In this interview, archaeologist and medievalist Kate Franklin discusses with us her recent monograph Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia as well as broader questions about how to deal conscientiously with material objects. While Franklin has extensively worked on the time and space of the Middle Ages in Armenia, her anthropological and archaeological work and research interests purposedly aim at incorporating several avenues of thinking inspired by recent developments in cultural theory and environmental humanities where questions of matter and materiality are central and decisive for understanding the ways in which people and object affect one another both politically and intimately.

Carel Bertram’s evocative book, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory, tells the story of Armenians living in the diaspora who travel to contemporary Turkey to seek the homes and villages that their parents and grandparents were forced to abandon during the genocide of 1915. Through the stories of individual travelers, Bertram relates experiences that are at once unique and yet universal, particular to the descendants of the survivors of the genocide of ...

Vardges Sureniants’ Trampled Sanctuary is among his most celebrated works of the 1890s. As a contemporary representation of the Hamidian Massacres, the painting draws attention to the fate of material objects, and to acts of desecration and material destruction. Inspired by Sureniants’engagement with material culture, this essay offers a close formal reading of Trampled Sanctuary, which draws out the ways he confronts the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. Sureniants’ representations should be understood not only as visual documentation of destroyed artifacts but as a totalizing scene of wreckage comprising almost the entire repertoire of Armenian art. His use of an impressionistic style and his simultaneous insistence on the specificity of each painted object invite us to take close account of the destroyed materials, while, at the same time, diverting our attention to the strokes and daubs of paint which seem to obstruct such careful inspection. Pictorial details lie just beyond the viewer’s perception, hinting at, but never delineating clearly, a catalogue of objects, monuments, and texts, producing a tension between the documentation of artifacts and his creation of them anew. Trampled Sanctuary demonstrates how the painterly surface of the canvas, and the material culture represented upon it, offer meditations on loss and responsibility, image-making and commemoration.

The themed issue originated from the idea that material objects foster conversations across different disciplines, epochs, geographical and paradigmatic terrains, and among various agents and interlocutors. In this introduction we present some of our ideas and aspirations on what it may mean to concentrate on material objects within Armenian Studies and why we contend that it may be productive and inspirational for the field. To this end, we bring forth questions raised by theoretical works in the field of material objects and materiality at large, as well as point to some of the existing literature in Armenian Studies and the works included in this issue that utilize the methodological lenses of material objects and materiality. In other words, the main instigator here is the dialogical and dynamic relationship that material objects spark.

Lori Khatchadourian is an archaeologist working at the intersection of methodological approaches emanating from social anthropology, critical heritage studies, and of course also archaeology. Geographically, her research has focused on Armenia and the South Caucasus. We sat down with Dr. Khatchadourian to discuss at length the role of material objects and the material world in her research, her ongoing interests in material culture and its impact on social life, as well as her public-facing, engaged research through the Caucasus Heritage Watch project. We talked about the excavation of (hidden or neglected) objects, the stories that can be told and the new inspirations that can be drawn from them. We also addressed the specific yet diverse ways in which the materiality of the past (be it Persian antiquity or socialist modernity) shapes contemporary political, economic, and ethical questions and relations, yet, at the same time, how being attentive to the present enables to grasp and to reconsider the remnants and debris of the past in novel ways.

This article analyses the contribution by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi to the exhibition Armenity, curated by Adelina Cüberyan v. Fürstenberg for the Armenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art in 2015. Reflecting upon two pieces from the artists, and putting them in relation with both the location on the San Lazzaro Island, and the celebration of the one-hundred-year commemoration of the Armenian genocide, the article proposes that the testimonial video Return to Khodorciur (1986) and the water-coloured Armenian Roll (1989-1991) materially substantiate the memory of the stories they tell. The features of the electronic image and the aesthetic of the video-testinomy in Return to Khodorciur, and the object per se as well as the reference to Armenian fables in Armenian Roll are able to render the generational legacy passed from Gianikian’s father to Ricci Lucchi and him. I suggest that the works on display offer to the viewers what I term image-objects, that is, images crafted by the artists to substantiate the material dimension of remembrance. At the same time, such images thematise the tension between erasure and presence, oppression and resistance, to the extent that producing them becomes a strategy to give shape to the artists’ effort to exist and resist – to r-exist.

The Missing Pages revolves around one material object, telling in riveting narrative prose the story of a medieval Four Gospels manuscript, beginning with its creation in Hromkla in 1256 and concluding with the settlement of a court case between the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Armenia over ownership of the manuscript’s canon tables (eight folios), which were removed from the codex during the Armenian Genocide. The book alternates between d...

The invention of photography in the 19th century was widely admired and acclaimed owing, among other things, to the camera’s perceived objectivity, based on its ability to depict reality far more accurately than previous means of representation. Such an attribution, however, overshadowed the fact that the camera is actually a tool of exclusion, omitting from its frame anything deemed unworthy of being seen or recorded. As a result, the clarity and truthfulness a photograph is accredited with...

The history of Armenian education in the Ottoman Empire has been sorely understudied. As a result, misconceptions abound in Armenian studies about how precisely Armenian children were educated. This article strives to debunk two prevailing myths about nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenian education circulating in scholarship today: (1) that the Armenian National Constitution and its National Education Council were transformational forces in the reform of Ottoman Armenian education and (2) that the Armenian National Constitution and Armenian schools were powerful vehicles for the valorization and spread of Modern Western Armenian from the start.

This article places the Miaphysite Christology of the Armenian Apostolic Church and its broader theological reflection in conversation with contemporary theoretical discussions about matter and materiality. Theology, the article argues, and Christological thought in particular, is implicated in the very foundations of conceptual and philosophical debates about materiality. Western Christian theologies have largely influenced the development of ideas about materiality, which are entangled with how we think about matter, nature, the environment, and the agency of humans and objects. An Armenian Miaphysite theology articulates a subtly but importantly different understanding of the relationship between the material and the spiritual from these theologies. Therefore, the article argues, Armenian theology unsettles many of these social scientific and philosophical debates by reimagining the conceptual configuration at the heart of dominant understandings of materiality.