Peter Dizikes
In
1919, an Istanbul resident named Hayganush Mark did something
remarkable: She started a magazine. Today, that might not sound
extraordinary. But Mark was Armenian. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
had just been massacred as members of a religious and ethnic minority
in the Ottoman Empire, and Armenians were still fleeing in the years
after 1915.
Mark’s publication, Hay Gin, gave voice to an endangered group — and it kept appearing until 1933, when the Turkish government shut it down.
Moreover, Hay Gin featured feminist perspectives on work,
marriage, and politics, which were not exactly common at the time. In
publishing the journal, Mark was engaged in an act of political courage,
while providing a guide about “how to be an Armenian in post-genocide
Turkey,” as MIT historian Lerna Ekmekcioglu writes in a unique new book
on the subject.
