Event Videos — UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Dennis Papazian's journey is a classic American immigrant tale. Through it all, he shares his wit, resilience, keen sense of perception, and vision, as well as the memorable characters he meets along the way, as he reflects on his consequential, eventful, and at times surprising life. It is a story that will inspire and give hope to all who join him on his journey.

In this talk, Dr. Bertram describes how, with luggage filled with stories heard from their own family members, including those transmitted through the songs they sang, the dances they danced, the foods they made, and even through their screams in the night, pilgrims understood that they were visiting a sacred landscape, albeit one violated by the profane. In this fraught yet transcendent place, pilgrims invent a series of rituals so that village by village, town by town, or even house by house, they ritually connect with their own ancestors, and, as they stand on their own ancestral land, allow them to be a part of their personal story in the present.

Monday, April 18, 2022, 1:00pm EDT / 10:00am, PDTOn Zoom and the Promise Armenian Institute YouTube channel.PRESENTERROBERT SUKIASYAN, PhD, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Promise Armenian InstituteDISCUSSANTRUBEN SAFRASTYAN, PhD, Counselor of Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Armenian National Academy of SciencesDeportation and massacres were the principal methods of exterminating the Ottoman Armenians. In the case of Sivas province, which had one the largest Armenian populations in the empire, the vast majority of the deportees were killed on the way to the Syrian desert. The study of survivor memoirs sheds light on this process while at the same time describing the administration...

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

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.