From Mundane Details to Great Revelations

Taleen Babayan

 

One simple — yet key — question set into motion 30 years of research: how many Armenians were actually massacred during the Armenian Genocide?

This question was posed to Dr. Sarkis Karayan in 1971, when he was serving as chief of the American University of Beirut’s Maternal and Child Health Center, by Dr. Stanley Kerr, chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at AUB. Close friends and esteemed colleagues, Kerr was working on his soon-to-be published book Lions of Marash, which focused on the eyewitness accounts of the American Near East Relief’s efforts during the Armenian Genocide. Kerr knew that Karayan was not only Armenian, but possessed the passion for history and research that would lead him to the accurate findings.

He was right.

Karayan made this quest one of his life’s missions and after countless hours of research and decades of dedication, Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, 1914: A Geographic and Demographic Gazetteer, was recently released by the Gomidas Institute, an independent and academic institution based in London (www.gomidas.org).

William Saroyan Street Named in Bitlis

The Bitlis town council has approved the renaming of five streets in this historic town in south-eastern Turkey. Among the names is “William Saroyan Street,” after the great American-Armenian writer whose ancestors came from Bitlis before 1915. Saroyan was born in Fresno but felt strong ties to his ancestral home. He visited Bitlis in 1964 and 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of that visit.

Bitlis Co-Mayors Promise to Name a Street after William Saroyan

The co-mayors of Bitlis, Hüseyin Olan and Nevin Taşdemir, have stated that they will rename a street in Bitlis after the well-known American Armenian writer William Saroyan. The Saroyan family emigrated to California from Bitlis, in eastern Turkey, before 1915.

Exhibition of Bitlis Armenians Held in Tatvan

Ayse Gunaysu



March 1, 2014. We are at the municipality’s Cultural Center of Tatvan, a district of Bitlis, close to the city center. There is a poster in the entrance of the building announcing the exhibition: “Bitlis Armenians, March 1-2, Gomidas Institute (GI).”

The Gomidas Institute Publishes the English Translation of Hagop Oshagan's "Remnants"

Hagop Oshagan, one of the greatest Armenian novelists of the twentieth century, was born in Brusa (Anatolia) in 1883 and died in Aleppo (Syria) in 1948. He was the author of a series of groundbreaking novels and short stories, as well as several plays and an extensive production of literary criticism, including his 10-volume Panorama of Western Armenian Literature.

“Talaat Pasha’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1917”

In 2008 Murat Bardakci, the Turkish journalist and historian, published a facsimile of a report on Ottoman Armenians from Talaat Pasha’s private archives. The report had been given to Bardakci by Talaat’s widow in 1982. In his own presentation of the untitled and undated report, Bardakci acknowledged that the materials he was presenting were open to interpretation. He called the report “A General Account of the Armenian Population after the Population Transfer [Tehcir] (possibly 1915-1916).”[1] Bardakci’s work was somewhat derided by Turkish nationalist historians and generally ignored by others.[2]