Email a copy of 'Karakashian: Halide Edib Adıvar on Komitas' to a friend
Loading ...
Meliné Karakashian
Meliné Karakashian was born in Beirut, Lebanon. After graduating from high school, she immigrated to the U.S., established residence in New Jersey, and continued her education, obtaining an Ed.S. in school and community psychology, a Ph.D. in child clinical psychology, and a practicing psychology license. She has volunteered to help victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake, the Karabagh War, and September 11. Her work has been recognized by the presidents of Armenia, the American Psychological Association, and the New Jersey Mental Health Association, among others. She is the recipient of two lecturing Fulbrights to Yerevan State University. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and two books. Komitas: A Psychological Study is her most recent work.
Latest posts by Meliné Karakashian (see all)
- The Making of Komitas: Victim of the Great Crime - October 8, 2019
- Revisiting Komitas: A More Optimistic, Psychological Reading - May 16, 2019
- Karakashian: Halide Edib Adıvar on Komitas - October 2, 2017
Halide Edib tried to convert Armenian orphans to Turks and Muslims, and she probably succeeded to some degree.
She was also a close friend of the butcher Kemal Ataturk.
I see nothing good about this alleged “feminist”.
Halide Edib fits right in with the deniers of the Armenian Genocide. First, I don’t think Komitas was entertaining the “great feminist” and her friends while the Genocide was ongoing. How could he, he was losing his mind after the atrocities he had witnessed. KOMITAS of Turkish origin is beyond laughable. Leave it to the Turks for Turkifying Armenians and their great accomplishments. According to the experts on Turkish cuisine, the Turks created all the dishes Armenians and Geeks have been preparing for two millennia in Anatolia. Armenians according to the Turkish experts on carpets did not weave carpets, they only sold them. Halide Edib was a rabid nationalist of the worst kind, literally foaming at the mouth describing what she deemed as transferring helpless Turkish children into Armenian households. When it was clearly the other way around. I pity the Turkish people who hold her in high regard. She was a loathsome human being.
Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut
http://www.scarshecarried.com
Halide Edib was not that arts lover and the positive person to Armenians. Certain facts about her should be listed so the anti-Armenian personality of the devil comes to face from the depths of the dark water:
– As the author mentions, during World War I, with the sponsorship and the supervision of Jemal Pasha, she was the principal of the Antoura orphanage, which was assigned to turkify the Armenian orphans of the Genocide with the most inhumane and stone age methods possible. Karnig Panian has lived the orpahanage’s sufferings and later described them best in his memoirs «Յուշեր Մանկութեան Եւ Որբութեան», that was recently translated to English by Simon Beujekian, titled: «Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide».
– She was one of the advocates of Panturanism and its activists in the turkish society and specially in the female turkish circles.
– She is the author of several novels and specially “Yeni Turan”, 1912, where she preaches the unification of the peoples of Central Asia and Caucasia with turanian origins and the creation of their empire under the leadership of Turkey, against the freedom of the Armenians, the Greeks, the Kurds and specially the Russians.
– She was one of the founders and main participants of the “Turk Ocagi”, Turk Ojaks (Turkish Hearth) educational and propaganda clubs, where the most important subject of review and discussion was the Panturanism, on how to propagate it in the turkish society and specially within the turkish inteligentia. It is very interesting that she has invited Gomidas Vartabed to some of those Ocaks to sing, and more tragically he was singing during one of those Ocaks to those turkish extremists just 2 weeks before his arrest.
– Finally, according to the author, Edib is presenting Gomidas as “a thief” of turkish music and songs (by the words of Youssouf Akchura, another renowned Panturanism activist), even a non-Armenian and at the end an individual with “the cry of the hatred and vengeance of his soul for my (turkish) people”: these are mere reversal of characters between Gomidas and the “Ojak” groups.
Sounds like she was a horrible Turk. Why are we learning about her?
M. Karakashian wrote and analyzed what is written in the memories of Halide Edib.
It is a natural phenomenon if someone likes someone else “thee” will feel he belongs to his nation.
It is great to know what Halide felt about Gomidas~Komitas and respected his talent, although she was rather unfair and unethical person dealing with the Armenian case.