Ümit Kurt explains to Jonathan Conlin how an innocent question asked in his local cafe launched him on a journey into Gaziantep’s past, uncovering the genocidal violence that gave birth to a new Muslim bourgeoisie.
Ümit is a Polonsky Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.
Invited by a friend to visit a cool new cafe in an unfamiliar part of his hometown, Ümit stumbled upon a chapter of Gaziantep’s history of which he was totally unaware. Curious to find out more about the elegant stone building housing the cafe, he approached the owner: “I was just wondering, from whom did you get this place? Who was here before you?” The owner explained that his grandfather had bought the house from some Armenians. “So what happened to them, where did they go?” Uncomfortable at this line of questioning, the owner replied with a shrug: “They left.”
Ümit found out that the house had belonged to Nazar Nazaretian, honorary Iranian consul, and would eventually meet one of Nazaretian’s descendants, whose Turkish was still inflected with Aintab dialect. In this conversation, recorded on 13 January 2022, Ümit discusses his new book The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, published by Harvard University Press.
Episode 9 – Gaziantep’s Forgotten Past
Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.
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