On Wednesday, October 23rd, Zohrab Center intern Luiza Ghazaryan (NYU ’26) presented original research at the NYU Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholars Program Research Symposium.
Conducted under the supervision of Zohrab Center director, Dr. Jesse S. Arlen, the basis of Luiza’s research was an over 800 page handwritten manuscript by Pilibos Kazanjian, entitled Խարբերդ եւ իր գիւղերը (Kharpert and its Villages), written in a form of Western Armenian with large impact from the Kharpert dialect and full of borrowings from Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Greek. Working with Dr. Arlen, Luiza translated selected portions from this lengthy, unpublished manuscript.
Kazanjian was born to an Armenian family in Kasirig Village in the Kharpert province of the Ottoman Empire. However, after the massacres of 1894-1897 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed, he migrated to America with his wife and five children, eventually settling on a farm in the Central Valley of California (Fresno area).
After publishing several short articles in the local Fresno Armenian paper “Mushag” (Մշակ) (see issues 3, 7, and 14 in July 1931), he was asked by his compatriots to write a book on the topic, encapsulating stories and memories from the region of Kharpert. The result was over 800 handwritten pages on Kharpert and many villages in the region, detailing local customs, traditions, and memories, generally falling into the Houshamadyan (“Memory book”) genre.
Luiza’s research focused especially on Kazanjian’s information on the marriage customs of Kharpert as well as the traditional medicine, practiced mostly by the elder women of the region.
At the research symposium, Luiza also participated on a panel surrounding the topic of storytelling and research methodology.
Luiza Ghazaryan is a Biology major at NYU (class of 2026), who is also pursuing minors in Creative Writing and Chemistry. She began working at the Zohrab Center in summer 2023, as a Lily E. Jelalian summer intern, a program generously funded by Dean Shahinian and has continued at the Zohrab Center since that time.
We congratulate Luiza on her research and achievements!
