The Armenian Woman in the Eyes of Western Observers

Abstract

When I reread the travel books that the still very popular German novelist Karl May wrote during the last decades of the nineteenth century for both youth and adults, I was struck by the very negative picture he painted of the Armenians, a people with whom he never had any contact. May, however, had not created this unpleasant image of the Armenians himself; he had found it fully developed in a great many of the accounts of the adventures, military advisors, geographers, archeologists, hunters, missionaries, politicians, merchants, the ladies and gentlemen of leisure whom Europe and America of the travel-happy nineteenth century sent to the slowly disintegrating Ottoman empire. Generally speaking, their reports present an increasingly negative and unsavoury image of the Armenians as individuals and as a people.