Legacy of Faith

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Master-weaver Artin Ayvazian worked hard at the loom to provide for his growing family, but it was not easy to compete with the new machine-made textiles imported from Europe to the city of Aintab. Fortunately his wife Horom earned a small supplement as a “Bible woman,” going door to door to teach housewives how to read the scriptures in Armeno-Turkish.

Since childhood, Horom and Artin had conversed in Turkish, as did the rest of the community. With expanding educational opportunities, the older generation began to pick up Armenian speech from the young, and eventually Horom initiated her husband into reading the Turkish-language Bible in the Armenian alphabet. No doubt influenced by the American Protestant missionaries who had shaped education in Aintab, Horom was convinced that believers, especially women, should be able to discuss religious teachings in the language of daily life.

As reform-minded members of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox “mother church,” Artin and Horom educated their daughters to think for themselves. Marie, the eldest, met her future husband Setrag Halebian through a liberal religious youth group, and in July 1908 the couple welcomed their first child. Perhaps on this occasion Marie received her Armeno-Turkish hymnal, pictured here, which she signed and dated in Armenian and English.

This was a time of fresh beginnings not only for the young family but also for the Ottoman Armenians, who welcomed the new era of constitutional monarchy ushered in by the Young Turk Revolution. Eight years later, with the Armenian Genocide in progress under those same Young Turks, the growing Halebian family escaped into Lebanon, taking the hymnal with them. While speaking fluent Turkish helped to conceal their identity on the road, the book’s Armenian characters would have given them away—had it been discovered.

“When you sing, you pray twice,” says the proverb. Marie’s Armeno-Turkish hymnal gives voice to a life-loving faith that crosses boundaries yet remains true to itself. By Garo S. Matossian and Lou Ann Matossian