R.G. Hovannisian - ARMENIAN KESARIA FEATURED AT UCLA CONFERENCE
|
--------FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE------
ARMENIAN KESARIA FEATURED AT UCLA CONFERENCE
Los Angeles—The Armenian communities of the region of Kesaria (Gesaria/Caesarea) were featured in the twelfth in the UCLA series on Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces. The conference, held on the UCLA campus on May 17, drew a large and enthusiastic audience, including many descendents of the towns and villages of Kesaria. Conference presenters came from Argentina, Armenia, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The conference was organized by Professor Richard G. Hovannisian, Holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA.
The region of Kesaria, historic Cappadocia, lies beyond the bounds of Greater Armenia, yet its history is closely associated with that of Armenia and it has had significant Armenian communities since antiquity. Kesaria also played a central role in the evangelization and conversion of Armenia to Christianity in the early fourth century. The story of Saint Gregory the Illuminator and his consecration in Caesarea/Kesaria is well known.
A thriving Armenian community existed in Kesaria during the centuries of Islamic rule, and even though the inhabitants in the city and some villages eventually became primarily Turkish speakers, many of the approximately thirty Armenian villages, such as Chomakhlu, Everek, Fenese, Evkere, and Tomarza, maintained their Armenian dialects to the time of the 1915 Genocide and continuing into a diasporan existence.
The overview of the history of the Armenian communities of Cappadocia/Kesaria was given by conference organizer Richard Hovannisian, who outlined the Armenian connection with the area since (according to Movses Khorenatsi) the time of Aram, a grandson of Hayk, the epic progenitor of the Armenian people. The Armenian linkage continued down to the time of Tigran the Great in the first century B.C. and then the periods of Roman/Byzantine and Turkic dominance until the important cultural revival of the nineteenth century. Armenian Kesaria then went through a process of elimination beginning with Sultan Abdul Hamid and completed by the Young Turk regime of the Ottoman Empire and the Kemalist regime of Republican Turkey. Today, the Church of Surb Grigor Lusavorich, the only structure in the region remaining under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Patriarchate, stands as a lonely reminder of the centuries-old Armenian community of Kesaria.
Professor James Russell of Harvard University (whose paper was read by Professor Peter Cowe of UCLA) focused on the pre-Christian period and the analogous forms of religion practiced in Armenia and Cappadocia. Yet the Cappadocian people and language did not endure, whereas the Armenians developed an independent theological, philosophical, and intellectual life that contributed to the formation of a distinct national and cultural identity that made them resistant to assimilation and absorption in larger, imperial-based cultures.
Professor Robert Thomson of Oxford University assessed the sources relating to the traditions about the consecration of Saint Gregory and the role Caesarea as a meeting point between Armenian and Roman/Byzantine ecclesiastical and secular leaders and intellectual currents. The presentation concentrated on traditions of Gregory in Caesarea which are preserved in non-Armenian sources and demonstrated the importance of Greek thought and practice in the formation of an independent Armenian church.
Dr. Erna Shirinian of the Matenadaran in Yerevan presented recent information about the large number of Armenian martyrs in Caesarea, Sebastia, and other parts of Asia Minor during the third and fourth centuries, demonstrating the significant role of Armenians in the development and spread of Christianity prior to the official conversion of either Armenia or Byzantium. She pointed out that these findings will help to open new perspectives on the history of Armenian asceticism and martyrdom, especially as knowledge about early Christianity and its institutions has been limited by the small amount of surviving classical literature on the subject.
Professor Dickran Kouymjian of CSU, Fresno (whose paper was read by Art History graduate student Jean Murachanian), dealt with a remarkable group of illustrated manuscripts, almost all Gospels, from the eastern fringes of Cappadocia. They have a style distinct from the art of Greater Armenia in the eleventh century and from the later style developed in the Cilician period. The manuscripts have been associated with the area of Melitene/Malatia and Sebastia/Sivas and seem to be linked with very early Christian art. The challenge is to determine if the earlier Gospels that served as models were executed in cities like Caesarea, Melitene, and Sebastia or rather in regions more closely associated with Armenian monastic and artistic traditions of the ninth and tenth centuries.
Dr. Sylvie Merian of the Pierpont Library in New York gave a captivating illustrated talk on silver liturgical objects made by a group of Armenian silversmiths in Kesaria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Several are inscribed and dated enamel and jeweled plagues that were placed on the covers of religious manuscripts. More than twenty-five of these, which show distinct stylistic features, have been identified to date. Three related families were the producers of most of the silverwork. The talk included what is known about the silversmiths, the stylistic characteristics of their creations, the silverwork technique, and the sources for some of the motifs.
Moving to the modern period, Columbia Ph.D. candidate Bedross Der Matossian discussed the major social, economic, and political transformations that took place in Kesaria/Kayseri during the nineteenth century. Although contemporary Turkish sources marginalize the presence and participation of Armenians in the history of Kayseri, the fact is that Armenians played a major role in the commercial and cultural life of the district. The speaker gave a broad picture of Armenian life in Kesaria, including churches and convents, educational institutions, commerce and economy, local and community administration, Armenian political movements, and the Hamidian repression of the 1890s.
Dr. Jonathan Varjabedian of Detroit and Los Angeles has devoted himself to gathering as much information as possible about Efkere, his ancestral village, which is located a short distance from the city of Kesaria/Kayseri. Armenian tradition links the foundation of the nearby Surb Karapet monastery to the time of Gregory the Illuminator, and an attested Armenian presence in the village can be traced to the early thirteenth century. The monastery, which attracted pilgrims from far and near, had a school that graduated hundreds of students over the years. Illustrations of the village and monastery enhanced the talk. Armenian Efkere suffered the same fate as most other Armenian villages in 1915. Several historic monuments remain in the village, and there is a large corpus of letters exchanged between villagers and their kinfolk in the Diaspora before 1915, which can provide a basis for further study of the Armenian village.
Dr. Herve Georgelin of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris gave an overview of the period from the 1890s to 1915 in the towns and villages of Kesaria. He discussed Armenian life in places such as Talas, Tomarza, Everek and Fenese (“twin rural villages, amusingly hostile toward one another”), Germir, and Chomakhlu. Rural life was harsh in the area around Mount Archaeos, requiring many young men to become seasonal workers (bandukhts) in Constantinople and then more permanently in America. Trade and the bandukhts connected these remote rural areas with the rest of the world. Moreover, despite the hard life, nearly all of the villages maintained at least one church and by the end of the nineteenth century operated schools for both boys and girls.
Ms. Tina Demirdjian of the Armenian Dress and Textile Project displayed clothing worn by Armenian women of Kesaria in the nineteenth century. Her illustrated talk on dress and textile included descriptions of coats and dresses, jewelry, and a selection of embroidery pieces from dowries, as well as a valuable silk rug from the famed Telfeyan factory. Through the use of women’s clothing and dowry pieces, a broader discussion of Armenian women’s history can evolve. The embroidery, textile, and dress, together with personalized narrative stories relating to the pieces, provide an important oral history resource that characterizes a part of the work of the Armenian Dress and Textile Project.
Professor Simon Payaslian of Clark University gave a moving account of Kesaria during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. As in other places, Armenians serving in the Ottoman army were disarmed, placed in work battalions, and subsequently killed. In April hundreds of prominent Armenians were arrested, and in May deportee caravans from other regions began to arrive in Kesaria. The plunder of Armenian shops and homes in Kesaria under the pretext of searches for arms started in May, and in June the deportations began and continued through the summer months. The survivors were scattered over a large area from Deir el-zor, Ras ul-Ain, and Aleppo to Homs, Hama, and the environs of Damascus. After the war, many hoped to return to their native towns and villages, but the rise of the Turkish Nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal crushed these dreams and condemned the survivors to a life of dispossession and exile.
Dr. Vartan Matiossian of the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, and the Hovnanian School in New Jersey, demonstrated the important role that natives of Kesaria played in the formation and administrative structures of the Armenian communities of South America. Among such leaders was Israel Arslan, from Munjusun, who helped organize the Armenian National Union (1918-20) and then the Armenian Community Center (1920-30) in Buenos Aires. He also was the first chairman of the administrative body of the Armenian Church and a long-time editor of Hay Guetron. Arslan was but one of several natives of Kesaria discussed who became pillars of the Armenian communities of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Professor Bert Vaux of Harvard University, a frequent participant in this conference series, gave audio-visual examples of the non-standard Armenian dialects of Kesaria and several of its villages: Everek, Fenese, Tomarza, Munjusun, Efkere, Nize, Balagesi, and Chomakhlu. The linguistic features of these dialects were compared with other subdialects of the so-called “ga-group,” as in “ga kirim” (I write). The presentation included riddles, sayings, folk tales, and audio excerpts from native speakers of the subdialects.
A rich photographic display of Armenian Kesaria, its town and villages and churches and monasteries, was mounted by Richard and Anne Elbrecht of Davis, California, whose contributions to each of the conferences in the series have been deeply appreciated by all attendees.
The participants and their guests were hosted to a post-conference reception and dinner in Rancho Palos Verdes by Mr. and Mrs. Serge and Sheila Papayans of the Armenian Educational Foundation.
This twelfth in the series on Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces in lands now in Turkey brings to a close this sequence of semi-annual conferences that began in 1997 with Van/Vaspurakan and followed by Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush; Tsopk/Kharpert; Karin/Erzerum; Sebastia/Sivas; Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa; Cilicia; Kars and Ani, and the Armenian communities of Constantinople, the Black Sea-Pontus region, and Smyrna/Izmir. The proceedings of each of the conferences are being edited and published. To date the first three volumes in the series have been published and the fourth, Armenian Karin/Erzerum, will be released during the summer.
The next conference organized by Professor Hovannisian and sponsored by the AEF Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA will be on November 14-16, 2003. It will feature the Iranian-Armenian community of New Julfa, which in 2004 will celebrate the 400th anniversary of its founding in 1604 as an autonomous and exclusively Armenian settlement across the river from Isfahan, the splendorous capital of the Shah Abbas.
--END --- END—
|
|