By mid-September 2025, more than 60 per cent of the National Museum’s goods had been looted, after the RSF used it as a military base and mine from June 2023 until March 2025. The collection held more than 100,000 artefacts spanning Sudan’s history. Sudanahye, a Sudanese-Armenian archival project launched just after the war began in April 2023, works to preserve records, photographs and oral histories as conflict damages homes and heritage sites.
A national collection looted
As the war spread through Khartoum, the RSF ransacked and pillaged properties, driving families from homes filled with generations of memories. After taking control of the city, the RSF made cultural destruction more deliberate and extensive, according to the account in the base article. The National Museum became an ad hoc military base and mine, offering protection and a steady financial stream through the black market.
The museum’s collection spanned the Stone Ages, Nubian and Christian times, and the Islamic period. In essence, it was a national living room. The Los Angeles Times reported that at least 76 heritage sites and 20 museums across Sudan had been ransacked. The Armenian Church in Khartoum was affected, too.
Vahe Boghosian, a diasporan Armenian and historian from London, launched Sudanahye around the outset of the war as the first multimedia heritage project on Sudanese-Armenian history. He wanted to prevent the erasure of his ancestry during the conflict and reconcile violent media portrayals of Sudan with the warmer accounts he heard from relatives.
“For me, growing up in the 2000s in London, my perceptions of Sudan were driven by the news cycle, by films ... and then you go and look at the Armenian photos, and it looks very different,” Boghosian said. “And then you hear the stories and you're like 'oh, it's even more different.”'
A record of exile and belonging
Sudanahye dates the first known Armenian settlement in Sudan to the 1840s. More Armenians arrived in Egypt and Sudan after the Hamidian Massacres in the late 1890s. Another wave came after the British conquest in 1899 and the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, seeking wealth and remittances. A further wave followed the 1915 genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1930s, Armenian families lived across Sudan, with Khartoum at the centre; the community reached about 1,000 at its peak.
“One of the reasons why the Sudanese-Armenian community history must be preserved is because it is like a constituent part of the experience of exile that Armenians experienced,” said Christopher Tounsel, University of Washington's Director of African Studies.
The project brings together historical documents from archives in Cairo, Arabkir and Durham, along with oral histories and photographs. Boghosian said written records largely cover business and some political activity, rather than children’s or women’s perspectives. Photographs reveal more about community life and interactions with other groups; oral histories carry emotion. Through social media, the project highlights personal narratives and aims to separate shared memories from atrocities continuing in Sudan.
Archives connect past and present
Boghosian also urges his predominantly Armenian audience to recognize Sudanese people’s suffering so it isn't forgotten. Sudanese people he interviewed have told him they value the country’s former tolerance of diversity, which allowed an Armenian to call themself Sudanese. Many hope that tolerance will return, and Boghosian hopes it will extend to other places that could welcome Sudanese refugees.
In New York, Boghosian and the Garod Collective, a community group that hosts Armenian cultural events, held a workshop on building a diaspora and honouring culture beyond the traditional “big three” institutions: church, school and social club. Founders Cynthia Nahhas and Nanor Vosgueritchian discussed their events and workshops. Nahhas said the Collective had held workshops translating queer songs into Armenian, along with a mapping workshop, writing workshop, backgammon afternoons, musical performances and a barbecue.
Boghosian has held events in Cairo, London, Berlin and Amsterdam, and last month held his first event in Armenia. In March, a separate U.S. tour took him to Boston and New York, where he worked with Project Save, an archive focused solely on preserving photography of the global Armenian experience. Its Archive Alive venture uses multimedia exhibits to spotlight grassroots initiatives, connect groups and bring archival materials under a common institution. Sudanahye was one of its first featured projects.
Project Save Director Arto Vaun said human rights attorneys had asked the archive for photographs dating as far back as 100 years to support cases at the Hague concerning the 2020-2023 ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. Tounsel said accountability could uphold agreements including the UNESCO World Heritage List and the 1954 Hague Convention; their authority, he said, is nullified if violations bring no repercussions.