CNN International ran a story today titled ‘Armenian homecoming’ about the village of Vakifli Koyu in southeastern Turkey near Musa Dagh. The story was about the visit of descendants of Armenian villagers from around the world. Vakifli Koyu has been called the last Armenian village in Turkey because it is still home to around 150 Armenians. According to an article (more later) it was birthplace of the former Armenian president, Levon Ter Petrosyan. UPDATE: As one reader has pointed out, most sources (here and here) say he was born in Aleppo, Syria.

The current residents are survivors of the genocide rescued by a French warship in the famous 40 days of Musa Dagh incident. A review of the book The Burning Tigris by James R. Russell gives us some more detail:

Mountains covered with forests and orchards, their higher slopes often wreathed in fog, loom above the plain of Issos, where Alexander the Great inflicted a stunning defeat on Darius, above the waters of the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. One of these is Musa Dagh, the Mountain of Moses. In 1915, the besieged people of five Armenian villages there fought the Turkish soldiers sent to exterminate them, and held them off until a French warship rescued the survivors. They returned after the war and placed a small stone plaque depicting a ship on the summit of Musa Dagh.

Some of the Armenian citrus farmers are still there. I visited their new church, in the village of Vakifli. One old man led me out of town and showed me where the fighting had taken place, but the plaque was gone: The Turkish authorities destroyed it long ago. The German Jewish writer Franz Werfel published his novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” in 1933 and, two years later, Hitler acceded to Turkey’s request that the book be banned; the same year, the U.S. State Department, under Turkish pressure, forced MGM to drop its plans to make a movie of the book. Since then, the U.S. government has steadfastly refused to term what happened to the Armenians a genocide.

Photographer Rudy Brueggemann also visited the village and wrote about it in An Armenian Journey.

I easily found Vakifli Koyu’s new Armenian church off the town’s main road. It’s a small stone building that contains a church in one wing, which then angles 90 degrees with an additional wing with extra rooms. The eave hangs covers a porch of marble steps. Red tiles line the roof, broken by small Armenian-style spire topped by a cross, just like the ones I saw on Armenian churches in Istanbul. A tiny graveyard shaded by trees sat across the road. Graves of recently buried Armenian Christians are great rarities outside of Istanbul.

He told me visitors from Canada, Germany, France, America, and Switzerland have visited Vakifli Koyu because it is the last Armenian Village on Musa Dagh. He offered me “Ermeni chai” and nectarines. Yet, even then, I refused to trust this kind, elderly Armenian man. I told him I never heard of a famous book about this mountain. I said I had never heard about the famous battle here in 1915. I claimed to know nothing about the Armenian exiles in the Bekaa Valley.

The Turkish Daily News reported on Turkey’s Armenian Community in 1999.

There were until recently five Armenian churches remaining in Anatolia, one each in the cities of Iskenderun, Kayseri (which the Armenians consider the birthplace of their church) and Diyarbakir, one in the tiny and aging village of Vakifli (in Hatay province) and one in Kirikhan (near Iskenderun). Less than a month ago the state ruled that there was no Armenian community left in Kirikhan and confiscated the church and all property belonging to it. Dikran Altin contends that there are still a few Armenian families remaining in Kirikhan and that in any case, the property rightfully belongs to the Armenian Patriarchate.

Vakifli is the birthplace of the former Armenian president, Levon Ter Petrosyan, who attempted to develop friendlier relations between Turkey and Armenia and banned the far-right Dashnak Party in Armenia. Turkey found, however, that its policy was held hostage by Azerbaijan because of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. Petrosyan was later replaced by Robert Kocharian, who allowed the reopening of the Dashnak Party.

The website of th Organisation of Istanbul Armenians has this article by Jolyon Naegele.

The inhabitants of six villages on the slopes of Musa
Dagh, Vakif among them, chose to resist in 1915 and
set up fortifications on the mountain. For 53 days they
repelled onslaughts by Turkish troops until French
sailors sighted a banner the Armenians had tied to a tree
on the mountain emblazoned with the words: “Christians
in Distress: Rescue.” French and British naval ships then
evacuated some 4,200 men, women and children from
Musa Dagh to Port Said in Egypt

A Vakifli Development Society has been started in an attempt to try and reverse the decline in the villages fortune’s. Young people move away, and the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul cannot find a priest.

UPDATE:
The CNN piece has been covered by AZG Daily.