In October 1913, the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire held celebrations commemorating the 1,500th anniversary of the creation of the Armenian alphabet and the fourth centenary of the first printed Armenian book. From the imperial capital to the rural hamlet in the Anatolian periphery, from Edirne to Nev?ehir to Trabzon, Armenians packed churches, put on theatrical plays, organized lectures, took part in public processions and adorned their spatial surroundings with the imagery and symbols of Armenian history and the alphabet itself. These were no isolated endeavors, for the 1913 Jubilee not only drew in the participation of the other Christian and Muslim communities of the empire but received the backing of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress. That the Jubilee was universally upheld as an exemplar case of harmonious intercommunal relations between Armenians and Turks invites inquiry into this hitherto little-studied event. This paper proposes to analyze the 1913 Jubilee by setting it against the storied background of the Second Constitutional Era, which briefly witnessed an efflorescence in political liberalization, and the cultural developments of the age, including the phenomenon of centenaries and commemorations of past events and figures. In placing it in dialogue with the recent literature that has appeared on the subject of Ottoman civic patriotism, the paper examines how Ottoman Armenians gradually came to adopt historical modes of understanding in the nineteenth century and how they contributed to the reimagining and reinterpretation of Armenian identity formation. Furthermore, by focusing chiefly on the festivities held in Istanbul, it demonstrates how Ottoman Armenians sought to negotiate and reconcile their conception of the nation with their identity as imperial citizens. Drawing from contemporary newspapers, archival records, and ego-documents, it shows how, amid the euphoria and triumph on the streets and the press, there flowed an undercurrent of ideas that revealed Armenian attitudes toward history’s use for political purposes as well as a uniquely Ottoman Armenian Orientalist conception of the past and present. Within the tense atmosphere of the post-Balkan War period, it also traces the nexus of public performance of heritage and politicized violence and the deep intercommunal rifts that still existed in Ottoman society. Weaving these varying strands together, will, I argue, shed light on how an important segment of Ottoman society came to define itself as both members of a nation with their own unique culture and heritage and citizens of a much larger imperial collective.

Between 1888-1915, thousands of Armenians, as well as Lebanese and Syrian Christian, and Muslim laborers of the Ottoman Empire left their home for the Americas to the maintain their families which they left behind. Armenians often did not intend to remain in North America and therefore searched for ways of return to the Ottoman Empire. Although the scholarship on Armenian migration has not concentrated on return, the archival records of the Ottoman Empire demonstrate that there was a considerable number of Armenians who tried to come back and this caused a serious problem for the Ottoman state. While concentrating on return, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on social mobility at the turn of the twentieth century and the state’s concerns over who entered and exited its borders. It will go on to demonstrate the relationship between the state and its mobile subjects. More specifically it will discuss the process that allowed Ottoman Armenians to emigrate if only they fulfilled the conditions that they give up their subjecthood, sign a document attesting that they would not come back, and abandon their property. This paper will demonstrate how the policies that encouraged Armenian emigration on the condition of no return went hand in hand with the elimination of the number of Armenians living within the empire through pogroms by the mid-1890s. Apart from the requirements mentioned above, Armenians also had to deliver two identifying photographs to the Ottoman state. Denaturalization of targeted populations and methods devised to control their movements such as photo registers remains a little-studied subject. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by analyzing the official migration photographs obtained from the Ottoman state archives and the state documents, indicating the no return policy of the Ottoman state and the treatment of Armenian returnees. I argue that this requirement was devised to keep a visual record of those banned from coming back, to check against lists of denaturalized subjects and the properties they abandoned. Ottoman Armenian migration occupies a space between forced expulsion and voluntary migration and Armenians’ agencies shifted between the conditions forced them to migrate and their own wills in choosing this journey. Due to the migration policies of the Ottoman government, Armenians found themselves in legal limbo, and they had to negotiate their identities between Ottoman subjecthood and statelessness.

The photographs that have been captured during World War I in eastern Anatolia and the Mesopotamian region regarding the deportation and extermination of the Ottoman Armenians were limited in number, due to the harsh climate and health conditions in the war zones, the low number of neutral and Entente State representatives in the region as well as the prohibition of photography in deportation zones. Nevertheless, through the alliance of the Ottoman Empire and Germany that enabled a great diplomatic network spread all over the empire, a number of German diplomats, missionaries and volunteers, who got individually involved in the effort to change the flow of events, were able to capture images. However, the reproduction and remediation of these limited photographs that appear nowadays as part of the visual representation of the Armenian genocide conform to a format of genocidal imagery derived from the excessive image production and circulation of the Holocaust, which very much shaped the way atrocities are apprehended. As Holocaust imaginary has determined the perception of how to comprehend violence and suffering, the Armenian genocide, which predates the Holocaust, has been demarcated and configured in relation to the representation of the Holocaust. In this regard, this paper will look at photographs of the Armenian genocide not solely as historiographical tools (either standing in as evidence for the truth of the event, or representing the totality of it), but will seek to think along photography’s affective power and persuasive capacity. By focusing on the particular case of the German consulate in Erzurum in 1915, which is comprised of numerous documents and few photographs of early stages of deportation, this paper will not only demonstrate the volatile mechanisms of military intelligence through the diplomatic correspondences but will challenge the paradigm intrinsic to the study of genocide photography. As these photographs were neither integrated into the historiography of the representation of the Armenian genocide, nor into the historiography of personal initiatives taken by some German individuals, this paper will argue that the lack of violence in these photographs prevented them to conform to the genocidal imagery. Nevertheless, through “complex set of relations”, it will demonstrate that despite the comparatively few images that were captured, the study of photography, through its evidential and testimonial capacity, proposes a distinctive comprehension of the experience of the Catastrophe.