türkçe links to original Turkish article
(Hürriyet Newspaper, 13 July2022)
Elif to the rescue!
Mehmet Kuşman (82) is a watchman at the Çavuştepe Fortress in Van,
built by the Urartu civilization in 764-734 B.C. Kuşman, who has been
the fortress's watchman for 59 years, is one of only seven people in
Turkey who know the Urartu language and he is teaching it to his
8-year-old niece Elif.
Kuşman retired in 2005 but remained at fortress's watchman, waking
at the crack of dawn and walking 25 kilometers to his post each day.
He acts as a guide for tourists and carves small stones with Urartu
inscriptions to sell.
"They left out a comma here."
The other six people in Turkey who know Urartu are all older than
Kuşman. In order to keep the language alive, he is passing it on to his
son Erzen Kuşman and niece Elif. Erzen bey is one of Kuşman's 11
children and he works as the deputy director in the Van Social Security
Council office. His father related that "Erzen, who is named after
Afif Erzen Hoca, was the only one of my children who showed any
interest in Urartu. Since he was a child he would come to the fortress
with me and he learned some of it so then I started to teach it to him.
He has promised to teach it to Elif in order to keep the language alive."
Kuşman explained that "When I came back from military service in
the 1960s I saw that some archeologists from Istanbul University
were excavating the Çavuştepe Fortress so I joined in to help them.
Urartu inscriptions emerged from the excavations and over the years
I taught myself the language. It was difficult to learn how to construct
a sentence but with the help of the experts I succeeded."
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