Tamar Gürciyan

In the Houshamadyan book, there is a section dedicated to Sarkis Usta Kadehciyan under the heading 'The Architect of the Armenian Church of Antep.' This section states that he served as the 'Chief Municipal Architect' for many years, trained many masters, and that many buildings in Antep were his work.

This article was written for the exhibition re-membering: Traces of Armenian Life in the Diaspora, held at the Villa Oppenheim, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum in Berlin. The exhibition was organized in collaboration between the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum, Akebi, and Houshamadyan. Upon Tamar Sarkissian’s invitation, I contributed a family heirloom violin and photographs to the exhibition curated by Asuman Kırlangıç — and now, we share their story with our readers.

SAR by dancer and choreographer Mihran Tomasyan and musician Saro Usta, which was first staged by the Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası in 2015, was performed again a few weeks ago. We believe that the performance itself and the Q&A session afterwards speaks a great deal about the experience of being an Armenian from Turkey and we would like to share the discussion we, three of the Parrhesia members, had with Agos readers.

I will never forget one day when I went to his class, before explaining in detail to the first graders how the dome of Hagia Sophia, which collapsed due to the earthquake in the 10th century, was restored, he came up to me and asked me the pronunciation of the name of Trdat (Dırtad), the architect who restored the dome, and tried many times to pronounce that name correctly before entering the class.