Then I began to speed up my words, as if to spit them out. The sheikh took him in when he was hungry and thirsty,” I said. “During the massacres, my grandfather was about to die, but he was saved by a sheikh in the area. “Why have you come?” he asked finally, in Arabic.įinally I gathered my courage. I fidgeted, not knowing the custom, then rose in deference.Īn uncomfortable silence filled the space between us. At last, Sheikh Fayez al-Ghubein entered the room, his face long and serious. What if the sheikh is offended by my request? What if he refuses to help me?Ī servant answered the door and ushered us into a formal meeting area, where I waited on plush floor cushions. I felt even more nervous and smoothed my wrinkled shirt. “The sheikh commands around 20,000 Bedouins,” he added. On the corner stood a large two-storey home with an ornate front gate. Finally, Levon pointed to our destination.
THE HUNDRED YEAR WALK AN ARMENIAN ODYSSEY PAGES DRIVER
On the wide streets, our driver steered our sedan towards the sheikh’s home. Raqqa had been one of the few safe places along the road. We crossed a bridge, and I reflected that in my grandfather’s time there hadn’t been an overpass here, only armed guards and boats ferrying the lucky ones across. Men in swim trunks stood knee-deep in the Euphrates, and groups of boys splashed around on this hot day, the shore tangled with lush foliage. Levon explained that the man who lived there was a Bedouin sheikh. We turned towards Raqqa, a once-medieval town that sits on the Euphrates River’s left bank.
An Arab leader named Sheikh Hammud al-Aekleh and his Muslim family had taken in my Christian grandfather after he had escaped from his doomed convoy, a chance encounter that changed my family’s fate. Enormous darkness had transpired near this stretch where we now travelled, but there was also light, and that was partly why I had come. My grandfather believed he had survived so that he could bear witness to this crime. However, it was becoming impossible for me to endure. I had become accustomed to hunger, having fasted three or four days a week, without a bit of food between my teeth. I opened up his account and re-read his words from 1916: I had lifted my itinerary directly from his pages, and I was trying to reach a hill near the Iraq border, where his caravan of thousands had been massacred.
Now I was retracing his nearly 1,000-mile odyssey across present-day Turkey and Syria, once all part of the Ottoman Empire. My family had recently discovered his notebooks, detailing his survival of the Armenian genocide, which Turkey still denies occurred. Or, rather, his words had – since he had been dead for more than three decades.