Authors

Discussion

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the figure of the bantoukhd (migrant worker) from Ottoman Armenia and Kurdistan remained a major preoccupation of reform-minded Constantinople Armenian intellectuals. Both the visibility of the bantoukhds’ abject poverty in the imperial capital, and the turbulent social, economic and political situation in their homelands, always remained at the forefront of these intellectuals’ concerns. The most visible among them across the city were the hamals (porters), (mainly) men who lived in misery in slum-like conditions in the city’s hans (inns). By the early 1880s, a handful of mainly western-trained Constantinople Armenian painters, closely associated with the city’s emerging vernacular Western Armenian-language Realist literary milieu, began to engage (alongside their literary counterparts) with the figure of the bantoukhd more closely. This paper reads these paintings as important visual documents that captured more than mere superficial images of the bantoukhd onto the canvas. Juxtaposing them with contemporary texts and material, including responses to these works, it argues that they also often acted as effective conduits of allegorical content, communicating these intellectuals’ concerns upon the condition of the migrants and the situation in their homelands during a period of stringent and ever-tightening censorship, when the expression of such content in print would have been deemed subversive leading to severe repercussions.