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• Postcard memory: Rare collection telling about life of Ottoman Armenians exhibited in Yerevan

It is amazing how Orlando Calumeno could collect so many post cards. Maybe ArmeniaNow can interview the collection owner to see how he arrived at the idea of collecting post cards from Western Armenia and how he acquired them. It is also interesting to know that at the dawn of photography age so many Armenians were making personal postcards in what today is a backwards country. Hagop, we don'...

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An exhibition telling about Armenian communities in Ottoman Turkey through postcards has opened in Yerevan. Its Turkish curator says the postcards, which were also displayed in Turkey and a number of European cities, are a good means to give a perspective on the life of ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire different from the current official one in Turkey.

Held at Moscow Cinema upon the initiative of the Yerevan-based think tank, Civilitas Foundation, and the Istanbul-based Birzamanlar Yayincilik publishing house (and sponsored by Haypost CJSC) the exhibition entitled “My Dear Brother: Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago” features hundreds of postcards reflecting the reality of life for an integrated community in nearly two dozen cities throughout the Ottoman Empire in 1900-1910.

The owner of more than 4,000 postcards is Italian Orlando Calumeno, an Armenian (on his mother’s side). Some 500 of these postcards were for the first time exhibited in Istanbul in 2005 through the efforts of Turkish publisher and historian Koker, who is also the curator and editor of the Yerevan exhibition.

Koker’s book “Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago” featuring Ottoman-era postcards reflecting peaceful and often prosperous life of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire was also published that year. The album of 500 postcards presents the places where Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, in particular cities and towns and the role of the Armenian communities there. A similar exhibition of postcards entitled “Dear Brother” was held in Istanbul and a number of European cities.

“History in Turkey is presented only from a Turkish perspective. This is particularly remarkable on the example of cities and towns,” said Koker in his remarks during the Tuesday opening of the exhibition, which will run through September 28.

“My goal is to show that Armenians lived in Turkey a century ago and to give true information about them,” added Koker, himself a native of Marash, one of many historical Armenian cities in Turkey now left without Armenian population.

The estimated number of Armenians before the start of World War One in 1914 was about 4.1 million, with some 2.1 million of them living in the territory of the Ottoman Empire. More than 1.5 million Armenians were massacred and deported from their historical lands in Western Armenia in 1915-23 in what many world governments and leading scholars later would describe as the first genocide of the 20th century.