Ottoman Armenians

Over a century on, the scenes described by Zabel Yessayan in the aftermath of the 1909 massacres of Ottoman Armenians in Adana still resonate grimly. In the political tumult in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, tens of thousands of local Armenians were killed in the first months of 1909, and Yessayan traveled down to Adana with a delegation from Istanbul to inspect the aftermath.

A new exhibition at Istanbul?s Depo gallery takes a closer look at personal and communal affiliations in the Armenian diaspora, said by Armenians themselves to be ?scattered like pomegranate seeds across the world.?

?GRANDCHILDREN, New geographies of belonging? opens on Sept. 3 at Depo in Istanbul?s Tophane neighborhood, and will run until Nov. 1.

The pioneering work of Zabel Yessayan, an Armenian author born in Ottoman Istanbul in 1878, was almost entirely forgotten after her death in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Even in Armenia itself Yessayan remains little known today, though new translations of her work have recently been appearing in English. 

'The Gardens of Silihdar' by Zabel Yessayan (AIWA Press, 163 pages, $20)

Mourad Fares was arrested on Aug. 16 in Turkey and taken into custody in France on Sept. 10