The missionaries who went out to help Armenian children found my grandfather and brought him to an orphanage in Istanbul. My grandfather was so little he did not even know his name or his age. The orphanage gave him a name - Krikor Terzian - and his age was determined by his height. They had all the children line up by height and then announced: “This group is two years old, this group is three or four, etc.” My grandfather was a short man. We still don't know his real age.
In the 1940s the Turkish government forced all Armenians to change their last names to Turkish ones, so my grandfather changed his last name to Dokum. Till this day my mother, his daughter, mostly speaks Turkish. She can’t read or write in any other language, and her spoken Armenian is very bad. This is true for most Armenians from her generation who were born in Turkey.
They all had to speak Turkish to survive.
My grandmother’s name was Beatrice Kemikzis, but we believe her real last name was Basmadjian. Again, we don't know her real age or real name, all we know is she must have been almost the same age as her husband, Krikor, when she became an orphan.
My name is Eliz Freya because my father Kevork thought that naming me Freya will protect me from the Turks. My maiden name is Akcelik. My father does not know much about his father, my grandfather.
I suspect that side of the family also had to change their names in the 1940s. I still don't know what my Armenian last name is on my paternal side. What I do I know is that I am 100 percent Armenian, I was baptized in an Armenian church and I went to an Armenian school. My personal negative experience living in Istanbul was that I was not to speak Armenian when I was out.
The worst episode of all happened in 1965, when I was walking home from my Armenian school and Turkish boys threw stones at me, calling me “gavur," which means non-believer. In other words - a Christian, not a Muslim.
Even today many Turkish Armenians speak Turkish and so many of them don't know Armenian. I am 60 years old, still waiting to find out what happened to my family and who they were.
