The Stones of Taru Village
By: Little Fiction
Tags: Turkey, Conflict, Nonfiction

Taru was destroyed in 1994.

“Our village was already dying by the time the planes came,” Haydar says. “A friend of mine — his parents ventured out one night with a flashlight to visit him on the other side of the village. You see how tiny it is here. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes away, but they were old and it took some time. They passed through a soldier checkpoint without incident. On the way back, an hour or two later, they were shot on approach at the same checkpoint. Murdered just like that. The soldier who pulled the trigger said he thought they were ‘terrorists’ when he saw the light of their flashlight bobbing along the trail, the exact same flashlight he had let through just an hour before. It never became news of course.”

Haydar has a sweeping bush of white hair and an equally bushy moustache that covers his upper lip. When he tells a story, I notice he sometimes holds the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip before he delivers the funny part. His wife is a tall elegant woman, with a long face and eyes that retain a somber light even when she smiles. With the tulip glasses of fresh tea, she serves German ginger cookies and cucumbers from their garden, then sits down at the end of the table where I, the foreign zava (groom), look completely lost. Everyone is speaking a mix of Turkish, which I know, and Kurmanji Kurdish, which I don’t. And somehow the climax of every story comes in Kurmanji.

“And then you wouldn’t believe who I saw coming!” Haydar says. “I swear, you’ll die laughing! It was…” Kurmanji! Everyone but me erupts into guffaws.

“I feel this land in my bones,” Suzan says, giving her husband a quiet smile and then looking back at me. “I’m proud we’ve come back, but I wasn’t born in this village, you know, but in Kumsor — where your wife’s ancestors came from a long long time ago. It means Qızılbaş, the red heads.”

“In Tunceli,” I say.

“In Dersim,” she corrects.

“So you speak Zaza?”

“I speak Dimilli. And also Kurmanji and Turkish.”

She is gentle, but adamant about these corrections. It’s not pride but a simple insistence on the truth. In Turkey there are two main branches of Kurd. One is popularly known as the Zazas, who historically immigrated first, probably before the Byzantines arrived. Taru village once stood and stands again on the border of their territory. To the east is the province of Bingöl, where my wife’s village lies hidden in a deep valley just a few kilometers away. To the west, is the province of Tunceli, the land once called Dersim on the maps and still called that by the people who live here — in private at least. It was here, in 1938, that the army of the new Turkish republic massacred tens of thousands of Zaza Kurds when they resisted assimilation.

Dersim was renamed Tunceli in an effort to obliterate its past, and some of its territory was redistributed to other provinces. The people were moved, too — a monstrous feat of social engineering aimed at diluting those that survived the massacres. The locals speak a variant of Kurdish called Zaza by people who aren’t Zaza, and increasingly by people who are. The name is supposedly pejorative — a mocking of the z sounds that pervade the language. Dersimlis particular about their culture and history call their language Dimili. Their religion is different, too. They are Alevis, not Sunnis Muslims, and don’t celebrate Ramadan or do the namaz or have mosques in their villages. Some don’t even consider themselves Muslims. My wife can remember her grandmother saying prayers to the moon when she was a girl.

Taru village is named for Mt. Taru (the name means “slope” in Dimilli), a rugged, sharp mountain north of my wife’s village. Taru is a volcanic crag of dark red rock which presides like a god over every settlement in the region along with its partner, Mt. Silbüs, which looms to the north of it — slightly higher but less harrowing. According to one of the many local legends, the two peaks were once lovers — a shepherd boy and his girl, Kurdish and Armenian, frozen now in stone for all time by the magic of a witch. The road over the mountain to the village is so treacherous that at one point, where the left half has washed away down into a ravine and the right side is covered in sharp rocks the size of a human head, I had to stop our tiny Chevrolet and tell my wife, “We can’t go on. We’ll destroy the car or fall off the edge.” It took her five minutes of intense argument to persuade me to move forward, each rocky crunch on the chassis making me grind my teeth.

“The road to Taru has always been horrible,” Haydar tells us once we are safe and sound in his dining room. “When I was a kid, I had to walk it all the way down to the town of Xolxol to go to school. Piles of snow and ice, and sometimes bears and wolves. Once I was trudging up the hill and suddenly at the top I noticed a huge wolf watching me approach. I just froze. We regarded each other for a moment — how do you do? — and then I slowly eased backward down the hill. I didn’t make it to school that day. Absent on account of wolves.”

Caves in Taru and Silbüs served as hiding places for Dimilli Kurds fleeing the Dersim massacres in 1938. Fugitives discovered there were bombed to every last man, woman, and child by the Turkish Air Force, led, according to village legend, by Atatürk’s adopted daughter, Sabiha Gökçen herself. This is not ancient history to the people of my wife’s village. A few nights later, at dinner, one of my wife’s cousins relates a story he heard from his grandmother.

“My grandmother remembers the massacres. Her voice still shakes when she tells it. She says that they all knew what was happening. Between the refugees and rumors and the bombings, the whole village figured that their turn was coming. It was September. The army was just on the other side of Silbüs. They heard that they were shooting everyone, so the village met in someone’s house to figure out what to do. They decided not to resist — they’d be caught on the road if they tried to run anyway, and all the hiding places in the mountains had been discovered. They all went home that night and locked up their houses — all the doors and windows were shuttered tightly. They said their goodbyes and waited for whatever was to come. My grandma was just a girl. She remembers clinging to her mother and watching the door all night, expecting at any moment someone to kick it in, drive them all outside, and shoot them. But the bullets never came. The government had called an end to the operations that night. They were saved by a hair’s breadth.”

But then came the 1980 coup and the Turkish war with the PKK. The local Kurds were tired of being told they didn’t exist by the Turkish government. They were tired of being arrested, tired of their culture being illegal, tired of their language being forbidden. All the villages in the area were given Turkish names — mentioning the Kurdish one once would have landed you in prison, charged with “splitting the country.”

In 2010, bowing to a new spirit of openness, all the village signs offered up the original — and true — names of the villages in parenthesis. When you turn onto the road to my wife’s village, a sign says SARITOSUN — (CONAG). The Turkish authorities have a funny way of putting truth in parentheses and quotes — the Armenian ‘genocide’ for example — and leaving lies well enough alone.

My wife remembers these times with great bitterness. “We used to bury our cassette tapes of Kurdish music. It wasn’t even safe to hide them in the house.”

Now, the language has been targeted once more. The Turkish government has declared that it will purge the country of “terrorists and traitors.” Kurdish mayors in eighty-nine Kurdish cities have been forcibly replaced by “trustees” sent from the ruling party. The city halls have been stripped of all signage bearing Kurdish words and festooned with Turkish flags. The images of proud young police and soldiers posing in front of the damage circulate all over Twitter. The bombings in Dersim have resumed as well. Journalists in the region have been detained for filming helicopters dropping explosives on a village.