A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.
(F. Engels, A Polish Proclamation, 1874)
There is a building in Gaziantep known as the Kurtuluş Camii. Anyone studying Turkish and the history of Türkiye is bound to know the phrase Kurtuluş Savaşı, the “War of Independence.” To translate the building’s name as “Mosque of Independence,” however, would be a mistake. Kurtuluş means, literally, “salvation, deliverance, liberation”—and it does so in the passive voice. Not the state of someone who saves, delivers, or liberates another, but the state of one who is saved, delivered, liberated, while he sits and waits for someone to come and save, deliver, and liberate him. There is a sad irony built into the name of the Antep mosque.
Two Sarkises
The building was erected in 1892–93 by Abdul Hamid II’s favourite architect Sarkis Balyan (whose masterpieces in Istanbul include the celebrated Beylerbeyi Palace on the Bosphorus, the Dolmabahçe clock tower, and the Pertevniyal Valide Sultan Mosque in Aksaray) together with a local stonemason, Sarkis Taşçıyan—whose surname is really an occupational byname: Turkish taş ‘stone’ → taşçı ‘one who works stone, a stonecutter,’ plus the traditional Armenian patronymic ending -yan.
Naturally you are wondering why two Armenians should have been chosen to build a mosque. There is no mystery about it: they were building an Armenian Apostolic church, dedicated to the Holy Mother of God.
1915
The Young Turk dictatorship deported the entire Armenian population of Aintab—as the province that became Gaziantep was then called—into the Syrian desert. The church was closed. At first the building was put to military use; then, for half a century, from the 1920s to the 1970s, it served as a prison. In 1986 it was converted into a mosque of Salvation, or of Deliverance, or of Liberation. (One does wonder who delivered whom, and from what.) It was restored in 2017, and five years later severely damaged in the catastrophic earthquake. His ways are past finding out.
