‘Agn Is In Ruins, The Nightingale Doesn’t Sing’: Songs of Pain of Genocide in Turkey

Harry A. Kezelian III

 

“That generation…”

Stephan Karougian, the 80-something male soloist of St. John’s Armenian Church Komitas Choir in Detroit, was telling me about his parents, as I sat in his living room, interviewing him about his life in Armenian music. He shook his head and sighed. He didn’t really expound upon those two words, but his tone of voice was enough to tell the story.

Karougian’s father had been born in Pingyan, a village in the Province of Sivas in Ottoman Turkey, very close to the large town of Agn in Harput province (the Ottoman borders divided up the Armenian villages of that region, which also included Armdan and Divrig). He told me that when his father would gather with friends, they would sing a song in Turkish beginning with the words “Egin de veran olmush” (“Agn is in ruins”). It was a very sad song about their region. But when Karougian first told me about this song, he didn’t say that it was a song about the Genocide, he simply told me that they sang it.

Second Feminist Armenian Studies Workshop Held at UCI

Sona Zeitlian

 

Following the successful launching of the Annual Feminist Armenian Studies Workshop in 2017 at MIT, a second two-day Workshop was organized. The workshop, titled Gendering Resistance and Revolution, took place at the University of California Irvine campus on May 4 – 5. This year’s workshop was co-organized by Houri Berberian, Professor of History and Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies at UCI, Melissa Bilal, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia, and Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Associate Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at MIT.

‘Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies’ Conference Takes Place at MIT

Throughout the last couple of decades, Feminist as well as Armenian Studies have developed to become two distinct fields of inquiry. Nevertheless, few efforts have been made to see them in juxtaposition and apply the theoretical insights of the one to the other. Among such attempts was the conference “Feminist Interventions in Armenian Studies/Armenian Interventions in Feminist Studies” organized by Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT) and Melissa Bilal (University of Chicago) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on April 7. With the participation of senior and junior scholars, all women, the conference purported to bring together experts in various fields and generate critical and theoretical debates regarding Armenian Studies and the contributions of feminist thought to it.