ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the growing scholarship on that involvement and traces how Armenians senses of belonging and identities have shifted over time. Seminal studies on modern Middle Eastern history have often focused on the political relationship between the state and its population. Categorizing a population as a minority without analyzing its construction and examining how the state and other communities have deployed the label, and how and why that status has changed over time, ensures their historiographic marginalization. People's unawareness of the Gezi graveyard demonstrates a broader unfamiliarity with Ottoman Armenians and with the power of Istanbul's Ottoman Armenians, who possessed a graveyard at the center of the imperial capital. The Gezi protests illustrate the double marginalization of Middle Eastern Armenians. As the representative of the Armenian millet, Armenian church officials automatically assumed secular and religious powers. In Lebanon the Armenian Church plays both secular and religious roles.