Archive for February, 2011
In the autumn of 1913, Noel and Harold Buxton travelled through the Armenian regions of Persia, Russia and Turkey, the next year publishing their account as Travels and Politics in Armenia (Smith, Elder & Co, 1914). “Tiflis”, they write, “is best known as the ancient capital of the Georgian kingdom, but today it is as much the capital of the Armenians as of any other race, for it has been the Armenians who have built up this modern city.”
Tiflis, now Tbilisi, was indeed in many ways primarily an Armenian city until 1921, when it became the capital of the Soviet Republic of Georgia; many of those Armenians who had not already left by that date moved to the neighbouring Republic of Armenia, ostensibly independent again.
The Armenian component of the population of Russian Tiflis grew throughout the 19th century: 16,807 in 1834, 28,488 in 1865, 37,610 in 1876 and 55,553 in 1897. It is true that the percentage started to fall with the rapid growth of the city (from 74% in 1803 down to the 38% at the time of the 1897 Russian census). However, this reflects the position held by Armenians in Tiflis society.
Whereas both the nobility and the working class in Tiflis were Georgian, and the Georgian working class mushroomed with immigration from the surrounding villages, the city’s middle class was overwhelmingly Armenian. They were skilled craftsmen, the merchants controlling the caravansarais, the owners of the hotels and cafes, and, as the century wore on, the financiers and industrialists largely responsible for developing the Tiflis economy during the rapid expansion it enjoyed under Imperial Russian rule. International trade, always significant in Tiflis, flourished even more with the opening of the railway to the Black Sea port of Poti (1872) and the Caspian Sea port of Baku (1883). Armenians resided in all quarters of the town but especially in Sololaki and Havlabar (Avlabari) districts.
Not all Tiflis Armenians had family names which one would instantly recognise today as being distinctively Armenian. Sometimes surname endings were Russified, to -ev, -oev or -ov (for example, Kevorkov and Pitoev). Names could be transliterated into the Latin alphabet in various ways – for example, a name could be spelt Alikhanov, Alikhanyan, Alikhanian or Alikhanyants. The suffix -ants was common in fact – for example, in names such as Sarkisiants, more familiar today as Sarkisian. Occasionally, you may see the suffix -ant or -antz.
Bluebird Research may be able to assist you with Armenian family history research in Tbilisi or elsewhere in Georgia. Please send us full details of the background information you hold and we would be glad to provide an opinion without any charge.
At number 4 New Street in the City of London, not far from Liverpool Street railway station, there is a discreetly elegant door, over which, on the architrave, are the words EZEPOS G BENLIAN in relief.
The brothers Aharon and Ezepos Benlian were Armenian merchants, trading together as A & E Benlian Brothers until their partnership was dissolved in 1904. They specialised in the import of high quality oriental carpets from the Tabriz region of Iran. Tabriz had a sizeable Armenian community and it is likely that there was a branch of the Benlian family residing there, as Aharon and Ezepos appear to have been born, circa 1861 and 1869 respectively, in the town of Caesarea in Cappadocia in the Ottoman Empire (today Kayseri, Turkey). The family also had a Constantinople connection, as Ezepos’s son Edward was born there in about 1899/1900. Quite possibly Ezepos had married his wife Haykanush Evrenian in the Ottoman capital a year or so earlier.
The G in Ezepos G Benlian is for Garabed, being the name of his father. This pattern of patronymic use was often taken over into the diaspora, at least by the first and sometimes the second generation of immigrant Armenians. Thus Ezepos’s son was named Edward Ezepos Benlian. If you are a family historian researching your Armenian roots and come to the point where you have identified the immigrant ancestors but do not the name(s) of their father(s), it can be safely assumed that the middle name of a child will be the forename of the father (although quite likely heavily anglicised in the process). A frequently encountered exception is of course Der or Ter, which may look like a middle name but is a common Armenian surname prefix denoting descent from an ancestor who was a priest. In this regard, many ecclesiastical titles are placed between forename and family name in Armenian usage, so that, for example, the Vartabed in the name Dikran Vartabed Hovhanesian is not a middle name but a clerical rank.
Ezepos renounced his previous Ottoman citizenship and became a naturalised British subject in 1910. He died in 1925 and his son in 1973. The Benlian family seems to have prospered in London, having addresses at different times both in the City and in suburbs such as Harlesden, Harrow and Wimbledon. New Street, formerly a hub of carpet and rug traders, in common with much of the immediate vicinity of Devonshire Square in EC2, has been gentrified; no. 4 is now the address of a legal practice.
And what of Caesarea? The Armenian community must now be very small, although the church of Surp Krikor still stands and apparently is the sole remaining functional Armenian church in eastern Anatolia. I have a copy of a Turkish language book published on the history of nearby Talas in the 19th century* (the same author has published a companion volume on Kayseri). Both towns were ethnically mixed in the 19th century, with a thriving population of Armenians and Greeks as well as Turks.
The Talas book includes a listing of the property owners of the town, arranged by mahalle (quarter) and street, with the valuation of their houses for taxation purposes. The information is based on taxation registers circa 1875 held in the local archives. These original tax records would have been written in Osmanlı Arabic script and names have been transliterated into the version of the Latin alphabet used in modern Turkish. Nearly all Christians, both Greeks and Armenians, had, or were given in official records, surnames ending in the patronymic suffix -oğlu (such as Onasıoğlu and Gülbenkoğlu – in fact, there was a mahalle of Talas named Gülbenk, in which many Gülbenkoğlu had homes including the family of Kalus Gülbenkoğlu a.k.a. Calouste Gulbenkian, the oil baron, art collector and philanthropist). Often only the full combination of forename and family name distinguishes them, and then not always successfully, from their Turkish neighbours – forenames such as Karabet (Garabed) and Kirkor (Krikor) are usually identifiable as Armenian, but other names could be those of Greeks or Turks. In the Talas book there are no Benlian entries. It would be interesting to obtain a copy of the Kayseri volume and see whether the family of Ezepos G Benlian is in evidence.
* 19. Yüzyilda Talas, by Hüseyin Cömert, pub Mazaka Yayıncılık, 2010
Many of the towns on the coast of Istria had Italian populations, but the rural population was predominantly Croatian. Here the traditional peasant society survived until about 1930. By “peasant society” is meant a largely self-sufficient farming or smallholding community, with a relatively limited cash economy, still living close to the land and according to cultural and religious norms which had evolved relatively little over the centuries. This is not to say that outlooks and experience were necessarily narrow, as we shall see in a moment when we look at emigration.
For a family historian with ancestral roots in Istria, it is important to remind oneself regularly of the larger political context, as this affected many of the events in even the smallest communities. Istria was part of Austro-Hungary from 1814 until the outbreak of WW1; Italian from 1918 until 1943; and of course Yugoslav thereafter. The Austro-Hungarian era in Istria is sometimes regarded with some nostalgia. Croatia was subject to Hungarian rule, it is true, but in the villages of Istria there was peace and no interference in daily life. This was not the case during the Italian occupation, when the peninsula was subject to increasing attempts at Italianisation – for example, Italian was made the sole language of government, the courts and business, while from 1930 there was pressure upon Croatians to Italianise their names.
These political changes affected emigration from Istria too. In general, there was restricted cultivable land, poor soil and limited opportunity. Accordingly, many peasants became part-time fishermen or sailors – often becoming cabin boys at a very young age (11 or 12) and working at sea until land was made available in the village by inheritance upon the death of the father. Others migrated elsewhere in Europe or to USA to find work and earn money – this could be temporary, during which they remitted money home before returning themselves, or permanent if they decided to settle.
During the Austrian era, the ports of Trieste and Rijeka (Fiume in Italian) attracted many migrants from across Istria. When these ports became Italian, they were cut off from their former natural hinterland of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and started to stagnate. This meant that, although Istrian villagers were still residing in the same country as the ports, their opportunities beyond the village began to narrow. This problem was compounded by the Italians making emigration more difficult and the US imposing post-War immigration quotas. In consequence, the long slow decline of Istrian villages can be traced to the 1920s.
The Catholic parish of Sveta Lucija na Skitači is situated south of Labin (also known as Albona in Italian) on the eastern side of the Istrian peninsula. Three small Croatian villages within the parish – Drenje, Ravni and Škvaranska – were the focus of a detailed demographic study by Rudolph Bell*.
The parishioners in Sveta Lucija belonged to a relatively small number of extended families. Rudolph Bell calculated that the more than 500 individuals born in the parish between 1852 and 1914 carried only 15 surnames between them. The commonest names in each settlement were Blažina in Drenje, Škopac in Ravni, and Tomičić in Škvaranska. It should be noted that in the parish registers and status animarum the local surnames were often given in Italianised form, even prior to the Italian occupation: for example, Škopac may appear as Scopaz and even as Scopazzi.
Bell’s microhistory of this small society, using family reconstruction methodologies based on the same records which a genealogist would use when researching their family tree, produced some very interesting outcomes.
From birth and baptism records, he discovered a mid-summer dip in births, lasting from mid-June to mid-August. The annual peak was in April, with a lesser spike in September.
In a previous blog I wrote about seasonality in marriage, focusing on Eastern Orthodox communities in the Balkans. It is interesting that in a Roman Catholic country like Croatia the same basic patterns prevailed. Bell found the same influences – ecclesiastical and agricultural – producing the same peaks and troughs. In Sveta Lucija, marriages were rare both during Lent and Advent and throughout the high intensity workload on the land from April to September. Marriages tended to be celebrated after Martinje (St Martin’s Day) on 11th November, with a lesser peak in February before Lent.
Bell calculated that the mean age at marriage was 27 for men and 24 for women; that what demographers call premarital conception was responsible for between 20% and 25% of all first-born children of marriages; that women traditionally nursed their children for between 12 and 24 months as a form of contraception, and thereby were able to space their children by about three years; and that the average number of children per marriage fell from 6.25 in 1870 to 4.5 circa 1900 to 2.7 in 1930.
Family historians tend to concentrate on the particular, what is individual and specific to their own family. However, it is illuminating to place and understand one’s one family in a larger context and the work of demographers, anthropologists, local and social historians, and others is a great aid in this respect. Nor should the general reader be deterred – not all such works are academic and abstruse. Demographers may be statisticians but they illustrate their work with specific examples and also with anecdotal evidence gathered from personal interviews (oral history). For example, Rudolph Bell comments in passing that the unmarried couples of Sveta Lucija na Skitači sometimes used premarital conception to overcome parental disapproval of marriage – in other words, by presenting the parents with the fait accompli of the young woman’s pregnancy, they could precipitate a marriage which their parents had wanted to delay or prevent.
*See “The Transformation of a Rural Village: Istria 1870-1972”, published in Journal of Social History, vol 7 no 3 (1974).
For the English-speaking family historian with roots in an Eastern European country, reading English-language travelogues from the past is one way to develop a better understanding of the old country. True, travelogues view a country from a single perspective only, that of the privileged outsider who, on his or her travels, is unlikely to see or experience the country as a native does. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be gained from historical travel writing and particular from reading a number of books so as to seek a more rounded composite picture of how a place seemed.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, more recent travel writers rarely seem to be successful in capturing a country. They may be too self-regarding, or unconsciously supercilious, or concerned to avoid seriousness, so that they fall into the category of the ephemeral and lightweight.
There is only a modest literature in English on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so I approached Christopher Deliso’s “Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa” (Haus, 2007) with some excitement. Deliso is an American living in Skopje, married to a Macedonian; his travelogue covers his clockwise trip around the lakes of Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and of course Macedonia itself.
It is probably accurate to say that I was disappointed by the book but, also, that I understood it and found it interesting despite itself. There are facets of the book which are not pleasing: the casual jibes at poor Albanians and their recent history, seemingly in the hope of raising an easy laugh; the over-intrusive self of the author; the way the book loses momentum midway and starts to peter out in an uncertainty as to its purpose and its audience. The author is described as having read Byzantine Studies at Oxford; it is right that a writer wears his or her learning lightly, but little learning makes it through to this book, which is a shame.
But still, the book catches something of the truth of the place. I can say this with confidence, even without having visited Macedonia. I have travelled in neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria and I have seen equivalents of some of the things Deliso describes. More than anything else I think I can sense and respect Deliso’s feeling for Macedonia. There is something compelling about the Balkans, something very attractive; and something not at all what you would think if you relied solely on the media’s perennial accounts of the region (a subject superbly dismantled by Maria Todorova in “Imagining the Balkans”), in fact, quite the opposite. It is the humanity of the people and their way of life. To which one should add the roughness and variety of the natural settings of the Balkans, and the beauty of the Orthodox monasteries and churches, and mosques, in that setting. Finally, of course, countries such as Macedonia have yet to be smothered by the blandness of corporate capitalism and the homogenising spirit of the European Union. For the next 10 or 25 years, they will preserve that particularity which makes them fascinating to someone like Deliso or, for example, Alan Grant, whose Balkanology website better illustrates the compelling draw of the region than anything I could write. I am conscious that, if you are from Western Europe, part of this power is the otherness of the Balkans and that this exoticising of the Balkans is something Todorova also addresses in her work; but it also seems to me that the otherness is real and that recognising and valuing it is a valid experience for a person born and raised somewhere in Australia, Britain or North America.
So read Deliso’s book if you can, accept its limitations, and, if you have roots in this particular corner of the Balkans, try to get out there to see it for yourself.
“You cannot know the feeling of a man who has no home… Perhaps no others can understand the hopeless homesickness of us older Russians.”
“The whole world is open to me… Only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country – Russia.”
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff, New York Evening Post (26 Dec 1933) & “Some Critical Moments in My Career”, Musical Times 71 (June 1930)
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.