Tachjian to Present Microhistory of Two Families during the Genocide

BELMONT, Mass.—On Wed., April 17, Historian Vahé Tachjian will give a lecture in commemoration of the 98th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide entitled “Genocide Diaries: A Microhistory of Two Armenian Families, 1915-1918,” at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) in Belmont. Tashjian is the chief editor and project director of the Houshamadyan.org website, “a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life.” This is his first time lecturing in the Boston area.

Vahé Tachjian

In 1915, two Armenian families, the Bogharians and the Tavukjians, were deported from Aintab, together with many other Armenian inhabitants of the town. They were forcibly resettled, first in Hama, and then in the nearby town of Salamiyya, in present-day Syria. Two diaries written by members of these families have been passed down: one by Father Nerses Tavukjian, and the other by Krikor Bogharian. In this lecture, based on his forthcoming book, Tachjian will attempt to recreate the quotidian world of the deportees—of ordinary lives caught in an extraordinary historical moment.
Vahé Tachjian was born in Lebanon and earned his Ph.D. in history and civilization from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His research covers the period of the French occupation of Cilicia, Syria, and Lebanon between the two World Wars, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and refugee problems in the Middle East.
Among his publications is La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mésopotamie: Aux Confins de la Turquie, de la Syrie et de l’Irak, 1919-1933. He is the co-editor, with Raymond Kévorkian and Michel Paboudjian, of Ohannès Pacha Kouyoumdjian: Le Liban à la Veille et au Début de la Guerre: Mémoires d’un Gouverneur, 1913-1915; with Raymond Kévorkian and Lévon Nordiguian, Les Arméniens, 1917-1939: La Quête d’un Refuge; and with Raymond Kévorkian, Lévon Nordiguian, Mihran Minassian, and Michel Paboudjian, Les Arméniens de Cilicie: Terroir, Mémoire et Identité.
The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. at NAASR, 395 Concord Avenue, Belmont, MA. For more information about Tachjian’s lecture, call 617-489-1610 or e-mail hq@naasr.org.