Aleppo, the city that caught us

Armenians did not arrive in Aleppo in 1915. Armenian merchants had lived there for centuries, trading along the caravan routes that ran from the Mediterranean to Persia. They had their own quarter, their own institutions and their own families who had never known anywhere else.

1915

In April 1915 the Ottoman government, run by the Committee of Union and Progress, set out to destroy its Armenian population. Men were rounded up and killed. Women, children and the old were driven on death marches south toward the Syrian desert, where most of them died of hunger, thirst and massacre. Estimates of the dead run from about 664,000 to 1.2 million. Historians outside Turkey overwhelmingly call it what it was, genocide; the Turkish state still denies it.

Religion was part of it, and the families who lived through it never pretended otherwise. Armenians were Christians in a Muslim empire, and that line was used to mark them as outsiders and enemies. Conversion to Islam was one of the few ways a person could survive, and it was rarely a choice: an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted and absorbed into Turkish, Kurdish and Arab households, given new names and raised as someone else. Historians who study these cases describe them as part of the genocide itself. The Armenian community was meant to disappear, whether its members died or were absorbed.

It was not a war of one faith on another, though. The killing was planned by a nationalist government, and some of the people who saved Armenians were Muslims. In Aleppo and around Deir ez-Zor, Arab families and tribes hid deportees, fed them and took in children, some of whom they later returned to the Armenian community.

Aleppo sat at the hinge of the deportation routes. Columns heading for Deir ez-Zor passed through and around it, and the city became the place where the people who survived came out the other side. Some arrived alone, some with whatever was left of their families, many as children who no longer knew their own surnames.

Three waves

The arrivals did not stop in 1915. Near East Relief, the American aid organization that ran orphanages and relief work across the region, describes refugees reaching Aleppo in waves: first the survivors of the deportations, then more after the First World War, and then a new flood after France handed Cilicia back to Turkey in the early 1920s and the Armenians who had returned to towns like Marash, Aintab and Adana left again.

By 1923, by Near East Relief's own count, Aleppo had taken in nearly 100,000 refugees, about 79,000 of them Armenian. For a city of its size, that was an enormous number of people with nothing, arriving faster than anyone could house them.

From camps to neighborhoods

The first homes were camps: rows of tents and huts on the edges of the city. Over the next two decades the camps turned, slowly, into neighborhoods. Families built rooms one at a time, opened workshops in their front rooms, and founded hometown associations named after the places they had lost.

Refugees who settled in the Meydan district called their settlement Նոր Գիւղ, Nor Kiugh, "the New Village." The name says a lot: they had come from villages, and they intended to make one again. Neighborhoods like Nor Kiugh, Meydan and Azizieh became the places where Western Armenian was the language of the street, not just the home.

Կաթիլ-կաթիլ լիճ կը դառնայgatil-gatil lich gu tarnayDrop by drop, it becomes a lake.

Karen Jeppe

One of the people who shaped those years was not Armenian at all. Karen Jeppe was a Danish teacher who moved to Aleppo around 1921 to work with the refugees. She ran a rescue home for Armenian women and children who had been taken into Muslim households during the genocide, many of them forcibly converted, and who were now trying to get out and come back to their own people. Over the following years her rescue home sheltered nearly 2,000 of them.

About a third were reunited with relatives. Others went to work on an agricultural colony she set up, or left once they could support themselves. Jeppe stayed in Aleppo for the rest of her life. When she died in 1935 she was buried there, among the people she had worked for, and an Armenian school in Aleppo still carries her name.

The church at the center

For a people who had been targeted as Christians, the church was more than faith. The Cathedral of the Forty Martyrs, Սրբոց Քառասնից Մանկանց, in the old Jdeydeh quarter, was consecrated in 1491 on the site of an older church, and for centuries it was the seat of Aleppo's Armenian bishops and at times of the Catholicos of Cilicia himself. After 1915 it, and the new parishes built in the refugee neighborhoods, were where people registered births and marriages, ran schools, looked for lost relatives and buried their dead. The cathedral's compound was hit during the war in 2015.

A life in three languages

By the 1940s and 50s, Aleppo's Armenians had built something that looked a lot like a small country inside a city: schools, sports clubs, scout troops, choirs, theater groups, printing presses and newspapers, and political and cultural organizations of every kind. Children grew up switching between Western Armenian at home and school, Arabic on the street, and often Turkish from their grandparents, who had grown up speaking it in Anatolia.

The kitchen mixed the same way. Aleppo's own cooking, with its red pepper, pomegranate molasses, walnuts and sour cherries, sat next to the dishes each family had carried from Marash, Aintab or Kharpert. Ask an Aleppo Armenian about muhammara or kebab cooked with cherries, and you'll hear it described as both Aleppine and Armenian, which it is.

Leaving, and leaving again

Aleppo was a first home, and for many families it was not the last. In 1946 and 1947, thousands of Syrian Armenians answered the Soviet call to "return" to Armenia, a country most of them had never seen. In the decades after, others moved on to Beirut, and from there to the United States, Canada, France and Australia.

Even so, the community stayed large. One estimate puts Aleppo's Armenian population at around 150,000 in the 1960s. By 2012, just before the fighting reached the city, estimates were closer to 50,000 to 60,000. The war scattered them again: to Armenia, to Lebanon, and further. How many remain today is uncertain; recent estimates are a fraction of what was there before 2011.

For a lot of families now in Glendale, Montreal or Yerevan, that means the Aleppo chapter of the story has two endings: the grandparents who left in the 1960s or 70s, and the cousins who left a century after their great-grandparents first arrived.

Why it matters at your table

If your family passed through Aleppo, it probably shaped more of your life than you realize: the Armenian your grandparents spoke, the Arabic words that slip into it, the food, the songs, the schools they went to, even the way they talk about "the old country," which for some of them means Marash and for others means Aleppo itself.

Ask your grandparents

1. Which Aleppo neighborhood did we live in? What was the street called?
2. Which school did you go to, and who were your friends there?
3. Where was the family from before Aleppo?
4. What did you eat in Aleppo that you can't find anywhere else?
5. When did we leave, and who stayed?

Add questions to your list