Istanbul as the capital of the Ottoman Empire was a crucial venue of the decision-making processes of the Armenian Genocide. The arrest of hundreds of Armenian notables in the city on April 24, 1915 is widely assumed as the beginning of the Young Turk’s extermination campaign against Ottoman Armenians. Yet, the fact that Istanbul Armenians, along with the ones living in Izmir, were kept exempt from en masse death marches has limited the scholarly interest only to diplomatic negotiations and rivalries around the Armenian crisis/massacres that took place in Istanbul. This talk however, takes a different focus. It elaborates on various strategies Armenian political actors, namely, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation committees, Ottoman-Armenian bureaucrats and the patriarchate as well as lay-people deployed to deal with and resist to the terror exerted on the Ottoman Armenians in general and Istanbul Armenians in particular. In so doing, the lecture illustrates and discusses multiple tiers and complications of both victim and perpetrator positions.
Mi 24 Apr 2019 | 17:00–18:30
Days of Genocide: How Did Istanbul Armenians Live Through the Terror?
Yektan Türkyilmaz (EUME Fellow 2017-20), Chair: Ümit Kurt (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
Beyond suffering the dire war-time restrictions and shortages like the rest of the population, the over 100,000 Armenians of Istanbul lived under strict state surveillance after November 1914. As of March 1915, the dark clouds of the upcoming catastrophe were clearly visible especially to the political elite in the imperial capital. April 24, 1915 was the turning point after which Armenians in the city began to be subjected to systematic arrests and expulsion that lasted until mid-1916. Only a few of these thousands of Armenians – mostly guest workers from the provinces – would ever return. The remaining community continued to live under the imminent threat of becoming victims of the terror. The haziness of the prospects combined with everyday forms of anxiety drastically reshaped the inter- and intra-communal relations. Hence, the analysis here focuses specifically on the psychological implications of terror: How individual and collective bodies behave under fear and uncertainty that genocidal violence incites, represents an underlining question that the lecture seeks to answer. Drawing on Armenian, Ottoman and American archival material, such as reports and correspondence, as well as memoirs and periodicals, this lecture illustrates the much-ignored ordeal of Istanbul Armenians during the calamitous years of the First World War.
Yektan Türkyilmaz received his PhD from Duke University's Department of Cultural Anthropology. He taught courses at University of Cyprus, Sabancı, Bilgi, Duke, California State Universities addressing the debates around the notions of collective violence, memory making and reconciliation, and politics of music. He is working on his book manuscript based on his dissertation, Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915, that addresses the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century and the memory politics around it. He has been a 2014/15 EUME Fellow and returned as a EUME Fellow for the academic years 2017/18 and 2018/19 associated with the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin (Arbeitsbereich Neuere Geschichte; Prof. Dr. Oliver Janz).