AURORA PRIZE

Rakel’s father Siyament Yağbasan and mother Delal had six children. Their second, Rakel, was just eight years old when her mother passed away. Rakel’s father remarried and had seven more children. The family spoke only Kurdish and was mainly engaged in farming. 

 

When Rakel was eight and a half years old, a group of clergy visited her village at the behest of Constantinople Patriarch Archbishop Shnork Kaloustian. At the time, Christian clergy from Istanbul traveled throughout Anatolia looking for Armenians and other Christians who survived the Genocide. Hrant Güzelyan and Orhan Younkesh, representatives of the Armenian Evangelical Church, took several groups of Armenian children back to Istanbul in order to give them an education. Rakel Dink and her two brothers were in the second group of kids. “We got to Bolis in order to learn Armenian, to read and write. There was no school near our village. No one knew how to read,” Rakel remembers. The new arrivals were housed at the Tuzla camp for Armenian children (Camp Armen), just outside Istanbul.

Hrant and Rakel at Camp Armen

Many years later, Hrant wrote in the Agos newspaper: “ Naturally, April 23 is a special date for me. It’s also the wedding day of my dear wife and I. The night that connects April 23 to April 24 is the night we gave life to our first child. It was neither April 23 nor April 24. It was most probably April 23.5.”

 

When the founder of Camp Armen Hrant Güzelyan was arrested (the Turkish state charged him with training terrorists at the camp), Hrant and Rakel assumed responsibility for running the camp until 1983, when the government closed it down for good and stripped the Armenian community of its ownership rights. In 2015, the owner of the property decided to demolish the camp building, but due to the 175-day-long struggle waged by Armenian youth from Istanbul, the camp was returned to the community. 

Hrant became involved in writing, working for the Istanbul-based Armenian newspaper Marmara. In the 1980s, he was arrested for three times for his political views. In 1993 he founded the Aras Publishing House together with some friends. Three years later, realizing the importance of familiarizing Turkish society with Armenian issues, Hrant founded Agos (Furrow), the first Turkish-language Armenian weekly in Turkey. 

 

“In Turkey, whenever there was a minor problem they would immediately blame ‘enemy Armenians.’ Labeling Armenians as the enemy, they would create their own politics. This became an important issue for Hrant: that we had to show ourselves, that they had to learn about our problems from us,” Rakel explains. The first edition of Agos was published during Easter of 1996. “The main headline read: ‘Behold, we have dug a furrow for you. Whoever has good seeds, let them come and sow them.’ Agos continues, but he…” Rakel laments.

“We did everything together. When they picked ‘Agos’ for the name, I said it was a very nice name. There is the parable of Jesus, where the kind farmer is sowing seeds and digs a furrow. How wonderful to connect it in such a way!” Rakel exclaims.

 

Rakel experienced mixed feelings of pride and unease through the entire period of Hrant’s activities. “Sometimes the old women would say, ‘My boy, we are afraid for you. Don’t talk so boldly.’ But, on the other hand, they were proud and glad that someone was speaking up for them. I too was proud. I too liked that free speech of his. After the crime, I sometimes feel guilty that I never held him back. That I never said, ‘enough,’ ‘until when?’ If only I had said it more…” remembers Rakel.

 

“My dear, who can forget your writings and sayings? What darkness can force us to forget? Can fear? Persecution? The pleasures of the material world? Perhaps death? No, my dear, nothing can force us to forget.”