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Gregory Ananian, the Sultan's Physician Who Fled to Trieste
Gregory Ananian is a peculiar figure: apparently very modern, yet full of contradictions, much closer to the modern age than to the nineteenth century, to the legacies of the Ottoman Empire than to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Ananian was born in Istanbul (1770), within the community of Armenians of Catholic faith. From a wealthy family, Ananian was thus able to attend the faculty of medicine at the University of Padua, then completing his internship in Paris, where there was a school run by Capuchin friars aimed at training Armenians as interpreters and missionaries. Yet, after this immersion in late eighteenth-century Europe, Ananian chose to...
The Birth of the Armenian Community of Trieste
April 24, 1915 marked the beginning of the extermination of the Armenian community living within the Ottoman Empire: there had already been persecutions and oppression by the Young Turk Government, but during the First World War, a massacre of one and a half million people took place. Even before this catastrophe, the Armenian diaspora had spread throughout the world and Trieste, after the establishment of the Free Port in 1719, also welcomed an Armenian community that contributed to the development of the city. The birth of the Armenian community of Trieste: a difficult beginning (1770-1810) The growth of Trieste in the central years of the eighteenth century,...
