“How people play and how they make a living” : the professions of Armenians from Kuty on the Czeremosz River compared to those of other nations at the end of the 18th century

The article focuses on professions and activities of the Armenians from Kuty on the Cheremosh River in comparison to other ethnic groups at the end ofthe 18th century. The author used several file documents (mainly from the 1880s) of a fiscal nature, which contain information on individual households, such as :the location of the house (main square, “backside”, i.e. at the back of the property, suburbs, etc.), ethnicity of the owner and his profession, i.e., the source of the family’slivelihood. This list was confronted with the previously unknown plan of the town from 1781. In the case of the Armenian community, the image of the family structure was completed by the 1791 list of the faithful of the Armenian Catholicparish in Kuty. On the basis of the above-mentioned documents, the author has prepared a list of house-owners (available in the annex), which was used to describeand analyze the professional structure of the Kuty community and the place occupied by the Armenians. It turned out that in Kuty at the end of the 18th century there were professional niches, monopolized by individual ethnicities. Armenians dominated a few, but one of their most exclusive niches was the production of moroccoleather. They had manufactories which professionally absorbed other ethnic communitiesas helpers, suppliers of raw materials and recipients of finished goods for trade or for further processing. The article also refers to the ethnic topography of Kuty, describing the places of Armenian and Jewish settlement in the town itself and multiethnic settlement in the suburbs. The appendices attached to the text contain a list ofmunicipal and suburban house owners around the year 1789.