User:Yerevantsi/sandbox/Cultgen
- Destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in Turkey
Complete destruction
[edit]Tekor Karapet Narekavank Bagaran Bagavan
unsorted
[edit]Mass Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage during the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) https://doi.org/10.51442/ijags.0043 https://arar.sci.am/dlibra/publication/399198/edition/369391/content https://web.archive.org/web/20250528190803/https://arar.sci.am/dlibra/publication/399198/edition/369391/content
On eve of anniversary, Turkey’s ‘cultural genocide’ of Armenian history is ongoing [1]
short
[edit]Maranci, Christina (2018). The Art of Armenia: An Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190269005. pp. 204-205
Peter Balakian notes that the harm done to Ani’s monuments, and many other Armenian churches throughout Turkey, conforms to Raphael Lemkin’s concept of cultural genocide: that in addition to the annihilation of a people, genocide also includes the destruction of their cultural property and the silencing of their past.29 In this sense, the widespread destruction of Armenian churches, schools, and monasteries, or their transformation into barns or munitions warehouses, presents a facet of the project of genocide. Even churches and Christian objects could be used as instruments for genocide, such as the famous Armenian Cathedral of Urfa, in which the residents of the city were burnt alive in 1896.30 In this sense, Ani, like the remaining Armenian monuments in the Turkish Republic, is a physical trace of an ongoing trauma, not only of the Genocide, but of its denial. In what Balakian calls the “lock- out syndrome,” Armenians cannot claim Ani as their own, but can only look upon it from the other side of the closed border. Particularly painful, in this regard, was the use of Ani as the location for a fashion shoot in Turkish Elle (2011), in which models posed among the ruins.31
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-27348-5_8
Although very few khatchk’ars have been preserved in modern Turkey, a handful of surviving examples from near Ahlat and Erzincan give an idea about the refinement and distribution of this art form in eastern Anatolia which seems to have inspired the makers of the Ahlat Muslim tomb stelae to synthesize the overall form of the Armenian khatchk’ar with the ornamental and epigraphic disposition of the Muslim funerary marker.[2]
On June 18, 1987 the Council of Europe adopted a Decree demanding from the Turkish government to pay attention to and take care of the Armenian language, culture and educational system of the Armenian Diaspora living in Turkey, also demanding an appropriate regard to the Armenian historical monuments that are in modern Turkey’s territory.
https://www.mfa.am/en/cultural-genocide/
https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/european_parliament_resolution_on_a_political_solution_to_the_armenian_question_18_june_1987-en-91fbffca-0721-49d5-9e53-f95393d470b2.html
https://www.armeniandiaspora.com/forum/2012/march-2012/260920-cultural-genocide-in-turkish-way-98-of-armenian-monuments-in-des
"Cultural Genocide" in Turkish way: 98% of Armenian monuments in
Western Armenia destroyed
https://www.pilar.hr/wp-content/images/stories/dokumenti/zbornici/43/Zbornik_VU_sv42-341.pdf
Armenian cultural monuments in Turkey would be a pertinent example of such cultural genocide
https://books.google.am/books?id=e-sYLOBaTBIC&pg=PA83&dq=%22cultural+genocide%22+Armenian+monuments+turkey&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5_bTZzsaNAxUxBdsEHYjjCqcQ6AF6BAgGEAM#v=onepage&q=%22cultural%20genocide%22%20Armenian%20monuments%20turkey&f=false
sources
[edit]Penoni, Francesca (21 December 2020). "The Armenian Architectural Heritage in Turkey: The State of Research" (PDF). Eurasiatica. 16. Università Ca’ Foscari. doi:10.30687/978-88-6969-469-1/008.
Smith, Adam T. (December 2022). "Unseeing the Past: Archaeology and the Legacy of the Armenian Genocide". Current Anthropology. 63 (S25): S56 – S90. doi:10.1086/722380.
von Bieberstein, Alice (17 January 2025). "A Village, a Depot and a Grazing Ground: Three Sites of Armenian Heritage in Eastern Turkey Under the Spell of "Faith Tourism"". Heritage & Society: 1–16. doi:10.1080/2159032X.2024.2443353.
Heritage Under Denial: Armenian Material Remains in Turkey The deportation and genocidal murder of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population, which began in 1915, went hand in hand, from the beginning, with the intentional destruction of Armenian material culture. While movable and immovable assets such as houses, fields, livestock, jewelry, and bank accounts, were subject to a comprehensive program of dispossession realized through so-called “abandoned property” commissions, churches and monasteries were often targeted for outright destruction (Kebranian 2016; Kévorkian 2007).
Armenian buildings and monuments were willfully destroyed. Buildings were also abandoned to the slow but erosive power of neglect or remained vulnerable to trespassing treasure hunters in search for “Armenian” gold and other kinds of loot (von Bieberstein 2017, 2021b, 2021a). Sites were also demolished in the course of major public construction work. Armenian churches and monasteries were converted into mosques, prisons, granaries, and stables. The new occupants removed Armenian names and inscriptions, while public authorities re-attributed the origin of buildings, declaring them a part of Turkish or Seljuk heritage (Kouymjian 1998).
This variegated policy of destruction and erasure forms an important building block of Turkey’s broader regime of genocide denial (Suciyan 2016). Following the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I, the late 1910s and early 1920s formed a small window when perpetrators of the genocide were pursued and property returned. But this window quickly closed again and continuities in both personnel and policies were reinstated following the transition to the newly emerging Turkish nation-state after the so-called “war of independence”. The denial of the Armenian genocide, while undergoing various mutations over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, remained a constant pillar of Turkey’s politics of history and memory. Adam Smith (2022) has recently detailed how, as part of these politics, Armenians and their history have been rendered absent in archaeological accounts of the region, by means of occlusion, mis-ascription, and misnaming. It is not only that non-Muslim heritage has not been valued or preserved in Turkey (Pekol 2022), heritage has more broadly been Turkified or at least de-ethnicised, with Armenian heritage most often referred to as “Byzantine” or “Ottoman”.
The few sites that have escaped wholesale destruction and which have become the object of conservation measures continue to be de-ethnicized in their respective provenances and thus de-politicized. They form cases of heritagization without naming (cf. Dissard 2016; Bertram 2022). They are put to the service of narratives of peaceful co-existence, of an authentic and traditional way of life featuring premodern techniques of artisanship and handcraft; they are made to speak of a generic wealth of historical heritage, yet without that heritage ever named or specified (Törne 2015).
The Armenian church complex on the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van in Eastern Turkey, listed as a cultural heritage site since 1979, for instance, was renovated under the leadership of Turkey’s ministry of culture and tourism and opened to the public in 2007.
While houses, fields, barns and livestock thus changed hands, a great many churches and monasteries were themselves re-categorized and transformed into private property. In 2012 it was revealed, for instance, that the great Varagavank monastery near Van in Eastern Turkey is owned by the Turkish journalist Fatih Altyalı, who said that the property had come into the possession of his grandfather (Ermenihaber 2019). A local villager looks after the site, which has largely shrunk to the remains of a church that was used for decades as a barn. It is thus exemplary of most sites of Armenian heritage in Turkey today, which remain in private hands and are not commercialized for the tourism industry. Rather, they provide shelter for animals and at times also guerillas. They become sites for digging for treasure or for the enactment of health and fertility rituals (Suni 2022).
And yet, the few “tourists” that travel this landscape are, to a great extent, descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide, many of which actually prefer to refer to themselves as pilgrims (Bertram 2022). Especially since the early 1990s and following the organizational leadership of a legendary Armenian-American tour guide, Armen Aroyan, what was once also Western Armenia has become a regular destination for groups of Armenians from the Republic of Armenia, Istanbul, as well as the Western diaspora in search for traces of the lost homeland (Bertram 2022; Kebranian 2016; Sensenig-Dabbous 2016; Korkmaz 2021). With one such group I once visited Varagavank monastery and became witness of an encounter that revealed the incommensurable life worlds between the monastery’s Kurdish caretaker and the Armenian visitors. Where the former sought to showcase individual care and preservation efforts, the Armenians saw, in the collapsed structures and remains of animal manure, evidence of violence and desecration. Varagavank and similar sites are frequent stops of these pilgrimage tours, especially given the fact that the actual villages of origin and former homes in particular are mostly very difficult or even impossible to find given the long history of demolition and re-construction (Pekol 2022; Bertram 2022). Sometimes entire villages have vanished. Armenians touring the region thus naturally navigate towards the remains of churches and monasteries that have not entirely been demolished.
Kévorkian, Raymond H. 2007. “Patrimoine monumental et ‘biens nationaux’ arméniens de Turquie: bilan d’une politique d’État.” Revue arménienne 7:51–62.
Bertram, Carel. 2022. A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages To Places of Ancestral Memory. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.
Kouymjian, Dickran. 1998. “Confiscation and Destruction: A Manifestation of the Genocidal Process.” Armenian Forum 1 (3): 1–12.
Kouymjian, Dickran. 2001. “Confiscation of Armenian Property and the Destruction of Armenian Historical Monuments as a Manifestation of the Genocidal Process.” In Anatomy of Genocide: State-Sponsored Mass-Killings in the Twentieth Century, edited by Alexandre Kimenyi, and Otis L. Scott, 307–319. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Pekol, Banu. 2022. “Destabilizing National Heritage: Preserving Turkey’s non-Muslim Architectural Heritage.” In Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe, edited by Eray Çaylı, Pınar Aykaç and Sevcan Ercan, 43-67. London: I.B. Tauris.
Ter Minassian, Taline. 2015. “Le patrimoine arménien en Turquie: de la négation à l’inversion patrimoniale.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 20. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.4948.
RAA
[edit]ԵՂԵՌՆ` ԵՂԵՌՆԻՑ ՀԵՏՈ 2015 [1] [2] ԵՂԵՌՆ` ԵՂԵՌՆԻՑ ՀԵՏՈ (2) 2016 [3] [4] ԵՂԵՌՆ` ԵՂԵՌՆԻՑ ՀԵՏՈ [Armenian only] [5] [6] ANI 1050 / 2011 [7] [8]
Kouymjian
[edit]1984 / The Destruction of Armenian Historical Monuments as a Continuation of the Turkish Policy of Genocide https://cah.fresnostate.edu/armenianstudies/documents/pdf/1984_ACrimeOfSilence.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20250411131431/https://cah.fresnostate.edu/armenianstudies/documents/pdf/1984_ACrimeOfSilence.pdf
Dickran Kouymjian, “When Does Genocide End? The Armenian Case,” The Armenian Weekly, vol. 69, no. 15 (April 12, 2003), pp. 8-9 https://www.academia.edu/24784817/Dickran_Kouymjian_When_Does_Genocide_End_The_Armenian_Case_The_Armenian_Weekly_vol_69_no_15_April_12_2003_pp_8_9 https://tert.nla.am/archive/NLA%20TERT/Armenian%20weekly/2003/15_ocr.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20250528150217/https://tert.nla.am/archive/NLA%20TERT/Armenian%20weekly/2003/15_ocr.pdf
The Crime against Cultural Heritage and Historical Memory https://cah.fresnostate.edu/armenianstudies/documents/pdf/2011%20Kouymjian-Genocide%20article.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20240621084945/https://cah.fresnostate.edu/armenianstudies/documents/pdf/2011%20Kouymjian-Genocide%20article.pdf
The destruction of Armenian Cultural Monuments: Its significance for World Heritage Preservation By: Kouymjian Dickran (California State University, Fresno, Emeritus, residing in Paris) ” In Noah's Country: a Roadtrip through Post-Genocide Armenia, Judith Crispin, ed., Sydney: T&G Publishing, 2015. https://arar.sci.am/dlibra/publication/10675/edition/9288/content https://web.archive.org/web/20250528151004/https://arar.sci.am/dlibra/publication/10675/edition/9288/content https://web.archive.org/web/20250528150741/https://arar.sci.am/Content/9288/293-302.pdf
References
[edit]- ^ Karas, Tania (April 23, 2015). "On eve of anniversary, Turkey's 'cultural genocide' of Armenian history is ongoing". Washington Post. (via Religion News Service). Archived from the original on 20 March 2016.
- ^ Pancaroğlu, Oya (2009). "The Mosque-Hospital Complex in Divriği: A History of Relations and Transitions". Anadolu ve Çevresinde Ortaçağ. 3. Ankara: AKVAD: 186.