Hye Sharzhoom Armenian Action
Sosse Yanez
Special to Hye Sharzhoom
The Nishkian Family Photo Archive has been made public on the Armenian Studies Program’s Flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/armenianstudies/albums/72177720323171031.
The Nishkian Archive contains 60 scanned images, primarily photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although some photographs are captioned on the back, most are not labeled. There are also newspaper articles and a partial autobiography of Karnig Nishkian written on notebook paper. Despite the absence of the autobiography’s subsequent pages, the first page gives a peek at the Nishkian family’s life during the late 19th century.
According to the manuscript, Karnig’s father Mardiros owned a dry goods store in Erzerum in the late 19th century. In 1874, his brother Hagop M. was dispatched to Constantinople, where he maintained the family business, sending fancy goods to their father in Erzerum. Hagop also had a side business dealing rugs with a man in Philadelphia.
Karnig’s autobiography references a secret organization founded in 1879-1880 [perhaps the Defenders of the Homeland] that protected Armenians from marauding Kurds and Turks, who, unchecked by authorities, were destroying life and property. Around 1882, the organization was discovered and its leaders were taken prisoner by the Ottoman government.
One of Karnig’s brothers, Garabed M., was a leader in the organization and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Unfortunately, the one-page autobiography ends here. However, Paul E. Vandor’s History of Fresno County California with Biographical Sketches (1919) offers some insight on the Nishkians’ beginnings in Fresno as well as their revolutionary activities in Western Armenia.
Vandor describes Garabed M. Nishkian as a “well-educated, broad-minded, charitable, and prominent man.”
He was born in Erzerum in 1855 and grew up to be a patriotic leader and the only survivor of a group that rebelled against Turkish atrocities.
Carrying a copy of his death sentence with him, Garabed fled to America in 1883, eventually settling in California upon seeing the potential to grow raisins. Vandor writes, “Shortly after his arrival, [Garabed] was photographed, holding the death sentence in his hand, with chains on one side of him and the American flag as the emblem of liberty on the other.”
Garabed then went on to arrange the transportation of his mother, four brothers, and sister. They engaged in viticulture in the Scandinavian Colony from 1890 until 1899 when they purchased their own vineyard on Whites Bridge Road. Garabed passed away in December of 1915.
The Nishkian Family Photo Archive contains photographs and documents about Nishkian’s Cyclery, established by Hagop’s son Kalam.
Born in Erzerum in 1881, Kalam arrived with his family in 1888. Like most of the pioneering Nishkians, he and his immediate family initially lived in the Scandinavian Colony of Fresno, which lay in what is today east Fresno. Around 1900, the young entrepreneur opened up a small bicycle shop on Tulare Street.
In the early twentieth century, bicycle shops also included the latest technologies of the day, including phonographs.
Later, Kalam opened a large-scale phonograph business at 1046 Broadway which he main-tained until his passing in 1925.
In a 1968 Fresno Bee article, Kalem Dashjian, a former repairman at Nishkian’s cyclery, recalled that phonographs were sold for from $125-$300 a piece. The music store had six rooms where customers could listen to records. The mezzanine was used for private dancing parties on weekends.