Armenian migrants in Turkey : history of a journey

Abstract

This thesis covers a decade-long story of Armenian migrants (from Armenia) living in the Kumkapı neighborhood of Istanbul. Based on nine months of ethnographic work by the author, it treats their way of settlement, employment, and integration in their new location by referring to well-known notions of immigration sociology and economic sociology. Actually, the presence of Armenians (from Armenia) in Turkey dates back from the early 1990s. Those were the most dynamic years of the shuttle trade, though newly rising circular migration between the countries of the Former Soviet Union, many of them on the threshold of economic collapse, and Turkey, the inevitable host for these people due to its proximity, easy entrance and suitable market conditions. Armenians from Armenia, one of the countries that experienced the consequences of the breakup of the Union the most severely, formed part of this crowd, too, after a long-running interruption since World War I. However, things had changed since then. Newcomers had been added to those who had grown old during the shuttle trade years, nearly all of them women above the age of 45, in order to engage in a quite different area of the informal economy, carework. Therefore, the actual residents of this old Armenian town of Istanbul, Kumkapı, form both one of several local branches of feminized migration relating in its turn to the globalization of domestic work, and a settled rather than circular community, with its specific social networks facilitating the acquisition of vital needs such as shelter, job, and protection for those already inside, as well as for the newcomers. Owing to the presence of many cultural institutions of local Armenians nearby, together with the historical meaning of the Kumkapı-Gedikpasa- Grand Bazaar line for the Armenians (of Turkey), the use of two major concepts, social capital and ethnic economy, serve to reveal what kind of links exist between the local and migrant Armenians, and to explain the deterministic relationship between social and economic sphere. Finally, this work, i.e., the lives considered here, having in its background the global economic transformations, will help to reconsider both the concepts of migration sociology and the ethnicity, solidarity and identity in the pale light of (Armenian’s most recent wave of) migration.