The Armenian mastermind behind Turkish pop

The name Sezen Aksu is known to everyone in Turkey and many music fans globally. Through her countless songs turned into cultural anthems, she has not only won the title of the Queen of Turkish Pop but also gained international acclaim, performing in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

However, the composer behind Asku’s greatest hits, Armenian-Turkish musician Onno Tunç, regarded as the architect of her early success, remains largely unknown despite being instrumental in shaping the sounds of Turkey’s nascent pop scene. 

This April marks 110 years from the Genocide of the Armenians committed by the Ottoman Empire which took the lives of over 1.5 million Armenians. Reflecting on Onno’s life, which was cut short in a tragic plane crash at the turn of the last century, is telling of many Armenians’ lives in modern Turkey after the Genocide – existence through silent and forced assimilation.  

Onno was born in one of Istanbul’s Armenian hubs, Şişli, to a shoemaker’s family, whose roots trace back to Anatolia, which used to be home to millions of indigenous Armenians before the genocide.  

At birth, he was given an Armenian name and an Armenian last name – Hovhannes Boyacian. However, when Hovhannes took onto the stage in the late 60s, he changed his Armenian first name to a truncated four-letter version Onno, to make it more palatable to the Turkish ear. He also changed his last name to Tunç, getting rid of his original last name, including the last syllable ian. These three letters, almost always found at the end of all Armenian last names, serve as the most common marker to differentiate between an Armenian and a non-Armenian. 

 

Onno’s younger brother, Arto Tuncboyacian, a critically acclaimed multi-instrumentalist and singer, shared: “Boyacian was too confusing for Turks…too Armenian. I am lucky to have had my career in the United States where it wasn’t so much of an issue to have an Armenian last name, but in Turkey, it was”. 

It is all too common for Armenians living in Turkey to resort to various methods of identity altering and concealing, name change being one of them. Many individuals of Armenian origin from Turkey, especially those with a certain degree of societal success, like the Nobel-prize winner Daron Acemoglu or the late journalist-activist Hrant Dink, all have Turkified names – void of any Armenian elements.

Name-changing is a practice dating back to periods of state-sponsored discrimination, including the 1915 Armenian Genocide and subsequent policies suppressing minority identities. Many non-Muslim minorities, including Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, faced economic persecution such as wealth tax, which forced them to change their identity and assimilate. Discrimination continued after the genocide. Policies like the 1934 surname law, which mandated all non-Turkish surnames be changed to Turkish ones, resulted in a new wave of assimilation where many more Armenians gave up on their names and adopted Turkified versions.

The new name, however, with Onno’s immense talent, took him far. After an initial stint in local bands as a jazz musician, Onno started seriously engaging in pop music in the 80s. In 1991, he had already co-produced one of the best-selling Turkish albums of all time, Gülümse by Sezen Aksu. Apart from Aksu, Onno was arranging for other artists like Levent Yüksel and Aşkın Nur Yengi who were emerging as the young stars of booming Turkish pop.

When reflecting on Onno’s choice to enter Turkish pop, his brother Arto remembers how it was not always going to be the case:  “At the time when Onno was starting out, there were really two choices – to stay within the Armenian community and be constrained by it or if you wanted more, you had to leave the community. That’s the reason I went to America-there you have room to be yourself, experiment with genres and be who you are – in Turkey you are Armenian”. 

During the years of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, along with other non-Muslim minorities, were excluded from the upper ranks of public life in Turkey – military, high-level government, etc. Today, the situation is not identical, yet painfully similar.

The Turkish state, despite legal pledges to uphold minority cultures through international treaties like the Lausanne agreement, provides little to no support to the Armenian community. According to Minority Right Monitor’s report from 2023, Armenian schools receive no state funding and solely rely on resources from within the community. With limited opportunities within the Armenian community, more people are pushed out of it – into forced assimilation.

Minorities of Turkey are further pressured by state-imposed measures like Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code. Initially designed to prosecute people for “insulting Turkishness or state institutions”, this piece of legislation has been commonly used to silence minority rights. Acts like public acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide or referencing Ottoman massacres of other minorities have cost famous intellectuals like Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk criminal charges and lengthy trials.  

Arto remembers that although Onno’s Armenianness remained under the radar during his fame in the Turkish pop scene, elements of his past, like the music of Anatolia came through in his music. “That is, actually, what made the music he made for Sezen Aksu and other stars so special. It was a mix of Armenian and Anatolian music together with Western jazz and Turkish mainstream.”

That is what was so different and new about Onno’s music – it was influenced by western classical tradition, some elements of jazz and other genres, but it had an indigenous sound. It was a global sound with a local flare.

Arto said that in their last phone call, Onno had shared how a recent trip to Paris, a centre of post-genocide Armenian diaspora, had inspired him to explore his Armenian side.

 “I am going back to my Armenian roots,” he said. 

That was the last phone call between the brothers.

Onno Tunç tragically died in a plane crash on January 14, 1996. Besides the glaring volumes of era-defining music, Onno left behind a cautionary tale about the cost of success for minorities in Turkey. Today, 110 years after the grand attempt to eradicate all Armenians from their ancestral lands, the small community still stands. Yet, as was the case with Onno’s life – Armenians in Turkey are still made to choose – between identity and dreams.