Ani Guestbooks Recording Visitor Impressions, 1900s-1910s Item Info
Guestbook 1
Guestbook 2
- Description:
- Two guestbooks kept in Ani during Nikolai Marr’s excavations have reached us. One of them bears the handwritten title in Armenian: Տպավորությունների Մատյան Անիի Պատմա-Հնագիտական Հուշարձանները Այցելողների 1901-1912 թթ [Book of Impressions of the Visitors of Ani’s Historico-Archeological Monuments]. The second guestbook has a Russian title: Книга записи впечатлений посетителей города Ани [Notebook of the Impressions of the Visitors of the City of Ani], and contains later entries. While much of the cultural production from Ani is of the highly official, serenely scholarly and artistically refined kind, the guestbooks kept at the site open a unique window into the global vernacular afterlives generated by its ruins. These guestbooks contain entries in various languages and drawings from people of diverse walks of life – local Armenians, including students, diaspora Armenians writing in broken Armenian or in another language, and non-Armenian visitors. Inscribing expectations and emotional states conditioned by perceptions and education, their at once highly personal and public notes straddle epigraphic, epistolary and poetic genres. They frequently overflow into grandiosity, taking the form of a melancholic meditation on the Armenian as well as universally human condition.
- Subjects:
- Nikolai Marr Guestbooks Ani (Turkey)
Citation:
"Ani Guestbooks Recording Visitor Impressions, 1900s-1910s", Ani, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), /items/ani_042.html