The Armenian Experience

The Armenian Experience
Author: Gaïdz Minassian
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786725614

Armenian national identity has long been associated with what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Immersing the reader in the history, culture and politics of Armenia – from its foundations as the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the modern-day Republic – Gaïdz Minassian moves past the massacres embedded in the Armenian psyche to position the nation within contemporary global politics. An in-depth study of history and memory, The Armenian Experience examines the characteristics and sentiments of a national identity that spans the globe. Armenia lies in the heart of the Caucasus and once had an empire – under the rule of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC – that stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Beginning with an overview of Armenia's historic position at the crossroads between Rome and Persia, Minassian details invasions from antiquity to modern times by Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Persians and Russians right up to its Soviet experience, and drawing on Armenia's post-Soviet conflict with Azerbaijan in its attempts to reunify with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This book questions an Armenian self-identity dominated by its past and instead looks towards the future. Gaïdz Minassian emphasises the need to recognise that the Armenian story began well before the Genocide 1915, and continues as an on-going modern narrative.

Shattered Dreams of Revolution

Shattered Dreams of Revolution
Author: Bedross Der Matossian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804791472

The Ottoman revolution of 1908 is a study in contradictions—a positive manifestation of modernity intended to reinstate constitutional rule, yet ultimately a negative event that shook the fundamental structures of the empire, opening up ethnic, religious, and political conflicts. Shattered Dreams of Revolution considers this revolutionary event to tell the stories of three important groups: Arabs, Armenians, and Jews. The revolution raised these groups' expectations for new opportunities of inclusion and citizenship. But as post-revolutionary festivities ended, these euphoric feelings soon turned to pessimism and a dramatic rise in ethnic tensions. The undoing of the revolutionary dreams could be found in the very foundations of the revolution itself. Inherent ambiguities and contradictions in the revolution's goals and the reluctance of both the authors of the revolution and the empire's ethnic groups to come to a compromise regarding the new political framework of the empire ultimately proved untenable. The revolutionaries had never been wholeheartedly committed to constitutionalism, thus constitutionalism failed to create a new understanding of Ottoman citizenship, grant equal rights to all citizens, and bring them under one roof in a legislative assembly. Today as the Middle East experiences another set of revolutions, these early lessons of the Ottoman Empire, of unfulfilled expectations and ensuing discontent, still provide important insights into the contradictions of hope and disillusion seemingly inherent in revolution.

The Experiment

The Experiment
Author: Eric Lee
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786990954

For many the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a symbol of hope. In the eyes of its critics, however, Soviet authoritarianism and the horrors of the gulags have led to the revolution becoming synonymous with oppression, threatening to forever taint the very idea of socialism. The experience of Georgia, which declared its independence from Russia in 1918, tells a different story. In this riveting history, Eric Lee explores the little-known saga of the country’s experiment in democratic socialism, detailing the epic, turbulent events of this forgotten chapter in revolutionary history. Along the way, we are introduced to a remarkable cast of characters – among them the men and women who strove for a more inclusive vision of socialism that featured multi-party elections, freedom of speech and assembly, a free press and a civil society grounded in trade unions and cooperatives. Though the Georgian Democratic Republic lasted for just three years before it was brutally crushed on the orders of Stalin, it was able to offer, however briefly, a glimpse of a more humane alternative to the Soviet reality that was to come.

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic of 1918

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic of 1918
Author: Adrian Brisku
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000372685

The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) was a unique, bottom-up, and a fleeting display of political unity and federalism among the main Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political factions between 22 April 1918, when it declared its independence, and 26 May 1918, when it was dissolved and replaced by the three nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Focusing on a crucial but poorly understood moment in the modern history of the Caucasus at the end of the First World War, this book offers a systematic, contextually-rich, and multi-perspectival—Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Ottoman, German, British, American, Italian, Bolshevik, Ukrainian and North Caucasian—account of the TDFR, drawing on contributions (with the new material from archives in Tbilisi, Grozny, Yerevan, Baku, Istanbul, Berlin, London, Washington D.C.) by a new generation of historians and scholars working on the region. The book argues that despite its month-long existence in this geopolitically volatile region, the TDFR, with and its federative nature and the various discussions about federalism and federation that it provoked, continued to have an appeal for Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians as well as for the Great Powers well beyond its dissolution. Moreover, the experience of the TDFR reifies federalism as a key political concept in the modern history of the Caucasus. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Caucasus Survey.

From the Depths of the Heart

From the Depths of the Heart
Author: Abraham Terian
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2022-01-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814684890

2022 Catholic Media Association honorable mention in prayer: collections of prayers St. Gregory of Narek (ca. 945–1003), Armenian mystic poet and theologian, was named Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis on April 12, 2015. Not so well known in the West, the saint holds a distinctive place in the Armenian Church by virtue of his prayer book and hymnic odes—among other works. His writings are equally prized as literary masterpieces, with the prayer book as the magnum opus. With this meticulous translation of the prayers, St. Gregory of Narek enters another millennium of wonderment, now in a wider circle. The prayers resound from their author’s heart—albeit in a different language, rendered by a renowned translator of early Armenian texts and a theologian.

A Century of Denial

A Century of Denial
Author: Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2015-04-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9781976185434

The Armenian Genocide is the only one of the genocides of the 20th century in which the nation that was decimated by genocide has been subjected to the ongoing outrage of a massive campaign of genocide denial, openly sustained by state authority. This campaign of genocide denial is a slap in the face to the Armenian people,preventing reconciliation and healing. As Pope Francis said so eloquently at his Mass marking the 100th time period of the genocide, quote, "Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it."

Goodbye, Antoura

Goodbye, Antoura
Author: Karnig Panian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2015-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0804796343

“This searing account of a little boy wrenched from family and innocence” during the Armenian genocide “is a literary gem” (Financial Times). When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly a thousand Armenian and four hundred Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care. This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: Its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history. Panian’s memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.