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The Research Repository

  1. 2025

    Հայկական սփյուռքի ձևավորման գործընթացը 1920-ական թվականներին (The Formation Process of the Armenian Diaspora in the 1920s)

    Moskovyan, Lusine

    Examines the situation created after the Armenian Genocide, when a large part of the Armenian population was settled outside the borders of the homeland. The article presents the 'Spiritual Armenia' (Հոգևոր Հայաստան) ideology developed by Dashnaktsutyun figures as the ideological foundation for consolidating the diaspora. It clarifies and analyzes the Armenian term 'սփյուռք' and reviews historians' positions on how the term evolved and was applied in the Armenian context. It then gives a comprehensive picture of the geographic distribution and demographic size of the Armenian diaspora during its formative decade, the 1920s, across the Middle East and the United States.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  2. 2025

    Հայոց ցեղասպանության հիմնական փուլի ընթացքում (1915–1916 թթ.) զոհված հայերի թվաքանակի հաշվումները (Calculations of the Armenian Death Toll during the Main Phase of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1916: Sources, Data, and Methods, 1915–1923)

    Tatoyan, Robert

    Reconstructs how the Armenian death toll was calculated between 1915 and 1923, during and immediately after the extermination campaign. Tatoyan shows the earliest estimates served political and humanitarian ends: publicizing the scale of the Ottoman government's crimes, trying to halt the persecutions, and organizing relief, and that after the war the question resurfaced in diplomatic negotiations over the Armenian Question, chiefly around reparations for human and material losses. Surveying the sources and their methods (Toynbee, Lepsius, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, and estimates derived from them), he finds the most widely accepted contemporary figure for the main phase to be roughly one million: about 600,000 deaths in the 1915 deportations and massacres, and about 400,000 in 1916 in the Syrian and Mesopotamian camps from starvation, disease, and the killings that followed the camps' dissolution.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  3. 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
  5. 2025

    Armenian Parabiblica and their Mediaeval Development and Function

    Stone, Michael E.

    Stone proposes a research methodology for Armenian parabiblical literature. The vast body of texts that grew up around, but outside, the biblical canon. He begins with a call for terminological clarity, noting that 'apocrypha' and 'pseudepigrapha' have both been used loosely and that 'Armenian parabiblical literature' needs proper definition. He then turns to how these texts actually functioned socially, and the part they played in shaping Armenian Christian culture, closing by setting out the research procedure he proposes.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  6. 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
  7. 2025

    Communication Network of the Ararat Plain, Armenia: Geographical, Economic, Political Dimensions (1st Millennium BC – 1st Millennium AD)

    Zardaryan, Mkrtich H.

    Zardaryan reconstructs the road system of the Ararat Plain across two millennia, arguing that the valley's role as the economic hub of the Armenian Highlands was set by geography: its river lines and accessible passes channelled traffic along south-north and east-west axes. With the consolidation of statehood under Urartu the trade-route system expanded sharply, and was inherited and extended by the Ervandid, Artaxian and Arsacid kingdoms; from the sixth century BC these routes integrated into networks reaching the Near East, Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Narrative, archaeological and numismatic evidence confirms their incorporation into the Silk Road. His clinching illustration: five of the six capitals of Classical and Early Medieval Armenia sit in the Ararat Plain.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. 2025

    La première incursion des Mamelouks en Cilicie: D'ʿAyn Djālūt jusqu'à Mari (1260–1266) (The First Mamluk Incursion into Cilicia: From ʿAyn Jalut to Mari)

    Ter-Ghevondian, Vahan

    Covers the six years separating two famous battles, ʿAyn Jalut (1260) and Mari (1266). Armenian, Arab and Syriac historians all report the first Mamluk invasion of Cilicia and the events preceding it, but Ter-Ghevondian examines angles that have not received sufficient attention: the internal conflicts within Cilicia, the role of the Sultanate of Iconium, and the importance of Egyptian espionage, the factors that favoured Mamluk success and Armenian failure. Where ʿAyn Jalut opened a half-century of Mamluk-Mongol struggle over Greater Syria, Mari was the prelude to the long series of incursions that ended in the fall of the last Armenian kingdom. The analysis rests on Grigor of Akner, Smbat Sparapet, Kirakos of Gandzak, Bar Hebraeus and Arabic chroniclers.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  15. 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
  16. 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
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 2025

    Saint Grégoire l'Illuminateur dans l'église de Tigran Honenc' (Saint Gregory the Illuminator in the Church of Tigran Honents)

    Rapti, Ioanna

    Rapti gives a narratological reading of the St Gregory the Illuminator fresco cycle in the thirteenth-century church at Ani founded by the wealthy citizen Tigran Honents. She analyses how the compositions are arranged, how the cycle is structured, and how the episodes vary in size, all in service of constructing Gregory's sanctity. Four phases emerge: the torture; the imprisonment in the pit and the escape; the vision and acclamation, paralleled with the miracle of St Nino; and Gregory's ministry, fulfilled in his ascetic death. Because the cycle builds to a climax around the church door, she argues it is not a plodding transposition of Agathangelos into pictures but a creative appropriation of the hagiographic tradition of the founders of Caucasian Christianity.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  20. 2025

    Stefan Stefanowicz Roszka and the Armenian Catholic Church in Transylvania

    Nagy, Kornél

    Stefan Stefanowicz Roszka (1670–1739), a graduate of the Collegium Urbanum in Rome, was remembered by Transylvania's Armenian community as a good shepherd, and by older Hungarian and Polish historiography as the man who stamped out 'Eastern heresy' and reconverted the Armenians to Catholicism. Nagy shows that modern scholarship has badly undercut that myth. Drawing on previously undiscovered documents from archives in Alba Iulia, Budapest, Esztergom, Rome, Venice, Vienna and the Vatican, he argues that Roszka's real work was to protect the Armenians and their Uniate church from an increasingly aggressive Latinisation policy pushed by the Roman Catholic bishopric of Transylvania.

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  21. 2025

    Step'anos Ōrbēlean et l'inscription de l'église Surb-Karapet de Noravank (Stepanos Orbelean and the Inscription of the Surb Karapet Church at Noravank)

    Augé, Isabelle and Ouzounian, Agnès

    Stepanos Orbelean, the thirteenth-century historian of Syunik, embedded documents, deeds and inscriptions in his chronicle. This article compares two versions of one deed he himself wrote: a long testamentary text preserved as a chapter of the chronicle, and a monumental inscription carved in the Surb Karapet church at Noravank. The authors revise and retranslate the inscription alongside a fresh translation of the chronicle version. Setting the two in parallel, they probe how the historian used his sources and what relationship existed between the now-lost archival documents that served as prototypes, the inscriptions, and the quotations reproduced in the historiography.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  22. 2025

    Sur l'histoire du complexe ecclésiastique de Zuart'noc' (On the History of the Ecclesiastical Complex of Zvartnots)

    Garibian, Nazénie

    The mother church of Zvartnots, St Gregory, was built with its ecclesiastical complex between 643 and 661 and is among the most studied of all medieval Armenian monuments, with a century of scholarship behind it. Even so, scholars keep returning to it with new hypotheses about its name, typology, sculpted decoration and archaeological setting. Garibian re-examines the historical context in which the complex was created, interrogating the primary sources against the archaeological data, and proposes new interpretations of the dating, of the reasons for the foundation, and of the circumstances of the consecration of a complex built to serve as the patriarchal see.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  23. 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
  24. 2025

    The Emergence of Vowel Harmony in Armenian Dialects: Turkic Influence, Endogeny, or Both?

    Hopkins, Elizabeth and Vaux, Bert

    Many non-standard varieties of modern Armenian have vowel harmony, and it has been assumed this was acquired through contact with Turkic. Surveying the synchrony and typology of Armenian vowel harmony, the historical changes that could have produced it, and new data on the origins of backness and rounding harmony in Oghuz, the authors find Turkish influence but reject a straightforward copying account: Armenian and Turkish harmony differ too much. They argue harmony arose from a mix of internal and external factors: vowel shifts in certain Armenian dialects plus universal biases created the preconditions by the eleventh century AD, before Turkic speakers arrived in the Armenian homeland.

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