Archive for the ‘armenian’ Category
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
An average American or British person knows little about Eastern Europe. Given an outline map of Europe, it is unlikely that they would be able to confidently fill in the names of all nation states across the region. In speech or in thought, they might confuse the Baltic and the Balkans, or Slovakia with Slovenia, and very probably Moldavia and Moldova. Head further east to the Caucasus and even more people would struggle to locate and identify the Russian breakaway republics or the independent states such as Armenia.
On a map, the Republic of Armenia appears tiny and landlocked, squeezed between neighbouring but not always neighbourly Azerbaijan and Georgia. This is a remnant of a much greater land area that was and, to Armenians, still is Armenia. There is no precise parallel in Europe. However, for those familiar with Partitioned Poland, a comparison can be drawn at the beginning of the 19th Century. At that date, previously independent Poland was carved up between the three empires of Austria, Prussia and Russia. At the same time, the land of Armenia was situated within the territory of the Ottoman, Persian and Russian Empires. The difference between Poland and Armenia is that in regaining its independence in the 20th century Poland recovered significant historical territory, while Armenia was reduced to its present much shrunken state.
It is important for Armenian family historians to realise that it is unlikely that their ancestors lived within the present borders of Armenia. For most, to visit Armenia is not to visit the land of their ancestors.
So where is Armenia, the Armenia which generated the global diaspora?
At the end of the 20th Century, only a small part of historic Armenia still lay in Persia, as the Ottoman and Russian Empires had expanded at its expense. However, those Armenians in Persia lived, relatively speaking, a less troubled existence. There were (and still are) significant Armenian communities in, for example, the cities of Tabriz and in the New Julfa district of Isfahan. Moreover, during the multiple troubles which afflicted the Armenian nation, Persia occasionally became a place of refuge.
The majority of Armenians resided in Ottoman Turkish Western Armenia. In English-language diaspora documents, such as American census returns, this is likely to appear as “Turkish Armenia” (or simply as “Ottoman Empire” or “Turkey” or “Turkey in Asia”). This is to contrast it with Russian Eastern Armenia (“Russian Armenia” or “Russia” on census returns). The border between these two regions shifted with the Russian advance south into and beyond the Caucasus. Armenians lived across Transcaucasia including in what are now Georgia and Azerbaijan – in fact, the Armenian communities in Tiflis (modern Georgian Tbilisi) and in Baku (now Azerbaijan) were larger and more dynamic than that in Yerevan, today’s capital but then only a comparative backwater. The most significant forward push of Russia was in 1878, when it subsumed the easternmost section of Turkish Western Armenia, including the towns of Ardahan and Kars. Russian retained this territory officially until 1921.
It is impossible to read Armenian history without a rising sense of indignation at injustice or, as Philip Marsden wrote in The Crossing Place, becoming partisan. Events in the 19th Century had already displaced many Armenians. The wars between Russia and Persia in 1826-28 and between Russia and the Ottomans in 1828/29 led to Armenian emigration into Transcaucasia – an estimated 45,000 from Persia and 100,000 from the Ottoman Empire. The 1877/78 Russo-Turkish War resulted in another 25,000 or so Armenians removing to Transcaucasian Armenia. Large-scale Muslim emigration (of Kurds, Turks and others) into regions which had experienced a loss of Armenian population changed the demographic balance of Armenia. Inter-communal relations began to sour. It is sobering to realise that the Armenian Genocide of 1915 was not a one-off aberration but the logical and pre-planned culmination of Turkish nationalist policy. It was foreshadowed by the co-ordinated state-sponsored Hamidian massacres of 1895-97. Atrocities were committed against Armenians in Constantinople, Cilicia and elsewhere: reliable estimates speak of 200,000 killed, 100,000 forcibly converted to Islam and between 60,000 and 100,000 emigrating. This pattern was repeated in 1909, albeit on a smaller scale. During both these times of massacre, hundreds of Armenian villages were entirely destroyed: it is important to understand that many of these places cannot be located on contemporary maps of Turkey, not because of a change of name (although this happens too, especially in the case of mixed communities) but because the sites remain abandoned.
The 1915 Genocide is well enough known not to need repeating. What compounded the misery for Armenians was that in the post-War situation they were abandoned first by the French in Cilicia, then by the British and US, and finally by the Soviets. Turkey, allied to Germany and defeated in WW1 (just as it was to be in WW2), emerged from the conflict with a larger territory which had grown at the expense of Armenia and had been ethnically cleansed of both Armenians and Greeks. But unlike Germany, the Turkish state, now a NATO partner and candidate EU accession state, has never paid reparations or acknowledged the Genocide. Perhaps this will change with the centenary in 2015.
What all this means for most Armenian genealogists is that researching family history is fraught with difficulty.
For those from Turkish Western Armenia, tracing roots in modern Turkey is (with some few exceptions, such as Constantinople) currently not a realistic proposition, at least in the way in which we customarily conceive of family history research, with ready access to parish registers or other vital records.
For those with roots in Russian Eastern Armenia, including the Kars province, there is more hope: surviving records are held in Yerevan.
For all researchers, the first task is to identify place of origin. The same place names – those of provincial and vilayet centres – appear all too frequently in such Armenian diaspora documents as passenger lists, naturalisation records and censuses. You will see Adana, Bitlis, Dikranagerd, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Kars, Kharpert, Marsovan, Sivas, Trebizond, Van and so on. While in many cases, the immigrant individual or family may indeed have been from the town of this name, in at least as many cases it is likely that they were simply from one of many Armenian villages in its district. In these circumstances, it is vital to exhaust all possible record sources in the immigrant land (such as USA) and collate all family information carefully before even considering turning your attention towards Anatolia and Armenia.
Bluebird Research welcomes enquiries from Armenian family historians. We may not be able to help in all cases, as so often circumstances are not conducive to successful research, but we will gladly provide advice, a second opinion or a free assessment.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, the Armenian population in Greece is thought to have been a mere 350 or 400 but starting to grow steadily. The settled population comprised merchants, of course, but also skilled craftsmen, such as goldsmiths, and their families. Other Armenians had come from Asia Minor – especially from the region of Mush – in the 1880s to work on major construction projects such as the Corinth Canal and the Ottoman Empire’s Thessaloniki to Constantinople railway. However, many of these were seasonal labourers who stayed for a while in, for example, Loutraki or Alexandroupolis (Dedeagatch) and then returned home. Later, many Armenians fleeing massacres in the Ottoman Empire, such as those in 1894 to 1896, used Greece as a temporary staging post on a journey to an ultimate destination elsewhere, such as USA.
The big influx of Armenians came with the collapse of the Greek Megali Idea and the subsequent population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Perhaps 80,000 Armenian refugees arrived in Greece at this time, many from Smyrna and Ionia but also from Cilicia and from Eastern Thrace. Again, many passed through Greece and headed to France or, for that matter, Soviet Armenia, with the result that the Armenian population in Greece started falling from the mid-1920s. This process continued into the 1930s and resumed after the War, during the so-called Nerkaght. This was the repatriation, or gathering in, of diaspora Armenians to Soviet Armenia during the period from June 1946 to December 1948: the official figure was 102,277 “repatriates” worldwide (many of whom would never have set foot before in the Soviet Republic), of whom perhaps 18,000 or more came from Greece.
Of course, other Armenians made a permanent home in Greece, which was generally a welcoming and sympathetic host. The Armenian refugees in the 1920s settled in much the same urban areas as their Greek Orthodox counterparts from Asia Minor. Some city neighbourhoods acquired a distinctively Armenian flavour, such as Sykies in Thessaloniki and both Dourgoti and Kokkinia in Athens. However, these quarters are gradually losing their Armenian character as the population falls, people assimilate and the successful move out to other areas of town.
To read more about the Armenian community in Greece, see the article by Prof Ioannis Hassiotis in Richard Clogg’s excellent Minorities in Greece (Hurst, 2002).
What does it mean for, say, the average Scottish or English person to research their family tree, to take it back three or four or five generations? To find out that ancestors worked as agricultural labourers, or in domestic service, or down coal mines? Probably not such a great deal. Recreational family history is a hobby often undertaken casually, out of curiosity or interest. The emotional and psychological resonance of the research is limited and incidental. Even identifying an ancestor who was a black sheep, or who died in penury in a workhouse, is unlikely to have much of a bearing upon your early 21st century world view and sense of self.
For an American, Canadian or Australian, or for that matter a British person of immigrant stock, the whole undertaking is more likely to hold deeper meaning regarding their understanding of their identity and place in the world. This is especially true where their people as a whole has experienced some kind of profound trauma – think of black family history research, or Jewish, or the Irish in the context of the Famine. Then family history research is part of the process of engaging with and making sense of that past; it is much more likely to be raw and charged.
Michael J Arlen’s book Passage To Ararat (Hungry Mind, 1996) is not about genealogical research per se but is profoundly about family history in the sense of understanding one’s roots. Arlen’s father, Michael Arlen senior, a reasonably successful writer, was born as Dikran Kouyoumjian. His life seems to have been purposed to leave behind and rise above his Armenian roots and he encouraged his son to live first as an Englishman and then as an American. Following the death of his father, Arlen junior felt a pressing need to learn about his father’s background. The Kouyoumjian family came from Ruse in Bulgaria, and previously from Constantinople, and before that from near Ani, NE of Kars*, on the Armenian plateau, now known as Anikoy and situated on the wrong side, the Turkish side, of the Turkish-Armenian border. Arlen does not reconstruct his family tree but researches Armenia and its history from ancient to modern and what it means to be Armenian. And this means confronting the hard fact of the Armenian genocide of 1915/16 at the hands of the Turkish state and understanding too that this was not an isolated wartime aberration but formed part of a determined pattern of events, to eliminate Armenians from what is now Turkey, extending at least as far back as the Ottoman massacres of Armenians in 1894-96 and on to the Turkish ethnic cleansing of Anatolia in 1921/22, culminating in the destruction of Smyrna and deportation of the Armenians, with the Greeks, from Asia Minor.
In the introduction to the 1996 edition of Passage To Ararat, Clark Blaise wrote:
“If there is a difference between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, it might be only this: the Germans have made restitution, both Germany and Israel thrive. The Turks have never apologised, the Armenians have never returned, and both are unhealed.”
And, of course, the Turkish state and too many Turkish academics still persist in vehement denial.
Passage To Ararat is recommended reading for anyone researching Armenian roots.
* The good news for Armenians with ancestors from the Kars region – including the villages surrounding the towns of Artahan and Kaghzvan – is that significant records of interest to family historians for this area are available in Yerevan (Erevan), Armenia. Please contact us for details of professional genealogical research assistance in Armenia.
The Armenian diaspora is global and has been for centuries: as long ago as the 17th and 18th centuries, Armenian populations were well-established not just in the ancestral homelands of Anatolia and the Caucasus, in the then Russian and Ottoman Empires, but also right around the Black Sea, in Persia, much of Europe and India, with outposts all the way east to China and the Far East. Cities as diverse as Constantinople and Smyrna (Istanbul and Izmir in modern Turkey), Lemberg (L’viv in Ukraine), Tiflis (Tbilisi in Georgia) and Baku (in today’s Azerbaijan) had significant Armenian populations. It might even be claimed with some truth that the cultural and social capital of stateless Armenia was Constantinople or Tiflis rather than Yerevan, which existed in something of a backwater at that time.
During the 19th century, the Armenian presence spread in Egypt and of course developed in North America as well as in England and France, but the pattern of the diaspora shifted during the traumas of the 20th century. Today, the Armenian populations in some of the longer-established diaspora settlements have shrunk and the revitalised centres are elsewhere: in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France and USA.
With such a history, researching Armenian family history research is rarely straightforward. Even if a family was unaffected by the persecutions in the Ottoman Empire, the often international branching and dispersal of families means that an Armenian family tree rarely confines itself to a single country. The archives in the Republic of Armenia itself have some excellent resources – civil registration for its territory dates back in some cases all the way to 1730 and Armenian Apostolic Church parish registers from 1828. One advantage is that the historical records – all those up to 1928 – are concentrated at the National Archives in Yerevan. However, there are no countrywide indexes to names in the birth/baptism, marriage and death/burial registers, so it is necessary to know, or to find out, exactly where a family came form.
Of course, many family historians with Armenian roots are more interested in genealogical records for communities in western Armenia, or what is today Turkish territory. The best news is that records for two provinces of the Russian Empire now in Turkey are held in Yerevan. These are for the oblasts of Igdir and Kars (which included the towns of Ardahan and Kaghzvan) which were Russian territory from 1878 to 1917. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive records in Yerevan for the Armenian communities elsewhere within the borders of modern-day Turkey. What records of interest to Armenian family history there are in Turkish archives, and how accessible they are, is still uncertain. It is worth mentioning that, given the importance of Tiflis described above, there are also significant holdings of Armenian-interest records in the National Archives of Georgia.
If you are researching your Armenian family tree and would like assistance or advice, please feel free to contact Bluebird Research. We have reliable researchers in Armenia and Russia and would be happy to provide an assessment upon request. We expect to be able to offer professional research services in Turkey later this year, although we must caveat this by stressing that success may be doubtful given the prevailing circumstances on the ground.
Armenia is not, of course, in Eastern Europe. However, Armenians resided not only in the Caucasus and across Anatolia to the Aegean, but throughout the Black Sea region, forming a significant minority community in countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Romania and Russia. Bluebird Research welcomes enquiries about Armenian family history research in these countries and will be happy to provide free assessments.
Armenian genealogical research is complicated not just by its diaspora in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor but, also, of course, by the state-sponsored persecution of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the genocide of 1915-17 and continuing into the early 1920s (for instance, the deliberate razing of the Armenian quarter of Smyrna by Turkish forces in 1922).
Bluebird Research is developing professional genealogical research services in Asia Minor, to include Armenian as well as Greek, Jewish and Levantine family histories. We would be delighted to hear from family historians in the Armenian diaspora and to supply an opinion as to the feasibility and likelihood of success of genealogical research in Turkey. In this regard, it is vital that you obtain as much information as you can from sources in your own country before contemplating research in Anatolia and the Caucasus.
Bluebird Research can offer research services in the Republic of Armenia itself. Contact us for further details.
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the middle class was small. The landed and ruling elite was separated from the peasantry and the labouring classes in the towns by a great gulf, rather than there being a sizeable middle class in to which both upper and lower echelons gradually shaded by imperceptible degrees. Of course, during the course of the long 19th Century, this traditional feudal structure changed with industrialisation and increased social mobility, and a recognisable and increasingly influential bourgeoisie began to emerge. What is striking about the traditional Eastern European society, however, was that the middle class was composed disproportionately of people regarded by both the landowners and the peasantry as non-indigenous, even if their families had lived in the vicinity for generations.
Karl Marx described how these people in the middle – the lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, tax collectors, merchants, traders, innkeepers, shopkeepers and so on – occupying the Lücken-Positionen, the gap in between, were overwhelmingly “non-indigenous” (Ivan T Berend, Decades of Crisis, University of California Press, 2001). Depending upon region, these roles might be filled by Armenians, Germans, Greeks or Jews. They were vulnerable for many reasons. They were regarded with distaste by the landowners and with resentment by the peasantry, although or because they were needed by both alike. Their religion usually marked them out as different and foreign. In the countryside they might live in isolation and even in the towns their communities were often small and occupied distinct quarters. This vulnerability became more pronounced at a time of national awakening (or re-awakening, as the case might be) and whenever assertive nationalism required an adversary it was likely to be turned against the perceived alien in the midst. Similarly, class consciousness was also likely to be directed against the moneyed middleman to whom both the upper and lower class turned in times of need.
These communities are one of the fascinating features of Eastern Europe up to the First World War. This is why the family historian may find Greek ancestors in Romania or Ukraine, and German and Jewish ancestors across the entire eastern half of the European continent and European Russia. Many towns, or quarters of towns, became German or Jewish settlements apart, islands in a sea of native peasantry. In such places, German often became the lingua franca of the town (certainly so in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Baltic gubernia of Imperial Russian) and would be learnt and spoken by all other elements in civic society, such as the Poles or Latvians in their respective lands.
Some of the people in the middle, such as the Armenian community in Poland, assimilated and only relicts remain. Elsewhere, for the reasons indicated above, the German and Jewish middle classes were subject to distrust, victimisation, deportation and worse over the course of the 20th Century and this distinctive element of Eastern European society has all but disappeared.
Over the course of the late 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank out of Europe and the Middle East into the region of Asia Minor currently occupied by modern Turkey, leaving in its wake territories which were contested and claimed by the emerging nation states.
For a family historian with roots in the parts of South-East Europe which were formerly Ottoman, the three main administrative divisions to understand for the period from 1864 up to the First World War are, in diminishing order of size, the vilayet, the sanjak (also sandjak) and the kaza.
The vilayet was the largest of these divisions and is approximately equivalent to a province. With some exceptions, these tend to be smaller than, and do not correspond in location with, the successor nation states which have replaced Turkey-in-Europe. For instance, the vilayets of Shkoder, Janina, Monastir, Salonica and Edirne cover the territory which extends today from Albania, Macedonia and Greece to the Black Sea.
Each vilayet was subdivided into a number of sanjaks, which in turn were divided up into the kazas. For instance, before the Great War, one of the western, Aegean coast vilayets in Anatolia was called Aidin and comprised the five sanjaks of Smyrna, Magnisia, Aidin itself, Denisli and Mentese. Smyrna contained 12 kazas (Smyrna & Nymphaeon, Krini, Pergamos, Vourla, Odemission etc), Magnisia 11 kazas, Aidin five, and Denisli and Mentese six each.
Across Anatolia or Asia Minor, the majority population was usually Turkish (or Kurdish in the east) but many towns and villages were mixed, with the different communities (e.g. Turkish, Greek, Armenian and Jewish) residing in their own relatively self-contained quarters. However, in some places the Turks did not form a majority: for instance, Greeks dominated Smyrna sanjak.
The 20th century erased the ethnic diversity of the former Ottoman Empire. Turkey itself became an overwhelmingly homogeneous nation state, an historical process which is still a matter of serious dispute for Greece and Armenia. The traces of Armenian and Greek civilization remain throughout Asia Minor and often feature as Turkish tourist attractions – see for example the website of the Turkish Culture & Tourism Office in UK here.
What remains unclear is the extent to which the Ottoman era Asia Minor records of interest to family historians, such as those in the Armenian and Greek diasporas, survive. Are Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic church registers of baptism, marriage and burial to be found in Turkish state archives? Are there any congregation list or even individual-level census returns? With a few exceptions (such as Armenian research in Constantinople), there is a sense at present that Greek and Armenian genealogical research within Turkey is, if not impossible, then doomed to disappointment. However, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the next decade will see an opening up of Turkish archives: Turkey remains an applicant to join the European Union, is promoting tourism, and has a potentially large international constituency of family historians who would be extremely interested in the contents of state archives. It will be interesting to see what happens.
There were scarcely 19 years of peace in interwar Lwów, between September 1920 and September 1939. Ironically, the city which had been at the forefront of Polish national and cultural activism during the long years of partitioned Poland became somewhat peripheral now that the country was united and independent. Its prestige declined. From having been Lemberg, the capital of the self-governing Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia and the fifth largest city of the Empire (behind Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Trieste), it became Lwów, one of many satellite cities within the orbit of the Polish capital Warsaw. And of course the ambitious and the unemployed, students and professional elites, now gravitated towards Warsaw.
There were three national communities in the city. During the Austrian era, from 1772 to the Great War, the authorities counted the population by religion rather than nationality, as, to a greater or lesser extent, an empire exists by denial of nationality or at least of national expression.
Between 51% and 53% of the city’s inhabitants were Roman Catholic. These were overwhelmingly Poles, with a very small minority of Austrians and assimilated Germans and Armenians (although a separate Armenian Catholic Church still functioned in Lwów).
18% or 19% were Greek Catholics, who were rusyny or Ruthenians, and increasingly identified themselves as Ukrainians as the 19th century advanced and the community’s national consciousness awakened.
27% or 28% were Jewish. The Jews of Lwów had traditionally resided in two designated areas and continued to do so even after regulations were relaxed in 1867. The first area comprised a largely affluent and assimilated community in the neighbourhood of three streets in the old town: ul Żdowska, Ruska and Zarwańska. The second area was a more working class and religiously Orthodox Jewish community in the Krakowskie and Żółkiewskie suburbs.
These three large national communities interacted and shared certain common aspirations during the era of Austrian rule, despite the irreconcilable incompatibility of Polish and Ukrainian national claims to the city and despite a wide range of internal differences. For instance, the Jewish community included assimilationists and Polish nationalists; Zionists; Bundists and communists; and largely apolitical Orthodox Jews. The Jews appear to have least frequently intermarried with the other two communities: it seems probable that intermarriage was restricted to those who not only assimilated but also converted to Catholicism. However, marriage between the Polish Roman Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics was not unusual.
It has been calculated that 16% of pre-WW1 marriages were mixed*. This needs to be placed in context of the respective sizes of the two communities. For instance, in 1900 there were 82,590 Roman Catholics and 29,327 Greek Catholics in Lwów. When this numerical imbalance is factored in, it means that one in three Poles may have been marrying a Ukrainian. Mixed marriages declined after Galicia became part of independent Poland and tensions between Poles and Ukrainians increased, but even in the 1920s mixed marriages are estimated at 8%.
These figures are salutary. History is necessarily written in generalisations with only occasional references to individuals by way of exemplification. The reality for individuals is granular and subject to infinite degrees and gradations of experience. In pre-Soviet era Lwów, there may well have been some “pure” Polish and Ukrainian families but it would not be surprising for family history research to demonstrate or suggest otherwise.
*Estimates of intermarriage are by Lidia Zyblikiewicz, cited in Philipp Ther’s “War Versus Peace” (Harvard Ukrainian Studies XXIV (1/4) 2000).
Records for the different communities in Lemberg / Lwów / L’viv are today found in L’viv and Warsaw. Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services in L’viv, across Ukraine and Poland, and would be delighted to undertake genealogical research on behalf of anyone with Jewish, Polish or Ukrainian – or mixed! – ancestry from the region.