One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.Footnote ¹ The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”Footnote ²

Why the disbelief for what I had witnessed in Ani? Two decades prior, during my first visit to the mid-19th-century Dolmabahçe Palace, built on the Bosphorus by members of an Ottoman Armenian dynasty of imperial architects, the Balians, I had already experienced erasure firsthand, when our allocated official tour guide ascribed the building to an invented, apparently “Italian” Baliani family.Footnote ³ Back at Ani (renamed Anı) in 2019, I had searched in vain for any mention of the city's Armenian connections on the signage placed at the Lion Gate, the main gateway into the city. Later that year, an incredulous colleague-friend tweeted his reaction to the official poster of the exhibition titled “Picturing a Lost Empire: An Italian Lens on Byzantine Art in Anatolia, 1960–2000” organized at Koç University in Istanbul in 2018, which prominently featured the black and white image of the Armenian Cathedral of the Holy Apostles in Kars (now a mosque), not far from Ani.Footnote ⁴ Fast forward to 2022, and to newspaper reports of Turkish high-level officials declaring the church on “Akdamar” island “the greatest symbol of Anatolian Islamic civilization.”Footnote ⁵

Are such erasures and distortions innocent and isolated occurrences, or, as has been suggested, mere “oversights” in the production of art historical knowledge due to the “emphasis of Turkish ethnicity during the republican period”?Footnote ⁶ Oversight would assume the absence of the deliberate and systematic, whereas emphasis would suggest a merely different focus or perspective. This essay contends that the evidence strongly indicates otherwise: that no critical observer could fail to note that these erasures are anything but innocent. Exclusions (whether conscious or unconscious), inaccurate, often clumsy, recategorizations, and name changes, which characterize the treatment of Armenian material culture in Turkey today, are consistent and intentional manifestations of ideologically driven prejudices (and chauvinism, however subtle or crude) inherent in the enactment (and reenactment) of a national history (and its integral art historical counterpart).Footnote ⁷ They project and reinforce the reductive views of a diachronic Ottoman (and pre-Ottoman) past as a “glorified prelude to a unilinear and oversimplified narrative of the history of the Turkish nation.”Footnote ⁸ For there are no criteria by which the Church of the Holy Apostles in Kars could be labeled “Byzantine,” the Balians “Italian,” and Ani Cathedral (or the Church of the Holy Cross) “Seljuk” or “Islamic.”

Any meaningful attempt to unpack the complex questions that emerge from these observations within the confines of such a short piece would prove a task too ambitious, if not impossible. Other contributors to this roundtable have already eloquently outlined the general absence of Armenians from Middle East, Turkish, and Ottoman studies frameworks and historiographies, attributing this as a contributing factor to the silence of scholars and others during and in the aftermath of the 2020 Artsakh War, and the recent and ongoing destruction of Armenian cultural heritage by Azerbaijan.Footnote ⁹ Absence and exclusion persist notwithstanding the enormous strides made during the past two decades by critical scholarship (mainly within Western academia) in challenging the structures that maintain them, which include the countering of untenable myths of Turkish/Ottoman nationalist historiography head on (including the denial of the Armenian Genocide). In art history, beyond a handful of recent studies by art and architectural historians within Turkey and abroad, a pervading disinterestedness and reluctance, even unwillingness, to discuss contributions by Ottoman Armenians to the arts openly, honestly, and critically, let alone reframe the art historical lens, dominates.Footnote ¹⁰

Why is it that, with art and art history having been at the forefront of decolonization discourses since the 1980s, Turkish and Ottoman art historiography has so far avoided the incisive scrutiny of the same decolonizing lens that has problematized and already overturned so many of the established truths of Western art historiography? Whatever one's position in the debate upon whether the use of the term “decolonization” is appropriate in the Turkish/Ottoman case, or whether the pre-republican imperial polity or the early republic can be described as “colonialist” entities or not, surely the furnishing of scholars with the critical interpretive tools and methodologies assembled under that rubric, which could enable the much-needed reframing of the art historical lens, would be a good thing.Footnote ¹¹ For focusing on terms (or, put dismissively, buzz words that scholars and activists latch on to) such as “decolonization,” that often inflame tensions and heighten emotions, obfuscate the real issues of what is at stake and detract from what is being proposed.

With art intertwined with politics throughout history, art history has never been (and cannot be regarded as) innocent: alongside European colonial expansion, both art history as discipline and the nation–state were inventions of the 19th century.Footnote ¹² Turkey is no exception among nation–states in according an exponential role to art in rendering the nation tangible. In her insightful assessment of Turkish and Ottoman art historiography (and the institutions that produce it), Gizem Tongo notes: “In a nation-state that was adamantly constructing itself as a counter-model to a multi-cultural and multi-religious empire, nation-building demanded that Republican art historians and the newly-founded ‘national museum’ should subject the art of the Ottoman Empire to a historical process of homogenization and Turkification that banished non-Turkish Ottoman artists from collective memory.”Footnote ¹³ Banu Karaca goes further in her important book, The National Frame, where she persuasively links the exacting of the erasure of the art historical and cultural heritage of minoritized non-Muslim communities (Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and also Assyrians) and also non-Turkic or non-Sunni groups (including Kurds, the Laz, and Alevis) at the heart of the Republican “Turkish Synthesis” project, with large-scale, state-generated violence unleashed by the process of Turkification (and its ideological counterpart, “Turkism”). She concludes: “the exclusion of minorities from national art histories . . . the link between large-scale economic expropriation on the heels of war, genocide (… the Armenian genocide in [the case of] Turkey), and other forms of state violence in the assemblage of art capital . . . and prominent art collections all constitute practices of dispossession that are rarely discussed as such within interrogations of the art world. . . . They become tabooed in national histories.”Footnote ¹⁴

Yet, even by the standards of such an unenviable record, the extirpation of the material and nonmaterial presence of the Armenian record from the past and present (and therefore future) of a polity that has been conceptualized as a “post-genocidal habitus of denial” glares out in stark relief as the most extreme, its severity unparalleled in both scale and extent.Footnote ¹⁵ The excision of the Armenian, an integral and integrated actor of the Ottoman cultural space, has left a gaping hole in art historiography. As I have asserted before, “when it comes to reframing the Ottoman art historiographical lens, Ottoman Armenians represent the one significant native Ottoman group with a wide geographic reach whose contribution, particularly prominent throughout the long nineteenth century, has played a major role in shaping all aspects of Ottoman visual culture (and not just visual culture). For an Ottoman art history without its Armenian actors—artists, architects, photographers, sculptors, calligraphers, craftsmen and women, decorators, patrons, dealers—is untenable.”Footnote ¹⁶ These lines were my response to frequent encounters with erasure throughout a decade of doctoral and postdoctoral research work. The very artists (and scores of others) and their oeuvre—at the heart of my investigation of connections between visual representations of labor migration and urban poverty in late 19th-century Constantinople, realism, and sociopolitical reform—were simply missing from Ottoman art historiography. Projections of reductive, exclusivist, linear, and teleological views that have Turkified Ottoman painting since the foundation of the Turkish Republic by actively excising non-Muslims and non-Turks from the picture (or at best assigning to them a peripheral status) have for a century reproduced crime by denial, and have perpetuated dispossession. Turan Erol's extensive “Painting in Turkey in XIX and Early XXth Century,” in A History of Turkish Painting by Günsel Renda and her colleagues, typifies this kind of art historiography.Footnote ¹⁷ As does the tome cataloging Ottoman participation in international world fairs, which features two artists—Halil Bey, a Muslim Turk, and the Levantine Della Sudda—as having represented the empire at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris; airbrushed from its pages are the six other painters and one sculptor whose work was exhibited in the Ottoman section of the International Art Exhibition at the Grand Palais, of whom six (including the only two gold medal winners among them, Zakar Zakarian and Edgar Chahine) were Ottoman Armenians.Footnote ¹⁸ Elsewhere, in an edited volume on the history of Ottoman painting published by the Culture and Tourism Ministry of Turkey in 2010, we encounter a prominent art historian inventing flimsy excuses to justify her rejection of the likelihood that the “earliest example of an Ottoman illustrated manuscript known to date,” produced in Amasya in 1416, was illuminated by an Armenian hand, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.Footnote ¹⁹ In the same vein, official publications of state museums and private collections, with their glaring omissions and the silences they impose (both on the gallery floor and the printed page), read like catalogs of art historical ethnic cleansing.Footnote ²⁰

The excision of the Armenian from Turkish and Ottoman art historiography is more far reaching than a simple removal of artists and architects. In the recent publication of the memoirs of the Paduan court painter in the Ottoman Imperial Palace, Fausto Zonaro, Venti Anni nel Regno di Adbul Hamid: Memorie e Opere, in English (translated from the Turkish rather than the original unpublished and inaccessible Italian), one finds that the editors, although including the subheading “The Armenian Massacres” in chapter 9, intervene to censor (delete) the artist's own observations, justifying their action with the following footnote: “The last part of this paragraph based on rumours heard by the artist Zonaro has been removed to avoid mis-interpretations.”Footnote ²¹ More subtle is the recaptioning of a painting by the Italian artist and long-term teacher at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Constantinople, Pietro Bello (1830–1909), from its original “Danse de hammals le 2me jour de pâques” to “Hamals Dancing on the Second Day of the Bairam,” in the recent edition of Adolphe Thalasso's L'Art Ottoman: les peintres de Turquie. Here a simple act of “mis-translation” converts the celebrants from Christian Armenians to Muslim “Turks.”Footnote ²² Meanwhile, a monument to the once iconic porters of Constantinople (mostly Armenians and Kurds, with the former the main targets of the 1896 massacres) erected by the municipality of Fatih in 2012 stands mute on a side street corner in Tahtakale in the Eminönü district of the old city of Istanbul, inviting click-happy tourists to snap the representation of the exotic “Turkish” hamal.

How do art and cultural historians confront erasure at such an overwhelming and all-encompassing scale? The recent compilation by Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price of responses to questions posed to a diverse group of practitioners of art history regarding their own understandings of what it means to decolonize art history, and the historical specificities of current calls, certainly provides much food for thought, as well as an instructive template for the sort of open public discussion that is sorely lacking in the area of Ottoman and pre-Ottoman art historiographies. Yet, for this to happen it must be preceded by the development, in Tim Barringer's words, of a “capacity for self-reflexivity,” a will for reflection on the history of its art history production and, to paraphrase Lerna Ekmekcioglu, the commitment of “doing otherwise.”Footnote ²³ Such a project also would involve, in Ekmekcioglu's words, “questioning the historical conditions that enabled certain types of knowledge(s) to be produced while inhibiting others.” It also would recognize art history's complicities, including the acknowledgment that canons and categories (such as “Islamic,” “Primitive,” “Orientalist,” “Turkish,” and “Armenian”), with their internalized biases and in-built essentialisms mirrored in constructions of national history, have been and are utilized to control and frame narratives. A disentanglement from nostalgias for glorious imperial pasts and fake romanticized multicultural utopias, challenging uncritical and unbalanced reliance on state archives (“control of the archive means control of memory”), and overturning mechanisms of censorship (and self-censorship) would reconfigure narratives to reveal hidden histories.Footnote ²⁴ The reappearance of the missing Others (not just the vanished Armenians) of Turkish art historiography would change its landscape beyond all recognition, and has the power to transform how Turks perceive themselves and the histories of their empire and nation–state.

Ekmekcioglu strikes a note of caution when she contends that in the current political environment any large-scale “communal self-reflection . . . is structurally impossible in Turkey, at least for now.”Footnote ²⁵ As to how far the gatekeepers and producers of art historical knowledge would be prepared to go in acknowledging Turkish and Ottoman art historiography's culpability in rendering the Armenian Genocide (and those of the Assyrians and the Greeks) and the material culture of those erased from history invisible remains to be seen. Yet, with the centenary of the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923 soon upon us, it is imperative that any narrative that seeks to explain the transition from empire to nation–state also must confront the elephant in the room: violent and systematic silencing as a fundamental building block of the new republic. Art historiography is not merely an adjunct to national historiography, but its integral part. As such it too requires a decolonizing eye to help unleash all the taboos of national history from their Pandora's box, where they have been contained for too long. It is long overdue for the distorted art histories that have normalized destruction, theft, and appropriation (and still continue to whitewash those who profited from dispossession and mass murder and whose names often grace universities and art collections) to be called out for what they are.

In art history the process continues. In my own field, the publication in 2004 of Garo Kürkman's two-volume compendium Armenian Painters in the Ottoman Empire provided the seminal intervention that made public a massive archive of previously silenced and forgotten artists in the Ottoman art historical milieu.Footnote ²⁶ Although the dissonance between the rich repository of images that Kürkman has painstakingly assembled and reproduced and his careful manoeuvres of nonconfrontational negotiation within a Turkish national art historical frame are striking, the images themselves have disrupted the official narratives of Ottoman painting history for good. With the opening of the archive (in its widest sense), young and emerging decolonizing scholars, whether they choose to adopt the epithet or not, are already repopulating Ottoman and Turkish art historiography with its missing Armenians (and others), as well as their lost material culture, in interdisciplinary and methodologically sophisticated endeavors, projecting new complex and nuanced narratives. Thus, Heghnar Watenpaugh's revelatory The Missing Pages narrates the life of a medieval manuscript across the multiple contexts of its existence.Footnote ²⁷ Sato Moughalian's Feast of Ashes confronts art history via biography and family legacy.Footnote ²⁸ David Low's game-changing The Ottoman Armenian World not only radically overturns the way we understand Ottoman visual culture, but also refocuses the lens, moving from the imperial center to the provinces.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile Osman Köker's Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago has reconjured a lost world through a compilation of postcards, and the groundbreaking online Houshamadyan Project has been blurring boundaries between multiple disciplines to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian life for over a decade.Footnote ³⁰ Beyond the confines of art history, Yaşar Tolga Cora's “The Market as a Means of Post-Violence Recovery” connects the aftermath of violence, capitalist exploitation of women, and oriental carpet production.Footnote ³¹ Ümit Kurt's recent The Armenians of Aintab exposes how immovable Armenian properties were listed as “Turkish Cultural Assets,” reveals the contents of lists of “abandoned” movable goods, and shows how appropriated artworks, such as silk embroideries, were gifted to the architects of the Armenian Genocide marked as “the handmade work of Muslim women.”Footnote ³²

Further afield, there may even be some discernible change in official Turkey, albeit at a glacial pace: during my most recent visit to the Dolmabahçe Palace in 2018, the guide described the palace as one of the masterpieces of the “Ottoman Armenian” Balians. In 2019, a sign at the site of the renovated Church of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar referred to the church as “Armenian.”Footnote ³³ There is even word of a new app being developed by the World Monuments Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation to help visitors navigate the site at Ani.Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps uttering the “A” word does not bring about the end of the world after all.