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The photograph depicts two women dressed in western-style outfits. The woman on the left is wearing a light-colored, floor-length skirt and a high-neck blouse. The woman on the right is wearing a long-sleeved, white blouse with collar and a floor-length skirt.

Melikian familly photo album

Zabelle Meutemediar Melikian is wearing a western-style skirt suit paired with a white frilly blouse and a bow tie.

Adam Kevorkian, Postmaster General, MBE, is wearing a dark-colored, Western-style three-piece suit with a matching vest, a white dress shirt, and a tri-colored tie. His suit is also adorned with his medals. He wears round, black-framed glasses.

Zabelle Meutemediar (1908–2007) married Hairabed Melikian (1903–1973) on July 5, 1925. She wore a calf-length, white, western-style dress with a long train, a hooded veil, and heeled shoes. He wore a western-style three-piece suit with a white vest, gloves, a bow tie, and a lapel pin.

The Agha’s Children traces the adventurous history of the Eramian dynasty in Cyprus over the last two hundred and fifty years.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, in the face of Ottoman oppression of the Armenians, Stepan Eramian Agha bought land in Cyprus for his second son, Boghos-Berge, and sent him away from the family’s ancestral estate in Turkey. Although life was safer on the island, this, too, was a troubled land. The stories of the Agha’s descendants are tales of love and hatred, cruelty and compassion, murder, piracy, slavery, tragedies and triumphs. Through it all the family survived and prospered and the Agha’s decision to move to Cyprus secured the future of his line when so many perished in the genocide of the Armenians.

The accounts in this book of the lives of the Eramian family members are based on the memories and traditions of their descendants, many of whom live in Cyprus to this day.

Two Turks from Lefka a village mostly inhabited by Muslims; the two men stand side by side and wear similar traditional clothes, namely, light-coloured shirts, white many-folded trousers tied below the knees, a colourful sash at the waist, stockings and flat shoes. One of them also wears a fez set askew on the head; his striped stockings are tied under the knee. The stockings of the other man are patterned (Deschamps 1898, 182; Lazarides 2005, 166).

The photograph ‘Some of my Turkish Diggers at Cyprus’ presents eight men, four seated in a row and another four standing be­hind them. All of them wear the baggy, pleated vráka with a sash around the waist; their vráka is white except for two men, who wear a dark-coloured, probably black vráka tied at the waist with a string. Most of the upper garments, shirts and sleeved jackets, apparently of loom-woven striped cloth, are also of light hues. Only a young man seated in front wears a brilliant waistcoat crossed over the chest and made of a flower-patterned fabric. His head bears a tall fez with a tassel falling to his right side and a white headscarf wound around the lower part of the fez. The head-kerchief of the bearded old man sitting next to him is probably of printed fabric. The headdress of the other men presents a variety of the same type, namely fez or red cap wrapped with a scarf.

A fez workshop in Nicosia, depicted by Oulevay in the 1890s shows a craftsman, dressed in western-style costume and fez, blocking a fez with a mould; more moulds are placed on the same table and other examples are hanging on the wall (Deschamps 1897, III, fig. 171; Deschamps 1898, 51).

Three Ottoman Turks are presented in a landscape with palm trees. They are peasants carrying goods for sell­ing – one of them holds a steelyard for weighing. They are dressed with the typical up­per class costume, namely a long robe (cüppe) over the entari, under which are seen pantaloons reaching down to the ankles, and flat leather shoes. A vo­luminous turban completes their attire. (sarik)

The drawing pre­sents three women standing in front of a hamam. All of them wear the same dress consist­ing of light shirts, pleated long skirts over pantaloons fastened at the waist with buckled belts, and plain flat shoes or slippers. Impressive headdresses and rich jew­ellery adds to the luxury of the whole attire.