NAASR's Mardigian Library Treasures — #NAASR

This edition of Library Treasures will focus on a single item acquired in 2019: Inchpēs zardarel tōnatsaṙě = Ինչպէս զարդարել տօնածառը (How to decorate the Christmas tree), a 20-page booklet written by “Zaruhi” and published in Tiflis in 1910.

This is the story of the 300-year journey of a remarkable book to our library. 

This issue will cover the life and illustrative work of Nonny Hogrogian.

In this edition of Library Treasures, we will highlight publications from the Mardigian Library collection that focus on murals of the Armenian churches. 

In conjunction with the celebratory event NAASR held on May 6, 2023, marking the appointment of Christina Maranci as the third holder of the Mashtots Chair in Armenian Studies at Harvard University, we are devoting this Library Treasures installment to materials from NAASR’s own organizational archives pertaining to this organization’s pioneering effort to establish the first chair in Armenian Studies in the U.S.—or, indeed, anywhere in the Armenian diaspora in North America—focusing on the years from 1954 to the appointment of the first chairholder in 1969.

This Library Treasures feature is part of NAASR’s 2022 focus on Armenian maps and cartography which has been supported by a grant from the Dadourian Foundation. Throughout the year we organized three lectures on this topic which can be viewed on our YouTube channel: Rouben Galichian, “The Ever-Changing Borders of Armenia in Ancient and Modern Times: The Cartographic Record”; Matthew Karanian, “Mapping the Armenian Highland”; and Khatchig Mouradian, “Gas Balloons, Emperors, and Armenian Mapmakers: A Cartographic Journey through the Library of Congress’s Collections.”

Haigazn Kazarian, working within the limitations of his time and place, was one of the first writers to attempt to write the history of the Armenian Genocide using archival documents and official records, and his pioneering role deserves to be remembered. Thumbnail photo circa 1914: Haigazn Kazarian is #2 from left standing.

Part 1 of our Library Treasures feature on the work of Edward Arakel Yeran presented books published by his Yeran press through ca. 1915. Part 2 continues and brings to a conclusion this work.

To mark May 28, the anniversary of the declaration of the first independent Republic of Armenia in 1918, we focus on one object from NAASR’s Mardigian Library.

In this feature we highlight a group, by no means exhaustive, of memoirs by survivors of the Armenian Genocide published in Armenian and English between the years 1918 and 1955. In these memoirs we hear the voices of women and men, clergymen and political activists, natives of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and of western Asia Minor, Protestant and Apostolic, intellectuals and “average” women and men, as well as one non-Armenian, an Assyrian whose people suffered largely the same fate as the Armenians.