Heritage of Displacement at the British Library’s Britanahay Բրիտանահայ: Armenian and British display

By Dr Erica Payet, Programme Manager

The Armenian Institute is proud to be participating in the British Library’s Britanahay Բրիտանահայ: Armenian and British display, which will be shown in its Treasures Gallery from 27 September 2025 until 22 February 2026. 

It all started about two years ago, when links between our team at the Armenian Institute and Dr Michael Erdman, curator and Head of Middle East and Central Asia Collections at the British Library, were formed. Michael is a highly experienced professional and scholar. As he explains in his rich blog From Altay to Yughur, he has been working with library collections in dozens of languages spoken across Eurasia for over 10 years now. After finishing degrees in finance and economics in Canada and Spain, he first worked as an economist before serving as a consular and diplomatic official for Canada in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama, and Spain. In 2013, he returned to academia, completing his MA in Turkish Studies, followed by a doctorate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, both at SOAS. His PhD, entitled Divergent Paths, discussed conflicting historiographies in Turkey and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s.

Dr Michael Erdman

His variety of interests and specialities can be further discovered in his written work– a wealth of articles published in academic journals and on his blog. Learning about his plans to showcase material related to Armenia and the Armenian diaspora from the British Library collection was especially exciting.

Back then, in early 2024, we were only at the beginning of our oral history project Heritage of Displacement (see my first blog post!). We were still in the process of training our volunteers and had not yet started recording interviews. Several of you will be familiar with this moment in the project, either as interviewees or as volunteers. Meeting on common ground and filled with excitement and curiosity about discovering British-Armenian connections, we shared the project’s vision with him and, together, began to see clear links and promising pathways for meaningful conversations.

Independently, we carried on our work for some months. Michael researched the British Library’s rich collection of Armenian material and selected relevant documents. While we were recording and processing interviews, he was busy crafting an exciting display narrative for all to enjoy. We converged again to learn which objects would be displayed, and to brainstorm the main themes we could draw from the relationship between the exhibited pieces and the contents of the interviews. On our end, I sent snippets of interviews to him as very small teasers, just a taste of the wealth of stories and voices we were collecting. It was at this point that we started to see the mounting potential there was in marrying contemporary oral histories with the centuries-old material heritage preserved in the Library. For instance, while Michael was considering including a page from a 1914 Egyptian-Armenian almanack, I recalled that we had testimonies from UK Armenians who had lived in Egypt, offering a complementary perspective on the Armenian community there. Similarly, several Cypriot-Armenians we interviewed spoke about their memories of the Melkonian Institute in Nicosia—an oral history that resonated with the decision to feature a photograph of the school in the display, and so on.

Michael agreed to assemble the audio clips into a few broad themes, which allowed us to include as many clips as possible. Last spring and summer became an intense period of work: studying the interview summaries prepared by our dedicated volunteers (see blog post 2), carefully listening through more than 50 hours of recording, and selecting compelling passages to shape into coherent, dynamic audio clips. We created far more clips than the exhibition could accommodate, but this effort is not wasted—they will serve future opportunities for sharing the interviews publicly. Each clip was given a title, a concise summary, its duration in minutes and seconds, and a clear indexing system, allowing us to share them with Michael as seamlessly as possible.

Care was also taken to anonymise the clips for the British Library display: only interviewees’ first names would be used, preserving a degree of privacy in the context of such a high-profile institution. Each interviewee was then contacted to confirm their consent for inclusion, and many—understandably—were curious to know which excerpts from their interviews would be featured. They were individually sent these details, and we hope that many of them will have the chance to visit the display in person. 

We explored several physical options for how visitors might engage with the audio: speakers, headphones, tablets, or web links. Exhibiting audio content in a museum–where the visual sense typically dominates–presents both a challenge and an important accessibility question. We also had to weigh considerations of costs, practicality, data safety, and the time constraints of producing and hosting the material. In the end, we chose to rely on visitors’ own smartphones, providing QR codes that link directly to the themed collections of audio clips. Within the exhibition design, this makes the audio presence discrete and “light-touch,” yet highly accessible, avoiding the need for additional hardware such as headphones, audio guides, or tablets. Visitors can simply scan the QR codes for each broad theme, browse a list of clips accompanied by short summaries, and decide what they wish to listen to. 

Our collaboration with Michael has extended well beyond the crucial task of selecting audio clips. It involved drafting an agreement to define the terms of our work together, cross-checking all exhibition texts and labels, coordinating on promotional material, creating URLs and QR codes for the display, and even organising a curator-led presentation (book now). Alternatively, you can read Michael’s detailed account of the display’s contents on his blog to learn more about each exhibited object. As with any large-scale exhibition, there has been a great deal to plan and manage.

We wish every success to this display in the truly magical setting of the British Library’s Treasures Gallery–a space that hosts many of the Library's other treasures, including a Shakespeare first folio and the Beatles' original lyrics drafts! We hope you will also get to explore these other thematic displays when you visit. We are deeply grateful for this opportunity to create connections between past and present; between visual, paper-based material and audio, oral-historical content; between the famous and the anonymous; and across a wide geographical range, from the UK and Armenia to Egypt, India, Cyprus, and beyond. Michael’s expertise and openness have been invaluable, and it has been a pleasure to collaborate with him and his team at the British Library on this exciting project celebrating the Armenian community in the UK.

Masthead of Aregak along with Queen Elizabeth II's image

Painting of King Levon V meeting Richard II of England from one the BL Royal manuscripts

Painting that goes with Zabelle Boyajian's Armenian Legends and Poetry

Launching Phase 2

By Dr Erica Payet, Programme Manager

Heritage of Displacement is 1 year-old! It is with pride and pleasure that we celebrate this important milestone and look back on the journey so far.

We are very grateful to the volunteers from all walks of life who have reached out to get involved throughout the year. The Armenian Institute has provided volunteer interviewers with free training with the Oral History Society to learn the ropes of proper oral history interviewing, which has its idiosyncrasies. They have also learned how to use the powerful Zoom H4 recorders and lapel microphones, as well as delved into the questions posed by ethical and legal issues. Together, we have carefully recorded, uploaded and saved over 25 interviews so far. We will be continuing to do so in the upcoming months: the interview phase was supposed to end when the next phase would begin, in early December, but we realised we still have the capacity to record several more interviews, as many of you are looking forward to seeing your own interview scheduled. You can visit our previous blog post to see our project timeline.

This year, many of the Armenian Institute’s events have been thought of as part of the Heritage of Displacement project, to foster reflection and discussion around the themes tackled in the interviews, but also to enhance the importance of recording family histories, preserving images and heirlooms with digitisation. There have been a splendid variety of approaches to these topics in the programme: discussions with podcast makers, filmmakers, authors and researchers about the importance of documenting history, and various methods to tell and record people’s stories; different angles of reflection around the idea of home, homeland, and placemaking; meeting creative members of the Armenian diaspora and get a glimpse of how their hybrid identities impact their work in literature, cinema, poetry, theatre and music; a writing workshop to craft poetry from photographs to express oneself in new and inventive ways; and of course events that celebrate Armenian traditions and heritage. In September we had a special event for our volunteers, in which we invited them to a documentary screening followed by a festive gathering. This was a nice opportunity to meet each other and chat about the project, while enjoying nibbles from Jakob’s restaurant. More exciting events are upcoming in 2025!

The project’s next phase has already been kickstarted! It is now time for the more quiet, desk-based phase of processing, a hugely important stage in being able to make the interviews openly accessible to the public. Again with the help of volunteers, it consists in producing summaries of each interview’s contents. Summaries provide a guide to what topics have been discussed in the interviews and where to find them, and as such are essential for research purposes. They are a point of entry into the recordings and help with their discoverability, thanks to the power of key-word search. 

In addition, we have to carry out sensitivity reviews of the material we collected, to ensure its compliance with the law before it can be made available for public access. For instance, we must check that the interviews do not contain libellous or illegal information, and that they comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018. The purpose of the sensitivity review is to make sure the interviewee did not mention anything damaging about living and identifiable individuals. The Armenian Institute has put into place a rigorous process to comply with that regulation.

We need all the ears we can get to help us in that mammoth task of carefully listening to these many hours of recordings! Get in touch if you are interested in taking part, even if you have not been involved with the project thus far. After two successful training sessions in November and December, more sessions will be scheduled in 2025 to learn these. The training is conducted online, and only lasts under one hour, so do not hesitate to register when they will be announced!

You get to make a real impact getting involved through this phase: you have the opportunity to input on what ultimately gets to be heard from the interviews. Indeed, we listen to your ideas of particularly interesting passages or delightful extracts that you think should be included in the final exhibition, to help us make selections. 

Through this project, we work to record family stories and personal relationships with cultural traditions. This project responds to the urgent need to document and preserve Armenian diaspora heritage, and to keep Armenian heritage accessible and relevant to new generations. If you are interested in taking part, email me today at erica@armenianinstitute.org.uk to get more information and to be made aware as soon as the next training sessions are announced. 

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players, they support projects that connect people and communities to heritage, like Heritage of Displacement. We are grateful for their support. 

Oral History in the Making

By Dr Erica Payet, Programme Manager

Almost eight months ago, on November 7, 2023, The Armenian Institute officially launched Heritage of Displacement: Oral Histories from the UK Armenian Communities (2023–2026), thanks to a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, using money raised by National Lottery players.

That was a few days after I took up my post as the Armenian Institute’s new Programme Manager. I am an art historian specialising in the history of photography and photojournalism, the arts from the Middle East, and the relationship between war and visual culture. I have over twelve years of experience working both in the art market and the non-profit cultural sector, as well as teaching art history and theory at the university level. When joining the Armenian Institute’s team, I hit the ground running to kickstart this ambitious memory project. I am delighted to now share with you how we have been doing so far!

The core aim of this project is to help British-Armenian communities take part in preserving their heritage of displacement, migration, and resettlement. Family stories and personal relationships with cultural traditions are being recorded and preserved, with a desire to shed light on paths of migration, and how Armenians have recreated ‘home’ in the UK. The plan for this new digital archive of recorded interviews, material heritage, and photographs is to be hosted on a dedicated online platform that will remain available as a resource for the community and for academic research.

At the heart of the project: our volunteers

Heritage of Displacement officially took off in November 2023, starting with a public announcement through our online channels, and the launch of our marketing campaign to recruit both volunteer interviewers and interviewees. Recruiting volunteers has been an incredibly rewarding process, with lots of interest from a variety of people from the community, Armenian or not, from different generations, with a variety of backgrounds and motivations for taking part. An impressive figure of sixty-nine people (more than double what we were hoping for!) got in touch with us to get involved as interviewers. A bit more slowly, interested interviewees’ messages also started trickling into my inbox. Some were perhaps, and understandably so, a little more hesitant to come forward, but each and every one of them was giving me hints of fascinating life stories and family trajectories, which they were generously offering to share.  

It was also at this stage of the project that we were able to detail our understanding of the profile of participants. We decided to be explicit that we are not looking solely for testimonies from the older generation. A key part of this project has been to understand how the younger generations live with the heritage of their ancestors’ displacement. This is why we do not have a target age for interviewees, which allows us to cherish the stories of younger UK Armenians, as well as their grandparents: the way they have experienced this legacy in their own life, what home means to them, what their connection to Armenia and Armenian is, or is not, the way they have grappled with family narratives of migration, with generational exchange, etc.

Training with the Oral History Society

An important and key stage in the project has been our engagement with the Oral History Society, whose representative and trainer, Rib Davis, helped and guided us with great patience. In early 2024, he started training the first of our volunteers in the nuances and challenges of conducting in-person interviews for oral history preservation.

Volunteers also learnt to use the Zoom H5 recorder, lapel microphones, and all the ancillary equipment for a quality audio recording. We discussed the technique of photogrammetry (3D reproduction of objects with the help of multiple photographs). I worked closely with the volunteers in the crafting and completion of the administrative documents that were necessary to officialise everyone’s involvement and structure the project behind the scenes.

We also produced a list of resources that our volunteers can tap into, if they feel the need to educate themselves further about the history of the Armenians, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the notions of diaspora, home, etc. before delving into their interviews.

Recording stories

At present, we still continue our outreach to individuals who are interested in sharing their stories with us. It is always an immense pleasure to hear from a new interested participant (if you are reading this and you feel this could be you, please get in touch here). UK Armenians’ stories and anecdotes, from the extraordinary to the mundane, are always captivating. This project, as a serious oral history endeavour, is not about putting forward exceptional stories, but about collecting a multitude of life narratives, without judgement about their potential to impress or not. It is in the collective that the project finds its power. This is why, when people hesitate, thinking their story may not be “worth recording,” I always encourage them to participate anyway: we think it is important to pay attention to everybody’s contributions, big or small, long or short. We can only discover patterns and build a collective memory when we listen to several stories together. 

In March 2024, shortly after a few teams of volunteers had completed the training, we began matching them with interviewees, mostly in pairs. With this, a considerable stage in the project had started, one that presented great logistical challenges, but that also was at the core of what we always endeavoured to do: meeting, talking, recording, and sharing stories. With two sets of recording devices at our disposal, and several people’s schedules to align simultaneously over several weeks, we have relied on everyone’s flexibility, motivation, and patience to successfully conduct each interview. With 20 interviews completed or scheduled in London so far, we are about halfway through the project's ambitious initial goal of 40 interviews in London and 8 in Manchester. The interview stage will close in November of this year, so we need to keep pushing and continue interviewing as much as possible over the summer and autumn.

Reaching out to Manchester

I mentioned 8 interviews being planned in Manchester. Indeed, as many of you know, Manchester is home to the second largest Armenian community in the UK, where Armenians started settling in the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the cotton and silk trade. Manchester is also home to the first ever Armenian church in the country, established 154 years ago, in 1870. Testament to this early and deep settlement is an important oral history project which took place there a few years ago, entitled Aratta and led by Zara Hakobyan. This existing collection of 15 oral testimonies has recently become accessible at Manchester Public Library’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust. At Manchester University, in the city’s Armenian restaurants, churches, schools and clubs, the presence of the old settlement of Armenian silk merchants is noticeable throughout the city, and this presence resonates throughout the larger North West region. 

We have recruited a small number of interviewers in Manchester who are awaiting their turn to start interviewing. The teams there are not complete, so if you are interested in joining us as interviewers, we would love to hear from you before July 15! But most importantly, we are looking for people from the Manchester Armenian community to become interviewees. We hope to hear from more of you to continue showcasing the kaleidoscope of experiences that Armenians in Manchester and its region represent.
Get in touch here.

What is next? 

When the interview stage will be complete, we will tackle the audio editing and the transcription phase, all tasks that will require further, and different, volunteer engagement. 

Looking further into the future, we have been discussing with potential exhibition partners behind the scenes, with some exciting announcements yet to come! 

We are also planning a social event for this autumn to gather our volunteer interviewers together. This will be an opportunity for us to show them our appreciation, give them an opportunity to mingle with the other members of this incredibly talented and motivated group, and share their experiences. We hope it will be a moment for reflection, but also a festive and friendly time to relax and look forward to the project’s next steps together. 

* You are volunteering for Heritage of Displacement and would like to submit a text about the project to be published as a blog post on the Armenian Institute website? Please email erica@armenianinstitute.org.uk. We welcome all your contributions, be they reflective pieces, essays, creative writing, or narratives of your experience. 

Acknowledgements

What a journey managing this ambitious project has been so far! The announcement day in November 2023 finally came after a long period of preparatory work that involved many individuals, whose work we rely on today. They contributed to elaborating the project’s theoretical basis, aims, long-term vision and chronology, before drafting and submitting the grant application in 2022. 

I cannot but use this opportunity to acknowledge those who have been behind this ambitious initiative, in particular our former Chair of Trustees, Dr Rebecca Jinks. Dr Jinks is a historian of genocide and humanitarianism at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has notably studied post-genocide reconstruction of the Armenian community. Thanks are also due to Dr Hratch Tchilingirian, scholar, sociologist and activist who was an Associate of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University, specialising in Middle Eastern and Armenian Studies, with a particular focus on cultural identity politics, homeland-diaspora relations, sociology of religion, and inter-ethnic conflicts in the Middle East and Eurasia. Dr Tchilingirian was also the Director of the Armenian Diaspora Survey, a separate Gulbenkian-Armenian Institute project which identified a need for more community oral history and recording projects in the UK. Other early supporters included the Manchester Armenian Church board, in particular our interlocutor Penny Evenson. Initial advice and support were also received from two academics with an interest in the oral histories of the Armenian community, Dr Sossie Kasbarian of Stirling University in Scotland, and Dr Jo Laycock from Manchester University. They should all be thanked for their contributions, along with others who worked tirelessly on initiating the project, including former Institute directors Tatevik Ayvazyan and Susan Pattie, as well as Ruby Chorbajian. 

The National Lottery Heritage Fund grant was finally obtained at a time of great changes for the Armenian Institute. Dr Juan de Lara took up his new post of director of the Institute in the summer of 2023. He allowed the ground work of the project to continue and to become more and more detailed, carrying the project forward despite obstacles. His dedication and flexibility are boundless, and he steers us to keep the overall vision in mind at all times. Maria Kazarian, the Institute’s former Programme Manager, worked on developing these preparatory stages, notably in drafting a detailed schedule and providing an initial reflection on interview topics. Our successive account managers at the National Lottery Heritage Fund have also been instrumental in guiding us through the project funding, we could not have done it without them!

The National Lottery Heritage Fund is the largest funder for the UK’s heritage. Using money raised by National Lottery players they support projects that connect people and communities to heritage. Their vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. From historic buildings, our industrial legacy and the natural environment, to collections, traditions, stories and more. Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. They believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.