FRESNO — “How We Lived: The Houshamadyan Project” will be the topic of a presentation by Dr. Vahe Tachjian, director of the Berlin-based Houshamadyan Project. The talk will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 11, in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, Room 191 on the Fresno State campus.
The lecture is part of the Spring 2019 Armenian Studies Program Lecture Series at Fresno State.
Houshamadyan was born from a simple and powerful idea: we should bring back to life the cities, towns and village in which Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire by reconstructing our inheritance – the rich memory of the lives of our ancestors.
Houshamadyan is a non-profit organization founded in Berlin in 2010. The website www.houshamadyan.org appears in three languages: Armenian, English and Turkish.
Alongside written articles, the Houshamadyan website uses a great variety of multi-media tools, such as musical recordings of historic value, oral history testimonies, old photographs, pictures, old film footage, maps, podcasts and so on. Every month, three or four new articles and new materials are added to the constantly growing website. More than 170 articles and family collections are already published.
Tachjian earned his PhD in history and civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is now the chief editor of the Berlin based Houshamdyan website. His main publications are: La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mésopotamie. Paris, 2004; Les Arméniens, 1917-1939: La quête d’un refuge, Paris, 2007 (co-editor); Ottoman Armenians: Life, Culture, Society, Vol 1, Berlin, 2014 (editor) and Daily life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915-1918, New York/Oxford, 2017.