Aram Arkun
The Society for Armenian Studies (SAS), a primarily American
association of scholars and supporters of Armenology, is celebrating its
40th anniversary this year. It held an international conference in
Yerevan in October, and on November 21-22, it convened a conference in
Washington, DC, called “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th-20th
Centuries.”
In fact, Der Matossian felt the first panel “should be seen as a
microcosm of what type of research needs to be done in order to bring
back the Armenians into Ottoman history and reconstruct their history.”
The focus on the Armenian Genocide for the other two panels, he said,
was fitting due to the approaching centennial of the start of that
event. Der Matossian also stated that “From the academic perspective, a
lot of work needs to be done in understanding the complexities of the
Armenian Genocide beyond the clichés of Muslims vs. Christians or Turks
vs. Armenians.” He concluded that Armenian Genocide studies can go
beyond the analysis of a specific event to provide “new empirical data
and thematic approaches to understand mass violence in general.”
Der Matossian thanked Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian, Berberian Endowed
Coordinator of the Armenian Studies Program at California State
University, Fresno, for help in organizing the conference and SAS
Secretary Ani Kasparian, of the University of Michigan, Dearborn, for
preparing registration materials.
The first panel, on Armenian contributions to Ottoman culture, was
chaired by Dr. Levon Avdoyan, the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist
at the Library of Congress. Before introducing the speakers, he stated
that “as someone who was at the 1976 conference, it is really
spectacular that we are at the 40th year of this organization.”
The first speaker on this panel, Murat C. Yildiz, a doctoral student
in the Department of History at the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA), spoke on “Reassessing Cultural Transformation in
Early-Twentieth-Century Bolis: Armenian Contributions to a Shared
Ottoman Physical Culture.” This topic was related to his dissertation,
entitled “Strengthening Male Bodies and Building Robust Communities:
Physical Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire.”
Yildiz depicted Armenian programs to develop exercise and sports as
part of a broader shared physical culture in the Ottoman Empire from the
mid to late 19th century. Athletics were associated with modernity, and
were thought important for building physical and mental health,
discipline and strength. In Istanbul the Imperial School and Robert
College disseminated such ideas but Armenians wanted to form their own
autonomous sports clubs. These clubs shared a developing middle class
identity with other Ottomans but had a distinct ethnoreligious nature.
Mistrusted by the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, these clubs
mushroomed in number with the liberties of the Young Turk era after
1908.
Armenians looked to their pagan past in naming some of these clubs,
such as the Kuruçeşme Ardavazt Athletic Club or the Armenian Dork club.
They published their own sports magazines like Marmnamarz (established
in 1911 by Shavarsh Krisian), which was part of a multilingual Ottoman
sports press.
Yildiz’s study can be considered part of a new movement to examine
social, cultural and political transformations in the Ottoman Empire
through linguistically diverse sources. He demonstrated that shared
Ottoman civic values did not prevent exclusive ethnoreligious ties.
Yildiz was followed by Nora Cherishian Lessersohn, a master’s student
at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, who
graduated from Harvard College in 2009 and has worked at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Manhattan District Attorney’s
Office. Her talk was entitled “‘Provincial Cosmopolitanism’ in Late
Ottoman Anatolia: An Armenian Shoemaker’s Memoir.” Her goal is to add
the Ottoman Armenian voice as a full partner in the conversation on
Ottoman provincial history.
She explored her great-grandfather Hovhannes Cherishian’s memoirs.
Born in Marash in 1886, he was a shoemaker who served in the Ottoman
army from 1910 to 1914 in Adana and Mersin. He experienced great
suffering and loss due to the Armenian Genocide, and its aftermath. He
was deported to Syria, and returned after the war to Marash, yet lost
his young bride and brother during the retreat from this city in 1920.
Nonetheless, he also enjoyed good relations with various Muslims.
Lessersohn read two excerpts from the memoirs. She called the close
relationship between Muslims and Christians provincial cosmopolitanism,
which resulted from living in an urban demographically complex but
provincial environment, something different from the interactions in
major port cities.
The next speaker was Anahit Kartashyan, a doctoral student
working on the Armenian Community of Constantinople in the 19th century
at the Department of Asian and African Studies at Saint Petersburg State
University. With a bachelor’s degree in Turkish Studies (2008) and a
master’s degree in Ottoman Studies (2010), both from Yerevan State
University (2008), Kartashyan taught modern Turkish from 2010 to 2011 at
her alma mater before continuing her graduate studies in Russia. Her
talk was titled, “The Discourse of First-Wave Ottomanism among the
Armenian Intellectuals and Statesmen in the Ottoman Empire,” and is part
of her dissertation work. She has studied a number of contemporary
Armenian newspapers, the records of the Armenian National Assembly, and
various other Armenian publications.
Ottomanism during its first stage, from the 1830s to the 1860s, was
an ideological justification for strengthening the state. A special role
was attributed to the middle class. For the Ottoman Armenians, reforms
were primarily cultural rather than political, yet in fact they could
not be implemented without political change.
Young Armenians saw Ottomanism as an opportunity to reorganize
education, culture and the Armenian millet, or ethnoreligious community
structure, and it could help in their struggle with Armenian
conservatives. They could get state support and privileges if they
respected the sultan and the laws of the Ottoman Empire.
However, the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims grew when reforms
were not implemented, so that excitement about Ottomanism disappeared.
In the next two decades, Armenians realized that equal rights were not
sufficient—they also needed access to the state bureaucracy.
The final presenter in the first panel was Dr. Heghnar Zeitlian
Watenpaugh, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of
California, Davis, Co-Chair of the Department of Art and Art History.
Her book “The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban
Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (2004)
received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians. Her next book on “Mass Violence and Cultural Heritage in the
Modern Middle East” is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her
paper was called “Reconstructing the Urban and Architectural History of
Ottoman Armenian Communities: Zeytun, 1850-1915.”
Watenpaugh became interested in Zeytun as a result of the Zeytun
Gospels, located now at Yerevan’s Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient
Manuscripts, except for eight pages at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America’s
lawsuit to take the eight pages away from the Getty called a great deal
of attention to this manuscript illuminated by Toros Roslin.
Zeytun’s architecture, religious life and local history provide the
last context for the manuscript before it was taken away. Watenpaugh
pointed out how Zeytun was usually studied from the point of view of
political history due to its unusual position of local autonomy through
most of the Ottoman period. She reviewed the extant sources and provided
images of Zeytun’s landscape, architecture and population.
Watenpaugh concluded that as Raphael Lemkin had written, the
destruction of things like architecture, relics, agricultural methods
and natural sacred phenomena are examples of the eradication of culture
as a part of the genocidal process. In this way, the Armenian layer of
life in cities and villages in Turkey today has been largely silenced or
ignored. Nonetheless, no art or urban history of the late Ottoman
Empire is complete without addressing the history of Zeytun or other
Armenian settlements.
Dr. Rachel Goshgarian, Assistant Professor of History at Lafayette
College, with a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University,
served as discussant for the first panel. Formerly Director of the
Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center of the Diocese of the
Armenian Church of America (Eastern), she is completing a book
manuscript entitled “A Futuwwa for the Borderlands; Homosociality, Urban
Self Governments and Interfaith Interactions in Late Medieval
Anatolia.” Goshgarian was excited to see such a wide range of papers
excavating what Armenian life looked like in the Ottoman Empire, and
asked a number of questions of the speakers.
Session II began with chair Barlow Der Mugrdechian introducing the
speakers. First was Asya Darbinyan, a graduate student at Clark
University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies with
Professor Taner Akçam, who received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees
in International Relations from Yerevan State University. Her master’s
thesis concerned American humanitarian assistance and Near East Relief
efforts for the Armenians during and after the Armenian Genocide. She
worked at the Armenian Genocide and Museum Research Institute as deputy
director. Her presentation for the panel was entitled “The Armenian
Genocide and Russian Response.”
Darbinyan explored relief efforts on the Caucasus front during World
War I, including the rapid official response of the government of the
Russian Empire to the suffering of the Armenians. Aside from political
actions and declarations, regulations were issued defining refugees
which created complexities in determining who was eligible for aid,
medical assistance and official refugee identity cards.
A number of organizations provided aid under dire circumstances.
According to N. Kishkin, in August 1915 the total number of refugees was
150,000. There was a huge daily death toll.
The Tatianinsky Committee, named after the Grand Duchess Tatiana
Nikolaevna, was established in September 1914, and collected donations
of money, clothing and food from companies, individuals, churches,
mosques, educational institutions and other organizations. The All
Russian Union of Cities had a Caucasus Department (or Committee), the
All Russian Union of Zemstvos, the Russian Red Cross, and various other
local and national Russian organizations provided humanitarian aid. When
Russian troops advanced and some Armenian refugees were able to return
to their homes, aid was still sent to them by the same committees.
The second speaker was Aintab native Ümit Kurt. With a bachelor’s
degree from Middle East Technical University in Political Science and
Public Administration and a master’s degree from Sabanci University from
the Department of European Studies, Ümit at present is a doctoral
candidate at Clark University’s Department of History and an instructor
at Sabanci. He is the author of “The Great and Hopeless Race of Turks:
The Origins of Turkish Nationalism in 1911-1916” (in Turkish 2012; in
English forthcoming from I. B. Tauris), and with Taner Akcam, Kanunlarin
Ruhu, which will come out in English as “Spirit of the Laws: The
Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide in 2015.” His talk was called
“The Emergence of the New Wealthy Class between 1915-1911: The Seizure
of Armenian Property by the local Elites in Aintab.”
Kürt presented the legal framework created for the confiscation of
Armenian properties by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which
was also linked to various local forms of Armenian hatred. This
framework was necessary to legitimatize the largely state process of
theft and seizure. In Aintab, the careful preparation and rapid seizure
was striking. Local notables became a new wealthy strata through this
confiscation.
Kürt used a number of Armenian sources, like the Aram Andonian
archives, the Sarkis Balabanian diaries, and Avedis Sarafian’s history
of the Aintab Armenians, to depict the deportation process in Aintab,
while also consulting German, Ottoman and other archival documents.
He showed Aintab to be a microcosm of the unfolding policies of the
Young Turks. The wide range of actors indicated how central and
coordinated the deportation of Armenians and confiscation of their
properties was, while the direct and active involvement of provincial
Muslim elites was motivated by the desire to enjoy Armenian wealth and
properties.
The final speaker of the panel was Khatchig Mouradian, a doctoral
candidate in Genocide Studies at Clark University who teaches at Rutgers
as coordinator of the Armenian Genocide program. He is a former editor
of the Armenian Weekly (2007-2014). His talk was entitled “The Meskene
Concentration Camp, 1915-1917: A Case Study of Power, Collaboration and
Humanitarian Resistance during the Armenian Genocide.”
As sources, Mouradian primarily used the Aram Andonian archives from
the AGBU Nubarian Library in Paris, the reports and minutes of the
Armenian prelacy in Aleppo and its council for deportees, and the
accounts, diaries and memoirs of deportees.
Tens of thousands of Armenians arrived in Meskene between May 1915
and winter 1917, of which many died of diseases and violence. Though
intended as a transit camp Meskene morphed into a concentration camp
where many spent months. Mouradian focused on daily life in the camps.
Many of the guards were Armenians, who were particularly brutal in
order to prove themselves to the Ottomans. Armenians tried to volunteer
for building works in order to escape further deportation and death in
Der Zor further down the river. Food and aid were minimal so most of the
camp residents were usually starving. Armenian women tried to help
orphans in the camp at great personal cost.
Camp director Hüseyin Avni was venal but not murderous and brutal. It
was his replacement Kör Hüseyin who nearly completely emptied the camp.
By the end of 1916, 28834 Armenians had been redeported to other camps
and 80,000 died at Meskene.
Dr. Rouben Paul Adalian served as discussant for the second panel.
With a UCLA history doctorate, he serves as director of the
Washington-based Armenian National Institute, and is the author of
“Humanism from Rationalism: Armenian Scholarship in the Nineteenth
Century” (1992) and the “Historical Dictionary of Armenia” (2010).
Adalian found that all three of the speakers from Clark University
provided new contributions to the understanding of the Armenian
Genocide, with a lot of detail. He directed questions to all the
speakers, and afterwards a lively discussion ensued with audience
members.
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