Ottoman History Podcast - Survivor Objects and the Lost World of Ottoman Armenians

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Episode 407 with Heghnar Watenpaugh hosted by Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The genre of biography usually applies to people, but could a similar approach be applied to an object? Can a thing have a life of its own? In this episode, Heghnar Watenpaugh explores this question by tracing the long journey of the Zeytun Gospels, a famous illuminated manuscript considered to be a masterpiece of medieval Armenian art. Protected for centuries in a remote church in eastern Anatolia, the sacred book traveled with the waves of people displaced by the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the chaos of the First World War, it was divided in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty Museum in LA. In this interview, we discuss how the Zeytun Gospels could be understood as a "survivor object," contributing to current discussions about the destruction of cultural heritage. We also talk about the challenges of writing history for a broader reading public. « Click for More »

When we talk about a person's biography, we usually discuss the major factors that shaped someone's life. Where they were born, what they did, where they went, who they met. The genre of biography traditionally applies to people, but could a similar set of criteria be applied to an object? In other words, can an object, a thing, usually an inert prop in the theater of her lives, have a life of its own? Its own biography? In this episode, our guest Hagnar Zaitlian Wattenpah explores this question by tracing the long journey of the Zaytun Gospels, a famous manuscript considered to be a masterpiece of medieval Armenian art, from its origins in eastern Anatolia to the 21st century, when several of its missing pages turned up at the center of a legal case in a Los Angeles courtroom.

This is the Oddman History Podcast, and I'm Emily Neumeier. Hagner Zaitlian Wattenpah is professor of art history at the University of California, Davis. Her recent book, The Missing Pages, reconstructs the modern life of a medieval manuscript, the Zaytun Gospels. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the sacred object had followed the waves of displaced people facing extermination during the Armenian Genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the chaos of the First World War, it was divided into two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty Museum. In our interview, Dr. Wattenpah reflects on how her research project took shape. At some point, I made the decision that this was not only

about a court case. This was about a more comprehensive history biography of this object. And the court case was one episode of its very rich and complex life. We also discuss how the story of the Zaytun Gospels contributes to current discussions about the destruction of cultural heritage. So just separating the destruction of the work of art from the destruction of communities, life ways, is an artificial one. And for listeners interested in a more behind-the-scenes perspective, we talk about the challenges of writing history for a broader reading public. So how do you create suspense? How do you create narrative arc? How do you create suspense? How do you create narrative arc? How do you make connections?

How do you take your documents and your quotes and your fieldwork and weave it into a story? All this and more, coming up. Dr. Wattenpah, welcome to the podcast. I'm very happy to be with you, Emily. Our listeners will no doubt remember that Dr. Wattenpah is actually returning to the podcast. We talked to her about her earlier project on the architecture of Aleppo. And your research is taking a new direction in this project. How did you initially come to the topic?

The new project started out when I read a news item about a lawsuit. item about a lawsuit. The Armenian church had sued the Getty Museum in 2010 over a fragment of a medieval manuscript that the Getty had that the church claimed had been stolen during the Armenian genocide and should be returned. So this was very prominent litigation taking place in Los Angeles against the world's wealthiest art institution. So I followed the case as it moved on through various legal motions and procedures over the next five years. And in November 2015, the church in the Getty settled. And in November 2015, the church in the Getty settled. And the object in question is the Zeytun Gospels manuscript, which, as you lay out in your book, was produced in medieval Armenia in the 13th century. What is a Gospels manuscript in medieval times is an excerpt from the Bible, so the New Testament,

only the four Gospels out of the New Testament. And creating, illuminating, copying, binding Gospels was an act of piety. It helped you ensure the salvation of your soul. Commissioning Gospels, luxury Gospels, was a major act of devotion. So the Getty has eight pages out of this Gospels, the canon tables. The canon tables are a feature of many medieval Gospel manuscripts. medieval gospel manuscripts. They are concordance tables, an index of sorts, that helps you understand where in the various, the four gospels, the same event is depicted more than once. And for reasons that could probably be further clarified, the canon tables themselves by the medieval period in the Armenian tradition,

the Byzantine tradition, and other traditions become an obsessive focus of artistic elaboration. The canon tables that often take up 10 to 8 pages at the beginning of the manuscript become the most elaborate, the most artistically interesting parts of the manuscript become the most elaborate, the most artistically interesting parts of the manuscript. And to the modern eye, to us, the canon tables look very abstract. It's a list of numbers. The numbers refer to the various verses and sections of the Gospels, surmounted by some kind of architectural frame. Artists add ornamentation.

Toros Roslin, the illuminator of the Zeytun Gospels, being the wonderful artist that he is, has all these inventive flourishes, trees and fruits and plants and animals and even hidden human faces, in addition to very abstract ornamentation. And they're very interesting because these are not narrative scenes. This is not the nativity. This is not the crucifixion. So to the modern viewer, This is not the crucifixion. So to the modern viewer, they're very, very intriguing, very enigmatic pages where you see the numbers. Those numbers don't necessarily mean anything to you instantly. And in this architectural frame, it's very intriguing.

And everything is set in this, these beautiful enamel like colors and in gold leaf so they're visually they are stunning objects and I'll just say for our listeners that if you want to have a look at these canon tables we have them available on the website that's autumnhistorypodcast.com there was a key moment when these canon tables were separated from the main manuscript when did that happen that was the the crux of the litigation who did it why when under what circumstances so that was one of the things that drew me in. It was a mystery. There is, we now know, and it was in plain sight all along, we know that the pages were removed around 1920 by an individual named Hagop Atamian in Marash. And we have his own narrative about why he did it, when did he do it, what were the circumstances that led to that point.

The most remarkable thing is he was quite young. He was 13 years old at the time. And he and his family had just survived the Battle of Marash of February 1920. the Battle of Marash of February 1920. And in his own narrative, the Gospels appears, it had been lost, it is looted, the person who looted it suffers from terrible nightmares and wants to bring it back to the Armenian community to be cured. and wants to bring it back to the Armenian community to be cured. And the father of Hagop Atamian, our 13-year-old,

comes in the presence of the manuscript, but they have to leave Marash and they have to leave it behind. And so Hagop says that knowing that they were going to leave this incredible object, this sacred object behind, he wanted to take a part of it to prove that they had existed. So that's when he separates the canon tables from the rest of the manuscript, and he keeps them with him, and the pages come to the United States with him

when he immigrates a couple of years later with his family. You know, I find this story of the moment of separation of the Gospels from the canon pages so poignant, because I think that a lot of listeners are probably familiar with famous restitution cases, predominantly, I guess, in Nazi Germany. lot of listeners are probably familiar with famous restitution cases um predominantly i guess in nazi germany and it's a very clear narrative that we see you know movies like monuments men that you know and and what's the movie with the um letter the woman in gold the woman in gold right but there's it's a very clear narrative of good versus evil and black and white. And it paints a very difficult moment to try to save something from this book as they face, you know, setting off into an unknown fate. So in a way, does the Zaytun Gospels offer another kind of series of stories about these cases in the 20th century?

series of stories about these cases in the 20th century? I think the Zeytun Gospels case was so compelling to me precisely because it told a different story and it enabled me to explore other kinds of episodes. With, you know, Hagop makes, the 13-year-old Hagop makes a momentous private decision. It's impulsive. But we, I think, the reader, we also understand or we can empathize with what he is trying to do.

With the Zeytun Gospels, we're looking at a manuscript that has survived. So it allows us access to the stories of people who, for a number of different reasons, recognize the manuscript, recognize it as a sacred object or as a great work of art or as a beautiful thing or as a shiny thing. And try to acquire it or save it or spirit it away or steal it. So we, it allows us, the story of the manuscript allows us access to all these different moments. And the Zeytun Gospels is the survivor manuscript. It's the survivor object. And it can help us understand the stories of all the other manuscripts and sacred objects and vestments and reliquaries and monasteries and churches and other treasures that existed in Anatolia and Cilicia that were destroyed or burned or looted or stabbed with swords and or shot. So it's it's unusual because it has survived. It is not the story of the Zeytun Gospels is not the typical story of, you know, the Armenian religious manuscript during the genocide. of the Armenian religious manuscript during the genocide. Most of the cultural heritage, the religious heritage of the Ottoman Armenians was destroyed.

In your book, you state that this project is really about an object and its people. And there are quite a few individuals who come forward in this book, some of whom are not very well known, I think that's safe to say. And are there any people in particular whose story really resonated with you as you conducted your research and field work? One person whose story I really admire, whose works I admire, is Archbishop Sürmeyan, this Istanbul intellectual who before the genocide seemed to be a very modern, very dynamic public intellectual, champion of Ottoman brotherhood. And when the genocide takes place, his world, of course, is turned upside down

and he becomes a priest and he ends up being appointed at a very young age, prelate of Aleppo, at a time when Aleppo is where Armenian refugees and survivors are concentrated. They are either trying to move there or they are moving through Aleppo to go elsewhere. And so Suleyman finds himself in a situation where not only does he see fragments of the Ottoman Armenian society that had been so glittering just a few years earlier, cycling through Aleppo in the most destitute and desperate situations. And he is a major political figure for the history of Armenians, the Armenian diaspora. But what I think we have forgotten is that he was also a historian, an art historian. And it is thanks to him that we know so much about the Zeytun Gospels, because he saw the manuscript before it was separated into two and made a full and comprehensive analysis of it. I admire Suleymane's insane project of recording and memorializing the remains of Armenian cultural heritage. And here he is in Aleppo having to tend to refugees dealing with

French colonial authorities, you know, celebrating mass, baptisms. In the middle of all that, he sets to himself this task of compiling a full and comprehensive inventory of every fragment of Armenian manuscript that cycles through his hands. And his monumental inventory of Armenian manuscripts just keeps growing as he discovers new fragments that are coming in through Aleppo. And he uses all of his wiles and his leverage as a religious figure and a political figure in order to gain access to these manuscripts and study them and record them. So people like Surmeyan or Aram Andonian, Zabelye Sayan, and others are these survivor intellectuals. Hagopo Chagan is also one of them. These survivor intellectuals who are on the fly, while they themselves are refugees, trying to devise ways in which they can repair some of the damage that has been done. They know that it is their task to record what has happened

and to salvage what has remained and to lead the community, whatever community that has survived. They're not prepared to do it. They don't have the means to do it, but they're doing it. And what I also find compelling about Surmeyan is that he has a plan for what Armenians should do. And his plan for Armenians is to embrace Syria as their own homeland. states other than their state of origin, which has in the meantime become the Republic of Turkey, while some other Armenian intellectuals are advocating a return, he recognizes that there is also another path. We can become Syrians, and we are part of Syria. So he creates this monumental history of Syria where he places the history of the Armenian community in Aleppo, which begins around the 12th century.

This is a model of acculturation, a model of survival as acculturation into new societies. And that, I find, a very creative and extraordinary model for him to advocate in the 1920s. So he's not only looking backward, but he's also looking forward. Absolutely. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Welcome back. Again, we're here with Dr. Wattenpah talking about her new book, The Missing Pages, The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice. This book clearly engages with current theoretical movements that have been really important for art history, namely thing theory, mobility studies, the social lives of

objects. These are the kinds of things we're talking about in art history. And within this theoretical literature, there are really interesting questions about the agency of objects themselves. It seems like these ideas are kind of operating in the background of this book. I really would love to hear if you think it's fair or accurate to say if this manuscript wields its own agency or influence on people. Absolutely. All of these art historical debates informed the way this book was conceived. Absolutely. And you're very, of course, you're an art historian, you're extremely astute in noticing all of these things, which in the book have to be presented in with a very light touch, because it is meant to be read by a broader public. So all of these art

historical debates very much inform the way I conceived of the object as the main protagonist. I mean, the object, the Gesetun Gospels, is the protagonist of the book. The assumption is that it participated in its own life, though it has agency, it does things. And this is complicated by the fact that at a period of its life, it was an active religious object, which people believed accomplished miracles. It got rid of your enemies. It legitimized oaths. It could be taken out. It did it taken out and taken on processions. It bestowed blessings on you. So people believed that and believe still this object does very real things in the world. So, and that was, it's something that I wanted to explore and make part of the story, how the people, the various people that the manuscript encounters relate to it in different

ways. The notable that, first, the notable man that brings it out of Zeytun clearly sees it as a holy object that is protecting him. Other people who encountered the object, like the young Ottoman surgeon and intellectual Dr. Artinder Hazaryan, for him the Zeytun Gospels is a work of art. young Ottoman surgeon and intellectual, Dr. Artinder Hazaryan. For him, the Zeytun Gospels is a work of art. It is beautiful. It is an antiquity. It is a national treasure. So the book enthralls him in different ways. So I am not on the extreme end of people who believe in thing theory and in thingness and in agential objects. But I'm very interested in the very complicated and reciprocal and multidirectional

relationships between objects and people, and especially objects of great symbolic significance like the Zeytun Gospels, enhanced with these aesthetic qualities. And the manuscript today in Armenia is still a relic, correct? The manuscript in Armenia is kept at the Madinataran, which is a secular institution. It's a state institution. So it's a museum object. However, it does get taken out once in a while to perform a religious function. even has become even more momentous. It is now recognized as one of the 14 most sacred relics of the Armenian church alongside the lance that was stuck on the side of Christ when he was on

the cross. So the Zeytun Gospels is right next to objects like that. In art art history very commonly the biography of objects that that were originally created for a religious context is that they were created and then they at some point made their way into a museum collection in the 19th or 20th century and were thus deactivated as religious art religious objects and then became works of art in a modern western museum space and what's so interesting about the narrative of this manuscript is that it's not this clean break i mean it sort of can toggle back and forth even today between these two identities yeah and and i think that's another art historical debate that's very vital today. Absolutely. Are certain objects that are preserved in repositories or museums, are they really art pieces or ethnographic objects or human specimens? Or are they

objects that do religious things, that have a religious function, that are they objects that do religious things that have a religious function that are gods, that are sentient beings, and that have to be treated and act in the world in a very different way? I mean, it goes back to the notion that these objects are not inert. Exactly. And in the case of the Zaytun Gospels, this manuscript is far from being inert, and you had to kind of follow its path. Your book is organized according to cities. So we start with the creation of the manuscript in Khromkla. Khromkla or Rumkale. Rumkale. I was thinking I was going to mess that up. Anyway, I was curious about your decision behind this framework for the book. Early on, did you have any other ideas for organizing it? Or was this pretty clear early on that this was the best

framing for the book? And to what extent is this tied to the research that went into the writing of this book, the fieldwork? Could you reflect on this fieldwork and why you felt that tracing the journey of this book geographically was the best way to tell this story? That's a fantastic question. It was a conundrum. How do you organize this? Do you begin with courtroom drama? Do you tell the full history of this manuscript or just the relevant material for the court case? And so at some point I made the decision that this was not only about a court case. This was about a more comprehensive history biography of this object. And the court case was one episode of its very rich and complex

life. But how to organize that? At first, my first thought and some of the first drafts were constructed around the idea of a reverse chronology, like a detective novel. You begin at the murder and then you try to reconstruct what has happened. So it's a reverse chronological sequence. And that proved very difficult to do because you're trying to tell a story that's already very complicated and that touches on a lot of places that not many people have heard of. So I had to find a less unwieldy and clearer way to take the reader through the process. As you know, Emily, I'm an architectural historian. I don't primarily work on objects. So I embarked on this project to write the life of a manuscript. And the way that I approached it was like an architectural and urban historian,

to look at the object in its spatial contexts. So I thought very hard about this. I felt very strongly that the people who had, the historian scholars who had worked on the Zeytun Gospels before, had not visited the places where the Zeytun Gospels spent time. And I felt very strongly, maybe because I'm an architectural historian, that I had to go to these places. But it was also a little bit of an active pilgrimage. So I went with, I went on a very moving and meaningful journey with my colleagues and friends, Carol Bertram, who writes about Turkish architecture, various architectures in Turkey, and communities in Turkey, and Mia

Fuller, who also works on cultural heritage issues around the Mediterranean. So three of us went on this journey, beginning in Hromgla, modern-day Rumkale, on to Zeytun and then Marash. So we really retraced the steps of the manuscripts as we knew it. And it was deeply meaningful, even though many of the traces of the Armenian communities of these areas are erased, sometimes erased many times over, very deliberately erased, crosses that are scraped out, whose outlines you can still see, inscriptions that are scraped out while the ornament next to them has been left.

So you're witnessing the erasure of this community as you're doing your fieldwork, and that's very powerful, and I think it was very important for me to see that and experience that. What was also very important was to see the enmeshment of the landscape with the built environment especially in Zeytun and it really made me understand why Zeytun is such a critical has been such a focus of why Zeytun has been so important to the Armenian imagination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what people mean when they call it the eagle's nest, the stronghold of the last true Armenians. It really brought home to me what the life of the mountain was versus the life of the plain, the life of the cities such as Maraj, Aleppo, versus the life in these mountain strongholds

where the treasures of the medieval kings of Cilicia had ended up. But one thing that I should mention is that it also brought home to me how important the Zeytun Gospels are because of that vanished world of Ottoman Armenians, of the medieval kingdom of Cilicia, of all the monasteries, the sacred places, the churches in Zeytun and its environs. The Zeytun Gospels is the only object that has survived from centuries of artistic production and so that also made me realize how important this object is and what it means to understand the meaning of a survivor object. That it can bring to life an entire world that's gone. Yes.

I think this brings us to another point, which is that in the destruction of cultural heritage, there's this common idea that human lives are more important than objects and buildings. I feel that to some extent, we always have to sort of do this caveat that of course human lives are more important than objects and buildings. I feel that to some extent, we always have to sort of do this caveat that, of course, human lives are more important than buildings and objects. And yet we're going to talk about the destruction of cultural heritage, which, I mean, this narrative essentially very cleanly separates these two as distinct categories but again and again in this book i noticed that you

stress how objects buildings and people met the same fate during the genocide especially in terms of violence erasure displacement and how the stories of all of these places people and things are intertwined i would love to hear you talk more about how perhaps we can start thinking beyond this human versus thing dichotomy and conversations about heritage i think in recent discussions of cultural destruction, the way in which issues are framed, the separation between the humans that inhabit a particular lived, built environment and the built environment itself is very problematic distinction. distinction. There is the old trope, a very problematic trope, where people in the West care about buildings and artworks that are destroyed, say the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Everyone is up in arms because this great work of art has been destroyed. this great work of art has been destroyed. But nobody really cares about the people who are affected by the destruction of these works of art. This is the trope that we see played out in certain kinds of discussions of cultural destruction in our own time. And obviously,

this is completely the wrong way to put it the destruction of built environments the destruction the destruction of monuments we see it over and over again goes hand in hand with the destruction of people with mass rape with displacement of populations so just separating the destruction of the work of art from the destruction of communities, life ways, is an artificial one. So I think we need to figure out ways to talk about these kinds of assaults on heritage communities as a continuous process of destruction. And I take inspiration from my colleagues in the law school, Karima Benun, who talks about these issues in a very comprehensive way within a human rights legal framework. And that's why I wanted to elaborate this concept of the survivor object,

which is kind of a theoretical claim in the book. To recognize this particular dimension of objects, whether ordinary objects of works of art that survive trauma along with the people that own them, use them, worship them. And particularly for highly symbolic, highly valuable objects like the Zeytun Gospels, they acquire a whole other status having survived the genocide, having survived exile, having survived immigration. genocide, having survived exile, having survived immigration. And I think when you see the object in a museum setting, in an exhibition, however thoughtful, however well conceived the art exhibition might be, what you're not seeing is that this is a survivor object with a recent history that it tells in its own materiality i mean the in the canon tables of the zaytun gospels you see this crease it when you approach the object you see it it doesn't show very well in photographs but the crease has something to do

with the way in which after it was removed from the book, it was stored, it became a family heirloiate the past and trauma of the past in a very powerful way. And they can symbolize resilience. They symbolize the trauma. These are extremely potent objects. So I think that one of the things I try to convey in the book is that the Zeytun Gospels is rightfully celebrated as a work of art, as a masterpiece of medieval illumination, of course. For those who can see, it also signifies that survival is possible. Reconstruction of communities is possible. Connection to the past is possible through this very potent object. That can, by the way, also accomplish miracles. This book is clearly written for a wider reading public beyond

academia and I know that a lot of our listeners are interested in doing a project like this in terms of translating their academic work into a format that would reach a broader public. Do you have any reflections or advice for historians who would like to tell their stories to a wider audience? I can imagine that you made it look really easy, but I can imagine that it wasn't. But I can imagine that it wasn't. And I think this is something a lot of our listeners would be interested in hearing you talk more about. It was very hard, very hard to write this book. And it took a very long time because it's like learning to write in a different language. It's a different genre.

It's a different genre. language. It's a different genre. It's a different genre. You can't, you're, so you want to make serious arguments and make theoretical claims and engage with theoretical literature, but you also want the book to read like a detective story. So we, how do you create suspense? How do you create narrative arc? How do you make connections? How do you take your documents and your quotes and your fieldwork and weave it into a story? Needless to say, it takes a lot of drafts. And my wonderful editor at Stanford University Press, Kate Wall, without her guidance and her suggestions and her support, I don't think I could have done this. I'm very grateful for everything that she did to support the writing

process of this book. I think in the modern publishing landscape, there really is a space for serious nonfiction, serious scholarly nonfiction that is literary, that can be read at on a number of levels by other scholars. And they would, you know, they will go through the footnotes and they will get the theoretical stakes and the debates but it should also be able to be read by um you know a 20 year old or somebody who doesn't have a grounding in um in art history so and even i wrote the captions to the illustrations in the zaytun gospospels in such a way that they're narrative. So you could even only read the captions of the illustrations and you will get the story. You will get some of the points that are being made. So I conceived of this book as a way that, as a book that could be read on a number of different levels,

as a scholarly book, as nonfiction, even as literary narrative. That's why there are these vignettes at the beginning of the chapters that are distinguished typographically. They are based on the same evidence that the chapters treat analytically, but they aim at presenting a picture, painting a scene, suggesting something. One of the vignettes is even the, one of the hidden faces in the canon tables reflecting on the state of being, on where tables reflecting on the state of being on where the object is so the object speaks in in that vignette so these are experiments in different kinds of storytelling that i wanted to include it was very hard to do there are also some easter eggs there are there are some allusions to well-known debates in art history. The Sirarpi

Derner Sesyan chapter has some Easter eggs. There's also references to well-known works of Armenian literature. The vignette at the beginning of the Aleppo chapter where Surmeyan is trying to bless a group of refugees on the shanty towns outside of Aleppo, and one person says something and he's not sure what is being said. That's an allusion to a short story by Shahan Shahnoor that was written in 1920s Paris that also plays on an ambiguity and it also concerns the traumatic events in Cilicia during the French period of occupation. I conceive of these vignettes as homages to the way in which others have tried to write about the unspeakable experiences of the genocide in various ways, in various modes of speaking, through songs, through poems, through modern novels, or through scholarship, or through the creation of documents, witness statements, lists of names.

So it's an homage to the various ways in which Armenians have tried to make sense of their most traumatic experiences and to record them. most traumatic experiences and to record them. Has this experience writing this book changed you as a writer in terms of also your academic, more academic writing? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because it really taught me that you cannot waste a word. Everything, every sentence, every word has to build up to what your goal is for that chapter, for that paragraph. And I think that's something that maybe we don't think about so much in our most specialized academic writing, but that was definitely something that I became aware of.

At one point in the book, when you write about Archbishop Hovsepian's research and scholarship on the Zetun Gospels, you described his work as a monument to the dead. And I wonder to what extent your project could also be thought of in that way. Josep Jan's art history was a monument to the dead because he lived through the destruction of his own research. He lived through the destruction of his own research. He was a priest prior to the First World War who had freedom of movement throughout the Middle East. He could visit any monastery, study treasuries,

study medieval manuscripts and photograph them. And after the cataclysm of the genocide, he realizes that his photos, his slide collection, is all that has remained of millennial art tradition. So his slide collection is no longer just his research tool. It becomes a memorial to things that are not there anymore. And I have a lot of empathy for what Hovsepian's position and thoughts must have been in a very small way. Of course, my previous research is on Syria, especially Aleppo, and I have a slight collection of beautiful monuments and people

and everyday life in Aleppo, things that are now destroyed. So I feel, So I feel, and new colleagues who have worked in Yemen, studying monuments and communities and lifestyles that are now in danger of being eradicated, his experience is unfortunately far from being unique. So I consider Hovsepian's art history, his unfinished art history, as a monument to the dead. I suppose you could describe my book as a monument to the dead. I'd like to think of it as a monument to survivors. What really intrigued me is how Hovsepian, despite the fact that he has gone through

all these experiences and has witnessed the destruction of his people, but also his research material, but he perseveres in his project even though he's unable to finish it not least because he gets elected Catholicos of Cilicia and so he really is called upon to lead his people in spiritually politically and culturally but he he's also one of these intellectuals who are exercising their agency. They refuse to be exterminated.

They refuse to accept that their community is dead. And they are going to lead its survival. They are going to lead its perseverance. They are going to lead its perseverance. Well, on that very thoughtful, empowerful note, I think that this is a good place to thank you, Dr. Wattenpah, for all of your time and your reflections.

And thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you, Dr. Niemeyer. So I'll remind our listeners that if they want to see the images and more information about the topic that we discussed today, they can go to the website, that's autumnhistorypodcast.com. That's it for now, and until next time, take care.