Carel Bertram, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory
Carel Bertram, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022, 312 pages, $26
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1Carel Bertram’s evocative book, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory, tells the story of Armenians living in the diaspora who travel to contemporary Turkey to seek the homes and villages that their parents and grandparents were forced to abandon during the genocide of 1915. Through the stories of individual travelers, Bertram relates experiences that are at once unique and yet universal, particular to the descendants of the survivors of the genocide of Ottoman Armenians, yet salient and resonant to experiences of loss, migration, and violence in many contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars, students of all levels, and a wide audience of readers interested in questions of memory, homeland, ritual, and return.
2Beginning in 1915, during the First World War, the government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic campaign of deporting and massacring its Christian Armenian and Assyrian population. This policy, which eventually included the confiscation, appropriation, and destruction of properties, forceful conversion and assimilation of survivors, eventually came to be known as the Armenian genocide. In this thorough book, Bertram addresses the ongoing effects of the 1915 genocide through the personal journeys of individual travelers who seek to return to the lands in which their ancestors were born. In the majority of the cases that she discusses, the travelers are the children or grandchildren of genocide survivors – whom Bertram terms “descendant pilgrims” – seeking to find the ancestral homes where their parents or grandparents lived before the destruction of their community in 1915. Though many were visiting these places for the first time, these travelers refused to be identified as tourists. Rather, they saw themselves as pilgrims and conceived of their journeys as pilgrimages. Bertram delicately considers what constitutes these travelers as pilgrims: she excavates the improvised rituals, the impromptu invocations of ancestors, and the imaginative reveries that make these trips spiritually resonant for their participants.
3In her study, Bertram presents a unique methodology, as she combines extensive ethnographic experience with a vast collection of written and published sources as well as video documentation. Between the years 2007 and 2015, Bertram travelled on over a dozen pilgrimages to contemporary Turkey, accompanying over one hundred pilgrims as they journeyed through the lands of their ancestors. These pilgrimages were organized and led by Armen Aroyan, an Armenian-American who guided such trips for decades. As Bertram describes, Aroyan was singularly gifted in curating individualized itineraries for each group and leading their minibus off the main roads to allow each individual traveler a unique opportunity to connect with their places of ancestral origin. Together with his Kurdish driver, Cemal, and Cemal’s son, Selçuk, Aroyan shepherded pilgrims into lands that to many seemed wholly inaccessible, even, as Bertram notes, as far away as the moon.
4Joining these pilgrims on their minibuses as a participant observer, Bertram witnessed their engagement with the lands of their ancestors. With palpable empathy, she chronicles their joys at finding traces that resonated with the stories passed down through generations – what Bertram terms “memory-stories”. She also carefully documents their sorrow at finding ancestral villages destroyed and overgrown, and their surprise in discovering the living descendants of Armenian survivors who were absorbed into Muslim Kurdish and Turkish communities. After these journeys, Bertram maintained correspondence with the pilgrims, interviewing them, drawing family trees, and reconstructing their family histories along with them. Bertram relates the experiences of the pilgrims and their painful family recollections passed down from generation to generation with great care, sensitive to the emotional weight of the narratives that she shares. In most cases, she uses the real names of the pilgrims, with whom she built close relationships and who entrusted her with their family histories.
5Beyond the pilgrimages in which she participated as a pilgrim herself, Bertram collected a vast corpus of literature documenting the experiences and recollections of other pilgrims stretching back to the mid-twentieth century. In this expansive work, Bertram weaves together memoirs, written reflections, news articles, interviews, personal correspondences, and video recordings of many pilgrimages, reflecting the experiences of hundreds of pilgrims. Bertram draws together this extensive archive to distill common threads of experience across many individual stories, while also maintaining the particular poignant moments of those stories that she chooses to highlight. This method allows her to paint the broadest possible picture of these unique pilgrimages, but in the logistics of writing, it also presents some difficulties. While her writing flows beautifully with her accessible and clear prose, for the reader, it is not always immediately obvious whether the story that she is relating is one that she personally witnessed on a pilgrimage in which she was a participant, whether it was from an interview or personal correspondence that she had conducted, whether she gleaned this story from watching a video recording, or whether she was restating a narrative from a published source. Although the sources of each story are meticulously documented in the endnotes at the back of the book, it would be helpful for scholars interested in following the sources if these sources were mentioned directly in the text.
6The book is organized around themes relating to how the pilgrims engaged with the landscape that they encountered on their journeys. In a brief introduction, Bertram introduces the reader to the travelers, to the history that tore their ancestors from their homes, and to the particular circumstances of their return journeys. The first of four main sections – The House in the Homeland – echoes the title of the book as it explores the importance of the ancestral family home as the focal point of the pilgrimages and desired destination – whether only imagined or eventually realized – of many pilgrims. The second section – Rituals in the Realm of the Sacred – describes and analyzes the emergent, improvised, and spontaneous rituals performed by pilgrims in the space of their ancestral homelands. In the third section – Homeland: A Repertoire of Feeling – Bertram explores how music calls forth memory and connects communities and places across time and space, past and present, homeland and diaspora.
7In the final section – The Future of What Remains – Bertram outlines how, during their travels, pilgrims encountered the descendants of Armenian survivors – those who had remained in their ancestral lands after 1915, often as children, assimilated into Muslim communities. Some pilgrims made contact with direct relatives, and Bertram details the complex feelings that arose during such meetings. In this final section, Bertram also provides a thorough history of Kurdish and Armenian relations from the final years of the Ottoman era to the present, including a detailed explanation of the evolution of Kurdish political thinking about 1915 and the Kurdish Movement’s efforts to apologize for Kurdish participation in the genocide. For instance, Bertram outlines how the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakır, Osman Baydemir, welcomed Armenians, not as tourists, but as compatriots returning to their home, echoing the sentiments of the pilgrims. Bertram’s discussion of the Kurdish movement is powerful and important, but it may have had more impact at the beginning of the book rather than at the end, as it is central to understanding the political climate of the region. Additionally, while Bertram quoted Kurdish officials, the perspectives of other Kurdish residents of the region may have further enriched the narrative.
8Within the four main sections of the book, Bertram includes multiple short chapters, each of which succinctly expands upon one main theme or genre of experience through illustrative examples of a few select pilgrims. For instance, in the first chapter – The Family Mansion – Bertram shares the story of one pilgrim who identified her family’s ancestral home, which had been transformed into an ethnographic museum, owned, and operated now by the government of Turkey. In the following chapter, Bertram describes how many pilgrims sought their ancestral homes but found those homes destroyed, in ruins, or inhabited by local Muslim families. Many pilgrims center their memory-stories of family wholeness prior to the genocide in the space of the family house, which often was also the site of the violence and trauma that tore the family apart in 1915. To capture the complexity of the memories associated with the home – of both a golden age and a violent rupture – Bertram draws on Mircea Eliade’s conception of the sacred and the profane. Bertram conceptualizes the house as sacred space, and the violence of 1915 as the profane intruding upon the sacred. Here, she argues, the sacred and profane are separate but intertwined, creating a double reverberation in the memories of the pilgrims.
9In her theorization of the pilgrims’ interactions with the ancestral spaces that they visit, Bertram strives to stay true to their experiences, their words, and their interpretations. Her theorization, however, relies heavily on a few authors, including Eliade to illustrate ideas of the sacred and profane as well as Gaston Bachelard to discuss the poetics of reverie and space. There is much literature that could have been relevant to the discussion that was notably absent, such as scholarship on trauma, space, and memory, including Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”. Nonetheless, Bertram’s book is a powerful ethnography that offers a much-needed glimpse of hope in a geography devastated by a violent history. Bertram demonstrates how pilgrims bring to this land their memories, rage, and sadness, but rather than only eulogizing or mourning the painful past, they participate in that space, and create a future out of the remnants of the past.
10A House in the Homeland is a snapshot of a particular time and a unique phenomenon and as such represents a unique and valuable study. For members of the Armenian diaspora, this book will hold a special meaning, and will be an inspiration, even a blueprint, for how to uncover a seemingly unreachable past. It will inspire further studies of family histories and more pilgrimages for Armenians and others who seek to trace a lost past. For scholars and students, this book is a powerful example of how to connect with a community wounded by past violence, and to carry out research with deep empathy. Bertram’s A House in the Homeland is a valuable ethnography that transcends genres and provides a novel perspective on Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Ottoman, and Middle East history, as well as a refreshing ethnographic approach to questions of memory, materiality, violence, trauma, and pilgrimage.
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Référence papier
Anoush Tamar Suni, « Carel Bertram, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory », Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 195-199.
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Anoush Tamar Suni, « Carel Bertram, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory », Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 05 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4064 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gmm
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