From Failed Recovery to Mutation: Armenian Women and Community in Post-Genocide Turkey

Scholarly studies of the history of the Armenians of Turkey in the post-genocide period are quite rare. Research from within Turkey has been difficult for political and academic reasons. There has not been a free political atmosphere in Turkey that would permit or encourage the production and making public of such works. Writing about Armenians from a perspective other than the official one would and in some cases did bring about trouble for those who engaged in such work. Moreover, until very recently, not many researchers in the Turkish academy pos­ sessed the essential historiographic and linguistic skills to study the his­ tory of the Armenian community.1 As for the members of the Armenian community, again, until the last two decades or so, young Armenians avoided the study of Armenian history, indeed of the social science and humanities altogether, because miscalculations concerning what would be permitted could lead young scholars to serious trouble. Scholars, whether of Armenian origin or non-Armenian, who live and produce in Europe or the United States have not been interested in much of what happened to the community of Armenian survivors after the genocide. At least one reason for this negligence must be the thought that the genocide was the ultimate end of the Armenian com­ munity in its homeland. Considering how enormous the loss was, study­ ing and talking about what remained may not have seemed worthwhile. Moreover, talking about the ongoing existence of Armenians in Turkey might have brought about the questioning of the genocide and its char­ acteristic of being a “final solution.” Yet some Armenians survived, re­ mained in Turkey, and created a third way of being Armenian; they