Project SAVE Releases New Calendar: `Armenians Roll out the Carpet’

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By Weekly Staff – on September 24, 2009

By Laura Bilazarian Purutyan

WATERTOWN, Mass. – Oriental rugs have long decorated the daily life of
Armenians, from New Julfa to New Jersey, Caesarea to California. This
fall, Project SAVE Photograph Archives will present the 2010 Archives
calendar, `Armenians Roll out the Carpet,’ which flashes back to
scenes of Armenians and their carpets in both vintage black and white
and contemporary color throughout the homeland and diaspora.

Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Inc. was founded in 1975 by
Ruth Thomasian with the vision of `building the collective memory of
the Armenian people through the documentation and preservation of
photographs.’ For Thomasian, each image in the Project SAVE collection
goes far beyond simply pictures of ancestors. Armenians were the
dominant native photographers in the Middle East, largely responsible
for producing the very images that Project SAVE is seeking to
preserve. The growing Project SAVE collection now includes over 30,000
photographs and 1,000 hours of donor interviews.

To produce the calendar, the Project SAVE staff started making choices
from several hundred photos featuring carpets and creating a theme for
each month to reflect the variety of subject matter, time periods,
places, and photo donors. Project SAVE’s calendar sparks the
imagination, as each caption reads like a story and conveys the donor,
date, background, location, and what’s going on in the photo.

One photograph in `Armenians Roll out the Carpet’ shows the Yale
University dorm room of Paul Kebabian draped in carpets. Arriving from
Turkey to study in the 1870s, Kebabian soon opened a rug store in New
Haven, Conn. Those families without the financial capital to become
rug dealers discovered the rug cleaning business; a 1930’s photograph
shows members of the Zakian extended family with rugs drying in their
home.

Another photograph dates back to 1937 in St. Paul, Minn. The Armenian
community of St. Paul participated in one of the early Festival of
Nations events, displaying their collection of hand-woven Armenian
rugs and other cultural arts.

The calendar also shows carpets in some unexpected places, like the
treatment room of the National Hospital of Sepastia, where hanging
carpets surround a patient and physician in an 1889 photograph. In a
portrait from the outskirts of New York City, a family embellishes
their picnic along the Hudson using a spacious oriental as an outdoor
carpet.

For Project SAVE, the annual calendar is a way to show the Armenian
community of today and tomorrow its own story. These calendars
function as both `calling cards’ to the public and `finding aids’ or
methods of describing, organizing, and providing access to the
archival treasure.

To become a sponsor of the `Armenians Roll out the Carpet’ calendar
with a personalized remembrance line, call Project SAVE at (617)
923-4542. Order forms for the calendar are available at
For more information, email
archives@projectsave.org.