“The story of how this art migrated from late Ottoman Anatolia to British Mandate Palestine was a blank box,” says Moughalian, who is also a doctoral student at the City University of New York and accomplished musician. “I knew that the means of the movement of this art had been my grandfather’s arrest and deportation during the Armenian genocide.”

Moulding stories

Feast of Ashes was a finalist in the 2020 PROSE Awards; it was also longlisted in the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. Moughalian’s monograph was a decade in the making, using both archival research, including at Istanbul’s Ottoman archives, and documents from her family.

“Before she died in 1995, [my mother] and her sisters had collaborated, and they wrote down all the stories they remembered about their ancestors,” the author recalls, adding that her aunt had compiled a list of Ohannessian’s works. “They created a family tree; they had place names; it was done in a community style of storytelling.”

Having never met her grandfather, Moughalian was inspired to trace his history from her mother’s stories about him and by seeing his ceramics around the house. Born in western Anatolia, Ohannessian was deported to Aleppo where he lived in a refugee camp. In 1918, he encountered British diplomat Mark Sykes who was searching for artists to renovate Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine.

Ohannessian eventually established a studio in Jerusalem. Moughalian credits that studio space as contributing to the creation of Jerusalem’s flourishing Armenian ceramic arts scene today.

“You see the art all over the city; you can’t walk very far without seeing a tile made in Armenian workshops,” she explains, adding that there are still nine Armenian ceramic studios in Jerusalem. “The café tables are made of Armenian ceramics; there are shop windows all over Jerusalem that feature Armenian ceramics.”

“Most of the Armenian ceramicists ended up coming with my grandfather to Jerusalem,” the author notes. “Some went to Athens; the Greek ceramicist ended up going to Athens, where they planted new traditions, which are also flourishing in Athens and its suburbs today.”

Traces of culture

For Moughalian, this story is not only about the roots of Ohannessian’s art in the Ottoman Empire. It is also about the dispersal of art forms – including embroidery and textile weaving in addition to ceramics – in diasporic communities. She will share her recent research on the establishment of craft workshops to train orphaned children with ceramic skills from which they could make a living.

“I’ll be talking about how the art migrated as embodied by these skilled ceramicists who dispersed during the genocide in the first world war,” she says, adding the talk will also highlight the Ottoman Empire’s multicultural nature. “Everywhere around us, we actually see the material traces of cultures that have travelled.”

Moughalian notes that her grandfather’s pieces reflect themes of multiculturalism – influenced by his geographical location.

“In my grandfather’s case, he began to include a lot of Christian iconography images of like St. George and the dragon [and] a variety of crosses,” she adds.

She says her grandfather’s art was notable for its vivid colours, using a mixture of opaque and transparent glaze. From a box stored in her cousin’s Los Angeles garage, Moughalian learned that her grandfather also drew inspiration from Arab conquerors.

“He continued to work with iconography that could be read in different ways by different faith communities,” she adds. “He was kind of freer to explore different kinds of iconography than he had done with the market that had existed in the late Ottoman, Kütahya.”

Moughalian argues her grandfather’s story reflects the interconnectedness of cultures brought together through journeys, including forced displacement. She hopes that the audience will look around their cities and recognize how their “lives are enriched” by these connections – despite their solemn memories.

“It was people who carried knowledge with them, carried aesthetic sense with them, carried value systems, carried enterprise,” she reflects, speaking on the Armenian genocide. “Our nations, as we call them, are like these carpets, these beautiful gardens of people with stories that enrich the communities in which they live.”

The talk is presented by the Armenian Cultural Association of British Columbia.

For more information on the talk, see www.facebook.com/ACABC.CA

For more information on Sato Moughalian’s Feast of Ashes, see www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/feast-ashes