Book Review: ‘Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt’

Richard G. Hovannisian (*)

 

Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt. By Justin McCarthy, Ömer Turan, and Cemalettin Taşkiran. (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2014. Pp. 496. $32.00.)

The Sasun crisis in 1894 was a watershed in Ottoman-Armenian history, as it marked the beginning of the process of elimination of the native Armenian population, continuing with widespread massacres in 1895-1896 and in 1909 and culminating in the genocidal deportations and massacres of 1915 to 1923. The historiography of more than a century has described and analyzed in detail the tribulations of the Armenian peasantry in the mountains of Sasun in the eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, their being stirred up by revolutionaries to resist Kurdish predations, and their victimization in 1894, reportedly with the involvement of regular Turkish armed forces.

Houshamadyan Releases ‘Ottoman Armenians: Life, Culture, Society’

Haroutiun Kurkjian
Translated by Khatchig Mouradian

This is the title of the volume that Houshamadyan presented to the public as its first publication, three years after launching the website with the same title (houshamadyan.org). Already from a first glance standing out as an elegant volume, it holds in its 270 large-size (28×22 cm) pages multidisciplinary research articles and photo galleries documenting a variety of themes.

The publication is realized in partnership with Haigazian University and the Department of Turkology at the University of Bamberg.

The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora

Jennifer Manoukian

There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part of my language too.

"Jewels of Devotion and Self-Sacrifice": Ottoman Armenian Women as Teachers

Jennifer Manoukian

 

The Armenian press in the late Ottoman Empire was the site of heated debates among writers and intellectuals, who would rip apart each other’s arguments and attack each other’s character with a ferociousness that might surprise even the most jaded, twenty-first century reader. The article above sparked a lengthy debate on education in the pages of the Constantinople-based newspaper Massis. While keeping its focus on the unique challenges facing young female teachers, the article also touches on thorny gender and class inequalities that inflamed some Armenian intellectuals and drove them to air their vitriol in a series of responses to the article.