Favet Neptunus Eunti

Book excerpt: The title Favet Neptunus Eunti, Latin for “Neptune favors the traveler,” looks at the traveling nature of the Armenian merchant-banking Mouradian family. Written in three parts, the book chronicles 700 years of Mouradian family history in five continents beginning with a description of both the family’s pre-twentieth century life and merchant trade route spanning the Eastern hemisphere from Singapore to Manchester and Marseille. It then focuses on the family's Chungoush (Çüngüş) branch by providing a biography of the last chatelain of the city’s Mouradentz Abarankn, Sarkis Agha Mouradian, his wife Mariam Khatoun (née Karagheusian), their children, and their control of the family’s outposts in Kharpert (Harput), Aleppo, Turkmenistan, and Singapore leading up to, and during, the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Lastly, it follows Sarkis Agha and Mariam Khatoun's descendants as they integrated into various countries after World War I and established a presence in business, legal, political, entertainment, and culinary industries. Whereas the foreword and epilogue to the book remain specific to the Mouradians, the methodological introduction to the book, “Seeing and Being Seen: Methods of Witnessing the Unwitnessable,” strays momentarily from the family and focuses more generally on torture as both the primary mechanism of genocide and the principal obstacle to documenting it, while proposing a means to overcoming this paradox. Research for the book is based on: - roughly 26 hours of recorded and previously unpublished interviews from now-deceased survivors of the Genocide and their descendants; - 13 public and private archives located in Italy, France, Turkey, and the United States of America; - 161 primary and secondary sources, along with over 50 previously unpublished private correspondence and governmental documents translated from Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Armenian, and French into English; - 26 nineteenth century Ottoman certificates of property title covering a portion of the family’s Chungoush property holdings, which are annexed, including both scans of the documents and their complete translation from the original Ottoman Turkish to English. The text is accompanied with over 400 illustrations, comprising of photographs of family members, properties, jewels, personal effects, documents, and maps of both the family’s trade and escape routes. The book is a limited hardcover edition in oversize format with lithograph printing on acid-free paper, Smyth sewn signatures, reinforced library binding, as well as gold and silver gilding to the cover.