A Charlatan in Bukhara

One may as well begin with a letter. Among the various materials that my colleague Tigran Matosyan and I have translated and annotated for what we hope will be a forthcoming edition of Armenian-language newspaper reports from tsarist and early Soviet Central Asia is the following item, published in the Astrakhan-based Lraber on 22 March (old calendar) 1909:

Letter from New Bukhara

28 February

It is now three months that the Armenian priest Ghazaros Hovsep’ian, who has been expelled from St Petersburg and from the cities of Turkestan, and temporarily suspended from his priestly duties, has been living in Old Bukhara. Here and in other cities he performs medical treatment for all illnesses, extorting money from gullible Sarts, Kyrgyz and Jews. Sarts and Jews laughingly tell how the self-proclaimed doctor-priest accepts incurable venereal patients, and how, wearing a cassock and with a pectoral cross on his chest, he swathes Sarts with bandages. On account of his activities of this nature, Armenian communities have expelled him from the following cities: Krasnovodsk, Kizil-Arvat, Askhabad, Kokand, Andizhan, Margelan, Chardzhui and Merv. In this latter city, meanwhile, a trial has begun against the self-proclaimed doctor-priest. This kind of vile behaviour hurts the feelings of our Armenian population, and in the eyes of non-Armenians our reputation is regarded as equal to mud. Now, in order that the Muslim and Jewish population of Bukhara not be given occasion to mock and tell sneering stories about Father Ghazaros’ activities, we hope that the spiritual authorities will be so good as to remove this self-proclaimed doctor-priest. Particularly in a far-flung place such as Bukhara, he is a great dishonour to us émigré Armenians, and it is hard to bear when you hear from non-Armenians various words used with reference to the priest such as ‘He is an expropriator, he is a blackmailer’, and so on.

Surat’ch’i

Regarding the figure of Ghazaros Hovsep’ian, we presently do not know much about him. Unlike most other Armenian priests who were active in tsarist-era Central Asia, he does not seem to feature prominently in archival materials held variously in Yerevan, St Petersburg or Tashkent. He’s almost certainly there, of course, lurking unseen in collections that I haven’t explored, or within files that I’ve ordered and transcribed material from, but where I’ve overlooked the relevant document in question because it hasn’t caught my eye (for who, after all, reads everything?).[1] But the knowledge that a haystack almost certainly has needles in it doesn’t make the process of looking for them any easier, and instead of embarking upon a laborious and possibly unavailing intercontinental archival manhunt in pursuit of one particular Armenian priest in Central Asia out of dozens, we may perhaps do better to assemble what little we know about Hovsep’ian from an alternative, more easily accessible body of material – material, that is, which is accessible both because it’s readable, presenting information in printed form and pre-digested for a popular audience, and because it’s obtainable, thanks to a huge-scale digitisation project that has produced one of the most remarkable troves of historical material anywhere in the world, accessed and downloaded at the mere click of a button. I am referring, of course, to other Armenian-language newspaper reports like the one reproduced above.

From among the countless hundreds of digitised Armenian-language newspaper titles that have been digitised and are available at the website of the National Library of Armenia,[2] Tigran and I in the course of our ongoing book project have spent the last few years working through some 50-odd tsarist- and early Soviet-era titles containing reports from Central Asia. Amongst these materials we have thus far found three other reports featuring Ghazaros Hovsep’ian, all of them dating to the 12-month period before the publication of the afore-mentioned item in Lraber. The first, published on 24 April 1908 in the pages of Mshak, the leading liberal-nationalist Armenian newspaper in Tiflis, is an item of correspondence by Hovsep’ian himself, commemorating the recent death of Arp’iar Arp’iarian (21 December 1851 – 12 February 1908), a prominent Armenian writer who had been assassinated in Egypt.

Merv, 15 April

In the person of the brave journalist Arp’iar, a valiant soldier of the pen has been shot by scoundrels in the land of the pharaohs. As an enthusiastic signatory to the complaint produced by journalists in Tiflis, I am dispatching to your editorial office eleven roubles (11 roubles) in aid of Arp’iar’s memorial; I received this money from those esteemed people whom I visited on the occasion of celebrating Easter; I shall dispatch to your esteemed editorial office a list of these people’s names and the money that remains to be collected, as soon as it amounts to a modest sum.

Father Ghazaros Hovsep’ian

The second item, published on 3 August that year in the pages of the Tiflis newspaper Hoviv,is a report from Kokand, noting Hovsep’ian’s surprise appearance in the city a few months earlier, and his provisional appointment as priest.

Kokand, 18 July

Recently, following the Armenian-Turkish clashes in the Caucasus, the number of Armenians – particularly in Transcaspia, and in these parts more generally – has been growing appreciably day by day and month by month. The Armenians in Kokand, Margelan, Andizhan and Namangan have long felt the need to separate themselves from the pastorship of the Armenian priest in Samarkand, and to form a separate parish, with a separate chapel and a single-classroom parish school in Kokand, but until May this laudable wish remained unresolved as just that – a wish. In May, when Father Ghazaros Hovsep’ian happened to arrive here, many of the parishioners asked the holy father to carry out services and give sermons every Saturday and Sunday. When the holy father graciously carried out the community’s wish, the community elected him as parish priest for a year, and on 20-22 June drew up a petition which they sent to the spiritual authorities in Astrakhan for confirmation.

We hope that the spiritual authorities at the Astrakhan eparchate will hasten to confirm the afore-mentioned honourable Father Ghazaros Hovsep’iants’ as interim priest; and it is the sacred duty of the Armenian community in Kokand to convene an immediate meeting and elect a churchwarden and trustees so as to make preparations in advance, both for the chapel and for the single-classroom parish school, because the academic year is soon approaching.

M.Ch.

And the third piece, again published in Hoviv, this time on 30 November 1908, and again dispatched from Kokand, is another item of correspondence by Hovsep’ian (here rendering his name as Hovsep’iants’) himself, relating however not to his newly assumed pastoral duties but instead to a rather eccentric-sounding claim that he alone possessed publication rights for the works of the recently deceased novelist Grigor Ter-Hovhannisian (1 December 1854 – 12 September 1908), otherwise known as Murats’an.

Kokand, 11 November

In order to avoid various misunderstandings, I consider it my duty to inform readers of your esteemed newspaper that our talented late novelist Murats’an left the job of printing and distributing the nine volumes of all his long stories plus the novel Georg Marzpetuniexclusively to me. As to why, and motivated by what worthy reasons, he took this decision, this will become clear to all my readers in the near future, when I publish the many letters that the deceased wrote to me.

Father Ghazaros Hovsep’iants’

It is vanishingly unlikely, of course, that these four pieces, all from within a single 12-month period, will be the only items by or relating to Ghazaros Hovsep’ian in the Armenian-language press. In each of the above cases, Tigran or I found the item in question by searching not for the personal name Յովսէփեան/Hovsep’ian but rather for the various Central Asian place names - Նոր-Բուխարա/New Bukhara, Մերվ/Merv, Կօկանդ/Kokand, and so on – which indicate an item of potential relevance for our translated edition. Any materials pertaining to this individual’s early life and career prior to his arrival in Central Asia thus inevitably fall outside the parameters of our search, and nor do we presently have any information about what happened to Hovsep’ian after the publication of the afore-mentioned piece in Lraber. What little we know of his life and activities is essentially the result of happenstance.

Say what you will about happenstance, though, but it’s better than nothing: and while we continue to know less about Hovsep’ian than we might like, the four pieces assembled above allow us to plot a rough account of his activities over the course of the period from April 1908 to February 1909. He is first attested in Merv, contributing to Mshak a commonplace expression of pious grief and a sum of money that he has collected from local parishioners while serving in some unstated, apparently supernumerary priestly capacity (Merv’s officially registered Armenian priest at the time being a widely-attested individual called Alek’sandr Papovian). A month later, in May, Hovsep’iants’ turns up unexpectedly in Kokand, far to the east in the Fergana valley, where he starts providing religious services on an informal ad hoc basis, and becomes the subject of an appeal by local parishioners to the Astrakhan eparchal authorities, requesting that the latter formally ratify him as Kokand parish priest. It is unclear what becomes of this appeal, but it would appear that it is either rejected by Astrakhan or rescinded by local parishioners: certainly, by the end of the year Hovsep’ian is evidently no longer in contention for the priestly position, judging from a document in the papers of the Astrakhan Armenian Eparchate held at the Armenian National Archive indicating that on 28 December Kokand parishioners hold an election for a new priest in which Hovsep’ian does not feature as a candidate, and at which they instead elect Father Nerses Abrahamiants’, who has hitherto been serving in Chardzhui and as an interim replacement for the jailed R’uben Bekguliants’ in Samarkand. We don’t know whether by the time of the election Hovsep’ian is still on the scene: the piece from the 30 November issue of Hoviv suggests that he is in Kokand at the time of writing on 11 November, but his precise whereabouts then become unclear until – having at some point been expelled from Kokand? – he later turns up in Bukhara. In the meanwhile, the conventional pious energies attested by the earlier two articles seem to have given way to, or at least made space for, a more mercenary concern with his own financial interests, and there is an oddly cranky tone to his unattested claim that he is Murats’an’s sole authorised executor. – Or is this unfair? Am I allowing my reading of an innocuous item to become distorted by my knowledge of the report of misbehaviour that would be published in Lraber just a couple of months later? Very well, M’lud, I retract any suggestion that Hovsep’ian is here already revealing himself to be a wrong ’un: that would be unwarranted. But the picture that transpires of an itinerant cleric turning up and officiating under the radar in one place after another, while displaying what could charitably be called a healthy sense of self-interest, is at least internally consistent with the unflattering depiction of Hovsep’ian in the February 1909 letter from New Bukhara. And while it is perfectly possible that Surat’ch’i, the pseudonymous author of this letter, has been motivated to write the piece by a sense of personal animus towards Hovsep’ian, the fact that details in the letter chime with details in items written by Hovsep’ian himself suggests at least that he has not simply invented the story.

This being so, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I propose to do something that is presently rather unfashionable amongst most serious Central Asian historians: namely, to take a newspaper report – in this case, the letter in Lraber with which we started this piece – at face value. That is, I propose that by February 1909, some three months after he was last attested in Kokand, Ghazaros Hovsep’ian was indeed living in Bukhara, touting himself to Muslim and Jewish locals as an unofficial priest-cum-doctor, having previously attempted something similar among the various Armenian populations in tsarist Transcaspia and Turkestan –  from Krasnovodsk and Askhabad and Chardzhui, where communities quickly established themselves along the course of the Transcaspian railway, to Andizhan and Kokand in the Fergana Valley, where Armenian settlement accelerated in the years after ca. 1900. And this story, I would suggest, chimes with a couple of little-remarked-upon points that we glean from our sources more generally about social and religious dynamics in early twentieth-century Central Asia.

Let us consider first the picture of Ghazaros Hovsep’ian hawking his services to various Armenian communities in Transcaspia and Turkestan not just as an unofficial priest, as we see attested in the report in the August 1908 issue of Hoviv, but also as an unofficial doctor. This latter detail is an anomalous one, for which we presently find no attestation in our other materials, though Surat’ch’i’s mention of a trial or case (դատ) initiated against Hovsep’ian on account of his behaviour in Merv raises at least the possibility that there may be corroborating testimony somewhere amongst the various court or administrative records presently held at the Uzbekistan Central State Archive or – perhaps less relevantly at the moment, given that nobody in their right mind is going to want to visit Russia any time soon – at the Russian State Historical Archive in St Petersburg (though probably not, alas, at the Turkmenistan National Archive, where one might once have hoped to find materials pertaining to the administration of Merv, but which in recent decades has become so dysfunctional, or even non-functional, that nobody seems entirely clear as to whether it still exists or not). The idea that Hovsep’ian in his dealings with local Armenian communities should have premised his claim to medical authority upon his putative religious status – think of that image of him bandaging up patients while enrobed in his full priestly regalia – furthermore sits in curious tension with the vision of a professionalised Armenian medical culture that accrues from the contemporary Armenian-language press, replete as it is with advertisements for doctors’ practices and dental surgeries and reviews of the latest Armenian-language scholarly works on gynaecology and public hygiene. But, as Sam Knight has recently shown in his terrific book The Premonitions Bureau, the line between rationalism and non-rationalism is a porous one, and there’s nothing like receiving the diagnosis of a conventionally incurable disease, venereal or otherwise, to incline even the most committed empiricist towards all sorts of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo; plus many of the tens of thousands of Armenian labourers and suchlike who streamed into Central Asia may in any case not have been readers of the Tiflis or Baku or Astrakhan press, and were perhaps little concerned with the principles of post-Enlightenment scientific method when deciding their own healthcare options. So it’s perfectly possible that Hovsep’ian should have found a ready market amongst the local Armenian population for his dubious services – even though any success he enjoyed is likely to have proved self-defeating, attracting the attention of those individuals or groups who subsequently drummed him out of town from one end of Central Asia to the other.

A striking point here is that, in Surat’ch’i’s telling, it was local Armenians rather than tsarist officials who did the drumming out of town. While the Russian authorities regularly dispatched errant Armenians from one place to another – frequently, we learn from tsarist administrative materials held at the Georgian Central Historical Archive in Tbilisi, packing troublemakers off to the Volga-Ural region – Hovsep’ian was apparently subjected to a more informal kind of sanction, one enforced not by the ruling authorities but by the community to which he ostensibly belonged. In being subjected to communal sanction, he thus seems to have shared the fate of numerous other Armenians in Central Asia whom we encounter in the pages of the Armenian-language press, all of whom seem to have committed the same cardinal sin: a sin that had nothing to do with medical malpractice, and everything to do with abusing the community’s good faith.

A common thread throughout many of the Armenian-language journalistic writings from late tsarist-era Central Asia is a sense of epistemological crisis: a sense that nobody quite knows who is telling the truth, who is acting in good conscience, and even who is who they claim to be. A disobliging review of an Armenian amateur theatrical performance in Samarkand or Kizil Arvat produces a flurry of correspondence from other Armenian residents expressing scepticism as to whether the reviewer ever actually saw the show. A fundraising soiree in aid of a local parish school becomes mired in accusations that the organisers have kept the funds for themselves. The treasurer of a parish board of trustees is removed from office when it transpires that he has not produced a single set of accounts in the last three years. – Your regular tabloid tittle-tattle, basically, but I wonder if there’s simultaneously something more distinctive going on – something specific to the nature of a diasporic community, displaced and deracinated. From ca. 1895 onwards, a common feature in Mshak and other Tiflis newspapers are lists of individuals from Armenian communities in Russia, the Middle East, Europe and further afield who have donated funds in aid of their suffering Armenian kinsmen – initially mostly directing their support to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, with the flare-up of Armenian-Azeri hostilities in 1905 increasingly focusing on communities in the Caucasus, and with the outbreak of war in 1914 once again focusing mostly on Ottoman Turkey. These lists of donors are testimony to Armenian communal solidarity, but also to a need for reassurance – for confirmation that money has been duly received, and that the goodwill of the Armenian community in Merv or Kokand (or Irkutsk or Tehran or Leipzig) has not been abused by scoundrels invoking some far-flung national cause for their own selfish gain. Such fears and concerns are discernible also in discussions of new Armenian arrivals in Central Asia. Strikingly for a community most of whose members themselves arrived in Central Asia no earlier than 1880, Armenians in the region seem to have been distinctly suspicious of those who arrived after them, particularly those presenting themselves as refugees from Ottoman Turkey or Karabakh and requesting local charity; to stem the flood, organisations soon sprung up aimed at providing refugees with food and a change of clothing on the condition that they then accepted passage back to Baku. This cold shoulder partly reflected a fear of economic competition – a fear that penniless immigrants would undercut the wages of locally established Armenian shop assistants and clerks, for instance – but also reflected people’s worry that they were perhaps being played for fools. There sprang up a veritable sub-genre of newspaper items from Central Asia that exulted, like Daily Mail reportage avant la lettre, in laying bare the fraudulent or misleading claims of new arrivals requesting assistance: the panhandler in Tashkent who claimed to be an Armenian refugee from Ottoman Turkey but who transpired to be an ethnic Assyrian (and thus, by implication, undeserving of Armenian assistance); the individual going round raising funds for the starving people of Shushi at a time when, as the correspondent breezily assured his readership, nobody in Shushi was in fact experiencing hunger; the bearded stranger in Askhabad who started soliciting money from church congregants halfway through the liturgy service by explaining that he had suffered oppression at the hands of some shadowy Turkish secret society, and could people please help him reacquire the successful business enterprise that he had lost. Interestingly, in both the first and the last of these three episodes the individual requesting assistance apparently claimed religious sanction for their activities, the Assyrian presenting what purported to be signed and sealed attestation by the Armenian catholicos confirming that his family had been murdered by Kurdish military irregulars and instructing all Armenian fellow-nationals to provide him with aid, and the bearded stranger in Askhabad unfurling a crude symbolic picture of St John the Baptist and Salome[3] that was apparently emblazoned with the seals of various Armenian monks. In the eyes of the correspondents reporting these two episodes, this sham invocation of religious authority compounded the two individuals’ culpability, rendering them what were known in Armenian as ‘cross-stealers’ (խաչագողներ). Coined by the Armenian novelist Hakob Melik’ Hakobian (1835 – 1888), better known as Raffi, in his 1882-3 work Խաչագողի հիշատակարանը (The Memoir of a Cross-Stealer), the term ‘cross-stealer’ refers to individuals, particularly traveling itinerants, who misappropriate the sanction of the Armenian church for their own wrongful ends: and, I would suggest, it conveys the sense also of what Hovsep’ian had been doing wrong in presenting his services to other Armenians in Central Asia as a priest-cum-doctor, relying on his priestly credentials – apparently real rather than invented in this case, but no less misleading for that – to convey a medical authority that he did not possess. As with the beggars in Tashkent and Askhabad, what made Hovsep’ian’s truly unacceptable was the fact that he was a cross-stealer.

But it was not just among Armenian communities that Hovsep’ian was abusing his priestly credentials. The more salient point in the report in Lraber was that, having apparently been chased out of Russian Turkestan, he had now set himself in Bukhara and was abusing his credentials also among Muslims and Jews – and it seems to have been this point in particular that spurred Surat’ch’i into taking action and issuing his complaint. In Bukhara, too, Hovsep’ian was acting as a cross-stealer: but whereas when conducted among Armenian communities his activities were injurious to intra-communal solidarity, exacerbating that afore-mentioned sense of epistemological crisis whereby doubt loomed omnipresent over the veracity of other people’s testimonials, when he comported himself thus amongst Muslim and Jewish communities something else, perhaps more fundamental, was at risk. ‘He is a great dishonour to us émigré Armenians’, writes Surat’ch’i: and this mattered. The Armenians in Central Asia were acutely aware (even when seeking to limit further migration to the region by their fellow-nationals) of a sense of demographic vulnerability, massively outnumbered as they were particularly by Muslims, many of whom spoke a Turkic language very similar to that of their Ottoman Turkish and Azeri former neighbours and rivals in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. The flare-up of inter-ethnic hostilities between Armenians and Central Asian Turks in the years after 1905 is in fact one of those curious incidents of the night-time that, despite widespread fears at the time, never actually happened – at least, that is, until the chaotic period after the October Revolution – but we see from materials in the Armenian press that the relationship between Armenians and the native population was one that had to be handled diplomatically, with dutiful attendance at memorial services for prominent Muslim functionaries and the like carefully signalling that the Armenian community wished to get on with its neighbours. The idea that this relationship might be imperilled by Hovsep’ian’s cavalier misbehaviour would have been a profoundly threatening one. True, Sarts and others were doing nothing more than laughing at him in February 1909 – but it was evidently a laughter born of contempt, and it perhaps did not bode well for inter-communal relations in the future.

This sense of Muslim contempt for Hovsep’ian is perhaps the most intriguing part of the article, and we are bound to ask: contempt for what, exactly? What was it about Hovsep’ian’s behaviour that was so self-evidently contemptible to the Sarts and Kyrgyz – which is to say, Kazakhs – and other Muslims, as well as Jews, living in Bukhara? On the face of it, Hovsep’ian’s behaviour in transmuting religious into medical authority seems to differ little from the array of popular healing practices that are attested across Muslim Central Asia throughout the tsarist period and into the decades of Soviet rule and beyond – the practices of shaykhs and ishans and otins, the curative powers of sacred places, the rituals promising to cure infertility or toothache. Why was Hovsep’ian’s behaviour self-evidently contemptible when to many Muslims these other medicalised transfigurations of religious authority were an integral element of both the religious and the medical landscape? It is possible, of course, this was not the case: it is possible that Surat’ch’i is here privileging a particular elite Muslim viewpoint, namely that of those rationalist modernist reformers who would have been equally scathing about traditional Muslim curative practices, and that the majority of the Muslim population did not regard Hovsep’ian’s behaviour as fraudulent – after all, he evidently seems to have enticed at least a few into engaging his services. But if Hovsep’ian’s activities did indeed incur the contempt of a wider Muslim populace, why should this have been the case? Was it his cupidity, perhaps? ‘He is an expropriator, he is a blackmailer’, Surat’ch’i quotes people as saying: money, and Hovsep’ian’s demands for money, would appear to have played a significant role in these encounters, and perhaps he dirtied his reputation by rendering his services in too grubbily transactional a fashion. Alternatively, maybe the issue was that his chequered reputation elsewhere in Turkestan preceded him, and people quickly recognised him as a figure of notoriety. Or perhaps there’s a more suggestive explanation – namely that, as a religious outsider, he benefited less than Muslim holy men and suchlike from the local population’s eagerness to believe in his curative abilities: the putative medical services that he provided were less integrated into people’s belief structures, and people could perhaps more easily contemplate without imperilling their own religious convictions the possibility that he had not in fact alleviated their symptoms. If this latter was indeed the case, this cross-stealing charlatan may ironically have had legitimate cause for feeling hard done by: of all the mystical quacks plying their services in late tsarist Bukhara, perhaps he alone did not benefit from a placebo effect.

[1] Indeed, it’s very possible that readers of this blogpost will have encountered him in their own archival explorations – in which case, any tips would be gratefully received.

[2] S See tert.nla.am, where readers will find, among hundreds of thousands of other items, scanned PDF images of the four items discussed here. (In deference to copyright, I have refrained from reproducing the actual images in question, and instead use photographs supplied by Tigran Matosyan.) The one drawback of this superb resource is that the website does not clearly catalogue its digitised holdings, and a casual reader may not realise the sheer range and scope of materials that can be accessed there. Fortunately, the resource is complemented by another magnificent website, https://www.grahavak.com, where readers will find a complete list of digitised Armenian-language newspapers at https://www.grahavak.com/գրադարան/periodicals.

[3] But why this particular image, and what precisely did it symbolise? There seems to have been a lot going on here.