How might we unpack the significance of Armenian pilgrimage tattoos as a kind of “embodied archive” of territorial disintegration, genocide, erasure, and reconstituting worlds across geographic expanses of Cilicia, Palestine, Lebanon, and the United States?Footnote 1 In this essay, I draw on memories, stories, and most importantly physical traces of Armenian pilgrimage tattoos on the forearms of my grandmother, who was born and raised in Beirut to a family of genocide survivors from Cilicia, traveled to Jerusalem in 1938 and in 1940 for pilgrimages to Armenian holy sites in the Old City, and escaped the civil war in Beirut in the 1970s to emigrate to the United States.
My grandmother’s tattoos were symbols that gave occasion for storytelling and conveyed family history and attachment to places that genocide and war had broken. Her tattoos and stories about her tattoos touched on key places of our family’s existence across distributed geographies, temporalities, and displacements—always centered on Beirut, a city in which forced displacement, migration, and exile are deeply embedded and inscribed.
She loved to recount stories about how she got her tattoos in Jerusalem—one depicting the head of St. John and the other a cross—when she was eight and ten years old, in 1938 and 1940. Her tattoos were traces of a time when she could make the journey between the Armenian neighborhoods of Beirut and the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem by car, a journey she never made again after 1940. Her tattoo stories also taught me about the multiple displacements that shaped her life long before she was born. Her parents were from Cilicia and had survived the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire that started in 1915. As is by now well known, the genocide unfolded as an ongoing process of displacement and dispossession that continued until the late 1930s, under the successor state of Turkey.Footnote 2 Her family had come to Lebanon as refugees in the early 1920s. Many of them later experienced multiple exiles after the civil war started in Lebanon in the 1970s, in the United States, Australia, Argentina, and elsewhere.Footnote 3
I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, close to my grandmother, who had arrived there in the 1970s. By the time I was a child, my grandmother’s tattoos had faded and blurred into blue quarter-sized stamps. I could only make out their design through her descriptions. Her words helped me “see” the tattoos as she did: as symbols of sacrifice and rebirth, inclusion in religious community, and the accomplishment of pilgrimage. Today, through the lens of my memories and conversations with her over decades, I understand my grandmother’s tattoos as something different: as maps that connect Cilicia, Jerusalem, and Beirut, across time, place, and histories of dispossession. Her tattoos were made in Jerusalem, but when she talked about them, she always referenced the distributed geographies of Armenian life, which were deeply grounded in the palimpsestic spaces of her hometown of Beirut, a city that contains the urban traces of forced displacement. Her tattoos mapped places I could not cartographically “see” otherwise, as many of them disappeared from some official maps. She brought these places into relation through her tattoos and stories. What does it mean to understand my grandmother’s tattoos as a map? Can we read Armenian pilgrimage tattoos, known as mahdesi, as a kind of archive that sits at odds with present-day cartographies of power?
In what follows, I will contextualize two very different kinds of Armenian tattoos: religious pilgrimage tattoos (mahdesi), and the Armenian genocide survivor tattoos that marked the bodies of women. I build on Elyse Semerdjian’s work on “embodied archives” as well as the work of Armenian and Palestinian scholars to describe how alternative archives, including recounted stories, can provide resources for remembering and reconstituting worlds that have been subject to territorial disintegration and erasure. I then explain how my grandmother’s account of her tattoos helped me understand the connections between the distributed geographies of her life and our family’s displacements, acting as a kind of map.
The empirical materials in this essay draw primarily from autoethnographic accounts of my memories of my grandmother’s tattoos and our conversations over the years. However, my sense of place and my familiarity with the neighborhoods in my grandmother’s memories of Lebanon are also rooted in my ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut between 2008 and 2015. My own positionality places me as an Armenian and Palestinian American woman; my parents and my Armenian grandmother were born in Lebanon. In exploring this history through my grandmother’s accounts, I build on an already significant body of work in which Armenian women reflect on their Armenian mothers and grandmothers drawing from memoir, autoethnography, and oral history.Footnote 4
I turn to autoethnography as a method that can address the gaps in Middle East studies and Middle East anthropology that have made it difficult to think about the displacements and dispossessions of Palestinians and Armenians together, even as they were explicitly linked in my grandmother’s tattoos. By centering an Armenian account of pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Armenian lifeworlds of Lebanon, I also seek to address what Bedros Der Matossian calls an “ambivalence to things Armenian in Middle Eastern studies.”Footnote 5 Part of this ambivalence stems from the misconception that Armenians are somehow a detached and monolithic group, rather than a diverse and complex set of communities that are part of the political and historical processes of the region.Footnote 6 For instance, scholars who write about Armenians in Lebanon still have to argue against a scholarly framing that exceptionalizes and others Armenians as outside the political dynamics of the country where they have lived for over a century.Footnote 7 Some Armenians are citizens of Lebanon, and may refer to themselves as Lebanese Armenians, but some are Syrian Armenians or are from the Republic of Armenia; all of these communities are part of the fabric of Lebanon’s political and social history, just as other noncitizens, including the one million Syrian refugees and 250 thousand Palestinian refugees in Lebanon as of 2026.Footnote 8
Beyond the inherent problems of such an othering discourse, this idea has obscured the ways in which Palestinian and Armenian political and social worlds were entwined in Lebanon spatially and temporally. After all, their displacements were only two decades apart, and they occupied some of the same informal spaces and camps, like Karantina, as I will explain.Footnote 9 Here, by centering my grandmother’s Jerusalem pilgrimage tattoos, I also aim to contribute to a scholarly conversation linking Palestinian and Armenian experiences of exile and genocide in a time of accumulating catastrophes and ongoing erasures that cannot be framed as past events.Footnote 10
Body Map, Memory, Territory
Tattoos, as permanent inscriptions on the skin, mark you for life. They can mark inclusion in a group, or differentiation and exclusion. Tattoos carry that ambivalence: they can mark individual agency or the loss of bodily autonomy.Footnote 11 The Armenian tattoos I discuss in this article—Armenian pilgrimage tattoos and Armenian genocide survivor tattoos—also are linked to territoriality, as evidence of having visited a Christian holy site and thereby earning special status, or as a mark of having been held in place unable to move, or having been ripped away from home and therefore out of place.
Over the past decade, since her death, I have been ruminating on my grandmother’s tattoos and thinking about how to understand them in relation to the many forced displacements that shaped her life. I never photographed her tattoos; it would have felt odd or disrespectful to do that, as they were a part of her living body and her animated stories. I also never saw them clearly, as they were blurry by the time I was born, stretched by her skin as she aged and they turned a bluish color. I could make out a cross with some kind of circular pattern around it on one of her forearms, but the head of the St. John tattoo looked more like a blurry wreath.
The practice of making tattoos in Jerusalem to mark the pilgrimage goes back hundreds of years and is not limited to Armenians.Footnote 12 One tattoo business, Razzouk, established itself in Jerusalem in the mid 1700s and still exists today.Footnote 13 Although I cannot be sure, it is quite likely that someone in the Razzouk family tattooed my grandmother. After corresponding with Razzouk Tattoo by email, they sent me the imprint of a stamp used to make the head of St. John tattoo alongside a written description. I immediately recognized the image: the head of St. John is framed by two branches; above his head, a dove points downward toward a cross. Some of Razzouk’s olive wood block stamps are hundreds of years old.Footnote 14 Perhaps this was the same stamp that made the temporary imprint on my grandmother’s arm, which was then traced by the tattoo artist with a needle and permanent ink. Trying to see my grandmother’s tattoos as they were when she was a child through the stamp imprint involved both memories and imagination, as she cannot confirm my findings. I found that social media and the Internet in general opened new ways for people (not only Armenians) to talk about Jerusalem pilgrimage tattoos and even share images of their own, newly made tattoos on Facebook and Instagram. One website featured a photograph from sometime between 1900 and 1911 of an Armenian woman being tattooed in Jerusalem by a man wearing a fez who holds a manually operated needle; this image is held by the US Library of Congress; the tattoo artist is named as Nerses the Goldsmith.Footnote 15 However, this tattoo artist was actually part of the Razzouk family, Jirius Razzouk.Footnote 16 Could he have tattooed my grandmother in 1938? She described having been tattooed with a manual needle, a detail I remember because she told me the manual needle hurt more than the mechanical needle that did her second tattoo in 1940.
My grandmother never referred to her pilgrimage tattoo as a mahdesi. She also never referred to herself with the term, which also was used as an honorific title that a person completing the pilgrimage earned, and which could be applied to women as well as men.Footnote 17 She could have called herself Mahdesi Yeghisapet (Yeghisapet was her first name), although I never heard anyone in Beirut use the honorific. There are scant ethnographic accounts of Armenian mahdesi tattoos. One anthropological account from 1908, titled “Tattooing: Oriental and Gypsy,” describes how Armenian women and men received these tattoos to mark a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, wore them as a mark of pride, and took on Mahdesi as an honorific title, although the author incorrectly translates mahdesi tattoos as Armenian for “seeing death” (mah is “death,” desi is “I saw”).Footnote 18 In fact, the etymology of the term is from Arabic, muqaddasī, “from Jerusalem.”Footnote 19 This linkage between the Arabic and Armenian terms is another way in which the mahdesi tattoos and the pilgrimage itself are part of a longer history of shared linguistic and cultural worlds in Jerusalem.Footnote 20
When my grandmother was a child in the Armenian neighborhoods in Beirut in the 1930s, she saw different kinds of tattoos on her Armenian family members and neighbors. Some, like hers, were the blue crosses and other Christian symbols of mahdesi tattoos. Others were the tattoos on women whose bodies bore the imprint of being kidnapped into bedouin or Kurdish communities during the genocide, women who experienced forced marriage, forced conversion, sexual abuse, or enslavement.Footnote 21 My grandmother described women with tattoos on their faces and knew they had survived some terrible violence but did not know their stories; these histories were not openly discussed. Filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian addresses these silences in her film, Grandma’s Tattoos, which unravels the story of her grandmother’s genocide tattoos, and those of other women and young girls who were abducted and were victims of sexual violence.Footnote 22
Sometimes, mahdesi and survivor tattoos could even coexist on the same body. Hourig Attarian writes about the ambivalent relationship between the survivor and mahdesi tattoos on the body of her great aunt, Azniv.Footnote 23 Azniv was tattooed on the forehead, which literally marked her fate; the Armenian term for fate, jagadakir, means “written on the forehead.” Attarian writes, “their fate had branded them for life, with that lone word of ‘jagadakir’ encapsulating the actual territorialization and appropriation of their bodies in equal measure” (italics in original).Footnote 24 Azniv’s survivor tattoos were joined by the small blue cross of a Jerusalem pilgrimage tattoo on her wrist, which prompted Attarian to wonder whether the pilgrimage tattoo would “purge the hellish memories that came with the fading ones.”Footnote 25
Elyse Semerdjian offers a powerful framework for how to think about the body, memory, territoriality, and transmission through her analysis of Armenian women survivors’ tattoos as “embodied archives” of genocidal violence.Footnote 26 She argues that the bodies of survivors are also “sites of resistance where the memory of victims are preserved by their descendants,” and that remnants and the memories transmitted through the body resist the acts of dismemberment of “individual and communal” bodies.Footnote 27 Drawing from Pierre Nora and Alison Landsburg, Semerdjian explains that her use of the term “prosthetic memory,” rather than “postmemory,” centers the importance of the body in this process of remembering because “memory is stored within the body and genocide is remembered as body horror in which victims are forced to witness extreme violations of the body and desecration of the corpse.”Footnote 28 If survivor tattoos can be read by descendants as an archive of resistance to dismemberment, perhaps Armenian pilgrimage tattoos can be read as a map archiving the traces of places under erasure or routes now blocked.
Historian Rana Barakat likewise describes her mother’s and grandmother’s stories about Palestine, along with her own experiences and imagination as “emotional maps” that help her return to places under erasure or made inaccessible.Footnote 29 By describing them as maps, she offers a compelling account of how to resist the tools of erasure by which Palestinian life has been effaced, property and land have been stolen, and generations of people denied the right of return, reparation, mobility, or political collectivity. Maps are powerful symbols of claims to mastery over the world.Footnote 30 But although contemporary maps delete place names, they do not erase these places. As Edward Said once explained in an interview, “As I grow older, I’ve become more rebellious and more unwilling to accept the power of the consensus as expressed through the geographical … holding onto geography—geography as part of history that has been denied.”Footnote 31
Art historian Karly Etz provides another way to think about tattoo maps as a way of holding onto geography in her analysis of Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s piece titled “And Counting …” from 2010. In this piece, Bilal had tattooed the names of Iraqi towns on his back with no lines to demarcate the political borders of the nation–state. The viewer of this piece could not retreat to the cartographic map from a distance, and instead “the audience [was] encouraged to focus on the body’s own border—skin—and witness the painful process of tattooing as an empathetic witness.”Footnote 32
My grandmother similarly held onto memories of places wiped off official maps by describing how they were interconnected through the story of her tattoos. But her tattoos were more than an illustration of the stories she was telling. As permanent inscriptions on her body, the scar tissue and ink were physical traces of Armenian life in Jerusalem. The tattoos were also permanent alterations to the body that marked her as belonging to a longer history of pilgrimage, displacement, and the distributed geographies of Armenian life. Because tattoos are part of the body, unlike other kinds of objects and even other kinds of maps, they cannot be taken away like property, home, family members, and language.
But if inscriptions on the skin can be read like a map, the ability to read it also depends on the reader’s access to its meanings.Footnote 33 My grandmother’s tattoo stories helped me trace her routes through time and across different places, including the multilayered city of Beirut. It is precisely this nonlinearity and distributed quality of her stories that allowed me to “read” her tattoos as tracing out overlapping pathways of the nearly continuous generational displacement that characterized her life, and the lifeworlds of her neighborhoods of origin in Beirut. To read my grandmother’s tattoos as maps, and follow their spiraling stories that link places together, is to read against the grain of existing political and temporal boundaries. She made these connections visible again, by rooting her tattoo story in the layered spaces of her childhood in Beirut, which contained the living traces of her connections to Cilicia and Palestine. Her tattoos, in other words, mirrored how Beirut itself, in its place names, its spatial legacies of camps and permanent exiles, is a layered, palimpsestic map of different places and displacements that have also left their mark.
Tattoos, Nonlinear Routes, and Distributed Geographies
As my grandmother told and retold the story of her tattoos, she moved from her childhood to the present day, then to the past before she was born and sometimes to a future in which I might possibly complete this pilgrimage myself. She explained how extraordinary it was that her father could afford two trips from Beirut to Jerusalem by private car with a hired driver in 1938 and 1940, narrating her story in tones that were both nostalgic and painful. After all, that was both a time of mobility and connection between Beirut and Jerusalem, and a time of stasis, forced displacement, and life in a refugee camp. As I came to explore these stories with her, other half-remembered or forgotten layers of her and her family’s experience came to the surface. Those traces of stories from a continually fragmenting geography were not recorded anywhere else.
My grandmother could not talk about her journey to Jerusalem without talking about her father through little anecdotes and stories that would illuminate something of his past, one he never mentioned. It seemed like she was still trying to piece together the story of his life too. He had listened to Radio Ankara, she said (Could this be true, I wondered, would it have reached Beirut?). Could he read Armenian? Might she have remembered him listening to Turkish radio to describe something of his longing for the past and his own complicated connection to the places of his childhood? Unlike her father, my grandmother had learned Armenian in school; becoming Armenian in Lebanon meant not only becoming a Lebanese citizen but also moving away from the Turkish language and teaching children standardized Western Armenian.Footnote 34 But reconstituting life and building new kinds of Armenian lifeworlds in Beirut did not provide respite from ongoing instability. My grandmother explained how her father, who at one point had enough money for these pilgrimages, would later die in far more modest circumstances, after the house he built in the Hajin neighborhood of Beirut, named after the hometown of the genocide survivors who lived there, was destroyed to build the Lebanese autostrade, or highway.
In this way, my grandmother’s tattoos not only encompassed multiple places across now disconnected pathways from Beirut and Jerusalem, but also the doubled city of Hajin, the Armenian name for the Beirut neighborhood that was home to her and the “original” Hajin in Cilicia where her father and other genocide survivors who built that Beirut neighborhood called home. Neither is named on maps—Hajin is not the official name of the neighborhood in Beirut, and Hajin in Cilicia was renamed Saimbeyli after its Armenian inhabitants were killed or deported. But Hajin lives on in the Armenian memory book I inherited from her, The General History of Hajin, compiled mostly from interviews conducted in Pasadena and published in 1942, as well as on the Houshamadyan website, which features many details and descriptions of Hajin before the genocide.Footnote 35 But there are also third, fourth, and maybe even fifth Hajins too, alive as a town association, the Compatriotic Union of Hajin, with chapters around the world, from Beirut to Buenos Aires to Pasadena. I attended Hajin commemoration events in Beirut and Pasadena, and heard my grandmother speak a little Hajineren, the town dialect, with others. Although her parents’ generation did not speak of the atrocities they had experienced, they found a way for her to know Hajin by ensuring that both the town name and the town dialect would survive even after they arrived in Lebanon in the 1920s.
Hajineren was not passed down to me, but my grandmother shared with me the layered stories of her family, with Beirut at the center of all of them. My grandmother knew that her family had arrived in Beirut as refugees and lived in a camp in Karantina, but she could not account for what had happened to her parents between the start of the genocide in 1915 and their arrival in Beirut in the 1920s. Karantina is one of the world’s oldest refugee camps, and is an archive of multiple displacements—including Armenian and Palestinian refugees—over much of the 20th century.Footnote 36 My family’s story in Karantina, and that of so many other Armenian genocide survivors, unfolds in the era when France and Britain sought to bring vast territories of the former Ottoman Empire into mandates. The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement placed territories of Cilicia (modern day Turkey) under French control. It is possible that my great-grandparents were part of the Armenian refugee population that France repatriated to Cilicia from the refugee camps of Aleppo and Alexandria in 1919 as part of efforts to establish an autonomous Armenian region sympathetic to French territorial interests and ambitions.Footnote 37 This position was reversed only two years later when France signed the Treaty of Ankara with the Turkish state and withdrew from Cilicia while maintaining control over Greater Syria. By 1922 the French evacuated Armenians from Cilicia, displacing them a second time. Many were brought to the shores of Lebanon, to informal camps like Karantina, or “quarantine.”Footnote 38 Such population transfers were a way of securing power and influence.Footnote 39 All of these displacements continued after World War I, coming on the heels of mass death and violence across the region. In Greater Syria (which included Lebanon at the time) the Ottoman closure of the port and the Entente powers’ blockade contributed to a famine and the spread of disease that contributed to the deaths of half a million people.Footnote 40
In the decades spanning 1915 to 1936, the Armenian genocide was one of the 20th century’s first genocides, although it was preceded by the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907.Footnote 41 The Armenian genocide resulted in massive and permanent population displacement and property capture as part of a modern state-building project. However, although the 1915 genocide was an Ottoman project, the erasure and marginalization of Armenians was continued (and continues) by the modern Turkish state.Footnote 42 It was also part of the origin story of modern humanitarianism, with relief efforts and orphanages to help survivors and their children put life back together in refugee camps and new permanent homes in Lebanon and Syria.Footnote 43 As Talal Asad has argued, modern humanitarianism emerges in the context of 19th-century expansion of European colonies and nation–states, but the term contains much older theological concepts and the notion of essential difference in the category of who is human, and who can become human.Footnote 44 Although the massacres of Armenians in 1915 drew enough concern from France, the United Kingdom, and Russia for those states to draft a joint declaration, with an early draft decrying the “crimes against Christianity and Civilization,” massacres committed by European militaries in the colonies, including the genocide in German Southwest Africa, did not prompt Euro-American coordinated international attention. This reveals not only hypocrisy, but also a core facet of modern humanitarianism and the concept of the human—as Asad writes, “States that kill in the course of their claim to be engaged in a universalizing project, that of raising ‘the best part’ of humanity in the name of humanity as a whole.”Footnote 45
Because they were Christian, Armenian refugees, including those in Karantina, were offered the chance to become citizens of the newly independent state of Lebanon, a right denied to subsequent waves of displaced people who lived in some of the same camps, informal spaces, and urban neighborhoods, and to most Palestinians who arrived just over two decades later.Footnote 46 During the Nakba in 1948, Zionist militias and then the military of the newly declared state of Israel displaced over 700 thousand Palestinians and erased and renamed villages; at least 100 thousand Palestinians were pushed into Lebanon.Footnote 47 Today, UNRWA estimates there are 222 thousand Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, including twenty-seven thousand Syrian Palestinians who were displaced a second time from Syria in 2011.Footnote 48 Less than thirty years after the Nakba, in 1976, Karantina became the site of one of the Lebanese Civil War’s most infamous massacres, when right-wing Maronite militias aligned with Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims in the area.Footnote 49 The Karantina massacre was part of the logic of ethnic cleansing and displacement that characterized Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war as well as Israel’s invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000 (an occupation that, at time of writing in 2026, has again resumed). War and occupation reshaped how people related to the geographies of different parts of Beirut and of Lebanon in ways that persist today.Footnote 50 There has been no respite to recover, and people in Lebanon live with a suspended sense of endless war.Footnote 51
In places like Karantina, and elsewhere in Beirut and its suburbs, people live among the layers of these accumulated pasts of the Nakba and the Armenian genocide as well as subsequent wars.Footnote 52 Take, for example, Bourj Hammoud, a working-class suburb of Beirut just across the Beirut River from Hajin. Bourj Hammoud’s neighborhoods are named after the Armenian town associations that built them in the 1920s and 1930s to house Armenian refugees, a move facilitated by French Mandate officials.Footnote 53 Some believe that the French hastened this process by intentionally setting fire to the Karantina camp in the 1930s, a story my grandmother also recounted to me, as her own family hastily moved into their half-finished home in the Hajin neighborhood after fleeing this fire.Footnote 54
But Bourj Hammoud’s urban place names are also sites of disorientation and forgetting— no one seems to know why an informal camp in Bourj Hammoud was called Sanjak, not even the people who were living there between 2008 and 2011, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the area. By the mid 2010s, the people living in Sanjak, in the telltale wooden and corrugated metal shacks of Beirut’s informal housing, were slowly being evicted to build a high-end residential development called St. Jacques near the autostrade, the same highway that took down my great-grandfather’s house in Hajin. It turns out the camp was named after the sancak (the Ottoman word for administrative district) of Alexandretta, from which Armenians were evacuated after that territory was ceded to Turkey in 1938–39. This Beirut camp was one of their destinations.Footnote 55 The city is replete with these traces.
Sanjak’s residents were displaced by the rampant real estate development sweeping eastward throughout Greater Beirut, but ongoing displacement is also part of the urban logic of Bourj Hammoud. Although Bourj Hammoud was initially built to permanently settle Armenian refugees, later its more densely populated neighborhoods like Sis and Nabaʿa were built through ongoing waves of displacement and violent dispossession, erasures and disappearances, from within Lebanon and beyond for nearly a century. For instance, Bourj Hammoud became a site of political efforts to organize Lebanese Shiʿa in the 1970s, following Shiʿi migration from the south and Beqaa Valley to Beirut’s peripheries during the 1950s and 1960s, a migration that accelerated over the years of Israeli bombardments, invasions, and eventual occupation of the south, first in 1978 and then in 1982.Footnote 56
Bourj Hammoud is, in many ways, an origin story, a transit point, a destination that bears the traces of many displaced and abandoned people—Armenian refugees, Palestinian refugees, rural to urban migrants from across Lebanon, Syrian workers and later war refugees, and migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia and Africa. Layers upon layers of these displacements and transits are palpable in Bourj Hammoud’s streets; Armenian and Arabic street signs, flags of the Kurdish PKK and the Lebanese Amal Party, and markets catering to migrant workers are all part of the sensorium of this place.
Many people in Bourj Hammoud have had multiple experiences of violent dispossession, displacement, and economic migration that cannot be classified within distinct categories of refugee, migrant, or displaced person, or transits across boundaries of historic Ottoman, Russian, and Persian empires, or new nation–states. For example, while doing research in Bourj Hammoud in 2011, I met a young woman who was an Armenian national from the Republic of Armenia; she was born there but her family “returned” to Lebanon. Her genocide survivor grandparents had “repatriated” from Beirut to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1940s. Her family later migrated back to Lebanon in the 1990s and early 2000s after the fall of the Soviet Union, the subsequent war with Azerbaijan, and Armenia’s economic stagnation. She was not the only Armenian national I met in Lebanon, but in her case, because her family, who were originally from an area now in Turkey, had “repatriated” to Soviet Armenia from Lebanon, there was no clear mechanism to reestablish her and others of her generation as Lebanese citizens. In the small, 1.5-square-mile city of Bourj Hammoud, they found an Armenian world where they could get by, alongside the many other parallel worlds this city contains, one that evades the territorialities of the contemporary map, and the ethnic cleansing strategies that try to put people in place, or displace them yet again. Perhaps Bourj Hammoud survives because it is not an important place. Perhaps it evades destruction, for now, because of its status as periphery. There, people hold on, living in the ever-accumulating layers of genocidal and expansionist wars. Bourj Hammoud is a place that persists, even as it is remade with every new layer of migration and displacement; it is a place that cannot be explained or contained within the maps of sovereign nation–states.Footnote 57
My grandmother’s tattoos and stories guided me as a map, but to really read them as I do now, I had to trace the many detours, disrupted journeys, returns, and thwarted returns that characterized her life in Beirut, and that in turn provide resources for thinking across Armenian and Palestinian displacement, and across other displacements that continue to accumulate in Lebanon, a country with the highest number of refugees per capita in the world.Footnote 58
An Accumulating Catastrophe, A Multiplicity of Returns
Jerusalem was only a few hours’ drive away from Beirut at the time my Armenian grandmother made the trip, now an impossible distance. Lebanon’s southern border approaching Israel has been rendered a heavily militarized and surveilled zone. Israel occupied Lebanon for twenty-two years, and continued its attacks for decades following the south’s liberation in 2000, poisoning the land with cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and land mines.Footnote 59 As I write these words in August 2026, Israel has launched a full-scale invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon again, and 4,346 people in Lebanon have been killed by Israeli aggression since March 2026.Footnote 60 There appears to be no respite from continued bombardment or occupation. The Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which expanded alongside the Armenian Cathedral of St. James over 1600 years ago, is constantly under threat of Israeli settler violence and has been subject to decades of an Israeli settler-colonial legal regime that moves and uproots people and transforms relations between people and spaces.Footnote 61 Like Palestinians, the Armenians of Jerusalem are not granted citizenship and live under a state of occupation; after 1948, Armenians were displaced from West Jerusalem, and the Armenian Patriarchate was forced to lease its properties on Jaffa Street and Princess Mary Street in West Jerusalem or lose them entirely.Footnote 62 The Armenian Quarter is under ongoing threat of erasure, as settler attacks and a controversial land deal to lease and develop an area of the quarter called the Cow’s Garden is only the latest in a long battle to stay in place.Footnote 63
It is hard to imagine the world before 1948, the world in which my great-grandfather, who never recounted his story of genocide survival, traveled twice to Jerusalem with his young family. I imagine that those years between 1938 and 1940 were a time when my great-grandfather had established some sense of stability in Beirut. He was living in Hajin with other displaced people from its namesake and had built a small church that still stands today. My grandmother was a child born to improbable survival, marked on her pilgrimages to Jerusalem by religious symbols of suffering, life, and rebirth at the ages of 8 and 10. She carried these symbols for the rest of her life. For me, the tattoos were traces of a lost world, one that seemed close enough to touch, on her arm, but impossible for me to see or experience.
It is difficult to imagine a hopeful future as I write these words in 2026 and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza continues, despite the declaration of a ceasefire, and while Israel resumes a project of annihilating civil infrastructure and life and forcing evacuations of one million inhabitants of southern Lebanon, which constitutes a war crime according to Amnesty International.Footnote 64 In the midst of this terror, it feels even more important to bring these pasts into relation and insist that the project of remaking, dismembering, and dislocating people and places is something ongoing, not past.Footnote 65 Here, I think of Walter Benjamin’s figure of the “angel of history,” seeing not a chain of discrete events but one catastrophe, a geographical dismemberment that “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”Footnote 66
We might also understand these pasts as part of an accumulating catastrophe that winds through the 20th and 21st centuries by refusing to understand them as different, discrete events and histories. In this article, I have offered one way to do this, by centering my grandmother’s pilgrimage tattoos. But occasionally the official archive also speaks clearly, and the reverberations of the Armenian genocide of 1915, and the machinations of the French and British during the late Ottoman period more broadly, should now be obvious. As historian Donald Bloxham writes, “The ‘territorial solutions’ to population ‘problems’ used in the territory of the former Ottoman empire after 1918, with their debt to the Armenian genocide, were considered a model by both the Czech leader Edvard Benes and by David Ben Gurion in 1941 concerning the future ethnic organization of their own states.”Footnote 67 But rarely are such quotations made clear, even as they continue to be meaningful in the present.
The violence against Palestinians in Gaza has only recently been classified as genocide or “plausible” genocide by international courts and humanitarian and scholarly organizations.Footnote 68 But this moment, too, did not emerge in a vacuum; it is part of an accumulation of decades of violent ethnic cleansing and erasure that only appear to be disconnected, “confusing” and, importantly, safely settled in the past. The juridico-legal category of the refugee does not function as a meaningful descriptor in these situations in which constant displacement seems to have no end, when origin and destination are scrambled and erased on the map, with new borders and checkpoints and weapons rising to trap people in place or keep them moving.
Tracing an ancestor’s steps through stories and memories, even in places we cannot walk through ourselves, places destroyed or transformed by state projects of erasure, allows us to recollect and hold onto the trace that might not exist in any other form. In his book A Rift in Time, Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Palestinian author Raja Shehade tried to retrace the steps of his uncle’s flight from Ottoman officials during the late years of Ottoman rule in the late 19th century.Footnote 69 But Palestine had been so altered, with its place names erased, that it was difficult for him to reconstitute his uncle’s path. Likewise, Rana Barakat turns to the stories of her grandmother as a way to move through spaces under destruction, in places where movement is limited. This is not only remembering, it is a way to re-member the places from which the body has been violently displaced.Footnote 70
In the case of my grandmother, her tattoos were a trace of an ambivalent time in the past, one of continued upheaval and erasure of worlds, and, perhaps, an enduring symbol of her family’s attempt at re-embodiment through religious pilgrimage. She passed these places on as stories, but they also remained as an indelible mark on the skin that no one could take away. She held onto Jerusalem on her body, even though she could not remember it well. Perhaps she was determined that I have an inheritance, even a spectral one wound up in stories, made material and physical on her arms, because a connection to the places she considered home, after so many overlapping kinds of dispossession, was something that no one could give me. Instead, I read her tattoo like a map, with her stories as keys to understanding the symbols and pathways they traced. Her tattoos showed me the traces of the multiple geographies that bound her to her family, a sense of the past and its losses, and the possibility of a present. For me, they speak to a future too.
In 2016, when my grandmother was admitted to hospice at the age of 85, the nurses documented every mark on her body as she was admitted. I was overcome with sadness to see them making a note of her tattoos. One of them counted, one, two tattoos, and another entered it into the ledger. I wanted to tell them what the tattoos meant, who she was, what she had lived through and seen, and the worlds that had been erased and what endured. But I remained silent.
And yet, some institutions endure and find new ways to speak. The Razzouk tattoo shop still stands in the Old City; their social media presence and website speak to a renewed interest in pilgrimage tattoos.Footnote 71 I look at the photographs of their olive wood and imagine the moment of imprint on my grandmother’s arm when she was just a small child. She described that memory for me many times, the hopeful act of becoming a pilgrim, insisting on a future, and being marked with images of suffering and rebirth. I was lucky to be able to feel the skin on her arms, to see the tattoos age and turn blue, testament to her survival too. I wonder if I, too, might be imprinted by the same wooden stamp that made her tattoos one day. Amid the horrors of this moment and of the past century, I might be forgiven for holding on to the hope for a million pilgrims to travel from Beirut and return to Jerusalem.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editors of IJMES, and Julia Elyachar for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am eternally grateful to my grandmother, Yeghisapet Isabel Kouyoumjian, for sharing her stories with me.
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