Biography of Karen Jeppe “Mother of Armenians” published in Houshamadyan

Portrait of Danish Humanitarian Karen Jeppe

On August 10, 2020, I co-authored an article about Danish humanitarian Karen Jeppe with Danish historian Matthias Bjørnlund on the open-source virtual Armenia project known as Houshamadyan. The 20 page article is available online along with a visual archive of over 20 maps and photographs from the League of Nations, Danish National Archives, and other libraries and private collections.

A life-time educator and humanitarian worker, Karen Jeppe was an eyewitness to the 1915 Armenian Genocide in ‘Urfa, having hid Armenians under the floorboards of her own home to save their lives. After spending a few years in Denmark recuperating from the psychological trauma of what she had witnessed , she returned to the Middle East as a League of Nations Commissioner for the Protection of Women and Girls in the Near East, which opened whole new avenues of possibilities for relief and developmental work. She was ambivalent about accepting the position, but accepted that recovering and recuperating forcibly assimilated women and children was necessary for the recovery of Armenians. She based her operations in Aleppo, Syria and in 1922 opened a large Reception Home (a.k.a. Rescue Home) at a compound by the railroad in what would later be called the Shaykh Taha district in the northern outskirts of Aleppo near the Quwayq River, a home where close to 2,000 Armenians would pass through until 1927, helped to escape by a complex network of agents, bribes, persuasion, and negotiation. The word was quickly spread throughout the region that there was an opportunity for Armenians to rejoin their community in Aleppo, which could lead to dramatic flights, and even cost the life of Jeppe’s agent in Hasakah, the Catholic Armenian merchant from ‘Urfa Vasil Sabagh. The main reason why saving Armenians after the genocide could still be a dangerous business was this: While the project was indeed sanctioned by the League of Nations, there was much local resistance against helping Armenians escape from Muslim households, and the French mandate authorities would also be hesitant to assist Jeppe’s organization in this endeavor to avoid upsetting, e.g., Bedouin tribes.

For more about Karen Jeppe’s biography and humanitarian project in Aleppo see, https://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayetaleppo/sandjak-of-aleppo/religion/missionaries.html

Review of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s Missing Pages in Critical Inquiry

I recently published a book review of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s award-winning cultural history of the Zeytun Gospels, an Armenian manuscript looted during the Armenian Genocide in 1915. I argue that the destruction of heritage was a criterion of genocide that Raphael Lemkin considered but did not finally include in the final draft of the UN Convention for the Prevention of Genocide (1948). The Missing Pages effectively resuscitates his project making the case for heritage as a human right and the destruction of art as an act of cultural genocide.

“An illuminated manuscript containing the Gospels rests in an archive in Yerevan, Armenia, while eight missing pages of canon tables––concordance lists of related biblical passages––are housed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Missing Pages is Heghnar Watenpaugh’s biography of a “survivor object,” the Zeytun Gospels. The dismembered manuscript is a potent metaphor for the Armenian community scattered across the earth like looted pages during a genocide campaign that began in 1915. The missing canon tables were the subject of a 2010 lawsuit initiated by the Armenian Western Prelacy against the Getty Museum in Los Angeles over ownership of stolen Armenian heritage.”

You can read the full book review on Critical Inquiry’s website here.

NEW PUBLICATION: BONE MEMORY

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new article titled “Bone Memory:  The Necrogeography of the Armenian Genocide in Dayr al-Zur, Syria” with the Journal of Human Remains and Violence this past summer.  It is part of a new book I am writing titled Remnants: Gender, Islamized Armenians, and the Collective Memory of the Armenian Genocide.  The article explores how Armenians have collected, displayed, and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria.  I argue that these bone rituals, displays, and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible.  I read some essays written shortly after the genocide and interviewed Armenians who traveled there before war erupted in Syria in 2011.   I was able to publish this amazing 1938 photograph of Haroutyun Hovakimyan, holding a skull in his hand, in my essay with permission from the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute.  He led this expedition to unearth Armenian remains in Dayr al-Zur and my research has shown that those same bones were used in the memorial at Dayr al-Zur once it was constructed in 1990.  You can access the full article on my Academia.edu site here.

THE COMPLICATED HISTORY OF ARMENIAN WOMEN’S GENOCIDE-ERA TATTOOS

Liz Ohanessian interviewed me for a piece she wrote in the LA Weekly about tattooed Armenian Genocide victims.  A photograph of an unnamed tattooed survivor in Aleppo in 1919 is on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’ “Tattoo” exhibit.

Report about Judayda, Aleppo on the BBC

I have been working with the BBC series “Museum of Lost Objects.”  This week, a new episode, “Return to Aleppo,” aired featuring the story of Zahed Tajedden, whose home in Judayda Quarter was converted into an impromtu hospital during the war.  I shared some of my reflections on the history of Judayda, the Christian quarter of Aleppo, which I researched in the Syrian National Archives before they were closed in 2012.  Thank you Maryam Maruf and Kanish Tharoor including me in this amazing bit of journalism!  Listen to the report here on BBC Radio 4.