“Accidental” Encounters with the Ottoman Armenians in Contemporary Turkey

This essay discusses a set of inadvertent encounters with the late 19th and early 20th century persecution of the Ottoman Armenians in light of Rosalind Morris’ notion of “accident,” which implicates the traumatic event as not just a distant, isolated and immutable past but also one that constantly crops up in the present and runs the risk of so doing in the future. The essay draws attention to the multiplicity of the actors and settings involved in the said encounters: bones, trees, living people, mountains, stones, buildings, rivers, fault lines, and valleys. In these encounters, the temporal pervasiveness characteristic of Morris’ notion of accident is therefore coupled by its spatial counterpart as it stretches above, below, through and across the geography concerned. This twofold pervasiveness is a call to begin to develop a new notion of truth about the persecution of the Ottoman Armenians—one whose contemporary resonance complicates sequentiality and builds on an entanglement of human-inflicted and natural forms of destruction and violence.