As in other places of the world, genetic-based tests offered by several countries to people curious about their family trees has all become popular among Turks, some of whom told Ahval that the results of their tests totally changed their beliefs about their ancestors and their “Turkishness”.
Turks are preparing to celebrate in 2071 the millennium of The Battle of Manzikert between the Byzantine Empire and Seljuk Turks, which, according to official history, marked the start of the Turkification of Anatolia.
Think identity has remained a source of tension in the country since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. While Turks are aware that a pure ethnic identity is almost impossible in Anatolia which has been home to numerous civilisations in its history, many in Turkey embrace the idea of a single ethnic identity and simps the idea of mixed roots. Controversial issues like the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish conflict and policies and discourses against other non-Muslim groups like the Greeks and Jews, whose numbers have dropped significantly in modern Turkey, have made the issue of ethnic identity even more complex.
The DNA based tests being offered by companies like My Heritage and 23andme are prohibited in Turkey. Therefore,Turks who have used those tests are mainly living abroad. After providing your DNA via testing kits, those companies send you a genealogy report that tells you your ethnic roots and sometimes list your relatives around the world.
Gül Çelik, a designer, told Ahval that she had had the test 10 years ago, but the company she had chosen had been continuously updating information on her ancestors as the number of people who had bought the test had increased and diversified over time.
According to the results, Çelik has Mongolian, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Armenian ancestors. Çelik said that her family was originally from the northeastern province of Bayburt and that her family members had refused to believe that they had had Armenian, Italian, and Greek ancestors. “I told them the test was scientific but they did not even want to listen,” she said.
In fact, Bayburt was a part of the Ottoman Empire’s northeastern province of Erzurum which had a total Armenian population of 202,391 in 1914, according to Armenian resources.
“Before this test, we believed that Bayburt had only Turks. But people get married, they change religions voluntarily or by force, they mix. Maybe my grandmother knew about it, but did not want to say because of social pressure, I am sorry for her,” Çelik said.
The reaction of Çelik’s family is similar to many people in Turkey who somehow have to face the realities about their ethnic roots. A 2012 book by Fethiye Çetin, a lawyer, tells the story of how she discovered that her grandmother’s hidden identity, which prompted a huge debate in the country about the Islamisation of non-Muslim populations. Another book named “The Grandchildren”, Çetin wrote with academic Ayşe Gül Altınay, provides a collection of intimate, harrowing testimonies by grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Turkey’s “forgotten Armenians”.
But unlike her relatives, Çelik welcomed her DNA results. “In foreign countries, I saw that Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians who were born and raised in Turkey culturally are not much different from the Turks. In fact, they are similar. Therefore I was happy with my DNA results as I am not a discriminative person,” she said.
Çelik also got in touch with one of her distant Italian cousins thanks to the test. “He told the story of our Italian ancestors from the 1600s. According to him, some 100 people were brought to the Ottoman territories as slaves and one of those 100 people were our great grandfather,” she said.
Çelik said her husband’s test results were equally surprising. “Test results showed that my husband is Jewish and from the Cohen lineage. He had never heard such a thing from his family before. He has no Jewish relatives. He was raised as a Muslim,” she said.
The stories of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey are somehow also stories of migration and demographic policies. When the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, the country had already faced a huge inflow of people coming from former territories of the Ottoman Empire, from Balkans to Caucasia and the Middle East. In its early days, the country witnessed a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Subsequent migration flows particularly from the Western Balkans continued throughout modern Turkey’s history, while many in Turkey, on the other hand, have moved to other countries, particularly to Europe, individually or in masses for various reasons.
Ayşe, who did not want to share her real name, is a mathematics professor who lives in the United States. She said her DNA test results were surprising as they showed how her ancestors moved from one city to another in Turkey’s Black Sea region.
Ayşe also got in touch with a third-degree cousin living in Ecuador. “I later checked, saw that his father was from Moscow. I knew that my father’s cousin migrated to Moscow. There he got married to a Russian and with their children, they later moved to Ecuador and the United States. This person is the grandchild of him (her father’s cousin),” she said.
The mathematician found that she is 20 percent Greek and 20 percent Armenian when she uploaded her first test results to another web-site that investigates people’s ancestors. “We are a society that is descendant of a large empire,” she said adding that the results made her happy.
A 2012 report in the journal Annals of Human Genetics indicated that paternal ancestry of those living in Turkey was 38 percent European, 35 percent Middle Eastern, 18 percent South Asian and only 9 percent Central Asian. But the DNA tests sometimes come up with results that are even more surprising.
Aslı Muzde, had taken the test to learn whether she had cancer risk. “But about ethnicity, I learned that I was 73 percent Central Asian. But the other distributions surprised me. Because I learned I had Italian and Greek blood, but what stroke me most was learning that I have between 1 to 2 percent American Indian blood, she said.
Muzde’s family also negatively reacted to test results, but her mother showed some interest after she learned that the test followed maternal patterns.
“I became acquainted with my third-degree cousin,” Muzde said about the sudden discovery of a relative living in Germany. “My guess is when my great grandfather came from Greece, they came as three siblings, but lost one. This cousin is the grandchild of this lost sibling,” she said.
“I became more interested in the problems of American Indians,” Muzde said when asked how did the test results change her life. “You see that you are only arms-length away from all races. The blood running in our veins are connected to each other, therefore there is no such thing as ‘we’ and ‘them’,” she said.
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