Sister and Brother

• 

• 

• 

This 4” x 5¼” fringed purse covered with glass beads in 14 colors was likely made by an Armenian prisoner in Ottoman Turkey. Notable for its motifs of Armenian Christian faith and national liberation, this was the cherished heirloom of an Armenian-Kurdish family.

A classically dressed young woman with unbound hair stands on a snake while displaying an Armenian tricolor flag and an upright sword. Sharing her grip on the sword, a uniformed, mustachioed rifleman with a golden cross on his cap stands over a chain. The Armenian caption at right reads “SISTER AND BROTHER.”

I first saw this purse in 1990 while chairing the Armenian cultural exhibit at the Festival of Nations in Saint Paul. The Turkish exhibit chair brought it from home to show our group. Sidestepping the “g-word”—genocide­­—he explained that his stepmother Aney was an Armenian whose family had converted to Islam.

Although Aney’s family was spared from deportation in 1915, her best friend was sent on the death march, leaving the purse with Aney. Decades later, as her stepson was preparing to come to America, Aney brought out the beaded purse. “Take it with you to America,” she told him. “They will understand it.”

Twenty-five years after that Festival of Nations, I ran into the gentleman again at a screening of The Cut, a Turkish-German film about the Armenian Genocide. Since our last encounter, he had learned that his grandfather, a Kurdish leader, had saved Armenians in 1915. He spoke warmly of the Turkish scholars whose research had led them—and him—to name the Genocide as such. 

Moved by his epiphany, I invited him to attend the upcoming Armenian Genocide centennial observance at St. Sahag Armenian Church in Saint Paul. There, on April 24, 2015, as we sat together in the front pew, he gifted the beaded purse to me.

A few days later he wrote: “I am not a religious man, but I think I was given a mission to find the proper owner for the purse. I am very happy that I have fulfilled that mission and found the person who was meant to possess it.” By Lou Ann Matossian