Acts of Defacement, Memory of Loss: Ghostly Effects of the "Armenian Crisis" in Mardin, Southeastern Turkey

The article explores the multiple articulations of the 1915 deportations and massacres, predominantly of Armenians but also of Syriac Christians, in the Ottoman Empire and the ways in which the descendants of the victims, the perpetrators and the witnesses experience and narrate the historical and political effects of those events. Stories about Christian converts to Islam and houses abandoned by the victims become subjects/objects of ethnographic inquiry which are analyzed to reveal the discourses and imagination surrounding the taboo-like secrecy of the events and the hidden bonds between the subjects, who belong to different ethnic and religious communities in the cosmopolitan border city of Mardin in southeastern Turkey.