Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

Loneliness of Galileo: Grandpa, who are these Gavurs?Kamil was a student at the Veteran Mustafa Kemal Primary School in the central Anatolian town ofAkşehir in the early 1960s. Although the school building, a mysterious and frightening space, piquedKamil and his friends’ curiosity, only years later did they learn that it had once been a religious school:“You know the benches used in the churches for prayer, we studied on them. Of course that was a mysteryto us. They were saying, ‘Here is a kilise [church], or kirse [in the local dialect]’. There was a big organin the basement. We were all curious about it. When we touched a key, a sound came out of it andwe ran away. The teachers used to warn us not to touch it. But we knew nothing about the organ beingplayed in church. We weren’t told any of this, this was a secret. Like something hidden.”People don’t want to talk about these thingsAs a curious child, Kamil wanted to know the secret and constantly asked his grandfather: “Grandpa,who are these gavurs?” [“heathens”]. As he was begging his grandfather, “Grandpa please tell me, grandpatell me please” and pushing him, his grandfather tried to escape: “Oh Kamil, I’m tired! Oh, Kamil,don’t make me tell you these stories.” There were places such as gavur’s neighborhood, gavur’s house,gavur’s hamam [public bath] but the gavurs themselves weren’t there, nor did anybody talk about them,to satisfy his curiosity: “And also it was as if the state, or let’s not say the state, but somebody has forbiddenit somehow. People don’t want to speak about these things. I don’t exactly know if they wereafraid or what.”The knowledge that was hidden from the boy Kamil, “That this church was an Armenian church, thatthe people who prayed in this church were Christians of the Gregorian sect, that it was a religiousschool” he learned when he grew up.Although the teachers tried to keep the children away from the organ, his grandfather used his tirednessas an excuse and ‘somebody’ forbade speaking about it, it is impossible to cover the traces of the gavursor to inhibit a child’s curiosity:“Who was the guy who said, ‘the world keeps spinning even if you hang me’? Galileo, you know, theybring him to the inquisition. He says, ‘ok, the world isn’t spinning.’ While walking out the door, he says,‘mate, you are a fool, the world is spinning.’ ‘Come on, don’t act like that,’ he says. The Armenians andthe Turks have lived together for such long years, however much we might want to shut this out, end22