The Armenian monastery of Varagavank stands teetering on the brink of collapse in the mountains above Lake Van, in eastern Anatolia. Built a thousand years ago, and once the seat of an archbishop, it was forsaken in 1915. The monastery's buildings have more recently been used as stables, as a Kurdish villager named Mehmet Coban explained. “The manure was piled this high,” he said, marking the spot with his hand. His clan found the church like this when they settled in the former Armenian village in the 1950s, he recalled. Having shoveled out the dung, Coban now shows visitors around the church and dreams of making the village rich by turning it into a tourist destination. When he enlisted authorities to support the project a couple of years ago, it emerged that a prominent Turkish media executive in Istanbul held the deed to the monastery. His grandfather had amassed vast landholdings around Van after World War I.
“The village is mine,” the executive confirmed to the daily Taraf in 2012. Although he agreed to cede the church to Turkish authorities for restoration, his ownership of an Armenian village was not contested. This is not entirely unexpected, considering that Turkish prisons, airports and even the former presidential palace are built on what was once Armenian property and that treasure hunting for the buried belongings of deported Armenians remains something of a national pastime. While Turkey still struggles with recognizing moral responsibility for the fate of the Armenians, material restitution seems even more distant. “The mere term ‘compensation’ instills fear in Turkey,” wrote Cengiz Aktar, a prominent Turkish political scientist, in an op-ed for Repair: Armenian-Turkish Platform. Nevertheless, he said, “We must find ways to talk about it.”