NAASR’s Mardigian Library Receives Rare Guerguerian Archives

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research has received one of the most significant archives of documents relating to the Armenian Genocide—the archive collected by the late Fr. Krikor Guerguerian—for research and study in NAASR’s Mardigian Library. These materials are considered “priceless” by noted scholar Prof. Taner Akçam, who relied on them heavily for his book “Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide” (Palgrave, 2018). Akçam holds the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Among the important items in the Guerguerian archive are photographic copies of numerous official Ottoman telegrams which were used in the 1919-20 Military Tribunals but had since vanished, including one from Behaeddin Shakir, one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), inquiring about details from the field on the deportations and killings of Armenians. Akçam considers this document as a clear expression of the CUP leadership’s genocidal intentions. The archive also contains photographic images of the now lost “Memoir of Naim Bey” published by Aram Andonian around 1920.

The AGBU Nubar Library Launches Website for Its Digital Collection

The AGBU Nubar Library in Paris is proud to announce the launch of its website, offering a wealth of information, photos and documents about Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian diaspora. The library's collection primarily concerns the nineteenth and twentieth century and is a vital resource in the preservation of Armenian cultural heritage.

The Authenticity of the Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams

Below is the English translation of an interview conducted by Turkey’s Agos Newspaper with Professor Taner Akcam on the authenticity of long disputed Armenian Genocide documents—the memoir of Naim Bey and the Talat Pasha telegrams. Akcam is the Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian, and Stephen and Marion Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Agos: A new work of yours, named The Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams has been published. Could you briefly tell us what your book is about?

Taner Akcam: As the title indicates, the book is about the memoirs of an Ottoman officer by the name of Naim Efendi and the Talat Pasha telegrams, which ordered the killing Armenians.

Agos: Aren’t these part of the so-called “Talat Pasha fake telegrams” claimed to be fabricated by the Armenians?

T.A.: Yes, these are the memoirs of Naim Efendi and the telegrams he gave to [Aram] Andonian, which everyone regards as fake or, if they find them legitimate, do not speak up about it.

The Book with a Black Cover

Khatchig Mouradian (*)

 

They arrived [in Meskeneh] by the thousands, but the majority left their bones there.
—Auguste Bernau, German employee
of the American Vacuum Oil Company[1]

My first copy of Andonian’s Ayn Sev Orerun was a reprint issued in Beirut in 1985, on the 70^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. It had a black cover with a drawing of a woman, in tears, next to a lyre.

I remember reading it as a teenager cover to cover, several times. The short stories were particularly jarring not only because of the horrid accounts and graphic details, but because page after page, the perpetrators were not named: The word “Turks” did not come up at all in the book.[2] Andonian did not name the victims either. The book had such a profound impact on me that to this day, every time I see that cover, sadness resurfaces.

The ‘Great Calamity’ Hoax: What ‘Medz Yeghern’ Actually Meant for the Survivors

Vartan Matiossian

 

“…All those human-like monsters who executed the Medz Yeghern
and tainted their hands with the innocent blood of the Armenians.”
Yervant Odian (1920)

During the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the word yeghern had already entered dictionaries of Modern Armenian and literary texts with the primary meaning of “crime.” It was used, both alone and within the phrase Medz Yeghern, as one of the names of the pogrom of Adana in 1909.

The echoes of this massacre had barely died out when a large-scale program of extermination was put into practice by the Ottoman-Turkish government. Along came the words yeghern and Medz Yeghern. This article will discuss their use in some of the many texts penned in the first two decades years after 1915.

Medz Yeghern: Setting the Record Straight

Vartan Matiossian

 

Too much fuss has been made about the use of the expression Medz Yeghern instead of "Armenian Genocide" since His Holiness John Paul II used it, for the first time by a foreign dignitary, when visiting Armenia in 2001. You can stretch it as much as you want, but the fact is that it literally means "Great Crime" (or whatever synonym of "crime" you may like) and nothing else. It is synonymous with Medz Vojir (a term also used in the years after the Genocide; Aram Andonian gave this title to his book in Armenian, the original to the book known in English as "Memoirs of Naim Bey"), and yeghernakordz means exactly the same as vojrakordz, namely, "criminal." Neither "cataclysm," nor "catastrophe," nor "calamity" (the one preferred by Turkish writers; I wonder who was the Armenian author of this mistranslation) will do justice to its meaning.