Project SAVE Releases New Calendar: ‘Armenians Roll out the Carpet’

By Laura Bilazarian Purutyan

WATERTOWN, Mass.—Oriental rugs have long decorated the daily life of Armenians, from New Julfa to New Jersey, Caesarea to California. This fall, Project SAVE Photograph Archives will present the 2010 Archives calendar, “Armenians Roll out the Carpet,” which flashes back to scenes of Armenians and their carpets in both vintage black and white and contemporary color throughout the homeland and diaspora.

Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Inc. was founded in 1975 by Ruth Thomasian with the vision of “building the collective memory of the Armenian people through the documentation and preservation of photographs.” For Thomasian, each image in the Project SAVE collection goes far beyond simply pictures of ancestors. Armenians were the dominant native photographers in the Middle East, largely responsible for producing the very images that Project SAVE is seeking to preserve. The growing Project SAVE collection now includes over 30,000 photographs and 1,000 hours of donor interviews.

To produce the calendar, the Project SAVE staff started making choices from several hundred photos featuring carpets and creating a theme for each month to reflect the variety of subject matter, time periods, places, and photo donors. Project SAVE’s calendar sparks the imagination, as each caption reads like a story and conveys the donor, date, background, location, and what’s going on in the photo.

One photograph in “Armenians Roll out the Carpet” shows the Yale University dorm room of Paul Kebabian draped in carpets. Arriving from Turkey to study in the 1870s, Kebabian soon opened a rug store in New Haven, Conn. Those families without the financial capital to become rug dealers discovered the rug cleaning business; a 1930’s photograph shows members of the Zakian extended family with rugs drying in their home.

Another photograph dates back to 1937 in St. Paul, Minn. The Armenian community of St. Paul participated in one of the early Festival of Nations events, displaying their collection of hand-woven Armenian rugs and other cultural arts.

The calendar also shows carpets in some unexpected places, like the treatment room of the National Hospital of Sepastia, where hanging carpets surround a patient and physician in an 1889 photograph. In a portrait from the outskirts of New York City, a family embellishes their picnic along the Hudson using a spacious oriental as an outdoor carpet.

For Project SAVE, the annual calendar is a way to show the Armenian community of today and tomorrow its own story. These calendars function as both “calling cards” to the public and “finding aids” or methods of describing, organizing, and providing access to the archival treasure.

To become a sponsor of the “Armenians Roll out the Carpet” calendar with a personalized remembrance line, call Project SAVE at (617) 923-4542. Order forms for the calendar are available at www.projectsave.org. For more information, email archives@projectsave.org.