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Thawing the Frozen Images of Ottoman Anatolia: Armenian Pilgrimages of "Return"
Abstract
This paper explores “frozen images” of the Ottoman Empire that are part of the geographical imagination of descendants of Anatolian Armenians who survived the Ottoman pogroms surrounding 1915. I study a cohort of over 250 of these descendants now living in North America, Europe, and the Middle East who, as self-described “pilgrims,” have “returned” over the past 20 years to modern Turkey in search of their ancestral towns and villages, often even finding their actual family houses. The frozen images that these pilgrims carry with them are both textual and visual. Those that refer to what they often call “the ‘before’ time” (pre 1915) are comprised of family narratives, photos, maps and drawings of village life. Those from “the ‘when things began to change’ time” are comprised of family witness narratives of massacres. Thus, for these Armenian pilgrims, their “home” Ottoman town or village was a space that was imaged and imagined as frozen at a particular time. Although this time became iconic as a sort of “birth moment” for their current Armenian identity, it also can be said that, because of the images they carry, they travel as Ottoman citizens (or their representatives) to an Anatolia frozen in the past. But I suggest that the pilgrims’ journey itself can serve to thaw the frozen image that they have carried “home.” Tellingly, I suggest that, while there, their time-focus is changed into a more spatial-focus. This spatial turn both enlarges the meaning of the original space and changes memory. This change is not merely due to the contrast between pilgrim expectations and the actual perceptions of reality in their [formerly] constructed space. Rather, I show exactly how what was once the pilgrim’s single story --with images placed in a specific time in the past-- becomes an interlaced conversation composed of many overlapping spatial images from no single time yet from many places. Thus, I will suggest how the frozen image of Anatolia, and the pilgrim’s relationship to it, is re-imaged, as evidenced textually in the pilgrims’ memoirs and articles, and visually in their photographic representations of place. It appears, then, that new Armenian images of Ottoman Anatolia are being constructed. However, they have not yet become iconic; perhaps because their meanings are still too ignited by the needs of the present to be frozen.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Armenian