Left Undisturbed: On Silva Özyerli’s The Spirit of Amida: A Life with Liqueur from Diyarbakır to Istanbul
Starting from a singular book devoted to the making of liqueur, Yeliz Güları explores the connections between memory, territory, and disappearance in the Armenian history of Diyarbakır. Between transmitted gestures, erased landscapes, and fragile forms of survival, The Spirit of Amida becomes the point of departure for a reflection on what displaced cultures still manage, despite everything, to let ferment over time.
A bridge over the Tigris River, near the city of Diyarbakır. (Source: from houshamadyan.org / Hugo Grothe, Geographische Charakterbilder, Leipzig, 1909).
Roh -meaning “spirit” in the Armenian spoken in Diyarbakır- names what remains after ingredients drawn from the land are set into fermentation, within a practice of liqueur making historically sustained by Armenians alongside Assyrians and Chaldeans in the region.
Roh emerges through a transformation that unfolds over time, as ingredients are brought into relation with one another and their concentrated essence slowly takes form. Herbs, fruits, flowers, seeds, skins, stems, and leaves may be boiled or distilled, then left to rest for months or even years. Through patience, what is drawn from them exceeds their individual parts, forming a taste meant to be savored slowly.
In The Spirit of Amida: A Life with Liqueur from Diyarbakır to Istanbul (Amida’nın Ruhu: Diyarbakır’dan İstanbul’a Likörlü Hayat, Aras Publishing, 2024), Silva Özyerli returns to liqueur making as a practice nearly lost alongside the communal life that once gave it meaning. Part recipe book, part memoir, part cultural history, the book serves both as documentation and as a guide for readers who wish to enter a grounding practice of liqueur making.
Book cover. Aras publishing (2024).
Writing from an Armenian, Christian, Diyarbakır-rooted experience -later shaped by displacement- Özyerli approaches liqueur making as a way of tending taste and memory under shifting conditions. Alongside her carefully composed recipes, the city -figured as Amida1 through the book’s titular invocation- appears as an integrated organism, where soil, climate, communal labor, custom, and architecture remain bound to forms of pleasure, sociability, and shared time shaped by liqueur gatherings. From this intimacy, a reflection emerges naturally on what has been eroded through top-down, hegemonic processes of cultural reconfiguration.
Liqueur as relational practice
From birth onward, liqueur making accompanied nearly every stage of life, unfolding through moments of shared intention at meaningful thresholds, sealed in the collective ritual of toasting.
Özyerli sketches a portrait of how earlier generations sustained collective forms of togetherness and everyday life through indigenous knowledge of craft and care, ranging from architectural practices to the infrastructures of daily living. Alongside this, she recalls stories that evoke modes of living oriented toward enjoyment and sociability: gatherings shaped by music and locally made spirits or wine, rooted in embodied knowledge of conviviality.
One such account in the book describes how evenings in villages surrounding Diyarbakır, along the Tigris River, turned into picnics and improvised rituals born of being outdoors. Using materials at hand -remnants of food and fire- people fashioned temporary sources of light and set them adrift on the river, turning it into a moving field of illumination, visible to those gathered along both banks. (95-96)
Such moments point to a sensorial practice embedded in a social fabric that has since disappeared – one in which public nature, the shared indulgence in homemade spirits, and intergenerational presence could come together in the region.
Another joyful practice now largely erased from present-day Anatolian consciousness is Vartavar, the Water Holiday, a ritual marked by soaking one another with water. Pilgrimages to churches and monasteries transformed nights into luminous events, as candlelight spilled across mountains and valleys, rendering sacred sites visible from afar and producing moments of collective visibility and gathering that have since vanished from the region’s public landscape. (96-97)
Surp Giragos Church, Diyarbakır, c. 1914–1915. Diyarbakır Association for the Protection of Cultural Assets (DKVD) – Diyarbakır City Archive.
Photograph by Erkin Ön, from The Spirit of Amida, depicting a traditional liqueur decanter.
By assembling such fragments, Özyerli offers more than a recipe book. Her narration carries the past into the present, insisting on its presence at a moment when time itself feels interrupted. What comes into view is not only an overlooked past of Diyarbakır, but the cost of a nature- aligned way of life, that has been made to disappear.
“Today, neither the village of Kıtırbıl -[where evenings along the Tigris once turned into communal gatherings]- nor its churches, nor its vineyards remain. The land on which they once stood is now where Dicle University was built; later, rubble from the destruction caused by the Sur clashes in 2015 was also deposited on that site. The village itself was renamed Fetih [‘conquest’ in Turkish] – officially justified by the supposed difficulty of its pronunciation.” (48)
In his essay If Only These Walls Could Talk, researcher Florian Bobin reflects on how place names produce attachment, a sense of everyday closeness, and belonging, while also, as he puts it, sneakily distorting history.
To live on a particular street, avenue, or boulevard, Bobin suggests, is to gradually take on a geographical identity shaped by that name – one that produces memory, attachment, and intimacy while rendering its past invisible. Odonyms -and place names more broadly- function as carriers of a selective memory: they do not simply negate history, but shape how it is remembered in the personal sphere, and with it, how history itself comes to be lived.
Forget about the liqueur, if possible2
Grand Rue De Pera, Constantinople / Derbent, Kağıthane, Okmeydanı3
Exile produced a rupture across liqueur making and the life that surrounded it. As Özyerli recounts, the jar in which liqueur is left to rest becomes a vessel that holds, like a secret, the fragmented stories of lives that began in Diyarbakır and were scattered elsewhere. (285)
Climate, air, and local plant life differ; ingredients once known no longer appear in the same form, and the liqueur’s taste falls flat. What is interrupted is an inherited relationship with nature, a knowledge accumulated and transmitted over generations.
Set against this history, a different question surfaces: “might such a life still be encountered today, or has it become rare to encounter someone who makes his living as a shoemaker and devotes the rest of his time to classical music-making?” (206)
Takvor Kemiksiz, Özyerli’s uncle-in-law, appears in Istanbul’s Kadıköy as one such figure across chapters devoted to liqueur making. Musical practice offered Kemiksiz a means of holding life together; through his work as a trumpet player, his life unfolded in communal spaces that once sustained shared forms of belonging. As a child witness to the Armenian Genocide, Kemiksiz was subjected to the deportation marches during which his family was torn apart. A lifetime later, when confronted with the consecrated grapes of the Assumption feast, these experiences -inscribed into his gaze- register not affirmation but distance. (205)
A similar history marked the family Kemiksiz’ sibling married into: Vahan, his sibling’s father-in- law, survived the deportations but never returned to his hometown, convinced that nothing of his people had remained there. Only much later did he learn that his wife, from whom he had been violently separated, had also survived and resettled in Armenia -remarried, rebuilt another life. (206)
Liqueur, in these subsequent chapters, appears as a practice shaped by transitions and their displacing effects, under conditions foreign to how it once was. It becomes a means of holding onto something that had belonged to them: shared moments and pleasure, now lingering as a ghost-like outline. It is as if the making of liqueur accompanies their gatherings, moving alongside the wounds -unfolding through time by way of fermentation and a required neglect- until it is one day, long after its setting, transformed into roh, ready to reach the lips only after words of goodwill have first been uttered.
Of(f) the ground
Something reverberated and stayed with me as I arrived at the chapter in which Özyerli undertakes a journey to her grandfather’s village, in the province of Diyarbakır, being the first of her family to do so, amid the atmosphere of Turkey’s peace process in 2014.
Twelve years have passed since then, and what continues to reverberate is the sense that such experiences are recurrent in nature – shaped by contingent conditions that may draw people beneath the burden of family histories toward recomposing fragments of their identity. Özyerli’s narration allows the reality of this repeatability to breathe, opening space for questions and for the possibility of response -rhetorical and otherwise- through both her literary style and moments of encounter with nature.
The (ir)replaceability of value
Introduced in Turkey in 1942 under the guise of wartime fiscal necessity and repealed in 1944, the Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi) has been widely interpreted as functioning as a mechanism of legalized dispossession, imposing arbitrary and often unbearable tax burdens that disproportionately affected non-Muslim communities and contributed to the coercive transfer of property and capital toward the consolidation of a Turkish-Muslim bourgeoisie.4
Read alongside the search for buried valuables left behind by Armenians in 1915 -often trivialized today under the rubric of “treasure hunting” in Anatolia, the Wealth Tax, several decades later, appears less as an isolated episode than as part of a longer continuum of dispossessing minoritized communities- reinforced by its social legitimation.
Could what dispossession leaves behind, once sedimented, ever coalesce into a form that inhabits the present – disturbing the moral safety and finality that sanctioned histories, backed by time, grant?
This is the question one seems to be left with when Özyerli returns to the village of her grandfather, only to find that, in the eyes of a present-day inhabitant, her identity is reduced to a presumed knowledge of hidden wealth. (257) The moment recalls journalist and activist Hrant Dink -assassinated in 2007- who was repeatedly confronted with requests for directions to buried treasure, responding by upending the question itself: that the real treasure was above ground.5
A view of the city of Diyarbakır. (Source: from houshamadyan.org / H. Hepworth, Through Armenia on Horseback, London, 1898)
Life at the edge of notice
Landscapes from which human structures have been erased, now left untended, invite close attention to the forms of nature that take hold there. Mycologist Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian brings lichens into focus as a biological component, exemplifying how interdisciplinarity across fields can expand epistemologies of knowing and seeing. Lichens inhabit ruins, stone-built villages, remnants of churches, and monasteries. They are often among the earliest visible forms of life to reappear.
Where Özyerli encounters a landscape of cracked, dried earth, Kaishian articulates a conception of nonhuman agency in nature amid what is often read as absence.
In her essay Guardians of the Land (Atmos, 2023), she draws notice to lichens as an overlooked component of architectural remains; organisms whose slow growth and longevity leave them as intimate record-keepers of air, rain, stone, and time. As symbiotic beings of fungus and algae, sun and stone, lichens document changes within their own tissues and, in doing so, emerge as witnesses to violences rendered obscure within official histories.
Elsewhere, not beneath
Removed from the soil in which they once took root, the almonds Özyerli carried back from land cultivated by her family now grow in pots on an Istanbul balcony – distilled into liqueur.
“Who can say that the soil has no life of its own – more powerful, more lasting, more faithful, more human; a life that multiplies and comes alive, kneaded from the dreams, bones, and ashes of loved ones? “6
In The Spirit of Amida, the past is brought into the present to be reckoned with. As the narrative moves from Diyarbakır to Istanbul, the reader comes to understand why Özyerli is drawn to testing the practice of liqueur making to its limits. Her dedication is not only an advocacy for a closer human–nature connection, but also an attempt to reassert links between identity, culture, and ways of knowing that challenge dominant narratives.
In 1915, it was decided by Ottoman authorities that forms of Armenian intellectual life, such as those articulated and lived by the Diyarbakır-born poet, writer, and educator Rupen Zartarian, would no longer be allowed to exist – a decision enacted through his assassination and those of other Armenian intellectuals. What Zartarian called forth to in the words cited above finds embodied resonance in The Spirit of Amida a century later.
By sharing her recipes, Özyerli invites collective making, entrusting onward what would otherwise remain private, inherited knowledge. At her liqueur station, herbs, flowers, and fruits are submerged in alcohol, sweetened, and set aside as time inhabits them and they, in turn, inhabit time – not so much an extraction of roh as a concentration of the not-yet.
Silva Özyerli’s The Spirit of Amida: A Life with Liqueur from Diyarbakır to Istanbul (Aras Publishing, Istanbul, 2024) is currently available only in Turkish, under the title Amida’nın Ruhu: Diyarbakır’dan İstanbul’a Likörlü Hayat.
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