«Ավերված աշխարհի վերակառուցումը» - Վահե ԹԱՇՃՅԱՆ

The article by Vahé Tachjian, presented in an interview with Armen Khechoyan, is devoted to the professional and scholarly path of a historian of the Armenian diaspora, as well as to his large-scale internet project «hУշամատյան» (Houshamadyan) dedicated to the reconstruction of the pre-war everyday life of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

Biographical and Scholarly Context
The material consistently traces the author's educational and research trajectory:

studies at Yerevan State University, followed by studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium);
defense of a doctoral dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, devoted to Cilicia and the border zone between Syria and Turkey in the 1920s, and to French and Turkish policy toward national minorities, including Armenians;
work at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin on a project concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Family Memory as a Research Impulse
Particular attention is given to the author's personal genealogy — roots in Urfa, Sebastia, and Sis — and to the chance discovery, through archival photographs, of his ancestors' house in Sis, which becomes a symbolic example of the restoration of a lost family history against the background of the tragedy of 1915.

Archival Work and Publishing Projects
A significant part of the text is devoted to collaboration with Raymond Kévorkian and Levon Nordiguian on the preparation of foundational publications:

a jubilee history of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) based on the archives of Paris and Cairo;
a book on the resettlement of Armenian refugees in Syria and Lebanon, drawing on the unique photographic archive of the Jesuit mission in Beirut, including the aerial photography of Father Antoine Poidebard.

The article describes the role of the AGBU and the League of Nations' Refugee Commission in the construction of the Armenian quarters of Bourj Hammoud and Nor Adana, as well as the dramatic story of the severing of the organization's ties with Soviet Armenia during the period of Stalinist repressions.

The «hУշամատյան» (Houshamadyan) Project
Central to the article is a description of the non-profit internet project, founded by the author together with Silvina (Argentina/Berlin) with the support of a private benefactor. The project's key features are as follows:

its goal is to document the everyday life of Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire before the Genocide, without including materials on the Genocide itself;
work with the legacy of hometown associations (Marash, Sis, Aintab), including the digitization and scholarly reassessment of memorial (compatriotic) publications;
collaboration with Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Haigazian University in Beirut, the Nubarian Library, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Armenia, and the archive of the Jesuit mission;
translation of materials into English and Turkish as a means of establishing a shared historical dialogue with the Turkish audience.

Conclusion
The key conclusion of the article is that the reconstruction of the destroyed world of pre-war Armenian life is possible only through the synthesis of professional archival work, international scholarly cooperation, and personal family memory, and that digital technologies open up new possibilities for preserving and disseminating this heritage among descendants scattered around the world and among the inhabitants of historic Armenian lands.