“Unwittingly Preserved for Over 100 years: Letters of Survival” by Dr. Talin Suciyan

FRESNO- Dr. Talar Suciyan will give a presentation on “Unwittingly Preserved for Over 100 years: Letters of Survival” at 7:00PM on Friday, January 31, 2025, in the Smittcamp Alumni House (2625 E. Matoian Way), on the Fresno State campus. Dr. Suciyan was appointed as Kazan Viiting Professor in Armenian Studies for the Spring 2025 semester and will be giving a three-part lecture series concentrating on the family archives of Armenian Genocide survivors.
This lecture will introduce the content and context of letters sent from Istanbul in the fall of 1922 by Sourpik (Surpouhi) Tekian to her daughter Tacouhi in the United States. Originally from Angora, the Catholic Armenian Tekian family had been exiled to Istanbul as a result of the Armenian Genocide. Sourpik Tekian’s letters were written at a pivotal moment, the fall of 1922, which marked the end of the Ottoman Empire and held deep repercussions for the remaining Armenians in Istanbul. Her letters are a rare source detailing everyday life in that period, making visible new temporal layers and routines of the day, enabling us to write a history from the perspective of a female survivor of the Armenian Genocide. In Sourpik’s letters, the dilemma of having been left behind in a purgatory, stuck between a former annihilated life and a new unknown one of perpetual exile, is clearly present.
Talin Suciyan is Kazan Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State for Spring 2025. She was born and raised in Istanbul. After graduating from the University of Istanbul, she continued her studies in Germany, where she obtained her Ph.D. Based in Munich, she has been teaching and researching at the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Munich for over 15 years. She is the author of Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces (Syracuse University Press, 2023) and The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, History and Politics (I. B. Tauris, 2016). Her research focuses on Armenians in the Middle East and Mediterranean. Her areas of interests are colonialism, histories of the autochthonous populations, medicine, peasantry and temporality.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in Fresno State Lot P1 or P2, near the Smittcamp Alumni House. Parking permits are not required for Friday night lectures.
The presentation will also be live-streamed on YouTube at: https://bit.ly/