100,000 individuals for all of Turkey appears to be a realistic estimate.

In Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner, using language as a crite-rion, gives a figure of approximately 8000 minority groups on earth. Of these 8000 groups, he continues, barely one-tenth have developed “nationalisms,” i.e. ”the striving to make culture and polity congru-ent,”2

or have elaborated any sort of ethnically based cultural and po-litical agenda. The Hemshin, like their Lazi neighbours, clearly belong to the 90 percent of groups which have chosen not to mobilize on the basis of their ethnic identity.3

However, they have maintained a sense of collective identity, the distinction of which is recognized by their neighbours.

Perceptions of history Historical sources agree that the Hemshinli are the descendants of Ar-menians who migrated to the Black Sea region or Pontos in the late eighth century. The district settled by these migrants came to be known as Hama-mashen (i.e., built by Hamam), after Prince Hamam Amatuni, one of the leaders of the migration. With time, Hamamashen became Hamshen, and following Ottoman conquest in the late fifteenth century, Hemshin. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Armenians of Hemshin converted to Islam. Various reasons have been given for conversion, including fiscal oppression, rise of Muslim intolerance vis-à-vis Christians following a series of Ottoman defeats at the hands of Rus-sia, the breakdown of central authority in the late seventeenth century and the ensuing climate of anarchy when the region was at the mercy of warlords known as derebeys (valley lords). Islam is believed to have progressed from the coast up, with highland villages remaining Christ-ian for a longer period than lowland ones. The religious context during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, however, more compli-cated than that, as the boundary between Christians and Muslims in Hemshin was blurred by the existence of yet a third category com-posed of crypto-Christians known as Keskes (Armenian half-half). The crypto-Christians of Hemshin were reported until the late nineteenth century to attend church, secretly baptize their children, and continue to celebrate various Armenian religious feasts such as Vartevar (the Transfiguration of Christ) and Verapokhum (the Assumption).4

A majority of Hemshinli, however, reject any suggestion that they have Armenian ancestry, preferring the thesis presented to them by Turkish nationalist historians such as Fahrettin K?rz?oglu. In its main lines, this revisionist version of Hemshin history argues that the Hemshinli are of pure Turkish stock and that they are the descendants of an authentic Turkish tribe. Historical and cultural links with Armeni-ans are downplayed or simply denied, and the use of the Armenian lan-guage by the Hopa-Hemshinli is attributed to their coexistence with Ar-menians in a distant past. This narrative is basically an extension to the Hemshinli of historical and linguistic theories, such as the Turkish His-torical Thesis and the extravagant ”sun language theory” (günes-dil teorisi), which have been created and supported by the Turkish Repub-lic since the early 1930s as an integral part of the nation- and state-building process. While K?rz?oglu has certainly been the chief and most famous proponent of the Turkish state version of Hemshin history, it was his predecessor M. R?za, who stated in a 1933 book that the Hemshinli were “Hittite Turks‘” and that after speaking Armenian for a while, “they now know no other language than Turkish.”5

The popularity of Turkish nationalist theories is obviously linked to the Armenian-Turkish antagonism and to the fact that it is socially more acceptable to claim Turkic ancestors from Central Asia than Ar-menian ones in the modern Turkish Republic. Yet, the preference of the Hemshinli for this thesis also has deeper roots that go back to Ot-toman times. In the pre-national context of the Ottoman Empire, peo-ple identified themselves in terms of their membership in a particular religious community, or millet. Thus, being ”Armenian” prior to the im-port of the European idea of nation to the Ottoman Empire meant be-longing to the Armenian Apostolic Church and the millet it composed. Leaving the Armenian Church to join another Christian denomination

or Islam also meant that one stopped being part of the Armenian ”na-tion.” “Armenian” was used interchangeably with ”Christian,” and ”Turk” with ”Muslim”—and continues to be done so to this day by most of Turkey’s rural population. That one could possibly be ”Turk” and ”Christian” or ”Armenian” and ”Muslim” was—and still is to most of Turkey’s population—a concept that was simply beyond the grasp of most of the Ottoman Empire’s inhabitants; an anomaly.

Identity issues The estrangement between Hemshinli and Armenians is best shown in the fascinating anecdote reported by the famous French linguist Georges Dumézil, who studied the Armenian dialect of Hemshin and published a series of articles on the topic in the 1960s. The young Hemshinli with whom Dumézil worked had no idea whatsoever that he spoke Armenian. He had only noticed when going at the beach in Is-tanbul that there were people speaking a language he could under-stand (i.e., Istanbul Armenians), yet he had no idea why, as they were not from his village or region.6

Answers on ethnic origins among the Hemshinli may well vary ac-cording to gender, place of residence, age, or location of discussion. What often appears is a reverse correlation between wealth and influ-ence on the one hand and admission to Armenian origins on the other. Thus, older women living in a village of Çaml?hemsin or Hopa will be more likely to admit to their Armenian ancestry than middle-aged businessmen residing in Ankara, who are more likely to staunchly re-ject any Armenian connection. Younger people, meanwhile, appear both confused and curious about their origins. In some cases, the Hemshinli who admit to some sort of Armenian ancestry will mention that the family founder was a migrant to the area, usually from Central Asia, who married within the Hemshinli community, and gradually as-similated. The same is visible among the Laz. It could be true, but it is a way of “saving” one’s family past while admitting the painful ”truth” for the rest of the group. In conversations with Hemshinli individuals who admitted to Armenian origins, there appeared to be two or three levels of perception of “Armenians”: one’s ancestors before conversion, the Hemshinli who remained Christians prior to WWI, and modern-day Ar-menians, from the Diaspora or the republic of Armenia.

While opinions on origins vary, there is a clear consciousness of group identity, including the notion of Hemsinlilik, i.e., to be Hemshin. This sense of community is expressed in the following statement from a Hemshinli periodical published in Ankara: “We, Hemshinli, are people who are spread out in all directions of Anatolia. But the longing for Hemsin inside us binds us strongly together.”7

The separation of Hemshinli into Bash-Hemshinli and Hopa-Hemshinli means there are actually two distinct group identities. The two groups do not mingle in the large cities of western Turkey and maintain separate associations. The traditional head-gear (pusi) used among Bash-Hemshinli is un-known among the Hopa-Hemshinli. The western, or Bash-Hemshinli, continue to celebrate Vartevar in their summer pastures (yayla)—even if the religious meaning of the feast appears to have long been lost on them—and have generally maintained more Armenian traditions than the Hopa-Hemshinli. However, it is more the continued use of Homshetsma, the Armenian dialect of Hamshen, by the Hopa-Hemshinli than the preservation of Armenian festivals by the Bash-Hemshinli that has attracted the attention of outsiders to the Hemshin-li population. The continued use of Homshetsma by the Hopa-Hemshinli is also believed to be one of the reasons for the separation between the two groups, as the Bash-Hemshinli prefer not be associat-ed with Armenian-speakers.

It is difficult to assert what the future holds for a small group like the Hemshinli. Assimilation represents a clear danger for the survival of the group. It is interesting to note in this context that the verb ”assimilate” has been adopted into Turkish and that minority groups like the Lazi and the Hemshin are often described as having been assimilated (assimiley olmus).8

The rural exodus has emptied most Hemshinli villages—particularly in Bash-Hem-shin—leaving only elderly people to live year-round in their native district. Some Hopa-Hem-shinli families are not teaching their children Homshetsma anymore, and the Turkish dialect used in Bash-Hemshin, which contains numerous Armenian loan-words, is dying. However, many young Hemshinli, including those born in the large cities of western Turkey, show a strong in-terest in preserving the culture of their ancestors. The day of doom has not arrived yet for the Hemshinli. They have not ”awakened” as a na-tion—and have certainly no desire to—but nei-ther have they allowed their distinct cultural identity to disappear.



Notes

1. Rüdiger Benninghaus, “Zur Herkunft und Identität der Hemsinli,” in Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey, ed. Peter Alford Andrews (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1989), 477.

2. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), 43-50.

3. Chris Hann, “Ethnicity, Language and Politics in North-east Turkey,” in The Politics of Ethnic Consciousness, ed. Cora Govers and Hans Vermeulen (London: Macmillan, 1997), 122.

4. For a detailed history of Hemshin, see the forthcoming volume, The Hemshin, ed. Hovann Simonian, to be published by Curzon-Routledge in 2004.

5. M. R?za, Benlik ve Dilbirligimiz, 2nd ed. (Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Arast?rma Enstitüsü, 1982), 35-36. First published in 1933.

6. Georges Dumézil, “Notes sur le Parler d’un Arménien Musulman d’Ardala,” Revue des Études Arméniennes n.s. 2 (1965), 135-42.

7. Benninghaus, 487 n 71. 8. Ildikó Bellér-Hann and Chris Hann, Turkish Region: State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2001), 204.



Hovann H. Simonian is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of
Political Science at the University of Southern California (USC).
ISIM NEWSLETTER 14

[CRDA-France]

Thank you for these texts. I have made a link to them.

Nil.

http://www.crda-france.org/fr/breligion/islam/1dialogue_hamshen.htm

#877

[Joseph]

http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:xZglWxqMb5EJ:www.isim.nl/files/newsl_14/newsl_14-24.pdf+hemshin&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us

[Joseph]

1.

http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2008-11-13-the-hemshin-a-community-of-armenians-who-became-muslims

The Hemshin: a community of Armenians who became Muslims

by Aram Arkun


The Hemshin: a community of Armenians who became Muslims
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Hovann H. Simonian, editor, The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey. London and New York: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2007, 417 pages including index and illustrations.

Nearly all Armenians would insist that the Christian faith is one of the major components of the Armenian identity. Yet today more and more is heard about Muslim Armenians and crypto or secret Armenians. The very existence of Muslim Armenians in particular raises interesting questions about what fundamentally constitutes an Armenian, especially when there are Muslims who speak Armenian and preserve and practice various elements derived from Armenian culture and tradition.

The Hemshin, also called Hemshinli, include both Muslims and Christians, and speakers of dialects of Armenian as well as those who speak only versions of Turkish or other non-Armenian languages influenced by the Armenian language. They have a long and complicated history, during much of which they lived in isolation from mainstream Armenian society and faced great oppression. The Hemshin themselves have conflicting notions concerning their identity. Today numbering as many as 150,000 according to some estimates, they live in Turkey, Russia, and Georgia, as well as in some diaspora communities in the West. Not much has been written about the Hemshin in English, so the volume edited by Hovann Simonian provides a welcome introduction.

This book, focusing on the Hemshin living in Turkey, consists of chapters written by writers from a diverse group of disciplines and nationalities. A second volume, focusing on the Hemshin of the Caucasus and the rest of the former Soviet Union and including a general bibliography, is planned for publication.
Origins

Anne Elizabeth Redgate's introductory chapter examines Armenian historical sources on the origins of the Hemshin. The 7th-century Arab invasions of Armenia led to harsh treatment of the Armenian population in the subsequent century. According to the historian Ghevond's History, part of the Armenian leadership, including the Amatuni clan, rebelled, leading to the emigration of Shabuh Amatuni, his son Hamam, and many companions circa 790. They founded a new principality in the Byzantine-controlled Pontos, northwest of Armenia proper. Its capital was named Hamamashen (after Hamam), and this word was later transformed into Hamshen and used for the whole area.

Historical Hamshen lies between the Pontic mountain chain in the south and the Black Sea to the north, today part of the Turkish province of Rize. The Hemshin also live further to the east, in the Artvin province of Turkey, in the region around Hopa. Unlike their Laz neighbors, the Hemshin tend to live among the higher mountains, not immediately around the coast. Thanks to the Pontic mountains overlooking the Black Sea, Hamshen is not only fairly inaccessible, but also one of the most humid areas of Turkey, with a semi-tropical climate that sees an average of 250 days of rain every year. An almost permanent fog covers the area. The Armenians there were always in close proximity to the sea, even when their political borders did not quite reach it.

In the next chapter, Simonian briefly reviews the same Armenian historical sources referred to by Redgate, and dismisses two alternate hypotheses concerning the origins of Hamshen: that refugees following the fall of the Armenian capital of Ani in 1064 were its founders, and that after the initial arrival of the Amatunis, a sparse local Tzan population was Armenized by migrants from Ispir and Pertakrag to the south.

Much of the history of this area is still obscure. Between the late 8th and early 15th centuries, there are only two extant mentions of Hamshen, so that one can only suppose that the principality of Hamshen survived as a vassal of the larger Armenian, Byzantine, Georgian, and Turkic powers around it. Armenian manuscripts from the 15th century reveal that Hamshen had become a principality subservient to the Muslim lord of Ispir to the south, as well as to an overlord, Iskander Bey of the Kara Koyunlu Turkmen confederation. Ispir, exclusively Armenian until the 17th century, was Hamshen's only neighbor sharing a population adhering to the church of Armenia. The other Christians in the area were Orthodox Chalcedonians. Hamshen fell to the Ottomans in the late 1480s, with its last ruler, Baron Davit (David) exiled to Ispir. The most famous member of the Armenian ruling family of Hamshen was the monk Hovhannes Hamshentsi, an eminent scholar and orator who died in 1497.

Hamshen came to be referred to as Hemshin in early Ottoman documents, where it was noted as a separate district or province. It was subject to the devshirme, or child levy, in the 16th century.
An intellectual center in a dark age

In the third chapter, Christine Maranci examines manuscript illumination in Hamshen, which, together with scribal activity, extended from the 13th to the 17th centuries. A wide variety of texts were copied, demonstrating that Hamshen was a significant intellectual center even in the 16th century, often considered a "Dark Age" for medieval manuscript illumination.

In another chapter, Simonian traces the process of Islamicization in Hemshin to the end of the 19th century. Simonian does a good job of utilizing at times contradictory or obscure Armenian and Turkish sources to better understand that process.

Ottoman records show that Hemshin was overwhelmingly Christian until the late 1620s. Starting in the 1630s, the Hemshin Armenian diocese began to decline, while one of the first mosques in the area was built in the 1640s. Conversion to Islam seems to have taken place gradually. However, it is not known whether there were particular episodic periods of crisis in which conversion accelerated. The need for equality with Laz Muslim neighbors, the desire to avoid oppressive taxation of non-Muslims, increasing general Ottoman intolerance of non-Muslims in a period of weakness for the Ottoman Empire, and anarchy created by local valley lords are some of the causes of Islamicization. Islam took root in the coastal areas first, and then advanced slowly to the highlands.

[Joseph]

2.

cont.

Emigration of Armenians also took place during this period of pressure on Armenians, from the 1630s to the 1850s, though fugitives who fled to other parts of the Pontos were still often forced to convert. Simonian looks at the killings, violence, and other difficulties faced by the Hemshin Armenian communities of Mala, Karadere, and Khurshunlu.
The Gesges emerge

Christians still persevered, though small in number, in Hemshin at the beginning of the 19th century. Members of the new Muslim majority produced a large number of Islamic clerics, civil servants, and military leaders for the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. These emigrants to large Ottoman urban centers all bore the epithet Hemshinli. During the centuries of conversion, odd situations were created. Mothers in some families remained Christian in belief, while fathers became Muslim; one brother might have converted to Islam, and another remained Christian. Furthermore, there emerged a segment of crypto-Christians called gesges (half-half). These Hemshin Armenians outwardly converted, but privately kept practicing various Christian customs, even sometimes including attending church services. This category of Armenians largely died out by the end of the 19th century.

In the second half of the 19th century, Ottoman proclamations of religious equality as part of the Tanzimat reform efforts led some Muslim Hemshin in the broader area to try to convert back to Christianity. This in turn led to a backlash by Muslim preachers and the opening of Turkish schools in the area. The pressure exerted by local authorities, combined with new opportunities in Muslim Ottoman society for economic and social advancement, led to the loss of the ability to speak the Armenian language for most Hemshin Armenians. However, Armenian influenced the type of Turkish spoken by the Hemshin through vocabulary, phrase structure, and accent. The Muslim Hemshin developed their own unique group identity, and have managed to maintain it till the present.

By 1870, according to Ottoman statistics confirmed by the British consul in Trebizond, there were only 23 Christian Armenian families in Hemshin. The remaining 1,561 families were Muslim.

Alexandre Toumarkine writes about the Ottoman political and religious elites among the Hemshin from the mid-19th century until 1926, with information about specific individuals and families. The Hemshinli, like the rest of the people of their area of the Black Sea, supported Atatürk initially, but entered into the camp of the opposition during the early years of the new Turkish republic. The chief organizer of the failed 1926 plot to assassinate Atatürk was a Hemshinli named Ziya Hursid, and four other Hemshinli were also accused of being involved. In an epilogue, Toumarkine notes that a number of contemporary politicians have Hemshinli origins. They include Mesut Yilmaz, prime minister between 1997 and 1998, and Murat Karayalçin, deputy prime minister from 1993 to 1995.
Tensions in 1878-1923

In his third chapter, Simonian focuses on the 1878-1923 period and the interaction of Muslims of Armenian background and Armenians. The district of Hopa, adjacent to Hemshin, was occupied by the Russians as a result of the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War. The approximately 200 households of Islamicized Hemshinli Armenians in Hopa proved their complete adherence to Islam by not reverting to Christianity under Russian Christian rule, unlike other Armenian converts.

Part of the responsibility for the distancing between Christian and Islamicized Armenians was due to Armenians themselves. The Armenian church did not attempt to actively work with the Muslim Hemshinli, perhaps fearing problems with the Ottoman authorities. However, even in the Russian Empire, the Armenian church made no effort to try to proselytize Islamicized Armenians, and, in some cases, actually created new obstacles in the path of those who wished to revert to Christianity. At the same time, even relatively progressive secularist thinkers like Grigor Artsruni could not accept as Armenians any Muslims like the Hemshin unless they first reverted to Christianity.

Muslims of Hemshin were hired by the Catholic Armenians of neighboring Khodorchur to the south, the last district of Ispir still populated by Christians, as guides for travelers, guards, and seasonal workers. Despite these generally friendly relations, some Hemshinli Muslims who engaged in banditry also periodically attacked the Khodorchur Catholic Armenians. During World War I, some Hemshinli and other Muslims of Armenian descent robbed their Khodorchur Armenian neighbors and took over their properties. The last Christian Armenian village in Hemshin, Eghiovit (Elevit), was destroyed, with its population deported and killed. After the war, Khodorchur was partially repopulated by Hemshinli.

In Hopa and more particularly in Karadere Valley and regions closer to Trebizond, Islamicized Armenians helped Christians instead of robbing them.

During the war, some Hemshinli were mistaken for Armenians because of their language and killed. During the Russian occupation of the area from 1916 to 1918, there were no recorded instances of reversion to Christianity among the Islamicized Armenians and Greeks.

Hagop Hachikian has a chapter on the historical geography and present territorial distribution of the Hemshinli, examining toponyms and historical sources to ascertain where and when settlements were established. Interestingly, Hemshinli Armenians settled in areas around the western Black Sea in various waves of emigration beginning immediately prior to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Emigration to this area continued in the period of the Turkish republic, with Hemshinli usually either settling in separate quarters of villages, or establishing monoethnic villages. Hemshinli continued to migrate, with diaspora communities of thousands now existing in Germany and the United States.

[Joseph]

3.

cont.

Meanwhile, thousands of village names that were found to have non-Turkish roots were changed by 1959, adding to the changes in names taken from the start of the 20th century under the Young Turks. This eliminated many of the originally Armenian names of the Hemshinli villages.
Villages today

Erhan Gürsel Ersoy writes about the present-day social and economic structures of the Hemshin people living in Çamlihemsin in Rize Province from the perspectives of cultural ecology. Houses are in the middle of agricultural land, so that villages have no real center and residences are dispersed over wide expanses. Ersoy looks at recent attempts at modernization of infrastructure in the region, including the building of some roads and the advent of telephones and electricity in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the early 19th century, many men from the Hemshin area emigrated to the Caucasus and Balkans, as well as large Ottoman cities. Emigration within Turkey continued in modern times, with Hemshinli becoming entrepreneurs and opening a large number of patisseries, bakeries, tea houses, coffee shops, restaurants, taverns, and hotels in large cities and towns such as Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Though the Hemshinli are a patriarchal society, a high number of women serve as the de facto heads of their households, given the fact that so many men migrate to the towns. The rural extended family structure has been breaking up. Locally most households still subside on agriculture and animal husbandry, with women doing most of work.

Gülsen Balikçi examines western Hemshin folk architecture in three villages of the Rize area. Like many traditional Armenian homes, the stable for animals is located at the ground floor at the back of the house. People live on the second floor, and there is a third floor too. An outdoor toilet is near the stable. Baths are taken either in the stable or near the oven inside the house. A fountain is built near the back entrance, and water is brought into the house through a hose. Food that will be used shortly is hanged in cloth bags from the ceiling, as a way of protection against mice and insects. A number of auxiliary buildings or structures are placed next to the house. The most important of these is a raised storage platform on posts called serender, in which food was kept for long periods.
The languages of the Hemshin

Bert Vaux explains that the language of the Armenians of Hamshen depend on their location. The western Hemshinli living in the Turkish province of Rize speak Turkish peppered with Armenian words, while the eastern Hemshinli in the province of Artvin speak a dialect of Armenian they call Homshetsma. Non-Islamicized Hamshen Armenians who live in Russia and Georgia speak the same dialect.

Homshetsma, never a written language, developed in isolation. Thus it preserves various archaisms, along with developing some idiosyncrasies. Homshetsma belongs to the Western Armenian family of dialects. Vaux provides some short texts in eastern and northern Homshetsma dialects as appendices to his overview. Uwe Bläsing, the author of two monographs concerning the Hemshin dialect, provides an overview of the Armenian vocabulary still used by the now Turkish-speaking western Hemshinli.

Hagop Hachikian examines aspects of the Hemshin identity. Two distinct Hemshinli identities exist: Rize and Hopa, or west and east, with distinct geographical and linguistic attributes. Aside from differences in language, the Hemshinli of Hopa do not use the traditional head covering of those of Rize. Those in the west still observe a festival of Armenian pagan origin known as Vartevor or Vartivor (Vartavar in Armenian, transformed through Christianization into a celebration of the Transfiguration of Christ) and have a richer repertoire of traditional dances. Their level of literacy and education is much higher than that of the east. The Rize Hemshinli, whose members have achieved high office, thus manage to preserve their distinctiveness while proclaiming a Turco-Muslim identity. Both branches of the Hemshinli still have some Armenian-derived family names.

In public, many Hemshinli reject an Armenian origin, and some even insist they were descended from Turks from Central Asia who founded the "Gregorian" denomination of Christianity. They are upset by Lazi and others who call them Armenians.
A lively culture

Ersoy, in another chapter, also examines aspects of identity. The western Hemshinli follow a very pragmatic version of Islam, and still drink alcohol, sing folk songs, and dance in mixed company. Ersoy looks at the Vartevor festival. Today it is organized by a committee with a chairman. Money is collected from each household in the highland pastures to pay a bagpipe player, buy alcohol, and pay for any other expenses. Drinking, fireworks, and folk dancing are the main attractions. Ersoy looks at a second festival with Armenian roots, the Hodoç festival, which takes place during haymaking, but is not as widely celebrated as Vartevor. It, too, includes food, drink, and folk dancing.

Ildikó Bellér-Hann explores Hemshinli-Lazi relations. The Lazi (Laz in Turkish), converts to Islam from Christianity during Ottoman times, live in the same areas as the Hemshinli, and number perhaps around 250,000. They have preserved their Caucasian language, related to Georgian, orally, and so are bilingual like the eastern Hemshinli. Lazi and Hemshinli are locally often contrasted with each other. The Lazi stereotypically are represented as agriculturalists, as opposed to the pastoralist Hemshinli. The Hemshinli are considered pacifists and calm, compared to the nervous, hot-blooded, and violent nature of the Lazi. The Hemshinli are said to be planners, whereas the Lazi are entrepreneurial and ambitious but live for the day. Hemshinli consider the Lazi mean and inhospitable, and also point out their large noses, while Lazi complain of the odor and lack of hygiene of the Hemshinli (a result of work with large numbers of animals).

[Joseph]

4.

cont.

Intermarriage between the two groups has been limited. Traditionally, it has been asserted that Hemshinli brides were taken by Lazi men, but no Lazi women married Hemshinli men. However, statistics from the 1940s and 1950s, and the late 1980s and early 1990s, belie this pattern.

Rüdiger Benninghaus examines the methods and consequences of the manipulation of ethnic origins by both western Hemshinli and non-Hemshinli, especially Turks. Attempts to prove the Hemshinli to have Turkish origins fit in with broader historiographical and linguistic approaches in Turkey, which in the 1930s went to the extreme of proclaiming that all languages derived from Turkish, and all civilizations were either Turkish in origin or influenced by the Turks historically.

Simonian's volume contains a wealth of information on the Hemshin, but may be a little difficult for general readers who are not familiar with Armenian and Turkish history. The problem is due in part to the complicated nature of the topic as well as the disparate approaches of chapters common to many multi-author works. There is some overlap between chapters, which perhaps could have been avoided. A general map of the region would have been useful for readers in the early part of the volume. It may be hard to keep track of the different towns of the original Hemshin territory, versus those to which the Hemshin later spread.

Most of the captions of the photographs of manuscripts and bindings pertaining to Christina Maranci's chapter have been matched to the wrong image, forcing readers to guess at the correct ascriptions. An errata insert would alleviate this problem. Some of the black-and-white illustrations in other sections of the book appear a bit faint.

Overall, this is an excellent resource book, and it is obvious that Simonian and the authors have put in much effort to use inaccessible primary sources in a variety of languages. Hopefully, Simonian's second volume will soon appear, and the two volumes in turn will lead to new monographic studies.