Пелтекян Катя

Peltekian Katia

Пелтекьян Катя

Katia Peltekian

Frequent contributor to Armenian News Network-Groong

Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Katia holds degrees in English Literature and Education from Lebanon and Canada. She has taught English at the American University of Beirut since 1988. She compiles not only current news on Armenia and Armenians for the Armenian News Network Groong, but also old news articles and reports from English language newspapers from around the world. In 2000, she published Heralding of the Armenian Genocide, which is a compilation of articles printed in the Halifax Herald (Nova Scotia, Canada) including reports of the ongoing massacres commited against the Armenians from 1894 to 1922. She is currently compiling articles printed in the London Times (UK); this will be published in the near future. The volumes will include articles from 1878 to 1920s.

Article by Katia Peltekian: ON THE TRAIL OF RELIGIOUS ARTIFACTS AND A GRAND OLD MAN, By Katia Peltekian http://www.aztagdaily.com/EnglishSupplement/20060424_EngSupl.htm

http://www.aztagdaily.com/EnglishSupplement/BIO_KatiaPeltekian.htm Katia M. Peltekian

Born to Jordanian-Armenian parents and raised in Lebanon, Katia Peltekian received her BA and MA degrees in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. She later received her second MA in Education from Canada. Between 1988 and 2004, she was a full-time faculty member at AUB teaching English at all levels. In the past 8 years, she has presented papers in English instruction at international conferences in Greece, Spain and England. She is fluent in English, Arabic and Armenian, and has basic knowledge of French and Turkish.

At an early age, Katia developed a love of reading in any form. As the Civil War raged in Lebanon, newspapers and newsmagazines became one method of entertainment in the Peltekian household. Her parents encouraged her and her brothers to write letters to editors of international magazines whenever the Armenian issue was mentioned in those papers. For the past 7 years and on a daily basis, she has diligently compiled on voluntary basis current news items for the Armenian News Network Groong (www.groong.org), which is a free internet service that collects all news articles and reports from around the world pertaining to Armenia and Armenians. In many instances, she also translates from Arabic articles that appear in Arabic language newspapers in Lebanon and the region.

While studying in Halifax, Canada, she became interested in reading old Canadian newspapers to see how and if they had reported the ongoing atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians during World War One. With the encouragement of the Armenian Cultural Association of the Atlantic Provinces based in Halifax, she compiled the articles pertaining to the Armenian Genocide between 1915 and 1922. Although she admits she had never been interested in history classes at school, she began educating herself about the condition of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. This led her to a much richer repertoire of news articles about the massacres committed by the Turks during Sultan Abdul Hamid’s reign in the 1890s.

And what she was able to collect from only one newspaper published in Halifax (Nova Scotia), where only a handful of Armenians reside, was quite significant. As she copied these articles from microfilms, she decided to have the compilation published in a book believing that many would learn about Armenian history as she had learned from these news articles. However, when she received no response from a couple of Armenian institutions she had approached for publishing it, she decided to publish the 350 page book at her own expense.

The book Heralding of the Armenian Genocide was published in 2000 and distributed for free mainly to the provincial government members in Nova Scotia and selectively in the other Canadian provinces. It was also distributed to a few Turkish diplomats, as well as to public and university libraries in Halifax. The rest were sent to libraries in Armenia and Armenian research centers in the USA.

The response Katia received from Armenian and non-Armenian scholars and interested individuals after the printing of the book was so positive that she embarked on a second project: compiling articles from a British newspaper. She chose The Times of London since she had easier access to it both at AUB library and at Toronto Reference Library where she spends three months in summer. To date, she says she has collected more than 1700 articles, reports, letters-to-editor, and speeches printed in The Times alone between 1878 and 1900. She plans to collect all articles until 1925 and publish them in volumes. To make sure she has the complete collection, she has traveled to distant cities in Britain to work at the different branches of the British Library.

Article: ON THE TRAIL OF RELIGIOUS ARTIFACTS AND A GRAND OLD MAN, By Katia Peltekian http://www.aztagdaily.com/EnglishSupplement/20060424_EngSupl.htm

Categories: Armenian Individuals