The Constantinople realists and late nineteenth-century representations of the migrant worker from Ottoman Armenia

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the figure of the bantoukhd (migrant worker) from Ottoman Armenia and Kurdistan remained a major preoccupation of reform-minded Constantinople Armenian intellectuals. This was due to the presence of thousands of provincial migrants in the imperial capital. Also referred to, often pejoratively, as Hayasdantsi (from Armenia), they constituted a significant proportion of the city’s urban poor. The most visible among them on the streets and port districts across the city were the hamals (porters), (mainly) men who lived in misery in slum-like conditions in the city’s hans (inns). 

Migration from the Ottoman east to Constantinople reached unprecedented levels in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. During this period, one of increasing tension between the Ottoman State and its Armenian population, both the visibility of the bantoukhds’ abject poverty in the imperial capital, and the turbulent social, economic and political situation in their homelands, always remained at the forefront of these intellectuals’ concerns. By the early 1880s, a handful of mainly western-trained Constantinople Armenian painters, closely associated with the city’s emerging vernacular Western Armenian-language Realist literary milieu, began to engage (alongside their literary counterparts) with the figure of the bantoukhd more closely. These artists produced portraits and narrative paintings representing with the condition of the Hayasdantsi using an ethnographic academic visual vocabulary and styles most commonly associated with Western so-called Orientalist art. 

Introducing several of these works, this paper reads these paintings as important visual documents that captured more than mere superficial images of the bantoukhd onto the canvas. Juxtaposing them with contemporary texts and material, including responses to these works, it argues that they also often acted as effective conduits of allegorical content, communicating these intellectuals’ concerns upon the condition of the migrants and the situation in the homeland during a period of stringent and ever-tightening censorship when expressing such views in print would have been considered subversive.

This seminar is supported by funding from the European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East (2021-2026), under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant number 101001717).