AGBU Co-Sponsors International Symposium on Monuments, Memory and Ani

Hirsch was followed by Dr. Andrew Herscher, associate professor in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, who examined the politics of counter monuments and the ethics of genocide as counter memory. Herscher defined counter memory as suppressed narratives that challenge publically sanctioned versions of history and a counter monument as a structure that can memorialize counter memory. In his presentation, he discussed one example of this kind of counter monument and investigated its relationship to counter memories of the Bosnian War:  The “Memorial in Exile” at the 2012 Summer Olympic Park in London. Herscher explained how the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1990s have since been erased from public memory in the Republika Srpska. Consequently, the “Memorial in Exile” declared by survivors of the Omarska concentration camp marked unmarked violence and brought awareness of a genocide whose memory has been actively suppressed. He argued that the declaration of this memorial endowed survivors and their descendants with the political agency that had been stripped of them and suggested a future organized around new ways to live in common.

The final presenter of the first session was Balakian who made use of The Ruins of Ani, a travelogue by his great-uncle Grigoris Balakian, to suggest ways of viewing the city of Ani through a postcolonial lens. He used the book, which he is in the process of translating, as a resource for articulating the challenges of transcultural ethics and proposing the possibility of a shared future at the current impasse of Turkish Armenian relations. “From Grigoris Balakian’s account, it is clear that, Ani — even in the early 20^th century — was understood as having a past marked by colonization, ruin and erasure. I’d like to situate this book within our contemporary understanding of the city to help inform the perception of Armenians as indigenous to the region and the disavowed colonized of the lands.” During his presentation, Balakian was careful to avoid nationalist discourse, while also asserting the connection that Armenians have to eastern Turkey and the intensification of loss that the ‘lock out syndrome’ from Turkey, coupled with the city’s history of neglect and ruin, has evoked in the Armenian Diaspora.

The second session, “The Medieval Armenian City of Ani: A Case Study in the Politicization of Art History, History, Historical Monuments and Preservation in a Post-Genocidal Context,” addressed the city’s cultural heritage and its position in contemporary Turkey.

The session began with a presentation by Dr. Christina Maranci, professor of Armenian art and architectural history at Tufts University, which offered a study of the Church of Saint Gregory in Ani and the Zvartnots Cathedral near Yerevan. The strong similarities in the structural elements of both sites demonstrate architectural imitation by Trdat, the architect of the Church of Saint Gregory. Maranci also explored the Church of Saint Gregory project as a display of specialized artisanship. By using Trdat’s talents and by reproducing the Zvartnots Cathedral, King Gagik I sought to showcase the technological capital of his Bagratid Kingdom. Maranci also considered whether King Gagik I sought actively to preserve the memory of Zvartnots by replicating its design in Ani and ended her talk with a plea to protect and re-excavate the site.

Dr. Heghnar Watenpaugh, associate professor of art history at the University of California-Davis, continued the session with a talk on the politics of cultural heritage at Ani. She began with a historical overview of the city and detailed the preservation and restoration campaigns that have been initiated by the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Culture. She compared Ani to contested cities like Jerusalem, Belfast and Mostar to illustrate the politicization of the site and its appropriation as a cultural symbol central to national consciousness. Watenpaugh also critiqued the Turkish government’s approach to characterizing the city of Ani: “Discussions of Ani often deploy the trope of multiculturalism without acknowledging the full diversity of the multiple cultures at Ani, especially its crucial Armenian layer. It seems the language of multiculturalism is instrumentalized to erase the actual history of diversity and bolster the dominant groups’ own cultural capital.”

Goshgarian added a sociological dimension to the symposium with her presentation on the interplay between the medieval Armenian ruins in the province in Kars and Turkish and Kurdish peoples who live among them. She remarked that interacting with the local population gives insight into the evolution of the structures’ function, which have largely been neglected, destroyed or repurposed. In her fieldwork, she found that a local ambivalence prevailed in the province of Kars with regard to Armenian structures. Many have been repurposed to store hay, machines and animals and provide stones for homes, but the prevailing dynamic was one characterized by an absence of a sense of ownership over the structures themselves. For Goshgarian, the relationship of the local population to the Armenian structures presents opportunities for cultivating understanding the aftermath of genocide in the successor state. “Interactions with children throughout the region made me realize that the people who have been living with these monuments do have a deep relationship with these structures and these spaces and that if, in the future, restoration and preservation of these monuments is to take place, all of this has to occur in conversation with the local people who live with these monuments every single day of their lives.”