An extract from Armenag Topalian’s Armenian Newsletter regarding Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road (ITV). Complaint concerning an ITV program on the Silk Road by Mariana Hasminian.

Hasmig Aivazian Topalian

16 September at 22:28 · 

Dear Ms Lumley and production team for your programme on the Silk Road,

I watched today’s episode and was saddened and appalled to find some very misleading inaccuracies on your programme, which I believe should not have been included in the script.

First of all, when showing the defaced frescoes on the Greek church in Cappadocia, you mentioned ‘perhaps it was the work of Non- Christians…’ but immediately you gave your Turkish guide the opportunity to refute that and explain that the Greeks themselves were doing that, out of superstition…Let me tell you, dear Joanna and whoever wrote the script to this programme - Turkey is full of ancient Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, etc churches with defaced frescoes. These churches and monasteries are abandoned because their people were massacred, deported or evicted from their lands. It is only those churches that show signs of damage and vandalism. If that ‘guide’ were right, you would see instances of defaced frescoes in Greek or Armenian churches in rural Greece or Armenia… or even in their functioning churches in Istanbul. The frescoes depicted in your programme have indeed been damaged by Muslims who believe it is ‘haram’ to depict faces, and especially hate seeing images of Jesus or scenes from the Gospels. This was a very big missed opportunity for the programme to address a huge problem of racism and chauvinism in Turkey. 

Secondly, Joanna moved towards the Black Sea province of Hamshen in Turkey. She met and befriended a clan of Hamshen Armenians. Again, lack of proper research, but always erring on the side of Turkish propaganda… she mentions that Hamshen Armenians came from neighbouring Armenia… Has no-one bothered to check this? Armenians don’t all come from the Republic of Armenia. In fact the vast majority of Armenians descend from their historic homeland in what used to be known only 100 years ago as the ‘Armenian provinces’ of the Ottoman Empire. Many of those territories were handed to Turkey by the Soviet Union after WW1. It is true that Hamshen Armenians are Muslim converts, but their origins are from that same land, for millennia, much earlier than the time of the current Turkish population's arrival from Central Asia.

Finally, at the end of the programme, Joanna Lumley gives us an advance on the next episode. She crosses over to Georgia and then goes down the Caucasus to… Azerbaijan, very skilfully avoiding Armenia. Why? Does she or her producers not know that Armenian merchants were crucial in the trade of goods along the Silk Road? 

I feel that the programme, particularly these two episodes, are tendentious towards promoting Turkey and skilfully trying to echo the inaccurate version that Turkey is lately selling to the world of a lovely, welcoming nation. All this, while still keeping their minorities in terror of victimisation. 

It is sad that an intelligent lady like yourself would buy into that, or even be sold into that fake propaganda. 

I wish you to set the record straight. 
Mariana Hasminian