Archive for January, 2012
I have written previously about the insights which historic travelogues can provide for family historians and others interested in Old World homelands. It is true that they may be partisan, and prey to a whole host of prejudices and received opinions about places and peoples. They may also be tantalising – one wishes that the author had dwelt longer on a particular subject, or written in greater detail about a place that is of especial interest to the reader but receives only a passing mention from the author. But by their very nature these books were produced by outsiders, and therefore tend to be detached and unsentimental; they are written with fresh eyes keen to see and to compare with what they know; and it is rare that ones come away at the end of such travel-writing without an enlarged sense of what the place was like in the past.
I have just finished reading Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, which was published originally in 1881 but is now widely available as a scanned print-on-demand volume (my own copy is from Elibron Classics, which has a nice range of historic travel writings). Tozer’s name alone is surely enough to identify him as a Victorian gent with an interest in the classics and antiquities. More specifically, he was a graduate of Oxford, a clerk in holy orders, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His main intellectual sphere of interest was Greece and the decaying Ottoman Empire.
Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor was the fruit of Tozer’s travels from July to September 1879, in other words very shortly after the famine of 1874 and the Russo-Turkish war of 1877/78. His book is interesting from a number of different perspectives – as a testament to a type of 19th century English gentleman, now all but extinct, and their manners abroad; as a record of the distressed state of the region in the late 1870s; for its descriptions of places and peoples met along the way, including typical habitations and features of agriculture; and for oddities such as manna and fat-tailed sheep.
To me it is also interesting for its definition of Armenia. I have tended to use fairly interchangeably the terms “Anatolia” and “Asia Minor” (which may be regarded respectively as Turkish and Greek concepts) to represent the entire geographical area of modern Turkey. Not so Tozer. For him, Asia Minor or Anatolia has a clear meaning; at a certain point travelling west to east, it gives way to Armenia; just as the latter segues into Kurdistan to the south and what might be called Pontus running along the southern seaboard of the Black Sea. More specifically, what separates Asia Minor from Armenia is the mountain range called the Anti-Taurus, or Aladağlar in Turkish. On the western side lie towns such as Kaiserieh (Turkish Kayseri) and Sivas which, although having an Armenian population as well as Turkish and Greek, are not in Armenia. Once you cross the Anti-Taurus you reach Armenia – ergo, the towns of Kharput (Turkish Elâzığ), Mush (Muş) and Erzeroum (Erzurum) are in Armenia. This is not to say that the towns are exclusively Armenian, for they were not – indeed, in Kharput, for example, Tozer estimates that there were only 500 Armenian households against up to 4,500 Turkish households. Rather, the towns were the outposts and centres of Ottoman rule; while the countryside was predominantly Armenian (Tozer writes that “the villages in the plain are almost entirely occupied by Armenians”) and here as everywhere it is the country which defines the national character of a region. Incidentally, many American-Armenians have immigrant ancestors who give “Kharput” (or a variant such as Harput, Kharberd, Kharpert etc) as their place of origin on passenger lists and manifests, petitions for naturalisation etc – it is important to exercise caution and not to assume that the ancestor was from the town itself rather than one of the multitude of Armenian villages in its catchment area.
Even in Armenia by Tozer’s definition, the Armenians “do not form an absolute majority of the population”. As Tozer states, “bad government” has led to much emigration, amplified by the recent war which drove Turkish Armenians into Russian Armenia. Moreover, Circassians had settled in Armenia after fleeing the Russian Empire during and following the Russo-Circassian Wars, and Kurds were pushing north and occupying former Armenian villages, further affecting the balance of population. Nevertheless, by rights the Republic of Armenia today should extend west, a third of the way across eastern Turkey, to Kharput. That it does not is the fault of multiple factors, principle among them the 1915 Genocide but also including the successive abandonment of the Armenian people by all the victorious Allies and Soviet Russia after WW1.
23rd to 29th January 2012 was Holocaust Memorial Week. It is fitting that this week the French Senate passed a bill which will make denial of a different Holocaust – the Armenian genocide of 1915 – illegal in France.
Imagine if, more than 65 years after the fact, the German or Austrian state denied the Holocaust. It’s unthinkable. Although in neither case was the state apparatus entirely cleansed of Nazis and their sympathisers, responsibility for the Shoah was accepted, reparation was made, and laws enacted which make Holocaust denial a criminal offence (as the pea-brained British historian David Irving found out during his 13 months in an Austrian gaol).
Yet nearly 100 years have passed since the Turkish state, in its then guise of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, perpetrated the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians, and still the Turkish state, academia and society generally refuse not just to accept responsibility but even to acknowledge the historic fact of the Genocide.
The Ottoman Empire was corrupt and incompetent but at least it was multinational and, for the most part, despite systemic discrimination embodied in law, in practice it was not always intolerant of minorities and other races and religions within its borders. The modern Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, was built upon Turkish nationalist and supremacist foundations. Turkey has tried to cleanse its territory of other peoples, through violence, expulsion and coercion. After the Armenians and Greeks were neutralised in Turkey, the only really large minority group remaining on its territory are the Kurds, who retain their identity despite more than eight decades of Turkish state persecution. The Kurds do not yet have a state of their own, nor do they have influential friends in USA or elsewhere prepared to support their rights. However, one can expect this to happen in time and Turkey’s reaction then will be interesting. In the meantime, the centenary of the Armenian genocide approaches in 2015 and one can expect further and ever more strident denials emanating from Ankara.
To start the year, here is a selection of eight books recommended for family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus:
Armenia
The Crossing Place, by Philip Marsden, 1993. This is subtitled “A Journey among the Armenians”. Marsden travels across the Armenian communities of the Middle-East and Eastern Europe to the Republic of Armenia but it would be wrong to think of this book simply as a travelogue, as it is more a reflection upon the survival of Armenia and the meaning of Armenian-ness in the Old World. Of course it touches upon the 1915 Genocide but equally it highlights the determined persistence and endurance of Armenian life.
Bosnia
Bosnia: A Cultural History, by Ivan Lovrenović, 2001. Most English-language books about Bosnia tend to be written from an outside perspective and to pontificate about the 1992-95 War. This book is one of the refreshing exceptions to that trend and is recommended reading for anyone with roots, whether Croat, Jewish, Muslim or Serb, in this part of the continent.
Greece
Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, by Juliet du Boulay, 1974. I like reading anthropological and ethnographical works for the insight they give into the everyday lives and mindsets of a people. This book covers every aspect of the lives of the villagers of “Ambeli” (a pseudonym), a remote hamlet on the island of Euboea (Evia). There is still continuity despite changing times, and this work will give the family historian a profound sense of the lives of their ancestors in rural Greece and, of course, of how their distant cousins back in the old land continued to live well into the latter half of the 20th century.
Latvia
Walking Since Daybreak, Modris Eksteins, 1999. This is a family story written by a Canadian Latvian academic but, at the same time, a history of Latvia in the first half of the 20th century and a rare view into the lives of the officially recognised Displaced Persons, those individuals and families who for one reason or another found their way into UN relief camps in Occupied defeated Austria, Germany and Italy in the period 1945-52.
Lithuania
The Lithuanians in Scotland, by John Millar, 1998. Unlike all the other books I have chosen for this list, this one is more about the lives of an Eastern European people in their host land than their native land. This book is an easy read and very good on the lives of Scottish Lithuanians and the difficulties they experienced in Scotland (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and being mistaken for Poles). As the title suggests, though, it will not give you much on the home country Lithuania (which was of course part of Imperial Russia at the time of emigration).
Poland
I might have chosen one of several works by the tremendous contemporary writer Andrzej Stasiuk. I have selected Dukla (1997). It’s imaginative non-fiction, reflections on the nature of being in the remote rural and mountainous Beskidy regions of Poland’s Podkarpackie province (once part of the Austro-Hungarian Galicia kronland). There are satellite dishes and there are motor cars, but there is also a strong sense that, beneath the superficial changes of modernisation and despite the impositions of the Communist era, peasant life in this part of the country at the end of the 20th century continued pretty much as was from previous centuries.
Russia
I couldn’t choose between two Great Russian Novels in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These are Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959) and Vasily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter (1994). The former is the greater work of art, but both cover a vast sweep of Russian history in the 20th century and capture the Russian experience in all its daunting multiplicity.
Serbia
A Serbian Village, by Joel M Halpern, 1956. This is subtitled “Social and Cultural Change in a Yugoslav Community”. While this might sound like a dry academic book, the author, an anthropologist, writes in fascinating detail about the particularity of daily life, culture and customs in the village of Orašac. Although by the 1950s life in the Šumadija region had already started to embrace modernity, there is still enough of traditional rural Serbia intact to make this book a great insight into the lives of peasant ancestors from continental Serbia.