“The road to Golgotha”
2008; Berghahn Books; Volume: 2008; Issue: 52 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3167/fcl.2008.520106
ISSN1558-5263
Autores Tópico(s)Balkans: History, Politics, Society
ResumoFollowing the story of a public memorial, I discuss the change in the scale of the remembrance of loss among post-Soviet Armenians in Yerevan. The shift from forgotten to visible Armenian loss started in the mid-1960s with protest from below during Khrushchev's political thaw and culminated at the beginning of the twenty-first century in an institutionalized state policy of commemoration. I discuss the ways in which a new memorial landscape of loss is represented and how a new cult of death is intensified by the redesigning and visualization of a traumatic past. I highlight a specific process of sacralization related to the new politics of unrecognized, 'bad' death, in the language of Christian suffering. Finally I turn to the ways Armenians voice the forgotten loss in terms of a global morality by involving outside forces—new “protective ancestors”—in the sacred repertoire of the nation. To illustrate this change, I concentrate on the area surrounding the memorial for the Armenian Genocide on the Tsitsernakaberd hill in Yerevan.
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