Listening to the voices of Ottoman Armenians: “Either save us from this misery, or order our death” ("Ya derdimize derman, ya katlimize ferman")

CMES presents the annual CMES Hrant Dink Memorial lecturer

PD Dr. Talin Suciyan

Associate Professor (Privat Dozentin) of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

This lecture will discuss the pivotal Ottoman era of Tanzimat through extensive use of the Archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople along with the Ottoman Archives. It will argue how unlike Tanzimat’s reputation for reform and equality for all the empire’s people, the Ottoman government actually constructed a process which disenfranchised Armenians in every respect. As seen through their own archives, Tanzimat in the language of the Armenian peasants from the provinces meant provincial oppressions. Petitions, reports sent from the provinces and Armenian administrative publications in Istanbul all demonstrate that Armenians of the provinces faced major issues, most prominently abusive and oppressive taxation and forced labor which changed their lives drastically. While Armenian men from throughout the empire became migrant workers as a result, the Ottoman Army was forcefully deporting Armenian peasants in the region of Cilicia. 

This lecture will concentrate on the smallest administrative units, namely the lives of Armenian peasants in their villages during Tanzimat, through which the effects of Ottoman temporal and territorial policies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries can be brought into focus. 

Talin Suciyan is Associate Professor (Privat Dozentin) of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces is her recently published second book, which was her habilitation accepted by her home university LMU Munich in 2019.   She received her doctoral degree in 2015 with her book The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, History and Politics (I. B. Tauris), which has been translated into Turkish (Aras Publ., 2018), German (De Gruyter, 2021) and soon will be released in Russian too. 

Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Armenian history, Ottoman inter-communal relations, labor, peasantry, gender, Armenian ecclesiastical law, non-contemporaneities, Armenian literature of the Ottoman provinces, and medical practices of the 19th and 20th century Middle East. 

Co-sponsors: Friends of Hrant Dink, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research
Contact: Liz Flanagan