Hampartzoum's Letter Collection
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Hampartzoum’s Letter Collection English Translation 1914-1995 Letters #1-#298 All footnotes and pencil notations are by Zaruhy Sara Chitjian and are not to be altered or amended, and no additional comments are to be rendered. INTERVIEWS ORIGINALLY RECORDED ON FIVE 60-MINUTE AUDIOCASSETTES INTRODUCTION CHITJIAN LETTERS This collection of about 300 letters were written in 1914-15 and 1919-1997 and belonged to Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. He was born in May of 1901, in Ismail, Western Armenia, and passed away on May 25, 2003, in Los Angeles, California, the United States. The major portion of the letters in this unique and rare collection was personally passed on to Hampartzoum by his elder brother Bedros' son Levon. They did not contain any envelopes. We don't know why the envelopes were not saved. To these were added letters already in Ham- partzoum's possession. The letters were kept by Mardiros Toros Chitjian's five sons: Bedros, Mihran, Kaspar, Hampartzoum, and Kerop Chitjian. But we are not yet certain which brother collected them all together before they reached Hampartzoum's hand. According to the testimony of Hampartzoum Chitjian and her daughter Zaruhy Chitjian, they had seen a large number of letters on Kaspar Chitjian's desk at his store. We think that the letters gathered here are only a portion and not the whole. We don't know how, or most importantly, for what reason some of these letters were kept and brought together. From the content of the letters we can see that the letters collected and kept in this group do not present all the letters that the brothers wrote to each other. In our opin- ion, these letters must have been collected for a specific reason, because many of them are re- plies to each other. A third of the letters in this collection were written in Ottoman Turkish. Those who had survived certain death by the skin of their teeth had taken on Turkish names and lived as "Turks." Despite this, they still lived in fear in horror. As a result, they wrote their letters in Turkish, or gave them to others to write in Turkish, so that they do not get caught. Fear reigned supreme in Turkey. All the letters leaving the country had to pass through the censor. Thus they were unable to convey the true conditions in which they were living. This collection contains correspondences written from 1914-1923 between Mardiros Chitjian, the five Chitjian Brothers, relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, and fellow villag- ers. The overall number of letters contained is about 300. 215 of them are in Armenian and the rest in Turkish. A. In Armenian: the 1. Mardiros Toros Chitjian - 7 letters (1914/6, 1915/1) From Perri to Chicago 2. Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian - 60 letters (1919/2, 1920/10, 1921/10, 1922/30, etc.) 3. Bedros Mardiros Chitjian - 25 letters (1919/1, 1920/10, 1921/14 4. Mihran Mardiros Chitjian -17 letters (1919/6, 1920/5, 1921/4, 1922/1, etc.) 1 5. Kaspar Mardiros Chitjian - 60 letters (1919/19, 1920/25, 1921/12, 1922/2, etc.) 6. Kerop Mardiros Chitjian - 2 letters (1930/1, 1936/1) 7. Relatives: Dickran, Markar, Manoug, Setrag, Baghdasar, Altoon, Yeghsa, Boghos, Hmayag - 37 letters 8. Miscellaneous letters: Hrant Mouradian, Avedis Kezirian, Megerdich Hayrabedian, Vartan Noroyan, Khosrov Yerevanian... Etc. B. In Turkish (1920-1922) 1. Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian - 36 letters (1920/14, 1921/20, 1922/1, 1930/1) 2. Kerop Mardiros Chitjian - 17 letters (1921/10, 1922/7) 3. Kaspar Mardiros Chitjian - 3 letters (1920/1, 1921/2,) 4 Aghavnie Toros Chitjian, 1 letter, 1921 5. Altoon Bahgee, 2 letters, 1921 6. Zeki Beg, 4 letters, 1921 7. Miscellaneous: 16 letters, 1920-1921 These letters are primary sources for those who want to investigate the political, econom- ic, moral, and psychological conditions prevalent in Turkey from 1914-1923. The letters are written with the special dialect of Kharpertzees in a very simple and clear style, because the writers of the letters have at best a fifth grade education. Thus the letters are full of many compositional and grammatical mistakes. However, strict attention has been paid to make the translation into English as authentic as possible -- their most beautiful salutations have been retained. Because of grammatical mistakes and also because the handwriting is often unin- telligible, the meaning is often hard to grasp. For this reason, in order for the content to be com- prehended, the exact replicas of the letters have been handwritten again in legible script. The spelling and grammatical mistakes from the originals have been retained. On the other hand, the education level of Eastern Armenia hundred years ago, even in the small villages chafing under atrocious Turkish oppression should be appreciated. It is under extremely treacherous conditions that our letter writers were born, lived, and left behind. There are many letters that were written by very young boys dictated by their parents. Hampartzoum and Kaspar, or whoever knew how to read and write, wrote for the others also: Hampartzoum, Hagop Kazandjian, Levon Gopoyan etc. When together with Hampartzoum's daughter, Zaruhy Chitjian, we decided to publish these letters, our first thought was to arrange them chronologically, according to the dates, in or- der to create a continuity and to make them easier to comprehend. Since we did not have the op- portunity to examine each of these letters when Hampartzoum was still alive, there are letters the authors of which we could not identify, nor could decipher their content. In such cases, we have denoted them with question marks inside square brackets [?], because these names are not men- tioned in Hampartzoum's memoir "A Hair's Breadth from Death," either. 2 A great number of letters that are referred to in some of the letters have not been com- piled in this collection. We think that they were either lost on the way or were not allowed to leave the country because of heavy censorship. In one of these letters, Kaspar writes: "I received a letter dictated by Kaspar from Mezreh, but I was unable to understand anything because many places in the letter had been blacked out by the hand of the censor." They could not write frankly about the goings on and conditions in the letters written in Turkey. Proof of this are the letters written in Turkish. In order not to reveal their true names they hid behind Turkish names, and wrote about certain subjects allegorically. The content and meaning of letters, #3-1914-7/18, #4-1914-9/7, #6-1914-12/20, #7-1915-2/25, etc., are multidi- mensional and very interesting. The mother rights to the son, the son to the parents, brother to brother, brother two sister, wife to husband, etc. There are also letters that are completely filled with the names and surnames of survivors and with the names of relatives being searched by survivors. It is in this manner that survivors found their surviving family members and relatives. Some of the letters describe the devastating, miserable lifestyle of the survivors of the massa- cres. Some others delve into politics and international issues. The Armenian letters contain writings and notations in Ottoman Turkish script, which, regrettably, we weren't able to translate, because of a lack of professional translators who are well versed in Ottoman Turkish. On the other hand, all the letters that were translated into mod- ern Turkish from Ottoman Turkish have been translated into Armenian and English. All the quatrains and songs in Turkish have also been translated into English. As far as we could, I added footnotes to the Armenian version, while Sara Chitjian did the same for the English translation, in order to clarify the incomprehensible statements and the depicted situations, as well to identify the people mentioned in the letters. We hope that interested parties, after reading the names and surnames mentioned in these letters, would want to track down the fate of their acquaintances, relatives, and friends. After conducting serious research, Zaruhy Chitjian was able to find the Mishmishians, and revealed the fates of many members of that family. She traced Shakeh, the daughter of Archbishop Kuid Mkhitarian, and was able to gather information about his activities and fate. She also tracked down the daughter of Tavit, Hampartzoum's close friend in Tavriz, and gathered information on the path that young boy's took. Zaruhy is still searching for new names and people to bring more light to this very dark period in the history of the Armenian People. Letters #1 to #7 in the collection were written between 1914-6/22 and 1915-2/25 by Mardiros Toros Chitjian. Letters #3, 5, 7 were written by him personally, and letters #1, 2, 4 , 6 were dictated to Kaspar, Hampartzoum, and Zaruhy. All seven letters were addressed to Mardiros' sons Bedros and Mihran: "From Perri to Chicago." Mardiros Chitjian was Toros Chitjian's only son. Toros also had two daughters named Marinos and Aghavnie. Marinos had married and moved to Medzgerd -- we do not know her husband's name -- while Aghavnie, who was a mature adult, lived with her father as part of the family. Toros' father was a Bolsetzi who had moved to Dickranagerd, while Toros had moved from Dickranagerd to Ismail. Mardiros married in Ismail and had six children there. In 1903, when Hampartzoum was 2, the family moved to Perri, which at that time was the political, eco- nomic and social-national center of the Charsanjak Province. Mardiros' and Trfanda Mouradi- an's union produced 8 offsprings, six boys and two girls: Bedros, Mihran, the twins Hampart- zoum and Kaspar, Kerop, Nishan, Zaruhy and Sultan.