The Armenian monastery of Varagavank stands teetering on the brink of collapse in the mountains above Lake Van, in eastern Anatolia. Built a thousand years ago, and once the seat of an archbishop, it was forsaken in 1915. The monastery's buildings have more recently been used as stables, as a Kurdish villager named Mehmet Coban explained. “The manure was piled this high,” he said, marking the spot with his hand. His clan found the church like this when they settled in the former Armenian village in the 1950s, he recalled. Having shoveled out the dung, Coban now shows visitors around the church and dreams of making the village rich by turning it into a tourist destination. When he enlisted authorities to support the project a couple of years ago, it emerged that a prominent Turkish media executive in Istanbul held the deed to the monastery. His grandfather had amassed vast landholdings around Van after World War I.

“The village is mine,” the executive confirmed to the daily Taraf in 2012. Although he agreed to cede the church to Turkish authorities for restoration, his ownership of an Armenian village was not contested. This is not entirely unexpected, considering that Turkish prisons, airports and even the former presidential palace are built on what was once Armenian property and that treasure hunting for the buried belongings of deported Armenians remains something of a national pastime. While Turkey still struggles with recognizing moral responsibility for the fate of the Armenians, material restitution seems even more distant. “The mere term ‘compensation’ instills fear in Turkey,” wrote Cengiz Aktar, a prominent Turkish political scientist, in an op-ed for Repair: Armenian-Turkish Platform. Nevertheless, he said, “We must find ways to talk about it.”

The expropriation of Armenian properties during and after the deportations that began in 1915 is seen by Turkish scholars researching the period as an integral element of the genocide. Mehmet Polatel, a historian affiliated with Bosphorus University and Koc University, has called the dispossessions a “crucial part” of the cleansing of the Armenians from Anatolia. “Dispossession can be seen as one of the factors that provided genocidal motivation on the part of the genocide’s perpetrators,” Polatel argued in a recent lecture at the American University of Armenia. In an interview with CivilNet TV, Umit Kurt, a political scientist with Clark University and Sabanci University, calls the expropriations a “structural component of the genocide.”

Documents cited by these and other scholars suggest that the state had planned the expropriations and the redistribution of Armenian property and goods while deportees were being rounded up. Authorities established an extensive system for the state takeover of Armenian property through a series of laws, orders and decrees issued between June and November 1915. Commissions charged with taking stock of Armenian possessions criss-crossed Anatolia with their ledgers, carefully recording the valuables the deportees were forced to leave behind. The contents of bank accounts were swept into the state treasury, and all “abandoned” property was transferred to the state.