Istanbul’s Armenian Printers
Istanbul’s Armenian Printers
Կոստանդնուպոլսի հայ տպագրիչները
Two-Day International Workshop and Study Day/Exhibition
Yerevan, 7–8 August 2026
Matenadaran, Small Conference Hall
Free admission
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This conference offers a new historical perspective on the pivotal contributions of Armenian printers, type-makers, and craftspeople in Istanbul to the development of Ottoman print culture from the late eighteenth century onwards. Bringing together new multilingual and transregional research, it situates their work within networks extending beyond the Ottoman Empire to Armenia, Qajar Iran, South Asia, and Europe. Particular attention will be given to influential figures such as Bogos Arabian (Պողոս Արապյան, 1742–1835) and Ohannes Muhendisyan (Հովհաննես Մյուհենտիսյան, 1810–1891), whose innovations in punchcutting, metal type production, and printing technologies profoundly shaped the visual identity of Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and South Asian languages and laid important foundations for modern mechanical typesetting. The conference will also examine nineteenth-century Armenian illustrated publications from Istanbul, exploring the interplay of movable type, engraving, and lithography and the evolution of visual culture across different media.
Combining historical, technological, and archival perspectives, the conference aims to highlight the enduring legacy of Istanbul’s Armenian printers in shaping typographic and visual conventions within, and well beyond, the Ottoman Empire. A companion study day will showcase rare multilingual publications from Istanbul presses, bringing together materials from private collections and public libraries in Yerevan that have never before been exhibited together.
Combining historical, technological, and archival perspectives, the conference aims to highlight the enduring legacy of Istanbul’s Armenian printers in shaping typographic and visual conventions within, and well beyond, the Ottoman Empire. A companion study day will showcase rare multilingual publications from Istanbul presses, bringing together materials from private collections and public libraries in Yerevan that have never before been exhibited together.
Programme
Programme
Monday, 7 August – Matenadaran, Small Conference Hall
11:00–11:30 Welcome and introduction
11:30–13:30 Armenian Type-Makers and Transcultural Typography
Casting Persianate Elegance: Boğos Arabyan, Ohannes Mühendisyan, and Istanbul’s Nasta‘liq Types
Borna Izadpanah – University of Reading
This paper argues that the emergence of a distinctly Persianate print culture in nineteenth-century Istanbul depended not only on Ottoman calligraphic authority but also on the technical expertise of Ottoman-Armenian printers and typefounders. Focusing on the work of Boğos Arabyan and Ohannes Mühendisyan, it examines the transformation of Nasta‘liq, the pre-eminent Persianate manuscript hand, from its written form into movable type. Arabyan’s experimental Nasta‘liq type of the 1810s constituted the first sustained effort to render the script typographically in the Ottoman empire, establishing a crucial foundation for later developments. Building on this precedent, Mühendisyan’s later 18- and 24-point Nasta‘liq types of the 1840s, developed from the calligraphic models of leading Ottoman masters, transformed this experiment into a mature typographic system. Collectively, these innovations redefined Nasta‘liq as a printable form of Persianate visual authority and established new standards for the printing of poetry, literature, and learned texts in the Ottoman capital.
Revisiting Tradition: Yovhannes Miwhêntisean and the Search for New Armenian Letterforms
Elena Papassissa – Oxford Brookes University
The development of Armenian typefaces reflects a history shaped by displacement, cultural resilience, and adaptation. Long before Armenia’s independence in 1991, the Armenian script was safeguarded largely through the efforts of Armenian diasporic communities, which played a crucial role not only in preserving its typographic heritage but also in its modernisation. Alterations to the forms of Bolorgir in the mid-nineteenth century symbolised a desire to convey modernity, assert cultural identity, and express national independence, while also seeking to improve the efficiency and affordability of printing and type production. A pivotal moment in this process occurred in 1847, when Armenian punch-cutter, printer, and publisher Yovhannes Miwhêntisean (1810–1891) published an announcement in Constantinople in the Armenian language, entitled Announcement upon the subject of newly fashioned typefaces, introducing significant innovations in Armenian typographic forms. This talk examines his contribution, situating it within a wider network of Armenian printers, publishers and intellectuals.
Shaping Ottoman Print Culture: Armenian Type-Makers and the Formation of Ottoman Naskh Typography
Onur Yazıcıgil – Sabancı University
This paper examines the pivotal role of nineteenth-century Armenian type-makers in the formation of Ottoman Naskh typography and its transition from manuscript to print. By tracing the design, production, and circulation of Naskh types, it argues that Armenian type-makers—drawing on the manuscript models of Ottoman calligraphers—established the typographic forms that came to dominate Ottoman printing and subsequently influenced typographic practices well beyond the empire’s borders. The talk also explores the commercial and technological dimensions of their work, including the economic strategies that sustained their foundries and the ways they navigated issues of copyright and intellectual ownership. Finally, it considers how the expertise accumulated by Armenian craftsmen laid the foundations for the emergence of Turkish type-makers, who gradually entered the profession and contributed to the continued development of Ottoman typography.
13:30–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:30 Ottoman-Armenian Encounters in Print and Image
Artist and Illustrator: Recovering the Forgotten Late Ottoman Graphic Arts of Stepan Agayian
Vazken Khatchig Davidian – University of Oxford
This presentation marks a preliminary exploratory foray towards recovering the overlooked oeuvre of a forgotten artist of late Ottoman Constantinople, the miniaturist and illustrator, Stepan Agayian (Ստեփան Ակայեան, 1867–1937). Intended as a corrective to the hitherto scant attention given to the arts of late Ottoman graphic design in Armenian and Turkish art historiographies, the paper seeks to, firstly, assemble the work of one of its most acclaimed practitioners, Agayian, into an archive of fragments recovered mainly from the covers and pages of the multilingual late Ottoman press; and, secondly, to critically engage with a selection of these traces, dating from the period when the artist’s work had its highest circulation and visibility—between 1908 to the Armenian genocide in 1915—, with a focus on the much-lauded covers produced for the Teotigs’ (the husband-and-wife team of Teotoros Labdjindjian (1873–1929) and Arshagouhi, née Djezvedjian (1875–1922)) popular Ամէնուն տարեցոյցը (Everyone’s Almanac) and the influential Ottoman Turkish-language journal, Resimli Kitab (Illustrated Book).
On the Politics of Reading and Writing in Armeno-Turkish Texts
Murat Cankara – Ankara Social Sciences University
For members of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire, the choice to read, write, and publish in Turkish using Armenian script was both a practical tool and a subject of debate. The last three decades have witnessed a considerable flourishing in scholarship on these texts. Today, we know that engagement with Armeno-Turkish was not a marginal activity limited to those whose primary language was not Armenian. On the contrary, it offered a vibrant platform—even for non-Armenians—and made significant contributions to building a transcommunal readership across the Ottoman Empire.
My aim in this presentation is to cast a panoramic view over reading, writing, and publishing practices as they were represented in the Armeno-Turkish texts I have edited and analyzed over the last twenty years. Drawing on various genres produced predominantly throughout the second half of the nineteenth century—including fiction, drama, and periodical articles—I will highlight the complexities of Armeno-Turkish print culture, emphasize the negotiations it entailed, and unpack some of the debates surrounding it.
Ottoman-Armenian Encounters with the Lithographic Press
Erin Piñon – Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
No one batted an eye when, in the middle of the nineteenth-century, Ottoman-Armenian printer-publisher-typographer Hovhannes Muyhendisyan issued three consecutive titles, furnished with images prepared by three different artists, using three different methods of printing. This was par for the course in Istanbul’s highly competitive, collaborative, and commercialized Armenian-language print market. These images, however, reflect the earliest encounters Armenian printers had with the lithographic press, the most cutting-edge method of reproducing images globally. They also mark a point of departure from how Ottoman-Armenian printed books looked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—filled with muddy impressions of worn and battered Dutch woodblocks that constituted the capital’s “stock” of available images.
This paper discusses the role Muyhendisyan’s print enterprise played in shaping Armenian book arts in the nineteenth century and the permanent, global repercussions his titles set in motion. It offers the first sustained study of Armenian contributions to lithography (վիմագրութիւն), a field often overlooked or conflated with epigraphy in Armenian scholarship. By analyzing the origins, functions, and circulation of these images, the paper moves beyond questions of European influence to ask how Armenian visual culture developed through its own traditions and internal dialogues.
Study Day/Exhibition
Study Day/Exhibition
Tuesday, 8 August – Matenadaran, Small Conference Hall
11:00–17:00 Study Day/Exhibition
The conference will be accompanied by a study day, showcasing prominent publications from Istanbul presses in languages such as Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Turkish, and South Asian languages. This unique show-and-tell will bring together publications that have never been shown together before, sourced from private collections as well as public libraries in Yerevan.
Speakers
Speakers
Ankara Social Sciences University
Murat Cankara majored in theory and history of theatre. He received his PhD from Bilkent University with a dissertation titled “Empire and Novel: Placing Armeno-Turkish Novels in Ottoman/Turkish Literary Historiography”. His PhD research focused on the novels written by Ottoman Armenians in the Turkish language using the Armenian script. He was a Fulbright fellow at Harvard University in the academic year 2007–2008 and a 2012–2013 Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he gave a course on Armeno-Turkish texts. He is currently a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Social Sciences University of Ankara and is particularly interested in modern Armenian and Turkish literatures, nineteenth century literary cultures in the Ottoman Empire (and elsewhere), encounters between Ottoman Armenians and Muslim/Turks, the appropriation of Turkish by Armenians, the historiography of Ottoman/Turkish literature, theater and drama.
University of Oxford
Vazken Khatchig Davidian is an Associate Faculty Member and Research Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (formerly Oriental Studies), and Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He defended his doctoral thesis (The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople: Late Nineteenth-Century Representations of Migrant Workers from Ottoman Armenia) in art history at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2019. As Calouste Gulbenkian Fellow in Armenian Studies, and Nubar Pacha Scholar, Davidian was the holder of two postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford. He is, with Boris Adjemian, co-editor-in-chief of the journal Études arméniennes contemporaines published by the Bibliothèque Nubar (AGBU), Paris. Davidian is the author of several articles on Ottoman Armenian art and cultural history and is currently completing a monograph based in part on his doctoral dissertation entitled Art, Realism and the Politics of Social Reform: Reading Late Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of Ottoman Armenian Subalterns, and preparing another on the Ottoman Armenian artist Sarkis Katchadourian (1886–1947).
University of Reading
Borna Izadpanah is a Lecturer in Typography at the University of Reading, where he also earned his PhD and MA in Typeface Design. His research explores the history of printing and typefounding, with particular attention to languages written in the Arabic script. His work has appeared in leading academic journals and edited volumes, including Arabic Typography: History and Practice (2022). Borna is currently completing his first monograph, which examines the typographic representation of the Persian language, emphasising its transnational circulation and the material infrastructures. His work has received several prestigious recognitions for both scholarship and design.
Oxford Brookes University
Elena Papassissa is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Oxford Brookes University (UK), Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), type designer and type consultant. Her work focuses on conventions, traditionalism, Latinisation, and modernity in Armenian typefaces across type-making technologies from 1512 to 1977. Elena has presented at international conferences, such as: Colloque ‘Orient typographique’ (Paris 2023), Future Graphic Language (Warsaw, 2019), the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) (Paris 2023, Montréal 2019, Amsterdam 2013), and the 5th International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication, University of Nicosia (ICTVC) (Cyprus, 2013).
Since 2013 she has been running her own practice, collaborating with international type foundries and type designers, and graphic design studios in London. Notable clients and collaborations include Monotype, Dalton Maag, Google, Tiro Typeworks, Jeffery Keedy, and Fraser Muggeridge studio. Beside typefaces in the Latin script, Elena has designed several Armenian fonts such as: Noto Armenian, Avenir Next World Armenian, and Jaguar Armenian.
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Erin Piñon is an art historian specializing in early modern Armenian book arts, spanning cultural networks from Europe to Asia. Her first book, The Life and Death of an Illuminated Manuscript: Armenian Painting and Ritual in the Age of Print, explores seventeenth-century Ottoman-Armenian manuscript art, book culture, translation, and ritual practices across Istanbul, Aleppo, and Isfahan. Piñon’s research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visual and material culture has appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s publications, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, West 86th Street, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, to cite a few. Her ongoing work examines the aesthetics of the Armenian diasporic condition and print culture between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Sabancı University
Onur F. Yazıcıgil is a type designer, typographer, academic, and founding director of ISType, an international platform dedicated to type design and typography. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at Sabancı University, Istanbul. His research focuses on the history of Ottoman typography, particularly Arabic-script printing, Armenian type-making, and the relationship between manuscript and print. His work bridges historical scholarship and contemporary type design. His typefaces have been published through Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, and he regularly lectures internationally on typography, type design, and printing history.
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