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The Research Repository

Armenian scholarship open to all

A digital library of verified, open scholarship on all things Armenian, including Armenian history, the Genocide, Artsakh, language, and the diaspora.

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What is being done to Armenian monuments in Artsakh now is not new and it is not vandalism. Seda Parsamyan traces the demolition policy of the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and puts the legal question directly: when a state sets out to erase a people's churches, at what point does that become cultural genocide? She works through how the concept has been defined, redefined and quietly narrowed by people who would rather it did not apply. The frame she builds is the one now being reached for over Artsakh.

Mass Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage during the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896)

Parsamyan, Seda A. · 2023 · International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5–34 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0043
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Topic:Safavid Iran
Showing 1 of 1 matching publications (200 total) · catalogue updated 2026-07-22
Journal ArticleOpen Access

The Conversion of Christian Armenians to Islam in Iran in the Early Modern Period

Kostikyan, Kristine, 2026
Religions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2026), art. 31 (MDPI); DOI 10.3390/rel17010031

From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, much of the Armenian population of the Armenian Highland and the South Caucasus lived under the Safavids, Afsharids and Qajars, whose rulers repeatedly encouraged conversion to Shi'i Islam. Beyond outright coercion, Kostikyan identifies a set of structural pressures, focusing on the Shi'i inheritance law applied to Armenians from the 1620s onward, which became a major driver of conversion. Drawing on contemporary documents, she reconstructs the consequences of that law and the legal strategies Armenians used to protect property from the claims of relatives who had converted. She also documents the efforts of Armenian Church leaders to limit its damage and to obtain royal decrees against it.

Safavid IranArmenians under Islamic ruleShi'i inheritance lawconversion and assimilationArmenian Church
English

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How this repository is built

What is in this repository?

Peer-reviewed and institutional scholarship on Armenian subjects — history, the Armenian Genocide, Artsakh, language and literature, the church, and the diaspora — in any language and from any country. Journal articles, books, book chapters, theses and institute publications are all in scope. Entries are chosen for what they contribute to an Armenian student's understanding, not for how recent or how famous they are.

What does 'verified' mean here?

It means a person opened the link and checked the record against the publisher's own page: the title, the authors, the venue, the volume and pages, and the identifier. The date of that check is shown on each entry's page. Where an entry has no date shown, no check has been logged for it yet, and the catalogue does not claim one.

What is the summary on each entry?

A short account of what the publication does, followed by notes on what it offers different readers — a student writing a term paper, an academic, someone reading for the community, someone new to the subject. They are meant to tell you what a piece is useful for, not only what it argues.

How do I suggest a publication, or report an error?

Use the 'Suggest a publication' link at the foot of the directory. The same address takes corrections — a broken link, a wrong page range, a misattributed author. Corrections are checked against the publisher's record before an entry changes.