Abstract
The last decade has been witness to an oral history boom pertaining to the deportations and massacres of Ottoman Armenians in 1915. These studies mostly aim to unravel the unknown aspects of the lives of Armenians in the modern Turkish Republic or/and to challenge the `Grand Narratives` of official nationalist historiographies. Despite their function to repudiate the universal, objective claims of the `History`, the multiple trajectories in the evolution of the heterogeneous collective memories regarding the 1915 events in different social settings still remains as an unexplained phenomena.
Arapgir, a small town in the province of Malatya, exemplifies the microcosm of eastern Anatolian towns which used to be a homeland for both Armenian and Muslim communities under the Ottoman control. Today, the descendants of the inhabitants of Arapgir have dispersed in three major locations: a) Armenian and Turkish descendants who reside in Istanbul, b) Armenian descendants of the deportees of 1915 who established a new district in Yerevan, Armenia, called `Arapgir` (???????), c) The Muslim populations who still reside in Arapgir, Malatya, Turkey. The dispersion of the Arapgir community across different locations leads to engender different regimes of collective memories. This paper examines how and in what ways the inter-communal relations in general and the `1915 events` in particular are remembered. To do so, I will compare oral history accounts of the sampled from the descendants of Arapgir community of 1915 in Yerevan, Istanbul and Arapgir/Malatya. To explain the collective memory`s relation to space and time in a comparative perspective, I seek to address how collective memories transmitted within the same social group from one generation to another and how the memory of groups conveyed, sustained and transformed across different contexts.
Considering the nature of the research question, this paper does not aim to utilize the oral history accounts to explain a question of `what really happened` in a particular historical moment. Rather the oral history accounts will be instrumentalized to explain the dynamic triangular interaction between the personal memories, memory agents and the public presentations of the past. Accordingly, this paper will fill a missing gap in the memory studies pertaining to 1915 events and argue that what renders the particular form of collective memories believable, persuasive or compelling to particular communities are the outcomes of the identity configurations and the memory artifacts that are available in these communities.
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