Sopon Bezirdjian and Theodore Birch (Iskender Bezirdjian): a father and son story of creative and political action in the Ottoman Empire, England, and France
Coffee will be served from 2pm.
Sopon Bezirdjian had an illustrious career as a decorator of Ottoman palaces in Constantinople. He moved to Victorian Britain in the 1880s, where he published a pattern book and repositioned himself as an Owen-Jones-style authority on ‘Oriental’ ornament. As well as working as a jobbing designer in Manchester, he designed two monumental pavilions for the Paris 1900 Exposition, and his archive of drawings, preserved at the Manchester Metropolitan University Library, also holds a few undated seemingly political works. Sopon’s son, Iskender Bezirdjian, who changed his name to Theodore Birch, worked as a journalist and printer, mainly in Paris, founding the Ottoman Philanthropic Society with other Armenian luminaries like Calouste Gulbenkian in 1908. This paper reconsiders Sopon and his artistic works in the context of Iskender/Theodore’s activism. We will investigate, through these two former Ottoman-Armenians in Britain and Paris, the changing orientations, even of elite Armenians like Bezirdjian/Birch and Gulbenkian, to the developing violence and humanitarian situation in their former homeland. What means did they use to raise their voices, and why did this appear to take so long in this group of Armenians?
Date: 21 November 2024, 14:00 (Thursday, 6th week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue: Balliol College, Broad Street OX1 3BJ
Venue Details: Massey Room
Speaker: Dr Alyson Wharton (Lincoln)
Organising department: Faculty of History
Organisers: Joe Leidy (Exeter), John-Paul Ghobrial
Organiser contact email address: movingstories@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Religion and Mobility in Late Ottoman and Modern Middle Eastern History (The ‘Moving Stories’ Seminar)
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Alexia Lewis