Digin Diruhi: What could you have learned from your family or friends in the Anatolian mountains?
Arusiag: The city of Smyrna is not the Anatolian mountains, Mama. It's a city just like this one. And furthermore, as you know, my parents are originally from Bolis!
Digin Diruhi: Oh well, there are Bolsetsi and then there are Bolsetsi! The upper classes, like us, are different.
Arusiag (to herself): She's starting again! I'll put a stop to it. (Aloud) You're right! There are shoemakers, and then there are shoemakers! [Il y a cordonnier et cordonnier!]Footnote 1
INTRODUCTION: RECOVERING AN OTTOMAN ARMENIAN VOICE
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of critical studies seeking profitably to complicate the way in which late Ottoman non-Muslim life is represented in both academic and popular literature. These new histories aim to debunk established post-Ottoman nationalist historiographies that portray former late Ottoman subject communities (e.g., Greek, Jewish, Armenian) as insulated and homogenous proto-nation-states. They posit them instead as heterogeneous and interacting communal bodies that have complex, contextualized, and variable relationships to their neighbors and to imperial power structures.Footnote 2 George W. Gawrych was already speaking to this problem of historiography in 1983, in his article “Tolerant Dimensions of Cultural Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire: The Albanian Community, 1800–1912,” where he wrote that nationalist histories had “left for the historical profession a distorted picture of a politically polarized and culturally exhausted Ottoman society. This society appears as a nebulous entity composed of many disparate and estranged cultures which received their separate cultural nourishment and ossification through the existence of seemingly hermetic communities defined by national and religious criteria.”Footnote 3
Thirty years later, in 2013, Ayşe Özil began her monograph, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia, with a nearly identical sentiment: “The Greek Orthodox people, or more generally non-Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, have been subject to discriminating narratives that depict them as essentially different from the rest of the Ottoman society. These narratives are based on the notion of an insular and homogenous ethno-religious community that has preserved an unchanging and indisputable unity as well as constant ties of solidarity since Byzantine times. Despite a growing body of critical work, this traditional view still dominates the field and the popular perception.”Footnote 4 Similarly, as Sibel Zandi-Sayek observed in 2012, “While scholars acknowledge how social, economic, and linguistic factors complicate Ottoman ethnoreligious categories, these categories continue to frame and inform the study of Ottoman society.”Footnote 5 It is clear from these statements, issued a scholarly generation apart, that despite the increasing stream of compelling critical literature, something is not yet sticking in the field of late Ottoman social history. Not only the popular but also the academic imagination of communal and intercommunal life remains largely unchanged, albeit with some welcome exceptions.
In this article I will contribute to the growing body of work written against the persistence of this model of communal insularity and non-interaction.Footnote 6 This model continues acutely to impair our ability to apprehend the “on the ground” social infrastructure and dynamics of late Ottoman society, and in the present case, of provincial society. By provincial society I mean, not the more evidently self-important society of the major ports and trading cities, the administrative capitals, and pilgrimage destinations, but rather a society with the particular diminutive relationship to Istanbul of province to capital.Footnote 7 This model diminishes not only our capacity to feel the social fabric and recognize the humanity of historical actors, but also our ability to fully seek, chart, and apprehend the nature of the interpersonal relationships and networks that propelled late Ottoman life. This article will offer a fresh attempt to excavate intercommunal and interactive elements of late Ottoman provincial society, and argue that we need to read and analyze the past with a new imagination of what was possible for relationships and identities within it.
Further, to the degree that the scholarly literature over the last generation has sought to unearth intercommunal interactions, elucidate synthesized cultural identities, and highlight intra-communal heterogeneity in late Ottoman society, it has largely addressed, and spoken from, the Greek, Jewish, Arab, or Albanian vantage points;Footnote 8 largely absent have been Armenian voices, especially those of provincial Armenian individuals. These Armenian voices continue to be obscured or oversimplified, at least in part by the powerful historiographical and memorial effects of the 1915 genocide. These effects include traumatized narratives or silences, a mainstream public discourse focused on genocide recognition, and the nationalist efforts of post-World War I Armenian leaders and their ideological heirs to break ties with their Ottoman past.Footnote 9 Few studies have examined the intercommunal interactions and affiliations of Ottoman Armenians outside of the framework of genocide. Even though memoirs of and oral history interviews with survivors of the genocide have referred to social and economic interactions with Turks and other Muslims, there has been little analysis or extrapolation of these local networks or their significance.Footnote 10 This article will work to recover a largely unexplored Ottoman Armenian complexity, an existential reality that, while certainly not indifferent to the anti-Armenian violence of the late Ottoman era, is not defined by it either.
Scholars of Armenian history have only recently begun to take fuller cognizance of the depleting and distorting effects of the dominant trends in Armenian historiography, which have obscured the interconnected social and political context of Armenians throughout history and especially during the Ottoman period. A survey of the existing scholarly literature and popular discourse, and a diagnosis of their philosophical and psychological underpinnings, is beyond my scope here; it will be sufficient to take note of recent historiographical efforts that have recognized this dominant historiography's effects and have worked to counteract them. One example is the project of medieval historian Seta B. Dadoyan, recently published as the three-volume series The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World. She proceeds from recognition of the problem of “monolithic” Armenian narratives, and seeks to “draw the outlines of a new philosophy of Armenian history based on hitherto undetected or obscured patterns of interaction.”Footnote 11 Recently, Sebouh Aslanian forcefully articulated the same problem in remarks entitled “Beyond the Lachrymose Conception of Armenian History”:
On the whole, the trend [in Armenian historiography] has been to emphasize the miseries, hardships, and persecutions of diasporic life for the Armenians, especially those living in the various domains of the Ottoman Empire…. This lachrymosity has resulted in sketches of Ottoman Armenian life that downplay creative cross-cultural interactions between Armenians and members of other millets of the Empire and has produced a simplistic image of Ottoman Armenians who are, as it were, left undisturbed in their national essence.Footnote 12
Nanor Kebranian has recently pointed out that the historical record of Armenian-Turkish interaction and synthesis is also absent in part for practical reasons:
It comes as no surprise that this symbiosis or, in Cemal Kafadar's terminology, this “commingling,” should elude scholarship or conform to persisting representations of the Ottoman Empire as exploitative, tyrannical and parasitic. The discipline of historiography posits the archive as its authoritative methodological prerequisite. But identifying, locating or even inventing an archive of commingling poses indefatigable obstacles when one attempts to grasp the amplitude of this multifarious existence. Where, in what language, in whose writing can one disclose the quotidian vicissitudes of “commingling?” The difficulty of construing a response is evidenced by the conspicuous dearth of scholarship figuring that experience. The vast majority of subjects, who underwent that converged subjectivity most profoundly and intimately, were themselves illiterate. They could not attest to their commingling. They have not bequeathed the documents of their symbiosis.Footnote 13
In what follows, I will explore a document that does enable us to grasp this elusive, commingled, quotidian experience. “Testimony” is the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian (1886–1967),Footnote 14 a shoemaker from late Ottoman Marash (present-day Kahramanmaraş in Turkey), and is one “document of symbiosis” with which we can answer Kebranian's lament. While we cannot know the extent to which Cherishian's writing was itself influenced by the aforementioned diasporic and academic judgments, we can see the many ways in which his memoir complicates such received truths. I will draw on it here to animate and illuminate at least one corner of the murky and impoverished picture we currently have of late Ottoman provincial life. I will develop the idea of “provincial cosmopolitanism” to conceptualize the disposition, affinity, and process of identity formation that enabled Cherishian and his associates to create and operate the interpersonal relationships that propelled their lives. Above all, I will use the memoir to amplify a hitherto inaudible, multivalent Ottoman Armenian voice.
A MILE IN HIS SHOES
Hovhannes Cherishian was born in Marash in 1886 and died in New York City in 1967. Marash, located in today's southeastern Turkey (Anatolia), was the largest town (kaza) in the Ottoman district (sancak) of Marash, which was itself in the Ottoman province (vilayet) of Aleppo. Armenians made up about 50 percent of the town's population in 1913–1914, constituting the largest concentration of Armenians in the district.Footnote 15 Armenian merchants, tradesmen, artisans, and other suppliers of goods and services dominated Marash's commercial life. Among these artisans was Hovhannes Cherishian.Footnote 16
Cherishian was the first of nine children and the self-described “scion” of his ancient family, the Apartian clan. He was deeply devout—his mother wanted him to be a priest—but became a shoemaker like his grandfather before him. His father was a barber. The family home, in the Armenian quarter, was adjacent to the commercial center. As a young man Cherishian volunteered for the Ottoman military and served from 1910–1914 in Adana and Mersin (both now in southern Turkey). In 1915, one year after he completed his tour of duty and was discharged, the Ottoman government ordered Cherishian's family deported to present-day Syria, where they spent nearly four years in the towns of Hamah and Muhradah. For reasons that are unclear, Cherishian and his brother were not on the list of deportees, but they chose to accompany their family. During these years Cherishian endured many hardships, some of which he recounts and others he says he will not mention, and he repeatedly maneuvered with his family to escape threats to their lives. Nevertheless, he was able to start a new shoemaking business, based first in Hamah and then in Muhradah, and to interact extensively with countless people that he encountered therein. Cherishian ultimately lost two brothers and a sister during these deportation years, as well as many compatriots and friends.
In 1919, Cherishian and the remaining members of his family returned home to Marash, now under control of the Allied army, where he married his first wife, and to the extent possible resumed his former life. It was a brief and ill-fated return, however, and in February of 1920 his family joined the thousands of Armenians who, after to the Battle of Marash and the start of the Turkish War of Independence, followed the defeated French troops when they withdrew southward toward Islahiye.Footnote 17 This exodus through the freezing cold resulted in the tragic deaths of his pregnant young wife and another brother. We are not told in the text what happened to many of Cherishian's other family members, including his mother, father, and grandfather, who feature prominently in the early parts of the text. All we know from the memoir is that only he and one of his sisters survived to reach Islahiye. From there they traveled to Adana, where they spent roughly nine months before heading to Izmir by ship, from whence Cherishian alone embarked for New York City, arriving at Ellis Island in 1921 at the age of thirty-five.
In New York City Cherishian resumed shoemaking, of a new, American sort. He married his late wife's cousin and together they had three children (one of whom is my grandfather, Stephen Cherishian). They lived primarily in Brooklyn, where in 1966 at age eighty he composed his memoir, which, as he says in his preface, is the brief story of his life. He was by then both a world and an age away from the Marash of his youth and early adulthood.Footnote 18
Cherishian's memoir, spanning 230 pages of handwritten Armenian script, focuses on his experiences in the Ottoman military, his family's deportation from Marash and his years as a deportee, his return home after World War I, the “last disaster of Marash”Footnote 19 in February of 1920, and his visit to Soviet Armenia late in his life. His testimony about these momentous and tragic events also includes details of warm and intimate human interactions, humorous and supportive conversations, small kindnesses and generous favors, favorite foods and drinks, and other revealing glimpses into Ottoman Armenian lived experience.
Cherishian experienced profound suffering and loss during his final years in his native land, and displays a deep commitment to the Armenian people and their history, expressed partly in his dedicating his “Testimony” to “the immortal memory of the two million innocent Armenians victimized in the Great Catastrophe (Medz Yeghern) of 1915.”Footnote 20 And yet his retrospective presentation and valorization of himself as an Armenian living under Ottoman rule in the tumultuous and violent years between 1886 and 1920 is anything but a one-dimensional, monovalent testimony of a person who identifies as a victim. Quite the opposite: throughout the text, Cherishian assumes various positions vis-à-vis his identity that, at first blush, appear antithetical to his experience as a victim of genocide. As a paramount case, his descriptions of deportation and death at the hands of the late Ottoman state are presented side-by-side with striking accounts of extended intercommunal interactions, affiliations, and networks characterized by intercommunal and interpersonal openness, sympathy, intimacy, and pleasure. This is a juxtaposition of themes to which the modern student of Ottoman Armenian history is unaccustomed.Footnote 21
Because of its multidimensional nature, Cherishian's testimony offers us a language with which to begin exploring the significance of the lived negotiation of violence, power, and friendship that defined at least one Armenian man's late Ottoman life. A devout Christian and an active participant in Armenian community affairs, Cherishian was nevertheless oriented toward intercommunal openness and affiliation, a condition that enabled his many social networks and interactions, both routine and improvised. Here I will begin by focusing on his treatment of these intercommunal connections, after which I will examine their implications for the study of late Ottoman society.
ON MEMOIRS AND RELATED MATTERS
That the document at hand is a memoir does not, of course, mean that it necessarily speaks from a historical vantage point that is any more “authentic” or “real” than monographs that historians construct from documentary sources. Many memoirs reveal more about the particular time, location, and politics of their authors than they do the period about which they are written.Footnote 22 It would doubtless be instructive to compare Cherishian's “Testimony” with other memoirs of Armenian genocide survivors, but even standing alone, its complexity is evident. The text is noteworthy for how it challenges the aforementioned nationalist and academic representations of (Ottoman) Armenians and Armenian-ness as simple, monolithic, and insulated.Footnote 23
Cherishian's account is not a rosy one, and he speaks as much of Turkish oppression as of Turkish friends. He also evinces a full awareness of his authorial position: his text is unapologetically a product of a time later than that about which he writes, and he makes no effort to hide his contemporary, retrospective voice. Having narrated an event in its chronological place, for example, he frequently interjects from his present vantage point either to draw lessons or make anachronistic observations. In other words, he acknowledges his authorial subjectivity. As Carlo Ginzburg has noted, subjectivity need not indicate unreliability: “The fact that a source is not ‘objective’ (for that matter, neither is an inventory) does not mean that it is useless.”Footnote 24 In fact memoirs, and productive readings of them, can be profoundly useful, not only for what they say but also for what they do not say directly. If we take seriously the evident complications in Cherishian's text, and productively interrogate them, we can perhaps understand what accounts for its discrepancies with the dominant historiographies. In this way, and in line with Ginzburg's famous protagonist, the sixteenth-century Friulian miller Menocchio in The Cheese and the Worms, the many complexities and statements that surface in the memoir of Hovhannes Cherishian may “permit us to perceive a previously untapped level of popular beliefs,” as well as possible existential dispositions, precisely because they “cannot be reduced to familiar themes.”Footnote 25 Only if we read his account as a collective of complex, seemingly contradictory statements, and on its own terms, can we begin to understand who this person was, how he understood himself and his world, and thus how his personal, intercommunal networks may have been built and operated.
For understanding the role memoirs can play in the study of late Ottoman society at large, it is highly suggestive to note how seamlessly Cherishian's can be transposed onto Aron Rodrigue and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's recent analysis of another memoir: the first published Ladino Memoir of a Jew in nineteenth-century Ottoman Salonica, written beginning in 1881 by Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903). In the following passage, if one substitutes “Armenian,” “Cherishian,” and “Marash” for “Jew/Jewish,” “Sa'adi,” and “Salonica,” respectively, the parallels are arresting.
This memoir, then, is at once a barometer of Jewish inclusion and isolation, of symbiosis and marginalization. Sa'adi's text indicates that neither of the opposing interpretations of Ottoman Jewish history stands on its own; neither symbiosis nor separation can capture a complex reality. Rather, individual Jews like Sa'adi lived on multiple registers that historians have come to see as contradictory but that could be experienced concurrently and without apparent illogic. Perhaps this has been unimaginable heretofore because we have not had access to first-person narratives by Ottoman Jews such as the one that follows.
While Sa'adi lived immersed in the intensely Jewish milieu of Salonica, this milieu was inseparable from, and indeed unthinkable outside of, the Ottoman context. The Ottoman social landscape supplied a constant interaction of peoples, combined with the affirmation of difference, factors that were embedded in hierarchies that spanned religion, class, and gender. None of this is immediately translatable into contemporary vocabularies. It is perhaps best described simply as Ottoman, or in its original Turkish, Osmanlı, an extinct social reality that permeates Sa'adi's memoir and, indeed, that memoirs like this are preternaturally equipped to illustrate.Footnote 26
We will now examine how this “extinct social reality” is enacted in the memoir of our provincial Ottoman Armenian shoemaker.
“OTHER”-HOOD AND BROTHERHOOD
It is well established that the Ottoman state, confronted by the challenge of administering a society divided by the communal differences of its subjects, sought to govern through the maintenance of those differences.Footnote 27 The question is how Ottoman subjects themselves responded to and lived with this maintained difference. The historiographical response has all too often been to insist on a society characterized by insurmountable communal separation, simple commercial functionalism, or unceasing communal antagonism. None of these realities account for the lived experience of Hovhannes Cherishian. Here I will examine how he negotiated and interpreted this maintained “difference of others.” In his memoir, we see a markedly evident but largely overlooked existential condition of supra-communal affinity, whereby communal difference was, at a quotidian level, at one and the same time elided and maintained. Ottoman subjects like Cherishian were able to interact and affiliate with communal “others” through shared experiences and in shared physical spaces and thereby to develop complex identities. It is apparent from his text that separation, discrimination, and violence were, at least for this Armenian man, only one element of (inter)communal life.
Some of the most evocative passages in the memoir involve his direct references to intercommunal interaction and affiliation. Throughout his text, especially through his accounts of his military service and his family's deportation, Cherishian, his friends, and his family encounter and interact with a significant number of non-Armenian “others”: Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs; “kind-hearted Turks” and “black-hearted Turks;” Circassians (Cherkez) and Albanians; Greeks and Kurds. Surely these are only a representative lot. While it is unclear from the text whether he personally encountered Arabs, Albanians, or Greeks prior to the atypical events of the early twentieth century (military service and deportation), what is clear is that when he does encounter these people he not only has a mode of operating with and relating to them but also frequently expresses pronounced sympathy and profound love for them. He often refers to a Turkish or Arab contemporary in terms of family and friendship. Of his relationships with his Arab military commanders during his time in the Ottoman military, for example, Cherishian writes, “The general [Mustafa Enver Bey] treated me lovingly as his own son, in the same manner as my former commanders Omar Effendi and Hamdi Pasha had done.”Footnote 28 Likewise, Ḥassān Agha, an Arab Christian from Mersin, says to Cherishian, “Ever since I met you, I have loved you as my child.”Footnote 29 Cherishian himself notes, through the voice of Ḥassān Agha, that neither the Turks nor the Armenians of Anatolia really liked the Arab inhabitants. As this Arab fellah, Ḥassān Agha tells Cherishian, “Even though we [Arabs] have not been liked by the Turkish and Armenian people, I love my people and I am proud of my forebears (nakhnikner).”Footnote 30 Ḥassān Agha adds, “The Armenians keep aloof from us.”Footnote 31 Despite his categorical assertions, Cherishian describes visiting Ḥassān Agha and his family every Saturday evening during his military term in Mersin, apparently to give instruction from Ḥassān Agha's copy of the Holy Bible, purchased from a Turk in 1909 “after Adana's slaughter (godoradz).”Footnote 32 Cherishian describes the book as “an illustrated Bible in classical Armenian.”Footnote 33 Writing of this weekly ritual, he notes, “I felt like a member of the family.”Footnote 34 Cherishian even falls in love with H.assān Agha's daughter, which he later justifies in terms of a brother's love for his sister.
Perhaps the most compelling illustration of intercommunal affiliation in the memoir is his account of how his own father, Panos Cherishian, ran a successful barbershop in Marash in partnership with a Turk, Çelebizade Huseyn Ağa. This is elaborated toward the end of the memoir, when it deals with Cherishian and his family's return to Marash three and a half years after their deportation:
Having returned to Marash, my father resumed his partnership with the Turk, Çelebizade Huseyn Ağa, in his business as a barber. Huseyn Ağa reimbursed my father close to 1,000 Ottoman liras, which was half of the barbershop's profit accumulated during the three and a half years of our deportation. The partnership between my father and Huseyn Ağa was an incomprehensible wonder (anhasgnali zarmanalik). Huseyn Ağa's father, Çelebizade Idris Ağa, although a wealthy man who had relatives, on his deathbed called my grandfather Khacher by letter and addressed him: “Khacher my friend, I am dying. My only son, Huseyn, has the same age as your son Panos; they are both 15 years old. Whatever you want to do concerning Panos, do the same for my Huseyn.” Having said this, he made Huseyn kiss the hand of my grandfather. He told Huseyn: “My son, after I die, you recognize my friend Khacher as your father and abide by his advice and fulfill your filial obligation to him until his old age.” Two hours after he made his will, Idris Ağa died. Six months after his death, my grandfather took his son Panos—my father—out of school, and put him with Huseyn in the barbershop of his older son Baghdasar to learn haircutting. And two years later, when they had learned haircutting, my grandfather ordered the construction of a barbershop at the crossroads of four roads near the public cereal market called Arasa. He had the property title issued in the names of the two, making Panos and Huseyn partners, saying, “I united you; may only God separate you from each other (Yes tsez medztsutsi togh miyayn Asdvadz zade tzez irarme).” The two, for more than thirty-three years in brotherly fashion continued haircutting, inviting everyone's amazement (zarmank). For that reason, theirs was the most successful barbershop.Footnote 35
It is impossible to know if Hovhannes Cherishian considered this friendship and business arrangement wondrous at the time or only in retrospect, or whether it was wondrous at the time only in view of the anti-Armenian violence of 1894–1896, 1909, and 1915. Be that as it may, the shop's very existence and its success indicate that it must have appealed to a Marash clientele that was both Armenian and Turkish. That these Armenians and Turks were being barbered, itself an intimate act, side-by-side, in an environment that, like the coffee shop, was in the Ottoman world a known arena of socialization and conversation, expresses an Ottoman Armenian lived experience with which we must come to terms.Footnote 36
The evident affinity between Panos the Armenian and Huseyn the Turk—itself an outcome of the antecedent affinity between Khacher the Armenian and Idris the Turk—suggests that for Ottoman Armenians like the Cherishians the acknowledged intercommunal differences within Ottoman society did not, by definition, restrict either their interpersonal interactions or their emotional dispositions. On the contrary, this fraternal relationship between a Turk and an Armenian, spanning at least two generations, indicates that a supra-communal affinity between communally distinct Ottoman subjects could exist. This calls into question the notion, dominant in both popular and scholarly discourse, of limited and insulated existential possibilities determined by static and monolithic (that is, restricted and restricting) Ottoman millets. In a society centered on family relations, any intercommunal relationship expressed in the paramount terms of family must be recognized as a highly meaningful form of affiliation, and should be analyzed accordingly.Footnote 37 Cherishian's relationships with Turkish brothers and friends even resume after he and his family return from their deportation years in Syria. His father's Turkish business partner renders him his share of the profits for those years, and they resume barbering together. Further to this, also in 1919, people described by Cherishian as “Turkish notables” (Turk yereveliner) attended his wedding celebration!Footnote 38 Modern historiography must take into account and acknowledge such non-Armenian figures and relationships, as Cherishian himself does, as having been integral and fundamental to the lives of provincial Ottoman Armenians.
The foregoing examples are not at all intended to minimize the profound and extended instances of intercommunal discrimination, persecution, and violence that took place both within Cherishian's memoir and in late Ottoman society at large. These are well documented in both the memoir and the vast literature regarding the Armenian genocide. As already described, Cherishian repeatedly narrates encounters of prejudice and violent persecution. He begins his “Testimony” with brief descriptions of the massacres of Armenians that occurred during his formative years (in 1894–1896, and 1909), and these were plainly pivotal life events for him. Armenians in the memoir, too, display unmistakably “discriminatory” attitudes toward Arabs and Turks/Muslims, whom they think are inferior to Christians.
What I seek to do here, however, is to recover themes less developed in the existing literature and conversation, and to assert that the two realities—friendship and hostility/violence—coexisted. It is obvious that intercommunal encounters in the late Ottoman ecosystem were not simply acts of differentiation or antagonism, or merely functional. To conceptualize them in that way is to overlook a supra-communal affinity that Cherishian's memoir attests to, and deprives us of the imaginative framework we need to discern a fuller picture of the social mechanisms and networks that propelled late Ottoman life. The following passage reveals how, even in his darkest moments in Syria, Cherishian maintained a willing openness toward and affiliation with communal “others” and their institutions.
Without knowing about his background, I had rented half of the shop of seventy-five-year-old Abdul Hamid [in Hamah, Syria], who had family ties with the Azam clan, and who was loved by the populace. He had served as a sergeant (çavuş) in the army and spoke Turkish well. He gave half of the money he earned to the Armenian children left in the streets. Scores of such children died of hunger day after day at corners in the market…. Azamzade Mustafa Effendi, scion of the Azam clan and one of the wealthy men of Hamah, was in the habit of visiting his sister's husband Abdul Hamid, my partner in the shop, after midday prayers on Fridays. I befriended him as of my first Friday at the shop.Footnote 39
FAMILIAR SPACES, FAMILIAR FACES
Cherishian uses geography, or place, throughout his memoir to signify or express ownership, location, and connection. Names of roads, mountains, and streams express his deep sense of belonging and connection to the land. Given how integral these details are to “Testimony,” they obviously had strong implications for Cherishian's life as an Ottoman Armenian, and they display the profound impact of place on person. But place is more than nature; it is also an ecosystem of people and practices, both historical and contemporary. Geography thus has another, equally important function in the memoir: Cherishian employs it to invoke his physical proximity to the built monuments of “other” communities, to convey not only his physical but also his existential and interpersonal closeness to the “other.” Excerpts will display two such usages: When explaining his reasons for enlisting, Cherishian tells the Arab colonel, “My Bey, our house is in front of the noble Congregational Mosque (Ulu Cami) in the Koytul Quarter, where the majority of the populace is Armenian. There are eight Turkish families there. As our fathers have done, we also grew and played with the Turkish boys; we have loved and befriended each other like genuine brothers.”Footnote 40 Later, during his service, Cherishian describes his first encounter with a particular Arab captain, who likewise describes the implications of the experience of neighborhood: “[The captain] introduced himself, saying: ‘My name is Muhammed Omar; I am an Arab, a native of Jerusalem. My home being close to the Armenian Monastery of St. James, I have passed my childhood by playing in the courtyard of the Monastery. I have fallen in love with you.’”Footnote 41
In her work on late Ottoman Palestine, Ottoman Brothers, Michelle Campos hypothesizes a condition similar to that described by Cherishian:
In each [Ottoman] locale, Muslims, Christians, and Jews developed distinct relations that were shaped by residential patterns, economic situations, and a wide variety of cultural factors in addition to the policies set in place by the Ottoman state. In these mixed towns and cities, religious and ethnic groups often lived in the same neighborhoods (sometimes even in the same apartment building or courtyard), belonged to the same craft guilds, worked and shopped in the same markets, went into business together, and frequented the same cafes and law courts…. In other words, the physical proximity of different religious groups could, and often did, lead to familiarity and even solidarity.Footnote 42
The sharing of physical space, then, was part and parcel of the constitution and production of a shared Ottoman existential space of supra-communal affinity, the very space that enables the aggregation in a societal or individual Ottoman body of otherwise distinguished elements and existential registers. It is this aggregation of diverse elements and registers that is so often missing from representations of late Ottoman society. As Lucette Valensi observes, the proximity in the Ottoman Middle East of one religious community to another could lead to intercommunal borrowing and the “sharing of customs and values among Muslims and non-Muslims.” This physical proximity had visible effects on the self-constitution and existential possibilities of these otherwise distinguished groups. Valensi writes:
This [physical] proximity facilitated the reciprocal borrowing of social practices and the sharing of customs and values among Muslims and non-Muslims. In this domain the data are remarkably abundant, if not always coherent, in particular with regard to public usages directly open to the gaze of observing foreigners. Travelers and missionaries in the Orient, in effect, never failed to be surprised by the … homology between their [Christians'] practices and those of the Muslims. On their side, the Turkish authorities bound themselves to maintaining the manifest differences between Muslims and non-Muslims, reiterating prohibitions and regulations, while underlining the degree of osmosis that existed between the socio-cultural practices of the diverse groups.Footnote 43
The proximity of different peoples to one another even within a specifically designated “ethnic” quarter is powerfully evidenced in Cherishian's memoir by the fact that in Marash the congregational mosque of worship for Friday prayers, the Ulu Cami, was effectively located in an Armenian Quarter. The visible level of intercommunal connection that such an urban geography promotes challenges any perception of all Ottoman non-Muslim quarters as ghettos like those found in premodern Europe. This point has been made effectively and categorically in much recent scholarship,Footnote 44 but the hermetic view of a ghettoized society seems still to dominate the popular and academic imaginations.
Again, I do not suggest that intercommunal Ottoman city/town life was a consistently idyllic expression of cultural harmony. As Campos writes, “Proximity also bore the potential for conflict, and times of crisis … often revealed the fragility of intercommunal relations.”Footnote 45 Indeed, at one point in Cherishian's memoir, two years after the 1896 massacres, he explains that he and his Armenian friends were once escorted back to school from an outing by a “kind-hearted Turk,” because “the road was not safe; [we] had to cross streets in Turkish quarters.”Footnote 46
But, again, these inconsistencies are precisely the point: life in late Ottoman Marash and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire was not an either/or circumstance. We must exercise the patience to consider more than one lived reality and conceptualize lives lived in more than one register. As Cherishian demonstrates in his memoir, a late Ottoman (Armenian) subject could feel both ownership and alienation, brotherhood and fear.
LANGUAGE
Regarding intercommunal interactions and affiliations, language is also a telling component of Cherishian's memorial text. Though he wrote it in his native Western Armenian, he notes he was also a fluent speaker of Turkish. In his text he writes positively of both languages and uses both, in different ways, as vehicles of self-expression. He does this in countless places throughout the memoir, and despite his determined use of Armenian, much Turkish and some Arabic enter into his text, both transliterated in Armenian script. His Turkish is most often reserved for words with no Armenian equivalent, or for when he transcribes intercommunal dialog. Of course it is relatively well established that many Armenians in Anatolia spoke Turkish exclusively, and learned Armenian only when nationalist efforts within the Armenian diaspora encouraged them to do so after the genocide.Footnote 47
Cherishian's proficiency in Turkish is attested to within the memoir itself, such as when a military clerk named Nazmi expresses admiration at his skill in the language, or when a boatman he encounters in 1920 comments on his “pure Turkish.”Footnote 48 Perhaps nowhere is this bilingualism and its positive valorization evinced more tellingly and amusingly than in Cherishian's transcription of a comic ritual performed nightly during his time as a soldier in the Ottoman army, in which the Armenian soldiers not only understand and speak Turkish (and also some Arabic), but know Turkish well enough to make fun of their Muslim Arab corporal for his poor Turkish! In other words, the Armenian Christian soldiers elevated themselves above the Muslim Arabs by virtue of their superior command of Turkish. A passage from the memoir will convey some sense of this nightly language game. Since the whole point of the story is to make fun of the Arab corporal's Turkish, which is presented as something between pidgin and gibberish, with several Arabic words included, much of the dialogue is almost untranslatable.
Besides me in the Unit grouping, there were two Armenian reservists (ehtiyat) born in Adana; one was Setrak, the other was Manug, named Saatji by the Corporal, since Manug was a watchmaker. Every evening after dinner, Manug caused laughter, prompted by the Corporal, entertaining the soldiers assembled around the dinner platter. To this day, I laugh when I recall that scene.
Upon my command “Look! (Bak!),” the soldiers saluted, to which Corporal Naji responded with: `alay-kum salām! Manug began his ordering: “First: Attention! Obedience to the Padishah! Five times prayer! Second: Comrade to Comrade! Comrade, like a pillar! I wavered. No! I moved. No! Comrade to Comrade! Comrade; I laugh like a goose. No! I speak: No! Comrade to Comrade! Third: I obeyed! Soldier's head not big! Especially, above me: I obey!” Continuing his ordering, he would say: “You know, compatriot? I have a father for him: no brains, no money, no love. You know what I did to his father? I did avaf; I sold him aghbab. But I have such a mother, not his mother, motherhood stepmother, God curse you a thousand times, his mother constantly does gir gir to his father.”
At this point, the soldiers could no longer hold back and would start laughing. Corporal Naji angrily hit the floor with his cap, exclaiming: “Is the military a joke (askeriye maskhara)? Then, I don't want this duty!” Manug the watchmaker, who was brazen, came out of the line-up and said: “We don't want a corporal like you. We have come here to learn soldiering, and not to hear ‘his father, his mother (babasina, anasina).’” Saying this, he began to climb the stairs built in the center of the structure, warning that he was going to see Hamdi Pasha. The Corporal turned to me with the order [given in Turkish], “Go catch him; truly this watchmaker is a madman.” Running after him, I caught Saatji in the middle of the stairway and pleaded with him: “Don't do it, Saatji, our corporal is a good and honest person.” After much talking on my part, Saatji returned to his place.Footnote 49
Aron Rodrigue, and Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, have described language in the Ottoman Empire as primarily utilitarian and therefore less significant to personal and communal identity than other factors, especially religion.Footnote 50 I disagree; while language could not have expressed what it does today in the one-to-one identity-arithmetic of the nation-state, Cherishian's text suggests that language in the late Ottoman era was nevertheless significant for expressing identities. Thus the Armenian soldiers use language as the criteria by which to mock their Arab commander and to express their difference from him. In another place in the memoir, local merchants in Adana mistake Cherishian for “a native of Constantinople or Izmir, on the basis of [his] speech and attire,”Footnote 51 expressing a direct correlation between language and identity. Of course, to be multilingual, like Cherishian and many of his Marash compatriots, is to understand that one operates in multiple worlds and registers, whether those are expressive of modern nations or past Ottoman spheres. After all, the Ottoman state was governed by the maintenance of diversity, and a plurality of languages was part and parcel of that diversity. (Administrative Ottoman was itself intentionally distinguished from vernacular Turkish, as an operation of differentiation).Footnote 52
If we overlook expressive components of identity such as these of Cherishian's, we hinder our ability to perceive a more lucid and comprehensive picture of late Ottoman provincial life. In the memoir we also encounter Turkish-speaking Turks in Zeytun speaking the Zeytun dialect of Armenian, and Armenian-speaking Armenians from Kesab who are fluent in Arabic, as well as other Armenian-speaking Armenians who are fluent in Turkish. For us to reject any relationship between people's multilingualism and their identities (and thus their potential existential realities) flies in the face of the Armenian proverb that declares, “You are as many persons as languages you know (Kani lezu kides, aynkan mart es),” and the Turkish one that asserts, “One who speaks one language is one person, but one who speaks two languages is two people (Bir dil bir insan, iki dil iki insan).” Proverbs are truisms—popular truths. Cherishian's “Testimony” compels us to look for each of these different “persons” when we examine any aspect of late Ottoman social and political life.
PROPHECY: THE WORLD AND WORLDVIEW OF AN OTTOMAN ARMENIAN SHOEMAKER
It should be apparent by now that Cherishian's testimony complicates many of our received historical narratives of late Ottoman (Armenian) provincial society. But what can we tell about the worldview of the man who lived these unexpected realities? For one answer, we can look to a distinguishing feature of the memoir—the theme of prophecy. Throughout the memoir, Cherishian repeatedly invokes a prophecy that predicted that the Ottoman Empire would end in the year 1920. His religious conviction in these beliefs of his forebears appears to influence much of his behavior. He writes of how the Marash community, too, inspired by one Bishop Nigoghos Khorkhoruni, “was waiting impatiently for the year 1920, which was ten years ahead.”Footnote 53 Cherishian introduces and elaborates the prophecy at length at the beginning of his memoir, after briefly describing the massacres of 1894–1896 and 1909:
With all this [the massacres], my centenarian grandfather Khacher found fault not only with the Turks, but also with the Western powers and the leaders of the Armenian parties subservient to them. He blamed the party leaders for not trusting the traditions of their forebears, and not waiting for the expiration of the year 1335 in the Turkish calendar before initiating the movement of national liberation (azkayin azadakragan sharzhum).
Myself, a sinful one … [once] asked my grandfather: “Grandfather, from where did you learn that date 1335 which you always repeat?” My grandfather replied angrily: “Where did you want me to learn it? It is the sacred tradition of our forebears and we should believe it. For, according to the Holy Bible … the martyred Armenian people … would be persecuted and be martyred for 1335 yearsFootnote 54 by external pagan authorities opposed to the Church, or the beastly, pseudo-Christian Judaic, destructive dominion of the West, in accordance with Daniel's prophecy. After that, the authority of justice, right, love, and cooperation will be established upon earth.Footnote 55
It is noteworthy that similar prophecies were in circulation in the Ottoman Greek communities of the late Ottoman era. According to Ronald Clogg, “Prophecies as to the downfall of the Ottoman Empire were current as early as the 16th century.”
There exists a considerable corpus of evidence that demonstrates widespread credence [during the Ottoman period], and not only among the unlettered, in a whole host of messianic and prophetic beliefs forecasting the ultimate liberation, as a result of Divine intervention, of the Greeks from the Hagaren yoke of the Ottomans.… One of the most widely disseminated of the prophecies concerned the xanthon genos, the fair haired race of liberators from the north … [which] appears to have enjoyed a wide currency throughout the period of Tourkokratia [Turkish rule]…. The Reverend Robert Walsh … at the time of the outbreak of [the Greek War of Independence] … noted that among the prophecies circulating among the Greeks was one to the effect that “a race with yellow hair, along with their coadjutors, should overthrow Ishmael.”Footnote 56
In his work Before the Nation, about the relations between the Ottoman Greek community and other Ottoman peoples in late Ottoman Anatolia, Nicholas Doumanis, using as his source the oral testimony of Anatolian Greek refugees, also speaks of an Ottoman Greek belief in prophecies that “foretold the return of the last emperor, Constantine XI,” who would remove the Ottoman yoke.Footnote 57 And yet, for the Anatolian Greeks, such beliefs did not inhibit their interactions with other Ottoman peoples. As Doumanis elaborates in a comment that could apply equally to the Ottoman Armenians, “Being a Romios [Anatolian Greek] did not preclude other identities or the salience of other relationships.… The same people who believed in prophecies that foretold the destruction of the Turkish empire had close Muslim friends, helped these friends in times of need, and visited Muslim shrines that were renowned for their miracle-working powers.”Footnote 58
In other words, just as multiple existential registers existed for the Ottoman Greeks, so too did they exist for the Ottoman Armenians. Intra-Armenian relationships and divisions should equally demonstrate for us that late Ottoman society could not have been divided up as cleanly as it is in the hermetic picture of popular memory. Cherishian frequently evokes and laments these intra-Armenian divisions in his text, calling the Armenian's “internal dissension” their “core enemy,”Footnote 59 especially as they stood in relation to the prophecy that emerges from his account. Cherishian cites as purveyor of the prophecy Bishop Nigoghos Khorkhoruni of Furnus, northwest of Marash, who was apparently a regular visitor to Marash and is remembered in both the memoir and the hushamadyan (memorial book) for Marash and Zeytun as a popular and somewhat rebellious figure.Footnote 60 His popularity suggests that the prophecy he preached was also popular, that it was in the air at the time but subsequently lost to the historical record, not unlike the alternative theology of Ginzburg's miller Menocchio.Footnote 61 Then again, Cherishian also says that many disliked Nigoghos because he, like Cherishian, was “anti-West,” which reminds us that Armenians were divided also in their opinions about the Christian European powers.Footnote 62 All this not only brings to light a lost history, but also suggests undercurrents of intra-Armenian differences in the late Ottoman Empire that are often lost in the prevailing narratives.Footnote 63 These ideas are expressed best in the memoir itself:
[Bishop Nigoghos] was anti-West (haga arevmdyan); he degraded and condemned those who were pro-West. The reason was obvious. As one who was loyal to the tradition of forebears, he considered the West to be the greater of two evils and the heathen Turkish khanate (Turk khanutiun) to be the lesser of two evils. He argued for remaining on good terms with the Turkish government (Turk garavarutiun) until the year 1335 of the Islamic era. He stated: If, instead of staying subject to the authority of heathens for 1290 years, we had submitted to any Western power for even one hundred or one hundred and fifty years, the name of Armenians or of Armenia would not last upon the face of the earth. The evidence for this, he claimed, was the incursion of Europeans into our community. By introducing various denominations and parties, they have reduced the united strength (miasnagan uzh) of the Armenian people, bringing it down to almost zero. This was true. Half of the Armenians of Marash had been converted to Catholicism or Protestantism. Aside from the Armenian Catholics, there were the Franciscan newcomers, whose ritual was in Latin and who competed with the Armenian Catholics. As to the Protestants, whether Evangelical, Baptist, Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and so forth, they all opposed Bishop Nigoghos. Added to them was the partisan opposition. The Armenian community of Marash, resembling chaotic Babylon, turned into the laughing stock for Turks.Footnote 64
ENLISTMENT
Cherishian's fervent belief in the prophecy of the imminent end of Ottoman rule is perhaps most remarkable when considered with his voluntary 1910 enlistment in the Ottoman army. The memoir's most outright instance of a complex or even contradictory Ottoman Armenian lived reality may be that while Cherishian says that he was waiting for Armenian liberation, he nevertheless volunteered for the Ottoman army, even though his family could have afforded the military exemption fee, the bedel. He cites three reasons for enlisting: to counter Turkish resentment at Armenian non-participation in the military, to train to be a soldier, and that Bishop Nigoghos had specifically encouraged him to do so. It is enigmatic that the Bishop who is preaching liberation prophecy is at the same time telling people to join the Ottoman army. To volunteer for anyone's military is an unequivocal statement, even when read with the most nationalist eye (that is, as seeking preparatory training for a war of Armenian liberation). And at no juncture does Cherishian express anything other than the firm commitment to the army that one would expect from a loyal and serious soldier. He served over time as company chief, company accountant, food commissioner, and depot superintendent, as well as a “sergeant on the training field.”Footnote 65 One might say that he displays ideal Ottoman citizenship. In this way, he resembles the Arab soldier who served in the Ottoman army in World War I whose diary Salim Tamari recently published. Tamari writes: “His enlistment in the military college, and subsequent military career as an officer in the Fifth Army (which he could have avoided by paying the badal), suggests that he was more than a casual believer in the integrity of the Ottoman regime.”Footnote 66
There was indeed an atmosphere of euphoria and enthusiasm after the 1908 constitution, though we cannot know how Cherishian interpreted these sentiments since he does not elaborate on Young Turk-Ottoman universalism in his text. The concomitant establishment of universal conscription, enacted in 1856 but only instituted in practice from 1909, likewise generated considerable enthusiasm among the Armenian population as an expression of universal equal rights and brotherhood.Footnote 67 As Michelle Campos explains regarding the general non-Muslim reaction to universal conscription,
[Ottoman] public discourse embraced universal conscription as sharing the burdens of defending the empire as well as putting an end to the myriad privileges enjoyed by the non-Muslim communities of the empire.… For many non-Muslims … support for universal conscription became a measure of support for Ottomanism, for the empire, and for the responsible participation of non-Muslims in the new Ottoman body politic. It was considered an honorable contribution to the Ottoman nation, not only a duty but a privilege for all Ottoman citizens.Footnote 68
This general Armenian enthusiasm is also evident in another memoir of the era, recently published as Crows of the Desert. In a passage that instructively echoes the enlistment narrative in Cherishian's memoir, Levon Yotnakhparian writes of his experience in Urfa, roughly 140 miles east of Marash:
In 1909 all the soldiers from our region were stationed at the Sumsa Gate barracks. There were 225 of us. Thirty-eight of us were Armenians while the rest were Turks. At 8 o'clock in the morning we were to leave our homes in Urfa to join the army; hundreds of Armenians had gathered in Aleppo Square to bid us farewell. A band played military music, creating a festive atmosphere. We started singing and marching toward the road to Aleppo. Everybody was proud of being a part of the Ottoman army.
Two days later we reached the village of Berejik. When the local Armenians heard that there were Armenian soldiers in the group, they came out and greeted us enthusiastically. The local priest and village elders requested from the general to allow the Armenian soldiers to stay with them as their guests until Monday. The general, who was a kind man, gave us permission to stay with them Saturday and Sunday. We spent a happy time and made new friends. During church service on Sunday, the priest gave a sermon filled with encouraging words and asked us to be loyal soldiers. He said that the Armenians will make the Ottoman army shine. “Who knows,” he added, “perhaps one day we will have our own country.” “Long live freedom!” he exclaimed in conclusion.Footnote 69
And yet, as Campos also notes, “By the time actual call-ups came around, a significant percentage of the summoned youth never showed up; of those who did, large numbers requested exemptions or paid the optional exemption tax.”Footnote 70 Many Armenians did in fact emigrate, procure a foreign passport, or pay the bedel—Erik Zürcher cites a British report that says only 5 percent of eligible Christian men actually served.Footnote 71 To be sure, there were Turks who likewise evaded military service, and overall Ottoman military conscription was far lower than that of its rivals.Footnote 72 In Cherishian's memoir, as in Yotnakhparian's, the excitement in Marash around the departure of their Armenian soldiers is apparent:
And when we entered the military court at the government center, what a scene! Thousands of Armenians assembled to send off the enlisted. There were three music bands and four groups of fine musicians. Many had come with Ottoman flags, ready to depart. The excitement was unlike anything I had seen….
Thus enrolled to join the [military] group, we thanked the military board members and when we went out, my Father and my Uncle kissed me upon my eyes and my cheeks. My Father tied a belt around my waist, saying: “My Son, there are 12 Ottoman gold liras inside it,” and filled my pocket with coins, bid me farewell. He said: “Go my Son, may God be with you. If you do not like the service or are uncomfortable, write to me and I will immediately pay your military exemption fee (bedeli askeriye). As to the shop, your brother Ezekiel will take care of it; do not worry.” As to my Uncle, he placed the Arab head-cloth and head-band upon my head; that way I was made a part of the group. Upon Colonel Abdul Razzak Bey's order, “March!” the 40-member Armenian band of the Franciscans joined with the bands of the other musicians, began to play the Freedom Hymn (Hurriyet I‘lān), the lyrics written by my teacher of Turkish Toros Effendi Mayikian, and composed by my Uncle Hovnan Varjabedian:
The entire assembly sang the hymn, heaven and earth shaking. Here and there circle dances were being performed, and the crowd shouted: “May despotism be destroyed!”Footnote 74
If Cherishian was merely waiting for the end of the Ottoman Empire and Armenian liberation, he did so in an odd manner. By his own account, while in the military he did his utmost to be a good soldier and earn the trust of his superiors, which evidently meant a lot to him. He repeatedly remarks on his good relationship with his superiors, and treasures their excellent letters of recommendation, which served him well during his deportation and after. He is the ideal soldier, yet all the while believing that the liberation of the Armenian people is just a few years away. Cherishian's complex if not contradictory behavior leads one to wonder what exactly his notion of that “liberation” might have been. One clue is found at the end of his memoir, where he writes (in New York City in 1966) about the foiled creation of an independent Cilician Republic that was to have been established in cooperation with Turks; in other words, a republic with Armenians and Turks living side by side.Footnote 75 We see similar sentiments in his recollections of a brief moment in Adana in 1920 when he and his compatriots sought officially to declare this Cilician Republic. Cherishian describes the process of obtaining signatures from “the religious heads of local minorities, Greek, Syrian, Kildani [Chaldean], and Arab, and from the heads of other official bodies … for a report by which Cilicia was being declared a Republic.”Footnote 76 Although collaborating with Turks and other non-Armenians, at this time he also feared that Turks posed a danger to his life, and took part in a retaliatory kidnapping of local Turkish merchants to ensure the safekeeping of Armenians whom Turkish brigands had previously kidnapped. Hovhannes Cherishian, an Ottoman Armenian, does not allow us to take even the rhetoric of Armenian “liberation” as a simple, exclusive, and hermetic category. Even when conceptualizing “liberation” in a nation-state, even when engaged in intercommunal conflict, his utopia is multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious, and multilingual.
PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITANISM
The passages I have quoted from Cherishian's memoir speak with what is for us an unfamiliar Ottoman Armenian voice and from an Ottoman Armenian existential space that has been insufficiently analyzed and conceptualized. His narrative's complications and contradictions reveal an underrepresented world and worldview that sheds new light on the possibilities that existed in late Ottoman provincial society for intercommunal interaction and complex identity-production. These and many other passages also illuminate a larger phenomenon evidenced by Cherishian and many of his associates in the memoir, which I am calling a provincial cosmopolitanism.
I propose this term to characterize the condition in which the diverse persons and communities (or personal and communal worlds) inhabiting the same local and provincial ecosystem, who had, for the most part, never lived elsewhere, could not only interact, as in Cherishian's memoir, but also, by means and virtue of their interacting in lived dispositions of openness and even supra-communal affinity, influence and inscribe one another. This was not the self-evident cosmopolitanism often lauded of the great Ottoman imperial cities, major ports, crossroads of medium- or long-distance trade, or pilgrimage sites. Nor was it necessarily just a byproduct of the European missionary presence or travel to Europe. Instead, provincial cosmopolitanism was a local cosmopolitanism, a lived disposition, affinity, and identity of individual persons and of collective groups that was the direct result of living in a demographically concentrated provincial urban environment in which individuals and groups of diverse and differentiated ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural composition engaged in an ecosystem of interaction.
What Sibel Zandi-Sayek observes of the traders and migrants in nineteenth-century Izmir—the cosmopolitan Ottoman port city par excellence—applies no less to members of the relatively stationary community of Cherishian's provincial Marash, or other provincial communities he writes of such as Adana, Mersin, Kesab, Zeytun, Hamah, and Muhradah: “Premised on diversity, the Ottoman social order allowed [its subjects] to preserve their identities and the differential customary rights, duties, and privileges associated with those identities.… Together they forged in Izmir a distinctive polyglot enclave, marked by differences but also conducive to creative forms of interdependence, exchange, and initiatives.”Footnote 77
I am suggesting that ecosystems of interaction such as these, mutually influencing and mutually inscribing, gave rise to Ottoman identities that could be dynamic, multifaceted, and complex, constituted by the aggregation and accommodation in particular individuals or groups of differences which we would not today expect to find maintained in a single identity. This occurred in not only port cities and capitals but also provincial areas. Such interacting individuals, who were both constituted and compelled by this provincial cosmopolitanism, were able to create and operate intercommunal networks that were fundamental to their lives as late Ottoman subjects. Most historiographical accounts give no hint of this provincial dynamic, and yet these networks should, to the degree possible, be fundamental to the late Ottoman histories that we write.
Cosmopolitanism's lived disposition of openness is expressed well by Margaret C. Jacob in her book on cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe:
Being cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern age meant—as now—the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds and colors with pleasure, curiosity and interest, and not with suspicion, disdain, or simply a disinterest that could occasionally turn into loathing. This benign posture, whether toward foreigners or disbelievers in one's own religion, did not come about—then or now—automatically, or even easily. It happens when circumstances or situations, times, and places exist that are propitious. In other words, such a varying stance in the world possesses a history.… Cosmopolitans … accept the foreign hospitality, without necessarily agreeing with, or practicing, every cultural value associated with it. They enjoy people different from themselves, live next to them comfortably, or socialize and trade with them respectfully.Footnote 78
Jacob is talking in the main about the educated and traveled class of the European Enlightenment, but as I have argued here, mobility or advanced education are not necessary preconditions for the emergence of provincial cosmopolitans. The cosmopolitanism of Hovhannes Cherishian arose from his specific historical and geographical location in an Ottoman ecosystem characterized by the maintenance of ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity and an interactive social dynamic. He articulates his cosmopolitan disposition when he says: “In every nation and religion, good people and evil people exist. I vouch that I have met many such people.”Footnote 79 He displays and enacts this disposition throughout the text, such as in the passage I quoted earlier in which he describes immediate openness toward and friendship with Muslim Arabs in Hamah whom he has just met. Similarly, he depicts meeting in Hamah a “young [Arab] superintendent named Ahmed Effendi, from the Chichekli clan…. He was a very fine person; I befriended him the day of his arrival, revealing to him my background.”Footnote 80 Obviously, Ahmed Effendi and these other Muslim Arabs in Hamah were also of open cosmopolitan dispositions to so quickly befriend the Christian Armenian Cherishian.
I further distinguish between a provincial cosmopolitan disposition—the passive openness to difference engendered by the ecosystem—and a provincial cosmopolitan affinity, the capacity to attach oneself to the qualities and characteristics of an “other,” especially a communal “other.” This affinity—expressed, for example, in Cherishian's many acts of affiliating with a communal “other” through the idiom of family, or the use and valorization of the Turkish language—is one possible result of the cosmopolitan disposition. Provincial cosmopolitan affinity, in turn, enables the third constitutive element of provincial cosmopolitanism: provincial cosmopolitan identity, wherein a subject, such as the Ottoman Armenian shoemaker Hovhannes Cherishian of Marash, more actively takes on multiple identities and aggregates and accommodates them as self-constituting. I include among these identities those cultivated by not only broader environmental influences but also diverse personal experiences, such as the simultaneous persecution and inclusion experienced by late Ottoman Armenians.
Provincial cosmopolitan identity in a single Armenian individual such as Cherishian can at once collate his experiences as a victim of the late Ottoman state and those as a leading figure in the commercial center of Ottoman Marash; as a devoted servant of Christ and the church and a loyal friend to Muslim Turks; as the Armenian-speaking scion of an ancient Armenian family (the Apartian clan) and the Turkish-speaking descendant of an eighteenth-century entrepreneur from Marash who went on pilgrimage to Ottoman Jerusalem eighteen times and received his new “Armenian” family name, Cherishian, from the Turkish phrase çıktı mübarek çiriş (“the blessed asphodel flower [cherish] has blossomed”).Footnote 81 In such a cosmopolitanism, difference is maintained, not elided. The very maintenance of difference produces this cosmopolitanism in the first place.
If we revisit the passage quoted earlier regarding Cherishian's deportation in Syria, it becomes evident just how ingrained and integral his “provincial cosmopolitanism” was to his life and behavior, to his lived (Ottoman) Armenian-ness. During his deportation years, which saw the displacement and death of family members, friends, and compatriots at the hands of the late Ottoman state, Cherishian could still feel immediate friendship and affinity towards Muslim Arabs, and they toward him. He could valorize Ottoman military service and the proper speaking of Turkish, and trust a stranger “without knowing about his background.” This cosmopolitan constitution allowed him to cultivate relationships that in many ways governed the course of his final years in his native land. Put simply, Cherishian's memoir helps us begin to recover and comprehend the existential possibilities of being an Ottoman Armenian in the late Ottoman era. It demonstrates the degree to which Ottoman Armenians could live multiple identities at the same time.
CONCLUSION: OTTOMAN COSMOPOLITANISM—CONVENTIONS AND INTERVENTIONS
In studies of the late Ottoman period the idea of “cosmopolitanism” has been used primarily by historians who take a revisionist stance toward nationalist historiographies, to signify a multicultural and often elite environment or person within a major imperial city or port.Footnote 82 As Will Hanley rightly laments in his 2008 article, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies,” “In writing about the Middle East, cosmopolitanism is characterized by a particular scope (focus on elites), a particular approach (invocation of a tag rather than pursuit of an idea), and a particular tone (grieving nostalgia)…. Existing interventions fail to provide a satisfying account of diversity, and the critique of nationalism that they entail is reflexive rather than creative.”Footnote 83 Hanley rightly argues that cosmopolitanism has by and large “clouded rather than clarified Middle East scholarship,”Footnote 84 and asks if the term is in any way effective. Ariel Salzmann abandons the term altogether in “Islampolis, Cosmopolis: Ottoman Urbanity between Myth, Memory, and Postmodernity,”Footnote 85 but Hanley leaves room in his conclusion for us to instead “renovate and expand the concept,”Footnote 86 as I have tried to do in this paper.
In a similar attempt to expand cosmopolitanism, Asef Bayat in his 2010 book, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, briefly cites the late Ottoman cases of Cairo, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Aleppo to illustrate what he calls “everyday cosmopolitanism,” or the “cosmopolitanism of the subaltern.”Footnote 87 This notion is also explored for contemporary cities, including Beirut, Cairo, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Tokyo, in the 2009 volume The Other Global City, edited by Shail Mayaram. Her project is “concerned with understanding the complex totality of interethnic relations in urban contexts including aspects of violence, but also aspects of coexistence and conviviality.”Footnote 88 To these notions we should now add the cosmopolitanism of the provincial. When the provincial Armenian shoemaker Cherishian describes himself sitting in his shop in Syria and reading a Turkish newspaper given to him weekly by an Arab Muslim friend,Footnote 89 he appears, in his own provincial way, no less cosmopolitan than the metropolitan figures İlay Örs described in “Coffeehouses, Cosmopolitanism, and Pluralizing Modernities in Istanbul,” who read “a wide range of multilingual newspapers” in an Istanbul patisserie café.Footnote 90
We need an analytical concept to designate a lived reality that is constituted by more than the statistical fact of “multiculturalism.” We require a way to express in our histories the dispositions and inclinations that can produce interactive and affiliative behaviors and networks such as those Cherishian describes. As yet, we have no analytical structures with the potential to do this better than “cosmopolitanism.” To make the cosmopolitan intervention—to insist that an Ottoman provincial shoemaker can be a cosmopolitan, too—is a first step toward creating a new language for late Ottoman social history, and a new way of seeing the late Ottoman social world.
