Trauma, belonging and nostalgia: Situating Ünye's Armenians in the displacement of the early 20th century

This study aims at researching the memory of the Armenian community in Ünye and its surroundings, focusing on their sense of belonging, where trauma and nostalgia produce mixed feelings. Ünye is a small town connected to Ordu and is located between the towns of Samsun in the west and Ordu in the east. Prior to the Tehcir of Armenians in 1915 and the Population Exchange in 1924, Ünye was, as was the whole Black Sea coast back then, heavily populated with Armenians and Greeks. This thesis focuses therefore on a particular historical period, when internal and external motives were effective in the displacement of populations and when social changes gained momentum in parallel with the political movements in the Ottoman geography. The population of the Central Black Sea region experienced a significant change with the arrival of Crimean and Caucasian immigrants and the departure of Armenians and Greeks. Using published materials like books, newspapers and memoirs on the one hand, this study also adopts an oral history approach, collecting narratives from both Armenian and non-Armenian inhabitants on their regional memory. The research also consists of a fieldwork conducted mainly in Turkey. Nevertheless, to reach Armenians from the Black Sea region of Turkey, it also included oral and archive sources during visits to Armenia, Lebanon, Greece, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Caucasus (Georgia, Abkhazia).