Event Videos (2020–2025)

A conversation with poets Shahé Mankerian and Susan E. Barba, with participation from students of the St. Gregory and M. Hovsepian School in Pasadena, California.

Illustrated lecture on documenting and preserving the dragon-stones of Armenia from the 2nd millennium BCE by Dr. Arsen Bobokhyan— PI of this project

In this illustrated talk, Sylvie L. Merian, Ph.D., explains the reasons for the late usage in Armenian artistic traditions of Resurrection iconography in which Christ is shown emerging from the tomb, demonstrate what inspired the artists, and show how this iconography became common in numerous other artistic media for centuries.

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.

Dr. Bedross Der Matossian presents his book The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century.

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.

First Annual Vartan Gregorian Memorial Lecture

This talk is part of a larger book project that explores the history of Iran’s Armenian women from the beginning of Naser al-Din Shah’s reign in 1848 to the 1979 fall of the Pahlavi dynasty.

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...

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.