Hemshin

The origin of the Hemshin traces back to Armenian communities that settled in the mountainous Black Sea region in ancient centuries, fleeing persecution farther east. For generations, they remained Christians of the Armenian Apostolic Church, isolated by the rugged geography that surrounded them.

Under Ottoman rule, through a slow process still poorly documented in its details, entire families gradually converted to Sunni Islam, a shift that unfolded over generations and advanced unevenly, with close relatives remaining on different sides of the faith for a time. Unlike other communities that changed religion, the Hemshin stayed on the same land, and some of them preserved the Armenian dialect inherited from their ancestors, creating a people who today combine elements of two identities that rarely coexist.

On the slopes facing the Black Sea, life still revolves around tea: whole families cultivate and harvest the leaves on plantations that cover the mountains, supplementing their income with beekeeping and small-scale farming. High-altitude herding shapes the calendar of the year, with families moving up in summer to higher mountain pastures, where the livestock produce the milk that becomes cheese and yogurt before the descent in autumn.

Wooden houses, many of them old communal structures that once sheltered several generations under the same roof, still dot the villages among the tea fields. Distinctive traditional dress, kept for festivals and special occasions, and a strong attachment to the mountain landscape continue to unite communities now scattered across different countries.

Today the vast majority of the Hemshin profess Sunni Islam, and this faith is so woven into daily life and social belonging that it is rarely questioned. Even so, some calendar customs and family memories clearly trace back to the community’s Armenian Christian past, surviving as domestic tradition even where the original religious meaning has been lost.

This double layer of belief, Islam lived publicly and Christian echoes kept at home, makes Hemshin faith something more stratified than it first appears. For most, however, being Muslim today is inseparable from being Hemshin, which makes any other spiritual choice a matter of identity, not just religion.

Part of the Hemshin community, closer to the border with the land of the Laz people, still preserves at home an ancient Armenian dialect, Homshetsma, which only recently received a formal writing system, created by linguists to record a speech that until then had been passed down only orally and was at risk of disappearing. There is no record of Scripture translated into this dialect. Most Hemshin, however, now speak only Turkish in daily life, the national language that also governs access to the Bible available today, but one that carries little resonance with the people’s deepest identity.

For most, being Hemshin means being a Sunni Muslim: the Islamic faith has fused with the group’s identity to the point of obscuring its own Armenian and Christian origin. Publicly acknowledging that heritage is already delicate, and following Christ would be seen as betraying not only religion but the family’s own history. The absence of churches in the mountainous region where they live, along with the cultural and linguistic distance from the few Christians in Turkey, makes any contact with the gospel even rarer.

The greatest silent longing of the Hemshin is to reconcile a divided history: many grow up without clarity about their own origin, and recovering that memory with dignity, without it meaning rupture with family or community, is a profound need. There is also a lack of anyone to talk with them about faith in a way that respects their language, their landscape and their history, rather than ignoring them or treating them as a curiosity. There is no local Christian community or discipleship available to any among them who might come to take an interest in the gospel.