Ottoman historiography portrays nineteenth century reform as a clash between top-down reforming bureaucrats in the imperial center, Istanbul, and provincial powerbrokers. It also asserts that these reform projects, collectively known as the Tanzimat, failed in their quest to promote a sense of Ottomanism among the empire’s non-Muslims. Instead, the argument goes, reform internal to those communities facilitated the development of nationalism and secessionism. By focusing on the clash between two Armenian priests in the empire’s eastern provinces, Mkrtich Khrimian and Boghos Melikian, my paper revisits these assumptions. Following Karen Barkey’s use of Ronald Burt’s theorization of structural holes to explain the conceptual category of empire in the Ottoman case, I posit the reform projects encouraged the bridging of these holes. Doing so required the use of individuals equipped not only with the authority of the central government, but also an intimate understanding of the periphery. Local knowledge, therefore, constituted an important part of the construction of networks between center and periphery. Melikian and Khrimian each possessed such local knowledge. The former used it either to thwart reform, or exploit to his advantage, while the latter deployed it to further the reform project and policies of centralization. Their struggle, however, reveals the multi-layered and intertwined nature of politics, not only between center and periphery, but also how they crossed social, ethnic, and religious lines. How these two priests managed to situate themselves in these networks determined the extent to which policies would be implemented. Their battle, however, was confined largely to leadership over the Armenian Church in an eastern province. This paper, therefore, shows how a study of Armenian religious institutions may be used as a lens for understanding Ottoman reform. While this paper does reference some Ottoman state documents, it is based mostly on published and archival Armenian documents. Unthinkable at the official level, Armenian sources do not shy away from implicating or criticizing political leaders. Set in their Ottoman context, these materials provide a new body of evidence for Ottoman history.

The Tanzimat (1839-1876) brought forth a multitude of bureaucratic, legal, institutional and structural reforms to the Ottoman Empire. Many scholars argue that this marked the introduction of modernity as a cultural project to the empire. These reforms, promulgated by the government in the imperial center, often met resistance in the provinces. Still, many local actors in the periphery also embraced and implemented reforms. This paper will read the reform process from ‘below’ by concentrating on the early works of Mkrtitch Khrimian (1821-1907), a seminal intellectual and church leader among Ottoman Armenians. In the mid-1850s and early 1860s Khrimian was still rooted in the periphery of the empire, namely in Van, and not yet closely connected with the imperial center, as he eventually became – assuming a position of the Armenian Patriarch in Istanbul (r. 1869-1873). Throughout my paper I will try to explain whether Khrimian’s writings expressing his attitudes as an Armenian patriot, on the one hand, and Ottoman reformer, on the other hand, were really contradictory or complementary. In 1855, Khrimian had founded the journal “Artsvi Vaspurakan” (Eagle of Vaspurakan), in Istanbul, the publication of which, however, continued from 1857 to 1864 at the monastery in Varag, located just outside the city of Van. By providing a discourse analysis of his journal, I will show what is it that Khrimian considered to signify progress, what he thought inhibited progress through his representation of Armenian landscapes and what reforms were necessary for the future. Although his writing was overtly patriotic, Armenia and Armenian-centered, he did not indicate that a solution to the socio-economic condition of his flock would be achieved through independence or even political autonomy. In addition to the journal “Artzvi Vapurakan”, I will use a number of published works of Khrimian, along with archival documents on the Tanzimat reforms. This seemingly contradictory phenomenon of being an ethnic as well as Ottoman patriot was not just peculiar to Khrimian, but also to the Armenian revolutionaries who appeared later in the 19th centuries, and, as the latest scholarship has demonstrated, also among Arabs, Rums and Kurds. This paper will thus contribute to the recent arguments in Ottoman historiography that throughout the 19th century subaltern agents as well played a significant role in transforming the Ottoman social space and reveal what informed the multiple loyalties existing among the intellectual elite of the various Ottoman ethnic groups.

Mkrtich Khrimian, Ottoman-Armenian clergyman from Van, primate, publisher, bishop, Catholicos, Patriarch and diplomat, is one of the most mentioned but little studied characters in the second half of the 19th century. He is best known for his fiery sermon following the failure of his delegation in Berlin in July 1878 to secure the intact survival of the provisions of the February 1878 San Stefano Treaty that ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878) that had provided for reforms in the Armenian provinces in the East of the Ottoman Empire. At the time he ascribed that failure to Armenians’ reliance on tears and complaints to obtain such reforms, as opposed to other peoples who had fought and died for such changes in their lot in the Ottoman Empire. Thus Khrimian is seen as the first to invite Ottoman Armenians to take up arms, a precursor of the revolutionary parties, who holds his prominent place in the pantheon of fedayees and guerrilla fighters, revolutionary thinkers and inspiring political figures. Simultaneously, while primate of Van, he pursued what might be called “ecumenical” policies toward Kurds and Muslims. He was also a strong supporter of industrial modernization in the heart of historical Armenia. And yet, he also wrote a large number of articles, tracts and books that display a deeply held set of very traditional beliefs as well as a reliance on the agriculturally based community. Khrimian also lived long enough to witness the rise of revolutionary parties and withheld his support from them. This paper will try to explain these apparent paradoxes

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.