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Out of Sight, Out of Mind: In Search of the Missing Armenians of Turkish/Ottoman Art Historiography with a Decolonizing Eye
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2022
Extract
One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.1 The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”2
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References
1 Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian, “Preserving the Medieval City of Ani: Cultural Heritage between Contest and Reconciliation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 4 (2014): 528–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Seal, Jeremy, A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat (London: Picador, 1995) 223–24Google Scholar.
3 My polite intervention contributed to an atmosphere of unpleasantness for the rest of the tour.
4 Exhibition at ANAMED (Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations), Koç University, June 2018; Hrag (@Hragv), Twitter, 20 October 2019, https://twitter.com/hragv/status/1185927651850182657.
5 Demirören News Agency, “‘Almond Blossom Festival’ Takes Place in Turkey's Van for the First Time,” Daily Sabah, 29 April 2022, https://www.dailysabah.com/life/travel/almond-blossom-festival-takes-place-in-turkeys-van-for-first-time.
6 Wendy M. K. Shaw, Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 188n17.
7 Uğur Ümit Üngor, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 240–45.
8 Edhem Eldem, “Greece and the Greeks in Ottoman History and Turkish Historiography,” Historical Review 6 (2009): 39.
9 Dale Berning Sawa, “Monumental Loss: Azerbaijan and ‘The Worst Cultural Genocide of the 21st Century,’” Guardian, 1 March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/01/monumental-loss-azerbaijan-cultural-genocide-khachkars.
10 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ed., “Towards Inclusive Art Histories: Ottoman Armenian Voices Speak Back,” Études arméniennes contemporaine, spec. issue, 6 (2015), https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.854. See especially the contribution by Gizem Tongo, “Artist and Revolutionary: Panos Terlemezian as an Ottoman Armenian Painter,” 111–53.
11 There is much recent scholarly debate on the matter. I take the position that during the late 19th century, and more so in the early 20th century and the early republican period, the term “colonialist” was certainly attributable to attitudes and policies of the ruling elites of both empire and republic.
12 Shelly Errington, “Globalizing Art History,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 417.
13 Gizem Tongo, “Eleni Iliadis (1895–1975): An Ottoman Greek Woman Painter in End-of-Empire Istanbul,” CLIO. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 48, no. 2 (2018), 72.
14 Banu Karaca, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 4, 6–7.
15 Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 21.
16 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, “Reframing Ottoman Art Histories: Bringing Silenced Voices Back into the Picture,” in Études arméniennes contemporaines spec. issue, 6 (2015), https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.854.
17 Turan Erol, “Painting in Turkey in XIX and Early XXth Century,” in A History of Turkish Painting, Günsel Renda et al. (Geneva: Palasar, 1987), 90–236.
18 Aytaç Işıklı, ed., Türkiye Fuar Albümü: Osmanlı Donemi; The Album of Turkish Fairs: Ottoman Era (Istanbul: İhlas Gazetecilik A.Ş., 2012), 165. This is the subject of the paper “The Ottoman Empire and the 1900 Paris Exposition: Orientalism, Representation and Identity,” copresented by Gizem Tongo and me at a conference at the University of Antwerp in September 2022.
19 Serpil Bağcı et al., Ottoman Painting (Istanbul: Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2010), 24n7. A footnote notes that the close associations between text and image suggest that, despite its affinities with Armenian manuscript illumination and decoration, the necessary mastery of the Turkish language of the artist(s) must mean they were “mostly [sic] likely Ottoman Turks,” making the ludicrous and incorrect assumption of Armenian unfamiliarity with the Turkish language.
20 See, for example, Kaya Özsegin, ed., The Collection of Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Mimar Sinan University (Istanbul, Yapı Credi Yayınları, 1996); Milli Saraylar Tablo Koleksiyonu (Istanbul: TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire Başkanlığı, 2010).
21 Erol Makzume and Cesare Mario Trevigne, eds., Twenty Years under the Reign of Abdülhamid: The Memoirs and Works of Fausto Zonaro (Istanbul: G. Yayın Grubu, 2011), 117, 128n91.
22 Adolphe Thalasso, Osmanlı Sanatı Türkiye'nin Resamları; Ottoman Art: The Painters of Turkey (Istanbul: Mas Matbaacılık, 2008), 85.
23 Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, eds., “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (2020): 11–12, doi: 10.1111/1467-8365.12490; Lerna Ekmekcioglu “Of Dark Pasts and Pipe Dreams: The Turkish University,” YILLLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 3 (2021): 185.
24 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 328.
25 Ekmekcioglu, “Dark Pasts,” 187.
26 Garo Kürkman, Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Matusalem, 2004).
27 Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
28 Sato Moughalian, Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
29 David Low, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzerum, Harput, Van and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
30 Osman Köker, ed., Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago: With the Postcards from the Collection of Orlando Carlo Calumeno (Istanbul: Birzamanlar Yayıncılık, 2005), https://www.houshamadyan.org.
31 Yaşar Tolga Cora, “The Market as a Means of Post-Violence Recovery: Armenians and Oriental Carpets in the Late Ottoman Empire (c. 1890s–1910s),” International Review of Social History 66, no. 2 (2021): 217–41.
32 Kurt, Ümit, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 127, 135–39Google Scholar.
33 The renovation of the Church of the Holy Cross is instrumentalized as a fig leaf by the Turkish State to disguise its catastrophic neglect of Armenian heritage throughout Turkey today. It should not detract from the fact that, even within a fifty-mile radius of Aghtamar itself, hundreds of Armenian sites are rapidly disappearing, prey to the elements and so-called treasure hunters.
34 I thank Heghnar Watenpaugh for the information; see “Ani Mobile Application,” Andalu Kültür, 1919–2020, https://www.anadolukultur.org/EN/34-our-works/178-ani-mobile-application.