LOS ANGELES — The USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies has announced a major development in making publicly accessible its Armen Aroyan Collection––a trove of rare video material documenting decades of Armenian-American engagement with Armenian heritage in Turkey.
The Collection comprises nearly 400 videos documenting group trips to Eastern Turkey––historical Western Armenia––between 1988 to 2016. The trips were organized by Armen Aroyan, an engineer and USC alum, mostly of American-Armenians visiting ancestral Armenian sites throughout Turkey. Aroyan videotaped nearly all the trips he organized and frequently interviewed participants, local Armenians (both Christian and Muslim), and many others. Approximately 1,470 people––whom Aroyan referred to as “pilgrims” for their return to the very places from which their ancestors had been expelled––joined his nearly 100 guided tours.
Across the many places Aroyan visited, he prioritized meeting and interviewing the area’s few remaining Armenians, which became harder with each passing year. Local Armenians would take him and his ‘pilgrims’ from one Armenian home or shop to another, forming relationships that would be strengthened with each future trip.
On rare occasions, Aroyan’s ‘pilgrims’ actually returned to their childhood homes. During his earliest guided trips, a genocide survivor revisited his ancestral homes in both Hajin (now-Saimbeyli) and Adana, sitting side-by-side with another survivor who had converted to Islam as a child.
Aroyan gifted his collection to the Institute in 2018 with the goal of making the footage widely accessible for research and educational purposes. The Institute has completed the initial phase of digitization and cataloging of the collection’s nearly 400 tapes. As a result of Aroyan’s generous support, a comprehensive metadata production scheme was also initiated, creating keywords to make each videotape easily searchable for end users on USC Digital Library. Place names, interviews, larger subject headings, and even music have been tagged to assist researchers in accessing and investigating a wide range of topics and themes.
Nearly half of the collection is now available on USC Digital Library as part of the Institute’s Digital Collection.
The Armen Aroyan Collection marks a unique contribution to the study of inherited memory and diasporic return, offering rare insights into historical sites where the traces of an Armenian past continue to endure.
Researchers who have questions or requests for potential peripheral materials associated with specific trips and/or the collection should email [email protected].
Access the collection here
