In A House in the Homeland, Carel Bertram presents a comprehensive account of the pilgrimages of Armenians residing in the diaspora to their ancestral homes in contemporary Türkiye. Drawing on over a decade of participant observation and archival research, Bertram constructs a narrative that is at once intimate and expansive, capturing the emotional power of return without falling into nostalgia or symbolic closure. These are not acts of tourism or political reclamation, but something more layered, encompassing pilgrimage as a ritual, as a form of mourning, and as a creative reimagining of interrupted genealogies.
The book is grounded in the experiences of pilgrims who traveled primarily with Armen Aroyan, an Armenian American who organized tours and guided trips to ancestral villages in Türkiye. These experiences formed the basis for much of Bertram’s fieldwork between 2007 and 2015. The pilgrims, predominantly from the United States, are not survivors themselves, but the descendants of those who fled or were killed during the Armenian Genocide (1915–18). Their ties to place are mediated through what Bertram terms memory-stories: affective narratives and attachments passed down across generations through storytelling, photographs, material objects, songs, and dances. These acts of remembering are not simple recollections but rather complex assemblages of knowledge and emotion that shape how individuals experience sites of ancestral belonging and homeland.
Bertram’s employment of memory-stories is one of the book’s central conceptual contributions. These inherited narratives establish personal truths that are carried across generations and animated through acts of return. When pilgrims travel to their ancestral villages, they do not simply recall what they have been told; rather, they reassemble these stories through their encounters with place. A crumbling wall, a tree remembered from a family photograph, the scent of a garden: all can trigger what Bertram calls “spiritual returns,” moments in which the past is not recovered but reactivated. Through sensory and symbolic engagement with landscape, pilgrims insert themselves into the narratives they have inherited, often creating new emotional meanings in the process.
The book is organized thematically into four sections, allowing the reader to move through different dimensions of pilgrimage. The first section delves into the physical and emotional weight of the house, a recurring motif throughout the book. For numerous pilgrims, the house signifies more than a lost structure; it is regarded as a sacred repository of family life, values, and memory. Even in the absence of a physical structure or when its original meaning has been superseded by Turkish state discourse, the imagined presence of a house exerts an emotional force. Pilgrims partake in various rituals, including the collection of earth and stones, the washing of their faces at a village fountain, and the placement of photographs in what was once the family courtyard. Bertram’s argument posits that these gestures transcend mere symbolism. They are poetic enactments of connection that materialize memory in the present. In her words, “all pilgrim rituals are exactly what a poem communicates: a powerful moment of an integrated, textured entirety that is movingly felt” (p. 97).
Bertram is particularly attentive to the interplay between sacred and profane space. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s theories of the sacred and the profane, she departs from binary framings and instead shows how the sacred often coexists with the profane. In several compelling examples, pilgrims experience moments of spiritual intensity in sites that also carry the memory of violence and erasure. The house, in this context, becomes a center of familial wholeness through the pilgrims’ agency in restoring that wholeness. This coexistence enables Bertram to explore how reverence can share ground with rage, and how the landscape itself bears the weight of unresolved histories.
What distinguishes this book is the ethnographic intimacy, which honors the specificity of individual experience. Rather than generalizing across a large sample, Bertram builds the narrative through close readings of individual stories. These are not conventional case studies; rather, they are evocative vignettes. Each vignette portrays how a descendant’s personal archive comes alive in the field. Bertram’s attention to detail is not limited to narrative; it extends to the material archive that underpins the book. She draws from a plethora of journals, letters, photographs, and artworks, including reflective essays written by pilgrims after their return. The incorporation of visual elements, including drawings, poetic reflections, and ritual acts, serves to reinforce the book as a multidimensional, emotionally resonant archive.
Nonetheless, the book’s narrative and ethnographic richness occasionally overshadows its analytical potential. Although Bertram introduces several evocative terms, for example “house-place,” “house-world,” and “reassembling memory,” these concepts are often presented descriptively. They remain analytically open, gesturing toward broader theoretical conversations without fully engaging them. In particular, the book addresses themes that are central to recent literature on affect, memory, and spatial belonging; however, it does not engage in sustained dialogue with these fields. Nevertheless, this restraint may be deliberate. Bertram’s objective appears to be less the construction of a theoretical framework and more the articulation of the intricacies of lived experience. In this respect, she achieves success.
Although the book is grounded in Armenian experience, its implications reach further. It resonates with other histories of genocide and displacement through its engagement with themes such as the affective geography of homeland, the politics of denial, and the intimate economies of memory. Bertram’s conceptual tools, especially those pertaining to sacred return and the poetics of reinhabiting memory, are generative for broader scholarship on postgenocide subjectivity and diasporic attachments to homeland. She effectively captures not only what these journeys mean for those who take them, but also what they reveal about the fragile intersections between memory, denial, and belonging in the postgenocide landscape.
Ultimately, A House in the Homeland offers more than a study of diasporic pilgrimage; it is an exploration of how people live with inherited loss and how they create presence out of absence. It does not seek to resolve the contradictions of memory and history, but rather to inhabit them. In doing so, it demonstrates what might still be recovered through acts of imagination and ritual. As a contribution to the study of genocide’s long afterlives in relation to place, the book is both valuable and moving. This study will be of interest to scholars working on Armenian history, memory and commemoration, diasporic pilgrimage, and the role of material and affective practices in shaping postconflict subjectivities.
