With the killing and forced deportation of more than 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in 1915 by forces of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the steeples have long since crumbled and Mr. Teke’s family, like so many that once prospered here, have left for Istanbul and beyond to Lebanon, Canada and the U.S.
“All my life I’ve fought to stay here, and I’ve paid a heavy price,” Mr. Teke said as he thumbed gold rosary beads clutched in his palm. “I will stay here until I die.”
Some 250 miles away in the city of Diyarbakir, where an Armenian community also once flourished, Yervant Bostanci is the only person of Armenian descent known to have accepted an invitation from municipal officials to Armenians abroad to return.
After two decades in Los Angeles, Mr. Bostanci relocated to the predominantly ethnic Kurdish city two years ago. A musician, he is the first Armenian member of a prestigious, government-funded choir.
While a milestone, Mr. Bostanci is too mindful of the bloody history that haunts Turkey to suggest Armenian representation in a state-funded organization could prompt many others to resettle in the land of their forebears.
“Last year, our choir sang the first Armenian song,” he said. “It’s a positive step, but I’m sure no one else will return. They have built their lives elsewhere.”
Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the day that Ottoman authorities began rounding up ethnic Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul, then known to Christians as Constantinople. By the end of 1915, the splintering empire’s minority Armenian communities were wiped out.
The horrors and trauma of 1915 still reverberate, not only in the lives of Mssrs. Teke and Bostanci but for Armenians scattered across the world. At the center of the anguish is the bitter controversy over what to call the bloodshed itself.
Turkey still vehemently disputes any suggestion that Ottoman forces committed genocide in 1915, saying the deaths occurred as part of war in which Turks were also killed by Armenians.
Most independent scholars have described it as genocide, however, and more than 20 nations have formally recognized it as such. When Pope Francis and the European Parliament voiced agreement last week, Ankara withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican in protest and accused Rome of joining an anti-Turkish conspiracy.
U.S. officials on Tuesday said President Barack Obama would stop short of labeling the 1915 bloodshed as genocide. On Friday, however, parliament in Germany—Turkey’s biggest trading partner and the home to its largest overseas community—is expected to recognize the Armenian genocide for the first time.
The consequences of the slaughter that convulsed a waning empire are more than semantic and historical.
Armenian communities are still all but nonexistent in eastern and southern Turkey. The fate of property seized by Turks and ethnic Kurds from deported Armenians is still disputed. And Ankara still has no diplomatic relations with present-day Armenia.
The question of identity still weighs heavily, too. The Armenian church is one of Christianity’s oldest and historically, Armenians are almost exclusively Christian. But to escape persecution in 1915 and afterward, many ethnic Armenians converted to Islam and began living as Turks.
Hundreds of these so-called hidden Armenians, while remaining Muslims, have publicly acknowledged their family and Christian roots since the reopening of the Diyarbakir’s Armenian church in 2011.
Yet tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians and their descendants across Turkey remain in the shadows, reluctant or ashamed to admit their heritage for fear of discrimination.
Mr. Teke is one ethnic Armenian, however, who refuses either to hide or leave.
Born in 1955 in the villa he still calls home, Mr. Teke grew up in the shadow of the 1915 killings. A 1914 census put the number of ethnic Armenians in Kayseri at 50,000, making it the largest Armenian community in the region.
Within 12 months, only a few hundred Armenians were left, according to historians, as Armenians were killed or forced on marches that almost automatically meant death from freezing temperatures or starvation.
Some 30 members of Mr. Teke’s family were among those killed in the marches. His grandfather, a lieutenant in the Ottoman army who survived the carnage only because he was away fighting in modern-day Syria, came back to Kayseri to find that his wife had been taken by a Turkish officer and the rest of family had vanished. The family home had also been looted.
“When he returned he didn’t even have a pillow to rest his head on,” Mr. Teke said. Nodding to a small wooden dresser stuffed with old photographs, he added: “This was the only thing he had left because we hid it in the cellar.”
Photos: Remnants of Armenian Communities in Turkey
Churches, graveyard, homes are still visible in the cities of Kayseri and Diyarbakir
In grade school, Mr. Teke’s own relations with Turks, many of whom lived in houses that had been seized from Armenians, were often hostile.
“At school, there were only two of us Armenians and we were always in fights. They called me gavur—or infidel—and said my family would be forced to leave.”
While most Armenians went abroad to escape the harassment, Mr. Teke fought. In 1973, two Turkish neighbors armed with clubs told him and his family to leave Kayseri or face the consequences. He stabbed both men, neither one fatally but drawing a long prison sentence. He remained undaunted.
“My mother called me in jail and said the mayor was going to scrap the last church in town and that the Armenians were all leaving,” he said. “I swore then I would never let that happen.”
After his release under a general amnesty in 1979, Mr. Teke had other run-ins with local authorities, but his tough-guy image helped fend off would-be attackers as did, he said, two plaster lions mounted strategically on the gate of his house. “If they try to attack here they’ll face a lion, not a dog,” he said.
During a recent tour of his Kayseri neighborhood, Mr. Teke pointed at the grand homes that once belonged to Armenians and the boarded-up workshops that Armenian artisans and traders formerly occupied. And then there is the city’s one remaining church. It’s only a tourist attraction now—there is no congregation left. Only an Armenian guard, who recently relocated from Istanbul, maintains the church.
“Everything here is Armenian, and it’s built to last. They never thought they’d leave this place,” he said.
While Mr. Teke is the last witness to an Armenian community facing death throes, Mr. Bostanci has become a flicker of hope for another Turkish city’s effort to revive its Armenian heritage.
Nicknamed Udi—after the 12-string instrument, or oud, that he plays—Mr. Bostanci was born in Diyarbakir in 1957 to a family that was saved from the 1915 massacres by ethnic Kurds in nearby Lice.
His family left Diyarbakir for Istanbul when ethnic tensions along with political violence flared across the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He fled Turkey altogether after a man threatened to shoot him for singing an Armenian song at an Istanbul nightclub. He settled in southern California, playing at concerts, weddings and folk celebrations for the area’s large Armenian community.
Mr. Bostanci first returned to Diyarbakir for a concert in 2004. He wept when he saw the dilapidated condition of Surp Giragos church, the largest Armenian church in the Middle East.
Yet nine years later, he resettled in the city, married a local woman of Armenian descent and joined the State Classical Turkish Music Choir.
“I was certain I’d never return here…But it’s been wonderful, although I do miss the States,” he said over a meal of homemade wine and white cheese.
What drew Mr. Bostanci to resettle in Diyarbakir was the plan by the Kurdish regional government to restore Armenian buildings and offer Armenian language lessons, as well as its public acknowledgment that the events of 1915 constituted a genocide.
Kurdish authorities and Armenians in Istanbul and abroad eventually raised funds for the restoration of Surp Giragos, which was completed in 2011.
Such moves have encouraged hundreds of so-called hidden Armenians to rediscover their family roots in Christianity. Armen Demirdjian, 55, was raised as a Kurd after Kurdish tribesmen rescued his Armenian father from the forced marches. He now works as a guard at the church and recently started using his original family name, Demirdjian, instead of Adburrahim to identify himself.
“My family had kept the secret to protect us children. Learning about Armenian past was first very confusing for me…but now I’m proud,” he said.
Abdullah Demirbas, former mayor of Diyarbakir’s Sur municipality, said the city has taken pains to encourage Armenians living abroad to visit or resettle in the city.
But like Mr. Bostanci, Ergun Ayik said an Armenian revival in Turkey is still more a hope than a reality.
“I don’t think Armenians will return to their ancestral lands…But then again, if I didn’t have any hope, I wouldn’t be doing this,” said Mr. Ayik, a Diyarbakir-born Armenian who oversaw the church restoration.
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By Joe Parkinson and Ayla Albayrak http://www.wsj.com/articles/one-hundred-years-later-a-bloodbath-haunts-turkey-1429695006?tesla=y