The Armen Aroyan Collection

The first time Armen Aroyan took a group of Armenians to visit the villages of their ancestors was 1991. At that time, he wasn’t sure if this was a one-time visit, but it came after a few trips he had undertaken with a small group of friends.

Armen Aroyan has deeded the approximately 400 hours of video recordings to the USC Institute of Armenian Studies to be digitized, indexed, and made available to researchers worldwide.

An engineer by profession, Aroyan planned that first trip with seven travelers, whom he began to call pilgrims. Over the next 27 years, there were around 100 more trips and 1,480 travelers.

Each trip was recorded in meticulous detail, on videotape. Throughout the years, the quality and accessibility of video developed and Aroyan’s recordings underwent format changes. But the content remained the same: individual travelers reciting, singing, crying, telling stories, sharing bits of Armenian history, and conversing with the local population.

This is a very specific way of studying inherited memory. It is also a window into understanding relationship to places with which so many identify, but which are unknown and unfamiliar.

The Armen Aroyan Collection is one piece of the larger Diaspora Documentation & Digitization initiative.