Dimanche 8 décembre 2019 à l’Ararat Eskijian Museum : “Home sweet home ” le “Pays” reconstitué des Arméniens…

"Pas de place comme sa maison" : Yerguir (le Pays , en arménien) et les ex-ottomans arméniens dans l'Arménie soviètique.

Comment les Arméniens ont conceptualisé la notion de "Pays" et comment le génocide par les Turcs et les purges staliniennes ont fait une seule tragéide.

‘No Place Like Home': Yerguir and the Ex-Ottoman Armenians in Soviet Armenia

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Ayşenur Korkmaz is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Amsterdam, European Studies.

This talk explores spatial attachments among the ex-Ottoman Armenians who survived the Armenian genocide and settled in their ‘new homeland’, Soviet Armenia. It addresses the question of how the refugees dealt with loss and displacement and reflected on their former hometowns, referred to as ‘Yerguir’, a spatial construct denoting a symbolic ‘Armenian homeland’ or a ‘local homeland’ in Anatolia. I argue that the refugees conceptualized Yerguir not only in relation to their expulsion but also the socio-political factors that influenced them in Soviet Armenia in three periods. The first era of reflection on Yerguir.

rgir was the 1920s and 1930s, replete with nostalgic sentiments. The second was the suppression of the theme of Yergiur, between 1936-1960, particularly during political crackdowns in Stalin’s era. The third period saw the revival of Ergir and marked a new phase in the conceptualizations of ‘homeland’ in which the displacement from Anatolia in 1915-1916 and the Stalinist purges have been enmeshed into one tragedy of the ex-Ottoman Armenians.