A real love story. A lost homeland. A family history reconstructed through memory, imagination and desire.

Once upon a time, in Constantinople, there lived Hadji Garabet Kevork Topakian, a respected producer of basturma. Garabet lived a lonely life until he fell in love with Gulizar, a beautiful young woman who returned his feelings. Her parents, however, considered him an unsuitable match and refused to accept their relationship.

One winter night, Garabet rode to Gulizar’s bedroom window. She chose to leave with him, and together they set off for Constantinople to marry. In the distance, Mount Ararat illuminated by moonlight witnessed their escape.

This was not a fairy tale invented by Rebecca Topakian. It was the love story of her great-grandparents.

In Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories, Topakian returns to the story of her Armenian family, who lived in Turkey before her grandfather emigrated to France. Rather than approaching this history as a straightforward family archive, she turns to fiction, mythology and desire - creating a space where memory, imagination and inherited stories can meet.

Travelling and living in Armenia, Topakian searches for a place she knows through family memory but has never fully possessed. Her desire becomes the thread connecting past and present: a desire for land and belonging, for identity, for the body of another person, and for a homeland that exists simultaneously as a physical place and an imagined one.

Her own photographs are interwoven with family archives, creating a visual conversation across generations. Images printed on transparent paper overlap with photographs of the Armenian landscape, allowing past and present to occupy the same space. The effect is intimate and dreamlike - as if the memories of her ancestors are being projected back onto the land from which they came.

At the centre of the book is the love story of Garabet and Gulizar, but Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories reaches far beyond romance. It is a book about what we inherit, what we imagine, and the places we carry within us even when we can no longer call them home.

Rebecca Topakian’s Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories masterfully blurs the lines between personal history and myth. Through a poignant dialogue between Armenia’s past and present, Topakian overlays images on transparent paper, symbolically merging history with contemporary landscapes. This work offers a profound exploration of love intersecting with complex histories.

Dr Taous Dahmani, for Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award 

Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories by Rebecca Topakian is the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 BUP Book Award.

A Special Edition of the book, including a signed and numbered pigment print, is also available.

*** 

Awards:

• Longlisted for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2025 Polish Photographic Publication of the Year

*** 

In the press:

• Lenscratch (English)

***

Photographs: Rebecca Topakian
Introduction: Rebecca Topakian
Poem: Karim Kattan
Book design: Aneta Kowalczyk
Photo editing: Aneta Kowalczyk, Grzegorz Kosmala, Rebecca Topakian

Cover: Soft cover, Refit Wool Blue 250 g, with hot stamping
Papers: Munken Pure 150 g, transparent paper

Format: 16.5 × 22.6 cm
Number of pages: 120
Number of photographs: 57
Language: English, French, Armenian

Print run: 500 copies
Printing and binding: Argraf (Warsaw, Poland)

Publication date: October 2024
Publisher: BLOW UP PRESS (Warsaw, Poland)
ISBN: 978-83-965969-4-9