Click to read the article in Turkish
Armenian Father Krikor Guergerian’s archives have been classified and opened for access in a project headed by Prof. Taner Akçam at the Clark University in the US.
Guergerian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide himself, collected documents regarding the exodus from 1930s until 1988, when he died. According to the project team, the documents have not been examined to this day because they were not classified.
Guergerian was born in 1911 in Sivas in the Ottoman Empire and lived in Beirut, Rome, Jerusalem and New York. Focusing on the Armenian Exodus, Guerguerian researched archives of numerous countries and collected documents.
A three-part archive
The Guerguerian archives, which were published in partnership with the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, consist of three parts. The first part includes documents in Ottoman Turkish. Most of those are on the trials of the members of the Committee for Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) and the perpetrators of the genocide.
The fate of the original documents is unknown. They are either destroyed or hidden. The documents in Guerguerian’s archives are the copies of the documents in the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The reason it has the documents is that the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople was a party to the trial. Because of that, the Patriarchate had the right to acquire copies of the documents in the case files. When the government of Turkey took control of İstanbul, the Patriarchate of İstanbul, in order to protect the documents, sent them to Jerusalem.
The second part of the archives consists of Guerguerian’s private documents. Until his death in 1988, Guerguerian worked on documents and took notes. He translated the documents that he collected into various languages such as Armenian, French and English.
And the third part of the archive includes documents that Guerguerian obtained from different countries, such as England, Austria, the US and Germany. Material that belonged to the Armenian Patriarchate of İstanbul is also present in this part of the documents.
Click for the archives home page.
About Father Krikor Guerguerian
Krikor Guerguerian was born in Sivas in 1911. Youngest of the 16 siblings, he witnessed the killings of his ten siblings, mother and father during the Armenian Exodus. He went to Beirut in 1916 and was put in an orphanage. In 1925, he enrolled at the Bzemmar Catholic Monastery. In the early 1930s, he graduated from the Beirut St. Joseph University. He then went to Rome to continue his education in theology and to be a priest. In 1937, he earned the right to be a Catholic priest. He then settled in Cairo, where his oldest sibling was living. He then met Nemrut Mustafa Pasha, who was the presiding judge of military court between 1920 and 1921 and learned important information from him. Until his death in 1988, he continued his works on the documents and books he collected. Guerguerian's works are still being translated into different languages. His most important work is the Documentary History of the Slaughter of Armenians in Yozgat. |
(OI/HK/VK)
