Ghosts of the old Middle East
- January 7, 2025
- Hannah Lucinda Smith
- Themes: History, Middle East, Turkey
The cosmopolitanism of the old Middle East is in terminal decline. The travails of Syria’s Armenian community are its latest manifestation.
A Christmas tree towers over Republic Square in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, twinkling with thousands of white lights. A thousand miles away in Damascus, Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Islamist rebel leader formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, meets the country’s Christian clerics, as millions of Syrians celebrate the end of the Assad regime. In between these two places and their Christmases are tens of thousands of Syrian Armenians, part of the fragmenting kaleidoscope scattered between their two countries and beyond.
Armenians, who celebrate Christmas today in the Armenian Apostolic Church, are part of the patchwork of nations, religions and languages that once made up not only Syria, but the whole Levantine region. For five centuries the Ottoman Empire ruled over not only millions of Muslims, but also millions of Jews and Christians of various denominations, as well as sects of Shia Islam. In 1906, when the population of the empire reached its height of 20.4 million, around three quarters were Muslim and the rest a mix of Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Roma and others. The Ottoman Empire delegated the administration of the minorities through its millet system. The millets were semi-autonomous communities that were allowed to govern their own religious affairs, but which were also forced to pay extra taxes, with fewer legal rights than the empire’s Muslim citizens. Armenians numbered around two million in Anatolia and Istanbul by the turn of the 20th century, and had risen to prominence in banking and business.
Their protected status came to an end with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Between the spring of 1915 and the autumn of 1916, up to 1.5 million Armenians and other Christians were massacred or deported from Anatolia. Tens of thousands headed across the southern border into Syria, where they swelled the existing Armenian community, turning it into the fourth biggest ethnic group in the country and one of the biggest Armenian diasporas in the world.
There were up to 100,000 Syrian Armenians living in Bashar al Assad’s Syria before 2011, depending on whose figures you believe. Sarkis Balkhian, who monitors the community and its migrations, insists those figures were an expedient overestimation for the regime. Assad, like his father, Hafez, before him, played on Syria’s cosmopolitan inheritance, co-opting the minority groups by stoking their fears of Sunni Muslims, who make up the country’s majority. He also handed out economic and political favours, particularly to his own sect, the Alawites, followers of a branch of Shia Islam. Balkhian reckons the real numbers of Armenians pre-conflict to have been closer to 70-80,000, with the biggest community centred in his home city, Aleppo. There, the Armenian Quarter of Jdeydeh was home to around 50,000 Syrian Armenians, as well as monuments including the 15th-century Armenian Apostolic Church of Forty Martyrs. Although, like most Christian communities, the Armenians largely stayed out of the conflict, Jdeydeh came under constant rocket attack after rebels entered parts of the city in 2012. The city’s minorities, including the Armenians, were terrorised by the fear of Isis, Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups. Most left, some on evacuation flights organised by the Armenian government. By the time Assad fled his country on 8 December, there were between 15,000 and 35,000 Armenians left in Syria. Most who left went first to Armenia, which offered automatic protection and citizenship. Around a third stayed there; the others have moved on to Europe and North America.
The Syrian Armenians I spoke to in Yerevan, a week after Assad’s sudden fall, were cautiously optimistic about the future. Assad’s regime terrified everyone, they told me, even minorities like the Armenians, which it professed to protect. Nobody was mourning Assad’s departure. But they were conscious, too, of the roots of the group that is now in control. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria before Al-Sharaa embarked on a radical rebrand. He is now wearing western-style suits and promising to protect minority rights, although some early edicts and appointments in his transitional government point towards a form of Sharia law; videos that have emerged online appear to show the new justice minister, Shadi al Waisi, overseeing the death penalty being meted out to two women in 2015 for adultery and prostitution. Everyone in Yerevan is waiting to see how it unfolds before they decide whether to go back. Balkhian’s family have already sold their house in Aleppo. The Armenian government shut down its consulate in Damascus on the day Assad fled, and withdrew its humanitarian peacekeepers from Aleppo, where they had been deployed since 2019 to protect its remaining community.
‘The vast majority of Armenians who remain in Syria today are those who no longer have the financial means to move elsewhere,’ Balkhian said. ‘Depending on what kinds of laws or restrictions are imposed, or not, they will make their decision. Some will leave, for sure. Some might go back.’
Those that do stay or return will inhabit shrunken communities. For many, the question is not whether cosmopolitanism in Syria can be saved, but whether it is worth the personal cost to do so.
Cosmopolitanism seems to be in terminal decline across the Middle East; the decimation of Syria’s Armenian community is just its latest retreat. The chaos of this century and the rise of radical Islamism, particularly in Iraq and Syria has accelerated the flight of the minorities. But the process began in the 19th century, says Michael Vatikiotis, author of Lives Between the Lines: ‘Western European pressure on the Ottomans forced the Sublime Porte’ – the empire’s central government – ‘to assert more decentralised bureaucratic rule over the Middle East, which then fed into nascent Islamic and later Turkish nationalism that fuelled the anti-Christian violence of the mid-19th century.’
In 1860, Muslims turned on their Christian neighbours during three days of pogroms in Damascus. The same year also saw violence between Christians and Druze in the Lebanese mountains, and these two events ‘then led to the great genocides on Armenians and Greeks in Anatolia’.
Vatikoitis writes from a personal viewpoint. He is the son of a Greek Orthodox Palestinian father and a Levantine Jewish mother from Egypt via Italy. His is an intricate, in some ways typical, story of the old Middle East. But the innate diversity he describes through his family portraits has eroded since the implosion of the Ottoman millet system, imperfect as it was. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 dealt a further blow, casting Palestinians as second class and driving them out of their ancestral lands. The secular nation states that replaced the empire, including Assad’s Syria, used sectarianism ‘as a useful state tool’, he says.
In Turkey, the withered core of the Ottoman Empire, the disappeared millets have left their marks. In the centre of one eastern Anatolian city, where between 50,000 to 60,000 Armenians were massacred, the remaining walls of what was once a sizeable church are now used as the perimeter of a car park that charges 50 TL per hour. Many of the ancient vineyards once tended by the Greeks and Armenians – the empire’s vintners – were taken over by Muslim farmers, who instead produced the grapes for fruit or pekmez, a sucker punch-sweet unfermented grape syrup. Over the past decade, and in the face of Erdoğan’s punitive alcohol regulations, a generation of young Turkish wine enthusiasts have rediscovered and bought or cajoled back the vines for wine production, rediscovering the grape varieties the Greeks and Armenians used.
In Istanbul, the ghosts appear in unexpected places. Wander around the backstreets of the inner districts, and you will find churches, synagogues and crumbling wooden houses that once belonged to Greek families who were forced out of the city, and out of Turkey, during the pogroms of the 1950s and 1970s. The government in Ankara still displays the relics of Ottoman cosmopolitanism like trinkets, sending congratulations to its minorities on their religious holidays. In 2023 the first new church in a hundred years opened on Turkish soil, yet in recent years Erdoğan has also converted ancient churches including the Hagia Sophia, once the seat of eastern Christianity, into mosques. The churches and synagogues that are still operating are locked behind razor wire, under constant threat from attack by radical Islamists.
Human ghosts are more stubborn. Over lunch overlooking the stormy Bosphorus on a December afternoon, a middle-aged and middle-class Istanbulite told me how her Armenian grandmother, orphaned in 1915, had been taken in and sheltered by a Muslim family as the pogroms progressed across Anatolia. She was brought up as a Turkish Muslim but never forgot her Armenian origin, and told her grandchildren about it quite matter-of-factly.
‘But she was always different to other elderly women, the way she sat upright and dressed well,’ the storyteller said.
In Turkey, in recent years, many others have started examining their family roots on an instinct that there are century-old secrets to uncover. In Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of the Kurdish region and once home to a large Armenian community, a handful of Kurds have converted to Christianity on discovering their Armenian origins. The descendants of some of the Istanbul Greeks who were expelled in the mid-20th century have returned to reclaim their properties and their Turkish citizenship – Erdoğan’s government introduced that right in the 2000s, his liberalising first decade. And across Turkey and beyond, small minority enclaves cling on in their ancestral lands, trying to find shelter in whichever new regime sweeps to power. The fading echoes of cosmopolitanism will inevitably live on, says Rana Haddad, a Syrian-British novelist; the question is in what form.
‘We cannot ever have a mono-cultural, mono-religious state on this planet in the 21st century. It’s unrealistic. Even what Israel is trying to do is a fantasy,’ Haddad says. ‘In this highly connected world we have to have cosmopolitanism. Ideally we should aim to have it not under totalitarian religious or secular ideology.’
The fate of Damascus and Yerevan, and the people in between, is tied through Istanbul once more. A century on from the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, which rang the death knell on the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, is trying to recast a Sultan-like influence across the region. From the start of the Arab Spring he and Ahmet Davutoglu, his erstwhile foreign minister, backed opposition groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist network to which both men are close. In Egypt, the Brotherhood briefly rose to power with Mohammed Morsi, who replaced the deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak – until Morsi himself was toppled by military coup two years later.
For a decade, Erdoğan and the Brotherhood were largely marginalised in the Arab world, but the fall of Assad has made both major players again. In Syria, Ankara has provided both direct and covert support to Al Sharaa’s HTS and other Islamist rebel factions, and is now set to wield huge political power in post-Assad Damascus. Ibrahim Kalin, Turkey’s spy chief, was the first high-level foreign visitor to arrive at the city’s airport, five days after Assad boarded a jet there and fled to Moscow. A week later Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, met with Al-Sharaa for a stage-planned coffee on Mount Qasioun. Several high-level appointments in Syria’s transitional government have Turkish connections: the foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, has been studying at Istanbul’s Sabahattin Zaim University – a private institution set up in 2010 by a foundation currently headed by Erdoğan’s son, Bilal. Shibani took his master’s there in 2022, with a thesis titled ‘The impact of Arab uprisings on Turkish foreign policy 2010-2020’, and he was studying for a PhD there until Assad fell. The new Aleppo governor, Azzam al-Gharib, completed a master’s degree in Quranic interpretation at Turkey’s Bingol University last year, having stepped back from his previous role as a commander of various Islamist rebel groups. Several other district governors, in Latakia, Damascus and Idlib, have been appointed direct from their former roles as commanders of Turkish-backed militias.
Optimists take Al Sharaa at his word when he promises to protect Syria’s diversity. Cynics point to some of his government’s early rulings, including proposed educational reforms that would remove the theory of evolution from school textbooks, along with figures from Syria’s pre-Islamic history. References to ‘defending the nation’, the bedrock of Baathist brainwashing, would be replaced with ‘defending Allah’. (The education minister backtracked after an outcry from Syrians over the changes, insisting that an expert committee will review the curriculum).
The developments will do little to persuade the Armenians of Jdeydeh and elsewhere in Syria to return. But as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist influence spreads across the Levant, an alternative ‘crude form’ of cosmopolitanism in the Middle East may be emerging in the Gulf States, Vatikiotis says: ‘Commercial centrality and transactional forms of government have created environments for a diverse array of people to make their fortunes and live together amicably, and much like the Ottoman model of old, in controlled environments, that promote collective prosperity.’
Almost 90 per cent of the population of the Emirates are expats, drawn there by low taxation and work opportunities. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hopes to turn his once-insular country into a tourism and investment hub. Armenia and Saudi Arabia officially established diplomatic relations in November 2023, and there is already a small population of Armenians in the Gulf State, according to the Joshua Project, which tracks small and threatened Christian communities around the world. The Armenian foreign minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, visited Riyadh in April and spoke warmly of his country’s deep ties across the Arab world (something that Yerevan is seeking to revive as it tries to distance itself from Vladimir Putin’s Russia). The two countries are also aligned on their recognition of Palestine – the Armenian community in Jerusalem also accuse the Israelis of carrying out land grabs on their sites, similar to those against the Palestinians in the West Bank.
Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have realised that, if they are to attract global labour and capital, they need to loosen their strict Islamic laws and intolerance of religious diversity, although both remain highly authoritarian and brutally intolerant of dissent. Neither are they tolerant of their own indigenous minorities, nor, in the case of Dubai, much concerned about the source of the wealth sloshing in. But if, as Vatikiotis argues, the Gulf is on track to be ‘a haven of new cosmopolitanism that ends at the border between the Hejaz and the Levant’, then perhaps the pouting Western influencers and money-launderers are simply the current versions of the foreigners who flocked to the Ottoman Empire to trade and do business, while the Middle East’s indigenous minority groups may one day find a new form of shelter there.
More difficult to recreate, though, is the elaborate weave of that old Levantine cosmopolitanism, which is being pulled apart further with each new crisis. Two 20-something sisters I meet in Yerevan tell me of their own messy family roots: officially Syrian Armenians, they tell me that their ancestors were in fact Assyrian Christians, who were also targeted in 1915. They adopted an Armenian identity in order to merge with a larger minority group in their new home, and today the family speaks Armenian, Arabic and Kurdish. It’s a lineage of which the sisters are proud, but neither will they return to their birth country, they say – the threats against their freedoms, as Christians and as women, are too great.
‘I think cosmopolitanism is worth saving, but we have to be realistic,’ Balkhian says. ‘Over the past 60 or 70 years the social fabrics have disintegrated thanks to conflicts and tyranny. And that is a loss for each country.’