"The touchiest subject in Turkey?
January 11, 2007
Earlier today, I was introduced to an 80 year-old Armenian-Turkish jeweller as a 'true resident of Istanbul', since his family has been living here for over 300 years. This really is rare, because most Turks living in Istanbul have roots in the city only going back a generation or two; they or their recent forebears came either from elsewhere in Turkey to avail themselves of the better economic opportunities in fast-growing Istanbul, or from territories of the former Ottoman empire during or shortly after its collapse. But it also served to remind me of something I've meant to write about, although it is a (somewhat) touchy subject in Turkey, depending on how it's approached: for years, historians, politicians, and others have debated the deaths of ethnic Armenians in central and eastern Turkey during the World War I, and whether they were systematically murdered by ethnic Turks and/or Turkish national forces in a genocidal manner. It's an incredibly murky subject (even the number of deaths is heavily disputed, ranging from several hundred thousand to over two million) and even objective historians have had great difficulties piecing together definitive analyses."
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