Gagrule.net

Gagrule.net News, Views, Interviews worldwide

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • GagruleLive
  • Armenia profile

The Dildilian photography collection: Glimpse of a lost Armenian home

April 29, 2017 By administrator

Armenian Genocide

Tsolag Dildilian (L) photographed with his family at his studio in 1912.

William Armstrong – william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr

‘Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home: The Dildilian Photography Collection’ by Armen T. Marsoobian (IB Tauris, 224 pages, $30)

For nearly a century, members of the Dildilian family practiced photography in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and the United States. Unlike the best known Armenian photographers who practiced in Istanbul during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, the Dildilians worked primarily in Central Anatolia and on the Black Sea coast. The archive they left behind gives a vivid glimpse into provincial life at a time of rapid change and brutal tragedy.

“Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home” brings together over 200 extraordinary photographs from the Dildilian archive. It also includes text and notes written by Armen Marsoobian, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University who has organized exhibitions based on the collection in Turkey, Armenia, the U.S., and the U.K. He is the grandson of Tsolag Dildilian, the founder of the family business in Sivas in central Turkey in 1882.

Joined by his brother Aram, Tsolag’s photography business developed rapidly and he was able to open studios over a period of 30 years in towns like Amasya, Konya and Adana. The book features photos from these studios, as well as from the family’s travels across Anatolia. More than 900 photographs and glass negatives survived, along with family memoirs describing life during this tumultuous era. It is amazing that so many photos were preserved, and most of the ones reprinted in the book are in top condition.

The photos have added poignancy because we know the cataclysm to come. We see local Armenians’ ordinary life in Anatolian cities; life that could not be further from the great power political intrigue that led to the genocide of 1915. The Dilidians’ photography business developed rapidly, and the collection presents a strange contrast: Unprecedented educational, cultural, and commercial success at a time when tragedy – which would ultimately destroy the family’s presence in its ancestral homeland – was building.

At the center of the book are a series of photos taken in the area around Anatolia College in Merzifon, an American missionary school, theological seminary, and hospital. Some of these photos feature historic moments, including celebrations on the restoration of the constitution in 1908 and Ottoman soldiers marching on campus at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Anatolia College also played an important role in the recovery after the Hamidian massacres of 1894, in which up to 300,000 Armenians were killed. Exemplifying the conflicted nature of the era, the tragedy of the massacres was followed by a period of spectacular growth for the school. New buildings were built, enrollments soared, and new faculty members were hired, primarily Armenians and Greeks but also Russians and Turks.

Armenian Genocide

Students of the Anatolia College in Merzifon, c. 1904. Sumpad Dildilian, holding the palette, later managed a branch of the Dildilian Brothers Art Photographers in Samsun on the Black Sea coast. He and his family perished in 1915.

Many Dildilians perished during the massacres and deportations of Armenians in 1915, but some family members were able to survive. Tsolag knew the commander of the local gendarmerie and had himself worked as a photographer for the Ottoman army. He and other family members were allowed to remain in Merzifon if they converted to Islam and assumed Turkish identities, which they did.

Tsolag continued to take photos, which capture the shell-shocked years after 1915. At one point over 2,000 orphans were being looked after on the college campus grounds, and we see photos of groups of children with heads shaved against lice. When the First World War ended in 1918, the surviving Dildilians reclaimed their Armenian identities with the hope of rebuilding their lives in Anatolia. But things got difficult once again with the Turkish War of Independence and they finally ended up leaving Turkey in November 1922.

The Dildilians rebuilt their photography business first in Greece and then in the U.S., but the vast majority of photos included in “Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home” are from the Anatolian heartland. Taken together, the collection is a rich, moving chronicle of a vanished world.

 

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: collection, Dildilian, photography

Armenian collection translation efforts connect family and neighbors

January 12, 2017 By administrator

LOS ANGELES — It really is a small world after all.

When he reached some of the final Armenian Genocide Collection testimonies to be indexed, translated and subtitled into English, Armenian Genocide Collection researcher Manuk Avedikyan realized he needed some help. The testimonies he had saved for last were in rare Armenian dialects — from Mush, Musadagh (Musaler) and Kessab — that he couldn’t understand.

So, he asked his friend Garen, whose family is from Kessab, if his mother could verbally translate one of the testimonies for him. She agreed, and Avedikyan brought the testimony to her house.

After she translated the testimony, Avedikyan asked her if she would be able to translate another in the Musadagh dialect, due to its similarities with the Kessab dialect and the interview was filmed in the village of Anjar, in Lebanon, where she used to live during a part of her youth.

Although she couldn’t quite understand the entire interview, her son deciphered a part of a conversation and was surprised to hear the interviewee mention the family name of a mutual friend of his and Avedikyan’s, Hovannes Zeithlian. Avedikyan sent Zeithlian the testimony and asked him to listen to it, which he did.

Zeitlhian was amazed to hear the man in the testimony speak in his dialect and talk about his (Zeithlian’s) own great-grandmother. She was one of two people who fired the first shots against the encroaching Turkish soldiers during the famous Musadagh resistance during the Armenian Genocide in 1915.

After discovering the testimony about his great-grandmother, Zeithlian was so excited that he translated the whole tape with the help of his father.

The coincidences didn’t stop there. That same man who mentioned the Zeithlians’ great-grandmother turned out to be the family’s next-door neighbor back in Anjar, Lebanon. Another interview of a survivor that was filmed in Kessab that Avedikyan showed his friend Garen ended up being a relative of theirs from Kessab.

“We found their grandmother, a relative, and their neighbor all in one hour,” Avedikyan said. “It’s so unexpected.”

Discovering and translating rare dialects has been an unexpected bonus of the Armenian Genocide Collection. USC Shoah Foundation didn’t know such testimonies were part of the collection when it partnered with the Armenian Film Foundation to integrate the collection into the Visual History Archive, but translating them and making them available to the public is a unique opportunity.

A small number of people do still speak these dialects, but the languages are not well-known or preserved, Avedikyan said. The Syrian civil war also threatens the communities where native speakers live.

“These people [in Kessab and Musadagh] are not going through easy times,” Avedikyan said. “These are rare dialects and the fact that this collection has a plethora of these different dialects shows the linguistic wealth of this collection, the unintended linguistic wealth.”

The English subtitles for the non-English testimonies in the Armenian Genocide Collection are expected to go live in the Visual History Archive in February 2017.

Source: http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2017/01/12/armenian-collection-translation-efforts-connect-family-and-neighbors/

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: Armenian, collection, family, neighbors

While Erdogan build Palaces & Bridges, Turkey Bankruptcies & collection cases skyrocket “up to 2,135,948”

August 23, 2015 By administrator

bankruptcies-and-collection-cases-skyrocket-in-turkey_8767_720_400Figures disclosed by Turkey’s main opposition the Republican People’s Party (CHP) convey the economic woes ordinary citizens and businesses are facing, with cases of debt collection and bankruptcy reaching alarming rates over the years.

Between 2004 and 2014 the number of cases in collection has jumped from 557,411 all the way up to 2,135,948 while the number of cases under review has reached 20,126,123 from 7,220,845, in the same period.

Turkey’s three main metropolises Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir were in the top three. Of the 4,493,038 cases for collection opened in 2013, 2,178,852 occurred in Istanbul.

Meanwhile the number of declarations of bankruptcy have increased by 10 percent between 2013 and 2014 from 2,577 to 2,839

By Ezelhan Üstünkaya | Ankara

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Bankruptcies, collection, skyrocket, Turkey

Support Gagrule.net

Subscribe Free News & Update

Search

GagruleLive with Harut Sassounian

Can activist run a Government?

Wally Sarkeesian Interview Onnik Dinkjian and son

https://youtu.be/BiI8_TJzHEM

Khachic Moradian

https://youtu.be/-NkIYpCAIII
https://youtu.be/9_Xi7FA3tGQ
https://youtu.be/Arg8gAhcIb0
https://youtu.be/zzh-WpjGltY





gagrulenet Twitter-Timeline

Tweets by @gagrulenet

Archives

Books

Recent Posts

  • U.S. Judge Dismisses $500 Million Lawsuit By Azeri Lawyer Against ANCA & 29 Others
  • These Are the Social Security Offices Expected to Close This Year, Musk call SS Ponzi Scheme
  • Breaking News, Pashinyan regime has filed charges against public figure Edgar Ghazaryan,
  • ANCA’s Controversial Endorsement: Implications for Armenian Voters
  • (MHP), Devlet Bahçeli, has invited Kurdish Leader Öcalan to the Parliament “Ask to end terrorism and dissolve the PKK.”

Recent Comments

  • administrator on Turkish Agent Pashinyan will not attend the meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of State
  • David on Turkish Agent Pashinyan will not attend the meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of State
  • Ara Arakelian on A democratic nation has been allowed to die – the UN has failed once more “Nagorno-Karabakh”
  • DV on A democratic nation has been allowed to die – the UN has failed once more “Nagorno-Karabakh”
  • Tavo on I’d call on the people of Syunik to arm themselves, and defend your country – Vazgen Manukyan

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in