In the Beautiful Heaven, a Golden Cage: Race, Identity and Memory in Turkification of Armenian Children in State Orphanages During the Armenian Genocide

• Published in: Journal of genocide research 2024-07, Vol.26 (3), p.243-263
• Main Authors: Gzoyan, Edita G., Galustyan, Regina A., Khachatryan, Shushan R., Margaryan, Narine V.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic achievement; Amalgamation; Assimilation; Children; Empires; Ethnic identity; Ethnicity; forced conversions; Forcible child transfer; Genocide; Ideology; Memories; Mothers; Nation building; Nation states; Nationalism; Orphanages; Orphans; Political development; Race; Racial identity; Religious conversion; Resistance; Turkish history; Turkish nationalism; Turkish orphanages; Women; Young women
• ISSN: 1462-3528; 1469-9494
• DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2023.2237700

The perpetration of the Armenian Genocide did not originate as the direct implementation of ideological convictions; rather, stemmed from an amalgamation of certain theories adjusted to political and economic developments in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the desire to transform a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire into a Turkish nation-state. Within this nation-building project, the Young Turk's government chose to exterminate the indigenous Armenian minority, using forced transfer and the assimilation of children and young women into Turkish society as one of the methods of destroying the Armenian community. This fits well into the overall Turkish nationalist ideology, as women and children were deemed as not having a transmutable ethnic identity: while a woman's identity could be discounted, the identity of children could be reprogrammed by stripping them of their Armenian identity and imposing a new identity through change of personal data, religious conversion and education. Building on existing research, this article first presents the ideological foundations of Turkish nation-building and the implementation of the Armenian Genocide to achieve this end, focusing on the forcible transfer and assimilation which selected Armenian children endured. Informed by both published and unpublished memories of transferred children, the second part of the article reconstructs the actual process and methods of Turkification used in several state-run orphanages while also presenting the resistance of Armenian children to these efforts. This article expands the number of known state orphanages and widens the geographic scope of where Turkification practices took place, thus substantiating a general assimilation policy of the CUP towards some selected Armenian children and arguing that forced transfer and Turkification were used as a method of destroying the Armenian community. It also enters new testimonies into public circulation that help to better understand the role of forced transfer during the Armenian Genocide and its implications on the survivors.