Understanding Reyhanlı Via my Family

Reyhanlı is my homeland. I am the descendant of immigrants. The bombs which blasted through the town of Reyhanlı in the province of Hatay hit and hurt our friends. We bled on the inside along with everyone else. While sharing in the pain of those from Reyhanlı -as well as the refugees from Syria- I thought back to my own roots.
 
The year was 1864. My father's grandfather emerged defeated from the war that czarist Russia had led against the people of the Northern Caucasus. Of his five siblings, only my great-grandfather had survived the war and the post-war massacres. When czarist Russia decided to go ahead with plans to ethnically cleanse the northwest reaches of the Caucasus, my great-grandfather was forced into exile from the lands which he had been born in.
 
With assistance from the Ottoman state, he took a boat from Novorossiysk to Varna and from there to a village not far from Pristina in Kosovo. There, he wound up getting married and setting up a life for himself. But the Balkans were not fated to escape the general atmosphere of war; when the 1877-78 Ottoman-Russian War resulted in the loss of the Balkans for the Ottoman state, my great-grandfather traded his goods for gold, stitching the gold into the inside of his belt, and headed towards Ottoman soil with my great-grandmother, who was known for her red hair.
 
And so a whole boatload of forced immigrants to the Ottoman state arrived in Hayfa (Haifa in present-day Israel). When it turned out that the Hayfa provincial governor was a relative of ours, my great-grandparents wound up staying for quite a while in Hayfa. Much later, they settled more permanently in Hatay-Reyhanlı. Large numbers of these immigrants, unaccustomed to the heat and malaria, died every day. After just one year, only a handful of the original group of immigrants were still alive. As for my great-grandfather, he recorded his memories in a notebook, which my father later wound up publishing.
 
My grandfather was initially a government clerk in Halep (present-day Aleppo) and later became a judge there. My father, who started primary school in Halep, used to play with other children at the base of Halep Castle. My grandfather was involved in the struggle to reclaim Hatay from the French. As for my other grandfather, my mother's father, he was known as the person who started the uprising against the very brief British occupation of Hatay. Out of respect for my grandfather, his daughter, my mother, was brought forward as the mascot of Hatay, presented as such to Col. Şükrü Kanatlı, the commander of the Turkish forces, when Hatay rejoined Turkish soil in 1939. In fact, Col. Kanatlı maintained his friendship with my mother and her family until the day he died. After Hatay was reintegrated into Turkey and after Syria gained its independence, our family friends remained in Halep, Damascus and the Golan Heights. Those in the Golan Heights were forced to migrate to Damascus, the US and Reyhanlı after the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights.
 
My father was the neighbor and student of Cemil Meriç, whose family had also migrated from the Balkans. My father did his doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in 1956 on “Agricultural Economics in the Amik Plain.” In fact, he even set up the department of agricultural economics at Ankara University and was the Turkish Workers' Party (TİP) MP from Hatay in 1965, though he later resigned from politics, saying that the whole scene had become dirtied.
 
He devoted himself to reading until the day of his death and was really one of the most important intellectuals to come from Hatay. After my father's death, all of the various political parties, municipalities and intellectuals in the area of Hatay took steps to embrace his memory. His name was given to various city boulevards, and yearly memorial ceremonies were carried out.
 
My family story that stretches from the Caucasus to the Balkans and from there to the Middle East and later to Hatay, and from Hatay over to Ankara. War, death, occupation, forced migration -- this is the reality of Turkey. This is the legacy of the Ottoman state. And Hatay, which embraced immigrants in the past due to this past, will continue to embrace them tomorrow and in the future.