Episode 10: Children of Anatolia: Armenians in Turkey

Our guest is Alek, an Armenian teenager living in Turkey. He thinks he does not belong to any particular country, neither Turkey nor Armenia. When he visited Armenia as an Armenian athlete living in Turkey, he was discriminated against and ostracized. He says Armenia does not consider Armenians living in Turkey as true Armenians, which makes him feel lost and “stuck between two walls.” Just because of his ethnicity, he is denied the right to exist in a country where he would be safe and included. Many of his friends have indirectly or directly ridiculed him for being Armenian and have repeatedly made jokes about his identity. To fit in, he has to bear with those jokes because he does not have any minority friends in his school. He took part in an episode of the podcast “Reign of Chains,” where he and one of his Kurdish friends talked about the structural bias and segregation perpetrated against Kurds and Armenians in Turkey’s education system. We also discussed how not just alienated and marginalized minorities but also many young and educated bright minds of Turkey have no choice but to leave the country for the safer and more inclusive West.