The Armenians in Modern Turkey ─ Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History

After the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million Armenians died, thousands of Armenian-Turks lived and worked in the Turkish state alongside those who had persecuted their communities. Living under heavy censorship, and in an atmosphere of official denial that the deaths were a genocide, how did Turkish Armenians record their own history? Here, Talin Suciyan explores the life experienced by Turkey’s Armenian communities as Turkey’s great modernisation project of the 20th century gathered pace. Suciyan achieves this through analysis of remarkable new primary material: a kaleidoscopic series of personal diaries, fragments of surviving material objects (such as charms and clothing), the oral histories of the period and a focus on the statutes and laws which led to the continuing persecution of the Armenian minority. The first history of its kind, The Armenians in Modern Turkey is a fresh contribution to the history of modern Turkey and the Armenian experience there.

Talin Suciyan has just completed her PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich where she is currently a teaching fellow at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies.