For Kevork Kahvedjian, life’s a snap

[Armine]

For Kevork Kahvedjian, life’s a snap

 

by Gil Zohar

 

JERUSALEM -

 

Photographer Kevork Kahvedjian, 63, owes his life’s work to his wife Hasmig’s decision one day in 1989 to clean out the attic of their house in the Old City’s Armenian Quarter.

 

There to their amazement they discovered box after box stuffed with thousands of historic but long-forgotten silver nitrate and glass plate negatives of Jerusalem, Mandate Palestine, Transjordan and Syria shot by his father Elia in the 1920s, Thirties and Forties.

 

A dutiful son and skilled portrait photographer in his own right, Kahvedjian Jr. began cataloging the negatives, and the following year mounted an exhibit at the American Colony Hotel.

 

“It had such a positive impact,” Kahvedjian remembers. “My father told me ‘I never thought my pictures would be liked so much.’”

 

Indeed Elia Kahvedjian’s evocative B&W photos won critical acclaim, and in 1998 his son published Jerusalem Through My Father’s Eyes. A year later Kahvedjian Sr. passed away and the book became his epitaph. But the impact of his documentary photographs continued to grow; by 2003 his son ceased working as a professional portrait photographer to concentrate on marketing his father’s life oeuvre.

 

“I stopped everything except the old photographs. There is such a demand,” he says.

 

Attesting to the truth of that statement, a steady stream of customers entered Kahvedjian’s key money studio on al-Khanqa Street in the Christian Quarter during the course of this interview. The mounted photos range from NIS 90 to 250, while Jerusalem Through My Father’s Eyes sells for NIS 230.

 

“I sell a lot,” acknowledges the photographer turned publisher. “I don’t need more work.”

 

Continuing the family tradition, Kahvedjian’s two sons Elie and Reuben are both professional photographers. Their color work is sold alongside their late grandfather’s pictures. Kahvedjian’s archive of 25,000 wedding, family and individual portraits has been packed away.

 

Kahvedjian is presently completing a second volume of his father’s photos, while his sons are working on a “Then and Now” volume contrasting the changes in Jerusalem over the last seven decades.

 

As well, Kahvedjian has begun cataloging the more than 2,000 negatives his father shot in neighboring Middle Eastern countries before 1948. All of the photographs are being digitally scanned.

 

“I hope to continue and finish before my time is up,” says Kahvedjian. Not surprisingly, his hobby is photography. “I still keep my old Nikon FM. It’s a battle tank. My sons prefer digital cameras.”

 

* * *

 

Elia Kahvedjian (1910 – 1999), named Yeghia in Armenian, personifies the tragic history of Jerusalem’s tight-knit Armenian community today numbering 2,100 members. He was born in Urfa, Turkey, a city in the fertile plain of upper Mesopotamia not far from Haran where the patriarch Abraham once lived. At the age of 5 he was caught up in the maelstrom of the Armenian Genocide – in which 160 members of his family were murdered.

 

Together with thousands of Armenians from eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, Urfa’s Christians were deported into the desert. “My father used to tell me how in the death march he saw piles of corpses and burnt people,” recalls Kahvedjian Jr., who is named in memory of his murdered uncle. With little water or food left, his father was handed over to a Kurd passing the famished column near Ras al-“Ain, Syria. “Walking away, they heard the machine guns massacre the column,” says Kahvedjian Jr.

 

Suffering from acute diarrhea, the five-year-old boy was sold for two gold coins to an Assyrian ironsmith in Mardin, Turkey. Three years later he was thrown out into the street to beg. Rescued by missionaries from the American Near East Relief Foundation – who saved 100,000 Armenian orphans after World War I – he was sent to an orphanage in Nazareth.

 

Garro Boghosian, one of his teachers there, was an avid photographer and used to take Kahvedjian into the field to carry his heavy photo equipment – initiating a life-long passion for photography.

 

Leaving the Nazareth orphanage at the age of 16, Kahvedjian and 10 other youths came to Jerusalem’s St. James Convent in the Armenian Quarter. He began apprenticing at the New Gate studio of a photographer named Toumaian, and then got a job with Garabed Krikorian on Jaffa Road. In 1930 he started working for Hananiah Bros., who also had a studio on Jaffa Road. Saving his money, in 1936 he bought one of their three shops on Jaffa Road by Barclay’s Bank (today part of the Safra Square municipal complex).

 

Kahvedjian shows a laminated card issued by Mandate bureaucrats stating “Approved Military Photographer No. 7.”“I used to call him 007,” he laughs.

 

One of those photos from the British regime, shot from a RAF biplane, is an aerial view of the Old City and Mount Scopus. Thanks to those ties with the Mandate regime, two British Intelligence colonels came to Kahvedjian’s studio late in 1947 to warn him of a pending Arab riot that destroyed the New Commercial Centre following the Nov. 29, 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine. The two officers helped Kahvedjian load up his equipment and negatives on two trucks and deliver the trove to safety in the Armenian Convent. Two days later Kahvedjian’s studio, today on the site of the Dan Pearl Hotel, was ransacked, together with all of Mamilla.

 

Kahvedjian and his family also sought safety in the convent. From there they went to Aleppo, Syria to stay with his older sister – who had survived the 1915 holocaust by being sold into a harem. After eight months, the family returned to Jerusalem, now divided between Hashemite Jordan and the newly established State of Israel.

 

Kahvedjian opened a new studio at 14 al-Khanqa Street. The rest is history.

 

- 30 –

 

Cutline:

 

Kevork Kahvedjian (photo Gil Zohar)

 

 

 

Justice delayed

 

Between 1915 and 1918 the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Muslim Turks, carried out a policy to eliminate its Christian Armenian minority. This genocide was preceded by a series of massacres in 1894-1896 and in 1909, and was followed by another series of slaughters beginning in 1920. By 1922 Armenians had been eradicated from their historic homeland.

 

Of the 2.1 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, some 1.5 million died in the forced march into the desert. Ottoman Generals Cemal, Enver and Talat were tried in absentia and condemned to death for the crimes in this genocide.

 

The architect of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, told a Swiss reporter in 1926: “The young Turks should be made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.”

 

But unlike Germany which contritely acknowledges the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity and has paid billions in reparations to Jews, Turkey denies that it committed genocide nearly a century ago. Armenian activists like Kevork Hintlian of Jerusalem, author of History of the Armenians in the Holy Land, hope that Turkey's pending application to join the European Union will finally lead to the recognition of their suffering.

 

"They died as if they were liars," the historian said with barely concealed outrage.

 

- GZ