Armenian Communities of Pontus

Richard G. Hovannisian History

The Trebizond-Black Sea Communities
UCLA Armenian History & Culture Series

Description
From early antiquity, the Armenian people developed a rich and distinctive culture on the great highland plateau extending from eastern Asia Minor to the Caucasus. On that crossroad, they interacted on many levels with civilizations of the Orient and Occident.

The golden plains, river valleys, and mountain ribs of the Armenian Plateau are separated from the lush, semitropical Black Sea littoral by the imposing Pontic mountain range. Nevertheless, associations between Armenia and Pontus date back to the era of the Persian Achaemenian Empire beginning in the sixth century B.C.Later in 401-400 B.C., the Greek general Xenophon traversed the Armenian Plateau as an escape route from the Persian heartlands to Trapezus (Trebizond) on the Black Sea, his account of that adventurous journey affording one of the earliest written descriptions of ancient Armenia. Economic and cultural interaction between Armenia and Pontus increased during the centuries of Roman dominion in Asia Minor and especially during the time of the medieval Greco/Byzantine Empire of Trebizond. Thriving, enlightened Armenian communities developed all along the extensive narrow corridor from Batum in the east to Samsun and Sinope in the west, while the curious Armenian enclave of Hamshen in the eastern Pontic hinterland retained much of its Armenian character long after its population was forcibly Islamized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The UCLA conference series, “Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces,” is organized by the Holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History with the purpose of exploring and illuminating the historical, political, cultural, religious, social, and economic legacy of a people rooted for millennia on the Armenian highland.

Armenian Pontus is the eighth of the conference proceedings to be published. Scholars from various disciplines offer the story of the Armenian communities in the Pontus-Black Sea region across the centuries until their violent elimination in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations
Contributors
Preface

1 The Armenian Pontus
Richard G. Hovannisian

2 Armenians on the Black Sea: The Province of Trebizond
Robert H. Hewsen 37

3 Azzi-Hayasa on the Black Sea? Another Puzzle of Armenian Origins
Vartan Matiossian

4 Contacts between Armenia and Pontus in the Pre-Christian Period
Richard Wilkinson

5 The Armenian Ties to Medieval Trebizond
Abraham Terian

6 The Foundations of Hamshen and Armenian Descent Myths:
Parallels and Interconnections
Anne Elizabeth Redgate

7 Islamization of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire:
The Hamshentsi/Hemshinli Case
Claire Mouradian

8. The Dark Ages on the Black Sea? Manuscript Painting of Hamshen
Christina Maranci

9. Armenian City Quarters and the Architectural Legacy
of the Pontus
David Kertmenjian

10 The Pontic Armenian Communities in the Nineteenth Century
Bedross Der Matossian

11 Reform, Revolution, and Repression: The Trebizond Armenians in the 1890s
Barbara J. Merguerian

12 The Fate of the Armenians in Trebizond, 1915
Simon Payaslian

13 Ordu on the Black Sea
Vartiter Kotcholosian Hovannisian

14 The Postwar Trebizond Court-Martial
Richard G. Hovannisian

15 Pontus and Armenia, 1916-1922
Richard G. Hovannisian

16 History and Identity among the Hemshin
Hovann H. Simonian

17 Pontic Armenian Communities in the Kuban and Abkhazia
Igor Kuznetsov

Contributors
BEDROSS DER MATOSSIAN is Lecturer in Middle East History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A native of Jerusalem, he is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2008 in Middle East History in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. His areas of interest include ethnic politics in the late Ottoman Empire, development of public sphere in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East, social and economic history of the Middle East, the comparative study of ethnic groups, and ethnic conflict in the Middle East.

ROBERT H. HEWSEN is Professor Emeritus of History at Rowan University and has taught Armenian history as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and Europe and most recently at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the co-founder of the Society for the Study of Caucasia and a contributor to the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, Revue des études arménnienes, and other publications. A specialist in the historical geography of Armenia, he has prepared Armenia: A Historical Atlas, contributed several maps for the Tübingen Atlas of the Middle East, and translated with critical commentary the Ashkharhatsoyts, an early geography that he attributes to Anania of Shirak.

RICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN is Holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and editor of this series. His numerous publications include Armenia on the Road to Independence, the four-volume The Republic of Armenia, five volumes on the Armenian Genocide, the latest being titled The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, and seventeen other volumes and sixty research articles relating to Armenian, Caucasian, Middle Eastern, and Islamic studies. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received many honors, including encyclicals from the supreme patriarchs of the Armenian Church, two honorary doctoral degrees, and election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He is the initiator and six-time president of the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS).

VARTITER KOTCHOLOSIAN HOVANNISIAN is an Internist with the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Group of Southern California and a contributor to several Armenian American newspapers and journals. She is the author of an ethnographic study of her father’s native village titled Dzitogh: Dashti Karno (Dzitogh in the Plain of Garin/Erzerum) and has engaged in extensive archival research on the Armenian Question and the first Republic of Armenia. She collaborates in editing this series as well as in translating and editing other related works in Russian, Armenian, and English.

DAVID KERTMENJIAN is Professor of Architecture at Erevan State University and Chair of Art History at the Erevan State Academy of Fine Arts. His Ph.D. thesis at Erevan Polytechnic University is titled “Planning and Architectural Features in Downtown Areas in Medieval Armenia,” and his Doctor of Sciences dissertation is titled “The Medieval School of Architecture in the Lake Van Region.” He is the author of numerous articles relating to Armenian city planning and architecture.

IGOR V. KUZNETSOV is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kuban State University, South Russia. His research focuses on history of anthropological theory and Pontus and Caucasus ethnography. He is a founding member and director of the Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies (Krasnodar), as well as an editor of its Bulletin: Anthropology, Minorities, Multi-Culturalism. He has also published a monograph devoted to the Hamshen Armenians and many articles on the Armenians, Hemshins, Pontic Greeks, and Meskhetian Turks in Nationalities Papers: Ethnographic Review and Diaspora (Moscow), Gesellschaftliche Transformationen/Societal Transformations (Berlin), and several other journals.

CHRISTINA MARANCI is Holder of the Arthur H. Dadian and Ara Oztemel Chair in Armenian Art and Architectural History at Tufts University. Her research focuses on medieval Armenia and cross-cultural relations with the Byzantine, Sasanian, and Islamic worlds, as well as issues of historiography. Her publications on Armenian art and architecture have appeared in numerous journals, including the Art Bulletin, Gesta, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her book, Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation, examines the role of Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski in shaping the study of the field.

VARTAN MATIOSSIAN is affiliated with the School of Oriental Studies, University del Salvador, Buenos Aires. He has written extensively about Armenian history and literature, both ancient and modern, in scholarly and popular publications in Armenian, Spanish, and English. He has translated twelve books from Armenian into Spanish and has published four volumes in Armenian, among them studies on the twentieth-century writer, Kostan Zarian, and on the Armenian com-munities of Latin America. He has an unpublished volume in Spanish about the origins of the Armenian people.

BARBARA J. MERGUERIAN is the director of the Women’s Information Center of the Armenian International Women’s Association in Boston. She has been a visiting professor at Tufts University, Erevan State University, and California State University, Fresno. She is the former editor of the Journal of Armenian Studies and the Armenian Mirror-Spectator newspaper and is the co-editor of three books: Exploring Gender Issues in the Caucasus; Voices of Armenian Women; and Armenian Women in a Changing World. Her major research interest has been the role of the American missionaries in their work among the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about which she has pub-lished several articles.

CLAIRE MOURADIAN is Senior Researcher and Vice Director at the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS-EHESS) and teaches at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris. She is a founding member and president of the Société des études arméniennes; has published De Staline à Gor-batchev: Histoire d’une république soviétique, l’Arménie and many articles on modern Armenian and Caucasian history; and is co-editor of Le Crime de Silence: Actualité du génocide des Arméniens, and the special issue of Revue d’histoire de la Shoah titled “Ailleurs, hier, autrement: Connaissance et reconnaissance du génocide des Arméni-ens.”

SIMON PAYASLIAN is Holder of the Charles and Elisabeth Kenosian Chair in Modern Armenian History and Literature at Boston University and formerly Kaloosdian/Mugar Professor of Armenian Genocide Studies and Modern Armenian History at Clark University. He is the author of The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present; United States Policy toward the Armenian Question and the Armenian Genocide; The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923: A Handbook for Students and Teachers; U.S. Foreign Economic and Military Aid: The Reagan and Bush Administrations; and International Political Economy: Conflict and Cooperation in the Global System (co-author); as well as articles on the United Nations, international law and human rights, peace studies, the Kurdish question, U.S. foreign policy, and Armenian literature.

ANNE ELIZABETH REDGATE is Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where she includes Armenian history in her courses in European history and World history. Her book, The Armenians, gives an account of the Armenians from the twelfth century B.C. to the late eleventh century A.D., and she is working on a second edition to continue the account up to the present day. Her research focuses on the early medieval period and especially on comparative history and issues of identity.

HOVANN H. SIMONIAN is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California. He holds MA degrees in International Relations from the University of Southern California and in Central Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. He has edited and contributed to The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey; coauthored, with Richard Hrair Dekmejian, Troubled Waters: The Geopolitics of the Caspian Region; and has published scholarly articles in several journals.

ABRAHAM TERIAN is Professor Emeritus of Early Christian Literature, including Armenian Patristics, at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in New Rochelle, New York. He served for two decades as Professor of Intertestamental and Early Christian Literatures at Andrews University and has been a recurring Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago. A recipient of the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities award, he has served as president of the Midwest Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, as editor of St. Nersess Theological Review, and as a member of the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. His publications include works on the writings of Philo of Alexandria as well as other monographs in Armenian Studies. His latest book, Macarius of Jerusalem: Letter to the Armenians, AD 335, establishes the authorship and date of the earliest full-length document bearing on the history of Armenian Christianity.

RICHARD WILKINSON is Head of the Department of Spanish at Winchester College in England after completing a career with the British Diplomatic Service. A graduate of Cambridge University with a degree in Classics and Archeology, he has also studied Modern and Classical Armenian in Paris, authored an occasional paper of the Society for Armenian Studies titled An Introduction to the History of Pre-Christian Armenia, and published articles on various aspects of Armenian archaeology in the Revue des études arméniennes and the Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies. He spent a semester attached to the Faculty of History of Erevan State University and has been Visiting Professor of Armenian History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.




About the Editor
Richard G. Hovannisian

Richard G. Hovannisian is Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History and Holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of California, Los Angeles. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1962, he organized the undergraduate and graduate programs in Armenian and Caucasian history. He served as the Associate Director of the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies from 1978 to 1995 and represented the State of California on the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education from 1978 to 1994. A Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Hovannisian is the author or editor of numerous books and scholarly articles, including four volumes on the first Republic of Armenia and five volumes on the Armenian Genocide. He has made many media appearances on Armenian and human rights issues. He is the founder and six-time president of the Society for Armenian Studies and serves on the board of directors of nine scholarly and civic organizations. Since 1997, he has organized semiannual UCLA conferences on Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces. Dr. Hovannisian has received many honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and advancement of Armenian Studies, including election to the Armenian National Academy of Sciences and decorations from the supreme patriarchs of the Armenian Church and from the Republics of Armenia and Artsakh.