Institution:	Institut für Osmanistik und Turkologie
Leiter/in:	Prof. Dr. Elke Shoghig Hartmann
Kooperationspartner	GWZO Leipzig (Dr. Bálint Kovács)
Mitarbeiter/innen:	Dr. Karen Jallatyan, Dr. Konrad Siekierski
Förderung:	Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Laufzeit:	01.01.2023-30.09.2026

Kurzbeschreibung

This research project aims to analyze the multifaceted dynamics that the lost city of Ani, once the capital of an Armenian kingdom, has generated across centuries within and beyond the Ottoman Empire and continues to do so in Armenia, Turkey and the Armenian diaspora. In proposing to conduct such multi-perspectival research, we are hoping to demonstrate the remarkably complex and enduring effects that lost cities can have on collective practices shaping our sense of time and space, cultural and religious imaginaries, processes of identity formation, intercultural relations and dynamics involving human rights, preservation, heritage and activist discourses. The interdisciplinary approach that we will adopt, drawing from social sciences and humanities and foregrounding their underlying connections through diaspora, urban architectural, and digital studies, will in their turn reinvigorate the various disciplines (e.g., history, literature, art history, architecture) which have previously engaged Ani, prompting them to develop new lines of inquiry and ultimately contributing to a more critical understanding of the effects of lost cities on our lives. The Armenian example of Ani presents an excellent opportunity for formulating questions that are increasingly pressing in our globalized world.

 

The capital of the medieval Armenian Kingdom, Ani was a politically, economically and culturally advanced center that over the centuries has symbolized Armenian statehood. A quintessentially lost city in the Armenian imagination and beyond, Ani has evolved from a real into an imagined place, turning into an enduring cultural icon evoked by generations of Armenian writers from the 10th century into the present. In Claude Mutafian’s words, the capital resembles a kind of phoenix, having been seen again and again as the all-important hub of Armenian culture, tradition, and history. Accordingly, there is a large body of research on Ani in the context of the middle ages (Maranci, Donabédian, Kazaryan) but not sufficient attention is paid to the perceptions of this lost city across centuries. Located in Eastern Turkey very close to the closed border with Armenia, Ani has thus generated a complex "culture of memory" by serving as a source of varied identities in Armenia, and in the Armenian diaspora, by carrying ambiguous valences within the internally varied Ottoman and contemporary Turkish societies and by being a challenging object of study across an array of academic disciplines.

This research project aims to address the complexity of configurations generated by the lost city of Ani by exploring from multiple perspectives and in an interdisciplinary manner their "different forms of ... interpretation, instrumentalization and coding" which have certainly given rise to "a distinct culture of memory, … for the negotiation of identities, the preservation of knowledge cultures, the formulation of criticism of progress, or the construction of mythical or sacral topographies as part of a veritable 'ruin cult'.'' To explore Ani's deterritorializing "culture of memory," the following set of overarching research questions will be pursued: What are the paradigms through which Armenian culture, as a nation-state and as diaspora, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey have related, and continue to do so, to the lost city of Ani? What are the internal structures and dynamics of these spheres of memory affected by the lost city of Ani? How do these spheres relate to each other?

 

The research is organized according to the following themes:

a)         The perception of Ani throughout history under a renewed interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival lens

What are the perceptions of Ani's memory particularly in the 18th-19th centuries? Can we claim that Ani became a lieu de mémoire for Armenians in general or can it be observed only amongst Transylvanian Armenians (Kovács)? Comparative historical research should be done focusing on Ani's position in the collective memory to analyze why and how Ani as a figure of origin for Armenian settlements became popular and localized in several regional historiographies in the 19th century (in the Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire as well as in East-Central Europe). Based on this, can we claim the formation of an invented tradition in the Ottoman regions, such as Van, Ezurum and Trabzon or even in Julfa in Persia? What is behind the pilgrimages of Ani-Armenians as for example in the case of Northern Nakhchivani Armenians, who would gather in the Surb Karapet Monastery in Mush and make pilgrimages to Ani (Tchobanian)? Was there a tradition of pilgrimages to Ani also before the age of nationalism? Or were these activities connected to the Armenian nation-building processes during the 19th century? Moreover, Ani became an imagined model and a source of influence in several architectural traditions. Given the above, it is also worth exploring how Turkish and Kurdish communities have perceived Ani from Ottoman times up to the present day Republic of Turkey. What do these architectural influences and art historical interest reveal about Ani as a lost city? Furthermore, how does the advent of digital media broadly and digital humanities in particular affect the dynamics of the layered and multifaceted deterritorialization generated by Ani?

b)         Ani in the literary, visual and architectural imaginaries across (post-)Soviet Armenia, the Armenian Diaspora, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

Exploring the representations of Ani in literature, film, the visual realm and architecture can help shed important light on Armenia's complex relation to loss. There is a great need for critical, systematic reflection in Armenia on how its culture is shaped by experiences of loss (Nichanian), exemplified by its relation to the lost city of Ani. The nation-centered framework still prominent in the scholarly and intellectual discourses in Armenia, coupled with positivistic attitudes carried over from the Soviet period and exacerbated by uninterrogated 19th century philological approaches, appear as overdetermining factors. As for the contemporary Armenian diaspora, with significant communities in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, it has been dominated by a diasporic malaise grounded on a nation-state-centered worldview inherited from the 19th century. This ideological attitude has perceived the diasporic condition as temporary and inferior. Given the above, in what ways do contemporary diaspora Armenian artists and artistic currents relate to the lost city of Ani? How does the latter shape the diaspora Armenians' perception of themselves as diasporans? Remarkably, the diasporic malaise among Armenians has given rise to a resistance from within their communities. Throughout the 20th century, three generations of writers, intellectuals and artists, each in their own way, have searched for possibilities of living the diasporic condition in a creative manner (Beledian). Mostly educated and immersed in Western intellectual currents but insisting on writing in the Western Armenian literary language standardized in the 19th century, they have tried to inhabit more authentically the experience of loss at the core of diasporic condition. In doing so, they have arguably forged an alternative relation to the lost city of Ani. Our research will try to understand the precise parameters of this more properly diasporic mode of relating to Ani, thus enriching our understanding of the complexities of the memory culture generated by this lost city. The above research will be further enhanced by the analysis of representations of Ani in the literary, artistic discourses of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, including but not limited to works emanating from the diverse Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian communities from within this space. We will pursue these lines of inquiry alongside new methodologies available from digital humanities to explore the unprecedented interactive role that the public can have through digital media in shaping the dynamics of perceptions of Ani.

c)         The effects of Ani on the dynamics of different kinds of actors and practices at various institutional levels and discursive sites involving digital media

In addition to deploying historical and humanities-inspired lines of analysis, our research will mobilize social scientific approaches. Here, the centerpiece of our research is to explore the logic of the pilgrimages made to Ani. Besides analyzing the institutions and actors who organize such pilgrimages, we will examine their routes, the ways in which through them visitors symbolically reinvest the landscape of Eastern Anatolia/Historic Armenia by participating in activities that evoke spiritual experiences (e.g., re-communing with ancestors and a lost nation). In this context, we intend to ask the following set of questions: In what ways does analyzing these pilgrimages as embodied individual and group experiences shed new light on Ani? What objects do the participants bring from their journeys? What kind of spiritual (identity forming) valences do these objects have? In what ways does the making of such pilgrimages affect the self-perception of its participants as 'authentic' Armenians? How do these practices change our commonly accepted notions of pilgrimage? Similar questions apply to pilgrimages made from Armenia, whose border is so close to Ani that visitors can see its ruins from it and yet cannot be with them because the border is closed. It might be the case that in comparison to the diaspora Armenians, for the residents of Armenia the lost city of Ani has a different value. Here, one might need to take into account the different religious, spiritual attitudes between these groups with their arguably different attitudes towards the Armenain Church. A related aspect is to also wonder about how pilgrimages affect the perceptions of Ani for locals. What kinds of interactions and transformations do encounters between visitors and locals induce? What effects do these pilgrimages have on the contested perceptions (narratives, interpretations) that the lost city of Ani generates within and in relation to Turkey with its internal diversities? Pilgrimages to Ani also have an economic dimension involving touristic companies and packages offered from both sides of the Turkish-Armenian border. How do these economic forces factor into the broader context of our research? Finally, the current constraints on conducting direct research in Turkey present an opportunity for developing an approach that merges digital humanities and social sciences to analyze the dynamics of the perceptions of Ani by different actors and institutions in social media, forums, the digital press and interactive websites through which the public becomes an active participant.

 

The three research themes described above compare similar practices and phenomena in their respective fields and strongly converge around their commitment to venture into interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival modes of inquiry — involving history, literary and film studies, social sciences, architecture and art history — as well as in engaging digital humanities. By insisting on such a multifaceted approach, our goal is to produce a series of investigations that draw from the foundational principles of discourse analysis (i.e., cultural, political, ideological, representational patterns and power dynamics of meaning production) but to also go beyond discourse analysis towards taking into account discursive-material processes into which ruins, images, embodied experiences and new media participate.