I’ve literally just walked in the door from meeting up with Christine Allison in Ortachiya, a Yezidi village in the Aragatsotn Region of Armenia. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Christine is researching the oral history traditions of the Kurds, and as part of that is using Ortachiya as a case study. She also wants to put the resulting work online.

Putting Ortachiya Online:
The Potential of the Internet for Memory Projects
Christine Allison, INALCO, Paris

This paper will discuss the possibilities of the Internet for academic research projects on memory. The proposed project is a case study of discourses of memory in a Yezidi village, Ortachiya in Aparan (Aragats), Armenia. The original idea was to carry out oral history interviews with inhabitants of the villages, observe the practice of commemoration and thus make an analysis of the discourses of memory. The results would be displayed online in a dedicated website as a showcase, a relatively common practice in oral history work.

However, the current situation in the villages makes me wonder if one could take this idea further, in a way which might produce interesting results for my research and perhaps for the Yezidis themselves. The current economic situation in Armenia has produced a depopulation of villages in general, and many have emigrated, to Russia in particular, to find work. This is also the case amongst the Yezidi minority in Armenia, but due to their already small numbers (probably about 50,000 at the fall of the Soviet Union) this depletion in the population has grave implications for the survival of their distinctive culture and traditions. When one visits the villages, one finds households of middle-aged and elderly people whose children are in Russia,and therefore unable to participate fully in village life.

This paper will consider the possibility of creating a website in the appropriate languages which would contain oral history material and would then be controlled by people from the Aparan area. (There is considerable online activity amongst Yezidis in Russia with at least one active Yezidi website with an interest in heritage). Comparisons will be made with existing websites, such as twentyvoices.com (which has different aims but shows the potential of the internet medium) and akakurdistan.com, the ‘Kurds’ family photo album’. Such a website might become a useful resource for local people and would certainly be an interesting test case for myself as a researcher.

Anyway, the reason for Christine’s visit today was because the Yezidi in Aragatsotn were paying respect the memory of recently deceased loved ones as well as their ancestors. I briefly interviewed Christine on this today and will post the transcript of that with photos and my own account later today, or more likely tomorrow.

Christine Allison and Amarik Sardar, Ortachiya, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006