A recent talk at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, when Ara Dinkjian (son of the great Onnik) and Vahé Tachjian introduced early recordings of Armenian classics, led me to the impressive website

• Houshamadyan: a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life.

With navigational aids, including useful context here, the site covers local Armenian communities and families on the eve of the 1915 genocide, largely through diasporic records— family histories and memoirs, images and recordings. The site is trilingual in English, Armenian, and Turkish—and the audience within Turkey seems to be significant, as explained in this review.

From the “Religion > Festivals” rubric”. Source.

For a documentary introducing the musical world of Dinkjian father and son, click here.

For more of my dabblings in the cultures of west/Central Asia, click here. For another remarkable online archive, see Nicolas Magriel’s work on the sarangi. For diasporic communities in the USA, note Annie Proulx’s wonderful novel Accordion crimes. And for attempts to counteract state-induced amnesia in China and Tibet, see e.g. here.