Vartan Avakian - A Curse That Turns Gold Into Ladybugs

Ten years ago, my great-aunt Anahid gave me a memory book dedicated to the village of her father in the Ottoman Empire. The book was a detailed record of the village's history, its flora and fauna, local traditions, the grammar of its dialect, and a documentation of the weeks of resistance during the genocide. It even included a couple of hand-drawn maps, showing the relative location of the village compared to others nearby.

Equipped with this book, I set out to find the village. I consulted researchers, historians, and a range of online sources to guide me, and eventually, I was able to geolocate the general area. Before traveling, I sent a message to my family's group chat to let them know. One of my aunts sarcastically replied, "Bring back your great-grandfather's gold with you." Other family members advised me to be careful and not to reveal that I am Armenian. We grew up hearing stories of Armenians visiting ancestral towns in eastern Turkey being suspected of coming to find and take the gold.

My quest also led me into a parallel universe in which 'Armenian' hand-drawn maps are the locus of another practice: treasure hunting. For Armenians, maps are tools of remembrance, used to revisit ancestral lands, document family histories, and preserve memory. But for some Turkish nationals, maps are instruments to search for 'Armenian gold'. This practice is driven by the belief that Armenians must have hidden their wealth when they were persecuted, expelled, killed, and ultimately ethnically cleansed from their lands. In this light, treasure hunting in Turkey cannot be separated from the broader history of Armenian dispossession. It is a cultural obsession that ties together rumors, cryptic maps, medieval spells, and conspiracy theories into the enduring myth of buried Armenian gold. This myth encompasses treasure hunters, conspiracy theorists, pseudo-historians, and infiltrates broader political discourses, revealing how the legacy of dispossession remains deeply inscribed in the Turkish popular psyche.

Treasure hunters employ ground scanners, pendulums, metal detectors and psychic healers. However the most valued items remain hand-drawn maps. These are said to be copies of Armenian family papers and are filled with cyphers: a fish pointing east, a turtle etched in stone, a three-headed creature, crosses, and enigmatic writings. Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein sees these maps not just as tools for locating gold, but as conduits to a buried history. She suggests that the search for Armenian gold does not bring closure, rather it extends historical violence into the present.

In 2022, Kadir Janpolat, head of the Ottoman Hearths (Osmanlı Ocakları) a nationalist organization in Turkey that promotes Ottoman imperial nostalgia and Turkish-Islamic identity claimed
Armenian gold could boost Turkey's economy tenfold. The claim depends on startling mathematics. What matters in such rhetoric is less feasibility than narrative utility. Such claims transform loss into capital; they reframe genocide as untapped potential. In this logic, history is no longer a burden but a speculative asset and the violence of the past is not memorialized but monetized.

More than a century after the Armenian Genocide, the promise of Armenian wealth hidden beneath homes, in churchyards, behind walls, continues to captivate. This enduring fascination should be understood as a continuation of the systematic, state-led dispossession and appropriation of Armenians that accompanied the Genocide itself. This system of material transfer rendered Armenians into ghosts, politically and economically. What lies buried is not treasure, nor merely memory, but the violence of a state unwilling to reckon with its foundational crimes.

Searching for 'Armenian gold' is a fantasy built on a foundation where each "X" on the map marks not just the promise of fortune, but the trace of a persistent crime. Yet the land rarely gives up its secrets. Even when the map is deciphered, when the treasure's location is revealed, the outcome is often a failure. Earth resists. Rocks turn to serpents. Soil bleeds. Metal detectors malfunction. Gold turns into ladybugs.
Rumors circulate that treasures are protected by spells, talismans, and the restless spirits of their rightful owners. In one account, documented by anthropologist Anoush Tamar Suni, a group of hunters finds a sealed clay pot. When opened, bees swarm out.
The hunters flee in fear. But as the story goes, had they withstood the sting, the bees would have transformed back into gold. Specters, rumors, and uncanny events intervene to protect what history refuses to forget. There are tales about treasure hunters who were cursed or driven mad after attempting to seize it. The treasure, then, is both a lure and a curse. It unearths what the official narrative seeks to bury.

The compulsive return to Armenian treasure reveals a society where past violence is displaced rather than resolved. The land does not yield its riches without consequence. It remembers. The stories told by treasure hunters betray a deep anxiety about what lies buried in both soil and conscience. These are efforts to turn erasure into gain, absence into inheritance, memory into capital. But such attempts are often met with haunting spells, and with endless rumors that lead to a maddening obsession.