Dates
General information
Within of the proposed theme, based on Ottoman, Armenian and Russian primary sources as well as the unpublished recollections of the Genocide survivors, it is planned to conduct the first ever comprehensive scholarly research of the history of Hamshen Armenians, who, forced by the Hamidian massacres and the Armenian Genocide (late XIX–first quarter of XX C), migrated from the Turkish Trabzon Province to Abkhazia and to what is now the Krasnodar region of the Russian Federation. In defiance of the hardships they confronted, they founded villages and remained faithful to their national-ethnic mindset and culture. Yet, the particularly rapid assimilation in the last decades entailed forgetting of their own history, language and customs. For a complete study, it is planned to carry out field researches, aimed to write down and evaluate the current state of demography, area of settlement, language, folklore and customs; to establish the risks of assimilation and the possible ways of confronting them; to determine and analyze the commonalities in the language, folklore and culture of both Christian Hamshen-Armenians and the Islamized Hamshenci, residing in Turkey.This research, apart from its historiographic and academic value, has also important socio-political significance.
