“From now on,” he said, “I want to carry on with my Armenian heritage and culture.”

The genocide and expulsion of Armenians from eastern Anatolia in World War I, an atrocity whose centennial will be commemorated this week with ceremonies around the world, is largely a story of the dead: Historians estimate that nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed. But there are also the stories of the tens of thousands of survivors, mostly women and children, who were taken in by local Turkish families. They converted to Islam and took on Kurdish or Turkish identities.

Now, a growing number of their descendants are identifying as Armenian, and their personal experiences contrast with the perennial denial by the Turks and the lasting pain and anger of the Armenians. The Turkish government has long denied that the massacres amounted to genocide — they say the killings were a tragic consequence of war, not a planned annihilation. Armenians, both in a vast international diaspora as well as in Armenia itself, have long demanded an apology and recognition from Turkey.

The Armenians in southeast Turkey, whom historians have called “hidden Armenians” or “Islamized Armenians,” want those things, too, but for the most part they are less beholden to the painful past.

“If you compare our anger to the anger in the diaspora and in Armenia, ours would be like 1 percent of their anger,” said Aram Acikyan, who works as a caretaker here in Diyarbakir at the Surp Giragos Church, the largest Armenian church in Turkey and the Middle East. The church was restored in recent years with the help of the local Kurdish authorities, and now symbolizes efforts at reconciliation.