Scholars are building a record of memories from the Armenian diaspora that chronicle an often untold perspective on life under the Ottoman Empire.
When the tightly knotted white and blue handkerchief was untied, it revealed a small handful of dirt from a distant time.
A Christian ethnic minority, Armenians lived throughout the Ottoman Empire among Muslim Turks and Kurds but were primarily concentrated in what is now eastern Turkey and western Armenia. Though many historical records and items document the empire around the turn of the century, little of it is told in the language, or from the perspective, of the Armenians. For Vahé Tachjian and Elke Hartmann, a married team of Ottoman scholars based in Berlin, this is problematic.
The most recent workshop was in Athens, where a small minority of Armenians has lived since thousands arrived as refugees in the early 1920s. A mile south of the Acropolis, in the back room of a primary school that doubles as an Armenian cultural center, about a dozen descendants trickled in on a Saturday afternoon. Mostly in their 50s and 60s, they came carrying shopping bags of photos and carefully wrapped books, textiles and pieces of jewelry.
He wrote how later he was unexpectedly reunited with his mother and they became refugees in Greece, moving from temporary settlement to temporary settlement with other Armenians who’d fled. Sapritchian compares it to the way the Greek government is dealing with its more recent influx of refugees from places including Syria and Afghanistan.
By the end of the day, hundreds of items had been shared and photographed, and Tachjian had nearly filled his notepad with stories and family histories.
But at the same time, the connections to this pre-genocide history are fading as family members age. “Many things have already disappeared,” Tachjian said.
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