Obituary: Armen Aroyan Led almost 100 Tours to Historic Armenia

In 1991, Armen led his first group trip to Eastern Turkey with seven participants, visiting historic Armenian sites and meeting local Armenians. He curated these trips based on the origins of each participant, helping them rekindle bonds with their ancestral villages and hometowns. Among the travelers were many scholars whose experiences gave them first-hand knowledge for future research and academic work.

Armen frequently visited his grandfather’s village of Jibin en route to Aintab and made countless visits to the historic ruins of Ani. Over the course of 25 years (1991–2016), he organized approximately 100 trips throughout Turkey, traveling with nearly 1,450 participants, whom he fondly referred to as “pilgrims.” He meticulously documented nearly every journey on videotape.

Across the many places Armen visited, he prioritized meeting and interviewing the area’s few remaining Armenians, which became harder to do with each passing year. Local Armenians would take him and his ‘pilgrims’ from one Armenian home or shop to another, forming relationships that would be strengthened with each future trip.

In 2018, he donated roughly 400 videotapes from these journeys to the Institute for digitization, with the aim of making the footage accessible for research and educational use. In 2025, with the discovery of additional tapes, the digitization process was completed, and the process of integrating the videos into the USC Digital Library began.

The resulting Armen Aroyan Collection is a one-of-a-kind contribution to the study of inherited memory and diasporic return, offering rare visual documentation of historical sites where traces of an Armenian past continue to endure.

The Institute also conducted a short oral history interview with Armen, now part of the California History Through Armenian Experiences archive.