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The Armenians Themselves Burnt Their Own Houses and Desecrated Their Own Churches: Luigi Villari’s Nakhichevan in 1905
Abstract
Luigi Villari’s book Fire and Sword in the Caucasus , published in London in 1906, is widely quoted by the scholars who study the history of South Caucasus at the time of the first Russian Revolution in 1905. After a short introduction about the interesting figure of this author, the first part of the article will take into consideration Villari’s peculiar attitude toward the Armenians. The larger part of the article will consider his first-hand description of the massacres perpetrated by the Azeris (Tartars) in the region of Nakhichevan. As a matter of fact, Luigi Villari’s testimony of the tragic events of 1905 is more interesting than ever to understand the origins of a contrast that continues—even if in a deeply different situation—to stain with blood the relationship between Armenians and the South Caucasian Turks.
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Luigi Villari’s book Fire and Sword in the Caucasus, published in London in 1906, is widely quoted by scholars working on the history of Transcaucasia, in particular in respect to the Armenian-Tatar war. Yet neither this text nor its author have been so far studied in detail. The Italian Luigi Villari (1876-1959) is a figure of considerable interest; he was a diplomat, traveler, and journalist. His father, Pasquale Villari (1827-1917), was an accomplished historian and politician who played an important role in nineteenth-century Italy; Villari’s mother was the British writer Linda White (1836-1915). It is remarkable that the author wrote a book an English at a time when this was not a popular language in Italy. He wrote extensively both in English and Italian about different topics, mainly related to history and international politics. It has been shown that, after the First World War, Villari joined Fascism and contributed actively to the regime’s propaganda in Great Britain. The present paper examines Luigi Villari’s book on the Caucasus, especially the author’s attitude towards the Armenians. I shall demonstrate that in his work, he handles negative stereotypes of the Armenians (“one of the most unpopular races of the East”), which were common in the Russian empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a rather interesting way.
Despite its architectural fame, the medieval city of Ani in eastern Turkey, once an Armenian capital on the Silk Road, was endangered until recently. Preserving the Medieval City of Ani: Cultural Heritage between Contest and Reconciliation traces the evolution of Ani since the late nineteenth century as an object of preservation and the subject of debate about heritage. As a primarily non-Muslim site in a modern, majority-Muslim country, Ani poses dilemmas shared by other cultural heritage sites in postconflict societies: it presents economic opportunity through tourism, but its history prompts questions about a painful recent past the state refuses to acknowledge. Analyzing the recent developments in cultural heritage management in Turkey involving international heritage organizations, especially for Christian and Armenian monuments, and highlighting the civil society debate about rediscovering long-suppressed episodes of Turkish history, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh argues that despite daunting difficulties beleaguering acknowledgment of the past, cultural heritage can provide a medium for reconciliation rather than contestation.
This is an attempt to research the roots of the protracted conflict between Armenia and
Azerbaijan and the way scholars from both countries looked on the events of 1905-1906,
which are described by many as “the Armenian-Tatar massacres.”1 These were the first
bloody clashes between two ethnic communities, which had co-existed peacefully sideby-side
for centuries. What was the reason for the animosity and did how the massacres 1905-
1906 affect the current situation?
It is no easy task to restore a picture of the events because both ethnic communities lived
under the Russian Empire where the media was not an impartial observer. Many scholars and
experts believe that the Russian authorities were either interested in, or actively encouraged, the
ethnic clashes in the Caucasus. At the very least, the Russian authorities did not act to stop the
bloodshed or restore order.
In this article I analyze the historical context of the events which led to the massacres, the
socio-economic causes which fed the conflict as well as the overall course of events. Despite the
fact that the current conflict - which began in 1988 between the two countries - was caused by a
territorial dispute, namely the Armenian claim to Nagorny Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, historical
and ethnic myths, partially associated with the events of 1905-1906 played an important and
tragic role in propelling the conflict.
The article analyzes the politics of archaeological research in late imperial Russia and addresses the problem of conflict and engagement between academic research, nationalist policies, and popular imagination. It tells the story of Nikolai Marr’s archaeological excavations in Armenia, and describes his attempts at de-heroicization and denationalization of the history of the city of Ani, a medieval capital of Armenia. The materiality of Ani’s history uncovered in the process of excavations attested to the cosmopolitan spirit of the city’s material culture. However, the epistemological principles of Marr’s work that defied the possibility of the “national” attribution of artifacts, and his interpretation of Ani’s “natural” rise and decay were out of tune with the dominant emotional atmosphere, as well as the popular narratives of the Christian Ani’s tragic demise after barbarian invasions. His scholarly position also contradicted the project’s reliance on the financial and political support of the Armenian community.
In the half century from the Russian annexation of eastern Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) to the outbreak of the Crimean War, Transcaucasian society underwent a deep and irreversible transformation which, in its effects, was as fundamental a metamorphosis for Armenians and Georgians as were the contemporary political and industrial revolutions for “western Europeans. Whether the move into the Russian orbit was “progressive,” as Soviet historians insist, or a fatal perversion of these nations’ natural development, as some nationalists argue, is not really a historical judgement capable of empirical demonstration. What can be shown, however, is that with the Russian occupation a historical process began which rent the fabric of traditional Georgian and Armenian society and produced both new opportunities and loyalties for some and a persistent, if ultimately futile, resistance to centralized bureaucratic rule by others. Responding to that resistance, the tsarist administration enticed the nobility of Georgia into participation in the new order, and at the end of the first fifty years of Russian rule, the once rebellious, semiindependent dynasts of Georgia had been transformed into a service gentry loyal to their new monarch. At the same time, the Armenian merchants and craftsmen of Caucasia's towns benefited from the new security provided by Russian arms and, while competing with privileged Russian traders, oriented themselves away from the Middle East toward Russian and European commerce. In the process they laid the foundation for their own fortunes and future as the leading economic and political element in Russian Georgia. The peasantry of Transcaucasia was forced in the meantime to submit to new exactions as their status became increasingly more similar to that of Russian peasants. And the respective churches of Georgia and Armenia made fundamental and irreversible accommodations to the new political order.
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