In this talk, Dr. Carel Bertram discusses how travelers came to experience these two landscapes (hostland/diasporic home and homeland) not merely together, but as mirrors, or as parallel or overlapping maps. She uses their conversations and their memories of homeland-related recipes and music to show how, during their travels, this sensibility was activated and nurtured in ways that impacted their understanding and experiences of homeland in powerful ways.
The boundaries between the Iranian and Armenian worlds were porous in many ways. The Armenian presence in Iran is attested from the Achaemenid centuries to the present. Although the Armenian Iranian community has decreased significantly since the nineteenth century, it still constitutes the most significant Christian element in Iran, finding means to preserve in large measure its religion, language, and traditions and to navigate between Armenian and Iranian identities.
Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multi-religious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities.
Examining case studies from Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia to Nagorno Karabakh and its surrounding regions and Nakhijevan in Azerbaijan, scholars present comparative and connective histories of how the historian’s craft and its proponents have been implicated in the incitement of conflict and the destruction of cultural heritage. Topics explored include Soviet nationality policy, the production of national histories for the South Caucasian nationalities, the standardization of curricula of national histories under Soviet and post-Soviet rule, and the destruction of historical monuments