CRRC, ARISC and American Councils are pleased to announce the 4th session of the Fall 2025 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be virtual only on Zoom and will be accessible via this registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/WsN5ejwFT9-5zP5Bcseolg
In Search of Home: The Campaign to Revive Ottoman-Era Towns in Soviet Armenia (c.1925-c.1965)
Jennifer Manoukian, ARISC Fellow
Date: 12 November 2025, 18:30 Tbilisi time / 9:30am US EST
This presentation uncovers the twisting and wholly unexpected story of how a dozen towns and neighborhoods in and around the Armenian capital of Yerevan came to be. Today, at first glance, nothing appears out of the ordinary about these locales. But when we take a closer look at their origins, an unlikely story begins to unfold—one that links the hinterland of the Ottoman Empire to Soviet Armenia to cities across Europe, the Middle East and the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. This was a time of great uncertainty for Armenians around the world. In the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, over a million survivors were forced to leave their homes in the Ottoman Empire and make new ones around the world. Some adapted quickly to their new lives in diaspora, while others pined for the hometowns to which they had been barred from returning. In the far-flung corners of the Armenian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s, nostalgic survivors formed dozens of compatriotic unions (հայրենակցական միութիւններ), or associations that brought together Armenians from the same Ottoman-era regions who were now scattered around the world, in hopes of keeping the memory of life in their pre-genocide towns alive.
This presentation centers on the work of compatriotic unions that went a step further: mobilizing and fundraising all over the world to establish new towns in Soviet Armenia that would bear the same names as the ones they had left behind in the Ottoman Empire. While few genocide survivors had any direct ties to Soviet Armenia, they were lured by the promise of security after upheaval, of a sense of place after displacement, and of a legacy for an uprooted local culture quickly disappearing. In the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and beyond, these compatriotic unions raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in places like New York, Boston, Milwaukee, Buenos Aires, Marseille and Beirut, sending the funds straight to the Soviet Union to build new towns from the ground up. Today, the names of these towns (Nor Sebastia, Nor Kharberd, Nor Arabkir, Nor Malatya, among others) still dot the map of the Republic of Armenia, but the transnational drama of their origins has largely been forgotten and has not yet been the focus of scholarly inquiry.
Jennifer Manoukian studies the cultural and intellectual histories of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the post-genocide diaspora. She earned her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, and recently co-founded Gesaria Armenian Research and Academic Services, a research, historical translation and editorial company focused on bringing cutting-edge historical knowledge and know-how in Armenian studies to academics, cultural organizations, family history researchers, and everyone in between. Her first monograph, Purist Pursuits: Language, Global Ideas, and the Creation of Western Armenian in the Ottoman Empire, is slated to appear with Stanford University Press in June 2026.
Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Councils for International Education, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils.