Out of Sight, Out of Mind: In Search of the Missing Armenians of Turkish/Ottoman Art Historiography with a Decolonizing Eye

Abstract

One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.1 The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”2