My wife’s grandfather Kirkor met an Armenian man from ‘Sasun’ at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul applying to move to Armenia. He spoke to him, learned of his village’s issues & took him to see Patriarch Shnork Kaloustian for help.
Kaloustian had just seen this article below... https://twitter.com/rubaroko/status/1391306145881542660

The Article headline writes ‘In an old Armenian village, everybody has become Muslim - in the 30 household village, the church will be made into a mosque and all male children will be circumcised.’
This taking place in Batman, a district that loosely borders Sasun.

Kaloustian decided to create a Migrants Council where they’d help move Armenians from the provinces to Istanbul, give them work, teach them Armenian (& Turkish) both integrating them into the Armenian community while indirectly making them seen within the Republic’s institutions.

The council would fundraise, children would be sent to the Karagozyan orphanage & school & older migrants would be placed in jobs with Armenians throughout Istanbul. A larger Anatolian migration among Armenians (Turks & Kurds) to Istanbul had already begun in the 1950s.

All while Protestants like Hrant Guzelyan also had initiatives of reArmenifying Kurdified Armenians (ex: Varto tribe) to Istanbul. Tibrevank boarding school in Uskudar had a noticeably large Anatolian Armenian student body & many ascribed to the Socialist movements of the time.

Eventually, Kirkor caught the council’s treasurer pocketing a large sum & threatened him to give it back. In the next weeks, MİT (National Intelligence Org.) opened a case where Kirkor & another council member were called to court to defend the intitiative.

Kirkor cleverly defended the initiative, pushing the narrative that they’re helping rural Armenians integrate into Turkish society & even teaching them to learn Turkish which the state had obviously failed to do in the SE regions. The case was fortunately cleared.

Beneificies integrated into Bolsahay society & one large Armenian family from Sasun even successfully moved to Soviet Armenia but due to the Yerevan authorities policy of separating the family into mutliple villages, they moved back to Turkey in order to stay intact as a family.

For decades the Istanbul-Armenian community inadvertently sped up the emptying of Armenians from native lands in a hostile post-genocidal Turkey, with the intention of keeping as many Armenians as Armenian as possible within the ‘protected safehaven’ that was Bolis/Istanbul.

This is a short glimpse of the reArmenification processes of Anatolian Armenians in the face of Turkification/Islamisization of minorities in the Turkish republican project.