SOCIETY FOR ARMENIAN STUDIES HOSTS CONFERENCE ON ‘ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE’
Friday, December 12th, 2014
Participants in the SAS 40th Anniversary conference in Washington, D. C.
BY ARAM ARKUN
>From the Society of Armenian Studies
The Society for Armenian Studies (SAS), a primarily American
association of scholars and supporters of Armenology, is celebrating
its 40th anniversary this year. It held an international conference in
Yerevan in October, and on November 21-22, it convened a conference
in Washington, DC, called “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the
19th-20th Centuries.”
SAS Executive Council president Dr. Kevork B. Bardakjian, Marie
Manoogian Professor of Armenian Language and Literature at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, welcomed participants and guests.
Chairman of the conference organizing committee Dr. Bedross Der
Matossian, Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History in the
Department of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, spoke
of the attempt to organize three panels, on the following topics: the
contribution of the Armenians to Ottoman culture, society, art and
architecture; Armenians of the Empire from the Balkan Wars to World
War I; and the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath. Unfortunately no
submissions were received on the second topic, but speakers for one
panel on the first range of topics, and two on the last, were found.
In fact, Der Matossian felt the first panel “should be seen as a
microcosm of what type of research needs to be done in order to
bring back the Armenians into Ottoman history and reconstruct their
history.” The focus on the Armenian Genocide for the other two panels,
he said, was fitting due to the approaching centennial of the start
of that event. Der Matossian also stated that “From the academic
perspective, a lot of work needs to be done in understanding the
complexities of the Armenian Genocide beyond the clichés of Muslims
vs. Christians or Turks vs. Armenians.” He concluded that Armenian
Genocide studies can go beyond the analysis of a specific event to
provide “new empirical data and thematic approaches to understand
mass violence in general.”
Der Matossian thanked Prof. Barlow Der Mugrdechian, Berberian Endowed
Coordinator of the Armenian Studies Program at California State
University, Fresno, for help in organizing the conference and SAS
Secretary Ani Kasparian, of the University of Michigan, Dearborn,
for preparing registration materials.
The first panel, on Armenian contributions to Ottoman culture,
was chaired by Dr. Levon Avdoyan, the Armenian and Georgian Area
Specialist at the Library of Congress. Before introducing the speakers,
he stated that “as someone who was at the 1976 conference, it is
really spectacular that we are at the 40th year of this organization.
The first speaker on this panel, Murat C. Yildiz, a doctoral student
in the Department of History at the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA), spoke on “Reassessing Cultural Transformation in
Early-Twentieth-Century Bolis: Armenian Contributions to a Shared
Ottoman Physical Culture.” This topic was related to his dissertation,
entitled “Strengthening Male Bodies and Building Robust Communities:
Physical Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire.”
Yildiz depicted Armenian programs to develop exercise and sports as
part of a broader shared physical culture in the Ottoman Empire from
the mid to late 19th century. Athletics were associated with modernity,
and were thought important for building physical and mental health,
discipline and strength. In Istanbul the Imperial School and Robert
College disseminated such ideas but Armenians wanted to form their
own autonomous sports clubs. These clubs shared a developing middle
class identity with other Ottomans but had a distinct ethnoreligious
nature. Mistrusted by the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, these
clubs mushroomed in number with the liberties of the Young Turk era
after 1908.
Armenians looked to their pagan past in naming some of these clubs,
such as the KuruceÃ…~_me Ardavazt Athletic Club or the Armenian Dork
club. They published their own sports magazines like Marmnamarz
(established in 1911 by Shavarsh Krisian), which was part of a
multilingual Ottoman sports press.
Yildiz’s study can be considered part of a new movement to examine
social, cultural and political transformations in the Ottoman Empire
through linguistically diverse sources. He demonstrated that shared
Ottoman civic values did not prevent exclusive ethnoreligious ties.
Yildiz was followed by Nora Cherishian Lessersohn, a master’s student
at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University,
who graduated from Harvard College in 2009 and has worked at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Manhattan District Attorney’s
Office. Her talk was entitled “‘Provincial Cosmopolitanism’ in Late
Ottoman Anatolia: An Armenian Shoemaker’s Memoir.” Her goal is to add
the Ottoman Armenian voice as a full partner in the conversation on
Ottoman provincial history.
She explored her great-grandfather Hovhannes Cherishian’s memoirs.
Born in Marash in 1886, he was a shoemaker who served in the Ottoman
army from 1910 to 1914 in Adana and Mersin. He experienced great
suffering and loss due to the Armenian Genocide, and its aftermath. He
was deported to Syria, and returned after the war to Marash, yet lost
his young bride and brother during the retreat from this city in 1920.
Nonetheless, he also enjoyed good relations with various Muslims.
Lessersohn read two excerpts from the memoirs. She called the close
relationship between Muslims and Christians provincial cosmopolitanism,
which resulted from living in an urban demographically complex but
provincial environment, something different from the interactions in
major port cities.
Conference organizer Dr. Bedross Der Matossian speaks
The next speaker was Anahit Kartashyan, a doctoral student working on
the Armenian Community of Constantinople in the 19th century at the
Department of Asian and African Studies at Saint Petersburg State
University. With a bachelor’s degree in Turkish Studies (2008) and
a master’s degree in Ottoman Studies (2010), both from Yerevan State
University (2008), Kartashyan taught modern Turkish from 2010 to 2011
at her alma mater before continuing her graduate studies in Russia.
Her talk was titled, “The Discourse of First-Wave Ottomanism among
the Armenian Intellectuals and Statesmen in the Ottoman Empire,”
and is part of her dissertation work. She has studied a number of
contemporary Armenian newspapers, the records of the Armenian National
Assembly, and various other Armenian publications.
Ottomanism during its first stage, from the 1830s to the 1860s, was
an ideological justification for strengthening the state. A special
role was attributed to the middle class. For the Ottoman Armenians,
reforms were primarily cultural rather than political, yet in fact
they could not be implemented without political change.
Young Armenians saw Ottomanism as an opportunity to reorganize
education, culture and the Armenian millet, or ethnoreligious
community structure, and it could help in their struggle with Armenian
conservatives. They could get state support and privileges if they
respected the sultan and the laws of the Ottoman Empire.
However, the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims grew when reforms
were not implemented, so that excitement about Ottomanism disappeared.
In the next two decades, Armenians realized that equal rights were
not sufficient–they also needed access to the state bureaucracy.
The final presenter in the first panel was Dr. Heghnar Zeitlian
Watenpaugh, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of
California, Davis, Co-Chair of the Department of Art and Art History.
Her book “The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban
Experience in Aleppo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (2004)
received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians. Her next book on “Mass Violence and Cultural Heritage
in the Modern Middle East” is forthcoming from Stanford University
Press. Her paper was called “Reconstructing the Urban and Architectural
History of Ottoman Armenian Communities: Zeytun, 1850-1915.”
Watenpaugh became interested in Zeytun as a result of the Zeytun
Gospels, located now at Yerevan’s Mesrop Mashtots Institute of
Ancient Manuscripts, except for eight pages at the Getty Museum in
Los Angeles. The Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of
America’s lawsuit to take the eight pages away from the Getty called a
great deal of attention to this manuscript illuminated by Toros Roslin.
Zeytun’s architecture, religious life and local history provide the
last context for the manuscript before it was taken away. Watenpaugh
pointed out how Zeytun was usually studied from the point of view
of political history due to its unusual position of local autonomy
through most of the Ottoman period. She reviewed the extant sources
and provided images of Zeytun’s landscape, architecture and population.
Watenpaugh concluded that as Raphael Lemkin had written, the
destruction of things like architecture, relics, agricultural methods
and natural sacred phenomena are examples of the eradication of culture
as a part of the genocidal process. In this way, the Armenian layer of
life in cities and villages in Turkey today has been largely silenced
or ignored. Nonetheless, no art or urban history of the late Ottoman
Empire is complete without addressing the history of Zeytun or other
Armenian settlements.
Dr. Rachel Goshgarian, Assistant Professor of History at Lafayette
College, with a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University,
served as discussant for the first panel. Formerly Director of
the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center of the Diocese of
the Armenian Church of America (Eastern), she is completing a book
manuscript entitled “A Futuwwa for the Borderlands; Homosociality,
Urban Self Governments and Interfaith Interactions in Late Medieval
Anatolia.” Goshgarian was excited to see such a wide range of papers
excavating what Armenian life looked like in the Ottoman Empire,
and asked a number of questions of the speakers.
Session II began with chair Barlow Der Mugrdechian introducing the
speakers. First was Asya Darbinyan, a graduate student at Clark
University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
with Professor Taner Akcam, who received her bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in International Relations from Yerevan State University. Her
master’s thesis concerned American humanitarian assistance and Near
East Relief efforts for the Armenians during and after the Armenian
Genocide. She worked at the Armenian Genocide and Museum Research
Institute as deputy director. Her presentation for the panel was
entitled “The Armenian Genocide and Russian Response.”
Darbinyan explored relief efforts on the Caucasus front during World
War I, including the rapid official response of the government of the
Russian Empire to the suffering of the Armenians. Aside from political
actions and declarations, regulations were issued defining refugees
which created complexities in determining who was eligible for aid,
medical assistance and official refugee identity cards.
Left to right: Dr. Hegnar Watenpaugh, Murat Yildiz, Dr. Rachel
Goshgarian and SAS President Dr. Kevork Bardakjian at the opening
session of the SAS conference.
A number of organizations provided aid under dire circumstances.
According to N. Kishkin, in August 1915 the total number of refugees
was 150,000. There was a huge daily death toll.
The Tatianinsky Committee, named after the Grand Duchess Tatiana
Nikolaevna, was established in September 1914, and collected donations
of money, clothing and food from companies, individuals, churches,
mosques, educational institutions and other organizations. The All
Russian Union of Cities had a Caucasus Department (or Committee),
the All Russian Union of Zemstovs, the Russian Red Cross, and various
other local and national Russian organizations provided humanitarian
aid. When Russian troops advanced and some Armenian refugees were
able to return to their homes, aid was still sent to them by the
same committees.
The second speaker was Aintab native Umit Kurt. With a bachelor’s
degree from Middle East Technical University in Political Science and
Public Administration and a master’s degree from Sabanci University
from the Department of European Studies, Umit at present is a doctoral
candidate at Clark University’s Department of History and an instructor
at Sabanci. He is the author of “The Great and Hopeless Race of Turks:
The Origins of Turkish Nationalism in 1911-1916” (in Turkish 2012;
in English forthcoming from I. B. Tauris), and with Taner Akcam,
Kanunlarin Ruhu, which will come out in English as “Spirit of the Laws:
The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide in 2015.” His talk
was called “The Emergence of the New Wealthy Class between 1915-1911:
The Seizure of Armenian Property by the local Elites in Aintab.”
Kurt presented the legal framework created for the confiscation of
Armenian properties by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP),
which was also linked to various local forms of Armenian hatred. This
framework was necessary to legitimatize the largely state process
of theft and seizure. In Aintab, the careful preparation and rapid
seizure was striking. Local notables became a new wealthy strata
through this confiscation.
Kurt used a number of Armenian sources, like the Aram Andonian
archives, the Sarkis Balabanian diaries, and Avedis Sarafian’s history
of the Aintab Armenians, to depict the deportation process in Aintab,
while also consulting German, Ottoman and other archival documents.
He showed Aintab to be a microcosm of the unfolding policies of
the Young Turks. The wide range of actors indicated how central and
coordinated the deportation of Armenians and confiscation of their
properties was, while the direct and active involvement of provincial
Muslim elites was motivated by the desire to enjoy Armenian wealth
and properties.
The final speaker of the panel was Khatchig Mouradian, a doctoral
candidate in Genocide Studies at Clark University who teaches at
Rutgers as coordinator of the Armenian Genocide program. He is
a former editor of the Armenian Weekly (2007-2014). His talk was
entitled “The Meskene Concentration Camp, 1915-1917: A Case Study of
Power, Collaboration and Humanitarian Resistance during the Armenian
Genocide.”
As sources, Mouradian primarily used the Aram Andonian archives from
the AGBU Nubarian Library in Paris, the reports and minutes of the
Armenian prelacy in Aleppo and its council for deportees, and the
accounts, diaries and memoirs of deportees.
Tens of thousands of Armenians arrived in Meskene between May 1915
and winter 1917, of which many died of diseases and violence. Though
intended as a transit camp Meskene morphed into a concentration camp
where many spent months. Mouradian focused on daily life in the camps.
Many of the guards were Armenians, who were particularly brutal in
order to prove themselves to the Ottomans. Armenians tried to volunteer
for building works in order to escape further deportation and death
in Der Zor further down the river. Food and aid were minimal so most
of the camp residents were usually starving. Armenian women tried to
help orphans in the camp at great personal cost.
Camp director Huseyin Avni was venal but not murderous and brutal. It
was his replacement Kör Huseyin who nearly completely emptied the
camp. By the end of 1916, 28834 Armenians had been redeported to
other camps and 80,000 died at Meskene.
Dr. Rouben Paul Adalian served as discussant for the second panel.
With a UCLA history doctorate, he serves as director of the
Washington-based Armenian National Institute, and is the author of
“Humanism from Rationalism: Armenian Scholarship in the Nineteenth
Century” (1992) and the “Historical Dictionary of Armenia” (2010).
Adalian found that all three of the speakers from Clark University
provided new contributions to the understanding of the Armenian
Genocide, with a lot of detail. He directed questions to all the
speakers, and afterwards a lively discussion ensued with audience
members.
From: A. Papazian