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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:terminology
Showing 1 of 1 matching publications (200 total) · catalogue updated 2026-07-22
Journal ArticleOpen Access

Medz Yeghern, the Silenced Name: Language, Politics, and the Armenian Genocide

Matiossian, Vartan, 2022
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 26–48 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0028

Matiossian traces the genealogy of the word yeghern and the shift of its primary meaning from 'evil' to 'crime,' 'massacre' and 'genocide' over the past century and a half. He shows that a nineteenth-century learned conflation of the Classical Armenian homophones yeghern (crime) and yegher (lamentation) produced the secondary sense 'tragedy, calamity,' collapsing cause and consequence into one word. Because yeghern is used only with active verbs, he argues, it indicates cause and points to the perpetrator. That ambiguity was then exploited in Turkey and the United States, with interpretive denial adopting 'Medz Yeghern' precisely to avoid the word 'genocide' by rendering it 'Great Catastrophe.' He proposes the correct literal translation is 'Great Crime.'

denialterminologyMedz Yeghernrecognition politicsWestern Armenian philology
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.