Cohabitating in Captivity: Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (Zarevand) at the Women’s Section of Istanbul’s Central Prison (1915–1918)

Abstract

Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (1893–1978), the only Armenian woman known to have been arrested by the Ottoman Turkish authorities in Istanbul in the spring of 1915, was born in Bursa to a Russian Armenian father and an Ottoman Armenian mother. One of the first generation of Armenian girls who received a European university education, Vartouhie sent letters home from Lausanne that would change the course of her life. In 1915, the Ottoman police raided the family home as Tavit Kalantar had been a high-level educator in Armenian schools. They found Vartouhie’s letters to her parents and her father’s papers, which they claimed included incriminating evidence. In August 1915, a military tribunal convicted Vartouhie and her father of propagating Armenian separatist ideology. They served two-and-a-half years in Constantinople’s Central Prison and, thanks to their Russian citizenship, were released after the Bolsheviks signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Central Powers, requiring “prisoners of war” to be freed.

Vartouhie published her prison memoirs in 16 installments in the feminist journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman), the first prison memoir by a woman in the Middle East and one of the very few for the Ottoman Empire. In 1921, Vartouhie emigrated to the US, where she married Zaven Nalbandian, a high-level Armenian Revolutionary Federation member who participated in Operation Nemesis. In 1926, they published an important book in Armenian on the pan-Turkic movement under the penname Zarevand. In 1971, the newly minted sociology professor Vahakn Dadrian translated their book into English as United and Independent Turania: Aims and Designs of the Turks. Their historical and political analysis, the first study of the Armenian Genocide in the United States, argues that Turkish irredentism had been a real threat for Armenians who stood in the way of the unification of Turkic peoples under one state. This chapter writes a hitherto unknown feminist and historian into Armenian, Turkish, and Ottoman historiographies as well as genocide and prison studies.

I first encountered the name Vartouhie Calantar in 2005 during my dissertation research while studying the post-World War I Armenian women’s journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman).¹ In early 1920, Hay Gin announced that Calantar’s prison memoirs were to be serialized in the journal.² I was struck from this first moment on: prison memoirs of an Armenian woman. A photo of her accompanied the announcement, a young lady in a large-brimmed hat, looking innocent, inexperienced, hopeful, and visibly content (see Fig. 1). It was hard to imagine that she had served two and a half years in the Women’s Section of Constantinople’s Central Prison (Hapishane-i Umumi Nisa Kısmı), during the early stages of the war as the Armenian Genocide was unfolding. Hay Gin reported that the Ottoman authorities had accused her of treason based on nationalist letters she had written home from Lausanne where she was pursuing a university degree. All of this was already unheard of, but that Vartouhie survived to write a detailed memoir of her prison days and published it in the most vocally feminist journal of the time was truly unexpected. And wonderful.

Fig. 1

Miss. V. Calantar (Hay Gin, no. 1, issue 6, January 16, 1920)

This chapter is the first publication about Vartouhie Calantar-Nalbandian, whom historians of all kinds have thus far ignored.³ There isn’t a Wikipedia page on her at the time of this writing in September 2021.⁴ My primary goal is to write her back into history, to give birth to a “Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (1893–1978)” as an object of study for Armenian, Turkish, Ottoman, women’s, genocide and prison historians. In order to do so, I first provide a concise biography of Calantar Nalbandian until her move to the US in 1921 by combining bits and pieces of information from various essays she wrote throughout her life, mostly in the US.⁵ Her arrest and trial before a military tribunal being vitally important for her life trajectory, as well as of general historical importance, I devote a section to this episode. I use Ottoman state archives, including prison records, to collaborate Vartouhie’s own narration of events as well as for her life in the prison. The second goal of this chapter is to provide an analysis of her prison memoirs, the only known first-person narrative of a woman prisoner of any ethnicity who served time in an Ottoman jail and the first known woman’s prison memoir in the Middle East. My primary interest is in how Vartouhie Calantar perceived her difference from others and how she understood differences amongst the population of the prison, including the inmates and staff. I examine her shifting positionality, her insider-outsider status, and her ethnographic gaze as she depicts the colorful yet intimidating world of the women’s ward.

Early Years

Vartouhie Calantar was born on February 2, 1893, in Ottoman Bursa.⁶ Her parents were both educators. Her father, a Russian Armenian named Tavit Kalantarian, had come to the Ottoman Empire to teach in the Armenian schools in order to prevent the Turkification of the Armenian masses in the provinces, a fear shared by many proto-nationalist Russian and Ottoman Armenian intellectuals. Her mother, Takuhie Manisalian, was originally from an Ankara family that sent four of their seven daughters, including Takuhie, to Mezbourian Girls’ Boarding School in Constantinople in the mid-1880s.⁷ Upon graduation, Takuhie went to Trabzon, on the Black Sea, to serve as the principal of the Armenian Girls’ School. In 1889 she met and married Tavit Kalantarian, who was superintendent of the schools in the same city. The couple moved to Bursa and opened up the Kalantarian Academy, which became known for its innovative pedagogy. Tavit had received a university education in philosophy and pedagogy in Vienna and Leipzig.⁸ It is likely that the Kalantarian school was the first co-ed primary and secondary school serving Ottoman Armenians, once described as a “feminist initiative” by its contemporaries.⁹ After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the family moved to the Ottoman capital as Tavit had been offered the influential job of Superintendent (General Inspector) of all Armenian Schools in the Ottoman Empire.

After living in Istanbul for three years, Vartouhie left for Europe in 1911 to pursue her undergraduate education. She studied history and literature at the University of Lausanne under the mentorship of Avedis Aharonian (1866–1948), a well-known Russian-Armenian writer and one of the leaders of Tashnagtsutiun, Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).¹⁰ It was in Lausanne and in the company of many Armenian university students and activists that Vartouhie grew closer to the ideas of the “Armenian revolution.” Her father had already familiarized her with this nebulous cause that referred to a range of goals from reforming the Ottoman Armenian provinces to working for autonomy or even liberation.¹¹ While in its most conservative sense being an Armenian revolutionary meant publicly protesting against Ottoman misrule and atrocities, “true revolutionaries” took up arms against the oppressor as she explained, in passing, in a 1934 article.¹²

Vartouhie’s encounters with Turkish youth in Lausanne, almost all sympathizers with the Young Turk movement, sharpened her political ideas.¹³ She dreamed of becoming a professor of History in the liberated future Armenia. Her graduate studies in pre-history and education at the University of Leipzig (which she attended after Lausanne) were cut short as the outbreak of WWI occurred while she was in Istanbul for summer vacation. She decided not to return to Europe until the war ended as she did not want to leave her parents alone. Her only sibling, a younger brother called Arshavir had recently died in an accident at the age of 17.¹⁴ Vartouhie Calantar never resumed her formal education because in the spring of 1915 the Ottoman authorities arrested her and her parents.

Arrest and Military Tribunal

Ottoman archival documents record that on April 15, 1915, the Governor of Bursa, Ali Osman, sent a ciphered telegram to the Ministry of Internal Affairs about an incident. In the school documents of a certain Hermine the police found papers containing anti-Turkish discourse (Türklerin ‘aleyhinde bir takım hezeyânlar). The testimonies of another Armenian (the unnamed daughter of Ohannes Aslanian) revealed the source as Tavit Kalantarian, whom the governor noted “appears to have made a habit of inciting Armenian children towards harmful purposes” (Ermeni çocuklarını muzır gâyelere sevki i’tiyad etmiş bulunduğu).¹⁵ That “habit” stands in stark contrast to another document found in the Ottoman archives: in 1901, the administration of Abdulhamid II gave a medal of excellence to the same Tavit Kalantar for his educational work.¹⁶ But even more strikingly, as late as December 1914 the Ottoman Ministry of Education had offered Vartouhie Calantar a teaching job in the soon to be established girls’ teaching college in Bursa.¹⁷ She declined the offer as she did not want to relocate.¹⁸

It is likely that the police raided the Kalantarian residence sometime in May 1915, based on the information received from Bursa in April or perhaps using it as a pretext.¹⁹ They found Vartouhie’s letters to her parents from Lausanne as well as her father’s correspondence with Avedis Aharonian and Dr.Hovhannes Kalantarian, Tavit’s brother in England who had long been engaged in pro-Armenian lobbying activities among British politicians. Enough incriminating evidence was produced to detain Vartouhie and her parents.

Vartouhie Calantar thus became the only Armenian woman, other than her mother, arrested by the Ottoman authorities as part of the bloody campaign to collect and neutralize Armenian intellectual and political leadership in the capital starting from April 24, 1915. While Vartouhie would later avoid mentioning it, the Armenian newspaper Hayasdan in Sofia reported that Vartouhie’s mother, Takouhie, voluntarily went to the jail in order stay with her daughter.²⁰ The Military Tribunal, which they faced in late August 1915, eventually freed Takouhie.

Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian did not provide a detailed account of their day in court until 1966 when she was 71. She depicted her 20-year-old self as “small, dainty body, short skirt, and curly, shoulder-length hair, look[ing] more like a child than a ‘revolutionary conspirator.’”²¹ Her father, almost 70, stood tall and confident. He was somewhat naïve, Vartouhie wrote, in his honest answers to the judge’s questions. Her mother looked invincible and proud. They knew they were innocent: all that they had ever wanted was safety and security for Ottoman Armenians. Two former students of the Kalantarians from Bursa were also in court, both as witnesses and as accused. Another Armenian, the principal of Kadıköy’s Armenian school whose name Vartouhie did not provide but was most likely Haig Khorasanjian, was also on trial. His crime: a book of Armenian patriotic songs was found in his office.

The prosecutor requested capital punishment for father and daughter for having plotted against the Ottoman Empire’s territorial integrity. In his defense, Tavit argued that “What we want is the chance to live and develop in security on the land of our ancestors – within your borders, but free of oppression and massacre.”²² They learned in court that their Armenian correspondence had been translated into Turkish by Reşat Bey (Mimaroğlu), the head of the second political section of the Constantinople Police Department and one of the two main organizers of the April and May 1915 arrests of Armenian leaders.²³

Vartouhie was accused of the crime of “participation in the Armenian nationalist and separatist movement.” Her summary to her parents of the Armenian revolutionary Rupen Sevag’s lecture at Lausanne’s Armenian Student Union was given as proof of her support for Armenians’ anti-Turkish politics.²⁴ Due to a mistake that Reşat made in decoding Vartouhie’s difficult handwriting, he got the name wrong (see Fig. 2). He read “Sevag” as “Anag” and interrogated Vartouhie as to who this person was. Vartouhi knew that Sevag was arrested but did not know if he had been killed (Rupen Sevag was killed on August 26, 1915, around the time that this interrogation was happening). She responded by saying that Anag was an Iranian student about whom she did not know much. In fact, Vartouhie had asked Rupen Sevag to give that particular lecture in Lausanne to explain his ideas about the brotherhood of nations and whether Turks could be trusted to which Rupen answered in the negative.²⁵

Fig. 2

A sample of Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian’s handwriting. Letter to Zaruhi Bahri, March 26, 1926. Madenataran (Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts), Zaruhi Bahri Archives, box. No 764

Vartouhie defended herself by arguing that her letters were personal and were only ideas, not actions. The presiding judge noted that their goal was “to forestall the actions.” Vartouhie found the courage to assert that if Turks had the right to be patriotic, Armenians should be given the same freedom. Her frightened father claimed that Vartouhie was merely an impressionable youth, only 16 or 17 when writing the letters, and her sentence should be transferred to him as her guardian. Vartouhie responded that her father, an old man with one foot in the grave, should be allowed to die in freedom and she should carry his sentence.²⁶

An Ottoman state document, dated October 2, 1915 and signed by the Minister of War Enver Pasha, claims that both Kalantarians produced documents with malicious content and tried to incite foreign public opinion against the Ottoman Empire in order to realize an independent Armenia.²⁷ In accordance with Civil Penal Code’s 54th article (second paragraph of the addendum), the court convicted both father and daughter to life sentences in the Çorlu fortress, 120 km. west of the capital while the mother was found innocent and released.²⁸ The girls from Bursa, too, were set free “for their services to the state.”²⁹ The school principle, whom Vartouhie clearly disliked for being scared and denying any involvement with Armenian revolutionaries, was also released after a short interrogation.³⁰

Thanks to high diplomatic interventions, the father and daughter’s sentences were soon reduced to five years at the Central Prison of Constantinople. Among those who tried to help them was the well-known feminist writer Zabel Yesayan, who had escaped to Bulgaria to avoid the April 24 arrests.³¹ According to Calantar, Yesayan applied to the Bulgarian royal family for assistance and personally visited the Tsarina Eleonore Reuss to secure her intervention.³² Bulgaria, later an ally of the Ottomans, requested a pardon from the Sultan. Neutral Spain’s King Alfonso also did the same thanks to the intervention of Dr. Hovhannes Kalantarian, Vartouhie’s influential uncle in London. After almost three years of imprisonment, the Kalantarians were discharged thanks to Tavit’s Russian citizenship, which he passed to his daughter as well. The Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty between the new Bolshevik government and the Central Powers, signed in March 1918, granted the release of prisoners of war. Since they had been tried in Military Court, father and daughter were considered prisoners of war and set free. In August of the same year, however, Tavit Kalantar passed away.³³ Vartouhie attributed his death to the deplorable conditions he had endured in the prison.³⁴

The Ottoman defeat and the signing of the Mudros Armistice in October 1918 breathed life into the Constantinopolitan Armenian community. Aid societies for survivors, organizations for political activism, and all kinds of press flourished, especially after the Allied occupation of the capital. Vartouhie’s public life started in this period as she aided in the establishment of the Constantinople chapter of the Hayreniki Oknutyan Miutyun/Committee (HOK, Society for Aid to the Fatherland) and acted as its general secretary.³⁵ She and her mother were among the founders and early members of the Armenian Women’s Association (AWA), a feminist organization that worked for women’s equality and for refugee/orphan care.³⁶ As a representative of AWA, Vartouhie helped to organize the “Gold Fund Day,” the campaign for women to donate their jewelry to the Republic of Armenia.³⁷ She also campaigned for the Armenian Red Cross’ initiative to collect money and gifts for the Republic of Armenia’s army, then fighting against Turkish Kemalist forces. Her writing career, too, which she would continue all her life, commenced at this time. Hayganush Mark invited her to contribute to the first issue of Hay Gin, effectively the organ of AWA, for which she wrote a few opinion pieces and a number of personal essays.³⁸ But it was her prison memoirs that established her presence in Hay Gin.

The Ward World of a “Political Mademoiselle”

Vartouhie and Tavit Calantar spent two and a half years confined at Istanbul’s Central Prison (Hapishane-i Umumi) in Sultanahmed Square (Hippodrome of Constantinople).³⁹ Opened in 1871 and demolished in 1939, it is considered to be the first modern Ottoman prison.⁴⁰ Usually referred to as “Mehterhane,” this is where Armenian leaders were imprisoned on the night of 24 April 1915 until they were deported out of the city.⁴¹ One of the most prominent Armenian intellectuals of the time, Teotig (Teodoros Lapjinjian) was incarcerated here for one year starting from March 1915. Together with his publisher, he was jailed because of an essay he published in his almanac’s 1915 edition. Similarly, Vahan Toshigian, husband of Hay Gin editor Hayganush Mark, was kept in solitary confinement in this prison sometime in late 1914 or early 1915. In 1920, Teotig published a 25-page narrative of his arrest, trial, and imprisonment in which he provided detailed information about the Central Prison. It is quite likely that Hayganush Mark invited Vartouhie to write her prison memoirs after reading Teotig’s memoirs.⁴²

In her 16-part memoir, Vartouhie Calantar emerges as a shrewd observer and talented writer with strong language skills and flashes of sarcasm.⁴³ “The Women’s Ward of the Central Prison” (Getronagan Pandni(n) Gineru Pazhine, in Armenian; Mehterhane, in Turkish) is thick in detail likely because she took notes during her imprisonment and because she published her memoir less than two years after being released. It is also written with minimal self-censorship. The historical moment in which the memoirs were written and published is an anomaly from the perspective of Turkish and Armenian relations. The Ottoman defeat and the ensuing Allied occupation emboldened Armenian leaders to sever relations with the Ottoman government, work for territorial separatism, and accuse the Turks of perpetrating massacres with the goal of systematically annihilating Armenians. During these unique years (roughly three years following the end of WWI), the Armenian press enjoyed relative freedom. The lack of self-restraint makes Calantar’s chronicle feel candid as she doesn’t mince her words.

The memoir calls for multiple layers of analysis from social, political, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives. My central focus here is the operations of difference and the workings of power. I take this prism for my study following the author’s own fascination with the internal, hierarchically organized world of the ward where a matriarch-inmate dominates her fellow prisoners, sometimes even the male prison administration. Through her in-depth character and situation analyses, we are invited to observe the Darwinist microcosm of the women’s cell where the fittest is the one who has money and the talent to manipulate power.

My analysis has three parts. First, I discuss Vartouhie’s viewpoint as an ethnographer trapped with her “subjects.” Second, I examine how she perceives other inmates’ response to her: they are friendly when they see her as an inexperienced, respectable girl but they become “Turks” (thus, enemy) when they see her as an Armenian thus, a traitor. Through a discussion of three figures in the ward—Kurd Sinem, Kurd Nuriye, and Chief Physician Zati Bey—I argue that class background was centrally relevant to how difference manifested itself in the ward. Third, I offer a reading of solidarity within the ward as expressed by Vartouhie not just with other Armenian inmates but also with women of different class and ethnicity. The example I use here is her neutral tone in depicting the sexual life of the women inmates, which I trace back to her feminist perspective.

An Autoethnographer Behind the Bars

In her 65-page-long memoir, we follow Vartouhie Calantar’s cinematographic gaze as she invites the reader to participate in the daily prison routine, meet its main characters, follow the intrigues and never-ending dramas of cell life, and even “hear” the inmates sing, chat, tell stories, and fight. When characters speak, they almost always use their native Turkish, written in Armenian letters in the text, usually with slight mistakes. Her use of the local language, which Calantar knew but was not her native tongue, along with her attention to detail lends an aura of authenticity to the author’s voice. Former prostitute Acem (Persian) Atiye’s fictional stories are filled with “ondan soracghazım” [sic] (afterwards) and “efendime söyleyim” (let me see….); on visiting days prison guards announce “Madmazel maman geldi” (Mademoiselle, your mama is here); at parties inside the kibars’ room (gentlewomen’s cell), Bulgurlulu Ayişe sings gazels (odes); Kürt Sinem dances Laz mountain dances; all women sing patriotic marches such as Annem beni yetişdirdi (My mama raised me), and Girit bizim malımız (Crete is our property), and dance chifte-telli, zeybek or hora, ending with heyamos. They sit on minders (cushion), put on yazma or charshaf (head coverings), perform abdest (ablution), recite namaz (prayers), eat pilaf and tahin-pekmez (mix of tahini and grape molasses). They believe in the evliya of the prison, a non-gendered saintly figure to whom they light candles. All this immersion in prison folklore turns the author into a self-appointed ethnographer. Yet, Vartouhie Calantar does not occupy the position of a freely detached participant observer. She is literally and legally one of them, detained like the subjects of her writing. Could her immobility and lack of choice render her a native informant? Does she ever become one of them? How she perceived others and how she was perceived by them (via her own rendering) attest to her insider-outsider status.

The reader quickly understands that Vartouhie Calantar sees herself as better than and above the other inmates. Her feelings of difference and superiority sprang from multiple sources. By personality, Vartouhie was an arrogant woman. She was proud of her parents’ lineage, especially her paternal roots that she termed “aristocratic” more than once.⁴⁴ She was raised by parents who believed in gender equality, the value of education, the importance of intellectuals, and a kind of Armenian supremacy in terms of civilizational level. She was one of the first Armenian girls from the Ottoman Empire to go to Europe for higher education, a point of pride for her. She also thought of herself as beautiful and attractive, not shying away from sharing the minutia of her premarital adventures in love with at least one confidante in her personal letters.⁴⁵ Vartouhie carried this attitude of a self-confident woman and self-righteous Armenian intellectual to the prison.

Her most salient identity in prison was that of a siyasi (political prisoner) and an Armenian one at that. She was an educated siyasi surrounded by thieves, street fighters, and prostitutes. The prison record corroborates her self-depiction. According to the defter/notebook/record that includes both Tavit’s and Vartouhie’s name (August 4, 1917), their cause of imprisonment was “working against the government.” Throughout the whole prison population above 18, which is 589 people (both men and women), only one other person’s crime is noted to be the same as theirs (a certain Abdülhalim Efendi bin Mustafa, a Muslim). The cause of imprisonment for seven male prisoners is noted as “possessing harmful documents” and as “releasing military secrets” in the case of two men. All nine of them were non-Muslims but none of them were women.⁴⁶ It is quite likely, therefore, that at least in the women’s ward Vartouhie was the only political prisoner. She mentions that there were other mektepli (schooled) in the ward but she does not depict them, focusing rather on petty criminals who seem to have dominated ward life.

Another identity that seems to be foundational in her interactions with the others is being a “madmazel.” In the prison, everyone addresses her as “mademoiselle,” a respectful way to address elite non-Muslim young women in the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁷ The prison is a microcosm of Ottoman society and Calantar wants to reflect that. The names of other inmates and prison officials include their distinctive characteristic such as their ethnic background, job, or place of origin (i.e., Hademe Mustafa, Muhacir Feride, Arap Fatma, Rumelili Ali Efendi, Bakkal Salih Çavuş). Hers is “madmazel,” which attests to the fact that she was seen as an upper class, respectable young non-Muslim woman.

The prison record shows that, in August 1917, there were 41 women in the prison (comprising 7% of the total inmate population). Of these, 15 were non-Muslims and of those 6 were Armenians, 8 Greeks, and one Jew.⁴⁸ Vartouhie mentions the other Armenian women (as I discuss below) but she clearly is the “madmazel” of this ward, likely the only unmarried one and the only siyasi. At least once, she is referred to as “saraylı” (of the palace, meaning, higher class, elite) and once “namusli [sic]” virtuous.

Fellow Inmates: Friend or Foe?

When Vartouhie’s difference is seen as class- or education-based, she is included in the life of the prison, respected, and even admired. She writes letters (in Ottoman Turkish) on behalf of the illiterate inmates; they ask her to pray on their behalf since, “as a virgin,” her prayers are considered more effective; they trust her with their money for safekeeping; they protect her from lice. Calantar humanizes “the enemy” by sharing with readers some of the moments when “the enemy” humanized her. She observes how sometimes the “human feeling got the better of racial hatred” when other inmates murmur: “Yazık, çok tazedir” [What a pity. She’s so young and tender] or “İhtiyar validesine pek yazık” [What a pity for her old mother].”⁴⁹ When her difference is perceived to be based on ethnicity or the cause of her imprisonment, however, the inmates’ attitudes change. As soon as mother and daughter enter the prison, they hear whispers of millet hayini (traitor of the nation) and hınzır ermeni [sic] (cunning Armenian).⁵⁰ The women’s “hate-filled eyes” turn to them when they are summoned to trial. Calantar writes about her feelings of insecurity in the following terms: “They no longer are the friendly, fawning Turkish women they were. A dark, cruel instinct, sending the same thrill from one to the next, has chained them, too, to a collectivity.”⁵¹ They murmur “idam” (capital punishment).

Calantar, the aspiring ethnographer observes prison life “as if it were a painting” with a dose of orientalization. She feels threatened by her subjects who can at any moment shift from being fellow-prisoners to members of the perpetrator group.⁵² The prison population is very much aware of the massacres against Armenians unfolding in the provinces thanks to communication with the world outside the prison walls. This happened, for example, via Turkish soldiers visiting their wives or mistresses or influential inmates who secured privileges such as outside strolls. Kürt Sinem is an important character in this regard.

When Vartouhie enters the prison, Kürt [Kurd] Sinem is the “lord and master.” A Kurd from the Kasımpaşa neighborhood of Istanbul, she was imprisoned after a street fight with the police. Calantar depicts her as a complicated figure: even though “she had the sharp, fierce look of a savage tribal chieftain,” she respected education and educated people. Sinem accepted Vartouhie and Takuhie in the elite space of the kibars’ room thanks to which they left the lepers’ room where they were first placed.⁵³ Kibars’ room was home to artists with nice singing voices, intellectuals, “hoja hanıms” who read the Quran, the schooled (who wrote and read letters for others), beautiful prostitutes, and “some blacks.”⁵⁴ According to Calantar, Sinem was intelligent, capable, and quite agreeable. She had a strange personal magnetism and was capable of inspiring enthusiasm and respect in the multitude. But “this female version of the Kurdish bandit,” Calantar wrote, was also audacious, two-faced, stubborn, ugly, and had dirty legs and a horribly masculine voice. Despite her coarse ways, however, she had a gift for governance and in fact governed the prison.⁵⁵ As usual, Calantar is eager to give a well-rounded depiction of her main characters, not to flatten them into caricatures.

Kürt Sinem also spoke about politics freely and loudly. This made the other inmates feel uncomfortable because she had the audacity to insult the government and the Military Tribunal. Thanks to Sinem, mother and daughter learn that the prison director, Çetacı [Bandit] İbrahim, left for Adapazarı to “wipe out the Armenians.”⁵⁶ Similarly, Sinem informed Vartouhie that the Armenians seized the city of Van.⁵⁷ Recognizing that this news cheered Vartouhie, Sinem kisses her forehead with enthusiasm. A faint sense of solidarity was in the air between the Kurd and the Armenian. While Sinem was no admirer of the current government, Vartouhie never implied that she could be an ally to Armenians. In fact, she associated another Kurd in the prison with the perpetrators. In one of her most intriguing passages, Calantar describes Kurdish Nuriye, Sinem’s former neighbor and her prison bodyguard, in the following words:

Nuriye’s bloodshot eyes and the wedding-rings adorning her fingers, which always called up an image of Armenian brides’ tortured hands in my imagination, sufficed to keep all the Armenians at a terrified distance from her. The fact was, however, that she herself maintained a standoffish silence with one and all. A Kurd in soul and body, she hated Turks as much as she did Armenians, for she considered them degenerate and immoral. She took care to hide her hair and half of her face from men and even kept her voice to herself in their presence. Whereas the Turkish women, light-hearted and undisciplined, amused themselves or slept all day, she knitted winter socks for her husband, carding and spinning the wool herself. At the same time, with a rope attached to her big toe, she rocked a cradle placed in a corner of the room. The child, the pup of a gypsy, (Arm. knchuyi tsak) barely six months old, covered with blue beads and little gold ornaments, slept quietly, suspended between two of the prison’s walls, as happy as he would have been at home, which was probably not very different. His mother’s hard, pitiless face softened every time she looked at her child. Sinem, in particular, adored him; she would kiss the baby, squeeze him, and make him utter little cries for hours on end. All the subjects of the realm, big and little, showered that child with countless compliments every day.⁵⁸

Calantar humanizes a figure and a whole community of inmates that she associates with the enemy (the perpetrators) all the while using what we would call racist language about the lowly Nuriye and her likes. However, an important nuance should be underlined so as not to fall into anachronistic conclusions. She regards the inmates as “primitives” not simply because of their race or ethnicity as such but because of their lower-class status, “uncivilized” upbringing, and archaic ways of being in the world, in binary opposition to how Vartouhie viewed herself as a refined, modern, and cultured young woman belonging to a civilized ethnic group. Vartouhie is often repulsed by other women’s behavior such as when they eat pilaf with their hands and offer a piece of dessert to her with the tip of their fingers. Despite her disgust, she is reluctant to refuse the desert because she feels that they, “these monkeys,” could strangle her at any moment.⁵⁹ In these instances, it is left to the reader’s imagination to intuit whether these women are truly capable of violence and if it stems from their “savage” backgrounds or Turkishness/Muslimness at the time of genocide, or a combination of the two. In any case, Vartouhie is “above” the rest but at the same time so incredibly subject to their whims. And it is this tension that is at the core of the whole memoir. In a way, she is the most vulnerable person in the ward.

The depiction of “difference” in the ward, then, can better be imagined as a matrix rather than a ladder. In other words, difference is not one dimensional and does not map onto a single identity source. Vartouhie belongs to a subjugated group but, in the enclosed space of the prison, she is a noble outsider. Even though she never emerges as a full participant in the life of the ward when inmates have fun together, she does cooperate with them multiple times, usually in a leadership capacity of some sort. For example, when Arap Fatma attempts suicide by trying to swallow a rusty nail, Vartouhie, under the horrified gazes of other women, convinces her to drop the nail. In another instance, when the inmates spot men on the roof of the building next door and start screaming, Vartouhie recognizes that they are not going to attack the women (as the inmates thought) but are trying to escape.⁶⁰ They all scream for the guards (who are all men) but when the guards are about to shoot the escapees, the women scream again even more loudly to prevent an unnecessary shootout.⁶¹ Vartouhie presents herself as the cool-headed, rational problem solver, an important distinction from the rest of the ward full of impulsive, uneducated, almost childish women.

Calantar reserves her most laudatory words for the only other truly educated person in the prison, a Turk, and for the system he created. She presents the chief physician Zati Bey (see Fig. 3) as an ally and rescuer. Ottoman archival records confirm that a certain Dr. Ibrahim Zati Öğet (1885, Salonica, 1945-Istanbul) served first as a physician and then as the chief physician in the Central Prison.⁶² He published eight books, a prison report, multiple essays and gave many interviews during his lifetime. In general, he was interested in the rehabilitation of children and youth in the prison, juvenile justice, sexual education of children, the connection of alcohol to crimes, among other topics. He pursued many charitable projects regarding orphaned children. We do not know if he mentioned or gave credit to Vartouhie in any of his publications for having translated a book for him.

Fig. 3

“Surgery room in Istanbul prison” published in Polis Mecmuası (Police Journal), September 15, 1916 (no. 77). The doctor second to the far-left side (the tallest) must be Dr. Zati based on my comparison with later pictures. Picture credit: Ufuk Adak

In her memoir, Vartouhie gives a detailed account of the health care services, calling them the best functioning part of the prison, detailing how the inmates, including the sick, received good medical attention, and informing the reader, somewhat proudly, that even during epidemics no one died except for one already-sick inmate. Ser-tabib Zati Bey appreciated education and learnedness, and needed it too. He asked Vartouhie to translate a book about the reorganization of prison health care from German to Ottoman Turkish. He must have asked her instead of her father since, having grown up in the Russian Empire, Tavit had minimal Turkish language skills (and his Turkish was closer to the Azeri dialect). Vartouhie undertook the translation, which she did for free. In return, Dr. Zati Bey arranged for the father and daughter to see each other once or twice a week in the prison secretary’s room, in his presence.⁶³ The doctor must have really appreciated Vartouhie’s translation and cooperation as he also arranged for her to sleep in a separate room in a bed next to a guard. The last lines of Vartouhie Calantar’s memoir read: “And, had it not been for the protection of the good-hearted principal physician, […], I do not know how my life would have unfolded in the midst of the vilest class of the enemy race [tsegh] in that period of the most intense hatred and fanaticism.”⁶⁴

Clearly, the main divide that separates Vartouhie from others is not exclusively founded upon ethnoreligious lines. The Turkish doctor is good because he is able to appreciate Calantar’s potential, he is modern and enlightened, and knows what she needs most: protection. Because of the sponsorship of Zati Bey, Calantar does not experience any real confrontation as an Armenian in the prison. She was indeed safer in the prison than most Ottoman Armenian women were outside of the walls of the prison as they were going through different stages of the genocidal campaign.

Sisters of Misfortune

In further situating Vartouhie Calantar’s positionality in the prison, one must recognize that her strongest source of strength comes from feeling that she was partaking in Armenian history in the making. She never expresses self-doubt about what she has written or said. She continues to believe in the fairness and future success of the Armenian national struggle (“a free, sunny country”), a form of resistance to Ottoman domination shared by many Armenian intellectuals.⁶⁵ When summoned for trial, she is intimidated but knows that her destiny, “small and modest, is part of a collectivity’s tragic, majestic destiny.”⁶⁶ In the pale faces of the Armenians around her, she reads “the holy suffering of all of them, all of us, which has a miraculous capacity to bind and unify, and [her] heart is filled with boundless elation.”⁶⁷

Just as non-Armenian inmates are bound to each other when the Armenianness of Vartouhie comes to the fore, Armenian inmates are bound to each other—though invisibly—when one of them is summoned to trial or a new Armenian enters the ward. It is thanks to an Armenian, a certain Akabi Hanım that Vartouhie and her mother move from the lepers’ room to the kibars’ room. When they first enter the prison, no Armenian dares to speak to them because of their “siyasi” status. But on the third day, Akabi, who is a “veteran” of the prison and in good standing with Kürt Sinem, brings them morning coffee, tells them that they can’t stay among the lepers, and that she will talk to Sinem. Indeed, Akabi, whom Vartouhie calls “our savior,” manages to convince Sinem to move mother and daughter to the kibars’ room.⁶⁸

Indeed, Calantar’s most empathetic words are uttered when describing Armenian newcomers. She calls them anedski kuyr, an Armenian phrase she invents that can be translated as a “fellow accursed sister” or “sister of/in misfortune.” It connotes comradery and union in the shared condition of being accursed. As soon as they enter the ward, Vartouhie rushes to them, telling them that she too is Armenian and that there is no reason to be afraid. They smile, they raise their terror-filled eyes to look at her, begging for help and protection. Every time a new Armenian enters the ward Vartouhie re-lives the day that she entered the prison, the terrible moment when she was thrown into that “hell filled with those devils’ clapping and laughter.”⁶⁹

As these examples illustrate, Vartouhie Calantar’s memoirs are a treasure trove for advancing our understanding of Armenian subjectivities in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and during the Armenian Genocide. They are also a great source to reach the world of the subaltern women, however mediated it may be. The memoirs are populated by the illiterate low-class inmates who usually do not make it into historical studies unless they leave a criminal record and even then, they are underrepresented since their legal personhood was always questionable.⁷⁰ Calantar allows us to have a glimpse of not only their life experiences but also their worldview as she describes politics from bottom up. For example, we learn that the “former whore” Acem Atiye cursed the Ittihadists (CUP leaders) and longed for the Hamidian era because she loved dogs and the Ittihadists rid the city’s streets of the stray dogs (which the CUP did in 1910 by deporting them to an island where they starved to death).⁷¹ We also learn that this same Acem Atiye referred to Arap Fatma as “maymun” (monkey) behind her back.⁷² Prison being a relatively representative sample of the larger society, women behind bars observed similar lines of hierarchy. “Blacks” (sevamortner) were at the bottom. They were in the kibars’ room only because “they made a name for themselves thanks to their pugnacity” and therefore served as the room’s fighting forces.⁷³ Indeed, Vartouhie uses “black” and “Arab” interchangeably and speaks in what we would today call racist language.⁷⁴

Calantar’s memoirs also provide a glimpse of how women sought intimacy and some fun in the enclosed space of the prison. They constantly flirt and fall in and out of love: the meydancı⁷⁵ flirts with the yard-keeper during bread distribution, the grocer’s aid and women prisoners exchange notes of gallantries in the guise of packages of salt and pepper, pharmacists (medical college drop-outs who are now prisoners) leave charming poems in the pocket of nurses’ white aprons (nurses also selected from among the prisoners), the toilet cleaner Muhacir (Immigrant) Feride, is in love with Hademe (Janitor) Mustafa, Kürt Sinem and Arap Fatma fall in love with the same man, the Albanian prison guard Ibrahim, and the ensuing love triangle ends with a cat fight, suicide attempt, and toppling of Kürt Sinem by Acem Atiye.⁷⁶ We also have a sense that the ward can be read as a homoerotic space. When Atiye dances in an almost naked state, inmates, “delighted by the suppleness of the old whore’s body and soul, cried “Maşallah! Maşallah! [Wonderful! Praise be!].”⁷⁷

The oversexualization of her fellow prisoners may be read as a way for Calantar to debase them, to mark her difference from them—showing them as lacking “respectability.” Yet, her tone in writing about these types of encounters does not communicate any condemnation. There certainly is no moral panic, no pathologizing; she does not portray the inmates as sexually deviant women. Perhaps it was Calantar’s feminism that allowed her to normalize these amorous adventures. What is certain is that her attention to sexuality reveals her as a liberated woman for her times. That she dares, as a 25-year-old unmarried elite Armenian female to write so explicitly about flirting and love affairs demonstrates her nonchalance regarding gendered norms of propriety. This freedom was likely instilled in her in the open-minded and non-religious milieu in which she grew up, one that was very different from the upbringing of those around her in the ward. “Women’s Ward of the Central Prison,” then, enables us to imagine different axes of inter-group differentiation, not just interethnic relations but also divisions along the lines of class, education, respectability, and cause of imprisonment.

Armenian Women’s Prison Memoirs in Comparison

Ottoman prison studies rely exclusively on Ottoman Turkish sources as well as Western-language reports and observations. Therefore, they lack an engagement with first-person prison narratives as there are no known Turkish language prison memoirs about Ottoman prisons. There are, however, quite a number of them in Armenian.⁷⁸ To my knowledge, there is only one study that takes Armenian-language sources seriously. Using late Ottoman Armenian political party periodicals and the voices of prisoners presented in those platforms, Nanor Kebranian uncovers different aspects of political imprisonment of Armenians during the Hamidian years, including those of unaffiliated peasants and artisans.⁷⁹

In terms of women prisoners, however, Vartouhie’s text is the only known one and it is the earliest prison memoir written by a Middle Eastern woman. The political imprisonment of women in the broader Middle East started in Egypt in the mid-1930s but personal memoirs weren’t written before the 1970s. Historically, until the second part of the twentieth century, jailed women were usually illiterate petty criminals who would not consider their experiences worthy of historical memory.⁸⁰

There are two other prison memoirs written by Armenian women. One of them belongs to Ellen Buzand (Yeghisapet Stamboltsian, 1895–1970), an Eastern (Russian) Armenian originally from Gyumri. Along with a handful of other Armenian women who were active members of the ARF, she served time in Yerevan’s Cheka Prison and Central Prison when the Bolsheviks came to power in December 1920, dissolved the ARF and considered its members to be dissidents.⁸¹ Buzand was imprisoned from November 1920 until the night of February 18, 1921 when, thanks to the ARF uprising, she was freed. She later escaped the country first to Iran, then to Paris, then to Los Angeles. She published her memoirs in two short installments in 1965 in the ARF’s Boston-based Armenian monthly Hairenik (Fatherland).⁸² She prefaced her essays by noting that the names of imprisoned women needed to be known as well as the reasons for their incarceration, something that male memoirists usually failed to document.⁸³

Unlike Vartouhie’s memoirs, Ellen’s are populated exclusively by Armenians, almost all of them political prisoners like herself: Sato (Satenig) Hakobyan, secretary of the Yerevan ARF, who distributed weapons to party members right before her arrest (she is the one who hid the archives of the party and refused to disclose them to the communists at any cost), Yevgenia Nigidichna Sarkisyan, a Russian educated teacher who opened up a girls’ gymnasium in Yerevan, Hayganush Gharipyan, the young and cheerful idealist who declined to see her husband on visiting days because he had become a communist. The male section of the prison was also full of political prisoners, including the former prime minister and many MPs. Ellen Buzand was proud to breathe the same air as it gave her a sense of belonging and purpose. Like Vartouhie Calantar, her greatest source of strength in prison was her consciousness that she was partaking in the destiny of the fatherland, that she was becoming a “particle of the Armenian society.”⁸⁴

In Ellen Buzand’s memoirs the main “other” is the “communist Armenians.” They are the heartless new rulers of the country who don’t shy away from locking up innocent teenaged girls to make sure that their fugitive fathers show up, who imprison the wife of a former MP together with her three-day-old baby, who shoot inmates trying to flee. Nevertheless, in the face of such serious danger, even the communists are seen as “Armenians after all,” and thus, one of “us.” This happens when the ARF uprisings begin in mid-February 1921. The inhabitants of the women’s section are unaware of these events when they hear a commotion in the middle of the night and screams of “Let the women free, save the women!” Ellen’s first thought is that Turks must have entered Yerevan and a “godorads” (pogrom/massacre) must have started. That must be the reason, she concludes, why their door was unlocked: Armenian men, despite their political differences, try to save the life and honor of Armenian women.⁸⁵ In conceptualizing the ultimate “enemy and danger,” Vartouhie and Ellen were in unison.

Another woman who served time in Yerevan’s Cheka and Central Prisons was Maro Alazan (Maro Muratyan Alazan, 1908–1974). A survivor of the genocide from the Van region, she had found refuge in Armenia where she married another Armenian originally from Van, the poet and literary critic Vahram Alazan. In 1937 Maro, a schoolteacher, was arrested and imprisoned only because she was the wife of Vahram Alazan, the head of the Writers’ Union whom the Soviet police had arrested in 1936 as an “enemy of the people.” This was the early stages of Stalin’s purges. As an intellectual on her own right, Maro had refused to “confess” to her husband’s “anti-Soviet, nationalist” activities. During her time in different prisons and prisoner’s colonies in and near Yerevan she served time together with more than a hundred political prisoners. This group included both women who were themselves writers, translators, and so on (such as Arusyak Poghosian and Arus Tatevosian) but also women like Maro who were imprisoned merely because of their connections to men that the government deemed politically dangerous, such as the prominent poet Yeghishe Charents’ wife Isabella and writer Aksel Bakunts’ wife Varvara.

In her old age Maro wrote a six-hundred-page memoir which was published only recently.⁸⁶ Forty of these pages pertain to her prison years. It is a fascinating account describing the life of the prison via Maro Alazan’s matter-of-fact though humorous voice. We learn, for example, how the political prisoners spent time (just sitting, talking, singing, playing chess, sewing), slept (on the floor or wooden beds), ate (everything tasteless except the bread), and encountered different characters (good-hearted Kurdish guardians and the evil prison director who beats up Maro for writing poetry for her husband on the walls of the bathroom).The memoir also provides information on different “events,” such a New Year’s eve party with a broom-turned Christmas tree and a memorial for the slain poet Yeghishe Charents. Maro Alazan also gives an account of situations avoided such as how she was spared from being dumped into the criminals’ cell, a place for prostitutes with severe syphilis one of whom had openly told Maro how they had killed a guardian after raping him. Dense with detail and analysis, this unique prison memoir too awaits its own study and further comparisons with Ellen Buzand and Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian.

Vartouhie Calantar’s Later Life in America

Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian’s life and work after her release from prison is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to note here that, after losing her mother, she left for the US in 1921 and never returned to Turkey. In 1923, she met and married Zaven Nalbandian, an influential ARF member and former participant in Operation Nemesis, the clandestine initiative to hunt down genocide perpetrators.⁸⁷ She kept her maiden name, a rarity even among her feminist peers of the time. Her passion for pre-history endured throughout her life, especially the origins of the Armenian people, about which she published various pieces.⁸⁸ She also wrote opinion pieces, book reviews, art criticism, music reviews, family history, and essays on Armenian politics, the role of Armenian women in past and present society, the importance of the Armenian Red Cross, and so on.

In 1926, together with her husband she took up the penname “Zarevand” and published, in addition to another book and many articles, Miatsyal Angakh Turania, the well-known historical study of the pan-Turkist movement in the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia.⁸⁹ It provides a detailed historical and political analysis of why and how Turkish irredentism is a real threat for Armenians as they geographically stand in the way of the unification of Turkic peoples under one state. Most sources wrongfully attribute the book solely to her husband. In the late 1960s, Vahakn Dadrian, the budding sociologist and another Turkish Armenian like the Zarevand duo, translated their book into English. United and Independent Turania: Aims and Designs of the Turks came out of the academic press E.J. Brill in 1971.⁹⁰ It is one of the earliest academic studies of the Armenian Genocide in the US (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Zarevand duo, June 1967, Washington DC, Levon Saryan private collection

Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian died in 1978 in her Washington, DC home. She must have prepared the tombstone in advance as the death date is left open in her tombstone at the Washington National Cemetery. What is notable is that she ordered her birthplace engraved as “Armenia” (see Fig. 5). Like so many in her generation she never set foot in Armenia proper.

Fig. 5

Vartouhie Calantar and Zaven Nalbandian’s tombstone at the Washington National Cemetery. Photo by Nora Lessersohn

As the couple never had children, she bequeathed most of their life savings to Hairenik publications, that is, the ARF press in Boston (the Armenian Review, the Hairenik Daily, and the Armenian Weekly).⁹¹ A few months before passing, she penned a short autobiography and sent it to the Hairenik Daily asking them to publish it once she is no more.⁹² She knew that she lived a life worth knowing about. Her personal archives are yet to be located.