Commemorating the Armenian Genocide [Hardcover]

Commemorated annually on 24 April, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is an important part of national identity in both Armenia and the diaspora.This book is a historical and anthropological account of how the genocide is commemorated by Armenians and its evolving significance over time. Beginning with the first demonstrations by survivors in Allied-occupied Constantinople in 1919, to the Stalinist ban on commemoration and the Khrushchev thaw and beyond, the book charts how the politics of the genocide and its official and popular memory fluctuated in Soviet Armenia and the diaspora. The book also provides a detailed account of the rituals involved in the annual march to the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan and other memory sites, analysing the ways that the collective memory of this foundational event is embodied and continues to reflect and shape Armenian identity today.A historical and anthropological account of how the Armenian Genocide is memorializedHarutyun Marutyanis Head Researcher of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He is also Chief of Department at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, where he previously served as Director (2018-2023).

Memory keeps a nation alive, Even if you cut off its heads, an Armenian poet wrote, the nation is like a hydra that will grow back many more. Anthropologist Harutyun Marutyan gives us a forgotten history of how Armenians around the world, and eventually in Soviet Armenia, remembered their martyrs in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Commemoration is fundamental to the passing on of memory. Even the young architects who designed the Tsitsernakabert Monument to the Genocide did not know what the Yeghern (Genocide) was when they took up the task. In this beautifully written history, we learn how memory was transmitted for the last one hundred years, a story that has not hitherto been told. Like monuments and co