Recovering Armenia

Recovering Armenia PDF Author: Lerna Ekmekçioglu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekçioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions. Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekçioglu gives voice to the community’s most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenian-ness sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles. Praise for Recovering Armenia “With verve, passion and wit, Ekmekçioglu shows how central women were to the restoration of the Armenian community in the decade after the genocidal war. Recovering Armenia is a must-read for all students of the Great War and its aftermath, and for anyone who wants to understand the modern Middle East and the roots of sectarian conflict that continues in the region today.” —Elizabeth Thompson, University of Virginia “This remarkably innovative history offers . . . a thorough account of the ways in which . . . Armenian survivors of the genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey inventively reconstituted themselves as a harshly constrained yet enduring national minority within the new Turkish Republic . . . . A pioneering work that will prove indispensable.” —Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University “Lerna Ekmekçioglu’s radically revealing and provocative book challenges conventional historical wisdom in its exploration of the continued existence of an Armenian minority in modern Turkey.” —Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union

Recovering Armenia

Recovering Armenia PDF Author: Lerna Ekmekçioglu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekçioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions. Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekçioglu gives voice to the community’s most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenian-ness sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles. Praise for Recovering Armenia “With verve, passion and wit, Ekmekçioglu shows how central women were to the restoration of the Armenian community in the decade after the genocidal war. Recovering Armenia is a must-read for all students of the Great War and its aftermath, and for anyone who wants to understand the modern Middle East and the roots of sectarian conflict that continues in the region today.” —Elizabeth Thompson, University of Virginia “This remarkably innovative history offers . . . a thorough account of the ways in which . . . Armenian survivors of the genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey inventively reconstituted themselves as a harshly constrained yet enduring national minority within the new Turkish Republic . . . . A pioneering work that will prove indispensable.” —Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University “Lerna Ekmekçioglu’s radically revealing and provocative book challenges conventional historical wisdom in its exploration of the continued existence of an Armenian minority in modern Turkey.” —Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union

A House in the Homeland

A House in the Homeland PDF Author: Carel Bertram
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
A powerful examination of soulful journeys made to recover memory and recuperate stolen pasts in the face of unspeakable histories. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 took refuge across the globe. Traumatized by unspeakable brutalities, the idea of returning to their homeland was unthinkable. But decades later, some children and grandchildren felt compelled to travel back, having heard stories of family wholeness in beloved homes and of cherished ancestral towns and villages once in Ottoman Armenia, today in the Republic of Turkey. Hoping to satisfy spiritual yearnings, this new generation called themselves pilgrims—and their journeys, pilgrimages. Carel Bertram joined scores of these pilgrims on over a dozen pilgrimages, and amassed accounts from hundreds more who made these journeys. In telling their stories, A House in the Homeland documents how pilgrims encountered the ancestral house, village, or town as both real and metaphorical centerpieces of family history. Bertram recounts the moving, restorative connections pilgrims made, and illuminates how the ancestral house, as a spiritual place, offers an opening to a wellspring of humanity in sites that might otherwise be defined solely by tragic loss. As an exploration of the powerful links between memory and place, house and homeland, rupture and continuity, these Armenian stories reflect the resilience of diaspora in the face of the savage reaches of trauma, separation, and exile in ways that each of us, whatever our history, can recognize.

The Missing Pages

The Missing Pages PDF Author: Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150360764X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
“[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts

A Question of Genocide

A Question of Genocide PDF Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199792763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian genocide is a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here a compelling reconstruction of what happened and why. This volume gathers the most up-to-date scholarship on Armenian genocide, looking at how the event has been written about in Western and Turkish historiographies; what was happening on the eve of the catastrophe; portraits of the perpetrators; detailed accounts of the massacres; how the event has been perceived in both local and international contexts, including World War I; and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then. The result is a comprehensive work that moves beyond nationalist master narratives and offers a more complete understanding of this tragic event.

Goodbye, Antoura

Goodbye, Antoura PDF Author: Karnig Panian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804796343
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
“This searing account of a little boy wrenched from family and innocence” during the Armenian genocide “is a literary gem” (Financial Times). When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly a thousand Armenian and four hundred Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: Its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.

Recovering Buddhism in Modern China

Recovering Buddhism in Modern China PDF Author: Jan Kiely
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists both participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China. This volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China's twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating new narratives of Buddhism's involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, this book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history.

Feast of Ashes

Feast of Ashes PDF Author: Sato Moughalian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503609154
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 557

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Book Description
The compelling life story of Armenian ceramicist David Ohannessian, whose work changed the face of Jerusalem—and a granddaughter's search for his legacy. Along the cobbled streets and golden walls of Jerusalem, brilliantly glazed tiles catch the light and beckon the eye. These colorful wares—known as Armenian ceramics—are iconic features of the Holy City. Silently, these works of ceramic art—art that also graces homes and museums around the world—represent a riveting story of resilience and survival: In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, as hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched to their deaths, one man carried the secrets of this age-old art with him into exile toward the Syrian desert. Feast of Ashes tells the story of David Ohannessian, the renowned ceramicist who in 1919 founded the art of Armenian pottery in Jerusalem, where his work and that of his followers is now celebrated as a local treasure. Ohannessian's life encompassed some of the most tumultuous upheavals of the modern Middle East. Born in an isolated Anatolian mountain village, he witnessed the rise of violent nationalism in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, endured arrest and deportation in the Armenian Genocide, founded a new ceramics tradition in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, and spent his final years, uprooted, in Cairo and Beirut. Ohannessian's life story is revealed by his granddaughter Sato Moughalian, weaving together family narratives with newly unearthed archival findings. Witnessing her personal quest for the man she never met, we come to understand a universal story of migration, survival, and hope.

Post-Soviet Armenia

Post-Soviet Armenia PDF Author: Irina Ghaplanyan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315282674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia has struggled to establish itself, with a faltering economy, emigration of the intelligentsia and the weakening of civil society. This book explores how a new national elite has emerged and how it has constructed a new national narrative to suit Armenia’s new circumstances. The book examines the importance of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan, considers the impact of fraught relations with Turkey and the impact of relations with other neighbouring states including Russia, and discusses the poorly-developed role of the very large Armenian diaspora. Overall, the book provides a key overview to understanding the forces shaping all aspects of present-day Armenia.

Soldier Dead

Soldier Dead PDF Author: Michael Sledge
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231135157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
What happens to members of the United States Armed Forces after they die? Why do soldiers endanger their lives to recover the remains of their comrades? Why does the military spend enormous resources and risk further fatalities to recover the bodies of the fallen, even decades after the cessation of hostilities? Soldier Dead is the first book to fully address the complicated physical, social, religious, economic, and political issues concerning the remains of men and women who die while serving their country. In doing so, Michael Sledge reveals the meanings of the war dead for families, soldiers, and the nation as a whole. Why does recovering the remains of servicepeople matter? Soldier Dead examines this question and provides a thorough analysis of the processes of recovery, identification, return, burial, and remembrance of the dead. Sledge traces the ways in which the handling of our Soldier Dead has evolved over time and how these changes have reflected not only advances in technology and capabilities but also the shifting attitudes of the public, government, and military. He also considers the emotional stress experienced by those who handle the dead; the continuing efforts to retrieve bodies from Korea and elsewhere; and how unresolved issues regarding the treatment of enemy dead continue to affect U.S. foreign relations. Skillfully incorporating excerpts from interviews, personal correspondence and diaries, military records, and journalistic accounts-as well as never-before-published photographs and his own reflections-Michael Sledge presents a clear, concise, and compassionate story about what the dead mean to the living. Throughout Soldier Dead, the voices of the fallen are heard, as are those of family members and military personnel responsible for the dead before final disposition. At times disturbing and at other times encouraging, they are always powerful as they speak of danger, duty, courage, commitment, and care.

The Armenians in Modern Turkey

The Armenians in Modern Turkey PDF Author: Talin Suciyan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857727737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
After the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million Armenians died, thousands of Armenians lived and worked in the Turkish state alongside those who had persecuted their communities. Living in the context of pervasive denial, how did Armenians remaining in Turkey record their own history? Here, Talin Suciyan explores the life experienced by these Armenian communities as Turkey's modernisation project of the twentieth century gathered pace. Suciyan achieves this through analysis of remarkable new primary material: Turkish state archives, minutes of the Armenian National Assembly, a kaleidoscopic series of personal diaries, memoirs and oral histories, various Armenian periodicals such as newspapers, yearbooks and magazines, as well as statutes and laws which led to the continuing persecution of Armenians. The first history of its kind, The Armenians in Modern Turkey is a fresh contribution to the history of modern Turkey and the Armenian experience there.