Richard Hovannisian’s Kharpert Volume Published in Turkish

The well-known Aras Publishing House of Istanbul has announced the publication of Harput, the third volume in Turkish translation from the UCLA Conference series on Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces, organized by Professor Richard G. Hovannisian between 1997 and 2009.

Destruction at Tadem: The Purge of the Armenians

 Uzay Bulut

Yet another plague has recently shaken Turkey: the purges of academics from Turkish universities. According to the BIA news network, 4,811 academics from 112 universities have been discharged by five statutory decrees declared during the state of emergency. Fifteen universities have been closed.

One of the universities, from which many academics have been dismissed or even detained by police, is Firat University in the city of Elazig (Kharpert), which has a long history of persecution of Armenian students and educators.

According to Matthew Karanian, the author of the 2015 book Historic Armenia After 100 Years, Kharpert is one of the oldest areas of Armenian habitation. “Some scholars believe that Kharpert may even be the cradle of the Armenian nation,” according to Karanian.

The author Robert Aram Kaloosdian, whose father comes from the village of Tadem in Kharpert, writes about individual stories of the Armenian villagers of Tadem, which was continuously inhabited by Armenians since its founding until the early 1920’s. His 2015 book Tadem, My Father’s Village: Extinguished during the 1915 Armenian Genocide also elaborates on the great importance the Armenian community of the village attached to education and learning.

The Blackberries of Kharpert

Eric Nazarian

 

It’s been an unspeakably bloody summer in the Middle and Near East. The awful war in Gaza, the beheading of James Foley, the sniper shootings on border villagers in Tavush, the endless mayhem and quagmire of Syria, the micro-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan inflamed by Aliyev’s Twitter threats to bomb Yerevan, and the Yezidi genocide perpetrated by ISIS that has created mushrooming humanitarian disasters all over the region.

Turning Poison into Medicine: My Journey as Producer of "Three Apples Fell from Heaven"

Sona Tatoyan

I love to walk. I can walk for hours and hours in New York City, my current home. My great-grandmother Lucine loved to walk. In the mid- to late-1950′s, she would walk for miles and miles through Aleppo and into the outskirts with my toddler father on her shoulders.

For the last 25 years I have been carrying Lucine on my shoulders.