SUPPORT US
HOME
INTERVIEWS
Greed and Envy in the
Armenian Genocide: A
Conversation with Ümit
Kurt
September 28, 2022 • By Aris Janigian
ENTIRE HISTORIES can be
written about the machinations
involved in keeping the history of
the Armenian genocide from
being written. A cottage industry
of denial or quasi-denial,
extending from academia to the
e Armenians
of Aintab: e
Economics of
Genocide in an
Ottoman
Province
ÜMIT KURT
major media to the highest levels
of world governments, has
developed over the decades to keep
Turkey, the giant axis of EastWest relations, content. One need
only ip through the latest
newspaper to see it in action: even as the West condemns
the slaughter of innocents in Ukraine, it wheels and deals
with Turkish President Recep Erdoğan — vociferous
genocide-denier and one of the cruelest autocrats on earth.
e historian’s job is to keep lies from ruling the day, from
having the nal say. Without historians’ patient rigor,
we would be at the mercy of what our politicians and
pundits tell us about our national histories.
e best
history writing saves us from that delusion and
resignation. It is not simply informative, it is
emancipatory, even redemptive. Ümit Kurt’s 2021 book
e Armenians of Aintab:
e Economics of
Genocide in an Ottoman Province is one such history,
whose rather prosaic title does little to prepare one for its
potent revelations.
Survivors have often claimed that simple greed was the
driving force behind the evisceration of the Armenian
race. In his book, Kurt — lecturer in history in the School
of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Science at
the University of Newcastle — lends credence to these
claims, demonstrating the cultural and economic richness
of the Armenian community prior to the genocide and the
expropriationist motives of the Ottoman regime and its
civilian proxies. Our conversation about his seminal book
occurred over the course of a week via email.
¤
ARIS JANIGIAN: Recently I had a conversation in
LARB with Bedross Der Matossian about his book
e Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the
Early Twentieth Century (2022).
at book details
the 1909 massacre of some tens of thousands of
Armenians in the city of Adana, part of a
continuum of terrors visited upon Armenians by
Turks that culminated six years later in the
genocide. I started by asking Der Matossian,
“What was it like, as an Armenian, to revisit this
wrenching period in our peoples’ history […] Did it
make the historian in you pause on occasion to
grieve?” So, I’d like to start this interview in a
similar vein: What was it like, as a Turk, to revisit
the genocide, that horri c period in my people’s
history? Did it make the historian in you pause on
occasion to …
e word “grieve” might not be
right, so I will ask you to complete the question
even as you answer it.
ÜMIT KURT: As a historian and perhaps even a
narrator (how the historian Hayden White
characterized the historian’s task), it is very di cult to
separate your research topic from your personal
history, especially when you are working on the dark
annals of your own country’s history. You are
sometimes a passive agent and sometimes active. It
starts with your upbringing and continues in your
education and, in fact, is with you your whole life. At
some point, “your” people’s history became part and
parcel of “my own history.” I did not own your
people’s history; on the contrary, it came to own me.
But I do not actually de ne myself as a Turk — it was
never my identity; it was imposed upon me through
education, society, and family. Yet strangely enough,
even when I was a kid, I always instinctively and
unconsciously resisted embracing it.
Could you tell us more about that?
I was raised by a Kurdish mother and an Arab father
but learned none of their mother tongues. My father
never let my mother speak Kurdish with me and my
siblings. He grew up a Turkish Muslim person par
excellence. Presumably, it was the only way for him
and his Arab family from Aleppo to survive in
Turkey. As a little kid, I used to eavesdrop while my
mother was speaking Kurdish with my grandmother
and aunties. When my father came in, the
conversation suddenly switched to Turkish.
is led
me to develop a certain kind of resistance to
everything about Turkishness and the nationalism
surrounding it.
Most studies of the Armenian genocide, and more
generally of violence in Anatolia, focus on grand
politics and the decisions within the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP). Your book, I think, is
seminal in that it has the potential to shift the
discussion. It demonstrates how local actors helped
perpetrate the atrocity. But before we get to the
heart of your ndings, would you be kind enough to
tell us about the genesis of this project?
e book was inspired by a journey I began years ago.
As I wrote in the book, after I graduated from
Middle East Technical University in Ankara in 2007,
I found myself again at my parent’s house in my
hometown of Gaziantep, formerly known as Aintab.
One day I got a call from an old friend: “Ümit, where
have you been? It’s been ages! I know a great place in
Kayacık where we can catch up.”
ough I was born
and raised in Aintab and had not left the city until
college, the word “Kayacık” did not mean anything to
me. It was just another district in the city, a
neighborhood I had never visited and of which I
knew nothing.
My friend said she would wait for me at Papirüs Cafe
and gave me directions. I took a bus to the Kayacık,
and upon arriving found myself surprised by the
charming atmosphere, letting myself get lost in the
side streets. I was on a narrow street with beautifully
constructed stone houses lining each side, taking one
back to a simpler, though slightly mysterious, time.
Tucked away between the high-rise, concrete
apartment buildings of “modernized” Gaziantep, this
neighborhood was like an architectural mirage. I felt
nostalgic for a past that was never mine.
Finally, I found Papirüs Cafe, which turned out to be
in one of those exotic houses. Like most of the
houses on the street, it had been converted into a café
as part of the process of “restoring” the city. As I
entered, a few letters carved at the top of the majestic
gate caught my eye. Not recognizing the script, I
simply assumed these were Ottoman characters.
Inside, I was once more left speechless. A spacious
courtyard with staircases on either side leading up to
two large rooms welcomed me.
e rooms were lled
with antique furnishings, and the high ceilings were
adorned with frescoes and engravings similar to
Florentine cathedrals.
Feeling a surge of pride in my hometown and
ancestors, I decided to talk to the owner to try to
glean some information about the history of the
house. He wearily explained that he inherited this
place from his grandfather. It must have been
especially strong co ee they were serving that day, as
I was emboldened to press further: “And how about
your grandfather? From whom did he buy this place?”
e man paused hesitantly, and then softly murmured
to the ground beneath him, “
ere were Armenians
here.” I said, “What Armenians? What are you
talking about? Were there Armenians in Gaziantep?”
He nodded. I was getting annoyed. “So, what
happened to them? Where did they go?” He retorted
indi erently: “
ey left.”
Alongside another million and a half. “
ey left” —
so chilling, straight from a Beckett production. A
perfect illustration, too, of the average Turk’s
monumental ignorance.
Yes. I mention in my book how I was naïve, to the
point of being ignorant — a 22-year-old university
graduate, unaware of the existence of Armenians in
my hometown? As I rode the bus back home, I
pondered why the Armenians — why anyone —
would just leave and hand over such an exquisite
property. A few years later, I discovered that the
house belonged to Nazar Nazaretian, Honorary
Consulate to Iran, who was a member of Aintab’s
wealthiest and most prominent family, and that he,
his children, and his grandchildren lived there.
ose
letters above the gate were not Ottoman but
Armenian, spelling out the surname of Kara Nazar
Agha, who built the house.
Years later, I would also have the chance to meet the
youngest member of the family, Shusan, whose
grandmother was deported at the age of one during
the genocide. Shusan kindly spoke Turkish to me in
Aintab dialect.
at building is no longer Papirüs
Café for me. For me, it is the house of Kara Nazar
Agha, the Nazaretians’ home, the house where the
grandmother of Shusan was born. Hence, for me, the
houses in Kayacık are the homes of the Barsumians,
Pirenians, Ashjians, Kradjians, Leylekians,
Cebedjians, and Karamanugians.
Some years back, I was lunching with Adam
Michnik, the great Polish solidarity leader and
editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral
Gazette), and the equally great Polish poet, the late
Adam Zagajewski. At some point, Adam asked me
about the Armenian genocide, and I found myself
trying to explain as best I could why Turks and
Kurds turned so suddenly violent against people
they had once considered close neighbors and
friends. I wasn’t doing a very good job of it, when
Michnik jumped in and said, “From my experience,
when the explanation gets too complicated, or there
is no explanation at all, the explanation is usually
money.” A brilliant one-liner, for sure, but I had a
hard time swallowing such a base explanation for a
crime of that magnitude.
at is, until I read your
book.
Michnik has a point. It is exceedingly evident that
money has an enormous, though not absolute,
explanatory power in mass violent incidents,
including genocide, especially in explaining why
locals get involved in the process of destruction.
e deportation and genocide of Aintab Armenians
was not implemented by rabble brought in from the
countryside to carry out an act recognized as too
despicable for respectable people, nor performed by
Aintab’s more ordinary have-nots, but rather brought
about by the district’s Muslim notables, landowners,
dignitaries, and the city’s elites.
rough its acquisition of Armenian wealth, a new
political class of nouveau riche was born. You can
draw a straight line from the CUP to those who
would take up positions of power after the war as
members of Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party.
e
elimination of the Armenians laid the foundations for
a new elite that would sustain its status over
generations, long after World War I and its aftermath
was only a memory.
is political elite, soon to be titans of industry,
would also be the future keepers of the Turkish
Republic. To admit to anything other than that the
Armenians had just up and left might be to admit
that the genesis of their riches was genocide — that
the factory their children believed their fathers or
grandfathers had built was built by Armenians; that
the mansion oors their children played on was
stained with Armenian blood. Armenians haunt the
existential foundation of the Turkish Republic. Of
course, admission of guilt would also trigger
reparations on the order of untold billions in today’s
dollars. Only these mind-altering costs to Turkish
identity and treasure can explain Turkey’s
totalitarian control of speech surrounding the
massacres, the irrational and murderous striking of
facts and people, like Hrant Dink, from the public
domain — anything and anyone that might dispute
this grimmest of self-serving fairy tales. All in
perfect keeping with what we know of human
psychology: absent contrition, perpetrators only
double down on the justi cation for their crimes.
Precisely!
e perpetrators and their families pro ted
from the genocide to the extent that, after 1923,
entire generations were educated and provided for by
the starting capital of Armenian property acquired in
1915. While the reports published in the 1914
edition of Annuaire Oriental clearly show that
Armenians from the region controlled all aspects of
the economic and business life, the 1925–28 editions
of the Gaziantep Ticaret Odası Yıllığı (Gaziantep
Chamber of Commerce Yearbook) con rm that no
non-Muslim merchants remained in the city, as I
point out in the book.
Until the mid-1940s, the in uence of Muslim elites
over the city continued.
e mayors of the city for the
years 1921–50 all came from the same in uential
families.
Your book helps ll a relative dearth of scholarship
on genocides and atrocities other than the
Holocaust. Congolese, Armenians, Cambodians,
Rwandans, to name just four other victims of
genocide, if we learn about them at all … well, their
slaughter stirs our sympathies but fails to ignite our
imaginations. Is this the reason we bemoan the
Russian horrors perpetrated in Ukraine today but
barely bat an eye when we learn that the Saudis,
with our help, have created a comparable
humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen? It’s almost as
though these “others” belong to a remote, dusty,
hellish world to begin with, where such vast-scale
human disasters are sadly inevitable.
For a long time, the Holocaust was studied as an
unprecedented, unique, and singular “event,” the
founding genocide of the elds of Holocaust studies
and mass violence literature.
e prevailing paradigm
was that this event could not be compared with other
mass murders, ethnic cleansings, and genocides that
took place in history, and that these incidents could
only be included in the de nition of genocide to the
extent that they contained patterns close to the
Holocaust.
is situation changed, however, towards
the end of the 1990s, with critical and revisionist
historians bringing to the agenda the colonial and
annihilationist policies of European empires against
autochthonous peoples in Africa, Aborigines in
Australia, and Indigenous peoples in the Americas;
through the concept of “settler colonialism,” a new
paradigm emerged. Accordingly, the Holocaust could
well be compared to these cases.
You demonstrate that the CUP was highly
organized. Not surprising, I suppose, as they
inherited a 600-year-old empire. Still, I was
impressed, if that’s the right word, to see how
methodically the expropriation was conducted.
e
Ottomans had layer upon layer of bureaucracies. It
put together commissions to oversee the exile of
Armenians. It laid out its plans, announced and
executed them in writs. Its accounting was
impressive even by today’s standards. I was amazed
at its detailed ledgers of what Armenians left
behind as they were sent on the death marches —
life insurance policies, land, livestock, jewelry, and
cash that the commissions deposited into central
banks for “safekeeping.” Household goods down to
the bowls and saucers — even a child’s pillow.
It’s important to note that these extraordinary
measures were set in motion by laws, regulations,
rules, and decrees that created a legal basis for a
systematic campaign against the movable and
immovable properties of Armenians. Genocide
enabled the complete ful llment of the policy of
ethnic domination through expropriation. By way of
a legal system, an entire community was reduced to
the status of nonexistence. Again, the CUP and local
governments concocted ways of making this illegal
process look legitimate under the veil of the law.
prospered through the acquisition of Armenian
property and wealth, elevating them into an even
more privileged position.
ey
In his book, Der Matossian argues that two socialemotional factors, hate and fear, were instrumental
in fomenting the 1909 Adana Massacres. Your book
would have us add “envy and greed” to explain the
nal solution to the Armenian Question. But why
did the CUP bother to make it “look” legitimate?
Did they hope to trick the Allies, who were
supposedly concerned with the fate of the Christian
Armenians? Were the Turks building a case for
acquittal down the road: “Here are the papers; you
see, we meant to bring them back — our accounting
demonstrates as much — only complications
occurred!”
e excuses didn’t work, not at rst.
e
architects of the genocide were tried and convicted
by the Allies. You tell of how, after the war, under
the guardianship of the British and then French,
some Armenians did return to their homes, did
reclaim their properties. But within a few years,
Atatürk had consolidated power, and with a tacit
nod of approval from those very same Allies, the
Turkish Republic he founded rid itself of the
Armenians who had returned or were left.
ey bothered to make it “look” legitimate because
they did not want the world, especially the United
States, Russia, Britain, and France, to see it for what
it was.
is explains the complex bureaucratic
mechanisms devised to deal with the administration
of the belongings left behind by the deported
Armenians. A similar process occurred during the
Holocaust. Jews saw their wealth transferred to the
treasury of the
ird Reich. Jewish properties and
wealth were appropriated within the limits of the
“law,” which provided a legitimate guise for the Nazi
leaders. But, in the case of the Nazis, this veneer of
legitimacy operated mostly at a bureaucratic level —
that is to say, the Nazi state did not really care about
the legality of the process. In the case of the Ottoman
Armenians, the Ittihadists made a serious e ort to
hide under the guise of legality when carrying out the
crime.
e government resorted to numerous oblique
means to conceal their intentions, which,
nonetheless, are readily discernible when analyzed
closely.
I suppose it’s natural to ask how Armenians, as
“second class” citizens — brutally taxed, with little
legal recourse vis-à-vis Muslims, under constant
and capricious threats of plunder and pillage —
were able to accrue such wealth?
Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, the
Empire’s Armenians underwent accelerated
economic, educational, cultural, religious, and
political change. Ali Nadir Ünler (1895–1986), a
local notable who played an important role in
Aintab’s o cial historiography, emphasizes that
Aintab Armenians were considerably ahead of the
Turkish Muslim community in terms of economic
and commercial activities.
e vast majority of
artisanal businesses were in Armenian hands:
soapmaking, jewelry making, copper working,
tailoring, shoemaking, construction, blacksmithing,
weaving, saddle making, and more. Ünler describes
how they protected their craftsmanship jealously and
refused to train Turks. Besides most elds of
artisanship, Armenians controlled nearly all of
Aintab’s trade, domestic and foreign. Most doctors,
dentists, pharmacists, and lawyers were Armenian.
Muslims, on the other hand, tended to earn less
money as grocers, butchers, and the like.
In Muslim eyes, a number of signi cant factors
underlay the superior position of Armenians by the
late 19th century. Endless unsuccessful wars spelled
conscription for young Muslim men, many fated
never to return. Most of those who did return were
either sick or disabled. Muslim peasants not drafted
(like their Armenian counterparts) bore the cost in
heavy taxes. Wealthier Armenians could buy
exemption by paying the bedelat-ı askeriye, an
exemption tax, and thus continue their economic
activities. Such factors permitted some a uent
Armenians to take over businesses and land that
previously belonged to Muslims.
Just because Armenians have a world-class sense of
irony, I’ll go ahead and say it: we do know a deal
when we see one.
At the beginning of the 20th century, more than half
of the commercial, industrial, and agricultural wealth
of the Aintab district was owned by Armenians, who
constituted less than a quarter of the population. To
be sure, Muslim imaginations exaggerated this
wealth. Terekeler (probate inventories) and
inheritance documents prove that Armenians became
only comparatively rich.
Here — and similar to what Der Matossian argues
— we nd the paradox that the equality promised,
and even to a degree granted, to Armenians under
the new constitution put them in Muslims’
crosshairs. It was one thing for Armenians to hold
economic power, but now they were allotted
political power as well. Perhaps it was all too much
for Muslims, especially Muslim Turks, to bear.
Almost as though Armenians were reclaiming the
world that was stolen from then, one reform at a
time. It threatened a half-millennium-old social
order, and it had to be stopped.
Let us go back to history again. From 1895 until
1915, Muslims and Armenians of Aintab, who had
previously coexisted in relative harmony, turned
against one another, with the former committing
inconceivable acts against the latter. In the late 19th
century in Aintab, the Armenian nation was
modernizing under the in uence of a burgeoning
middle class. International pressure for reforms to
ensure the rights of and protection for Armenians
seemed to con rm this impression.
e 1895
massacres featured extensive plunder of Aintab
Armenians, which was an integral step in restoring
the hierarchy that the massacres augured. Important
members of Aintab’s urban Muslim elite, clergy, and
local government were implicated in scapegoating
Armenians and in cheerleading the killing — more
so, it appears, than Abdülhamid II’s central regime.
Some of the self-same elites joined the local CUP
branch in the second constitutional period, which at
once safeguarded their social power, gave them
in uence in the new ruling regime, and gave the
CUP a conduit into local a airs. Although this
period at rst appeared to create a sense of calm by
placing both communities on an equal level, ethnic
tensions soon reemerged. Di erent segments of the
Muslim community perceived that the restoration of
the constitution mainly favored Armenians, further
exacerbating feelings of resentment as the Ottoman
Empire continued to decline politically and
economically. It ultimately erupted in Adana and its
outskirts, where tens of thousands of Armenians were
massacred.
is was the prelude to the genocide.
Most historians have had a di cult time
unearthing documents that demonstrate the willful
intent of the genocidaires.
e Turks have kept
most of these archives o limits to scholars or have
carefully eliminated damning evidence. How did
you get your hands on these remarkable documents?
I must point out one thing very clearly: the
government kept entire records of these sales and
other transactions of abandoned-properties
commissions, but over the course of one and a half
years’ research in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, I
could not manage to obtain them, including in the
Aintab branch, as they were kept hidden and
inaccessible for researchers.
ese records were
essential for my book to document “legal” theft and
the plunder and liquidation of Armenian wealth in a
local place.
en, something extraordinary happened. In 2015, I
paid a visit to Los Angeles to meet a friend of mine
who was a descendent of a genocide survivor from
Aintab, the late Pakrad Kazazian. Uncle Pakrad had
been supportive of my work since we rst met. He
wanted to introduce me to his cousin, whose
grandfather, Sarkis Yacoubian, was from Aintab and
had survived the genocide, ending up in Aleppo,
where he opened a bakery. Uncle Pakrad took me to
her house. It was quite a warm welcoming. After nice
chats and delicious food, Pakrad’s cousin brought
dozens of old papers and documents, all written in
Ottoman Turkish, and put them in front of me. She
thought that there might have been some materials
that could be useful for my book. While getting lost
amongst them, all of a sudden I realized that a report
of the Aintab Liquidation Commission was lying in
front of me and I was reading the auction results
regarding the movable properties, assets, and goods
of her grandfather, Sarkis Yacoubian.
What the documents were telling me was
groundbreaking.
ey clearly showed and proved
plunder and spoliation under the veil of legality. To
date, this kind of documentation had not been done.
And it would not have been done but for the
doggedness and courage of historians like yourself.
For decades, academics, politicians, statepersons,
and major media, including right here in the United
States, have conspired against the Armenians and
their memory. Today, the cruel and absurd fairy tale
is no longer tenable; only Turkey, really, believes it
anymore. Perhaps someday it too will face up to its
history and make peace with the ghosts that haunt
its existence.
¤
Aris Janigian is the author of ve novels, and co-author,
along with April Greiman, of Something from
Nothing (2001), a book on the philosophy of graphic
design.
¤
Sections of some interview responses are excerpted or
reworked from Kurt’s book,
e Armenians of Aintab:
e Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman
Province.
Did you know LARB is a
reader-supported
nonpro t?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our
mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging
writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the
arts freely accessible to the public. We could not do
this work without
theJanigian
support of our readers and
Aris
members. If you enjoyed this article, please consider
Aris Janigian is the author of ve novels, and co-author, along
joining
a member
or making
a Nothing
one-time
donation
with
Aprilas
Greiman,
of Something
from
(2001),
a book
today.
ank
you!
on the philosophy of graphic design. For his rst novel,
Bloodvine, Janigian was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a
TODAY!
“strong and welcomeGIVE
new voice,”
and over the course or four
subsequent novels, he has plumbed the American experience,
from the struggle of 1920s immigrants to the neurosis and
decadence of contemporary culture. is Angelic Land, set during
the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, was called “today’s necessary book”
by critic D. J. Waldie, and Janigian’s Waiting for Lipchitz at
Chateau Marmont, about a screenwriter who goes from riches to
rags, spent 17 weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. In
his recently released Waiting for Sophia at Shutters on the Beach,
Janigian broaches sexual politics and “rape culture,” one of the
most heated issues of our times. Aris Janigian has pursued a
three-pronged life and career, as a writer, academic, and,
following in his father’s footsteps, a wine-grape packer and
shipper in Fresno, California, where he currently lives. Holding a
PhD in psychology, Janigian was senior professor of humanities
at Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a
contributing writer to West, the Los Angeles Times Sunday
magazine. He was a nalist for Stanford University’s William
Saroyan Fiction Prize and the recipient of the Anahid Literary
Award from Columbia University.
LARB CONTRIBUTOR
RECOMMENDED
Finding Love Amid War: On Shahé
Mankerian’s “History of Forgetfulness” and
Vahe Berberian’s “Diary of a Dead Man”
Ra Joe Wartanian reviews new books by two Armenian
American writers, Shahé Mankerian and Vahe Berberian....
e Pursuit of Property: e Afterlife of an
Armenian Charitable Complex in Istanbul
What happens when a prize piece of land in Istanbul is also
connected to the Armenian community?...
Andouni: e Shared and Unshared Songs
of Armenian Exile
"My great-grandfather often was quiet and rarely spoke, if
at all, about what he endured. My knowledge of what
happened is limited — impossible to verify."...
Promises, Promises: e Strange History of
Film and the Armenian Genocide
Michelle Tusan revisits the fraught history of the Armenian
Genocide on lm....
A Century of Violence: Revisiting the
Armenian Genocide
A review of four books published at the centenary of the
Armenian genocide....