Until the headquarters of the East Anatolian Imperial Army was deployed in 1831 on the plain of today’s Elazig in Turkey, no settlement existed aside from the gardens of the well-off families of Harput. The ancient town and citadel of Harput, located upon the hill overlooking the modern city of Elazig, was however among the most cosmopolitan, intellectual and commercial centers of the Ottoman East, hosting Islamic exegete, Armenian writers and Western missionaries. A century later, in the 1950s, the nascent settlement on the plain had grown into a middle-size town whereas Harput had turned into a ruined suburb of this new city. This paper will address the concurrent processes of abandonment and ruinization in Harput and of the emergence of Elazig as a new city in Eastern Turkey during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The urban history of the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire has been confined mostly to port cities with commercial value for the capitalist world economy. Hence, exclusive emphasis has been put on spatial modernization and progressivist mindsets instead of abandoned places and fragmented lives. The urban experience in the eastern provinces of the empire has yet to be accordingly addressed. This paper will examine the transitional dual-city experience of Harput/Elazig from 1850-1950, a phenomenon vastly analyzed in colonial contexts in Middle East and North Africa but rarely paid attention on in the contexts of non-colonial state formation. The paper seeks to understand the ruinization of Harput’s built environment in two periods of mobility. First, the bourgeoisie suburbanization in new Elazig and the moving out of Harput’s commercial classes in the 1870s-1900s took place hand-in-hand with the largely economically motivated emigration of young men from Harput to the Americas. The presence of American missionaries and of their renowned Euphrates College (1871-1915) turned Harput into the primary gate of the entire Eastern Anatolia for those who wanted to embark for the New World. Second, the first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed attempts of forced demolishment in Harput: the deportation of Armenians (30-35% of Harput’s population) in 1915 and the state-sponsored destruction and dismantlement of Harput’s built environment in the early Republican period of 1930s, both supervised from Elazig. The original data of this essay has been acquired through two years of research in the state archives, in the missionary archives and in newspaper collections.

This paper examines the reflections of the Italiani d’Egitto (Italians of Egypt) who left Egypt in the 1950/1960s on the subsequent changes in the urban landscapes of Alexandria. Due to changing Egyptian legislation since the 1930s, a combination of restrictive nationalizations on behalf of the Nasser regime (1954-1970) and Italian policies regarding dual citizenship, the majority of the once 70,000 large community of Italians residing in Egypt left en masse between the end of World War II and the 1960s. They describe their repatriation in Italy as a type of exile from the cities they called home for several generations. Today, only about 200 members of these Italian communities remain in Egypt; families that could not afford to repatriate, elderly whose children supported them from elsewhere, and few individuals who managed to maintain businesses despite the politics of the 1950s/1960s. While most literature deals with the history of former foreigner communities in Egypt in terms of a dichotomy situating their nostalgia for a cosmopolitan past in contradistinction to the nationalist movements among an Egyptian majority, I argue that the Italiani d’Egitto’s relationships to the abandoned places of their pasts suggest a socio-historical typology that falls outside of this dichotomy and offers much in the way of addressing questions of historical consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean. Their articulations of the apartment buildings, shops, streets, beaches, and piazzas of their pasts illuminate aspects of the circumstances that shaped twentieth century Egyptian cities and the experiences of Italians raised “abroad” under the Fascist regime in a country occupied by the British. This paper suggests that the reflections of the Italiani d’Egitto can be read through a juxtaposition of historical and social narratives, letting coherences and dissonances bring out the texture of pasts lived, abandoned, and remembered, and place them in relation to the worlds occupied by today’s inhabitants of those spaces. To do so, the paper presents the experiences and family narratives of Italians from the old communities that remained in Egypt, as well as individuals from Egyptian and other communities in Alexandria involved in historical preservation and confronting the country’s political history, movements increasingly visible since the 2011 revolution wherein a rise in the occupying and destruction of abandoned buildings has been witnessed and the construction on those grounds of massive housing units. This paper is based on archival, ethnographic and oral-historical research conducted from 2011 to 2013 in Egypt and Italy.

This paper revisits the most controversial site of the Armenian genocide, the Eastern Anatolia city of Van in 1915 and explores the political agendas and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to the total destruction of this historic Ottoman city. From April to August 1915 Van became a scene for the most tragic occurrences: Van --the hub of the Young Turk - Dashnag alliance after the 1908 constitutional revolution—is interestingly the first place in the empire where inter-communal coexistence entirely and violently collapsed. Van is also the site in the Ottoman Empire where the genocidal intent of the Young Turk government first materialized. It was the ruling elite’s fantasy of an imminent “Armenian conspiracy” that triggered the so-called Armenian Rebellion in April 1915. Van Armenians managed to resist the government’s utterly exterminationist repression after a month long struggle. Soon after, Van became the first Ottoman city to fall under Russian occupation in May 1915, which was preceded by the evacuation of the city by the Ottoman bureaucracy and Muslim inhabitants. At a time when the rest of the Ottoman-Armenians were being subjected to widespread arrests, deadly deportations and unprecedented massacres, Van Armenians were building their own rule in the province under Russian protection. By the end of July 1915 the Russian military authorities unexpectedly ordered the evacuation of the city by the remaining inhabitants, mostly Armenian. As of August 1915 historic Van was an already in ruins and a ghost city. Van was the epicenter of the Armenian genocide, the place where it incubated. Paradoxically, however, genocide as such did not occur in the city/province; as the entire power structure in Van swiftly and radically changed hands between rival empires multiple times in a matter of a few months. Van in 1915 was a distinctive space within the larger devastating landscape of the Armenian genocide, one where myriad experiences, agendas, and actors clashed without any single dynamic or force establishing its unquestioned hegemony. Yet the city Van was the site and victim of a urbicide par excellence. All parties involved in the process targeted the city Van –its infrastructure, residential areas, government buildings, market place, military buildings, communication facilities, and foreign missions. Drawing on Armenian, Ottoman and Russian archival documents, periodicals, memoirs, photographic and cartographic materials and secondary sources my paper investigates the ideological/symbolic and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to urbicide in Van and the memory politics around it.