4 - Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and the Crisis of Leadership and Infrastructure in the Early Seventeenth-century Western Armenian Diaspora

Summary

The second part of this book focuses on the lives and works of two Kemah-Armenian authors, Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and Eremia K‘eōmurchean. They were both unusual men who served as distinguished leaders in their communities: in no way can they be seen as ‘typical’ of their times and society. But analysis of their lives and writings provides a glimpse into contemporary social changes, and I argue that their biographies can serve as the basis for building a periodisation of Ottoman-Armenian history in the seventeenth century. When first-generation refugees arrived in Istanbul, Western Anatolia and Thrace, they faced a crisis of leadership and infrastructure, and churchmen like Grigor Daranaḷts‘i applied themselves to community and infrastructure building. It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that Western Armenian intellectual and literary life reached its maturity primarily through the literary and intellectual efforts of one man, Eremia K‘eōmurchean. Analysis of these two authors serves as a means of investigating Armenian settlement and cultural life in the aftermath of the mass migrations.

Grigor Daranaḷts‘i and his chronicle – the topic of this chapter – have already been mentioned in this book. In Chapter Two, his chronicle was an important source for describing Kemah and the ‘Valley of Monasteries’ during the time of the Celali Revolts; in Chapter Three, it was used to construct an account of Armenians’ first settlement in Rodosto. Grigor's chronicle is known to Armenian historians, some of whom have used its first part as a repository of data about early seventeenth-century Armenian history in the Ottoman Empire, but these scholars have not considered the chronicle holistically as an artifact of seventeenth-century Ottoman-Armenian cultural and social life.

Here I will remedy this by providing an account of Grigor's life and considering his chronicle in its entirety as a literary work and political testament. The Armenians who fled westwards from the Celalis arrived in a different cultural sphere without extensive Armenian cultural or religious infrastructure outside of Istanbul and with intense political and religious divisions within their own community. Grigor was a pastor, fundraiser and infrastructure builder for the newly arrived Armenians, and his chronicle is the political testament of the leader of an Armenian faction which was written to satisfy the utilitarian needs of a community displaced by migration and divided by internal conflict.