Cohabitating in Captivity: Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (Zarevand) at the Women’s Section of Istanbul’s Central Prison (1915–1918)

Vartouhie Calantar Nalbandian (1893–1978), the only Armenian woman known to have been arrested by the Ottoman Turkish authorities in Istanbul in the spring of 1915, was born in Bursa to a Russian Armenian father and an Ottoman Armenian mother. One of the first generation of Armenian girls who received a European university education, Vartouhie sent letters home from Lausanne that would change the course of her life. In 1915, the Ottoman police raided the family home as Tavit Kalantar had been a high-level educator in Armenian schools. They found Vartouhie’s letters to her parents and her father’s papers, which they claimed included incriminating evidence. In August 1915, a military tribunal convicted Vartouhie and her father of propagating Armenian separatist ideology. They served two-and-a-half years in Constantinople’s Central Prison and, thanks to their Russian citizenship, were released after the Bolsheviks signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Central Powers, requiring “prisoners of war” to be freed. Vartouhie published her prison memoirs in 16 installments in the feminist journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman), the first prison memoir by a woman in the Middle East and one of the very few for the Ottoman Empire. In 1921, Vartouhie emigrated to the US, where she married Zaven Nalbandian, a high-level Armenian Revolutionary Federation member who participated in Operation Nemesis. In 1926, they published an important book in Armenian on the pan-Turkic movement under the penname Zarevand. In 1971, the newly minted sociology professor Vahakn Dadrian translated their book into English as United and Independent Turania: Aims and Designs of the Turks. Their historical and political analysis, the first study of the Armenian Genocide in the United States, argues that Turkish irredentism had been a real threat for Armenians who stood in the way of the unification of Turkic peoples under one state. This chapter writes a hitherto unknown feminist and historian into Armenian, Turkish, and Ottoman historiographies as well as genocide and prison studies.