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The Research Repository

  1. 2025

    Ջեմալ փաշայի ցեղասպան քաղաքականության արդարացման փորձերը թուրք պատմաբանների կողմից (Attempts by Turkish Historians to Justify Cemal Pasha's Genocidal Policy)

    Anumyan, Meline

    Anumyan takes up a thesis recently circulated by some Turkish historians: that Cemal Pasha, Ottoman Minister of the Navy during the Genocide, was more tolerant toward Armenians than the other Young Turk leaders and opposed the deportations. She isolates four principal propositions supporting that narrative and refutes each in turn. Her conclusion is that although Cemal's stance appears at first glance to differ from that of the other perpetrators, it was in substance identical: his goal too was the elimination of the Armenians as a nation, pursued primarily through assimilation. She argues the rehabilitation of principal architects of the Genocide is dangerous precisely because it can install a groundless image of the 'Armenophile Turk' in Armenian public consciousness.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  3. 2025

    Armenian-American Soldiers as Liberators against Nazism

    Aftandilian, Gregory

    Aftandilian examines Armenian-American soldiers in World War II — many of them children of genocide survivors — who enlisted partly to prove their patriotism and shed the 'foreigner' label. He argues their wartime experiences, both leaving distraught survivor parents at home and witnessing Nazi atrocities in Europe (including against Armenian slave laborers and prisoners), led them to connect the extreme nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress with Nazi ideology, deepening their sense of Armenian identity and responsibility. The article draws on oral-history interviews and Armenian-American periodicals.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  4. 2025

    Armenians in Strasbourg and Berlin: Engagement, Institutions and the Dynamics of Diaspora

    Tavitian, Nicolas

    Based on 72 in-depth narrative interviews in Berlin and Strasbourg, examines how Armenians with differing migration histories engage with diaspora communities and institutions, identifying three distinct routes of engagement and developing the concept of 'diaspora dynamics': engagement as conditional and negotiated rather than automatic.

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    2025ThesisOpen Access
  5. 2025

    Church of Armenia, Church of Rome: Faith, Print, and Power in Ottoman-Armenian History, c. 1690–c. 1715

    Ohanian, Daniel

    Examines a growing religious divide within the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population around 1700, a divide that reshaped the culture, institutions and politics of their communities for the next two centuries. Before the late seventeenth century essentially all Ottoman Armenians belonged to the traditional Armenian Church; within a few decades many converted to Catholicism while others developed a trenchant anti-Catholic group identity. Ohanian identifies four drivers: the expansion of Roman Catholic missionary efforts, the unprecedented availability of Armenian-language books through printing and long-distance circulation, shifting Ottoman-French diplomatic relations, and the complexities of Ottoman imperial administration. The study draws on sources in Classical Armenian, vernacular Armenian, Ottoman Turkish and French from more than a dozen archives.

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    2025ThesisOpen Access
  6. 2025

    Formulation and Use of the Concept of "Resistance" in the Context of Genocides

    Stepanyan, Inesa

    Traces the evolution of the concept of 'resistance' across the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, spanning organized armed defense, nonviolent opposition, and spiritual, cultural and intellectual efforts to preserve identity. Stepanyan argues for a taxonomy that does not collapse all resistance into armed struggle. She treats the ongoing struggle against denial as a continuation of resistance beyond the temporal boundaries of the genocides themselves.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  7. 2025

    Homeland, Belonging, and Return: Push–pull Factors of Armenian Repatriation During the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

    Melkonyan, Nvard and Melkumyan, Yuliana

    Examines both push and pull factors shaping Armenian repatriation in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Drawing on secondary analysis of statistics, sociological research, in-depth interviews, and focus groups, it identifies the political, social, and economic push factors driving Armenians out of Russia and Ukraine: fear of war, uncertainty, instability, deteriorating economic conditions. It then maps the pull factors drawing Armenians to the homeland: safety, cultural and social ties, a sense of belonging, a more comfortable lifestyle, and a desire to contribute to the country's development. It also documents the counter-pressures inside Armenia itself: an underdeveloped repatriation system, persistent security concerns, weak infrastructure, and low wages.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  8. 2025

    How to Paint Destruction: The Role of Material Objects in the Work of Armenian Painter Vardges Sureniants

    Maranci, Christina

    Maranci, a leading scholar of Armenian art and architecture, offers a close formal reading of Vardges Sureniants' painting 'Trampled Sanctuary' (1890s), a near-contemporary depiction of the Hamidian Massacres. She argues the work should be read not merely as documentation of destroyed artifacts but as a totalizing scene of wreckage that gathers up nearly the whole repertoire of Armenian art. Sureniants' impressionistic handling, she contends, both invites and obstructs close inspection of the ruined objects, producing a tension between recording artifacts and re-creating them — a meditation on loss and on the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  9. 2025

    Hunchak Figure Tashir (Simon Hovvian): Public and Political Activities, 1915–1921

    Hovhannisyan, Gegham

    The First World War threw the Hunchak Party into crisis and left its Paris central administration non-functional, prompting a new leadership to form in Tiflis, where Tashir (Simon Hovvian) was elected. Already known as a publicist, party theorist and teacher at the Gevorgyan Seminary, he edited the newspaper Gaghapar in 1916–1917. Tashir was sceptical of the Armenian volunteer movement and tied the resolution of the Armenian Question to international social democracy and national self-determination. Between 1917 and 1920, as many Transcaucasian Hunchaks drifted toward the Bolsheviks, he argued for the Hunchak Party's independent existence, holding that Armenian liberation depended on Soviet Russia and on internal Armenian conditions rather than on the European powers.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  10. 2025

    Intersection of Conflicting Interests in the Ottoman Borderlands: The Sanasarian School of Erzurum in Russian Consular Reports on the Eve of the Great War

    Gazdik, Daniel

    Argues that the Sanasarian School of Erzurum was an active participant in transimperial networks rather than a passive object of imperial policy. Russian consuls watched it with suspicion for fostering nationalist sentiment and ARF influence, and their reports form the evidentiary core of the study. The school emerges as a node where Ottoman, Russian and Armenian interests intersected on the eve of the First World War.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  11. 2025

    Komitas in the Life and Activities of Thomas Hartmann

    Zakaryan, Anushavan

    During the Genocide, Komitas suffered a mental collapse in exile and was hospitalized in Paris. Armenian intelligentsia figures took up his care, and the Russian composer of German origin Thomas Hartmann, together with the Tiflis-based 'Society after Komitas', provided material and public support. Arriving in Tiflis in February 1919, Hartmann published a substantial study of Komitas in Zakavkazskoe Slovo, among the first serious scholarly treatments of him, and delivered a lecture-concert that catalyzed a broader Tiflis effort to care for the composer and preserve his creative heritage. The Society was founded in May 1919, drawing in Armenian, Russian and Georgian composers, performers, writers and painters alongside Hovhannes Tumanyan.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  12. 2025

    Not Only Franz Werfel: The Lesser-Known Works of Foreign Writers on the Armenian Genocide

    Bakhchinyan, Artsvi

    Bakhchinyan surveys little-known literary works from 28 countries that treat the Armenian Genocide in whole or in part, spanning poetry, prose and drama across nearly every genre from historical fiction to horror and children's literature. He deliberately excludes authors of Armenian origin and concentrates on material absent from the 1996 Armenian Question encyclopedia or published after it. He finds that foreign authors generally worked from non-Armenian eyewitness testimony, and that they most often render the Genocide through the fate of a survivor: frequently a woman or child. Writers covered include Carducci, Galsworthy, Huxley, Cheever, Updike, Iskander, Kalinoski and Moleskis.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  13. 2025

    On the Internal Political Developments of Cilician Armenia in the 1320s

    Hovhannisyan, Aram

    The 1320s were among the hardest decades in the history of Cilician Armenia: the Mongols were no longer allies, and the kingdom stood alone against the surrounding Muslim states. Drawing on medieval primary sources and current scholarship, Hovhannisyan reconstructs the internal political events and the struggle for power in the kingdom. He gives particular attention to the killing of the regents by the Armenian king at Adana on 27 January 1329, the circumstances of the act and the individuals involved, and works to establish the full set of causes behind it, after which Levon IV ruled alone.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  14. 2025

    Prerequisites for the Emergence and Formation of Independent Theological Thought in the Armenian Church

    Sahakyan, Fr. Movses (Davit)

    Christian faith is one of the cornerstones of Armenian identity, and it finds its distinctive expression in Armenian theological thought. Fr. Movses Sahakyan takes the early period, from the Church's apostolic foundation to the beginning of the sixth century, tracing the mission of Sts Thaddeus and Bartholomew, the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, and the invention of the Armenian alphabet and its effect on Armenian Christian thought. He works through the universal and local ecclesiastical challenges of the era, the Nicene Creed and the successive councils, to show how period authors and events crystallized a distinctly Armenian theology, one that answered both internal religious needs and developments in global Christianity.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  15. 2025

    Religion and Spirituality in the Memoirs of Child Survivors of the Armenian Genocide

    Seppälä, Serafim

    Argues that Armenian Genocide survivor memoirs remain an understudied genre despite their value as a grassroots record of the events and of how trauma is remembered. Seppälä brings together two neglected facts: that many memoirs were written by child survivors and dwell on childhood experience, and that religious material (God, faith, prayer, providence) runs all through them. Because most texts were composed decades after the events, the analysis rests on a theory of narrative subjectivity and retrospective narration. The findings emphasize the paradoxical character of survivors' spirituality: after the genocide religious conviction does not cohere into a system but survives as detached fragments, ranging from astonishing faith to deep bitterness.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  16. 2025

    The Armenian-Italian Joint Expedition to Dvin (Fourth Campaign, Autumn 2024)

    Petrosyan, Hamlet et al.

    Reports the results of the fourth excavation campaign at Dvin, conducted by the Armenian-Italian research group in autumn 2024. Work covered three sectors: the southern portion of the Lower Fortress, the so-called 'Market' area where a micro-stratigraphic trench was opened, and the Tiknuni areas. The team also reports ceramic analysis carried out on material recovered since 2022, and first results from research on faunal remains.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  17. 2025

    The First of Early Modern Armenian Diplomats: Rethinking Abgar Dpir's Contribution to Armenian National History

    Ghazaryan, Flora

    Takes up the understudied field of early modern Armenian diplomacy through the neglected case of Abgar Dpir's 1562 delegation to Rome, a turning point that provoked aggressive Vatican intervention and deepened the confessional split between Catholic and Apostolic Armenians. Ghazaryan unpicks the mission's motives, allowing for the divergent aims of the parties involved. She argues that Abgar Dpir was not of royal descent, and that the royal pedigree was manufactured by Etchmiadzin's leadership to fit him into the Western 'society of princes' and give the delegation a hearing. She further contends that his celebrated printing activity functioned as cover for the diplomatic mission.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  18. 2025

    The Importance of Paris-based Zhoghovurd (People) Daily Newspaper in Researching the Armenian Diaspora's Involvement in the French Resistance (1941–1945)

    Teteyan, Arshaluys

    Armenian participation in the French Resistance is usually reduced to Missak Manouchian and his group, but the wider Armenian diaspora in France, largely composed of survivors of 1915, wrote many chapters of Resistance history that remain unknown. The article argues that Armenian-language newspapers published in France during and after the war are a major untapped source, focusing on Zhoghovurd, issued in Paris under editor Shahe Tatourian from 1943 to 1948. Its pages carry eyewitness and participant testimony in three groups: memoirs of Armenian Resistance fighters and their fallen comrades; data on the numbers, biographies, and commemorations of Armenian combatants; and reports on Armenians returning from Nazi death camps and the community's efforts to rehabilitate former prisoners.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  19. 2025

    The Problem of Armenian Origins in the Light of Recent Archaeogenetic Data

    Palyan, Aram and Petrosyan, Armen

    Marshals the latest archaeogenetic evidence to re-examine the origins and formation of the Armenian people. The authors argue that, whatever the location of the early Indo-European homeland, the late Indo-European homeland formed in the steppe and forest-steppe of Eastern Europe between the Volga and the Dniester. Genetic data show migration across the Caucasus into the South Caucasus and the Armenian Highland from the mid-third millennium BC, whose descendants created the Trialeti-Vanadzor, Sevan-Artsakh, Van-Urmia and Lchashen-Metsamor cultures. Even at the end of Urartu (7th–6th c. BC) the population of the land of Etiuni still carried roughly 75% steppe patrilineal DNA, which the authors read as support for the Etiuni hypothesis of Armenian ethnogenesis.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  20. 2025

    The Socio-Economic Picture and Political Situation of the Eastern Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and 1840s (According to the English Diplomat James Brant)

    Vardanyan, Sona

    Uses the travelogues and consular reporting of the English diplomat James Brant to reconstruct the socio-economic and political situation of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and 1840s. Vardanyan draws out the demographic shifts working against the Armenian population and reads the power dynamics between Armenians and Kurds in the region.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  21. 2025

    The Struggle between Urartu and Assyria during the Reign of Rusa, Son of Sarduri: According to the Research of C.F. Lehmann-Haupt

    Sargsyan, Vahe

    During their 1898–1899 journey through the Armenian Highlands and northern Mesopotamia, C.F. Lehmann-Haupt and the chemist W. Belck explored the presumed region of Musasir, the spiritual centre of Biainili-Urartu, and copied the Topzawa inscription. Lehmann-Haupt treated this bilingual text as a primary source for reconstructing the conflict between Urartu and Assyria under Rusa, son of Sarduri. Sargsyan shows that several of the pioneer Urartologist's reconstructions remain contested: the identity of the king who commissioned the inscription, the chronology of the events, and the causes and route of Sargon II's 714 BCE campaign.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  22. 2025

    Կոմիտասն իր նամակների հայելիում (Komitas in the Mirror of His Letters)

    Mnatsakanyan, Yeva

    Treats Komitas: composer, musicologist, folklore collector, teacher, and founder of the Armenian school of composition, as a national symbol whose fate is read as the fate of the Armenian people. The article analyzes the worldview and psychological registers of his letters and the philosophy condensed in them, presenting the vardapet as both a son of his environment and a world-recognized musician with a dramatic inner life. Its aims are to use the letters as an instrument for revealing an inner world, to interpret their key messages from the standpoint of present-day artistic consciousness, and to trace intercultural communication through them. The author concludes that the letters do not fully unlock Komitas, but confirm that he purified, notated, and created 'the majestic homeland of our song.'

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  23. 2025

    "One Unalterable and Indivisible Nature" Through the "Ineffable Union": Armenian Christology and Materiality

    Sheklian, Christopher

    Sheklian brings the Miaphysite Christology of the Armenian Apostolic Church into dialogue with contemporary 'new materialist' theory. He argues that ancient debates over the natures of Christ shaped the very Western philosophical vocabulary of nature, essence, and substance, and that the Armenian tradition — through the term բնութիւն (bnut'iwn) and thinkers such as Khosrovik the Translator, Step'anos Siwnets'i, and Nerses Shnorhali — offers a distinct conceptual configuration of materiality that unsettles Chalcedonian assumptions. He connects these theological differences to present-day philosophical and ecological stakes.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  24. 2025

    A(nother) Urartian Royal Bowl Property of Sarduri (I), Son of Lutipri, from Karmir-blur, Stored in Hermitage Museum

    Novikova, Anna et al.

    Reinterprets a ribbed bronze bowl from Karmir-blur inscribed with the name of King Sarduri as the earliest known bronze inscription of Sarduri, son of Lutipri, the first Urartian sovereign. A second Hermitage bowl bearing a similar inscription shares the same features and is likewise attributed to Sarduri I. Together the two vessels form the missing link between the earliest ribbed bowl and the later plain bronze vessels associated with subsequent Urartian kings. The article thus revises the chronology of Urartian royal metalwork and inscriptions.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access

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