Dear Hyetert readers,
Hyetert, the only Istanbul Armenian news aggregating website, was founded in 2001 by the administrators of Hyelist – a discussion group formed by some Istanbul Armenians- with the advice and endorsement of His Beatitude Patriarch Mesrob II, as the only online news source for Turkey’s Armenians.
Hyetert was started at hyetert.com from 2001-2011, then moved to a blogspot address. After that date, the website was managed almost single handedly by its founding and managing editor, the late Murat Bebiroğlu, until February 17, 2017, the day of his demise. From there on Hyetert continued to track news for a while and stopped its updates on July 2017.
Meanwhile the domain name hyetert.com, that contained the first ten years’ archive was lost and some of its files became unreachable. Moreover, due to lack of proper backups, the site’s content from 2007 to 2011 was completely lost.
The team comprised of Azad Djan, Murat Özkan and Ayda Erbal thought that it would be a pity to lose almost twenty years of the Armenian life in Turkey and this website being the only archival outlet of the Turkish Armenians that is fully open to public should continue its mission and thus they started working on it in November 2017 to transfer the formerly divided and technically suffering archive into a single web address.
As of January 2018, Hyetert has picked up from where it left under its new infrastructure and voluntary editorial staff at the www.hyetert.org address.
What will you see at Hyetert’s new address?
At the new address of Hyetert, you will find the full collection of the news, articles and op-eds posted to the website from 2001 until January 20, 2018, except for some missing links. The volunteers for Hyetert will continue updating the site with the latest news in the upcoming days. Simultaneously, they will also try to publish the missing news for the period between 2007 and 2011. This way the website will soon be complete.
Due to shutting down and banning of several newspapers and websites in Turkey during the same period and because most of the current newspapers’ archives are not well kept online, we kindly ask our readers who may have copies of the news published during this missing period to share them with us by using this link.
Hyetert will continue to both aggregate Armenian related news and provide authentic content by its authors about significant subjects just as it used to do.
In this period where Istanbul Armenians are yet at another turning point, we sincerely wish that Hyetert’s return to its continuing mission to inform Istanbul Armenians on matters of interest both within Turkey and abroad brings good fortunes to the community.
Sincerely,
Hyetert
January 2018
Our Editors
- Ayda Erbal
- Azad Djan
- Tamar Karasu
Note: You can reach Hyetert’s inauguration “About” text published in 2001 explaining why Hyetert was founded to beging with here. The “About” published at the time of transfer to the blogspot site can be reached here.