Historical Alchemy: Buried Gold, Buried Pasts

ABSTRACT:This article attends to the material legacies of past violence through a focus on the contemporary search for buried gold in the Kurdish-majority region of Van in southeastern Turkey—gold believed to have been left behind by Armenians fleeing the 1915 Genocide. Grounded in an exploration of local narratives and practices of treasure hunting, it demonstrates how the search for buried gold illuminates the multiple, contradictory, and ambiguous ways that the violent history of the Genocide continues to animate and enchant everyday life in the region. Through a focus on the semi-illicit digging for buried gold in a post-genocide geography, this article highlights how past and present cycles of violence are sedimented into the material landscape and how memory, temporality, and the reverberations of historic crimes coalesce in the enchanted objects hidden beneath its surface. By approaching treasure hunting as an embodied interaction with the past, it argues that the search and digging for mythical buried gold is a material recognition and unearthing of the taboo and officially denied history of the destruction of the Armenian community. Furthermore, it argues that treasure hunters translate an understanding of the violent past of the Genocide into buried gold in the present—what I term "historical alchemy." The process of historical alchemy, which involves the transformation of a history of genocide into gold, demonstrates the fundamentally material quality of how the past is imbricated in the present and sedimented in the landscape. It is this material temporality—echoes of past genocide emerging from the earth as buried objects and remnants of a silenced history made physical in the present—that highlights the intrinsic links between 1915 and 2015, between the Armenian and Kurdish communities, and between ongoing cycles of violence, ruination, and dispossession.