Abstract

Though the deportation of the Armenians of Julfa during the 1604 "Great Surgun" remains the most prominent example of forced displacement in the seventeenth-century Armenian experience, it represents but a single star in a broader constellation of razed cities along the Ottoman-Safavid frontier. This paper explores why Julfan memory remained uniquely resilient, arguing that its prominence was a deliberate construction of the Vardapetk’ (scholarly priests) of New Julfa. By establishing a scriptorium in the Isfahani suburb as early as 1607, these clerics functioned as a “memory factory,” utilizing the Ołb (city lament) genre to frame their exile in biblical terms—likening Julfa to a latter-day Jerusalem and the Julfans to the exiled Judeans. In doing so, the Julfan authors participated in a continuous literary tradition that had previously chronicled the falls of cities such as Jerusalem (1187), Edessa (1144), and Tabriz (1585). By consistently evoking the Book of Lamentations, the Ołb genre enabled the Vardapetk’ to interpret their communal plight through the framework of a “Chosen People” suffering from divine punishment. Furthermore, the model of the Judeans in Babylonian captivity provided a template for the Armenian community in exile to retain its distinct Apostolic faith and, by extension, its communal identity. Crucially, these writers were not exclusively Julfan; rather, the Diocese of New Julfa was a central hub for the clerical diaspora, which allowed for a broader Armenian identity to be subsumed under a centralized Julfan idiom. Through the analysis of works by scribes such as Hovhannes Makuetsi, Nerses of Bitlis, and Davit’ Gałametsi, I demonstrate how the Diocese utilized medieval themes of łaribut'iwn (exile) and pandxtut'iwn (uprootedness), to create a dialectic between displacement as a permanent historical condition and the sanctity of the homeland left behind. Ultimately, I also consider how this diocesan project reverberated beyond the page; by constructing churches that remapped the sacred topography of Old Julfa onto the Isfahani suburb, the Vardapetk’ effectively "imported Zion" to Safavid Iran.