ARARAT ESKIJIAN MUSEUM HOSTS LECTURE ON AINTAB
September 21, 2013 – 11:58 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – The Ararat Eskijian Museum in Mission Hills, CA, wore
the image of Old Aintab earlier this month as fifty or more Aintabtsis
and supporters gathered to hear a lecture by Umit Kurt, PhD candidate
in the department of History at Clark University, Asbarez reports.
The lecture, titled The Emergence of the New Wealthy Class Between
1915-1922: The Seizure of Armenian Property by Local Elites in Aintab,
focused on the importance of acquiring Armenian wealth and material
possessions to the local Kurds and Turks in Aintab before and during
the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
As to the lust for Armenian property that could act as a motive for the
killings, Kurt described a “link between the role of stolen Armenian
assets in the integration and stabilization of Turkification, which
makes confiscation of Armenian properties a social process”. The fate
of the Armenians was not only linked to the Committee of Union and
Progress party (CUP) orders, but behavior of the local elites.
Material rewards were given for collaboration at the regional level.
In Kurt’s words, “the large distribution of Armenian property provided
a useful incentive that strongly reinforced Armenian hatred and other
political and personal issues.”
Besides the local elites, many other state companies were also involved
in the seizure of Armenian properties including auction houses,
property assessors, trustees, and transportation companies in support
of Turkish anti-Armenian policies in Aintab. The opportunities for
success and growth facilitated the removal of Armenians, whereas the
effects of the loss of properties to the victims were demoralizing and
stigmatizing. Additionally, the deportation of Armenians to the Syrian
Desert proved effective in separating them from their properties as
they were made not to return. A new local wealthy class emerged and
prospered through the obtainment of Armenian wealth and property.
After the lecture, Umit Kurt displayed a short film called My Father’s
Aintab and old and recent images of the Armenian quarter in Aintab.
The evening followed with a Q&A session where one of the audience
members asked Kurt why he chose to research the destruction of Aintab’s
Armenians and their properties.
As a native of Aintab, when Kurt was younger, he did not know about
the presence of Armenians or about the Armenian quarter in Aintab.
When one of his friends invited him to a unique coffee shop to meet,
his life and interests changed forever. When he reached the coffee
shop, he first noticed the intricately carved, monumental front door
of the coffee shop and was amazed at the internal beauty and homey
design, which contained every feature of an Armenian home. He asked
the owner, who was Turkish, to show him around the place and the
upstairs section composed of many rooms aesthetically extrinsic to
his eyes. Kurt noticed the numbers “1894” (when the first Hamidian
massacres took place) on the wall and asked about the previous owner.
The man replied, “I don’t know, Armenians were here.” Later, he
discovered that a man named Nazaret Agha of the Kimia family owned the
house, before it became a coffee shop. It became the groundbreaking
point in his life where he sought out to research the history of the
Aintab Armenians and in the meanwhile, also write his own story.
Umit Kurt is of Kurdish descent maternally, but is not certain of his
father’s side. He is a PhD candidate at Clark University and student
of Taner Akcam, a prominent scholar on the Armenian Genocide. During
the Q&A session, Kurt was asked if he received any objections or had
been tried for “insulting Turkishness”, in which he responded that
he has not yet encountered any objections from the Turkish government
regarding his research on the stolen Armenian properties.
In the last minutes, Kurt spoke words that made everyone smile. He
said, “I don’t work for Armenian people; I work for my own people to
reckon their own historical wrongdoings.”
From: Baghdasarian