To Remember and Write: The Armenian Memory Books (houshamadyan)

The concept of saving the memory of the native city, town, or village, and writing its history, was an existential question that alarmed the generation of Armenian genocide (1915) (Kévorkian 2011; Akçam 2012; Suny 2015) survivors who started a new life in exile from the 1920s onwards. Such concerns recur in the introductions of almost every memory/memorial book, during a time when Turkish state denialism, international indifference, and neglect towards their situation were evident in its various forms. In these circumstances, they were convinced that future generations would be unable to reconstruct the memory of their native land in a genuinely comprehensive manner. Therefore, they felt the need to immortalize the legacy of their past—the town or village of another time—and the enormous injustice that they experienced, by putting pen to paper and writing eyewitness testimonies. That was the start of the publication of the houshamadyans.

^{The covers of Ourfa, Khnous and Charsandjak houshamadyans.}

The editing and the publication of these books was often achieved through collective efforts, whereby a considerable number of compatriots spread throughout the world participated in different ways towards the preparation of the books. Kevork Sarafian (1953), editor of the three-volume book on the city of Ayntab (present-day Gaziantep), reported that before the publication of the work, he wrote about a thousand letters addressed to the different contributors to the work (xiii). Some submitted articles, while others gave information about different aspects of life in Ayntab, and others sent in family photographs or views of the city. Some also prepared city maps or made drawings of Armenian churches, houses, or objects used in everyday life1.

This article examines the contents of the houshamadyans. This genre of books started to be published during a period when diasporic Armenian elites inaugurated a process of reconstructing Ottoman Armenian identity, often aiming to create culturally homogeneous communities, in opposition to the actual cultural diversity of the refugees. The article will show how, in these circumstances, the houshamadyans, which in their essence are a depiction of a past life characterized by diversity, adapt themselves to diasporic nationalist environments.

^{The covers of Parchandj, Gesaria/Kayseri and Hayni houshamadyans.}

Post-genocide national reconstruction and rejection of Ottoman Armenian heterogeneous culture

The houshamadyans were published mostly in the diaspora during a period, when the watchword of the post-genocide Armenian community life was national reconstruction. It was imperative to find and regroup the fragments of a people that had been massacred and deported. Gathering its thousands of orphans and ensuring that they would enjoy an Armenian education was a crucially important part of this task. “Wipe clean” or “purify” are frequently recurring verbs in the Armenian rhetoric of this period, whenever the subject of discussion is the orphans’ education and “Armenization.” The communal leaders and the intellectuals aimed also to reject the multifaceted cultural heritage that Ottoman Armenian refugees brought with them to the diaspora. Instead, they sought to create a new national identity in accordance with the mainstream ideology of the post-WWI period, which required building national states and homogeneous national societies.

How, in these conditions, did communal elites conceive of the houshamadyan genre of books as they were advocating the construction of homogeneous communities among the diasporic Armenians? At first glance, it is possible to think that a houshamadyan is by its very nature a book promoting the local Heimat culture with its dialect, heroes, and crafts, and all its singularities, which in many aspects differ from other Armenian-inhabited localities. Moreover, it is more difficult to expunge from such local descriptions the hybrid nature and the multifariousness of everyday life in an Ottoman environment where Armenians coexisted for centuries with other ethnic groups, like Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Syriacs, and so on.

For example, in the village of Morenig (present-day Çatalçeşme, Harput region), the St. Barsam feast day (commonly called Morenig's day) is celebrated on the Thursday after Easter, with the presence of numerous pilgrims, among them Armenians, Turks, and Kurds, coming from across the whole region. The vineyards, gardens, and meadows are filled with thousands of pilgrims, who, along with eating and drinking, organize various games such as horse races, wrestling, drumming, and egg-cracking (Aharonian 1965, 129; Vahé Haig 1959, 904–05).

In other words, the Other is implicitly or explicitly present here and may inevitably be an integral part of the Armenian social fabric. Thus, the presentation of the history and the social life of just one locality—this is the purpose of the houshamdyans—gives us the opportunity to analyze episodes of local lives under a microscope. In these circumstances, despite the ideological time stamp and self-censorship, the authors of houshamadyans provide us with numerous authentic images of Ottoman Armenian life in cities, towns, and villages. The depictions of these grey zones of Ottoman Armenian daily life could thereby contradict the communal elite’s discourse.

^{The family house in Hussenig (present-day Ulukent, in the Kharpert/Harput Valley), as drawn by Carl/Khosrov Kazanjian from his memories. Carl/Khosrov matriculated at the Euphrates College, and later became an architect in the United States. This canvas measures 350 mm x 230 mm (14"x 9"). Drawn in 1935 (Source: Kazanjian collection - Los Angeles).}

Furthermore, many of the houshamadyans are about the life and history of Ottoman Armenians living outside the traditional Armenian homeland. For example, there are memorial books on Armenian life in Ankara, Yozgat, Kayseri/Caesarea, Rodosto/Tekirdagh, Edirne, Adapazar, Izmir/Smyrna, Kyutahia, Izmit/Nicomedia, and Bardizag/Bahçecik. These places are located sometimes far away from historical Armenia, which corresponds to the area covered by the six Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Mamuret-ul-Aziz/Kharpert, Sivas, and Diyarbekir.2 For centuries, Armenians developed a communal lifestyle in these areas. They treasured their lives in these cities, towns, and villages located in the Ottoman Empire and they viewed themselves as belonging to that place (in many cases, they had settled in these areas long before the foundation of the Ottoman Empire). The day when they were definitively exiled from these cherished localities, no individual or collective efforts were spared by these exiled people to publish memorial books and to preserve the memory of their native places, which they called hayreni kaghak or hayreni doun (homeland). This heterogeneous collection of homelands could also be considered a direct blow to one of the main nationalist ideas: the reinforcement of the concept of a unique collective homeland (Tachjian, Adjemian, Davidian 2021).

The houshamadyans and the idea of the Heimat/local patriotism

Yet it would be inaccurate to conclude that the contents of the houshamadyans contradict the diasporic ideological context of the period. The situation is more nuanced. Since these books were also products of the time, their authors, editors, and publishers were all dynamic actors in the nationalist process of reconstructing and restructuring Armenian identity. In other words, many of their authors or editors—even though this may seem contradictory—were part of the communal elite. In his works, Alon Confino (1993; 2002) demonstrates how the conceptions of localness and nationhood are altered during the process of constructing the collective image of a nation, and, in this way the Heimat could be transformed into an interchangeable representation of the local, regional, and national community. The houshamadyans and the idea of the Heimat/local patriotism that they were generating should be examined from this perspective as well.

^{Amasya, 1900s. Group photograph taken during an Armenian feast in an orchard (Source: Mekhitarist Order, San Lazzaro, Venice).}

A thorough study of the houshamadyans will show us that they bear the stamp of the times and follow the dictates of the ethos of the period. In other words, the general rhetoric used in these books is, in many respects, similar to the one used by Armenian diasporic newspapers of that period. A good example is the introductory chapter of many houshamadyans, where many authors see, in the economic and cultural development of Soviet Armenia, the resurrection of their own homeland.3 The same memorial books reserved several pages for the investments made by their own compatriotic unions in development projects in Soviet Armenia. The general tendency in interwar periods was to raise funds in compatriotic circles for the sake of the construction of villages or neighborhoods in Soviet Armenia. The mobilization was global and the collected funds were considerable, especially in Western countries (Europe and the Americas). The wish of many compatriotic unions was the establishment of such villages or districts, bearing the name of their native village, city, or town, but with the addition of the Armenian adjective nor (new) included in the name. The examples are multiple: Nor Yevtogia, Nor Chenkoush, Nor Kharpert, Nor Agn, Nor Hadjin, Nor Habousi, Nor Tlgadin, Nor Arapgir, and Nor Malatya. All of them were Armenian-inhabited towns or villages located in present-day Turkey.

However, not all compatriotic unions’ aspirations were fulfilled by the Soviet regime, so that despite all the financial sacrifices, the names of some villages or districts never emerged on the map of Soviet Armenia. Manoog Dzeron (1938), author of the houshamadyan on the village of Parchandj, writes in his book that he has three dreams: the first is the publication of his book; the second, the establishment of New Parchanj in a resurrected Soviet Armenia; and the third, to visit Armenia and New Parchanj with his wife (251). At the time of he was writing, he and his compatriots were raising funds for the revival of their village in Soviet Armenian territory. That toponymy was never used and Dzeron’s dream never came true.

^{The covers of Tomarza, Garin/Erzurum and Ayntab houshamadyans.}

The idea of the symbolic resurrection of the Heimat is also manifested on the cover art of the book about Tomarza (a town near Kayseri/Gesaria), where we see in the foreground the Holy Mother of God monastery of Tomarza and, in the background one-story houses and a mosque, all symbols of the lost homeland. On the upper part of the cover, we see the Echmiadzin cathedral, as well as Soviet-style tall buildings depicting the modernism of the era, and in the background, there is a symbolic picture of Mount Ararat, all illustrating the collective homeland of Soviet Armenia (Madaghjian and Kankruni 1959).

Another example is the description of the Other—the Turk and the Kurd—in memorial books. There is almost never a separate chapter or section where this subject is discussed. The Other is overlooked and has no separate place in local memory. And if it is recalled, in accordance with the predominating ideas in Armenian society of that period, it is usually assigned a negative character, one of the causes of the tragedy that Armenians experienced. That means that the Other is discussed mostly in terms of violence and not coexistence. Yet when the reader delves deeper into these books, it isn’t hard to see that the Other is implicitly present and is an integral part of the Armenian social fabric.

^{Parchandj (present-day Akçakiraz) village. Drawn by Manoog Dzeron, February 8, 1932, Joliet, Illinois.}
Interestingly, it happens that some local rhetorical discourses that first appeared in houshamadyans were adopted in the construction of the collective image of the nation, henceforth becoming a component of the collective narrative and demonstrating how homeland symbols and narratives interchangeably represent the locality and the nation, as defined by Confino (1993; 2002). A relevant example was the use of Turkish as the mother tongue in several Armenian inhabited areas of the Ottoman Empire. Several authors explained the phenomenon by simply affirming that, throughout the centuries, there were Turkish persecutions against those who spoke Armenian and that the state threatened to cut their tongues out, though this is clearly a post-genocide interpretation that needs to be deconstructed. This image of threat first appeared in houshamadyans, such as those about Ayntab, Adana, Rodosto, Kayseri, and so on, and was later transformed into an element of the national narrative.4

Such was the ideological context in which memorial books were produced. These works are undoubtedly outstanding accounts of the diversity of everyday life in the homeland, each one of them opens new vistas for research on the Ottoman Armenians in particular, and the Ottoman Empire in general.

^{Van, the Migirdicyan/Dilodyan family. (From left): (Name unknown), Khushush (Migirdic and Makruhi’s daughter), Makruhi, Kurken (Migirdic and Makruhi’s son). Kourken is holding a book, while Khoushkhoush is holding a publication that resembles a newspaper. With this photograph, the family most probably wished to show that the children went to school and were literate (Source: Migirdic Migirdicyan, Toronto)}

This article is part of the collection “Dwelling Together. Urban Housing, Neighborliness and Multilocal Homemaking”. To read the other contributions to this collection, click here.