PARRHESİAPAR

In his debut novel Unufak, Rober Koptaş attempts to touch upon the suffering and devastating societal events experienced by the Armenian community of the 20th century through a story crafted across three generations.

Weeks ago, when the Israeli army ordered the people of the south via X (formerly Twitter) to leave their homes and 'relocate to safer places,' large numbers of refugees arrived in our areas. Zaven, a clothing vendor friend in Bourdj Hammoud, told me, 'Three women came to my shop, around 50–60 years old, dressed in black and wearing headscarves, asking if I needed workers; they’re looking for work. My heart shattered. I already don’t have work for myself; I couldn’t say anything to them.' Not long after, a woman stopped me in front of my house, asking, 'Do you know of any houses for rent?'

The International Hrant Dink Award ceremony turned into a celebration for women this year, and later created a discussion area where we could talk about ‘woman-to-woman’ solidarity models. When it comes to Armenian women living in the diaspora, there is not enough space to talk about violence against women in the public sphere. Different practices of violence against women and girls that remain behind closed doors can be buried in silence

Born and raised in Beirut, I have navigated the complexities of my identity, especially in relation to my Armenian neighborhood, Bourdj Hamoud. In 1968, Kurkjian delved into this existential struggle of the Diaspora Armenian in his pivotal piece, "A Second Equation with Multiple Unknowns." He poses crucial questions about the nature of Armenian identity in the Diaspora.

The main theme of our meeting and the common point that brought us together was that we were all Armenian women. Although each of us had thought about, discussed, and even found opportunities to take action on the problems we face as women in society, we realized that as Armenian women, we deeply felt the lack of a space that would allow us to express these problems and seek solutions.

After the massacres of the Hamidiye Regiments in the late 19th century and after 1915, with the increase in the number of orphanages, Armenian women and orphans predominantly worked in the carpet workshops established by the missionaries. Carpet weaving was a craft that some orphan girls knew from their families. This craft provided them with a space of solidarity after they had lost everything in the face of savagery. In return, they were employed as cheap labor for the companies of American and European missionaries.

Remembering the story of Martha, after whom the cove is named, may help us understand the latest developments on the beach. There seems to be a significant parallel between the perspective that objectifies and exploits a woman's body and the desire to possess and control a rare beach like Martha Cove. Martha Arat was a Lebanese Armenian woman, born in 1920. When her father was appointed to the Ottoman Bank, she came to Istanbul at a young age and attended Saint Benoit High School.

Long before 1915, Armenians had begun migrating to the United States due to abusive taxation and other oppressive policies in the provinces. The best known of these migration centers is Fresno, the hometown of William Saroyan. Another, of course, is Philadelphia. Armenian families in Philadelphia, which is still a heavily Armenian-populated city today, have numerous correspondence with their relatives living in the Ottoman provinces, photographs, and family archives documenting the daily life of Armenians at the turn of the 20th century. The exhibit “The Armenian Genocide, One Family's Story”, organized last year at Stockton and Montclair universities, was a good example of this.

The sea and fishermen form a common theme in Ara Güler's photographs of Istanbul. The exhibition of a selection of photographs taken in the old fishermen's neighborhood of Kumkapı under the title 'Kumkapı Fishermen' was inspired by Ara Güler's series of articles titled 'Kumkapı with Armenian Fishermen' published in Jamanak newspaper in 1952, taken when he was still a young photojournalist. Among his famous signature photographs of fishermen and net menders captured sometimes in groups or single, there are also women who immediately catch our eye, the most striking one being Merametci Saten Hanım.

On Wednesday, April 24th, alongside Nesim Ovadya İzrail, our memory walk with approximately twenty participants led us to a point where we encountered the memory of spaces where Armenian intellectuals, whose stories we have read in books and their photographs we have seen in commemorative ceremonies, once converged. As one participant noted, during our walk, "unlike official history, what happened appeared more real to us”.