Eastern Turkey, of course, used to have a large Armenian population and a substantial Syriac Christian population. After the genocide of 1915, most of the surviving Armenians left the country, but in the Southeast there were still sizable communities in the 1960s and 70s (I had not realized this until the last two days). We visited a semi-museum in Diyarbakir set up as the "traditional Diyarbakir house", at least for the better-off. (This is a nice thing for tourists: because the traditional house is set up in a square around a central courtyard, walking down the streets you only see the walls of the houses, not the outdoor space where people congregate. This makes peeking in half-open doors pretty irresistable). The house had belonged to a rich Armenian family, and there are photographs and clothes and curtains / carpets etc. all through it. The last Armenians left Diyarbakir (there are probably a few left) in the 1980s and early 1990s during the civil war; most of the Syriac Christians did the same.

We visited Syriac churches in Marden and Diyarbakir (also, outside of Marden, a Syriac monestary that was pretty disappointing - a 10-minute guided tour by a guide who didn't do much more than explain what christians were.. the monestary is still active, but the monks hide while the tourists are let in) and got to speak with the priest in Diyarbakir. The only Armenian churches we've visited have been ruins or abandoned. (There are the ruins of a very large Armenian Catholic church in Diyarbakir, something I hadn't known existed). The Syriac communities in Mardin and Diyarbakir are only a few hundred each. The patriarchate was once in Mardin, but moved to Damascus a few centuries ago (Syria's population today is about 10 - 12% christian -- although in this part of the world these labels are more about who your grandparents were than what you believe).

A few things are striking. One just comes from architecture: there was a tremendous amount of give-and-take between Christianity and Islam. Many buildings went from being pre-christian temples to churches to mosques to churches to mosques, or some other pattern; mosques were modified from church patterns and later churches borrow heavily from Seljuk and later Islamic architecture.

The other thing that is striking is how many people I've met who are willing and even eager to talk about the history of the Armenians. I've met several people now who had Armenian grandparents (Mahmood's grandmother "converted" at 15 when her family was killed and a Kurd who liked how she looked married her); the mosque caretaker who showed us around today was quite cutting in his criticism for how christians had been treated; and all the young political activists - especially the Kurdish activists - we've been meeting talk about this history (and I don't usually volunteer that my great-grandparents were Armenian). This is a marked difference from most of the older generation (and from most of the younger generation, honestly -- nationalism is pretty bred-in-the-bone here, and the proud Turkish Secular Identity is premised on the idea of Turks as One Kind of People). But a lot of Kurds realize that their situation now is not that different from that of the Armenians (and the Greeks, and the Syriacs, and the Alawis) -- except that the Kurds are still there. Mahmood asked me to apologize to my father for the part the Kurds played in the Armenian genocide.

We also got a copy of a new travel book -- available for free download at www.anotherlookateast.org -- on East and Southeast Turkey put together by a group based in Diyarbakir and that writes history back into the region. I've only read the chapters on Diyarbakir and Urfa, but it's interesting (most of the official tourist plaques don't mention Armenian owners or communities and treat christian sites mostly as ancient historical curiosities). And a friend of Mahmood's (who works at a youth cultural centre here where they teach Kurdish dance & music and do theatre classes in Kurdish and Turkish) of a book that, among other things, lists the names of Armenians deported from Erzurum and the region in 1915 (this is the region my great-grandfather came from).

Could say more, but now I am off to take a shower. It is very very hot here.