This paper introduces the narrative painting 'The Reading of the Letter' (1897) by the respected Constantinople artist Garabed Nichanian (1861-1950) as an important contemporary visual comment on the exchanges between bantoukhd (migrant worker) sons in the imperial capital and dependants in the homeland, desperate for news, that criss-crossed late nineteenth century Ottoman Anatolia in their thousands. The figure of the bantoukhd from Ottoman Armenia was a major preoccupation of Constantinople Armenian intellectual elites. The presence of thousands of provincial (mostly) men in the imperial capital, the most visible among whom worked as hamals (porters) on the streets of the imperial capital and lived in slum-like conditions in the city’s hans (inns), ensured that these migrants’ difficult living conditions in the city, as well as the prevailing social, economic and political situation in Ottoman Armenia, always remained at the forefront of these intellectuals concerns. A popular theme for many leading Constantinople Armenian painters, representations of the bantoukhd, most commonly naturalistic academic portraits utilising an ethnographic visual language, often acted as conduits that also conveyed, during periods of stringent censorship, allegorical messages upon the situation in the homeland. Nichanian’s The Reading of the Letter stands out from this body of work in that he directly addresses those left behind in the homeland. In the painting, the artist imagines rural Ottoman Armenia, without ever having set foot there, yet his brush renders a realist scene depicting the reception of a letter from, or with news of, an absent bantoukhd son, in which an illiterate elderly couple in provincial dress are listening to a young man, perhaps the village teacher, also in native garb, reading a letter to them. The letter, the central focus of the painting, would most likely have been penned by a literate fellow villager in the city or a friend, or even the son himself who may have attended one of the numerous Sunday schools, set up by charitable individuals in Constantinople to help spread literacy among the bantoukhd population. The expressions on the faces of the parents suggests that Nichanian’s letter would have been one of the so-called ‘black letters’, a term often used by Ottoman Armenian writers. This paper provides a close reading of surviving examples of ‘black letters’ alongside Nichanian’s painting, and, through the utilisation of contemporary sources and materials, aims to delve into the hopes, expectations, fears and disappointments contained within and pinned upon them.

The increased and faster movement of people, textual materials and knowledge in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire contributed to novel ways of experiencing, imagining and understanding ethno-confessional and imperial belonging. To demonstrate this process, the proposed paper focuses on the movement and migration of laborers, ecclesiastics and merchants in and out of the eastern Ottoman borderland region of Van. As such it treats Van as a trans-local space whose local politics and imaginaries of belonging were shaped by the movement of people and texts from the Russian Empire to Van and from there to Istanbul. It furthermore aims to demonstrate how the circulation of goods, knowledge, petitions and print through the migration of laborers, ecclesiastics and merchants made Van an integral part of the empire. Such a proposition overcomes the understanding of imperial integration through the lens of the Ottoman state and the empire’s ethno-confessional communal administrations, in other words the millet system. Through the unpublished memoirs and correspondences of the Bishop Yeremia Tevkants (1829-1885), a local of Van, this paper traces the sites of interactions and the experiences of travelers traversing paths that connected Van to the Russian Empire and Istanbul. I corroborate the experiences of Tevkants through Ottoman-Armenian petitions sent from locals of Van to the Constantinople Patriarchate and to the Armenian Catholicosate of Edjmiatzin—the highest office of the Armenian Church then in then in the Russian Empire. Furthermore, the circulation of newspapers, periodicals and books in and out of Van tells us much about the experiences of migrants but also how they used such materials to remain engaged in the local politics of Van and in shaping imaginations of Van. While circulation of people, knowledge and information enhanced imperial integration, for locals of Van travel also fostered a greater sense of local belonging: a local patriotism of Van. Both the experiences of traveling and the ensuing discourses about the emotional and physical condition of the migrants known in Armenian as pandkhtutiun produced multiple conceptions and articulations of belonging between the 1820s and 1870s.

Through examining homeland associations of Armenian migrants, this paper aims to bring new perspectives on our understanding of the spatial dimension of the Armenian ethno-religious community (millet), by questioning the unchanging and stable character historians attribute to it in their analysis of the late Ottoman Empire. This paper argues that millet was not the only organization that held the members of the Armenian community together. Neither had it triumphed over other forms of social bonds between the members of the community, such as class, gender or sharing a place of origin. The paper examines the sharing of origins from the same homeland as one of the most persistent forms of belonging that held members of local Armenian communities in Anatolia together, and considers its most tangible form, namely migrants’ home land associations which were established by Armenian migrants (bantoukhd) throughout the empire. By examining the networks of these associations from the second half of the nineteenth century to the post-Genocide period, the paper will show the ways in which bonds based on sharing local ties were interconnected with but different from the supra-local Armenian millet. The persistence of local ties and the links they have with the imperial, on the other hand, will also lead us to rethink the meta narratives of the modernization and centralization of the empire as a top-down Istanbul centered and European inspired projects. The homeland associations therefore show that the modernization of the empire was multilocal and multicentered to a great extent. The paper uses surveys of Armenian Cultural Associations and local memory-books (houshamadyans) and Ottoman Turkish sources to examine around 100 of the Armenian migrants’ homeland associations which were established in Istanbul and other cities of the empire in the second half of nineteenth century onward. These associations formed transcultural networks as defined in migration studies, facilitated travel of economic, social and cultural capital, functioning between a mono-ethnic Armenian village in the sending community in the East and the multiethnic urban center, like Istanbul. The paper therefore will also contribute to the studies that examine the impact of transnational networks of migrants and immigrants, and highlight the agency of non-state actors in the societal change in the Middle East.

The Itinerant Image: Domestic Photographs in an Age of Global Movement As an instrument capable of engineering dramatic extensions of vision beyond the user’s immediate environment, photography proved itself vital in the creation and maintenance of social relationships during a time of human movement unprecedented in scale and scope. With this understanding, this paper seeks to advance our conception of the role of photography in the Armenian migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It furthermore aims to provide, through its focus upon the visual archive, a fresh perspective on this migration and to use the decentered processes of photographic circulation and exchange to contribute to a reimagining of the migratory experience. This paper highlights the multidirectional flow of images in an effort to reconsider dominant Western-centric notions that underpin work undertaken in the fields of both migration studies and the history of photography. To this end it examines the output of two photographic studios closely associated with the migratory phenomenon: The Soursourian studio of Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, and the Melikian studio established by a former resident of Kharpert in Massachusetts, USA. Kharpert will be considered as a translocal field, a locality shaped by migration and the circulation of people, images and narratives, while its migrants in Massachusetts will be examined in terms of their photographic relationships not only to new people and lands but to those left behind also. Examining the flow of images between these two places, and at times these two specific studios, this paper will consider photographs as dynamic objects whose movements traced lines between members of separated families and communities. Particular attention will be paid to family photographs and individual portraits as I demonstrate how, being created to act far beyond the confines of ‘home’, such images belied their own ‘domesticity’. The paper will consider the social life of certain photographs as it endeavours to reconstruct the stabilising roles they were asked to play during historic moments of disruption and flux. Such roles varied dramatically, for while photography was undoubtedly by its nature a medium of global communication, it was also intensely local, being reconfigured in each place in accordance with specific demands and desires.