Journal ArticleOpen Access
Vardanyan, Gevorg · Hakobyan, Narine, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 54–80 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0063
Examines Ottoman denial of the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) inside the United States, centered on Ottoman Minister Alexander Mavroyeni Bey and his collaborators. The Ottoman legation in Washington reframed reports of anti-Armenian violence as justified responses to 'sedition,' and the authors argue this was not merely exported internal propaganda but a distinct transnational strategy built for American audiences. Mavroyeni Bey drew analogies to US treatment of Native Americans, appealed to American sovereignty, and worked with the American Muslim convert Alexander Russell Webb to delegitimize Armenian-American activism and discredit missionaries. Armenian-Americans were the campaign's primary target because of their grassroots organizing and their influence on humanitarian mobilization. The study pushes the history of denial back from 1915 into the Hamidian era.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Maranci, Christina, 2025
Études arméniennes contemporaines, No. 16 (2025), 'Objects of Thought', pp. 73–97 (Bibliothèque Nubar / AGBU); DOI 10.4000/15gme
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.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Parsamyan, Seda A., 2023
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5–34 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0043
Parsamyan argues that the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Ottoman Empire began with the conquest of Western Armenia and has continued to the present, with Armenian culture repeatedly destroyed outright or 'neutralised' by successive Turkish regimes. The first part reviews how genocide theorists have defined and redefined 'cultural genocide,' including attempts to revise or rename the concept. The second sets out a chronology of the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. She then gives a detailed account of the demolition policy pursued during the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, assessing whether it is best characterized as vandalism or as cultural genocide.
