“Her Name Was Not Seher, It Was Heranuş…”: Reading Narratives of Forced Turkification in Twenty-First Century Turkey

Abstract

The process of Turkish state formation coincides with systematic large-scale massacres, persecution and exclusion of certain groups-namely Armenians, Rums, Jews, Assyrians and Kurds. However, accounts of the process of Turkish nation-building which deal with its destructive side often overlook the "Turkification" of many non-Muslim women and children in the wake of the First World War. This study aims to fill this gap by drawing on personal narratives and testimonies of forceful assimilation published in the last decade in Turkey. As any discussion on the Armenian Genocide was one that was silenced until not so long ago in Turkey, and historians working on the topic of the Armenian Genocide or mass persecution of Rums often discover that data is either inaccessible or 'lost', it is of even greater importance that the personal narrative of survivors be integrated into history writing.