photo #9388706

Armenian woman who was forcibly tattooed during the Armenian Genocide between 1915-1923... She survived the Armenian Genocide. But the violence followed her onto her own skin. During the mass deportations and killings of Armenians beginning in 1915, thousands of Armenian women and girls were abducted, sold, enslaved, forcibly married or absorbed into Muslim households. Some were children when they disappeared. And some were tattooed. Photographs taken in the aftermath show Armenian survivors with elaborate markings across their faces, foreheads, chins, hands and arms. The tattoos could reflect the Kurdish, Arab or Bedouin communities into which the women had been taken. For survivors who had been forcibly assimilated, those marks could become permanent evidence of a life imposed upon them. The woman in this photograph is one of them. We do not need to invent her terror. Her photograph already records what history did to women like her. Many Armenian women lost their families, their homes, their language and even their names. Some were converted to Islam and given new identities. When rescue organizations later searched for Armenian women and children, returning was not always simple. Years might have passed. Some had children. Some feared rejection. Others carried visible marks connecting them to the households in which they had lived. The tattoos could not tell anyone whether a woman had submitted willingly, resisted, adapted to survive, or simply had no choice. That is what makes photographs like this so haunting. Genocide was not only an attempt to kill a people. For women who were abducted, it could also mean an attempt to rewrite who they were. Yet she survived long enough to stand before a camera. Someone photographed her. And more than a century later, we are still looking back. #drthehistories