Aurora Mardiganian
Aurora (Arshaluys) Mardiganian (Armenian: Առրորա [Արշալոյս] Մարտիկանեան; January 12, 1901, Çemişgezek, Mamuret-ül Aziz, Ottoman Empire – February 6, 1994, Los Angeles, California, USA) was an Armenian American author, actress and a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.
Contents
Biography
Aurora Mardiganian was the daughter of a prosperous Armenian family living in Chmshgatsak (Çemişgezek), twenty miles north of Harput, Ottoman Turkey. She witnessed the deaths of her family members and was forced to march over 1,400 miles, during which she was kidnapped and sold into the slave markets of Anatolia. Mardiganian escaped to Tiflis (modern Tbilisi, Georgia), then to St. Petersburg, from where she traveled to Oslo and finally, with the help of Near East Relief, to New York.
Ravished Armenia / Auction of Souls
In New York, she was approached by Harvey Gates, a young screenwriter, who helped her write and publish a narrative that is often described as a memoir titled Ravished Armenia (full title Ravished Armenia; the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl, Who Survived the Great Massacres (1918).[1]
The narrative Ravished Armenia was used for writing a film script that was produced in 1919, Mardiganian playing herself, and first screened in London as the Auction of Souls. The first New York performance of the silent film, entitled Ravished Armenia took place on February 16, 1919, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, with society leaders, Mrs. Oliver Harriman and Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, serving as co-hostesses on behalf of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief.[1]
Aurora Mardiganian recalled sixteen young Armenian girls being "crucified" by their Ottoman tormentors. The film Auction of Souls (1919), showed the victims nailed to crosses. However, almost 70 years later Mardiganian revealed to film historian Anthony Slide that the scene was inaccurate and went on to describe what was actually an impalement. She stated that "The Turks didn't make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses. They took the clothes off the girls. They made them bend down, and after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina. That's the way they killed - the Turks. Americans have made it a more civilized way. They can't show such terrible things."[2]
Mardiganian was referred to in the press as the Joan of Arc of Armenia, describing her role as the spokesperson for the victims of the horrors that were then taking place in Turkey and the catalyst for the humanist movement in America. In the 1920s Mardiganian married and lived in Los Angeles until her death on February 6, 1994.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Balakian, Peter (2003) The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: HarperCollins. pp. 313–14.
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Further reading
Slide, Anthony. Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian. Jackson, Ms.: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
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External links
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- Pages with broken file links
- Articles containing Armenian-language text
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- American people of Armenian descent
- Ethnic Armenian actresses
- Ottoman emigrants to the United States
- Armenian Genocide survivors
- Witnesses of the Armenian Genocide
- Ethnic Armenian refugees
- Ottoman Armenians
- 1901 births
- 1994 deaths
- 20th-century American actresses
