By Dr Erica Payet, Programme Manager
Almost eight months ago, on November 7, 2023, The Armenian Institute officially launched Heritage of Displacement: Oral Histories from the UK Armenian Communities (2023–2026), thanks to a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, using money raised by National Lottery players.
That was a few days after I took up my post as the Armenian Institute’s new Programme Manager. I am an art historian specialising in the history of photography and photojournalism, the arts from the Middle East, and the relationship between war and visual culture. I have over twelve years of experience working both in the art market and the non-profit cultural sector, as well as teaching art history and theory at the university level. When joining the Armenian Institute’s team, I hit the ground running to kickstart this ambitious memory project. I am delighted to now share with you how we have been doing so far!
The core aim of this project is to help British-Armenian communities take part in preserving their heritage of displacement, migration, and resettlement. Family stories and personal relationships with cultural traditions are being recorded and preserved, with a desire to shed light on paths of migration, and how Armenians have recreated ‘home’ in the UK. The plan for this new digital archive of recorded interviews, material heritage, and photographs is to be hosted on a dedicated online platform that will remain available as a resource for the community and for academic research.
At the heart of the project: our volunteers
Heritage of Displacement officially took off in November 2023, starting with a public announcement through our online channels, and the launch of our marketing campaign to recruit both volunteer interviewers and interviewees. Recruiting volunteers has been an incredibly rewarding process, with lots of interest from a variety of people from the community, Armenian or not, from different generations, with a variety of backgrounds and motivations for taking part. An impressive figure of sixty-nine people (more than double what we were hoping for!) got in touch with us to get involved as interviewers. A bit more slowly, interested interviewees’ messages also started trickling into my inbox. Some were perhaps, and understandably so, a little more hesitant to come forward, but each and every one of them was giving me hints of fascinating life stories and family trajectories, which they were generously offering to share.
It was also at this stage of the project that we were able to detail our understanding of the profile of participants. We decided to be explicit that we are not looking solely for testimonies from the older generation. A key part of this project has been to understand how the younger generations live with the heritage of their ancestors’ displacement. This is why we do not have a target age for interviewees, which allows us to cherish the stories of younger UK Armenians, as well as their grandparents: the way they have experienced this legacy in their own life, what home means to them, what their connection to Armenia and Armenian is, or is not, the way they have grappled with family narratives of migration, with generational exchange, etc.
Training with the Oral History Society
An important and key stage in the project has been our engagement with the Oral History Society, whose representative and trainer, Rib Davis, helped and guided us with great patience. In early 2024, he started training the first of our volunteers in the nuances and challenges of conducting in-person interviews for oral history preservation.
Volunteers also learnt to use the Zoom H5 recorder, lapel microphones, and all the ancillary equipment for a quality audio recording. We discussed the technique of photogrammetry (3D reproduction of objects with the help of multiple photographs). I worked closely with the volunteers in the crafting and completion of the administrative documents that were necessary to officialise everyone’s involvement and structure the project behind the scenes.
We also produced a list of resources that our volunteers can tap into, if they feel the need to educate themselves further about the history of the Armenians, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the notions of diaspora, home, etc. before delving into their interviews.
Recording stories
At present, we still continue our outreach to individuals who are interested in sharing their stories with us. It is always an immense pleasure to hear from a new interested participant (if you are reading this and you feel this could be you, please get in touch here). UK Armenians’ stories and anecdotes, from the extraordinary to the mundane, are always captivating. This project, as a serious oral history endeavour, is not about putting forward exceptional stories, but about collecting a multitude of life narratives, without judgement about their potential to impress or not. It is in the collective that the project finds its power. This is why, when people hesitate, thinking their story may not be “worth recording,” I always encourage them to participate anyway: we think it is important to pay attention to everybody’s contributions, big or small, long or short. We can only discover patterns and build a collective memory when we listen to several stories together.
In March 2024, shortly after a few teams of volunteers had completed the training, we began matching them with interviewees, mostly in pairs. With this, a considerable stage in the project had started, one that presented great logistical challenges, but that also was at the core of what we always endeavoured to do: meeting, talking, recording, and sharing stories. With two sets of recording devices at our disposal, and several people’s schedules to align simultaneously over several weeks, we have relied on everyone’s flexibility, motivation, and patience to successfully conduct each interview. With 20 interviews completed or scheduled in London so far, we are about halfway through the project's ambitious initial goal of 40 interviews in London and 8 in Manchester. The interview stage will close in November of this year, so we need to keep pushing and continue interviewing as much as possible over the summer and autumn.
Reaching out to Manchester
I mentioned 8 interviews being planned in Manchester. Indeed, as many of you know, Manchester is home to the second largest Armenian community in the UK, where Armenians started settling in the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the cotton and silk trade. Manchester is also home to the first ever Armenian church in the country, established 154 years ago, in 1870. Testament to this early and deep settlement is an important oral history project which took place there a few years ago, entitled Aratta and led by Zara Hakobyan. This existing collection of 15 oral testimonies has recently become accessible at Manchester Public Library’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust. At Manchester University, in the city’s Armenian restaurants, churches, schools and clubs, the presence of the old settlement of Armenian silk merchants is noticeable throughout the city, and this presence resonates throughout the larger North West region.
We have recruited a small number of interviewers in Manchester who are awaiting their turn to start interviewing. The teams there are not complete, so if you are interested in joining us as interviewers, we would love to hear from you before July 15! But most importantly, we are looking for people from the Manchester Armenian community to become interviewees. We hope to hear from more of you to continue showcasing the kaleidoscope of experiences that Armenians in Manchester and its region represent.
Get in touch here.
What is next?
When the interview stage will be complete, we will tackle the audio editing and the transcription phase, all tasks that will require further, and different, volunteer engagement.
Looking further into the future, we have been discussing with potential exhibition partners behind the scenes, with some exciting announcements yet to come!
We are also planning a social event for this autumn to gather our volunteer interviewers together. This will be an opportunity for us to show them our appreciation, give them an opportunity to mingle with the other members of this incredibly talented and motivated group, and share their experiences. We hope it will be a moment for reflection, but also a festive and friendly time to relax and look forward to the project’s next steps together.
* You are volunteering for Heritage of Displacement and would like to submit a text about the project to be published as a blog post on the Armenian Institute website? Please email erica@armenianinstitute.org.uk. We welcome all your contributions, be they reflective pieces, essays, creative writing, or narratives of your experience.
Acknowledgements
What a journey managing this ambitious project has been so far! The announcement day in November 2023 finally came after a long period of preparatory work that involved many individuals, whose work we rely on today. They contributed to elaborating the project’s theoretical basis, aims, long-term vision and chronology, before drafting and submitting the grant application in 2022.
I cannot but use this opportunity to acknowledge those who have been behind this ambitious initiative, in particular our former Chair of Trustees, Dr Rebecca Jinks. Dr Jinks is a historian of genocide and humanitarianism at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has notably studied post-genocide reconstruction of the Armenian community. Thanks are also due to Dr Hratch Tchilingirian, scholar, sociologist and activist who was an Associate of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University, specialising in Middle Eastern and Armenian Studies, with a particular focus on cultural identity politics, homeland-diaspora relations, sociology of religion, and inter-ethnic conflicts in the Middle East and Eurasia. Dr Tchilingirian was also the Director of the Armenian Diaspora Survey, a separate Gulbenkian-Armenian Institute project which identified a need for more community oral history and recording projects in the UK. Other early supporters included the Manchester Armenian Church board, in particular our interlocutor Penny Evenson. Initial advice and support were also received from two academics with an interest in the oral histories of the Armenian community, Dr Sossie Kasbarian of Stirling University in Scotland, and Dr Jo Laycock from Manchester University. They should all be thanked for their contributions, along with others who worked tirelessly on initiating the project, including former Institute directors Tatevik Ayvazyan and Susan Pattie, as well as Ruby Chorbajian.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund grant was finally obtained at a time of great changes for the Armenian Institute. Dr Juan de Lara took up his new post of director of the Institute in the summer of 2023. He allowed the ground work of the project to continue and to become more and more detailed, carrying the project forward despite obstacles. His dedication and flexibility are boundless, and he steers us to keep the overall vision in mind at all times. Maria Kazarian, the Institute’s former Programme Manager, worked on developing these preparatory stages, notably in drafting a detailed schedule and providing an initial reflection on interview topics. Our successive account managers at the National Lottery Heritage Fund have also been instrumental in guiding us through the project funding, we could not have done it without them!
The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players they support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Their vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more. Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. They believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.