Conclusions: Legacies of the Great Armenian Flight

Summary

This book has argued that the Western Armenian Diaspora emerged in the coastal cities of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the Great Armenian Flight. It was composed of diverse communities of Armenians – mostly descendants of the refugees of the seventeenth century – living in Western Anatolia, Istanbul and Thrace, places where there had been scant Armenian populations before the migrations. While the standardised Western Armenian literary language is a product of the nineteenth century, the populations that would embrace it as their modern literary language in Istanbul and Izmir had begun their distinct literary and cultural development long beforehand, in the seventeenth century, after a transfer of the centres of Armenian intellectual life from Eastern Anatolia to the coastal cities of the Ottoman Empire. The move is a story of urbanisation, as villagers and residents of provincial cities transformed Istanbul into the most important Armenian demographic and cultural centre in the world. The Armenians of Istanbul and other centres in the western parts of the Ottoman Empire would demand new kinds of Armenian and Armeno-Turkish literature. The new context created a different literary mood from that of the historic cultural centres of Eastern Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Cilicia, and this would lead to the rise of a literary tradition and translation movement aimed at meeting the needs of refugees and their descendants.

Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and Eremia K‘eōmurchean were two key architects of the new society that developed after the migrations. The former had been the fervent political leader of the first refugees, while the latter was Ottoman Istanbul's first prominent Armenian intellectual and author. In spite of their contributions to the settlement and intellectual life of the Western Armenian Diaspora, neither Grigor Daranaḷtsi nor Eremia K‘eōmurchean are celebrated or remembered as having great significance among Armenians of the world today. Not a single street in Armenia is named after them, nor are their works studied in Armenian schools. Rather than having become Armenian national heroes, they have been relegated to sporadic study by Armenologists, without having entered into the Armenian national consciousness.

Part of the reason for this relates to the subsequent histories of their life works.