Graveyards have always struck me with their mystical images whilst traveling across vast plains of Central Asia, lonesome towns of the Caucasus and abandoned villages in the higher mountains of eastern Turkey. Graveyards dressed with carnations, portraits carved into black marble or simply in-scripts on plain grave stones... However travels always broaden our minds and bring many surprises opening new gates into an unknown side of foreign objects and our understanding of their hidden history.
Couple of years ago, I discovered a graveyard full of of peculiar grave stones whilst passing through a village in the higher Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey. Each one of the grave stones was stretching between a meter and three on various locations within the same village. Having stopped for a short break and a natural photo opportunity, I’d taken pictures of these grave stones. They attracted my interest because they did not carry an inscription whatsoever and their untamed and sharp forms created reflections in my mind of whispering memories of a long forgotten and hidden past. It was hard to tell whom these grave stones belonged and which civilisation might have brought them up to remain so eternal yet still unknown to future generations.
The same village would be another stop-over during my photographic journeys along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which I’ve documented extensively kilometre by kilometre from the Caspian to Mediterranean Seas between 2003 and 2007. This time, I would spend couple of hours in the village of Geben (province of Kahramanmaras) and I engaged in pleasant conversations with village youngsters who had formed a village development association. Having spent years in eastern Anatolia on various trips, this small town and its people seemed different in many ways. They were curious about social development projects and played an active role in establishing small rural businesses. They were open to new ideas and came across extraordinarily liberal in their political views.
Youngsters at the village association kept our contact alive and invited me to another meeting while I was in the region on a different photo shoot. This time, they talked about their society openly and expressed an interest in an oral history project to be implemented with village elders. According to the planned “amateur” oral history project, youngsters would meet village elders and ask them various questions about their recent past including common life with Armenians who had lived in this region side by side with Turks just like anywhere else in Anatolia until their deportation in 1915.
The oral history project never attracted any institutional or financial support but the idea was interesting and youngsters were keen to undertake their interviews with elders. Having received methodological support from Ozge Adiguzel, who worked as a social development specialist in the region, interviews were conducted with over a dozen people in the village and some of them resulted in interesting transcripts presenting thought-provoking memories about common life with Armenians. They’d also included stories of some Armenians who converted to Islam either as individuals or in groups before and during the deportation. These people had intermarried with sons and daughters of Turkish families and formed a new identity for those who are still called “Dönükler - The Converts”. As the first round of interviews was conducted, I decided to film a documentary about this story and traveled to the Taurus Mountains in August 2006 to start filming work.
I truly believed in the importance of documenting this oral history project which had no political or official motives whatsoever where the only drive was village youngsters’ curiosity about their own past. Nevertheless, I was also aware of the sensitivity of filming a documentary about the Armenian issue in Turkey which still is a sensitive subject, provoking anger and protest against critics of the official Turkish policy as well as condemnation of some critical intellectuals to prison sentences and public dismay.
While developing my concept for “Whispering Memories”, I decided to use the camera as an observer and exclude myself as the director from any role where I would engage in active questionnaire with village elders who were directly interviewed by their youngsters. The result was a 42 minute long documentary film simply constructed of sound-bites acquired in two consecutive years between 2006 and 2007. A didactic narration was avoided but a visual story line was put together by including a three-day traditional summer wedding representing the continuation of generations and the mixture of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds in rural Turkey.
The stories were at times not clear enough as first hand witnesses had already passed away, but some of the interviewees talked very sharp and told what was truly remembered and, how and why Armenians left the village in 1915. Some of the memories -at the first instance- sounded vague and insignificant but those reading between the lines will find “Whispering Memories” as agonising as the sharp edges of grave stones which had struck me at the first glance.
Mehmet Binay / Director
“Whispering Memories”
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