While the previous chapter offered an overview of Eremia K‘eōmurchean's biography and the main themes of his writings in Armenian, this chapter considers his diverse corpus in Armeno-Turkish. In the aftermath of the Great Armenian Flight the demand for works in Armeno-Turkish greatly increased. Istanbul, in particular, thrived as a centre for literary production and translation in Armeno-Turkish from the seventeenth century until the twentieth, when the Armenian Genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire obliterated the structural needs for the composition of Turkish literature written in the Armenian alphabet. Eremia expanded the types of translations produced in Armeno-Turkish, recrafting the tradition to suit the needs of readers or, more likely, listeners in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It is not clear if subsequent translators and authors of Armeno-Turkish were directly influenced by Eremia, but he and later authors in Istanbul responded to a common urban milieu. Eremia produced all of his Armeno-Turkish works in manuscript form, but by the 1730s Istanbul had become a centre for printing devotional works in Armeno-Turkish.

Before Eremia, Armeno-Turkish literature in Anatolia was primarily used in poetry. Eremia's most significant contribution to the hybrid language's development was to use Armeno-Turkish as a vehicle for long-form prose translations in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. This chapter will cast light on both a critical aspect of Eremia's intellectual activity and also on an unrec-ognised turning point in the development of Armeno-Turkish. This chapter differs from previous overviews of Eremia's Armeno-Turkish corpus in three main ways: it includes new transcriptions and translations; it highlights linguistic differences between Eremia's devotional and secular translations; and it marks Eremia as the starting point of a translation movement based in Istanbul that arose both to meet the needs of Armenians living in the aftermath of the Great Flight and also to satisfy the curiosity of some Muslim intellectuals.

The History of Armeno-Turkish

The deep interaction between Armenian and Turkish cultures in Anatolia began with the Seljuk incursions of the eleventh century. Examples of Armeno-Turkish poetry go back to the Middle Ages, with the oldest concrete sample dating from late thirteenth-century Erzincan. Most Armeno-Turkish writings of the medieval period are poetical, the works of a diversity of troubadour-like minstrels called gusans, ozans and, later, aşıks, whose tradition of poetry spanned the medieval, early modern and modern periods, continuing into the nineteenth century.