An Encyclopaedic Compendium of Everything Ottoman Armenian:
Reading Teotig’s Everyone’s Almanac through the Prism of Art and Cultural History
Wednesday, November 2, 2022, 6:30PM at HG 1010
From its first edition published in Constantinople in 1907 during the autocratic reign of Abdülhamid II, to the last, printed in exile in Paris in 1929, the very popular Everyone’s Almanac (Ամէնուն տարեցոյցը) epitomised an intellectual vigour and encyclopaedic breadth unparalleled in the history of Ottoman Armenian-language publishing. Edited by the Ottoman Armenian husband and wife team of intellectual-polymaths Teotig (Teotoros Labdjindjian, 1873-1928) and Arshagouhi Teotig (Djezvedjian, 1875-1922), and published annually – except for an interval during the period of the Armenian genocide and its immediate aftermath –, Everyone’s Almanac remains a veritable compendium that provides to this day an unrivalled archive-in-print of the late Ottoman and immediate post-Ottoman Armenian experience in every conceivable field, including the visual arts and cultural history.
This illustrated presentation takes a diachronic look at the sizable art-historical content of the nineteen published volumes. It proposes the application of a loose periodisation as a means of furthering a more nuanced understanding as to how context had coloured the Teotigs’ handling and treatment of Armenian material culture at different times. Via this approach, it also seeks to reveal evolving mindsets, impetuses and incentives behind their endeavours whilst engaging with, and in response to, external factors such as censorial constraints and volatile political environments.
Vazken Khatchig Davidian is Associate Faculty Member at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (formerly Oriental Institute), University of Oxford. He defended his doctoral thesis in art history entitled ‘Image of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople: Late Nineteenth-Century Representations of Migrant Workers from Ottoman Armenia’ at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2019. He is, with Boris Adjemian, co-Editor of the journal Études arméniennes contemporaines published by the Bibliothèque Nubar, Paris. The author of several articles, he is currently working on the monograph Art, Realism and the Politics of Social Reform: Reading Late Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Armenian Hamal of Constantinople, based in part on his doctoral dissertation.
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