Panoramic view of the old town of Urfa, seen from the citadel (source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Eanl%C4%B1urfa#/media/Datei:Urfaskyline2.jpg)
Every April 24, I remember a story I accidentally became part of nearly a decade ago—something that seemed small at first but turned out to be one of the most striking personal stories I’ve ever witnessed.
In late September 2016, just as I was settling into the first weeks of my master’s studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, I went to our department’s welcome party. I arrived an hour early by mistake. The room was still being set up, and only two PhD students were there—one from Turkey, the other from Japan. They let me stay, so I sat down and began reading a book I had just bought from the campus bookstore, something on dependency theory.
A few minutes later, the Turkish student approached and asked where I was from. When I told her, she said she had guessed—we seemed to come from the same part of the world, based on how I looked. We made small talk until the Japanese student joined us, and then the Turkish student began explaining the historical tensions between Turks and Armenians. She spoke about the historical Armenian presence in what is now eastern Turkey. But when it came to the Armenian Genocide, we disagreed.
The party got underway shortly after, and I didn’t see her again. Honestly, I forgot about the conversation.
But then, months later, on April 23, 2017, while I was staying at my aunt’s place in London, I got an email—from her.
She had found my contact information somehow and reached out with a message that clearly came from a place of emotional upheaval. She told me she’d been doing some reading about the Armenian Genocide and had stumbled upon something unexpected. Her great-grandmother’s surname was Rastgeldyan (Ռասթգելդյան). She saw it mentioned in an article by an Armenian journalist in Radikal, a Turkish newspaper, about crypto-Armenians from Urfa.
It shook her. She had grown up Turkish, unaware of this buried family history. Now, she had questions, and I was the only Armenian she knew.
I helped as much as I could. I found the article, translated parts of it, and sent it to her. A couple of weeks later, when I was back in Norwich from London, we met in person and she told me about what happened after her discovery.
Within days, she had begun confronting her family. Most denied it. One uncle admitted it. Another relative accepted it without hesitation. Just three days after the email, she was publicly posting about the genocide on social media.
And suddenly, all the pieces of her life started to rearrange themselves. Her family, though nominally Muslim, had never practiced. The women didn’t wear hijabs. Her uncles were artists and musicians, something very unusual for those parts of modern-day Turkey. They celebrated holidays differently. They dyed eggs on Nowruz—a tradition that didn’t make sense in Turkish or Islamic contexts, but made perfect sense for Armenians.
She discovered more. Her great-grandmother had likely married an Armenian man. Their name had been Turkified to Rastgeldi, but traces of their origins were everywhere. The family had once lived near St. Gevorg’s Church in Urfa, which had been turned into a mosque. After the genocide, one branch of the family fled to Syria and became Rastkelenyan.
She found out her Syrian relatives had made it to Armenia and opened a restaurant in Yerevan. It was mentioned in a Forbes article. She traced part of her lineage to Toros Rastkelenyan, a French-Armenian sculptor. When she showed me a photo of her uncle, I saw the resemblance immediately.
Until recently, the family only married within itself. They even had Armenian nannies. The history was hidden but never gone—it had simply been waiting for someone like her to ask the right questions.
Back then, in 2017, her life was already beginning to change. She had started reclaiming her Armenian identity. She wanted to learn the language. She dreamed of visiting Armenia. She was reaching out to relatives scattered across the world. She was even thinking about taking back the surname Rastgeldyan.
She told me she felt betrayed—that her family had hidden this part of her, stolen it without ever speaking of it. But she also felt grateful. Grateful to have found it, to have something to hold on to. She saw herself as a link in a chain of survival—a living thread connecting the past to the future.
And she was proud. Proud that the Armenian alphabet had been created in her ancestral city—Urfa, ancient Edessa. Proud that her ancestors, even in silence and danger, had held on long enough for someone like her to remember.
Unfortunately, we eventually lost touch. After I graduated from the University of East Anglia, I lost access to my university email—the only channel through which we had kept in contact. Since then, so much has changed—both in my life and in Armenia’s. And yet, I still think about her, especially on Genocide Remembrance Day. I often wonder how her journey unfolded. Did she learn Armenian? Did she ever make it to Armenia? Wherever life took her, I hope she found the answers she was searching for.
Tigran Grigoryan