New Topics in Armenian History & Culture (morning)

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Well, I've said this 21 times before so, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 22nd annual Vardanants Day Lecture Series, Armenian Lecture Series. This year -- well, they're all been special but this year is really special because we have a conference with some of my friends, colleagues and academic types to fill your day talking about Armenian history and culture. But before I began, and before we start this program, I'd like to introduce you to a colleague of many years who has held many, various positions at the Library of Congress, of importance to the collections and the preservation of those collections, and I'm delighted to introduce him thanks to the appointment by the new librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Mark Sweeney, who is now the principal deputy librarian of Congress. [ Applause ] >> Thank You, Lee. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Library of Congress in today's 22nd Vardanants Day, Armenian Lecture Series. I'm delighted to be addressing you in this hall in the historic Thomas Jefferson Building, attached to a room on there that is dedicated to Woodrow Wilson, the president of so many important moments in history, especially of the Armenians in the early part of the 20th century. In 1991m Mrs. Marjorie Dadian made a generous donation to the Near East Section in the name of our husband Arthur, for the health and maintenance of the Armenian collections. That gift not only allowed us to appoint the first Armenian area specialists, but also was the genesis of a long-running and very successful olestra series, which began in 1994, which is why we're here today. Since that time, the Armenian collections have grown from some 7,000 items to over 40,000 -- 45,000 items in our collection. The Near East section has sponsored conferences, such as the American response to the Armenian Genocide in 2000, a major exhibit in 2012 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the first printed Armenian book. That exhibit to note wisdom and instruction the Armenian literary tradition at the Library of Congress, brought nearly a quarter of a million visitors here to the library into the galleries. The Library of Congress remains an described important repository of the world's heritage, this universal collection. And we're proud to include among those ancient, yet still vibrant cultures, the history of the Armenian people, as exemplified in the talks of the scholars you will soon hear today and enjoy. Again, welcome to the Library of Congress and please enjoy today's program. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Thank you, Mark Sweeney. None of these programs have happened in a vacuum. We have many people who are responsible for supporting, for helping erect everything that in the construction of lectures and exhibits, some of whom I will mention later. But at this point the most important is the next speaker, Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb who is the chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division who has been a constant supporter of all my Armenian programs, and this one in particular since it is a special edition of the Vardanants series. So, please, join me in welcoming Dr. Mary Jane Deeb. [ Applause ] >> Thank You, LaVon, and thank you Mark Sweeney, for all your support and for everything you've done. So, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen good morning. I too wish to welcome you to the Library of Congress. And in the name of the Division, the African Middle East division, which is hosting this program today. I would like to use the little time I have to recognize all those who have made possible this program. It takes a village, as the saying goes, to put together a program such as this one, that brings together the best and brightest colors in Armenian history under one roof, or, in the case of the Thomas Jefferson Building, under one dome. My thanks go first and foremost to Dr. Lebon Abdulyang, the organizer of this and the 21 other Vardanants programs that have put the Armenian collections at the Library of Congress, at the very heart of any scholarly research work on Armenia. The French have a wonderful term "uncontournable", that loosely translates to "unmissable", or "inescapable", and most aptly describes the status of our Armenian collections today. This is thanks to LaVon's efforts in developing these collections, as well as with outreach efforts to make these collections better known in the United States and throughout the world. Thanks go to Mark Sweeney, who not only has taken time from his extremely busy schedule to be with us today for Vardanants day, but who has, throughout his tenure as associate librarian, acting deputy librarian and now as a primary deputy librarian, been extremely supportive of the African and Middle Eastern division, giving us funding for new staff, for microfilming our newspapers -- including the Armenian newspapers, and giving us badly needed space to shell our ever-growing collections. My thanks also go to Helena Syncome, the director of collections and services and her staff, for their support regarding all the administrative aspects involved in planning an event such as this one. Thanks to the Communications Office that worked on announcing the program and sending out press releases, the special events office that turned this room into the wonderful conference hall that you're enjoying, and arranging with the caterer for breakfast, for lunch, for breaks. To John Regan, who via his sound system ensures, as he has today and has for the past 20 years, ensured that we can all hear what is being said, despite the echoes in the room, that we can all see what we are showing on our PowerPoint presentations and on whom we have depended on all those years. I want to thank the webcasting team that's behind you that has been filming our programs and all our events. And that is of critical importance because you'll be able to go back to your students and say, "I was there, I gave this lecture, I had colleagues whom I had not met before, they're all there -- all the top scholars are there", and share this with your students, because this is part of the archives of this division, our webcast. I want to thank you, last but certainly not least. Thank you all for coming and being with us, to celebrate this very special day in Armenian history. I know you will very much enjoy the program today. The speakers have traveled from far and wide just to be with you, and to have and to share the research and their work here at the Library of Congress. So, thank you all for being here, thanks. [ Applause ] >> My thunder has just been taken away because Mary Jane has thanked so many of the people that I wanted to thank heart full -- with my heart full. It happens that you deal with so many people here and this is, if anything, an extremely collegial institution. But I'd be remiss if I did not point out a few others. Dr. Paul Crego has been my partner in acquisitions and cataloguing of both Armenian and Georgian, and he also dabbles in Amharic and other languages. Tomorrow Ohanyan and Clare Dego of the conservation department have taken truly unusable manuscripts and valuable Armenian items and turned them into bibliographic gold. John Evans, the former ambassador to Armenia who is in attendance as he usually is, has been a great supporter of our programs. "The voice of America", with Armen hiding his face behind a camera has been a constant source of publicity for our programs. I want to thank them and I want to thank the speakers that you will hear today. Each and every one of them I count a friend and a dear colleague. Now, I purposely did not write down my introduction to Armenian history because I didn't know how much time I had, but since I had this time, I'll speak for about an hour is that -- no [laughter]. No? OK, fine. Let me tell you the genesis of this conference. A little over a year ago I was approached by someone from the Smithsonian and said, "this festival on Armenian culture is happening, would the library like to do something to complement this festival?" And I said, "absolutely". And I said, "now, what could I do?" Now, I had been wanting to invite Dr. Armen Matterosian and Dr. Luke Vartan Baronian to participate in the conference because of their work on R2 and genetics etcetera, and I built this conference around them. And I must tell, you I invited these dear people and not one of them took more than 24 hours to say, "yes, we would like to participate". However, Dr. Baronian is not here because of an unavoidable emergency and Armen has told me he did not plan it this way, but his wife was due yesterday so, I said, "you're forgiven for not attending". This year marks the 50th anniversary of my beginning to study Armenian history and culture, academically. I take this study so seriously that I will no longer call it "Armenian Studies", because that reduces it to almost a ghetto studying of Armenian history and culture. This is the scholarly study of Armenia, including history, linguistics, literature. One of the things that is maddening that I find -- with every culture, but Armenian in particular, is the fact that there are certain tropes that everyone knows. You know, the ark landed on Mount Ararat, Armenia as first Christian country, the genocide, the kingdom of Silesia. People know this, but what they don't know is from the very first solid mention of Armenia in the 6th century BC by the Greek geographer Heckatias of Mialitus and on a Persian inscription of Darrius the Great, from that time to the present there is an exceedingly rich and largely unknown history. So, I said -- I wrote to my dear friends and said, "I would like anything but first Christian country, genocide and the ark landing on Mount Ararat". If everyone had been able to come you literally would have gone away at 5 o'clock, totally confused because you would have been bombarded with fact after fact and richness after richness. You still are going to go away not confused, but very enlightened about this very rich history. I'm just going to say two things that you need to both know about Armenia before we continue. Look at the map. You will see that Armenia historically has been in eastern Anatolia, the Armenian plateau and up to the Caucasus. East-west transit, very easy, north-south, transit extremely difficult. So, and this is known as Garzonian's law after Nina Garzon at Columbia University. When the surrounding powers -- because Armenia was always a client state between surrounding powers, were equal in strength or equal in weakness, Armenia flourished because east-west trade transit was plentiful. When, however, one of those entities grew stronger, it created a vacuum, sucking the other power into guess where? Armenia, and it was at these periods that Armenia did not thrive. That is a constant in Armenian history, most of the time it was to surrounding powers -- I could argue now but I won't, that we have five at the moment. So, and the other constant is the fact that Armenia thrived and survived because there were communities on top of many different mountains, and when one fell, the other one existed. This fostered independence but it also fostered a feeling against a centralized authority. Those are the two constants of Armenian history, and within those constants, I want you to listen to everything that follows. And what is going to follow right now is from my dear friend Helen C. Evans the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the Mary and Michael Jahara's curator for Byzantine Art. I am not going to give you an entire biography because that's why I prepared this program. While she is talking, you may read it. The one thing I want to draw your attention to about Dr. Evans is that she is curating yet another exhibit, and this exhibit is on Armenia, a huge exhibit on Armenian Art, which will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 22nd. So, at this point, Dr. Helen Evans, to speak on Silesia on Mongol trade routes. [ Applause ] >> So, as the first speaker, I would like to be the first to thank LaVon, not just for organizing today but for all he's done farming in studies in the United States, by what he's done at the Library of Congress over so many years. Its effect is something that we don't always fully think about, but we really should always admire. So, I hope very much that all of you join me in admiring him and what he's done. As I hope you will know from him, we will open an exhibition on medieval Armenian art at the MET this fall, on September 22nd. And in our research for the exhibition and its catalog, I and other catalog authors have realized that our view of the role of the Mongols, in terms of Silesia, as well as greater Armenia, should be reconsidered. The devastation caused by the Mongols as they advanced into greater Armenia in the early 1200s has been described by Gregoria Wagner in Caracas [inaudible] and recorded in numerous manuscript color fonts. However, the exhibition's research has shown that there was another, more positive aspect of the interaction between the Mongols and the Armenians in Silesia and greater Armenia that should be studied further. That aspect is how much the critical role Armenians played on the trade routes of the packs Mongolica [phonetic] contributed to Armenian wealth in Silesia and greater Armenia during the second half of the 13th century and well into the 14th century. This talk introduces the topic from an art historical perspective, in the hope that others will study the matter further. As someone whose primary research has been on the kingdom of Silesia, I'm approaching the issue through evidence there. Like others, I've always recognized that the Silesian king had the first alliance with the Mongols in the early 1250's was important. However, when viewing the handsome, fortified ruins of the Armenian killing Kingdom of Silesia on the Mediterranean coast, I've never adequately considered the source of the funds required to maintain such magnificent sites as the hegemon fortress of Lambrom on the right and the walls of the Silesian capital of Cyss on the left. I hope to show today that from the time this of the Silesian-Mongol Alliance until the fall of the Silesian Kingdom in the late 14th century, Silesian control of Mongol trade routes was key to the great Kingdom's wealth and authority. Richly gilded royal portraits like these of king Heptune's son LaVon and his wife display elaborate silk robes. What was the source of the silks in 1262 when LaVon and lady Quran were shown if their marriage on the left, and a decade later when they knelt in prayer with their children on the right? It's not enough to argue as I long have that these images with their extensive references to Byzantine art, were only evidence of the increasing power of the Silesian state and its ambition to be the new Byzantium, as the power of the Empire weakened with the Fourth Crusade in 1204. It is relevant that they displayed their ambition by increasingly adopting the Royal images and dress of the Byzantine emperors. At their wedding, the young royals are shown being blessed by Christ, as found in Byzantine art, and Prince LaVon wears the tablon of Byzantine Royals on his tunic -- on his mantle. A few years later, when they kneel beneath the Byzantine douses, now king LaVon and queen Quran, they are dressed like the Byzantine emperors, including wearing the imperial laurels. Nothing in the images directly relates to Mongols. Rather the only other external influence is the West, as shown in the kneeling poses and the crowns of the royals and the Queen Quran Gospel on the right. What is relevant today is to consider the source of the wealth that supported the richly gilded portraits and the ambitions of the Silesian ruling class they portray. I am arguing that the answer was a control of trade routes for the Mongols. Armenians had long been of critical force on the Silk Route trade, east-west, as LaVon referred to with the Garzoian. In the 13th century with arrival the Mongols, the Armenians ultimately were able to maintain a similar role under Mongol rule, and expanded, by controlling Ayahs, as we will see, a major port city for the exchange of goods with the West. The expanse of the textile trade for Silesia is most easily visible in these two manuscripts written for archbishop Johannes John, the brother of King Heptune The First and uncle of King LaVon. On the left, in the Marshall Ocean gospel of 1274 from the Morgan Library, the archbishop wears a fleur-de-lis decorated vestment and he's to the far left. That is representative of Western Europe, most especially France. He presents the marshal's family to the Virgin they are kneeling, and she is reaching -- extending her mantle over them. That's opposed, most closely associated with Minnuchio's "Madonna of the Franciscans", as their necessity unrecognized long ago. On the right in 1289, the year of his death, the Archbishop's tunic is decorated with a Chinese dragon. Dikron Kim Jong has linked the Dragons posed to a textile in the MET's collection, from East Central Asia, a region under Mongol control. You see a fleur-de-lis textile beside the early image of the archbishop on the left, and the MET's Chinese dragon beside his later image on the right. The fabrics of the Arts bishops two vestments represent the extreme ends of Silesia trade routes. To the west, links to France, whose King Louis the Ninth had allied so closely with Silesia when he came East on crusade, that on his return to France he left his ward Bowman the Sixth, the young Prince of Antioch under the care of King Heptune. To the east, a continued Armenian presence on the silk routes that were now under Mongol control. By the dates of bishop John's manuscripts, the Silesian state had extensive links with the Mongols. To avoid Mongol military conquests that had happened in greater Armenia, King Heptune had surrendered the harem of the Seljuk ruler, who had been sent to him for safety to the Mongols. Constable Simbad had to his older brother, then went to the Mongol capital at Karakorum in Siberia and 1247-48, where he successfully arranged the first treaty between the Mongols and a Christian state which had not been invaded. When Simbad returned to Silesia, he brought with him a Mongol wife, as Mongol treaties were confirmed by marriage alliances. The son of that alliance is recorded as being present at the Silesian court in 1264-65, evidence of the Silesian state's role as a vassal of the Mongols was also clear clearly demonstrated in 1260, when King Heptune, accompanied by the Prince of Antioch, marched with the Mongols as they entered Damascus upon their conquest of the city. Silesia's port cities, especially Ayahs, are an understudied link in the appreciation of the wealth that came to Silesia through control of Mongol trade routes. The Western book of Marbles illuminated in 1271, shows Ayahs as a busy city, filled with men and Western dress as you see on the left. But it was a Silesian city, and by that fact, the westernmost port of the Mongol Empire. Western Europeans who wish to reach the east for trade, or as missionaries, were most likely to enter the east through Ayahs. Most famous of those was Marco Polo, who went east through the port in 1271. He recorded that it was a city full of spices and textiles of wool and cloth of gold, that were brought there from inland, clearly meaning that these goods were then transported further west. The image on the screen doesn't record in a way that we can recognize the Silesians who rule the city, are any Mongols who would have been interested in protecting their Western north city, yet they were present. And this is shown on a portalon, a chart of the Mediterranean Sea routes of 1339 on the right. Let's see if I can make this work. Silesia -- boy, that's doing no good. So, come two-thirds of the way down and third of the way over you see kind of a green square, that is Silesia and it's port cities. The Silesian flags in this western map are prominently displayed and Eius and the other solution ports of Tarsus and Cortez are clearly identified within the green area, if you can see it clearly. What's also interesting is that the two mount peaks of Mount Ararat are, if you go up, and there's a red square and then right to the side of that are two green Peaks, which actually have Noah's Arc on them, and are clearly identified as Mount Ararat. And I think -- I would suggest that that shows that they know that goods are traveling through greater Armenia to reach Silesia to be loaded onto the ships whose roots are being shown on this map. And that this is a relevant aspect of what makes Silesia so wealthy. Mongol Authority and Silesia in the early 1300s is most visible and the illumination of king LaVon the fourth by Sergei's pit sack of 1331. The text is a translation of a crusader legal code, the ascesis of Antioch meant for use in Silesia, and King LaVon on the upper right wears a western fleur-de-lis inspired crown. However, he sits cross-legged on a low throne, the type of pose and throne found in depictions of Mongol authorities. By this date, the Western presence through intermarriage and connections with the Catholic Franciscans was so widespread in Silesia that it would seem logical for the King to be shown sitting, as in the West. And I would argue that his Eastern pose in this image should be understood as further evidence of the important of Silesia relations with their Mongol overlords, whom we know had troops in Silesia that often functioned his tax collectors. Silesian's links with the Mongols have been have -- excuse me, Silesian links with the Mongols must have included connections with the trade routes the Armenians of Greater Armenia controlled for the Mongols also. Rachel Kashkarian and the exhibition catalogue notes that the authority of Silesia was such, that around 1200 Anni refused to make changes in religious practices without the approval of the King of Silesia and the patriarch of Romkla. Evidence of continuing connections between Greater Armenia arsal and Silesia are also found in manuscripts. A colophon and a commentary on Isaiah records that it was written in Silesia in 1295 -- 1299 before being sent to the monastery of Gladsor, whose school was called a "Second Athens". The portrait of S.A Negetski on the right, he's at the upper left who was its great teacher, was added to the work at Gladsor. Wealthy Armenian families, especially the Prussians and Arabellians funded the school. This is the era when the Persians, Karyans and Orbellians flourished through their control of trade routes for the Mongols. Through greater Armenia and perhaps beyond, our historical evidence of the wealth of the Persians and the exhibition includes this handsome reliquary of the true cross on the left that Prince Asayah dedicated to a monastery of vegetarians, providing perpetual problems with what to call it, his portrait is at the base. You see it in detail that I blew up, with his hands raised in prayer in the ancient Christian manner. His son, Emir Hassan, completed the monastery "The White Virgin" begun by his father that is at the top right, and decorated it with an image of himself hunting in Mongol dress, that you see below it. I would suggest that the Mongol features on both of these men may indicate that the family, like Constable Simbad in Silesia seam it at their authority with the Mongols by the necessary intermarriage with the elite, because it was the way on treaties were concluded. And to conclude, I am going to be brief. I believe that further study is needed of the relations between the Mongols and Armenians of Silesia and greater Armenia. This nativity scene of 1311 has long been considered to be a work created in the Mongol capital Tabriz. Silvie Marion, who is speaking today, as shown in the catalogue for Armenia, that it was produced at Glandsor, but in 1311 when the monastery was in contact with Silesia. And Evalion suggests in the catalogue that the Nativity displays the "may chi" [phonetic] in Mongol dress. If so, it may be that by the early 14th century, Armenians profiting by controlling Mongol trade routes solve the Mongols to their east, and as positive a light as this image suggests. As research expands on the work done in the exhibition catalogue by a variety of authors, with most especially Rachel Costaryan on the Armenian wealth, derived from being a power on Mongol trade routes, I think other issues will arise. And one of interest to me is whether the Silesian Armenians, who moved to the Crimea, which was under Mongol, rule as the Mongols devastated their own country, move there as a deliberate choice to maintain their trade routes with the Mongols, even as the extent of the "Pox Mongolica" declined. I hope this brief introduction to the question of the Mongol impact of the wealth of Silesia and Mongol great control of Greater Armenia will encourage further research into the role of the Armenians as a power on Mongol trade routes. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank You, Dr. Evans, I think that actually is a brilliant introduction to what I said that there's so much left to be studied and produced in Armenian history. Our next speaker is someone who is not unknown to the Library of Congress and to the region, Dr. Amy Landau. She is at the -- she is the director of cultural affairs and curator of Islamic and South and Southeast Asian art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. And if you have not been there I really urge you to go to see the splendors, and not just the Armenians splendors. Dr. Landau will speak on a concert of luxury wares and estates, the will of the 17th century Armenian merchants Po-hos [inaudible] Anyang. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. Can you all hear me? I would like to begin by warmly thanking LaVon to return to some old friends who I'll talk about today, and also to be in the company of good friends. And I hope to welcome all of you to the Walters Art Museum, it's only 45 minutes away. We honor, preserve and celebrate great collection of Armenian art there, and I still look forward to a future collaboration between the Walters and the Library of Congress. So, my talk today pivots around a document of great interest for early modern Armenian patronage and collecting. It is the will of Jota Pohos Vallejanian. Pohos was a Zion of one of the wealthiest Armenian merchant families of 17th century Iran. His will is dated 1062 of the Islamic calendar, which translates as 1646 of our Common Era and it was amended seven years later. The will was originally written in Persian, and his bequest was translated into Armenian by the 19th century historian Ter of Hanians, to be included in that authors "Pat Mattoon Nor Juhaiu", or "History of New Julfa". Ter of Hanians oversaw the archives of Sorb Amana Parchik, was a great archivist and historian, like our dear friend LaVon, and he wrote his extraordinary useful history published in 1880, primarily on the basis of Persian and Armenian documents preserved at the cathedral. Poho's will, with its really dizzying list of palatial estates, vineyards, shops, gold and silver tableware, carpets, porcelain, provides a rare view of the vast possessions owned by Armenian elites residing in Safavid, Iran. This document excites me as an art historian, since it offers concrete evidence of the sizable, financial and physical wealth of Armenian merchants, who were also major patrons of Arts. We often reference the enormous wealth of Armenian merchants patrons but rarely do we know the details of their assets, which are provided in Poho's will. In its dazzling enumeration of properties, objects and textiles, Poho's will offers a platform for us to discuss the amassment of possessions both local and foreign that I believe was key to the identity of 17th century Armenians. Surplus wealth was constantly communicated by Polos, his family and other Armenian resort merchants, residing as Kristyn Dime that has protected religious minorities within the Safavieh Empire. Pohos' lists of luxury wears and estates prompts us to think about Armenian patrons as great collectors of the early modern world, and it has pushed me to consider our medium merchants, not just as devout patrons, but also as voracious collectors. Compared with scholarship on early modern European collecting, there has not been thorough investigation of collecting, collections and collectors in Iran. Within the sphere of Persian and collecting practices, scholarship has tended to focus on aggregations of specific media, such as arts of the book and porcelain. Manuscripts and ceramics, however, they were intended -- they were intended to be seen and enjoyed with other valuable objects, resulting in "collections of collections", according to Hoary Twatsea, or "a concert of things" as described by Stefan Weber. Drawing upon the will of Pohos, in association with other texts and images of the period, such as these beautiful life-sized oil paintings were seeing in front of us, I'm starting to explore the amassing of luxury items in association with the accumulation of properties to understand how various objects, such as clocks Mira's, Italian red velvet and glass, placed in architectural surrounds, all worked in concert to express a carefully constructed Armenian identity, a successful merchant, worldly collector and devout community member. So, let me begin by just giving you a taste of the will, and as you could all see, and this is just the will's preamble. "Before a Council, Khwaja Polos, son of Khwaja Petros, son of Kwaja Velijanean willfully and with complete rationality bequeaths, to his sons Hacobjan and Hovhanjan, and their mother Murasay, daughter of Voskan, all his possessions of which he himself has ownership, either considerable or inconsiderable, ready cash or possessions. That is, domestic movables, vessels, table-cloths, rugs, carpets, thick felts, clothing, household utensils, goldware, silverware, copperware, enamelware" -- which was probably definitely imported, "precious stones, chinaware, livestock, purchased slaves", and then he goes on to describe all the four-legged beasts that he owned. "Landed property, vineyards, houses", and the list goes on. And it concludes, "whether it be credit, charitable capital" -- and here he uses the Islamic term "waqf", "that he invested in Julfa at Isfahan" a place he had built and part of which he had inherited, which are now properties in his name. So, as many of, you know, Shah Abbas forcibly deported the Armenians from Julfa. So, Polos' amassed possessions should be considered in light of his being third generation of the Velijanean family in, Safavid, Iran. According to Terhov Janean's, Polos' grandfather was from Haiajztan. "I was among those who were originally relocated from Julfa", which you probably saw on the map earlier. As many of you know, again, Julfa was on the contested lands, along the Ottoman-Safavid border. Shah Abbas the first raised Julfa and forcibly relocated Julfa's residents, who had already been profiting from the sale of silk through an extensive trade network. Due to their wealth and mercantile connections, Shah Abbas spared Velijanean's community, Velijanean's community, the hardships endured by the less affluent Armenians, and repositioned the Julfans within his empire, at Esfahan, close to the core and very close to the commercial center, and you have to imagine this Maydan just buzzing with merchants and buyers in the 17th century. New Julfa was purposely built to house the Julfans across the Zion Derude river, the Zion Darude, the river to the south of Isfahan. By the time Polos' father was an active member of the New Julfa community, the Velijanean's, along with the suburbs other merchant families, were profiting tremendously from selling Iranian silk across the globe, through a network of New Julfan satellite communities. Representatives of the main wealthy families of Julfa were representing the Julfan families abroad in South, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Russia and Europe. And, of course, we have all this information from wonderful economic historians who are working on New Julfa at the moment, in the past ten years. Surplus wealth went into construction -- constructing an awesome built environment. Through a network of bridges New Julfa became an extension of Isfahan's palace precinct. The quarters of Isfahan, inhabited by the Muslim political elite, were connected to the most beautiful Armenian houses of Julfa, a suburb of Isfahan through a network of bridges, such as the one you're seeing here. In Terhov Anians' history, in the chapter dedicated to the Velijanians, he immediately links Velijan with "Sorb Bethlehem" or "Holy Bethlehem", the most stately domed church built during the initial decades following the transportation of the Julfans from Julfa to New Julfa, in Juha to Nor Juha. Throughout this church, one can find the name of Polos and his family. Petros, who founded this glorious Church in 1628, and now we're going to see a picture of Petros, located in the congregation area of the church. Here we see Petros wearing a dress analogous to the Muslim political and economic elite. He's wearing the fur line vest and patterned headdress, the fur probably imported from Russia where the Armenians had very close ties around the 1660s. And he rests his hand on the Holy Gospel, and in the other hand, I believe he's holding a fair mon. So, a decree issued by the Safavid Court, which gives this Dime, this Christian minority the ability to build a religious structure in Isfahan. The bequest of Polos makes frequent reference to this church, and this church is located in the Great Square of New Julfa called Mezmaydan, "the Great Maydan". 17th century visitors, as well as our 19th century historian Terhov Haneans, has written that Polos and his father Petros were highly regarded for their massive investment in this great square, which was really the commercial heart of the suburb. And here I quote Terhov Hanians who writes, "especially its homes, its beautifully laid out shops and its magnificent Church". I'd like to pause on the overall effect of Bethlehem Church, which is decorated with European-style murals, and here Bethlehem is actually the first church to be decorated with these Europeanized murals so, we have to think of the Velijanean family as really ushering in this new mode referred to as "ferein ushazi" in Isfahan. So, one, as we all know at this point, many of us have worked on this, the wall paintings in the church are based on prints -- will ultimately derive from prints, "Evangelicae Historiae Magnus", and this was printed in the late 16th century and Antwerp and it had many different iterations throughout the 17th century. But we really have to see, we've been focusing on these wall paintings, but we have to see the entire structure in concert. So, we have to look at the portrait, the paintings, the gilded stucco and the cobble tiles with yellow inscriptions just really pronouncing the name of Petros, Polos and their family. And we have to imagine this building covered in beautiful silk carpets, embroidered with metallic thread and with Pope's -- with Popes, sorry about that, that was a bad mistake. But [laughter] with priests processing in such glorious copes as the one you see here, which actually the members of Victorian Albert Museum have found an Armenian inscription in this cloak. Adjacent to this church -- so, we have to think of entering this church as a sensory experience, and when the visitor leaves the church, there is a plethora of shops that are also associated with Polos and his family. The French traveler Jean Baptiste Tavernier writes, "the beautiful square in which the market is held is entirely surrounded by shops, it's another of the works for which the public is beholden to Petros, Polos' father, and which render his memory famous among the Armenians". The will also continue to list all the other shops, not just in New Julfa but in other suburbs of Isfahan. Well, the request statement does not say. We may assume that the various shops owned by Polos sold both local and foreign goods. Although the Safavid Court unilaterally commissioned European merchants to obtain foreign items for them, it was the Armenians who really had the lion's share of the market as importers of European and Russian luxury wares. Importation of foreign goods by Armenian merchants is really well documented, and we see reference to this in these two oil paintings in front of us. Venetian glass, Italian red velvet, enamelware, European clocks. Reading through the latter part of the will, one is astounded by the sheer number of properties owned by Polos. The document lists houses in New Julfa and, as I mentioned, other suburbs of Isfahan. They were built close to the church and close to the shops, but we also have to think about all these houses being built next to other important patrons of New Julfa, such as the family of Tsar Fras and the family of Abbatik. Abbatik -- the reference to Abbatik may be the individual who was part of the commission of the cathedral, Amana Parkich. Clearly ownership of property was a good investment. Traditionally land ownership in the Middle East in Europe was the basis of wealth. Houses were assets that could be used or bequeathed by family members and there is evidence that the domestic properties were even rented out. Aside from the economic benefits, however, I'd like to point out the sociological aspect to the amassment of properties. And for comparison we could look to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire. New Julfa, merchants who were also "outsiders", quote-unquote, as a relocated Dimmi community, desire to show their communal investment and their ties, their location to their built environment. Within these spaces, these public and private spaces, affluent Armenian families like the Velijaneans, received -- they welcomed into their house Armenian, European, Russian merchants, as well as members of foreign embassies, including ambassadors. This is especially true of the public areas of palatial estates, and 17th century sources are replete with references to visits on behalf of the Safavids Court. We know through the good work of Cara Pettean that the Velijaneans owned a house, a mansion, that in one room was decorated with the eight wonders of the world so, that's an additional one. And much work needs to be done on interpreting why they felt that these eight wonders were important. They probably derived from Hemskirk, a printed source. And also we could assume that in the houses of the Velijaneans they had life-size oil paintings such as the ones were seeing before us. A number of these survived and they're seen in situ and the few mansions of the Armenians that survived in New Julfa today. What are we looking at? So, here we're looking at single figures in these fantastic European-style interiors. The columns are decorated with Pucci, the ballast rod and the claw leg-type table are all service backdrops and basically they're riffing off of royal portraiture that is being circulated throughout Iran, and here we see Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. And on the right hand side -- no, yes, on your left hand side we see an urn that is probably drawn from a printed source. They're really fantastical, imagined objects that European artists are circulating in Iran. And what -- these are not individuals that are being depicted -- they are types, and they're what type they are is communicated by the details of dress and head wear. And Cornelius Debruyne documents one of the elite Armenian women, and just look closely -- and I don't need to describe it for you, but if you look at her specific head wear and gold coins hanging down from it, it was created to make a great impression. So, the luxury goods depicted, they speak to both the realities, as well as the aspirations of Armenian mercantile elites. The wine tape -- the wine decanter on the table on the long stem glass, they've been identified as venetian manufacture and the stopper of the decanter in the form of the three eagle head is believed to be a Russian design. And I already mentioned her coat, red velvet, is a reference to Italian manufacturer and we also find references to Italian red velvet in Persian sources of the period. So, let's just recall the list in Polos' request. The silverware, the china, the carpets, the enamels and more. Polos like other members of the Safavid elite amassed a significant collection of luxury items. The desire to assemble diverse objects in this massive quantity, which is enumerated in this will, was shared by the Safavid Court and by other Armenian families. And these individuals were all mutually invested in imparting this image of really unlimited wealth and opulence, in a 17th century context. The emphasis is usually on foreign goods, and there was an investment, actually, to maintain the foreign nature of goods by not making certain things like enamels locally, but importing them abroad, from abroad. And that ability to own foreign items became a privilege of the court and the Armenians. It became a sign of class and social differentiation. I believe that the amassment of luxury wares and domiciles on behalf of the Armenians like Polos was driven by this common impulse, a desire to maintain a privileged social and economic standing in the Safavid Empire. Objects and architecture worked in concert as an expression of lifestyle, taste and the knowledge of worlds well beyond Safavid, Iran. According to Dimmi Law, New Julfa's Armenians were to be of lower social standing and political stratum than their Muslim peers. Their ready access of cash, however, allowed these merchants to build and buy beautiful homes and wonderful things to decorate them with. This conspicuous consumption signaled membership and thus off of it upper class, including an association with the Persian court. Polos' is request -- the quest gives an immediate and firsthand description of the numerous houses and the luxury items that were used to furnish them. There must be more documents like this and I'm looking to my colleagues in the field to work on them and to publish them because only then will we actually know the enormous wealth that these Armenians of New Julfa had, and we need to analyze exactly what objects are coming in and how foreign and local goods are working together in the houses of New Julfa, which still remain to be documented in full. I thank you for your attention [ Applause ] >> All right, thanks Jamie Landau. This, both Dr. Evans and Dr. Landau's paper reminds me of another point that needs to be made, which is the influence of Armenia on its neighbors and the influence of the neighbors on Armenia, both of those papers give wonderful examples of that. And also the fact that everyone you are listening to today is an active researcher in archives and user of digital collections, and that's another point to be made by their papers. And that also brings me to a dear friend, a colleague of mine at Columbia studied under Nina Garzion, who will speak on some beloved manuscripts of ours here in the Library of Congress and elsewhere. I speak of Sylvie Merion, who is at -- and I have got to get this absolutely correct, is at the Pierpont Morgan Museum and -- >> Morgan Library and Museum. >> Library and Museum. And is an expert on all things related to Book Arts, manuscript arts and illuminations, and today she will speak to us on the eclectic nature of late Armenian manuscripts from Constantinople, Dr. Merion. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very much, LaVon, for that nice introduction and for inviting me, and also for all the wonderful things you've done in the decades now. OK, can everybody hear me? All right. OK, I just want to see how does this work, OK. OK so, Armenians have a long history in Constantinople. Their presence in the city has been attested to since at least the 4th, 5th century AD. Ongoing political upheavals in Anatolia over many, many centuries generated increasing Armenian emigration across Byzantine lands into the capital Byzantium, later called Constantinople and its temple. After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire with the Ottomans gaining control of the capital city in 1453, Armenian emigration to Constantinople continued. So, I'm not going to go over this map too much because we've already seen one, but I have circled areas I'm going to talk about. But one thing I do want to mention is that in Armenian Kalla funds, which I will explain a little more in a second, they refer to Constantinople by many different names, including Byzantium. So, in 17th century manuscripts they're still calling the city "Byzantium" sometimes. So, we have Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul or Bolis or Stambul. And the circled areas are places I'm going to be talking about. The earliest Armenian Church in Constantinople is St. Sarkis, known since 1360. By the 17th century, a large Armenian community was present in Constantinople with many churches to serve them. Manuscript Calafunds indicate that numerous scriptoria in the capital were still producing high quality, luxury manuscripts, both on paper and on parchment, which is animal skin at this time, and I want to explain what a colophon is, it's an inscription written by the scribe who's copied the manuscript, usually put at the end of the manuscript saying, "I did this, please pray for me, the miserable scribe Hagop, I need your prayers, even though I don't deserve anything" and he will tell you where he made the manuscript, the date and give you a lot of historical information and a lot of information about his family and anyone who worked on this manuscript. So, they're very important for historical research also. And so, I will be mentioning the word "colophon" a lot. All right so, three churches or manuscripts with scriptoria are frequently named as being the places the manuscripts were produced. Saint Nicholas, St. Sarkis the general and St. Gevorg or St. George, also called "Sulumanastij" in Turkish, and sometimes the Armenians also use the word "Suleimanasteed" in the colophon. The production of manuscripts in the 17th and 18th centuries was not unique to Armenians, however. In Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions throughout the Near East, manuscripts continued being created until the 18th and 19th centuries. By Western standards, this is very strange and surprisingly late. I should also mention that in Western manuscripts you usually don't have a colophon. If you have it, you will have something to the effect of, "this was copied by Joe", that's it. We have pages and pages and pages of information through colophons in the Armenian tradition, OK. So, Armenian scribes, artists and bookbinders at this time continued making manuscripts at this late date, using traditional methods and skills, passed on to them by their masters, using parchment at times, copying the manuscripts by hand and painting the eliminations, and binding the books using long-established techniques. They were, however, receptive to new ideas, techniques and iconography brought to them through contact with neighboring peoples or European traditions, as we shall see. Now, why were these cultures in the Near East still producing manuscripts in the 17th and 18th centuries? By this time in Europe, printed books had long overtaken the production of manuscripts, but this Western European technology of printing, which began around 1455 with Gutenberg's printing press in Europe, was not readily available in the near East. It would take time to import the technology, equipment and expertise needed, and even longer for it to become accepted and widespread due to technological issues, funding and censure, for example, by Ottoman authorities. Indeed the first printed books in Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic were all produced in Europe. The first printed book in the Armenian language was printed in Venice, Italy around 1511 or 1512, a modest book of prayers and spells, particularly useful to travelers and merchants, and you see a copy of this book here. An Armenian printing press was established in Constantinople as early as 1567, but it only functioned for two years. Armenian presses would not be reestablished there until 1677, and that press only produced two books and lasted one year. Ottoman authorities would not officially permit printing in the Empire until 1727. However, Armenian books were printed in Europe throughout the 17th centuries in cities such as Amsterdam, Marseilles, Livorno and Louvre of Poland, which were -- and these books were exported to the Near East, but clearly not in the quantity which met the needs of the community. It is therefore not surprising that scriptoria were still busily producing superb medieval style manuscripts well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Consequently, for centuries, Armenian printed books and Armenian manuscripts were produced simultaneously and influenced each other. By this -- next slide, there we go. By the 17th century, Armenian manuscripts in Constantinople enjoyed an undeniable renown and luxury manuscripts were commissioned from Constantinopolitan scriptoria from distant regions. This unusual luxury manuscript Bible on parchment was commissioned in 1607 by the wealthy Armenian merchants Hojin Nazar, who New Julfa, Iran, an affluent Armenian suburb of Isfahan, the capital of the Iranian Safavid empire. It was completed in Constantinople in 1623 and delivered to Hojin Nazar in 1629. Note that the complete Bible in the Armenian language would not exist in printed form until it was printed in Amsterdam in 1666. So, before 1666 if you wanted a Bible in the Armenian language you had to have it copied by hand. This Bible with Genesis scenes in roundels -- it doesn't work on the thing -- OK. On this side you see the round circles. It had -- these are Genesis scenes along with the story of Adam and Eve in the three registers below, uses iconography borrowed from Europe and found in manuscripts -- European manuscripts from the mid-9th to the 15th centuries. It is highly unlikely -- and I would say probably impossible, however, that Armenians in Constantinople had any direct access to such manuscripts, and we have not yet determined the exact sources they used. In any case, this type of Genesis frontispiece became a popular model for a group of 17th century Armenian Bibles. They exist in at least ten Armenian manuscripts made in Constantinople and later in New Julfa. This sumptuous example of a parchment Synnex Aryan, which is a book of saints lives, was specially commissioned from Constantinople by Vartavet Sarkis, the head of the Armenian Monastery of St. Macarius and Nicosia Cyprus. Perhaps there was no scriptorium in Nicosia with scribes or artists capable of producing such a lavish manuscript, or perhaps there was no exemplar from which to copy in Nicosia. We should note, again, that the Armenian Synnex Aryan did not exist in a printed version until 1706. So, if you needed one for your church, monastery or private use before 1706, there was no other solution than to have one copied by scribe. Armenian artists and Constantinopolitan scriptoria worked in two distinguishable styles. Both approaches look back at their solution for bears, especially for decorative elements. One employed a more classical style, constituting a kind of Silesian, revival mixed with elements drawn from Western European and Byzantine art. This manuscript, a gospel dated 1643, exemplifies this more classical style in the portrait of the Evangelist Matthew on the left. On the right is the first page of Matthew's Gospel, and we note that his symbol, an angel, has been twisted to form the first letter of the text. So, that angel there is actually the letter Kim in Armenian. The symbols of the evangelists twisted into letters -- the angel, lion, ox or eagle has been used since the Silesian period in Armenian iconography. The intricate decoration of the headpiece as well as the marginal design on the right, are typical of traditional manuscript illumination. The headpiece is the archway the on the right-hand page, and of course you see that very beautiful fancy decorative marginal design. Another traditional characteristic of Armenian illuminated gospel books was to include sumptuously decorated Canon tables, which are kind of indexed to the four Gospels. The example on the left is from a mid-17th century gospel book from Constantinople at the Morgan, and it's compared with one from the 12th century, on the right. The importance of Canon tables is emphasized by the fact that at least three Armenian medieval commentaries were written to explain the symbolism of these usually lavishly decorated pages. The most famous of these commentaries was written by the 12th century Catholicos St. Nersesh Norhali. Catholicos, for those who may not know, is the supreme head of the Armenian church and Nersesh Norhali was also a theologian, poet and composer of hymns. In his treatise he discussed the importance of lavish cannon tables, as a visual aid to meditation, calling them "baths of sight and hearing for those approaching the soaring peaks of God". 17th century Armenian artists from many regions -- not just Constantinople, continued to illustrate cannon tables in a similar manner as an homage to their ancestral traditions. This is an example of the second style of manuscript illumination used in Constantinople, which developed in the second half of the 17th century. This style was characterized by figures outlined in strong, black lines with prominent noses and the use of mostly flat planes of color, sometimes abstracted as we see here on the left. And I particularly like the water shown here. It's very, very abstract and actually very modern, to my eyes. The unnamed artists of this manuscript, however, still looks back to Armenian traditions for the decoration of the headpiece and the intricate marginal designs. You see the marginal designs on both images and, again, the headpiece. [ Applause ] These three manuscripts exemplify this later style of Constantinopolitan manuscripts, as demonstrated in the works of the artists Markos Badgerahan, which means "portrait painter", which is a very unusual epithet for an artist to use, and his son Gabriel. Manuscripts by Markos date from 1651 to 1694. Gabriel was certainly trained by his father. An early Salter by Markos is on the left dated 1659. Father and son sometimes worked together, as in the Alexander romance in the center, done in 1694 when Markos was elderly. It was copied by Gabriel, who also informs us through the Colophon that he painted the pictures, but that his father decorated it. By this he probably means that Markos had a more minor role in illustrating this manuscript. The manuscript on the right is illustrated by Gabriel alone, who now informs us that his father has died. The stylistic connections between the two men are obvious. We can see the small black dots for eyes, strong black lines outlining the nose, eyebrows and the figures, and two lines to indicate the mouth. Gabriel, however, has taken these features even further in his handling of bold lines. This manuscript, a complete Bible, was produced in 1647 in Constantinople, in a scriptorium under the jurisdiction of St. Nicholas Church. This manuscript was copied on parchment, made from animal skin. Done in what we're calling "the classical style" with -- however with a lot of unusual features. This is the beginning of the Psalms, with the repentant David on the left traditionally believed to be the author of the Psalms. David kneels while looking up at a chastising angel, who holds a skull, three switches and a sword. These represent the punishments that God has demanded David choose in retribution for his sins. Famine, war or plague. The skull represents the ultimate outcome of any of these punishments, death. This iconography is not Armenian, it has been borrowed from Western Europe through the vehicle of an imported illustrated printed book not yet identified. The facing, intricate page includes a traditional Armenian back headpiece and marginal decoration, with traditional Armenian decorative bird letters. So, the first letter of text there is actually letters forming words made of twisted birds, sometimes they also like to use fish. However, the vase of flowers under the arch of the headpiece is something quite different. The artist of this manuscript seems to have been enamored with flowers. Here is another example of a vase of flowers under a traditional headpiece and there are many, many others in this manuscript, I could do a whole lecture just on this manuscript, but I can't. We're not allowed. Not only are they -- the flowers used in headpieces as we just saw, but they are also scattered throughout this Bible as a framing device for the portrait busts of authors of various books of the Bible, and there are dozens of similar floral portraits throughout this manuscript. Another unusual characteristic of this Bible concerns the decoration of the book of Revelation. Before the 17th century, Armenian manuscripts of the complete Bible -- which were not very common anyway, they did not illustrate the apocalypse with anything more than perhaps an author portrait of John. After the 17th century, through exposure to imported European printed and illustrated books, they began illustrating the book of Revelation by copying European woodcuts and engravings, as there really was no Armenian tradition of illustrating Revelation. In a few cases we have been able to identify the exact printed source. In this case I have found the type of engraving used as a model, ultimately derive from Dirar. This etching and the Armenian elimination depict a literal illustration of Revelation chapter ten, verses one to 11, and I'll read it first two lines. "And I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head. His face was like the sun and his legs like pillars of fire. He held a little scroll, open in his hand, setting his right foot on the sea and his left on the land, he gave a great shout like a lion roaring". And in this case the left and right legs were reversed in both the engraving and the Armenian illumination shown here. Oops. I'm getting ahead of myself. Exposure to all types of European printed books had a great influence on Near Eastern artists of the 17th century. Not only European religious books, but also books like printed herbals, which would have been replete with plant and floral images. And not just Armenian artists, as we shall soon see. In the 18th century when Christians, Muslims and Jews were still making manuscripts, things start to change even more drastically. This exposure to new motifs would have a strong effect on book decoration, as well as other art forms, and would bring about important changes in taste and style in the Ottoman Empire, as well as elsewhere in the Near East including Iran. Now, before I get to 18th-century manuscripts, I want to just first show you the bindings of a couple Armenian manuscripts and. yes, these are two Armenian manuscripts. The binding on the left is typically Armenian in both decoration and technique, which were used for centuries. So, I should just briefly explain different cultures have different ways of making their books and have different techniques of sewing and making their manuscripts, OK? So, the library -- this, the one on the left is a typical Armenian example. The Library of Congress example on the right is an Armenian Christian manuscript, but has been bound in a typical Islamic binding, probably Turkish but could possibly be Persian. It is Islamic in both decoration and technique of binding. Now I'm going to discuss this very interesting Library of Congress manuscript at length now. Upon opening the book with the Islamic binding, we first note that it is handwritten in Armenian, and also that the first page is a title page. Now, this is unusual because title pages were common in printed books but not in manuscripts. This book is an apocryphal Christian text, the acts of St. John the Evangelist, and we are provided with a date, 1214 in the Armenian era but written with Arabic numerals, instead of the Armenian alphabet used as numerals, which would have been normal and which is how he gives the date in the Colophon. This date, 1214, is equivalent to 1214 plus 551 AD, 1765. The next page depicts a portrait of St. John the Evangelist, but the style is much more European. Notice the gentle modeling of the face and there's a much better understanding of perspective, especially evident in rendering the checkerboard floor, something else not commonly seen in Armenian manuscripts. The facing page of texts includes bird letters, and a decorative headpiece typical in Armenian manuscripts, but there is nothing typical in its decorative scheme. It is filled with naturalistic flowers instead of the usual Armenian motifs, as we just saw, and a traditional marginal design is placed on the right but has been transformed by using flowers. As we go through the book, we note first that it is paginated, again, using Arabic numerals, something not normally done in a manuscript. It's possible that these numbers could have been added later but the paleography appears very similar to the numerals on the title page, and I'm convinced that the scribe wrote all of them. They are carefully written on each page within the gold box. More startling is that the beginning of each chapter is embellished with a naturalistic flower. LaVon Abdoyan has informed me that he had a botanist colleague look at these images, who confirmed that not all of them are real plants. There's often something wrong, for example, certain flowers supposed to have six petals and the artist did it with eight or something like that. But they certainly were painted in an extremely naturalistic manner. In spite of all these unusual characteristics -- and there are more, which I don't have time to get into, the manuscript includes a traditional and lengthy Armenian colophon, from which we learned that it was completed in 1765 by the scribe artist, notary and flower painter, Havanes of Becos, son of Madeiro Simonian. Becos is a district of Constantinople. The person who commissioned and paid for this luxurious manuscript was Bouhaus Amira, son of Medeiros Jovian, grandson of Mahtesi Harukun Amira. And Amira is an Armenian honorific title for a group of wealthy people who were leaders of the Armenian Ottoman Millette and favored by the Ottoman government. The colophon does not specifically say where the manuscript was produced. The scribe and artist just tells us that he is of Becos, not specifically that it was made in Becos. Theoretically this could mean that the manuscript could have been produced elsewhere. But for reasons I will explain, I believe that it was produced in Constantinople, perhaps in Becos itself. So far, I have found one other manuscript made by the same scribe an artist Havanes of Bakos. This 1762 copy of the book of prayer by the beloved 10th-11th century Armenian mystic and saint Gregory of Notic. It is extremely similar to the Library of Congress manuscript. This is the beginning of the text, with a portrait of the author, St. Gregory on the left, and the highly decorated headpiece and marginal decoration on the facing page composed, again, of flowers, as we saw in the Library of Congress manuscript. And note again, the checkerboard floor. The person who commissioned this manuscript, as we're told in the colophon was Mahtesi Haruchun, son of Mathesi Alexan Amira, again, a wealthy Armenian from Constantinople. This is the other full-page illumination in this manuscript, St. Gregory kneeling before the Virgin and Child, who holds a tiny book in his hands which had been symbolically presented to Christ by the author. This the front cover of the knotting manuscript with, again, a Turkish style binding. And the manuscript also includes the same type of flowers in the margins as we saw in the previous example, and neither this knotting manuscript or in the previous acts of Saint John, does the text discuss flowers. These flowers are placed here simply for the visual pleasure of the viewer, not because they are illustrating something discussed in the text. Now Havanes of Becos was not the only Armenian artist in 18th century Constantinople, who was enamored with flowers. There are many examples of late Armenian manuscripts with this type of decoration. The artist of this 1770 missile from Constantinople has filled the headpiece and marginal design with flowers. This secular manuscript, a history by the 12th century author Samuel of Unny was copied in Constantinople in 1777 by the scribe Nickohios. The artist is not named but it's very probable that the flower painter was Havanes of Bekos himself, as it is extremely similar to those in the two manuscripts we saw earlier that we know he produced, and we know for sure this is from Constantinople. The floral decoration has nothing to do with this historical text. Again, a decorative motif used to embellish the text for the visual enjoyment of the reader. This example is from a text called "The city of Troy and it's Kings" by Nicholaios Lucianos, copied in Constantinople in 1779 by the scribe and translator Georg Dpir Yovhannessian Palatetsi. The artist is not named in the colophon. Note again the use of decorative flowers, painted in a very Rococo style, especially as seen in the headpiece. Traditional Armenian decorative marginal motifs, still common in the mid-12th century, have now been transformed to a new floral concept by the mid-18th century, reflecting a general change in taste in the region. And not just with Armenians, this fascination with decorative flowers became quite popular in the upper and ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period of increasing contact with Europeans, as well as with their material goods, which would have an effect on the artistic vocabulary in the capital. We now see similar floral motifs even used to embellish Turkish religious manuscripts, such as this Quran of 1798 on the left, and a pious text from 1848 to '49 on the right, this one with an even more Rococo style to it. One of the most famous examples of the use of such ornamentation is the so called "Fruit room" of the Sultan's harem or private family quarters of the Topkapi Palace, painted in 1705. The Sultan at this time was Ahmed the Third, who reigned from 1703 to 1730 and under whose rule there was much contact with France and French diplomats. The walls and ceiling of the fruit room are filled with Rococo vases of flowers, bowls of fruit and floral sprays throughout. On the right is another of -- is an official Ottoman document, dated 1862 to 77, the deed of endowment of a later Sultan's mother, again, highly decorated with floral motifs. Because of the late advent of printing in the Near East, Armenian manuscripts were still being produced in Constantinople and elsewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scribes, artists and bookbinders continued centuries of uninterrupted Armenian book art traditions, even after books were produced on a printing press. However, as we have seen, they also embraced new developments derived from imported European printed books, of which I only could speak of a few, but they are -- and they are also reflected -- they also reflected local taste, including new iconography, increased interest in perspective and new decorative motifs. The floral motifs, for instance, were probably first introduced through European printed herbal or botanical books, but were used in manuscripts purely for their decorative qualities. In fact, floral mania became ubiquitous in the privileged strata of the Ottoman Empire, and was also used to decorate late Turkish manuscripts and even mural paintings for the ruling class and the wealthy elite in the Capitol. In Armenian 17th and 18th-century manuscripts we see continued reverence for their native traditions, combined with an openness to borrowing, sharing and absorbing cross-cultural stylistic vocabularies, resulting in these fascinating, eclectic manuscripts. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> So, as a transition, rapid transition from the late Middle Ages to the modern age but still in the art, historical and sociological sphere, is a good friend and a person who has been active in archives, searching out some very interesting material on little-known subject and that is Vazken Khatchig Davidian from England, who is finishing his dissertation on this subject, and he will be speaking on the image of the migrant worker, visualizing the Banduokh, from Ottoman Armenia in late 19th century Constantinople. [ Applause ] >> LaVon, thank you. I'm afraid I woke up this morning and I'd sort of lost my voice so, it's sort of comeback, I've been drinking lots of hot water. LaVon thank you so much for organizing this amazing gathering, and having all of us here. I thought with the first three peoples I'd sort of died and gone to art historical heaven, and it's amazing from wealth and patronage, we're sort of moving to porters in 19th century Constantinople. So, there you go. I just want to introduce you to a few words just in case you're not familiar with them. The first word is "Bantoukhd", and I do use the Western Armenian transliteration, I don't apologize for it because we're dealing with late 19th century Constantinople. So, a Bantoukhd is a migrant worker. They're usually male young men who basically leave family and homeland and moved to Constantinople to work. So, my paper is really about the bantoukhd in Constantinople. "Bantkdoutioun" is a phenomenon but it is also -- it is a really charged word because there's a sense of tragedy about the whole thing. So, someone goes on bantkdoutioun, it's all bad yearning for home, etcetera. So, it has negative connotations and there's a whole genre of bantoukhd songs as well going back a few centuries. A lot of the heart of the bantoukhds that I'm going to be dealing with today, Hamals, and Hamal means "Porter". It comes from the Arabic word "Hamala" I which means "to carry". The Armenian word is "pairnagish". So, most of the images you will be seeing today will be of porters, and the last word I want to introduce you to -- Mercer, you probably know it, is "Hayasdantsi". But hayasdantsi, in the late -- in its late 19th century Constantinople serving carnation meant an Armenian who came from Ottoman Armenia, and a hayasdantsi was a native of Van, a native of Mush, of Esroom, etcetera. So, we understand -- when we talk about hayasdan, when I speak about Ottoman Armenia or hayastan, I'll be meaning not the Republic today, it is Armenia as it was understood in those days. And "dantsi" is a suffix that denotes from a particular place. So, a native form -- of Mush, for example, would be a "Mushetsi", from Mush and "Tsi". So, there you go. So, here we go. See if this works. "Hamals on the bridge at Karakoy", by the respected but now mostly forgotten Ottoman Armenian artist Simon Hagopian, 1857-1921 is a rendering of an everyday scene, which sets for men instantly identifiable as bantoukhds and Hamals by trait, mid conversation while suppressed by an especially constructed timber structure in the middle of the Galata bridge, that links the old city of Constantinople to the dynamic commercial hub of Karakoy in the upscale quarter of Para. In this contemporary and familiar scene, one that Hagopian would have passed by daily, the artist has situated these rural transplants into the heart of the urban megalopolis, represented here as an ambivalent space, conjured through a band of hazy brushstrokes that rendered the unmistakable outline of the Galata tower. You can -- you can't really see it very well, but -- I can see it here, but it's just over the head of the of the man on his own. It's really hazy, and the general skyline of the European part of the city recognizable. Hagopian has utilized narrative gesture with great care, to imbue tension and charge into the conversation. To definitely communicate to the viewer the unhappy state of mind of the central figure. At the right of the image, conveying some form of displeasure, to his three fellow Hamals, who are listening to the man's words with great concentration. With deft use of brushstroke, the artist has skillfully marked the minutest details and captured movements, such as the enquiring gestures of the man's hands with their protruding networks of silver veins -- silver blue wanes, and Callum's open palm. Meanwhile, the sweat on his brow and red sunburns neck evoke years of relentless toil on the streets of Constantinople, and the hard life of the bekkiar. "Bekkiar" is a Turkish word, which means "single men". A lot of these men were not single, but they actually lived in Constantinople in groups, having left all their wives and families back in the old country. So, bekkiar is a collective term that actually denotes these people. And they lived in hans, and a han -- or a ham is as an inn where many of these people lived in slum-like conditions, separated from family and away from their homelands. The dirty rags, riddled with holes and crudely patched in places, all told their distinct stories of poverty, migration and hardship. This is a thoroughly modern image. Its modernity explicit in the meticulously rendered ornate ironwork of the bridges balustrade, signifying the latest achievements of modern British engineering, and further underlined by the consciously photographic frame employed by the artist. Consider the striking similarity of the frames adopted by Hagopian and the British photographer and illustrator Wren Abel's photographic image carriers resting, reproduced in the London Illustrated newspaper black and white on 2nd of January, 1897. The published photograph further confirms the meticulous care with which Hagopian has rendered each detail of the bridge, the hamal's rest station and the timber decking of its pavement. Irrespective of this compositional affinities of Hagopian's painting, with a view as observed through the frame of the camera lens, we do not know whether the artist had introduced -- had reproduced the scene from a photograph, a common practice employed by several of his contemporaries, or had sketched it in situ and then executed in his studio. The gritty naturalism of Hagopian's representation of a fleeting moment on the bridge, rather than a mere picturesque ethnographic depiction of an exotic group -- one of the most visible and emblematic of the imperial capital of three types, the hamals, in a timeless, oriental setting, suggests instead a desire for an honest artistic engagement by a non-western artist with his own immediate environment. This presentation will focus on visual representations of the figure of the bantoukhd, by late 19th century Constantinople Armenian artists by promoting two main ideas. Firstly, it will propose that work such as Hagopian's "Hamals on the bridge" that addressed contemporary themes of social concern and were executed in a Western mode of visual art production, oil on canvas painting, needs to be considered within the milieu of a particular Ottoman Armenian incarnation of realism, the major preoccupations of which included the life of the bantoukhd in Constantinople and the implications of the phenomenon or bantkhdouioun on -- from Ottoman Armenia. Realism was a dominant intellectual philosophy among the city's reformist circles during the final two decades of the 19th century, and associated most notably with a group of journalists, chroniclers and other writer activists, assembled around the influential editor Arpier Arpiarian, 1851 -- 1908. And the popular dailies Arabic orient from 1884 in Hairenick Fatherland from 1891 to 1896, which he edited. Such a position challenges accepted nations in Armenian historiography that have hitherto presented the so-called Constantinople realist generation Bostahai Rabash Sevunts a literary movement, the sole domain of novelists, essays and journalists. Secondly, it will propose that during the period under consideration, characterized by the increasingly stringent censorship controls of the Abdul Hameed the Second regime -- he reigned between 1876 and 1908-1909, and rising tensions between the state and the empires Armenian population, where any articulation of Armenian identity was perceived as a threat, artists often utilized allegory cloaked beneath the fashionable ethnographic sensibilities of the day to convey messages, which were often received or projected by some viewers as such, in order to evade the scalpel of the censor and represent on canvas what could not be published in print. The phenomenon of bantkdoutioun had already emerged as a prominent preoccupation of Ottoman army intellectuals during the second half of the 19th century. For these intellectuals, Ottoman Armenia and bantkdoutioun represented the two faces of the same proverbial coin. They believed economic and structural improvement in Ottoman Armenia would stem the flow of migration. To Mugarich Cremyan, 1820-1907, it was patriarch of Constantinople between 1869 and 1873, and he was catholicos after 1893 until his death in Russian Armenia, affectionately known as Heinrich, "little father", his disciple the bishop Kaerkin Servantsidean, 1840-1892 both natives of Ottoman Armenia -- they were both born in Van, and a generation of mid-19th century writers and ethnographers, bantkhdoutioun had meant the tragic abandonment of the land. They espouse the economic development of Ottoman Armenia, especially of its agricultural sector, and called for the establishment of infrastructure, the rule of law, security of life and property within the Imperial Ottoman framework. The editor and activist Megerdich Portulalyan, 1848 to 1921, considered bantkhdoutioun as sin. The desertion of homeland and denigration of the Armenian name, for him being a Hama was an insult to being Armenian. These sentiments are at the heart of the author Mardiros Khatchmerian's "Life of the Armenian bantoukhd", "Geangye bantachtats", published in 1876 in Constantinople. Khatchmerian urged all bantoukhds to return to their half and homes in Armenia, "till its soil and make it blossom". Using romantic and religious allegory, Hachmeryan divided bantoukhd into three categories, the good or fortunate, "bantoukhd pachtavor", who diligently sent money to their families and ultimately returned home. The wretched, "bantoukhd tejvaj", who were exploited and were ultimately unsuccessful, and those who disappeared without care, "bantoukhd anhop hiuhaireniats", leaving destitute families behind. Unsurprisingly, it is a latter category that is subjected to his greater attention and for whom his unconcealed aya is reserved. Meanwhile, the allegorical image on the cover, the original of which was conceived in the 1840s in Paris by the paduan artists and engraver Michele Fanoli -- he was born in 1807, he died in 1876, and he was actually a teacher, he was an art teacher at the Muradian School in Paris. And he was asked to come up with his image by Ivosovski's brother, the archbishop Gabriel Ivosovski. So, the image depicts the desolate figure of a woman, sitting for long among ruined classical columns at the foot of Mount Ararat, which had from the mid-19th century -- this image has from the mid-19th century onwards, become the ubiquitous personification of the words of Armenia. Bantkhdouioun abandoned ruination, abandonment ruination. While emigrating for work was certainly not a solely Ottoman Armenian phenomenon, I mean, other groups migrated as well for work. So, while this was not solely an Armenian phenomenon, the specific perception of the tragic abandonment of the homeland had an especially powerful, emotional resonance among them. Similar artistic and literary sponsors to similar phenomena are absent from the contemporary artistic production of other neighboring Ottoman populations, such as Kurds, Greeks and Turks. So, the period they were actually looking, at the 1880s and the 1890s, if you go through works by Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Greek Levantine artists, you will never actually see this kind of image, just like the one that I actually showed you earlier. So, it is pretty unusual, and it's pretty unique among Armenians. The two decades following the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-1878 and the Great Famine of Van and its aftermath in 1880-1881, as well as the Treaty of Berlin and the toothless proposals for reform, had experienced an increase in the outflow of migrants, mostly younger able-bodied provincial males from Ottoman Armenia, fueled by socio-economic, inter-ethnic and political tensions, facilitated by the increasingly regular steamship connections between Trebizond and other black sea ports, and Constantinople. So, before, they actually walk from the villages of Mush all the way to Constantinople. Now they only had to walk to the Black Sea, catch a boat and go to Constantinople. The areas of Ottoman Armenia from where emigration to the capital was highest, was a region without roads and -- roads or railways. It lacked infrastructure, where subsistence farming was a major form of economic activity. The region was characterized by economic stagnation, physical insecurity, social disorder and the absence of the rule of law. By 1890, the editorial, a practical suggestion called "Zagan ara Charkma" published on the 5th of May, 1890 in Arabelc, claim that it is an accepted truth, and in comparison with the other peoples of the Empire, Armenians have the largest number of bantoukhds in Constantinople. While estimated at 15,000 in the 1860s, the numbers were believed to have exceeded 80,000 before the 1894-1897 massacres. Now, in a city of 1 million that's a pretty extraordinary number, it's a huge chunk of the Armenian population. But, of course, I'm not arguing that all of these people were actually Hamals, is basically people who had actually migrated from Ottoman Anatolia and elsewhere to Constantinople, they were Armenian and they were basically bantoukhds. In a really interesting article recently I saw Robert Tatoian had -- in Armenia it's calculated about 15% of the population -- of the of the male population of the Bitless Villi, it actually had gone on bantkhdoutioun, which is a really, really interesting figure. So, I'm not quite sure. Sort of, you know -- there's a few sort of sources, whether they can be trusted or not, but again, sort of if you actually look at the source material, it really does show that a huge number of people did migrate. And Constantinople was not the only place they actually went there, for example the Sussmansees, people from Sassoon, are known to have particularly gone to Halep, where they actually worked as bakers. So, among Aleppo Armenians today, the surname "Khazakosian" will immediately suggest that one's ancestors actually came from Sassoon. But we're really concentrating on Constantinople, I digress. To the urban Ottoman army intellectual of the realist generation, from a vantage point of mid to late 1880s and 1890s Constantinople, Ottoman Armenia was a distant land in the East that most had never seen or experienced, yet imagined vividly and idealized. There was a huge, huge chunk of literature, mostly ethnographic that was actually available to these people so, they did imagine what Armenia would have been like. But, of course, it's -- Armenia lived in their imagination rather than the actual sort of poverty that was actually on the line. However, the presence of thousands of bantoukhds on the streets of the imperial capital provided a powerful material counterpart to any abstract notions of Ottoman Armenia. A real flesh-and-blood, physical manifestation of the streets of the imperial capital, personified in the recognizable form of the provincial migrant. Most visible among the highest Sansees were the thousands of Hamals, mainly peasants from the villages of the plain of Mush, but also from the province of Van, who for centuries past had come to Constantinople to work, lived in slum-like, conditions were organized into as esnaf. An esnaf is it's a kind of guild, it's a kind of union, where people have a certain profession group together, and the esnad actually looked after them. It was it was a very interesting organization. The word "esnaf" means different things at different points in time, but you can sort of imagine it as a kind of -- sort of workers union. So, these migrants, these bundles pass -- these hamals passed on their work from one generation to the next. So, the father would come work for five years, go back home and send his son. So, you basically have the same family, sort of members of the same families sort of taking on the previous generation's position. Hence, the surname Hamalian or Hamalbashian is a pretty sort of popular surname among Armenians from the Van region, and the Mush region. They were really proud to be Hamals. Being a being a Hamal was actually being a porter, it was quite a, sort of honored sort of profession for them. But, of course, Constantinople Armenians looked at them in a completely different way, but we'll get to that. The Armenian hold on the profession in the city appears to have strengthened after sultan Mahmud the Second, 1808-1839, massacred and expelled the Muslim Hamals of the port, following the last Janissary revolt of 1826. The Armenian patriarch Garibay the Third of Constantinople, 1823-1831, was ordered to provide 10,000 men as replacements for the killed or expelled Muslim porters. Instantly recognizable, the Hamal of Constantinople had already become an iconic figure. The subject of fascination for writers and artists, visitors and locals throughout the 19th century, there's a huge number of orientalist texts, travel literature where -- which would mythologize the Armenian Hamal of Constantinople. They keep on repeating the myth was sort of, they saw these Armenian Hamals carrying enormous pianos on their backs up mountains and, you know, it's all these stories. So, with the advent of photography, they became popular -- they became a popular subject for the photographic lens as well. So, for example -- I just want to show you just a few examples here, this is an albumen print, which was taken outdoors and it's a Hamal. This is actually another photograph, it's a famous photograph that's actually been used numerous times in different contexts across the decades, and it is from the studio of the Armenian, the Ottoman Armenian photographer Abdullah Phrese. And it's also been used as a as a postcard. From the late 1890s, a lot of these images were actually -- some of the more popular ones were actually used as postcards. And for example here you can actually see four men arranged pleasingly around a barrel and two poles. Of course, for every European would actually receive this postcard -- I mean, it doesn't really say anything what a Hamal is, but these are actually the implements of their work. Since the poles and the barrel, which four basic -- four men, four men, six men or eight men would actually carry. So, there are two types of Hamals, the Hamals who worked as a group and Hamals who basically carried the weights on their backs as single workers. This is another interesting photograph, and again, I really don't have much time to go into it, but LaShienda who is -- it's really encapsulate -- I don't have time to go into it, but it really encapsulates how a lot of Constantinople Armenians -- but not just Constantinople Armenians, urban Ottomans really look down at the Hamals. And the street dogs were also really, really common in the streets of Constantinople. And so, you get lots of images where the Hamals and the dogs are basically posing next to one another. It really does -- it's a picture that speaks a million words, really, but anyway, we don't really have much time for photographer because we've got paintings to look at. The bantoukhd in Constantinople became the major preoccupation of the realists throughout much of the 1880s and the early 1890s, with hundreds of articles chronicling every aspect of their lives and experience in the city. Yet no writer has looked as closely as the bantoukhd and represented his experience to the extent and with the sensitivity, empathy and active employment and involvement, as the educator and noted chronicler Melkon Grunyan, 1859-1915. Writing under the pseudonym "Herrant", he represented the bantoukhd's life in all its facets. In his letters of the bantoukhd, "bantoukhdin amakhner", a series of 20 or so chronicles, written in Constantinople and published in by the then weekly newspaper "Masses" between 1888 and 1891 and "Highrenick" between 1891 and 1892. The letters, which according to the literary historian James Atmeckjean had given unparalleled authenticity to the literary realism of the time, were usually addressed through Arpyarian, then editor of "Masses", at whose request they were written, and by extension to a Constantinople Armenian readership. Employing language that is simple, direct, yet intensely visual, etfrastic, Herrnat closely described the individual bantoukhd, painted being a man and probed into the darkest little corners of his soul, revealing his innermost thoughts and sufferings. Himself a bantoukhd, unlike most of the other realists, Herrant knew his subject intimately. He castigated the contempt with which urban Armenians of Constantinople denigrated and dismissed him, relentlessly advocating the provincial bantoukhds dignity. Expressed concerned with a luring of young men and boys into what he termed "ignoble professions", such as male prostitution, practice within homo-social spaces such as the hammam and other, has he termed them, "abbatoirs of morals" such as mayhanesse and coffee houses. Reproduced letters that he himself had scribed on behalf of illiterate bantoukhds. In one such letter addressed to a mother informing her of the death of her son, we are provided with a glimpse of what he termed "a black letter", seftaukhed, thousands of which crisscross 19th century Anatolia, carrying news of death and sickness. Like Herrant, Constantinople artists too often took a close and pathetic look at the bantoukhd. The bantoukhd Hamal from Mush -- its undated, but it was probably painted in the late 1890s, also by Simon Hagopian who painted the earlier Hamals on the bridge, is an intense study of a migrant where character and psychological depth have taken center stage. Hagopian has skillfully captured the likeness of an attractive, dignified man on the cusp of middle age, where the empathy the artist must have felt towards the sitter is clearly reflected. Here, the Hamal's direct gaze breaches the gulf between the subject, artist and us, the viewers. The neutral white background avoids any distraction from the subject, with a Hamal claiming our undivided attention. Meanwhile, Arpyarian rights of another earlier portrait of a bantoukhd Hamal from Mush, the painting "Manugahbarj", "brother", "Manugahbarj" means "brother", the whereabouts of which are currently unknown, by the highly respected 19th century Constantinople artist Petros Srabian, 1833-1898. Writing in the popular daily Arabic orient, on the 25th of February 1884 under the pseudonym "Herraskhan", he recorded his and his friends responses to the work. "With a few friends we visited Petros Srabian's home. He had just completed "Manuhagpbarj". That slight face and its feelings of sadness, this faded eyes, skinny fingers, the rags. And I don't know what noble wind was waving on his entire face, turned us all towards melancholy. 'What an odd thing' said one of our friends, 'were I to see him, the old man on the street, I would certainly have passed him by without the slightest care, whereas by looking at that painting, his eyes, as if magnets pull my glance towards them'. The talented painter, by pulling the old man's grief eroded" -- he used the word "veshtamash", "hard softest strings, had captured within his eyes the most psychological". He uses the word "hokipanagan", which translates directly as "psychology", "psychological". So, it's the most psychological moment and all the emotional storms tormenting his heart for 70 years. Whilst Srabian's intentions are not made explicit in the text, we don't really know what he actually sort of meant to convey by sort of painting Manugahbarj, and we don't know where the painting is. Despite the artist's presence during the viewing of the work so, when Arpyarian and his friends view the work, they were at the artists atelier. So, there must have been privy to the artist's own thoughts on the image. The reviewers words clearly suggests an allegorical reading, which he notes, turned him towards melancholy. Another reviewer records a similar response to an earlier painting by Srabian entitled "Armenian beggar from Van". And this is the image. Now, this is a much admired work -- and this is confirmed by its election for exhibition at the prestigious 1882 exhibition of the artists of the Bosporus and Constantinople, the ABC club, under the patronage of the British ambassador Lord Dufferin, and the favorable reviews of contemporary viewers. Fortunately for us, "Armenian beggar from Van" is also one of the very few works by leading 19th century Constantinople artist, that is held by a public institution, the National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan, where it is currently listed as poor Armenian villager, "ahcat haithuratzi" and, hence, readily accessible to art historians. Consider the following review of the work by the prominent Constantinople educator, author and later politician Minas Ceras, in an article published on the 28th of May, 1882 in the influential Constantinople Armenian language newspaper "Masses". Under the headline, painting exhibition "Negara huntys". Writing under the pseudonym "Ascazerj", which means "lover of nation", he noted -- and this is -- this is basically the paragraph where the translation's from. "The painting represents an Armenian beggar from Van. With his colorful rugs and dark blue headdress, who leaning towards his stick looks at the viewer with pitiful eyes". "The expression of this painting is extremely tender and heart-rending, "hus desaruch". The sensitive brush of the author has succeeded in personifying the emigration bantkhdouitioun, and plundering, [inaudible]. He actually uses these words in print, which is quite extraordinary of our provincial brethren. "I sought foreigners who was saddened before the site". He uses the word "yerevuit", which translates to "site". "And perhaps wasn't it natural that I should weep? I, who is not a connoisseur of the Arts" -- he uses the word arvestahket", "but simply any" -- and signs off "Ascazerj". Ceras' reaction betrays even more explicitly the attribution of an allegorical interpretation of -- to the image. "Rather than being a benign depiction of a beggar, the image appears to have conveyed certain troubling messages to contemporary viewers". The concern trouble born artist and art historian Raphael Shmanian, 1885 and 1959, notes that in the 1870s desperate battles from Ottoman Armenia dressed in rags and in wretched conditions, nable to find work in the city, would wander the streets of Armenian populated districts begging, often attacked abused or chased away by stone throwers. Shmanian, just as Ceras in the opening accept, drew -- in the above accepts, drew a direct link between the phenomena of begging in at Constantinople and bantkhdoutioun. Yet Srabian's reference to Van clearly signifies the 1881 famine, looming large on the artist's and reviewer's consciousness. To Ceras, the painting represented the personification of plunder and destitution, which he incredibly, explicitly noted in print. But also crucially in 1882, famine, a subtle allegory and the inability of Ottoman Armenia to feed itself, meanwhile the censors of the committee for inspection and controls, the authority responsible for the approval of all publications that also included the scrutiny of pictures, would have viewed Srabian's beggar as a critique, would not have viewed Srabian's beggar as a critique of the Ottoman state, but instead regarded the painting as a harmless, ethnographic representation, thus permitting its uncensored exhibition. What is certain is that Srabian's beggar had successfully bypassed any sensorial constraints and under a cloak of seemingly benign ethnographic naturalism, had conjured within the brush what the pen might not have been allowed to express. Just like the figure of the machete hamal, the beggar from Van appears as a recurring theme among Constantinople artists, allowing them to engage through such personification with and comment upon the words of Ottoman Armenia. Let's consider two surviving versions of Hagopian's beggar, also by -- again, Simone Hagopian's beggar, a woman from Van. The two versions of this 18 -- the first one, this one was actually painted in 1889, the second one's actually dated in 1908, and it's another version of this, which basically means that the artist kept on producing and reproducing the same image. As in Srabian's beggar, nothing detracts from the degeneration and poverty of the old woman. Hagopian's background especially recalls the practice of late 19th century photographic studios, of subjects being photographed outdoors with a blank canvas of the wall with its cracks serving to reinforce an aura of hopelessness, heightening the realism of the scene. Her bare feet and outstretched hand, her fingernails inked with black dirt evoke the imploring fatalism of the posture and pathetic gaze of Srabian's male beggar. The beggar woman's gender and old age add further layers, her destitution, loneliness, defenselessness and cruel abandonment in a patriarchal society. Hagopian has utilized the gritty naturalism and powerful realist visual vocabulary to elicit the empathetic response of the viewer, towards the poor and dispossessed rural population of Ottoman Armenia two years, after another famine in 1887, and the bundles on the streets of the imperial capital. Yet through this representation of a provincial woman, Hagopian may have also been seeking to draw attention to one of the most devastating consequences of bantkhdouitioun. The wholesale desertion of thousands of wives, or their abandonment altogether, a major preoccupation of the Constantinople patriarch age and depress in the late 19th century. Many bantoukhds married young, often at 12 or 14, leaving their child brides behind to seek work in Constantinople. Many of these men never returned, abandoning their wives to a life of mistreatment defined by rigid tradition. Following years of brutality, slavery and abuse by their absent husbands' families and blamed for the non-return of the bantoukhd sons, these women were often put out on the street with no options and no hope. Newspapers are replete with reports of women who have been rejected by their families, had been left homeless, forced to beg in their villages or nearest and onerous towns, and some indeed turn to prostitution. And others -- because the Armenian Church would not allow divorce, even though the husband would have been gone for 20 or 30 years, they would convert to Catholicism or Protestantism to say they were actually able to remarry. Whether these works -- whether Hagopian's painting of the beggar woman from Van was ever exhibited, was displayed in public or reviewed, I have not been able to establish, I have not find any, any references to it, with the exception that the beggar woman from Van, alongside the Hamals on the bridge -- the first image that we actually had look at, were listed in a short, biographical note on Simon Hagopian's biographical note of suit of by -- Simon Hagopian published in Theotic's 1912 Almanac. that attests that these were among the artist's finest and most renowned works. And this is also sort of shown by the fact that the artist kept on reproducing the same work. People would probably go to him and ask for him to actually repaint the paintings so, he produced several examples. Now, there's one final work that I'd like to sort of show you, and it's a painting by another celebrated Ottoman Armenian. He's unfortunately completely forgotten, but he was a major figure in Constantinople in the 1880s and 1990s. He was a society portrait painter. He was the Constantinople born and Naples educated artist Garabed Nichanian, 1861-1950. Now, this painting of which there are two versions, and this is probably the original version that was painted in 1897 in Tiflis, and is, again, luckily for us at the National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan. The second one is a smaller copy of it and it's in a private collection in Istanbul. It's completely different from the other -- of from the other images because it actually depicts these people in Ottoman Armenia. So, this is a second work by Garabed Nichanian, who despite never having been to Ottoman army aid, I don't think he actually ever left Constantinople to go anywhere east, outside Constantinople. He also produced this this famous painting, which is now unfortunately lost. It's in somewhere in the United States and I've been looking for it for the past three years so, if anyone knows where it is, it's in a private collection. I had to show it just to ask you if anyone knows where it is, to let me know. But luckily a photograph exists of this. And he has created this sort of quite theatrical painting of an Armenian wedding of Mush, and again, he used bantoukhd from the streets of Constantinople who basically confirmed his idea of types of Ottoman Armenians from Mush, who he basically took to his Atelier and he actually sketched them, and he produced this massive painting. It's about two meters wide and one half meters tall. So, by Ottoman standards, it's a pretty massive work. But talking about this work, I know that I'm out of time and this was exhibited in in Tiflis of the 1897, Fifth Caucasian Art Exhibit and it got really, really extraordinary reviews. And again, I won't go into it but if anyone has any questions, you can come and ask me afterwards. But I'd like to sort of point out that it is a letter that is at the center of over the painting. And the question is, is this one of those black letters that Herrant wrote so much about? Sort of, you know, taking bad news from the Bantle son, or perhaps the army in hospital in Constantinople or the patriarch aid informing them that their son has actually died. And the final point I will actually make is that this painting was actually made in -- was actually executed in 1897. Nichanian, alongside Srabian and several other artists, and lots of other Armenian intellectuals actually left, they were exiled from Constantinople. They escaped the 1894-1897 massacres, and some went to Europe, some went to Russian Transcaucasia. And Nichanian ended up in Russian Transcaucasia. So, the point I'm actually making is that despite having left Ottoman Armenia, this artist was still engaging with a phenomenon of bantkhdouioun and how important it was for Armenian realists. Thank you so much. I'm sorry I'd run over my time but -- [ Applause ] >> The beauty of having a conference like this is you hear so many new topics. The downside -- the downside is you don't have the time to really delve into -- in any depth, and all of them so far have been magnificent. And which leads us to the last talk of the morning session, and by friend and researcher at the Library of Congress while working on his doctorate, and noted lecturer Hashit Muradian, who is now at Columbia university, and he will be speaking on "Unarmed and dangerous, nonviolent resistance from the Ottoman empire to the Third Reich". [ Applause ] >> Thank you, LaVon for this phenomenal conference. I feel like after talking about arts and wealth, talking about poverty and art, you know, it's an Armenian conference so, there has to be the great equalizer, death and destruction [laughter]. So, I'm here to deliver that talk. But I will do, however, is along the lines of LaVon's introduction where he talked about how, you know -- when we think about Armenian history, it's not just about Armenians converting to Christianity, the destruction of the Armenian Genocide -- some of these, like, topics that we often really -- occupies our historiography and public discourse. But also even within these histories, there are important aspects that are neglected. Again, often for reasons that have to do with often political circumstances, other times because they are -- because of the unavailability of archives, etcetera. And the topic that I'm going to be dealing with here, in a comparative perspective, is going to be the notion of unarmed resistance. This essentially constitutes the focal point of my work, because when we think about mass violence in general, what are we talking about? The Army and genocide, the Holocaust or other cases of mass violence, the narrative is typically one of asymmetry. Genocide itself is a manifestation of the extreme asymmetry where you have a powerful group attacking another group with the intent to annihilate it. This asymmetry gives the impression that the narrative have to flow from one direction to the other, and there's very little that can hold against it. This is important so, this is like watching an avalanche from a distance, right? What we see is the Avalanche taking everything in its way. This merciless, unstoppable, you know, attack on everything in its way. But ultimately, if we look closer, every little component, every little pebble, every tree in its way is pushing back. And this is the point that I would like to make in this talk. And I'm going to be focusing on this idea of pushing back. And pushing back itself, resisting, it's not conditional on the presence of weapons. We can't -- it's difficult to argue that you need this machine, this metallic machine that propels gunpowder and little bits of metal, you need that to be present for human beings to resist. Yet, if we look at the historiography, up until very recently -- and in general both in Armenian history and beyond, the focus, the emphasis is very much on if any -- if there is any, is on armed resistance. So, here's a quote from an Armenian woman who lived in Aleppo during World War I, talking about her husband and what he did as Armenian deportees in the thousands were arriving in what is today Syria, what was back then Ottoman Syria, beginning in May 1915 as a deportation and massacres of Armenians are going on. So, she writes -- this is after the death of her husband from disease that he contracted from deportees. She writes in the letter, "my dear Badveli -- Reverend, barely out of bed from his sickness, disregarding the personal hardships and peril to his own life, relentlessly labored day and night to save other lives. Together we pressed ourselves to the very limit of our endurance. All our time, energy, efforts, sleep, food, clothing and other material possessions we put on the line on behalf of this wretched, miserable mass of torn and battered humanity". Now, this is humanitarian work, and humanitarian work typically does not necessarily come as resistance. We -- I will allude to this a little bit later, but it's important to note here that the work that these humanitarians were doing in Aleppo, as the thousands of deportees were arriving in a city and the region, actually constituted resistance, what I refer to as "humanitarian resistance". Because it was being done eventually against the will of the authorities and by essentially breaking the law. So, this is not humanitarianism -- an act of human tourism that's being done under circumstances where you have the support of the authorities or at least the neutrality of the authorities, but actually activism, humanitarianism that is done against their will, by risking one's life, by risking one's imprisonment, etcetera. So, it's important to highlight this, this idea that any action that occurs as being won at engaging in, in order to save a certain group or individual, and in order to fight back against a certain group does constitute a resistance, whether or not there's a weapon involved. Now, as I said, this is this is common in historiography. This is a quote from a scholar who has written extensively on resilience and resistance. "By the 1950s and beyond, historians who had examined of European Jewry concentrated on the perpetrators rather than the victims". Also very true in the Armenian case. "This inattention should not come as a surprise, given that the enormity of the German crimes overshadowed their victims. Perhaps, too, it should not come as a surprise that early historians of the period were primarily interested in learning about the forces that caused such unprecedented destruction". These are two examples, one is that of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which is, you know, when we talk about Jewish resistance. You know, that is one typical example that comes to mind, and the other is the example of the Armenians fighting back on Musa Dagh, which has been immortalized by Franz Werfel in the novel "The 40 days of Musa Dagh". Now, it's important to note that in most cases of mass violence, the majority of the targeted population does not have access to weapons, has no training in weapons or has no interest in using them. But this does not, again, create a situation where one is unable to resist. "For decades, most scholars have in fact shared the stereotype of the resistance, presenting it almost exclusively as an armed action and almost entirely masculine". "Later, references began to appear to unarmed actions and those of women but only rarely did such mention go beyond an emotional homage", again, very typical of the historiography on mass violence in general. Now, this is one of the important problems here, is that once we focus -- as we think about resistance, once we focus on armed resistance, there are a lot of things that are being forgotten and neglected, importantly women and the fact that women also resisted in many of these circumstances. Most, however, did not with weapons, right? And I'll come back to this later on. Now, scholars have defined resistance in a number of ways. I will be showing you a few definitions from the Third Reich, World War II and the Holocaust just to give you an idea about the way these definitions are framed. One definition, "a set of the activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed". Notice how these more recent definitions are a lot broader, right? There's no specific reference to guns. "Any activity designed to thwart German plans, or perceived by the occupiers as working against their interest". "Any group action consciously taken in opposition to known or surmise laws, actions or intentions, directed against the Jews by the Germans and their supporters". Now, the definition I use, and I will be referring to as I discuss the Armenian case is the following, "actions carried out illegally, or against the authorities' will, to save Armenian deportees from annihilation". Again, there's no reference to weapons, it could be any kind of action. And I will be giving examples of a number of effective forms of resistance that do not employ weapons. Again, it does not make a big, you know, Hollywood movie, right? When you're not, you know, just shooting and blowing up people, but it's, again, it's important to realize that what kind of like, you know, the small, the tiny sliver of people have access to weapons and the fact that we cannot dismiss everybody else, as people who just went to their death like sheep, right? Which is something that is commonly used both in -- by many in any reference to genocide and mass violence. Now, this is one example. I started my talk by referencing Reverend Ascijan, who was assisting Armenian deportees in Aleppo as they started arriving from all over the Ottoman Empire during the deportations of the massacres. This was -- he was just one example of out of many. The three Armenian churches in Aleppo -- the Armenian community in Aleppo was not deported at this point, and only part of it would eventually be deported later on. So, all three Armenian churches formed there, formed committees to provide assistance and relief to the Armenian deportees arriving in Aleppo. One of these committees was headed by father Haroutyun Yessayan. This was a committee of the Armenian prelisty of Aleppo, and it included a number of dignitaries of the Aleppo Armenian community. Now, what did this committee do? They mobilized tremendous resources and prepared detailed reports about the deportees who are arriving, in order to best assist them. Initially, there was no government opposition to what they were doing. The Ottoman authorities -- and I argue this in my work, we're dealing with other things, and the local governor of Aleppo who was very friendly to Armenians and he was actually supporting these efforts. Now, this committee met every single day almost and we have the minutes of these meetings, which is essentially like having a camera in the city of Aleppo as these deportees are arriving the degree of detail that you see here, these are samples of a few of the minutes of the meetings, is tremendous. Now, what they did they also prepared lists of every single item that was purchased in order to assist these deportees who are arriving in Syria. We're talking about wood, we're talking about food supplies, bribes that were given to Jandarmes and others. Every single, you know, Turkish lira, every single dime that was spent is documented for throughout the war in a couple of ledgers of, as I said, tremendous detail. Not only that, but every single receipt has been kept so, you can imagine this offers us a universe of information and knowledge that really allows us to look at this from the perspective of the victims, mind you in -- as the genocide is unfolding. Now, it's important to note that these efforts were initially supported by the local authorities. Eventually this would not be the case. So, these actions, these humanitarian actions would soon morph -- change into humanitarian resistance, as the central and local authorities start cracking down on this humanitarian effort, start arresting some of its members and its leaders and trying to stop these efforts to assist Armenian deportees. And notice, this is when I argue this becomes resistance, because at this point you are doing it against the will of the authorities. Now, it's important to note that since this is an effort that is unarmed resistance, we see more and more women involved, in important ways. This is one example Nora Altoumyan was -- helped administer an orphanage in Aleppo and she played a key role in in providing assistance and help to many old friends whose parents were killed during the deportation massacres. And now so, this is -- she's in the picture here, just see it center -- But there are many other examples. Another important fact that I noticed in many of these documents accounts, is that the farther away you went, one went from the organized community, the greater the role of women became. In many ways, as the Armenian community itself was very patriarchal in structure, these committees were headed by priests, and I mean women could not -- I mean, just as a basic statement here, right? So, as you can imagine, you know, again, still although Armenian were very active in Aleppo and helping deportees. But the farther away one went in Syria into places where the communities did not have that kind of influence, or into places that the community did not have that kind of access -- and I will give an example of this, the more you saw women playing a more important and prominent role in this effort to resist, in this effort to engage in actions against the world of the authorities. Now, humanitarian resistance provided humanitarian assistance to deportees was not the only way in which Armenians resisted. Another, a few other important forms are have to do with information, with communicating and communication. Communicating information about what is going on, both among the Armenian deportees themselves, and from the Armenian world into the world at large, in order to inform newspapers, diplomats, consuls and beyond the Ottoman Empire, politicians and world leaders about the plight of the Armenian population. And again, all of this was done against the will of the authorities and secretly as one can imagine, and often those who were caught, arrested were imprisoned or killed. Now, I will give two examples of this. One is this image that you have on the right, it is a photograph of a handwritten newspaper in one of the concentration camps where Armenians were interned during the Armenian side. It is from Messghana where, you know, you have, at certain points, thousands of the deportees crammed in this area, where daily dozens -- sometimes a few hundred people are dying of starvation, disease and deprivation. And alongside food and supplies and medicine, a very important need for a lot of these people is information. They want to know what is going on. They cannot really -- they don't have the option of going out of these camps, these camps are very well protected by -- again, are guarded by Jandarmes and guards in the inside, on the inside. Their only way of acquiring information is new convoys that are arriving into the camp a few times a week, sometimes daily, new convoys of deportees. And there are these individuals who would go and ask these people what they saw, who has survived, what has happened in the different parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they have been and write them down. And these little pieces of paper -- and this is one surviving sample of it, and then pass that around among the camp's population. Now, the other example that I would like to highlight has to do with providing the West, particularly Europeans and Americans with information about what is going on in the Ottoman empire as the destruction of the Armenian population is in progress. In the city of Istanbul itself, there were most of the intellectuals as we know were arrested, beginning in April, 1915. Some of those who were not and managed to escape and went into hiding actually formed a committee that was tasked with gathering the information from the provinces of what is going on, and smuggling this information, oftentimes on the sides of printed newspapers with invisible ink, etcetera, into Europe for publication in the newspapers there and also for the diplomats and politicians to have access to. This was a tremendous effort, and a lot of these letters and texts have been recorded and have been published, and it really indicates the phenomenal work that was being done in terms of information and communicating what is going on, as a form of resisting oppression and destruction. Now, an additional example of resistance, unarmed resistance, was the effort to save as many Armenian writers and intellectuals as possible, particularly by two brothers, the Mazloumian brothers who owned the famous Hotel Baron in the city of Aleppo. Hotel Baron is one of the landmarks, historic landmarks of Aleppo it's a number of prominent figures, prominent historical events have taken place, prominent figures have stayed there, and as I said, a significant landmark. And the two brothers who owned the hotel actually use their connections and access in order to help, save and assist Armenian intellectuals with the realization that since this was an onslaught on Armenian identity and culture. One of the important ways to fight back and keep the culture thriving is through assisting the who are upholding it. Now, there are many ways, as I approach some general concluding remarks, there are many ways in which we can think about individual agency. It's important to note that not every individual who is subjected to this onslaught, this, you know, I used the image of an avalanche earlier, will resist by taking up arms, or will resist at all. But most people will exercise agency, most people if not all people will do something to survive. And it's important to highlight this. Whether it's through humanitarian resistance, whether it's through medical resistance, whether it's through trying to figure out ways to survive one additional day, individuals will exercise agency. And when we tell the story of mass violence, when we tell the story of genocide it is important to think about it in the same manner. If we ask the average individual, average person to describe what happened during the Holocaust in a few sentences, the description will probably go something like, "this many Jews were killed by the Nazis" and make some references to certain locations, concentration camps, death by bullets and other important salient aspects that we know about the Holocaust. Very little will that description have and hold about the resistance of the victims. And in fact, almost -- there will be almost no reference to any unarmed resistance by the victims. Now, the very intention of genocide perpetrators is to erase the agency of the victims. It's the ultimate for of you raising the agency of the victims. And inadvertently, whether we are historians or anybody discussing whether we're dealing in public discourse as newspaper, as journalists, and as writers and as editors, when we describe crimes and mass violence in this manner, when we are inadvertently emphasizing the very thing that the perpetrator wanted to accomplish, which is erasing the agency and the voice of the victims. It's important to realize this asymmetry. It's important, yes, to understand that the Nazis held tremendous power, and no matter what kind of resistance one engaged in, it was very unlikely for it to change things on a tremendous, massive level as far as the targeted population was concerned. Still, though, it's important to think about these acts of resilience -- resistance and resilience. Not just in terms of success rates, not just in terms of how many people were killed, how many Nazis were killed, how many Jandarmes were killed, but also to think about them in terms of upholding the dignity of the people who are caught in this avalanche, and in terms of really telling their story as part of the narrative. And this I think is an important -- this goes to the core of how we think about mass violence, violence and even violence in our societies, emphasizing and focusing on the perpetrator and not really emphasizing what the victim did often is well intentioned. It tries -- our attempt is to show the victims as abject -- helpless, absolutely helpless, and therefore as if to make the crime look worse and more horrendous and more horrible. But as I said, we are -- what we are engaging in is inadvertently silencing the victims further. This is very true in the Armenian case, as well as in a number of cases. Again, the narrative of absolutely helpless victims, almost no agency and a state that is using all the resources at its disposal to annihilate them is one that compelling, but it's not true. It's not true, it's ahistoric and it defeats the purpose. The other aspect that's important to notice that, again, often because of in order to make certain narratives more appealing to a broader audience, the emphasis on the humanitarianism and the work and the resistance of groups and individuals who are not members of the victim group. For example, in the Armenian case we talk about the role that the missionaries played in helping and assisting the deportees. We talk about the role that American diplomats played in the years of deportations and in the years that followed, the huge amount of money that were raised in this country to assist the deportees, and the survivors of the genocide. Now, ultimately, though, as these massacres were taking place, no American diplomat, no missionary was able to access these deportees. So, yes, tremendous amounts of funds were raised, but the individuals were risking their lives on the ground were more often than not Armenians themselves. More often than not without weapons. Again, it is important as we highlight the important elements of mass violence and the importance of humanitarianism, global humanitarianism -- and again, a lot of this has plenty of implications on our day today. It's important to realize that we are at best when we are supporting and look -- any group, any community in any part of the world. At the best, no matter how much assistance we're providing. What we are doing is to complement and support the important and significant role that the locals are playing on the ground against all odds. So, I want to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Can one define the resistance simply by one's access to training in and willingness to use guns? Is resistance ineffective, even impossible without a machine that employs gunpowder to propel pieces of metal? The study of resistance during the Armenian Genocide leaves much to be desired. The struggle against genocide denial has produced and perpetuated perpetrator-centric narratives, it was genocide, here's why, and the related drive for genocide recognition around the globe has produced Western humanitarian centric narratives. Your ancestors witnessed it, saved Armenians, now you should recognize it. Thus, the action is genocide, the reaction is Western outrage and humanitarianism, while the victims exercised no agency. Treating genocide largely as an action of the perpetrator while dismissing the reaction of the victim is not only ahistorical, but inadvertently reinforces the very attempt of the perpetrator to strip the victims of their voice and agency. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Thank You Patrick. It's been an enlightening morning session -- >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.

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Published: Thu Sep 20 2018