Speaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past in Armenia and Turkey

The book is a product of the research project, “Adult Education and Oral History Contributing to Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation” conducted between August 2009 and February 2010 in various locations in Armenia and Turkey. It is based on oral history methodology and includes the stories of everyday people from the two countries interviewed by the students who were trained during the summer camp in Dilijan, Armenia in oral history skills and methodology.

Oral historians study how ordinary individuals narrate historical events as a means of making sense of the past in the present. In remembering the past, multiple sources are used: people’s own experiences and memories, as well as other sources such as postmemory (memories transmitted by older generations), history and the media.

In this research, individuals in Turkey and Armenia from diverse backgrounds and regions were interviewed in order to document how they remembered and reconstructed recent history. The book is divided into two sections. The first section presents the results of the research in Turkey (“Wish they hadn’t left”: The Burden of Armenian Memory in Turkey), compiled by Leyla Neyzi from Sabanci University. The second section (Whom to forgive? What to forgive?) presents the results of the research in Armenia conducted by Hranush Kharatyan-Aragelyan from the Armenian Centre for Ethnological Studies, “Hazarashen”