Recreating Home in Exile: The Armenian Memory Book as Art Artefact and Roadmap (original) (raw)
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To remember a native village or town, collect written accounts, photos, and maps, and raise funds to publish a book that displayed all of this material, this was the decadeslong dream of many who made up the first generation of Armenian exiles. It was in this general environment, starting in the 1920s, that books-houshamadyans-began to appear in succession in various Armenian diasporan communities. This article analyzes the post-genocide ideological environment where most of the houshamadyans were written and published. It examines the contents of this genre of book in detail and shows how the houshamadyans, which in their essence are a depiction of a past life characterized by diversity, adapt themselves to diasporic nationalist environments.
2019
In this essay, I will analyze the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian , an Ottoman Armenian shoemaker and genocide survivor from what is now southern Turkey, as an attempt to "restore the ruined ancestral [Armenian] hearth" and render "part of the lost legacy of [his] forebears" back unto "the possession of the Armenian community." By analyzing examples of transcultural memories from Cherishian's text, I will highlight the ways in which Cherishian uses his memoir to restore (and thus return to) a complex, multicultural, pre-genocide Ottoman Armenian existence. I will first locate Cherishian's memoir in nostalgia and memory studies as a way to draw out his role as an author. I will then explore aspects of Cherishian's text that reveal that which he lost to the genocide-and thus that which he restores through his memoir. In conclusion, I will discuss briefly the importance of memory sources for writing Ottoman and Armenian history.
The Eagle of History Notes on the cultural memories of Armenians
2010
Monuments are materialized condensations of events. They inform us about the way a culture deals with its past. The Genocide Monument in Armen ia’s capital, which was built in memory of the 1.5 million murdered Armenians in 1915, is r epresenting this. In the integrated museum documents are exhibited, which witness those states having recognized the Genocide. To each of these documents particular problems are inherent due to international sphere. This affects absent documents, too, especially those ones by the Turkey or the USA. Discourse about the recognition of the Armenian Genocide not only recov ers different national strategies of perception of a historical fact, but by that narrat es something about processes of reproduction of cultural memory. In the seventh chapter of his “On the concept of hi story” Walter Benjamin writes: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simu ltaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is ...
Art of the Armenian Diaspora, ed. W. Deluga, Warsaw 2020. FULL TEXT
publication subsidised within the framework of the programme CZAsopismA / neWspApers by the ministry of Culture and national heritage, fund for the promotion of Culture. Agreement no. 01687/20/fpK/iK reviewers prof. Bálint Kovács prof. Athanassios semoglou revised by Caroline Boddy, timothy Cook, Anette and Denis morin, Anthony rose photographs The materials have been made available by the authors of the texts together with the right to their publication. In the case of public and private collections the source has been indicated. In other cases the editorial staff has made every effort to attribute the image to a source.
2023
In recent years art historians have paid renewed attention to dimensions of the life of art objects beyond the moment of their creation. One way in which art historians have studied the biographies of objects has been through the study of provenance-an area of art history that has attracted critical attention recently. Provenance, often presented as a dry list of successive owners of an art object, can reveal much more-an 'alternative history of art'. Disagreements over provenance are often at stake in disputes over the ownership of an object and often figure in restitution battles. This paper considers the case of Armenian manuscripts that entered European and North American collections as a result of successive waves of violence against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which culminated in the Armenian Genocide (1915-1922). The destruction of the cultural heritage of Armenians and especially religious culture was a central element of the Armenian Genocide. As monasteries were destroyed, many of their medieval treasures were looted and entered the art market. Some collectors organized missions for the express purpose of buying as much of the cultural heritage of Ottoman Christians as possible before it disappeared. A recent lawsuit filed by the Armenian Church against the J. Paul Getty Museum concerned a fragment of a religious manuscript, the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels illuminated by Toros Roslin in 1256. That work had ended up in the United States after a chain of events that included the destruction of the church in which it had been kept during the genocide. This chapter highlights my experience of the difficulties of conducting research on the provenance of objects set into motion during the Armenian Genocide. These difficulties include uneven archival record, the destruction of much evidence, and the fact that for decades, as the Armenian Genocide was denied, its history was suppressed. In a time of renewed interest in the marginalized fields of art history, the history of what I call 'survivor objects'-objects that have endured genocide, war, or exile along with their communities, and often play outsize roles in processes of survival, restitution, and commemoration.
Place, Belonging and History: Reflections on the Ottoman Armenian Past and Heritage
Études arméniennes contemporaines, 2021
is a historian and the author of numerous books and articles on Armenian survivors of the genocide and the genesis of post-genocide Armenian communities in the Middle East. Based in Berlin, he has since 2010 been the co-director and chief editor of Houshamadyan, a project aiming to revive the material and cultural life of Ottoman Armenians prior to and after the genocide. In this interview, he engages with the notion of homeland and reflects on its importance in his own work and diasporic experience. Vahé Tachjian est historien et a publié de nombreux travaux sur la vie des rescapés du génocide des Arméniens et la formation de nouvelles communautés diasporiques arméniennes au Proche Orient après la Grande Guerre. Depuis 2010, il a été le co-directeur et le rédacteur en chef du projet Houshamadyan, basé à Berlin, qui vise à faire revivre la vie culturelle et matérielle des Arméniens ottomans avant le génocide. Dans cet entretien, il expose son appréciation de la notion de homeland et évalue son importance à la fois dans sa pratique historienne et dans sa propre expérience diasporique.