Crafted presence The afterlives of the Armenian genocide

During the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, around 300,000 Armenians were driven out of the Ottoman Empire across the Russian border, settling in what would soon become Soviet Armenia. While adapting to numerous political and socio-economic transformations in Armenia over several decades, the ex-Ottoman Armenians and their descendants have been reflecting on the violent past and expulsion from their Ergir. A territorial construct in Armenian, Ergir translates to “the Old Country” and connotes the former living spaces of Armenians in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Contemporarily, the term is used both as a politically-charged “national homeland” (analogous to the terms “Western Armenia” and “Historic Armenia”) or a “local homeland” like a village, city, or region located in Turkey’s east. This thesis examines how this national-local “homeland” was brought into life in Armenia in its physical absence. How were its traces, namely the abandoned homes, graves, churches, deceased relatives, and everything else that ex-Ottoman Armenians had to leave behind, mediated and made present? I argue that Ergir’s void was, and continues to be, filled by a crafted presence, a mediated presence that manifests itself in portable mnemonic repositories. I define crafted presence as a response to what no longer exists (or perhaps never has existed) and is thus rendered an object of longing. This can be a time period, an event, an experience, a place, an object, a person, a tradition, or an ideology. Crafted presence aims to counter the perceived absence of these things by supplanting them with a deliberately constructed symbolic presence, locked into a frozen and timeless state. In the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, the ex-Ottoman Armenians and their descendants in Armenia have skillfully crafted the presence of lost homes, graves, families, and everything else that was rendered absent by the catastrophe of 1915-16 through orally transmitted memories, literary representations, commemorative objects, and rituals.