“Seated that afternoon on the bare cliff of Tetvan [Tatvan], dreaming in solitude and contemplating the opal waters of Van, I was surrounded by gliding shadows and the Sipan-Dagh, which loomed against the evening sky, like a pyramid of smoke, enveloped gradually in a cloak of dark cloud, while Ararat flared in the distance like a smidge of brimstone. That landscape, with its deathly gleam and its infinitively mournful beauty, assured me at last that I had reached my destination, in the heart of ancient Armenia.”
Source: Nogales, Rafael de: Four Years beneath the Crescent. London: Sterndale Classics, 2003, p. 56
Panorama of the rocks and the City of Van
“Towards the south rose the irregular mass of the Khamur [Hamur], and the beautiful landmark of Sipan. That graceful mountain stood disclosed to three-quarters of its height. Such are the rewards which Armenia bestows upon the traveler, and which Man is powerless to destroy. (…) The soil is rich and loamy; but it is little cultivated, and lies idle beneath a covering of rough grass. The climate is more propitious than that of the corresponding highlands in the more northerly, or Russian portion of the land. The rainfall is probably less; but this disadvantage may be balanced by the earlier maturing of the crops.
(…) Sipan, with this plain on one flank and the lake of Van upon the other, is worthy to rank among the most beautiful objects in the natural world. (…)
How well I now recalled the longing I had then experienced to explore the famous lake on their further side! What a thrill of pleasure I now felt to be floating upon its waters, expanding towards those mountains with the proportions of a sea! (…) The scene behind us contrasted the softness of a southern landscape with the stern grandeur of the coast above our prow.”
Source: Lynch, H.F.B.: Armenia: Travels and Studies. Vol. II (The Turkish Provinces). London: Longmans, Green, and Co. (Reprint Beirut: Khayat, 1965; 1967; 1990), pp. 15, 19
The fertile basin around Lake Van forms one of the natural centers of the Armenian Plateau, along with the Ararat plain, and was therefore an early settlement center of this region.
According to the biblical creation myth, Noah’s ark landed ‘on the mountains of Ararat’ (Genesis 8:4). This did not refer to Mount Masis (5 137m), but to the land of Urartu, as the Assyrians called the ancient oriental empire at Lake Van. Through false vocalization of Assyrian cuneiform script texts, Urartu became ‘the land of Ararat’ in Hebrew, which Christians later equated with the most majestic and highest mountain in Armenia.
Lake Van (3 765 square kilometers), which is six times the size of Lake Geneva was called Tosp(a) Lake (Տոսպայ լիճ) in ancient Armenian language. It contains alkaline water and is one of the many saline lakes in Asia Minor. In Armenian, it was also referred to as a sea under different names (Վանա ծով – ‘Vana Dzov‘ – Sea of Van; Արճեշի ծով – ‘Ardsheshi dzov’ – ‘Sea of Arčeš’; Բզնունեաց ծով – ‚Bznunyats dzov‘ – ‘Sea of Bznunik‘). In its immediate north, the volcano Sipan rises, with 4 058 meters the third highest mountain of the Armenian Plateau, in the northwest the legendary dormant volcano Nemrut (2,948 meters), not to be confused with the summit of same name of Mount Ankar in Commagene in contemporary Southeast Turkey. In Armenian, Nemrut is called Sarakn (‘Mountain spring’). Both bear the name of the mythical king or hunter Nemrod who, according to Armenian belief, came from Babylon and resides in the crater of Mount Nemrut.
According to ancient Armenian authors such as the ‘father of Armenian historiography’ (patmahayr) Movses Khorenatsi (5th century) and the geographer Anania Shirakatsi (610-685) vishapner (serpentine dragons) lived in the Lake of Van; in the Armenian Plateau of the Bronze Age, stone vishapner symbolized fertility and were often erected near springs. According to the legend, the Armenian god of fire and wind, Vahagn, would plunge into Lake Van to drag out any vishap that had grown large enough to devour the world; for this service Vahagn bore the epithet vishapakagh (‘reaper of vishaps’). Scholar James R. Russell considers that this legend is an Armenian adoption of Urartian myths concerning the combat of the war god Teisheba with the water monster Ullikummi. Russell writes that into the modern period, the Armenians of the Van basin would refer to the sudden storms that arise on the lake as vishap kami (wind).[1] However, the motif of a storm and sky god, fighting serpentine dragons, can be further traced back even to the Hittite monster dragon Illuyanka and its divine slayer Tarhunt.
The first written testimonies about the Armenian Highlands are also due to the Hittites. The next written evidence comes from the Assyrians, whose king Salmanasar (Shalmaneser; Šulmānu-ašarēdu) I undertook a campaign to Uruatri (Urartu) in 1273 B.C. and conquered ‘eight countries’ as well as ’51 cities’ there. It seems to have been an area on the upper reaches of the Great Zab [in Turkish Büyükzab Suyu], the Armenian Tauros and Lake Van, where there was a loose alliance of Hurrian tribal princes. Other campaign reports of the 13th to 9th centuries B.C. mention the Nairi lands, another confederation of territorial rulers in the area between Lake Van and Lake Urmia, which the Assyrians identified with Uruatri in the 9th century B.C.
With their wealth of ores, grain and cattle, Uruatri and the Nairi lands were tempting targets for the Assyrians. This forced the affected mountain tribes in the middle of the 9th century B.C. to form a more permanent alliance under Aramu (Arame, Aram), the first ruler of Urartu, as the region was now called in Assyrian inscriptions. With the foundation of a royal dynasty under Sarduri I (ca. 835/40-825/24 B.C.) comprehensive administrative reforms among his successors Ishpuini (825-810 B.C.) and Menua (ca. 810-785/80 B.C.), the state, which called itself Biaina (Biainili), consolidated itself.
Urartian fortress of VanThe ‘Treasure Grotto’ with the inscription of King Sarduri I (834-824 B.C.) on the north side of the Van Rock (Source: Lehmann-Haupt, Carl Friedrich.: Armenien einst und jetzt. Vol. 2,1: Das türkische Ost-Armenien – In Nord-Assyrien. Leipzig 1926. – Archives of the Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia (IDZA), Berlin), p. 30
The reforms did not only provide for a uniform calendar and units of measurement, but also for the nationalization of large areas of arable land. The centralized Urartian state based on the priesthood and civil servants, headed by the king, who also acted as the highest priest. In their inscriptions, the Urartian rulers always described themselves as executors of the will of their state god Khaldi, in whose name they waged wars and had cities, castles and other large buildings built. The king’s enormous granaries and livestock were used to feed the 20,000 warriors of the standing army and their families. Although the Urartians generally avoided open field battles with the Assyrians, in the 8th century B.C. they themselves expanded in order to get rid of annoying enemies and acquire new cultivated land or raw material resources. As a result, in the north they defeated the tribal alliance Etiuni and conquered the Ararat plain, in the west they defeated an alliance called Khate under the leadership of the king of the late Hittite city-state Malatya (Melitea) and won the rich iron ore deposits at the middle course of the Euphrates. South of Lake Urmia, they defeated the ‘Land Mana’.
Urartian fortress of Van
At the beginning of the reign of Sarduri II (ca. 753-733 B.C.) Urartu had reached the peak of its expansion and stretched over 800 kilometers from the middle reaches of the Euphrates to the east and 500 kilometers from north to south, including Lake Urmia and the entire South Caucasus. As in the actual territory of the Urartian Empire, the new conquests were secured by a dense network of garrisons and castles, which also controlled the long-distance trade routes. Lake Van, however, remained the actual center of power, on whose eastern shore Tasha, originally an important place of worship had already been elevated to residence under Sarduri I. He built his castle on what is now Van Kale (‘Van Fortress’). It was not until the downfall that Rusa II (about 680-639 B.C.) moved the residence to the rocks of the new foundation named after him, Rusahinili (Turkish Toprak kale – ‘earth fortress’) in the northeast of Lake Van.
Since 810 B.C., Urartu succeeded in contesting the supremacy of Assyria in the Near East for about 70 years. It apparently allied itself with the cavalrymen of the Cimmerians, Scythians and Medes, who migrated westwards from the Iranian Highlands. While the Cimmerians were fighting to bind the Urartian army, the Assyrians again dared to make advances. Since the Armenian Highlands were difficult to conquer, let alone to keep, the Assyrian king Sargon II concentrated after his victory in 714 B.C. on the systematic destruction of the center of Urartian power and settlement in the Van Basin. The population was massacred, towns, settlements and harvests burned, fields flooded, fruit trees and vines chopped off, Ardini (Mushashir), the sanctuary of the god Khaldi, desecrated and completely plundered. The desperate King Rusa I (around 735/730 to 713 B.C.) threw himself into his sword ‘like a pig’, as the victors’ reports say with malice. Weakened and humiliated, at the turn of the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. Urartu again had to adjust to a coexistence with Assyria. Both empires sank shortly after each other under the attacks of new enemies from the north. Scythians and the Medes allied with them, first attacked the northern and eastern city fortresses in the middle of the seventh century B.C., then from the end of the 7th to the middle of the 6th century B.C. followed the destruction of the capital and the remaining castles, which were usually burned. The latest mention of an Urartian royal name dates from 640 B.C., the last mention of Urartu as a toponym from 418 B.C.
Until the 19th century, Urartu belonged to the ‘forgotten cultures’, at least from the point of view of European archaeology. Since then, numerous excavations, finds and the deciphering of its cuneiform inscriptions have made it possible to get quite precise ideas about this ancient Near Eastern culture. However, the treatises often give the impression as if this empire had suddenly emerged from the darkness of early history without any connection, in order to extinguish itself just as meteorically after three hundred years of existence. If, on the other hand, the obvious continuities are taken into account, Urartu appears as a link between the Bronze Age cultures of the South Caucasus and the Armenian Plateau, but especially between the Hurrians of the third and second millennia B.C .and the Armenians. Even if Urartu, especially at the zenith of its development of power, was not an ethnically uniform state, the stratum supporting the state probably was Hurrian.
During the consolidation phase, King Ishpuini replaced Akkadian in the administration with Urartian, which, however, was still written in Assyrian cuneiform script. In addition, there was a down-to-earth hieroglyphic script, which is still indecipherable today and is widely documented in the Armenian Highlands.
Tower-like temples stood at the center of the citadels and city fortresses crowned with battlements. These buildings, called susi in Urartian, like the fortified and residential buildings, were erected on a base of hewn or quarry stones and very thick brick walls and had a square ground plan with pronounced corner patterns. This is also a down-to-earth tradition, as square towers were already erected in the Bronze Age city fortresses. In addition, the Urartians worshipped their gods in front of so-called god gates, which were carved into rocks as false gates and arose from the oriental idea of the birth of the god from the mountain. In front of these rock gates lay a cult terrace with small altars as well as simple stone steles ending in an arch at the top.
Urartu’s economy based on cattle breeding and a varied agricultural system with numerous types of fruit and vegetables. The Urartian horses were particularly sought-after and were usually named first in the lists of prey meticulously drawn up by the Assyrians. Their rulers raved about the gardens of their Urartian opponents: ‘The image of the city was dominated by friendly gardens, which were covered with fruit trees and vines, so that they dripped with fruit as abundantly as a downpour from the sky’. In the same city Ulhu, the recreation place of the Urartian king, the Assyrian victors were having an orgy in the hidden wine cellars of Rusa II and drew his good wine ‘like river water‘. Wine seems to have been a staple food, because in the garrisons and fortified cities there were always large stocks in huge amphorae.
The construction of irrigation systems belonged to the ritual of Urartian land seizure. Urartian rulers repeatedly mention how they, on behalf of Khaldi, transformed previous deserts into flourishing meadows, for example in the valley of the Arax River or in the Ararat plain. As in the construction of fortresses and temples, they adopted and perfected older, down-to-earth methods and techniques. One of their innovations was the Qanat system: Underground tunnels collect the ground water and seepage water under the debris of the mountains and transport it to the earth’s surface. The extensive Urartian irrigation system consisting of canals, dikes, reservoirs, cisterns and Qanat tunnels still impresses even in its remains, which testify to great technical and organizational achievements, whereby the manpower of the warriors of subjugated and then forcibly resettled peoples was presumably used, as inscribed in the construction of the fortress. Some of the canals and roads were even driven through hard rock. These testimonies to early engineering achievements include the reservoir (Keshishgöl) of Rusa I and the 71-kilometre-long canal of King Menua, which supplied the capital Tushpa with water. Some of its canals still operate water mills. Later generations were only able to explain these outstanding achievements by semi-legendary persons and attributed the Menua canal to the biblical Assyrian queen Semiramis, or Shamiram in Armenian.
Viaduct of the canal built by King Menua over the Khoshab River (Source: Lehmann-Haupt, Carl Friedrich.: Armenien einst und jetzt. Vol. 2,1: Das türkische Ost-Armenien – In Nord-Assyrien. Leipzig 1926, p. 98. – Archives of the Center for Information and Documentation Armenia (IDZA), Berlin)Urartian bronze findings
Urartu’s fortified cities formed centers of specialized handicrafts that worked on behalf of the court or temples. A particularly high level of development is evidenced by the metal craft, which on the one hand was linked to the achievements of the Bronze Age cultures, but on the other hand can already be addressed as an Iron Age culture. In ancient times, the South Caucasus and the Armenian Highlands were regarded as the countries of origin of iron ore mining and processing. Already at the turn of the ninth to the 8th century B.C., the Urartian army’s armament was converted from bronze to iron; the decommissioned bronze weapons migrated to the temples as consecrated offerings or were remelted into images of gods.
Urartu’s jewellers mastered almost all of today’s common processes, including sophisticated ornamental techniques such as cell melting. The artisans also achieved outstanding achievements in furniture making: elegant tables, chairs, beds and thrones were artfully assembled from individual parts; the graceful legs often ended in lion’s claws or cattle hooves. Other specialities included stone processing, the production of textiles, which were highly esteemed even by the Assyrians, and wall decoration through painting, incrustation and mosaics.
The Mithras Gate (Armenian: Mheridur; Turkish: Meher Kapısı) on the Zimzim Mountain, an Urartian sacred place, dedicated to the god Khaldi (Source: Lehmann-Haupt, Carl Friedrich.: Armenien einst und jetzt. Vol. 2,1: Das türkische Ost-Armenien – In Nord-Assyrien. Leipzig 1926, p. 59. – Archives of the Center for Information and Documentation Armenia (IDZA), Berlin)
Religion and the royal cult were at the center of the performing arts: sacrificial rulers were depicted repeatedly, often next to a tree of life, the sometimes strongly stylized symbol of eternal renewal and royal rule. The gods appear human, but in ancient oriental iconography with wings and a pair of horns as a sign of divinity. They stand, in profile, on the animals assigned to them: Khaldi frequently on a lion, Teisheba on a bull. Winged mixed creatures, including griffins, as well as star rosettes recall the imagery of Neo-Assyrian murals and palace reliefs, which were popular imitations especially in the early phase of Urartu. In its self-confident, independent form, Urartian art shows a preference for geometric and ornamental patterns as well as a clear tendency towards abstraction and stylization. Animals, humans and gods walk along in constant repetition as in a solemn endless procession, without dynamics and ‘narrative’ components. In keeping with its courtly and ceremonial character, this art is timeless and feigns an uninterrupted continuity. In addition, there was a more lively and realistic folk or provincial art, albeit less frequently documented, which is characterized by a greater variety of forms as well as a greater impartiality and individuality in the depiction of, above all, profane themes.
The direct political heir of Urartu was Media, which made Urartu/Armenia a tributary as early as 590 B.C., while the Persian kings, who ruled Armenia between 550 and 330 B.C., became its indirect heir. Together with the citadels and fortified cities of the Urartians, Medians and Persians also appropriated the Urartian fortifications and sacred buildings. The columned halls of the Achaemenids called apadana appear as a direct continuation of the two- or three-aisled hall construction of Urartian palaces, just as the tower-shaped fire temples of Old Persia are unmistakably modelled on the susi temples of Urartu. The Scythians also drew on the iconographic and stylistic art of the subjugated Urartians and, for their part, conveyed primeval elements to Central and Western Europe.
Armenians at Lake Van, around 1898 (Source: Rohrbach, Paul: Vom Kaukasus zum Mittelmeer: Eine Hochzeits- und Studienreise durch Armenien. Leipzig, Berlin, 1903. Archives of the Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia (IDZA), Berlin)
The main heir, however, was the people living on the former Urartian dominion, first mentioned by the Ionic-Greek logographer Hekataios of Miletus (ca.560-480 B.C.) and in an inscription of the Persian Grand King Darios I from 519 B.C. under the name Armenian (in Greek: Armenoi). Especially in Armenian everyday culture and in popular belief numerous elements were preserved which remind of Urartu, if not of its predecessor cultures and testify to the great longevity of the traditions in the Armenian Highlands. These include not only elements of traditional costume such as the soft Urartian ribbon caps, the takeover of the territorial community or the calendar system. There is also an unmistakable continuity in certain agricultural techniques or the construction of earth dwellings that were ideally adapted to the terrain and in which people and animals warm each other under one roof in the winter.
Language analyses suggest that the ethnogenesis of the Armenians involved not only Hurrian-Urartian, but also Indo-European, above all Luwian, and also autochthonous Asia Minor and South Caucasian tribes as well as, to a lesser extent, Semitic (Aramaic) population groups. The 6th to 2nd century B.C. is regarded as rough key data. Armenian contains considerable non-Indo-European components in its vocabulary, grammar and sound, which it shares with Georgian and Urartian. Up to 20 percent of the known Hurrian-Urartian vocabulary is occupied by Armenian, including words such as ‘dzar’ (tree), ‘dzov (sea), ‘hovit’ (valley) and ‘oriord’ (girl of noble descent, Miss). Urartian names of persons and places were continued in Armenian for a long time: Aramu (Arame), the first Urartian king mentioned in writing, is still a popular first name as Aram. The toponyms Tushpa and Biainili became Tosp and Van and were, after more than a millennium, reminded by Movses Khorenatsi at a time, when the knowledge about Urartu had long since faded from all other peoples of the region. In his History of Armenia (around 480) Khorenatsi describes the Urartian metropolis Tosp, the cuneiform scripts of the Urartians, the royal rock tombs as well as the ‘Semiramis Channel’ as one of the most wonderful phenomena of Armenia and mentions the Urartians as the immediate predecessors of the Armenians.
The regional Armenian toponym Vaspurakan translates as the ‘noble land’, or ‘land of the princes’. After its conquest in 590 B.C., the Urartian kingdom became a Median satrapy. But Media’s supremacy over Armenia lasted only 40 years, for already in 550 B.C. Cyrus II (the Great), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty, smashed the Median empire and rose to rule almost all of Asia Minor as well as Armenia, which the Achaemenids governed through satraps. The governors of the satrapy Armenia came from a dynasty founded by Yervand I (Greek/Persian Orontes, 570-560 B.C.), which had already provided governors for the Medes and whose ethnic affiliation is uncertain. However, since the supremacy of both the Medes and the Persian kings remained only nominal for long stretches, the Yervandides are regarded as the first Armenian ruling dynasty.
The ancient Kingdom of , as a centralized state, from 321 B.C.-428 A.D. under three royal dynasties of the Yervandides (570-2nd century B.C.), the Artashian (190-55 B.C.) and the originally Parthian dynasty of Arshakuni (53-428 A.D.). Only in 189 B.C., Vaspurakan was incorporated as its eighth province into Greater Armenia or Armenia Maior, as the Romans classified this part of the Armenian Highland (Bardzr Hayk). After the division of the Armenian Highland between Eastern Rome (Byzantium) and Sasanid (Sasanian, Sasanide) Persia in 387, Vaspurakan became a part of Persian ruled Armenia.
In autumn 640, a new supremacy of the Near East, the Arab Caliphate, appeared, murdering and plundering. Even at a distance of more than 200 years, the Catholicos and historian Hovhannes Drashanakerttsi (c. 850-929) described the event as frightening: ‘Searing south wind’, which ‘swept away the power of nations and tribes’ and ‘laid waste to the country’s gardens’. Armenia’s ‘aristocrats disappeared, and those who remained were subjugated like slaves’. Driven by the dynamics of Islam, a young and therefore particularly aggressive religion of conquest, the Arabs had conquered and destroyed the once powerful Sasanid Empire in the 630s to 640s. Since Byzantium (Byzantion) once again refused to help the oppressed Armenians, the aristocracy of Eastern Armenia was compelled to negotiate with the conquerors in 652. A quite favorable for Armenia treaty granted a three-year tax exemption as well as the renunciation of the building of garrisons against the recognition of Arab sovereignty.
The methods of earlier conquerors were repeated in Arab policy toward Armenia: a relatively tolerant initial phase, in which the internal autonomy of the nobility remained largely untouched, was followed at the end of the 7th century by the consolidation of foreign rule, which was accompanied by a drastic deterioration in the living conditions of the subjects. Compulsory labor, which the Armenians had to perform when building garrisons, as well as tax pressure since 703 led to insurrections, which in turn entailed bloody punitive expeditions. Just like their Persian predecessors, the Arabs established governors (Armenian: vostikanner) from the ranks of their own nobility. On the other hand, the Arabian instruments of domination showed novelties in comparison to those of the Persians and Byzantines: The Arabs did not levy their taxes ‘per hearth’ (household), but as a poll tax to be paid by all male Armenians between the ages of 15 and 60. Under the legendary caliph Harun-al-Rashid, the plundering of the subjects reached its peak at the beginning of the 9th century.
Another novelty was the settlement of nomadic tribes, who displaced the sedentary native population from the fertile plains to higher and more barren regions. The Arabs exploited the discord among the Armenian aristocrats (nakhararner) to perfection, whereby they proceeded double-track: Those noble families that had fought against foreign rule for centuries, such as the Kamsarakan and Mamikonian, were literally exterminated, while offering privileges to the more willing, such as the Syuni (Siuni, Siwni) and especially the Bagratuni in the Northeast of the Armenian Highlands, and in Vaspurakan the Artsruni. In gratitude for the fact that the Bagratuni had fallen away from the Mamikonian during the uprising of the years 747 to 750, the Arabs transferred to them the office of sparapet (supreme commander), which had previously been exercised by the Mamikonian, and later even elevated them to ‘princes of princes’. Privileges and donations made this noble house so powerful that large parts of eastern Armenia belonged to it at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries. At this time, the Caliphal Empire was already so weakened by internal crises and revolts on its periphery that it threatened to disintegrate into individual territorial principalities (Emirates), whose rulers were increasingly striving for independence.
The noble House of Artsruni of Vaspurakan, also promoted by the Arabs, seems less corrupt than the Bagratuni: After the elimination of the Mamikonian dynasty, this family took over the leadership of another popular uprising in 762, which ended on 24 April 775 with the Battle of Bagrevand, in which 4,500 Armenians died. First Vaspurakan and then Sasun in the southeast and south of the Armenian Highland developed into centers of resistance. The attempt of the vostikanner to collect taxes in Armenia led to an uprising, which expanded despite the brutal punitive expedition from 852 to 855 to popular uprising.
Because of the long fighting, the Arabs were so weakened that in 875 a council of princes proclaimed Armenia’s independence and suggested to the caliph to proclaim Ashot Bagratuni king. Although the ‘ruler of the devout’ delayed this decision by another ten years, he had to recognize the Bagratid prince as a legitimate king as did Emperor Basileios I, who sent him the crown according to ancient Roman custom. Byzantium and the Caliphate equally needed Armenia’s alliance, and the diplomatically gifted Ashot I. tried in his five-year reign to maintain good relations with both, but at the same time to advance the unification of the Armenian principalities. However, even at the zenith of Bagratid power, the princes’ urge for independence and Byzantine intrigues prevented complete centralization. Armenia also remained internally divided. Already Ashot’s son and successor Smbat I. (890-914) met with fierce resistance from the Artsruni of Vaspurakan. The Emir of Atropatene took advantage of their quarrel with the Bagratids by crowning Gagik Artsruni (879/80-943) king of a second regional Armenian kingdom in 908. Centered on Lake Van, his kingdom stretched over the southeast of the Armenian Highland, comprising also the northwest of Iran with the Emirate of Her (Khoy). At its greatest extent, Vaspurakan comprised the lands between Lake Van and Lake Urmia (also known as Kaputan) in 908. But even at this time the Artsruni remained under the sovereignty of the Bagratuni Kingdom of Ani.
The Principality of Vaspurakan, rival to the Bagratids, had its trade and crafts center in Van, probably the oldest city in Armenia. The residence of the Artsruni, however, was on the island of Akhtamar, where King Gagik I. (reigned 908-937) donated a magnificent palace church. However, the strengthening of Armenian territorial principalities was not in the interest of Byzantium. The first victim of Byzantine intrigues in 966 was the South Armenian principality of Taron, where the Bagratids had established a side line, followed by the principality of Vaspurakan south and east of Lake Van, whose last ruler, Senerkerim Hovhannes Artsruni, was forced in 1021 to surrender his rule to the Byzantines and seek refuge with his family and army in the small town of Sebaste (Sebasteia) and its surroundings. Shortly afterwards, Vaspurakan was incorporated into the Byzantine Empire as an administrative unit (thema) named Vasprakania.
The shortsighted Armenia policy of the Byzantines took immediate revenge. As early as 1048, 1049 and 1054 the Seljuks, a nomadic tribe of Turkic descent who had advanced from present-day Uzbekistan to Asia Minor, plundered and murdered the country, robbed of its princely families, left behind depopulated settlements and triggered a mass flight of the population that had never been seen before. Hundreds of thousands fled south to Cappadocia, Armenia Minor and Cilicia, or north to Crimea, Moldova, and Poland.
After the final Byzantine defeat in 1071 at Manazkert (Manzikert), not far from Lake Van, most of Armenia and some eastern regions of Asia Minor came under the rule of the Seljuk sultan, although this did not last long. As early as the beginning of the 12th century, his Armenian empire broke up into the constantly fighting Emirates of Ani, Dvin, Kars, Khlat (Akhlat; Vaspurakan) and Karin, which the conquerors called Erzurum. The Seljuk wars and rule had a devastating effect: Arable land was converted into pastures, and the indigenous population, as far as they had not fled, was pushed into higher regions. In the plains, agriculture and horticulture lay as low as trade and handicrafts. The historian and contemporary Aristakes Lastivertsi complained at the end of the 11th century: ‘Those who were snatched from their loved ones were scattered like stars if they were not struck by the sword. In our time, wars broke out in all directions: The sword in the east killed the west, fire in the north and death in the south. Joy deserted the land.’
A temporary power vacuum in the Middle East favored Georgia’s rise to regional hegemonic power, starting with the reign of its highly educated and capable king Davit IV (1089-1125) aqmashenebeli (‘the restorer’), who initiated the liberation of Georgia and parts of Armenia. The first crusade (from 1096) and the gradual resurgence of the Byzantines created further positive conditions for a Christian empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, which reached its zenith under Davit’s legendary great-granddaughter Tamar (1184-1213). Tamar’s military commanders, the brothers Ivane I and Zakare Zakaryan from an Eastern Armenian noble family of partly Kurdish descent reconquered some areas of Vaspurakan in the beginning of the 13th century.
However, the upswing in the liberated regions lasted just under forty years. As early as 1236, a 30,000-strong Mongolian army invaded the South Caucasus and conquered all of northern Armenia by the end of the year. 1242 to 1245 followed the conquest of the Armenian west and south. The Mongols’ rule, which lasted about a century, was accompanied by numerous and particularly heavy tax burdens: the land tax, a poll tax for all men between the ages of 15 and 60, and a military tax. As during the Seljuk rule, many Armenians tried to escape the seemingly endless misery in their homeland by emigrating.
“Canon tables, a widely used comparative index to the gospels, were developed by Eusebius of Caesarea for his pupil Carpianus who appears in the headpiece of the explanatory page on the right. When bound, the tables on the left would have been one of the following index pages. Illuminator Minas (?) (active in region of Vaspurakan (now eastern Turkey))”, 15th century (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; http://www.metmuseum.org/)
In the second half of the 14th century, the Turkic-born Emir Timur Lenk (‘the lame’, also Tamerlan, died 1405) claimed to come from the clan of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, whose empire he claimed in vain as inheritance. In the 1370s, Timur conquered his own great empire. The Turkmen tribes of the Black and White Muttons (Kara and Ak Koyunlu, respectively), named after their banners, who had already established themselves in Asia Minor and Armenia by the end of the 13th century, succeeded the short-lived Tamerlan empire. They ruled Armenia from 1410 to 1502.
16th century Ottoman miniature (Selim-name) depicting the Battle of Chaldiran
In 1472, the majority of Armenia fell under Persian rule, which was soon challenged by the Turkish Ottomans. During their long struggle for supremacy over the Armenian highlands, Safavids and Ottomans redefined their spheres of influence: After the Persian-Ottoman Battle of Chaldiran (Chaldoran/West-Azerbaijan/Iran; 23 August 1514), the Ottomans gained half of Armenia. In order to strengthen the Muslim proportion in his new territories in Armenia, Sultan Selim I had Kurdish nomads settle there. Following the Ottoman-Safavid war of 1532-1555, the Treaty of Amasya sealed the first Persian-Ottoman division of Armenia; Van became a buffer zone between the rivaling Ottomans and Safavids. From 1616 to 1639, renewed fights for supremacy between Iran and the Ottoman Sultanate had flared up. With the Treaty of Zuhab (also Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin) in 1639, the devastating domination struggles finally ended and Armenia was divided for the second time between the two feudal military despoticies. Now only the two Eastern Armenian Khanates Yerevan and Nakhichevan remained for Iran. Van/Vaspurakan fell under Ottoman rule in 1548 and because of the Ottoman-Safavid war of 1532-1555.
The two rivals for the supremacy, which entered the Armenian stage at the beginning of the 16th century and determined the fate of the country in the following three centuries, were the Ottoman Sultanate, named after its founder Osman, and Safavid ruled Iran. The Ottomans had already emerged at the end of the 13th century on the northwestern edge of Asia Minor, along with other Turkish state foundations in this region, and had subdued several states by the second half of the 14th century. With the conquest of its capitals Constantinople (1453) and Trapezunta (1461), Byzantium and the Pontic Empire, the last and once most important Christian empires in Asia Minor, were abolished.
Since the conquest of the Crimea in 1476, the Ottomans also controlled the Black Sea. During the subsequent advance to the Caspian Sea, they reduced the Armenian Highland to rubble and ashes, but came into conflict there with the Safavids. This Shiite Turkmen tribe from Ardabil named after its religiously revered ancestor Sheikh Safi-ad-din Ardabili, had taken over Iran in 1502.
In violation of the peace treaty of Amasya (1555), the Ottoman army invaded the South Caucasus in 1578. When in 1603 the Ottoman attempt to invade the city of Van failed, Allahverdi, the Shah’s general, devastated the surrounding region and massacred the population. 23,000 Armenians and their cattle were deported from Vaspurakan to Isfahan and Kashan. When the recapture of the Ottoman-occupied city of Yerevan failed, Allahverdi did the same in the plain of Ararat. Over all and according to various sources, in February 1604 between 50,000 and 100,000 Armenians were driven into the inner provinces of Iran. About one fifth of the deportees drowned in the torrential, freezing cold floods of the Arax – ‘behind us the sword and in front of us the water’, as the poet Hovhannes Tumanyan later aptly described this traumatic experience. In order to prevent resettlement and to deprive the Ottoman occupiers of any livelihood, Allahverdi had fruit trees, vines chopped off, and wells destroyed. He settled the survivors of the forced marches in Shiraz and Hamadan, but above all near the Safavid capital Isfahan.
In 1538, Vaspurakan became an Ottoman general governorate. After the suppression of the uprising of the Kurdish emir Bedir (Badr) Khan (Bedirxan) Beg (1843-1846), Van as a general governorate was dissolved in 1848 at the latest and administratively divided into the three districts of Van, Mush (Muş) and Payazat (Beyazit) which were incorporated into the eyalets (general provinces) of Erzurum and Diyarbakır respectively.
Soon – in 1875 or 1876 – Van was separated from Erzurum and declared a ‘valilik’ (valiliği), i.e. a particularly small province, before it received the status of a regular province (vilayet) in 1877. However, at the same time, its territory was considerably diminished: Hakkari became an autonomous province (vilayet), and before 1884, the Mush kaza and the Sbargerd/Ispayert, Khizan/Hizan, Shirvan/Şirvan and Gardjgan/Karçikan nahiyes were incorporated into the newly established Bitlis province. According to different sources, the erstwhile province of Hakkari (established as a province in 1875 only) was incorporated into the Van Vilayet as one of its two sancaks by imperial order of 1888. At the same time, Gardjgan/Karçikan permanently joined the Van vilayet. In 1891, 1897, 1902 and 1913, the administrative structure of the Van vilayet underwent major changes. In 1893, the Amadya nahiye was excluded from the Van province.[2]
Population
In 1862, i.e. before the unification of Van and Hakkari, the overall population was estimated to be 418,700, half of these (209,100) being Christians. For 1886, the estimate by the French geographer Vital Cuinet was 430,000 inhabitants, of these 79,998 Armenians, while the German Brockhaus encyclopedia names an overall population of the province with 376,200 (1894). The German theologian Johannes Lepsius, based on the Armenian Patriarch Malakhia Ormanian, estimated the number of Armenians for 1911 much higher: 192,000. According to the Armenian historian Harutyun Marutyan, in the 1890s the province of Van, with 242,000 people, was the second largest province in the Ottoman Empire after the province of Sivas (370,000 Armenians) in terms of its Armenian population.[3]
The province of Van had 450 towns and villages.[4] According to the official 1914 Ottoman census the population of the Van province consisted of 179,422 Muslims and only 67,797 Armenians. However, the Ottoman census took into account only male citizens, excluding women and children, and many Christian land dwellers of the Ottoman Empire avoided the registration of male newborns in baptismal registers in order to save them their later tax or military service obligations.[5] According to the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, the corrected estimates for the Van province (including women and children) was 313,000 Muslims, 130,000 Armenians (110,897, as quoted by R. Kévorkian), and 65,000 ‘others’, including Syriacs of various denominations.
There are different data on the extent of the province, possibly due to different reference periods:
Vital Cuinet (1890-94): 47,700 square kilometers (in 1886)
Brockhaus/SAE: 40,000 square kilometers
Artashes Abeghian (1922): 39,300 square kilometers (in 1914)[6]
History
Since 1820 the Armenians of Van were under the leadership of twelve wealthy Armenian notables, which were called onikiler (from ‘on iki’ – ‘twelve’) in Turkish.[7] Under Ottoman rule, the Armenians of the Van province shared the fate of Armenians in other Ottoman regions, including the legal and societal discrimination of all non-Muslims. However, their relative superiority and settlement density enabled the Armenian population here, as well as partly in the Tauros Mountains (North Cilicia), to resist the oppression of local, regional or central government authorities. Twice, in June 1896 and in May 1915, the Armenian population of the city of Van and its surroundings was able to defend successfully its quarters against the combined attacks of irregular Kurdish and regular Ottoman forces.
One of the most positive results of the Ottoman reform attempts of 1856 was the secularization of the millet system, in which each of the Ottoman Non-Muslim ‘church-nations’ was granted its own parliament (‘National Assembly’), largely composed of laypersons, and a ‘National Constitution’ to regulate the internal affairs of the community. In 1856, young Armenian intellectuals and employees of the reform-friendly Ottoman civil servants drafted the ‘National Constitution’ for the ermeni millet. Thus the Patriarch remained the official representative of the Armenian Apostolic denomination to the Ottoman government, but was now obliged to the will of the Armenian ‘National Assembly’. Composed of a civil and a religious chamber, this committee counted 140 delegates, of which the laymen with 120 persons had a clear predominance over the clergy. Remarkably, the ‘National Constitution’ of the ermeni millet served as a model for the Ottoman constitution of 1876.
Armenian presence within modern Turkish borders in early 1600s
Front Page of the Armenian National Constitution (1863)
It took nine years until the Ottoman government, against the resistance of the conservative Armenian upper class in Constantinople (amira) and under the impression of Armenian uprisings in Zeytun (1862), Van (1862) and Mush (1863), agreed to a weakened version of the Armenian National Constitution in January 1864. The Constitution also allowed the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople to establish a network of prelatures in the ‘Eastern provinces’. Even if the local bishops could not change anything about the factual lawlessness of the West Armenians, they since 1860 conveyed news about the increasing number of violations of the law and attacks by Kurds and North Caucasians (‘Circassians’) to the Patriarchate in Constantinople, which greatly upset the Armenian spokesmen there.
As petitions to the central government hardly produced any results, the conviction grew that the existing conditions were unreformable; more and more Armenian opinion leaders believed that the only improvement would be to free Armenia from foreign rule. Above all, however, one had to take the defense of the rural population into one’s own hands. Between 1872 and 1885, small, mostly short-lived secret societies such as Miut’yun ou Prkut’yun (‘Unity and salvation’, Van, March 1872-1874), Sev Khach (‘Black Cross’, Van, 1878/79 – approx. 1885) and Pashtpan Hayrenyats (‘Defender of the Fatherland’, Erzurum, 1881-1882) emerged, whose spiritual father and co-founder was the clergyman Mkrtich Khrimian (1820-1907). Deeply revered among the people as ‘Hayrik’ (‘little father’), the later patriarch (1869-1873) and Catholicos (since 1893), who came from Van, initially stood in the educational idealistic tradition of the Armenian enlightenment (zartonk), whom he tried to serve as a pedagogue and publicist until he was radicalized above all by the disappointments emanating from the Berlin Congress (1878).
Kurdish hunter. – Drawing by Th. Deyrolle, after nature (Archives of the Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia (IDZA), Berlin)
With the entry into force of the National Constitution (1864), the onikiler of Van lost their power. Some reforms by the Imperial government, but more so increasing contacts with foreigners and Western education – be it in Protestant mission schools or in foreign studies – intensified the liberal aspirations among the Armenian population in the 19th century and, following the example of partisan liberation movements in Southern Europe – the Hellenic kleftes (Κλέφτες – ‘robbers’), the carbonari of Italy – finally led to armed liberation movements for the independence or at least autonomy of the Armenian settlement areas.
Sultan Abdülhamit II (late 19th century)
The Ottoman reforms, however, also aggravated the mistrust and dislike of Muslims towards Christians without really enhancing the situation of the Christians. With the foundation of the Hamidiye Cavalry in 1891, mainly recruited from Kurdish tribes and named in honor of the ruling Sultan Abdülhamit II, anti-Christian attacks increased. Hamidiye units were largely involved in the massacres of the years 1894-1896. These brutalities began in the Sasun region of southern Armenia, where Kurdish irregulars brutally suppressed a revolt of Armenian peasants against their double taxation by state tax collectors and Kurdish tribes. Further massacres of Armenians who protested against the Sasun slaughter in the Ottoman capital Constantinople followed, as did massacres of Armenians in the provincial capitals Erzurum, Urfa and Harput (Kharberd).
Parallel to the half-hearted reforms of the 19th century, the growing Islamization of East Anatolia took place. It affected above all the Armenian settlement area, where a Kurdish land seizure took place on a large scale only after the Ottoman conquest of this region, i.e. after the Safavid defeat in the Battle of Chaldiran (1514). Between 1876 and 1914 alone, 100,000 Kurds are said to have immigrated to the Mush, Van and Erzurum districts.
Kurdish Chieftain (Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia)
The relations between Kurds and Armenians were never consensual or even friendly due to theirunequal legal position, but also due to diametrically opposed economic needs and habits as nomads or farmers. The events of the period 1876 to 1918, in which the Kurds participated frequently in massacres, burdened this conflict-laden relationship even more. In addition, the Armenian-Kurdish relationship in the Ottoman Empire was characterized by the triangular relationship between the Ottoman state, Kurdish tribal leaders and the Christian rural population. When in the 19th century the Sublime Porte, i.e. the central government based in Constantinople, increasingly tried to assert its claim to power militarily against Kurdish tribal leaders, this was at the expense of the Christians. When the last Kurdish ruler of the Çizre-Botan principality, Bedir Khan (Bedirxan) Beg, had unleashed the uprising of 1843-1846, Kurds killed more than ten thousand East Syriacs, or so-called Nestorians, in the Hakkari region.
In the early 20th century, the thinly populated Province of Van, with 450 towns and villages, still had a predominantly Christian population (Armenians; Syriacs/Assyrians, or ‘Nestorians’); 110,897 of these being Armenians. At least half of them fell victim to massacres in April 1915 and subsequent starvation and epidemics during repeated flights.
The liberal Irish businessperson, traveler and politician Henry Finnis Blosse Lynch (1862-1913), whose paternal grandmother was Armenian, traveled Armenia in 1893 and 1898 on two separate occasions. In the second volume of his travelogue, he characterized the 1890s as a period of upheaval in Ottoman politics:
“Van is situated at the threshold of the Kurdish mountains, close to the immemorial strongholds of Kurdish chieftains, whence they descend with their motley followers into the plains. No sooner the centralizing tendencies in the Ottoman Empire come near to establishing upon a permanent basis the unquestioned supremacy of Ottoman rule in these remote districts, than the Armenian movement commenced to make itself felt. (…)
From one cause or another, the whole character of Mussulman government has undergone a marked change within recent years. It is scarcely possible to recognize in the ruling circles of such a city as Van the Turkey of our fathers. Fear and suspicion are written upon every face. These passions are transmitted to the rank and file of their co-religionists; the air is full of rumors of Armenian plots. In the old days there would have been a riot and quite possibly a massacre; and everything would settle down. At present, a swarm of spies, under the direction of emissaries from the Palace, keep the old sores open and daily discover new opportunities for inflicting wounds. All the vices of the Russian bureaucracy have been copied by willing disciples in the capital, and sent down to the provinces to serve as a model. One may assert without exaggeration that life is quite intolerable for an inhabitant of this paradise of Van.
The spies smell out a so-called plot and denounce its authors to the Governor, who, poor man, is tired to death with their reports. If he fails to follow it up, he is accused at Constantinople, and runs the risk of losing his post. If he interferes, his action may quite well lead to bloodshed at a time when his efforts at pacification were commencing to bear fruit. (…)
Of course the power of the Kurds is daily on the increase in such circumstances as these. The Palace leans towards them; their petty leaders are taken to the capital and invested with high orders. The wretched puppet of a Governor does not dare to overawe them, as even his slender resources would well enable him to do. On the other hand, the former docile, cringing spirit of the Armenians has given place to a different temper. Partly they are goaded by the spies into so-called rebellion; and, in part, they have been aroused to a consciousness of their own real miseries by the persecution of the most respected of their clerical leaders and by the spread of education.
The Armenian movement has had the effect of resolving their community at Van into two distinct parties.”[8]
The province and the city of Van were spared from massacres until January 1896, when the British vice-consul in Van, W.H. Williams, mentioned in a report, that numerous Armenian villages had been looted and ,Armenians are everywhere in a state bordering on panic, afraid lest the spring will bring still further disasters‘.[9] Indeed, in June 1896, the Ottoman authorities sent an expedition to attack the Armenian population of Van.
Between the 3 and 11 June some six to seven hundred Armenian men defended the Armenian sections of the Aygestan (Garden, or Orchard City) district outside the walled Old City. After a week of fighting, Sultan Abdülhamit II sought the mediation from the Western powers to end the violence, promising that he would guarantee the lives and safety of the Armenians of Van. After some negotiations, and making clear they had been acting in self-defense in the face of continual massacre, the Armenian defenders agreed to leave for Iran, escorted by Ottoman troops. En route, as nearly 1,000 Armenians marched towards the Ottoman border, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen massacred them. This was followed by further massacres throughout the Van region. Vice-consul Williams estimated that overall, some 20,000 Armenians had been killed and some 350 Armenian villages destroyed.[10]
A year later, on 25-27 July 1897, an Armenian Fedayeen group of 250 fighters undertook a revenge attack, known as the Khanadzor (Khanasor; Surb Khach) Expedition, against the Kurdish Mazrig tribe that had been responsible for the massacre of the defenders of Van when they were moving towards the Iranian border. The 250 Armenian fedayees attacked and killed the fighting men of that tribe, sparing the women and the children, among whom the Mazrig chief, Sharaf Bey; when Sharaf learnt earlier that armed Armenians were advancing, he disguised as a woman by wearing women’s dresses and escaped, leaving the defenseless women and children behind.[11]
In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP; better known in Europe and the USA as Young Turks) came to power through a military coup. The hope of the Ottoman Christians that after the restoration of the Ottoman constitution of 1876 further reforms would be introduced to equalize and improve their situation was quickly shattered. In April 1909, further massacres of the Armenian population took place in Cilicia, with 30,000 victims and the participation of pro-government armed forces.
Since the outbreak of the First World War, there have been growing signs that the Young Turkish war regime could seize the opportunity to destroy the two largest Christian ethnic groups – Armenians and Greeks – forever. Since the late summer of 1914, brutal house searches and real or alleged seizures of weapons have indicated the preparation of large-scale measures to quell an allegedly imminent Armenian uprising. Since October 1914, the Ottoman Armenian population aged between 16 and 50, and in some places up to the age of 70, have been drafted to carry out forced armoring work. They were used as porters (hamallar taburlar) or road construction workers (ameliye taburlar) and suffered from inadequate food, lack of shelter and relentless labor, even if they had bought themselves out of military service.
Defense line at the Old City (Fortress) of Van (Source: The Great War: The Standard History of the All Europe Conflict (volume four) edited by H. W. Wilson and J. A. Hammerton (Amalgamated Press, London 1915) – https://www.firstworldwar.com/photos/trenches3.htm
At the end of February 1915, all Armenian civil servants were suspended and all Armenian soldiers were withdrawn from combat positions; some of the officers were court-martialled and shot. The simple soldiers were mostly put into the armoring units, where they eventually died of malnutrition or epidemics or were killed, shot or drowned.
The disarmament of the Armenian population was accompanied by the systematic arming of the Kurds and the Muslim mob; notorious robbers, highwaymen and other violent criminals were released from the prisons and formed together with Kurds into irregular units (ςeteler), which were often used by the Young Turkish Committee for ‘special tasks’.[12]
In the border province of Van, the appointment of the Albanian Governor Hasan Tahsin Uzer (1878-1939; term of office in Van: 1913-February 1915), who was considered liberal and ‘plausible ostensibly philo-Armenian’[13], as Governor General in the Erzurum province, marks the beginning of growing acts of violence against the Christian population. For in Van, Tahsin was replaced by Cevdet Belbez (died 1955), also of Albanian descent and a brother-in-law of the Ottoman Minister of War Ismail Enver; Cevdet was also the first son of Tahir Pasha (died 1913), who was governor at Van until 1910. Cevdet had been described as ‘a man of dangerously unpredictable moods, friendly one moment, ferociously hostile the next, capable of treacherous brutality‘.[14]
These traits and Cevdet’s strong hatred of Christians were evident just two months after his appointment as Governor of the Van Province. ,After his return from the abortive expedition in north-east Persia, Djevdet returned to Van and instigated a reign of terror in the outlying villages of the province on the pretext of searching for arms. But the Armenian leaders in the city did not protest. However, when Djevdet demanded 4,000 Armenians for the Ottoman army, the Armenian leaders demurred; they offered him 400, and the rest in exemption (which they were legally entitled to do). But Djevdet insisted on men, not money.’[15] The Armenians then requested to mediate, fearing that their men would be immediately killed if given to the Ottoman army.
In mid-April 1915, there was trouble in the town of Shatakh near to Van, when an Armenian schoolmaster was arrested and a local demonstration in his support had been staged. Governor Cevdet asked four prominent Armenian leaders and four leading Turks to mediate. ,At the first village at which they stopped a feast was prepared for them; and it was there that the four Armenians were treacherously murdered.’[16] This happened on 16 April 1915. According to Dr. Clarence Ussher (1870-1955), physician at the American Mission and representative of the neutral United States at Van, three days later Governor Cevdet issued a general order throughout the province, which read: ,The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protect a Christian, first, his house shall be burnt; then the Christian killed befo e his eyes, then his [the Muslim’s] family and himself.’[17]
Three days later, on 19 April 1915, all Armenian villages throughout the province of Van had been attacked by Ottoman soldiers. ‘Only inaccessible places, those heights that Armenians had come to know so well over the last thousand years, secured Armenians from attack – and also places under the protection of powerful Kurdish chiefs, who were friendly to Armenians and detested the government as much as they; Moks was one such place. Of these attacks on the villages Ussher says, ‘We have absolute proof that 55,000 people were killed.‘[18]
At that time, the Armenians began to prepare themselves in the city of Van for a second defense of the quarters they inhabited. On 20 April 1915, the artillery fire of the western garden suburb began by the Ottoman military. Under the command of Aram Manukian, the Armenian residents of Van defended themselves until 17 May 1915, when the Ottoman besiegers withdrew to the western shore of Lake Van in retreat of the advancing Russian forces and Russo-Armenian volunteers, who reached Van on the 19th May 1915.
All contemporary observers of these events agree that Van’s defense was an act of self-defense. Nevertheless, the Ottoman government in Constantinople depicted it as a rebellion and an act of betrayal under war conditions, justifying its earlier intentions to deport and destroy the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman Empire.
During the siege, a provisional government of the Armenian population of Van was established, whose task included collecting and distributing the scarce food supplies. Not only had the local urban population of about 30,000 people to be supplied, but also the up to 15,000 refugees from the rural environment. A further problem for the defenders of Vans was their shortage of weapons and ammunition, which they tried to compensate by producing their own ammunition.
In the Armenian collective memory, Van’s second defense lives on as a heroic deed (‘herosamart’ – հերոսամարտ), when the highest 1,500 Armenian civilians faced a superior force of up to 12,000 well-armed Ottoman gendarmes and Muslim irregulars of various ethnicities.
Self-defense in thekaza Çatak (Shatakh) began on 17 April 1915, the day after the assassination of Armenian leaders Ishkhan and Arshak Vramian (MP) by order of Governor Cevdet. Under the leadership of the local Dashnak activist Tigran Baghdasarian, the Armenian villages of Shatakh defended themselves for 45 days until May 15, 1915.
Grace Higley Knapp (1870-1953), American missionary and teacher. Born in Bitlis, she received her education (1883-1889) in the USA and then returned to the Ottoman Empire where she taught in Bitlis, Erzurum and Van. The following excerpts are from her letter of 24th May, 1915, to Dr. James L. Barton (Near East Relief).
“During the mobilization of the fall and winter [1914/5] the Armenians had been ruthlessly plundered under the name of requisitioning; rich men were ruined and the poor stripped. Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were neglected, half starved, set to digging trenches and doing menial work; but, worst of all, they were deprived of their arms and thus left at the mercy of their fanatical, age-long enemies, their Moslem fellow-soldiers. Small wonder that those who could find a loophole of escape or could pay for exemption from military duty did so; many of those who could do neither simply would not give themselves up. We felt that a day of reckoning would soon come – a collision between these opposing forces or a holy war. But the revolutionists conducted themselves with remarkable restraint and prudence; controlled their hot-headed youth; patrolled the streets to prevent skirmishes; and bade the villagers endure in silence – better a village or two burned unavenged than that any attempt at reprisals should furnish an excuse for massacre. (…)
On Tuesday, the 20th April, at 6 a.m., some Turkish soldiers tried to seize one of a band of village women on their way to the city. She fled. Two Armenian soldiers came up and asked the Turks what they were doing. The Turkish soldiers fired on the Armenians, killing them. Thereupon the Turkish entrenchments opened fire. The siege had begun. There was a steady rifle firing all day, and from the walled city, now cut off from communication with the Gardens, was heard a continuous cannonading from Castle Rock upon the houses below. In the evening, houses were seen burning in every direction.
Map of Van City Neighborhoods
All the Armenians in the Gardens – nearly 30,000, as the Armenian population of the walled city is small – were now gathered into a district about a mile square, protected by eighty ‘teerks’ (manned and barricaded houses) besides walls and trenches. The Armenian force consisted of 1,500 trained riflemen, possessing only 300 rifles. Their supply of ammunition was not great, so they were very sparing of it; used pistols only, when they could, and employed all sorts of devices to draw the fire of the enemy and waste their ammunition. They began to make bullets and cartridges, turning out 2,000 a day; also gunpowder, and after a while they made three mortars for throwing bombs. The supply of material for the manufacture of these things was limited, and methods and implements were crude and primitive, but they were very happy and hopeful and exultant over their ability to keep the enemy at bay. Some of the rules for their men were: Keep clean; do not drink; tell the truth; do not curse the religion of the enemy. They sent a manifesto to the Turks to the effect that their quarrel was with one man and not with their Turkish neighbors. Valis might come and go, but the two races must continue to live together, and they hoped that after Djevdet went there might be peaceful and friendly relations between them. The Turks answered in the same spirit, saying that they were forced to fight. Indeed, a protest against this war was signed by many prominent Turks, but Djevdet would pay no attention to it.”
Source: The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16; Documents presented to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Bryce. London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, Ltd., 1916; Reprint Beirut 1979, pp. 33-35
Elizabeth Freeman Barrows Ussher (1873 – 20 Sept 1915); American missionary, born in Kayseri; after a childhood in Manisa and Constantinople, she went with her family to the United States. After her education and some teaching experience there, she returned to the Ottoman Empire in 1899, travelled to Van and married Dr. Clarence Ussher in June 1900. Following her marriage, E. Ussher became a teacher at a girls’ school in Van and was the head of the musical department. As a result of their charity work for refugees during and after the siege von Van, E. Ussher and her husband contracted typhus, which was widely spread among the refugees. While Clarence Ussher survived the disease after a coma, Elizabeth died on 14 July 1915 and was buried in Van. Excerpts from her diary were event-close published in 1916 in her biography, written by her father John Otis Barrows.
Dr Clarence Ussher’s house (center) in Van (Source: Barrows, John Otis: In the Land of Ararat. London, Edinburg 1916)
“April 20th. (…) Although the Vali calls it a rebellion, it is really an effort to protect the lives and the homes of the Armenians. (…)
May 5th. More refugees arrive. A bullet passed between two women standing on our east open roof. Armenians first used their homemade mortar for throwing dynamite bombs. Were successful. It is now more than two weeks since fighting began in the city, and the Armenians have the advantage. By this you see that the Vali has not succeeded in his diabolical purpose to wipe them out in three days. He must be surprised by such unheard-of resistance. But the Armenians say that, if they are finally overpowered, the Turks shall pay dearly for their victory.
„One of the poverty’s young captives“. From: Barrows, John Otis: In the Land of Ararat: A Sketch of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Freeman Barrows Ussher, Missionary to Turkey and A Martyr of the Great War. New York, Chicago, Toronto (et al.): Fleming H. Revell Co., (1916), p. 115
There is a strong resistance made in the city, for it is expected that the Russians will soon come to our assistance. But in the defenseless villages the story is very different. There the tragedy is too awful to be described. It is nothing but systematic and wholesale massacre. There is first the killing, and then the taking of prisoners, and sending them to the head of the Armenians to be fed. In this way it is expected that the starvation will finish the slaughter. It is now evident that there was a well-laid plan to wipe out all the villages of the vilayet, and then crush the city rebels.
Before the trouble began here, many of the outlying villages had been burned, and the inhabitants killed or driven away. So from the first our refugees were villagers, some from a distance. So when our premises could hold no more, the houses near by, and protected by the positions hold by the revolutionists, were also filled. It is estimated that there at least 10,000 fugitives who are being fed by us in the gardens. It is impossible to give an adequate idea of their condition. Fleeing without time even to collect their food, they come to us barefoot, ragged, hungry and half sick from exposure and fear.
Many of the Turkish soldiers are averse to this butchery; so the Vali has promised plunder and glory to the lawless Kurds, who are nothing loath to do his will. One morning forty women and children, dying or wounded from Turkish bullets, were brought to our hospital. Little ones crying pitifully for ther mothers who had been killed while fleeing, and mothers mourning for ther children whom they had been obliged to leave behind on the plains. (…)”
Source: Barrows, John Otis: In the Land of Ararat: A Sketch of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Freeman Barrows Ussher, Missionary to Turkey and A Martyr of the Great War. New York, Chicago, Toronto (et al.): Fleming H. Revell Co., (1916), pp. 128, 134-136
Van City 1915: Armenian refugees wait for food in front of the American mission (Source: Barrows, John Otis: In the Land of Ararat. London, Edinburg, 1916)
Rafael de Nogales Méndez
Rafael de Nogales Mendez
Rafael Inchauspe[19] Méndez (1877/9-1937), who became known as Rafael de Nogales, was a Venezuelan revolutionary, author and since the late 19th century, as he described himself, a ‘soldier of fortune’. He had left Venezuela at young age to be educated abroad in Germany (since 1886) and Belgium, where he attended the military academy.[20]
In 1898, Nogales participated as a youngster in the American-Spanish War in Cuba, in 1902 in the Liberating Revolution of Venezuela and in 1904 in the Russo-Japanese War. As an exile from Venezuela, he lived an adventurous, restless life, among others as a cowboy in Arizona and a gold hunter in Nevada, before he went home to fight against president Goméz. When he learnt about the outbreak of the Great War, he returned to Europe where he intended to fight for Belgium, suffering from German occupation. However, when his plans failed to participate in one of the Allied armies in a befitting way and without giving up his citizenship, he met in Constantinople with War Minister Enver and entered the Ottoman forces in February 1915 as a regular officer, but without taking an oath or renouncing his nationality, and was dispatched to Van via Erzurum. In Van, he led the gendarmerie units and Kurdish irregulars – in all a force of 10-12,000 armed men (p. 57) -, and for 21 days became deputy commander during the siege of Van under the command of Governor General Cevdet Bey and of Halil Bey. On 13 May 1915, Nogales gave up his siege command because he ‘recognized the futility of another siege‘. However, from now on he feared Cevdet’s revenge: ‘When Djevded found that I was resolved to go, he feared undoubtedly that later on I would reveal his knaveries; wherefore he secretly ordered Burhan-ed-Din to assemble my escort of his trusted tools only; which meant, to speak Turkish, of men who could be depended upon to assassinate me on the road.‘[21]
A month later, after having helplessly witnessed massacres in the provinces of Van and Bitlis, Nogales decided on 12 June 1915: ,Deeply shocked by the large number of murders which have been committed against Christians, if not by direct order, then at least with the knowledge of the commanding General of our expeditionary force, colonel Halil, I resigned from the post of a Deputy Chief of Staff of the gendarmerie division of Van.’ (p. 88, German ed.) [22]
From now on, he had to escape ‘the claws’ of Cevdet and Halil, who tried to get hold of Nogales, not only for revenge, but also in order to permanently silence an inconvenient witness of their massive crimes. Miraculously, with the help of the coincidence and the increasingly strained relations between German and Turkish officers, which resulted in the support of some German commanders, Nogales succeeded to survive in other units of the Ottoman forces until the end of WW1 when he was demobilized, highly honoured and decorated by the Sultan. After an interim visit to Berlin (autumn 1918), Nogales finally departed from the Ottoman Empire in April 1919.
Five years later, Nogales published the first of his four autobiographical books, the memoir Cuatro años bajo la Media Luna (1924), which was soon followed by an authorized German (1925)[23] and an English edition (1926). In more recent years, his remarkable testimony saw translations into Russian (2003) and Turkish (2008)[24]. Nogales is proving as a seasoned, educated author who even in the most disparate circumstances of struggle and destruction reveals a sensitive understanding of historic and cultural contexts, and who had always an eye for the grandeur of the Armenian Highland (cf. the motto in the beginning of the chapter on the Van province).
,Shortly after my arrival, a valet de chamber presented himself to conduct me to the dining-room, where, in the center of the room, a brilliantly lighted table glittered under a service of silver and crystal that would have been remarkable for its elegance even in Europe. The Governor [Cevdet] sat opposite me, in correct evening attire, white cravat and all, I believe even to the flower in his button-hole; while Captain Reshid Bey was upon my left in immaculate uniform. The latter commanded the Laz battalion and was the Governor’s right-hand man, the executor of his secret orders. Seeing him there, refined and cultured, how was I to imagine that those delicately manicured and bejewelled hands were dripping with the blood of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent victims! A gentleman called Ahmet Bey was seated upon my right, dressed in well-cut English tweeds. He spoke several languages perfectly, was a member of some of the best clubs in Constantinople, and had spent many years in London. With his aristocratic manners and his rather blasé expression, anyone might have taken him for one of the snobs driving four-in-hand along the avenues of Hyde Park. Yet this Ahmet Bey was none other than the notorious bandit Tcherkess-Ahmet, leader of a troop of Circassian guerrillas who later killed the Armenian deputies Zorab [Grigor Zohrap], Vartkes and Daghavarian in the Devil’s Gulch, by the Governor’s order; and one year afterwards was hanged in Damascus by Djemal Pasha, who feared that later on his own complicity in that assassination might be revealed!
And as the four of us sat about that brightly lighted table, discussing the latest novels or recalling some adventure in gallantry, the panes of the Seraglio shook from the roar of artillery, which was making the heroic city of Van tremble to its foundations and turning it into an immense cauldron wherein were consumed daily hundreds of innocent women and children whose only political offense consisted in being Christians. (…)
April 24 [1915]. (…) The resistance of the Armenians was terrific and their valor worthy of all praise. Wherever our troops advanced they received a strong and well-directed fire. Each house was a fortress that had to be conquered separately. In spite of the simulated attacks which I organized from time to time in order to try to deceive the enemy and launch my columns of assault against the heart of the town, I was never able to attain my object. (…)
April 25. (…)
While Djevded and I from the ramparts of the castle observed the development of this struggle with very different feelings, the Armenians of the city began firing upon us from the dome of the cathedral, also called the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, which I had insisted on respecting hitherto not only as a Christian temple, but also as a monument of unquestionable historical value. The imprudent provocation of the besieged now, alas, precipitated the destruction of that edifice. For as soon as Djevded Bey became aware of the source of the discharges, he immediately demanded of me to demolish the church with cannonballs. Thanks to the extreme solidity of its structure, the sanctuary withstood for two hours or more the shots we rained upon it. But by sundown nothing remained of its pyramidal dome but broken rafters, mournful ruins of its ancient splendour. The Armenians, dislodged from that stronghold, commenced to fire against us from the minaret of the Greater Mosque, the Mohammedan cathedral. When I immediately commanded the destruction of the mosque also by our cannon, the Governor protested most earnestly. But I answered Djevdet Bey, as I had every right to do under the circumstances: ‘War is war.’
Thus perished in a single day the two principle temples of the city of Van, which had figured among its most famous historical monuments for almost nine centuries.’
Source: Nogales, Rafael de: Four Years Beneath the Crescent. London: Sterndale Classics, 2003, p. 70, 75, 76f.
Andreas Yessayi Gulanian’s Testimony (born 1905, Shatakh)
“(…) Our Shatakh peasants have taken an active part in the self-defence, and they told various historical events, which I’ve heard and remember.
(…) The Turks assaulted Armenian villages of Shatakh. The self-defence began on April 4 (old calendar; April 17 according to the new calendar) and lasted until the middle of May, about 45 days. Both Van and Shatakh resisted the well-armed Turkish and Kurdish executioners.
During the 45 days of Shatakh self-defence, the Armenians defended themselves well in spite of their being besieged and the lack of arms and cartridges. (…)
Fortunately, the Russian army reached Berkri from Alashkert and approached Van. Djevdet ran away with his soldiers. For the first time in history, the Russian Imperial army entered the town of Van on May 6, 1915 (by the old calendar). The famous Armenian General Dro’s volunteer group was with them. On May 15 (by the new calendar May 28), Aram Manukian sends Dro’s group to Shatakh by the demand of the Shatakh authorities. Hearing about the arrival of the Armenian volunteers, the Turks of Shatakh run away. Thus, the 45 days of the self-defense of Shatakh ended in a glorious victory. A prefecture was created in Van under the leadership of Aram Manoukian and another one in Shatakh having Tigran Baghdassarian as governor.
The peasants went to their summer resorts, and the peaceful life was re-established in the town: agriculture, crafts and trade began to get back to normal. The Armenians met the Russians in Van and Shatakh. (…)”
Source: Svazlian, Verjiné: The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors. Yerevan: “Gitoutyoun” Publishing House of National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenian, 2011, p. 125
The Chaldean bishop of Van inventoried the casualties of the Catholic Syriacs:
(…) sixty Assyro-Chaldean villages in the vicinity of Van that had been subjected to atrocities. The village of Kharachique, composed by 37 families, lost 103 persons. Khinno, 32 families, lost 51 persons. Ermans, 22 families, of which half were massacred. Sele, 50 families. Kharafsorique, 20 families were completely annihilated. Akhadja and Rachan, 30 families, there are no more than 2 males and the females escaped, etc., etc. In the district of Gawar [Kurdish: Gever, or Gevar; since 1936 Yüksekova], likewise in the province of Van, the Assyro-Chaldeans made up some twenty villages where nearly everyone was massacred, except the women and the small children.[25]
Van 1915: Armenian woman fleeing the massacre (source: Barrows, John Otis: In the Land of Ararat. London, Edinburg, 1916; archive: Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia, Berlin).
The hope of the Armenians in the province of Van for normalization was deceptive in view of the continuing war and the often-changing course of the front in 1916 and 1917. Already on 27 July 1915, the Russian army withdrew to Akhlat and Soup, leaving the Armenians of the kazasVan,Shatakh and Moks in a precarious situation. On 30 July, the Russian General Staff ordered the evacuation of the entire province on the official grounds that there was a threat of encirclement. On 3 August 1915, the Russian army left the provincial capital Van and forced the Armenian local government to evacuate the Armenian population of the city and its environs. With his Circassian and Kurdish auxiliary troops, Cevdet conquered the city of Van again and was able to hold it for a few days until the Russian forces returned to the now completely depopulated city of Van. The repeated withdrawals of the Russian forces from Van have already caused contemporary commentators to doubt their purely military necessity.
Apart from very weak, sick and old people, most Christian residents had followed the Russian evacuation order – up to 260,000 Armenians from the province of Van and the plain of Alashkert. The exodus from their homeland was called deportation, flight or migration in the memories of the contemporary witnesses. On their forced march to the north, the refugees were attacked, shot at, robbed and killed by Kurds. More than 1,600 refugees were killed at the infamous bridge over the Bandimahu River in thekaza Bergri (Pergri) alone. Many of those who survived this threat subsequently died of hunger and disease in refugee camps in the South Caucasus or Iraq.
Elisha Francis Riggs Jr. (1887-1936), 1916-1918 U.S. military attaché to Russia:
“(…) For 24 hours the Turks were left to enter the city [Van] and wreak their will on the inhabitants. Those remaining in the city were subjected to indescribable misery while those attempting to escape were attacked on their way into Russia by Kurds. In this manner 260,000 people, mostly women and children, were turned into the public charge in the Caucasus, who if left protected on their own country could have aided the Russian armies in Armenia by furnishing them with supplies from their farms.”
Source: Lieutenant Riggs in a report from Odessa, 26 April 1917, to the U.S. Embassy at Petrograd, quoted from: Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, p. 335
Dr. Johannes Lepsiuson 2 June 1921 before the jury court of the Berlin Regional Court III in an expert testimony during the criminal trial against Soghomon Tehlerian:
,The rest of the Armenian population, about 250,000 souls, from the eastern vilayets, were spared deportation by the Russian occupation of the border vilayets and fled to the Caucasus. At that time the Russians advanced to the western shore of Lake Van. When they later returned, they took the Armenians with them, not out of love for the Armenians. For when the Russians entered the same vilayets again, they did not allow the Armenian families to return home. Yanushkevich, Nikolay Nikolayevich’s chief of general staff, who then commanded the Caucasus, declared that Russia would settle Kurds and Cossacks in the evacuated areas instead of Armenians in order to form a broad military belt against Turkey. Milyukov, the leader of the Russian cadet party, made the strongest accusations in the Duma that the Russian government was doing exactly what the Turks had done before, wanting an ‘Armenia without the Armenians‘. After all, the Russian advance saved the lives of 250,000 Armenians; the Russian retreat deprived them of their land. They are still sitting in the Caucasus on a much too narrow territory and have suffered hunger and great hardship for years.”
Source: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pascha [The Armenian genocide in Court: The Talaat Pasha Trial]. Edited and introduced by Tessa Hofmann. 2nd, enlarged ed. Göttingen, Vienna: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker [Society for Threatened Peoples], 1980, p. 58 f.
With the exodus of June 1915, around “250,000 people were displaced from Turkish-Armenia. Around 20,000 people from the region of Pergri [Berkri] should be excluded from this figure because they were unable to join the main movement of refugees and were exterminated. The rest, 207,000 people, moved to the Russian Empire through Kars, Igdir, and Julfa. The balance [around 23,000 people] perished during the retreat. The majority of those arriving in the Caucasus were women and children. Barely 10 percent were men – mostly elderly.
The main flow of the displaced, 170,000 people, was in the direction of Igdir. I was among them. Behind us were those who had fled from much further away. The end of those lines of refugees was lost in clouds of dust. Special horesemen were stationed at the Turkish border crossings to search for lost children and the sick. From these points all the way to Igdir, the refugees were scattered over vast expanses of fields, pastures, and orchards. 20,000 people were crowded into the city of Igdir. There were 45,000 people in Echmiadzin alone. A large current of refugees moved towards Yerevan, like a swarm of locusts, mowing all edible plants and gnawing the roots of vines on their way.”
Source: Tehlirian, Soghomon: Remembrances: The Assasination of Talaat Pasha as Told to Vahan Minakhorian. London: Gomidas Institute, 2022, p. 35
Two songs of Armenian survivors from Van, as recorded by Verjiné Svazlian in her dissertation:
Ah! Vaspurakan, sorrowful Armenia,
Countless heroes were sacrified.
They resisted so long in the terrible battle
And were martyred for the love of the nation.
****
Here is Van.
All around is blood.
Those who go there do not return.
Who knows, what is going on?
Source: Cf. Svazlian, Verjiné: The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors. Yerevan: “Gitoutyoun” Publishing House of National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenian, 2011, p. 671f.
Nvard Avetis Mouradian’s testimony (born 1903, Shatakh region, Korovank village)
“(…) In 1915, before the beginning of the massacres, people both in our village and in the neighboring ones consulted together and decided to organize self-defense. But they had no arms and their forces were negligible. So, the whole village decided to migrate to Van and await the march of events.
It was in spring 1915, in April-May, that we collected and tied up everything which was possible to carry and which could be of use on the road, loaded the bundles on 5 oxen und came out of the village. My grandmother Khazik went on foot with her daughter-in-law, my grandfather walked with his five sons and grandsons, and we, the elder children ran here and there and played. We were unaware that the coming Sodom and Gomorrah would continue for 5-6 years and that very few would remain in the land of the living.
We were going to Van. Large groups of the emigrants had already passed through the same road. What I saw on the road to exile, I do not wish my enemy to see. Mothers threw their daughters to the river and then followed them in the water in order not to fall in the hands of the Turks and be dishonored.
On the road to exile and from the beginning to the end, our young men, armed with whatever they could lay their hands on, were going in front and on both sides of the group to protect us against the Turks’ attacks. But what could a handful of unarmed men do against the well-armed Turkish soldiers on horseback and against large groups of brigands? So, many people died and remained unburied on the roads and in the valleys.
After a few days we reached Tagh, the center of Shatakh. The district was divided into two parts: the Armenian quarter and the Turkish quarter. The Turks had gone off long ago. We rested in one of their abandoned houses, we washed ourselves in the cold water of the rivulet flowing through the town; we had a light supper and slept. But, in the early morning, we heard a noisy confusion and people screaming: ,The Turks are coming, the Turks are coming.’
We set out again in a hurry. We arrived at Sevtikin. The peasants had abandoned their homes, and the village was deserted. We found some bread and cheese and even cold cooked meat in one of the houses. In that village we came across an abandoned swaddled baby. My mother Hasmik had compassion for the infant; she took him in her arms and breastfed him.
After Sevtikin we arrived at Gorondasht. That abandoned village was full of orchards and wheat fields. The wheat-ears had grown to a man’s height. It was a hot summer day. We hurried to the wheat field to gather a stock of grain for our journey. The Turks attacked us once more. Our men defended us at the cost of their lives against the Turkish gang of robbers, and we started on our journey.
I remember: there were everywhere abandoned and ruined villages, ownerless cattle, unburied, murdered people. There was a pregnant woman among our refugees, who gave birth to her child on the road.
We arrived in Van; we came to a halt in Aygestan. The people of Van were defending the town with the help of the Russians. My father Avo, my uncles and all the adult males joined the volunteers and went to the defensive positions. I have often taken bread to my father there.
We, the elder children, began to go to school there, to study the letters and the Bible.
However, the inhabitants of Van also migrated. I remember, my sister got lost on the first day of the exile from Van. My mother Hasmik cried and wailed loudly. But soon we found my sister. It proved that the Russian soldiers had seen my lost sister and had taken her with them. I remember also that on the first day of our departure from Van my grandfather Khacho counted the members of our family, and it became clear that out of the 83 souls of our large family only 27 were left. The others had died, had been killed or were lost on the road.
We reached Sev Djour (Black Water – Arm.), which was a quiet large, violently flowing river, which was dangerous to cross. We saw on its bank a killed priest. The Turks had cut off his head and put it on his buttocks. A little further there was a dead woman laying on the ground, her little baby still sucking her breast.
Collection of sick and weak refugees during the Russian retreat from Van 1915. Source: Al’bom armjan-bezencev (Tiflis: Armjanskij Central’nyj Komitet)
The Russian soldiers were with us. The armed gangs of Kurdish brigands attacked us; the Russians defended the people. We were obliged to retreat to Van. Before getting to Van, we went through the Hayots Dzor (Armenian Valley – Arm.) to Khoshab, which was deserted.I remember the ruined village of Bashakala. There, too, armed gangs of Turkish and Kurdish robbers attacked us, we suffered little casualties, since the Russian soldiers were defending us. We arrived at the St Bartholomew Monastery, which was also deserted. There was nothing to eat or drink. It was good that the Russians shared their military supplies with us.
We wandered here and there for days and months. We reached the village of Mahlam, where ownerless cats and dogs were roaming. The Turks attacked us again.
My grandfather, Vanits Khacho, was filled with great despair. He did not utter a word. He did not want anything. He had no strength to walk. He was about 80 years old.
Winter came. We reached Nerkin Bzhnkert. It was the second winter we were wandering on the roads. We remained in that village during the whole winter. It was in 1917. Spring came. Our people thought about finding ploughs and sowing wheat. Spring sowing was accomplished; the fields turned green. But the Ottoman soldiers and robbers appeared again in armed groups. The Russians had left; our men were defending us.
My grandfather was so desperate that he did not want to migrate again.
,Apo, we’re going to Korovank, come,’ implored our people in persuasive tone.
Rest of the refugees during the Russian retreat on 14 (27) July 1915 at Taşlıçay (today: Province Ağrı)
We reached Bayazet, where the Russian army units stationed. But soon the Russians began to retreat, and the Armenian refugees followed them. There were many clashes with the Turks. Two of my uncles were martyred, numerous children were lost, one of our daughters-in-law got drowned in the river.
My grandmother Khazik passed away in the village of Gyolu due to the sufferings of the journey.
The villages of Dara and Kotola where completely deserted. We rested somewhere for a while and then continued our journey since the armed Ottomans attacked us incessantly.
The refugees suffered great losses at the village Kondaghsez. A huge number of people drowned in the river.
I remember, my uncle Mkhitar’s only son got lost. He had had that son after fifteen years of married life. The boy was born on the road of the exile. ,Marto, my dear, where is my son?’ asked my uncle Mkhitar his wife. It turned out that the mother had been fearful that she would not be able to cross the river with the infant in her arms, that he would get drowned, so she had placed the swaddled baby behind a big stone. My uncle did not listen to the entreaties of our relatives. He returned back to find his son. And, in fact, he found and brought him back. Our joy was boundless.
We reached Payachuk where we stayed for two months. Then we moved to the town of Urmi [Urmia?], where famine prevailed. There was not even drinking water. Suddenly a loud roar was heard there; it was a British airplane. The British made the refugees understand that they would help them.
We got to Hamadan. The Russian soldiers quitted us and went to Russia.
When we arrived to Baghdad, 12 souls had remained from our large family. My grandfather Vanits Khacho also died in Baghdad.
In 1921, after staying for 2 years in Baghdad, when I was married and had my son, Andranik, we embarked, together with many other refugees, and reached Batoumi, then – Soviet Armenia by train. We lived, in the beginning, in Ashtarak and Artashat, and in 1932 moved to Yerevan.”
Source: The testimony was written down in 1970 and made available to the ethnographer Verjinè Svazlian in 2005 by the grandson of Nvard Mouradian, Manouk Mouradian. Quoted from: Svazlian, Verjiné: The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors. Yerevan: ‘Gitoutyoun Publishing House of National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenian, 2011, p. 122 f. https://hyetert.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/TheArmenianGenocide.pdf
Mkrtich (‘Hayrik’) Khrimian (Mkrtich I of Van) – Մկրտիչ Խրիմեան (Մկրտիչ Ա Վանեցի)
A priest who is affectionately known in the vernacular as ‘hayrik’ (‘Little Father’), combined the activities as an educator and publicist, which are typical for the period of national revival with those of a traditional Armenian Church leader.
Hovhannes Ayvazovskiy: Mkrtich Khrimian near Echmiadzin (1895). http://aivazovski.ru/gal903/
Khrimian was born on 4 April 1820 in or near Van. However, his family name points to the Crimea as the place of origin of his family. Khrimian attended monastic schools on the Van lake island of Lim and in Ktuts and worked as a teacher himself from the 1840s onwards. As a widower, he was ordained priest in 1854; two years later, in 1856, he became abbot of the monasteries Varagavank and Surb Karapet (Mush). During his term of office (until 1862), he founded a boarding school in Varagavank in 1857 and a grammar school in Surb Karapet. At the same time, he published the magazines Artsvi Vaspurakan (‘Eagle of Vaspurakan’, 1855-1864) and Artsvi Tarono (‘Eagle of Taron’, 1863). In 1869, Khrimian was appointed Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, but was only able to hold this office for four years. Already in 1873, he saw himself forced to resign because he was considered too radical due to his submissions and memorandums to the Sultan.
Khrimian’s key experience and political radicalization came at the Berlin Congress, where the ‘Armenian Question’ was internationalized for the first time; he unsuccessfully led the Armenian delegation there. Returning to the Ottoman Empire in 1879, he became the spiritual head (primate) in Vaspurakan and founded an agricultural college there in 1880. Because he supported secret national liberal organizations like Sev Khach (‘Black Cross’) in Van and Pashtpan Hayrenyats in Erzurum, he was called back to Constantinople by the Ottoman government and banished to Jerusalem after the demonstration of 15 July 1890. On 26 September 1892, he was ordained Catholicos of all Armenians and as spiritual head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, he was called Mkrtich I. of Van (Vanetsi).
During the massacres in Western Armenia in 1894-1896, Khrimian organized refugee aid. At the same time, he advocated conditions that would enable the refugees to return safely to their homeland, whose ‘de-armenization’ Khrimian feared otherwise. For the same reason he appealed in 1895 to the Russian Tsar Nikolay II in Saint Petersburg to implement the reforms in Western Armenia provided for in the Berlin Treaty of 1878.
After his transfer to the Russian Empire, where he resided at the canonical seat in Vagharshapat (Echmiadzin), Catholicos Mkrtich I fought against the law of 12 June 1903 confiscating the property of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Russian Empire; he called on the heads of the Armenian dioceses to resist the expropriations. Catholicos Mkrtich I died on 29 October 1907 in Vagharshapat; his modest tomb is located at the entrance of the main church of this monastery.
Anton von Werner: Berlin Congress (Painting of 1881). In the center: Chancellor Otto von Bismarck; right: the Ottoman delegation
The ‘Armenian Question’ at the Berlin Congress (1878)
In the 1870s anti-Ottoman uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina triggered the so-called Middle East crisis, on which the major European powers attempted to reach agreement with the London Protocol of 21 March 1877. Sultan Abdülhamit II, however, rejected it as interference in internal affairs. Russia, which had already offered itself to the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman-controlled South-Eastern Europe as a self-proclaimed protective power in their liberation struggles against the Ottomans, declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 24 April 1877 and marched into the Ottoman-Armenian settlement area, where it was militarily very successful. After the Russian units operating in the Balkans were only 12 kilometers away from the Sultan’s Palace in Constantinople, at the Sultan’s request the war ended on 31 January 1878 in Adrianople (Edirne) with an armistice, followed on 3 March 1878 by a preliminary treaty concluded in San Stefano.
This treaty not only brought complete independence to a number of Balkan states (Serbia, Romania, Montenegro), but also satisfied the expansion desires of the victor Russia. San Stefano stipulated that Russia, apart from the Ajarian port of Batumi and the southwestern part of Bessarabia, would receive the West Armenian cities of Ardahan, Kars and Beyazit and would leave its troops in the Ottoman Empire six months after the final peace agreement. Articles 16 and 25 also obligated the Ottoman Empire to implement immediately reforms to ease the situation of the West Armenian population and to guarantee the protection of Kurdish and Circassian incursions.
Russia, however, did not succeed in implementing its military successes politically, because it encountered above all the resistance of Great Britain, which was likewise interested in spheres of influence in the Ottoman territory and decidedly insisted on a ‘review’ of the preliminary peace of San Stefano.
In a direct contract dated 4 June 1878, Great Britain assured the Ottoman Empire of its military support in the event that Russia attempted to conquer Western Armenian territories. In return, Great Britain received the right to occupy Cyprus.
The diplomacy of Austria-Hungary also worked towards a revision of the San Stefano Treaty, proposing an international conference on the results of the Russian-Turkish war. In addition to the signatory states of the London Protocol, the Ottoman Empire, representatives of Greece, Romania, Montenegro, Serbia and Iran should also be participating. However, because of the bias of Austria-Hungary, Russia rejected Vienna as the venue for the meeting and proposed Berlin instead, where Chancellor Otto von Bismarck explicitly wanted to be understood not as an arbiter, but as an ‘honest broker’. However, Congress leader Bismarck did not care much about discussing the ‘Armenian question’ how the reform project in Ottoman ruled Western Armenia – the Vilayet-i Sitte – was henceforth described. Bismarck only then wanted to talk about the Armenian question if the Greek question was solved. Nevertheless, the Armenian question was discussed from 4 to 6 July 1878 in connection with § 16 of the preliminary peace agreement.
Although the fate of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire was directly negotiated at the Berlin Congress, no Armenian and in particular no member of the Armenian delegation was allowed to be present in the conference hall during the discussions. The only exception was Mirza Melkum Khan (Hovsep’ Melk’umian, 1831/33-1908), who took part in the conference as Iranian Minister of the Interior. Mkrtich Khrimian headed the Armenian delegation. Deeply humiliated and disappointed by the results of the Berlin Congress, Khrimian, after his return to Constantinople, gave a famous sermon in the Armenian Church at Skutari: ,While all congress participants ate the khavidz [wheat flour porridge] with iron spoons, we only had paper spoons, which is why we did not receive anything’. In conclusion, Khrimian called for the armed liberation struggle: ,It was written on the congress doors: The right belongs to the strong, politics is meaningless, because the right lies on the sword edge. Armenians, learn to appreciate the iron, for your salvation is possible with its help.’
It is said that the Armenian delegates tried to influence the Armenian question by pushing paper slips with petitions through the locked door of the conference hall.
Mkrtich Portugalian – ՄԿՐՏԻՉՓՈՐԹՈՒԳԱԼՅԱՆ
The educator, journalist, publicist and political leader Mkrtich Portugalian was born on 21 October 1848 in the Kumkapı district of Constantinople as the son of a banker. In Constantinople, he received primary education; then, throughout his life, he was self-taught. Orphaned at an early age – his father died in 1859, his mother in 1865 – the young Portugalian had to make his own living since 1867. In Tokat (Evdokia), he began working as a teacher for the children of wealthy Armenians.
Mkrtich Portugalian
From young age, Portugalian was distinguished by his rebellious and libertarian character, which could not escape the eyes of the Ottoman authorities. In January 1873, they imprisoned Portugalian on charges of involvement in the national liberation struggle and closed the Varduhian School in Tokat, where he had taught. Released from prison in December 1873, Portugalian became the publisher of the Asia magazine, and wrote a great deal of editorials and numerous articles in which the valiant activist exposed and condemned the authorities for oppressing all the peoples of the Empire and, in particular, the Armenians. He called on all the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople to spare no effort and material resources to spread the light in Western Armenia.
Following his considerable propagandistic and organizational work, Portugalian, with a number of prominent Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople, founded the Araratian Armenian Society to foster the level of Armenian education in all the provinces of Western Armenia and became its chairperson. During the 1877-78 Russian-Turkish war, the preliminary armistice of San Stefano and the exciting days of the Berlin Congress (1878), he traveled around the Armenian-populated towns of Armenia and the South Caucasus, and published many articles in the Mshak, Masis and other Armenian periodicals that called to fight the Ottoman dictatorship. With the advice and direct involvement of Portugalian, the Sev Khach liberation organization was set up in Van, which under the conditions of cruel dictatorship carried out a rather active revolutionary work. By portraying the liberation struggle of the Armenian people, Portugalian was planning to enlighten the people, educate and prepare ‘the dreadful and deadly wound’.
Portugalian has established many schools and associations in the West Armenian provinces and especially in Van, which became the center of the awakening of national consciousness. Of particular importance was the Haykazian Central School, founded in Van in 1881 with the support of the Russian consul K. Kamsarakan, who derived from the ancient Armenian noble family of Kamsarakan.
Portugalian was also the founder of the first political party that emerged under the conditions of Ottoman realities: In the summer of 1884, during a festive event in Van attended by M. Khrimian, K. Kamsarakan, the first and second year graduates of the Haykazian Central College and the community of Van, Portugalian invited twelve graduates of the Haykazian Central School to form the ‘Partnership Union’, which actually became the organizational core of the future Armenakan Party. In January-February 1885, with the participation of M. Portugalian, a Patriotic Society was created in Van as a liberation organization. On 15 March 1885, the Ottoman authorities drove out Portugalian to the capital Constantinople in order to keep him in direct and strict control. To avoid arrest, Portugalian fled in the middle of 1885 from Turkey and was confirmed in Marseilles, France, where he started publishing the Armenia magazine (1885-1923), which was one of the first political periodicals in Armenian language. The journal, which remained loyal to the liberal conviction of its founder, put forward the example of the Bulgarians to prepare the Armenian people for its liberation struggle, and emphasized the alliance with the people of the Ottoman Empire and under the Turkish yoke.
In the autumn of 1885, already in exile, M. Portugalian founded the first Armenian party Armenakan Kasmakerputyun (Kusaktsutyun) (‘Armenian Organization’) with teachers and pupils from his meanwhile banned educational institution in Van, which, in the spirit of the Enlightenment (zartonk), was trying to ,prepare the people for a general movement, especially if the external circumstances – the attitude of the foreign powers and the neighbouring races – seem to favor the Armenian cause’. Although Portugalian continued to propagate even from exile the need for a united front and ‘national freedom’ in his magazine Armenia, this first Armenian political party remained of local importance, for the more radical objectives of the subsequent revolutionary parties were more widely supported due to the rapid deterioration of the situation in the Ottoman Empire.
Portugalian died on 26 September 1921 in Marseille, in front of the Armenia cogwheel car, in extreme poverty, serving until his ultimate breath the idea of the liberation of his people.
The Armenian poet and author was born in Van on 1 August 1903. He became known above all as a writer of mostly autobiographical short novels about his imprisonment and exile in Siberia and about his home town of Van, from which he had to flee in 1915. He then grew up in Armenian and American orphanages in Yerevan and Dilidjan, studied and published his first poems in 1917; his first book followed in 1924. In 1926, he joined the literary group Noyember, since 1934 he was a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1936, Mahari was sentenced to ten years exile for ‘nationalism’ and from November 1938 to August 1947, he was imprisoned in the special prison Vologda near Moscow as well as in the camp Novo-Ivanovsk (East Siberia). Arrested again in Yerevan in November 1947, he was sentenced to exile in the Krasnoyarsk region (Central Siberia) for ‘unreliability’. In 1954, he was released and ‘rehabilitated’. Mahari died on 17 June 1969 at the age of 66 in Palanga (Lithuania). He had married the Lithuanian Antonina Povilaytite (1923-2018), who had been arrested at the age of 22 years as a law student and member of a patriotic Lithuanian organization and had been exiled to Siberia. With this biography, G. Mahari forms a typical fate for the double victimization of numerous Armenian genocide survivors who fled the Ottoman Empire and fell victim to Stalinist persecutions in the Soviet Union as alleged nationalists.
Published in 1966, the author’s only novel forms a literary monument to his beloved hometown and his father Grigor Ajemian, a school principal and well-known representative of the liberal Armenakan Party. Grigor Ajemian was shot dead in 1907 by his brother Tigran Mirakhorian, probably for political reasons. Mahari first addressed the death of his father and his uncle’s admission of guilt in a trilogy of autobiographical narratives (1928-1955). In Ayrvoġ aygestanner he elevated the trauma of his childhood to a key event of general symbolic significance. The protagonist Mihran Manasserian, whose name echoes his uncle’s, is a member of the social revolutionary party Dashnaktsutyun. He shoots his brother Grigor in the circle of his family and raises his son instead of his father.
The novel of time and morals goes far beyond conventional family chronicles. In 27 chapters and a ramified narrative without actual plot but with numerous flashbacks, Mahari reconstructs the development in the Ottoman provincial capital Van during the years 1912-1915. At the center are the Dashnaks, acting in the name of ‘national liberation’, their terror against different-minded people, the siege of Van by Ottoman-Turkish armed forces as well as the self-defense of the population of the Armenian suburb Aygestan (‘orchard’), the relief by Russian armed forces, their sudden withdrawal at the end of July 1915 and the permanent evacuation of the Armenians.
At the center of this complex storyline is Mahari’s prudently weighing protagonist and bearer of ideas, Hovhannes Muradkhanian, a wealthy merchant and landowner: ‘Like a spider’ this patriarch sits in his airy roof pavilion (kiosk), smoking a water pipe with relish and receiving his visitors, to whom he makes no secret of his aversion to ‘national liberation’. In designing his figures, Mahari refrained from black-and-white painting; the multi-layered characters reveal themselves in inner monologues, dreams, and ironically distanced commentaries by the narrator. This is precisely why they are capable of critical self-knowledge despite vices and weaknesses.
The release of Ayrvoġ aygestanner ran counter to the national pride and historical narrative of the Armenian diaspora and even more the Soviet Armenians. A slander campaign for which Parowyr (Paruyr) Sevak, then secretary of the Writers’ Union, was responsible culminated in 1967 in the public burning of the book, a ban on selling it, death threats and the exclusion of the author from the Writers’ Union. Readers, critics and functionaries were struck by the fact that Mahari interpreted the massacres in Van Province ‘like a Turk’ also as the result of irresponsible interference of foreign national revolutionaries from the Russia ruled part of Armenia, describing people’s heroes of real history as the patrons of robbery and revenge murders. Mahari’s renunciation of ethnic stereotypes and the usual dualistic narrative of ‘innocent Armenian victims’ and bloodthirsty Turkish executioners met with vehement rejection.
The broken author gave in to the public reprimand of both the Communist Party of Armenia and the Writers’ Union, and shortly before his death, contrary to his innermost conviction, delivered a ‘patriotically’ revised version, on the basis of which an even more strongly amended version by Mahari’s son Grigor Ajemian appeared posthumously in 1979. It was not until 1993 and on the author’s 90th birthday, that the Armenia Writers’ Union distanced itself from the burning of books. The recognition of the antiheroic work, which the Armenian literary critic Marc Nichanian praised in 2002 as the most important East Armenian novel of the 20th century, came very late. In 2007, an English translation of the original version was released in London.
Vanakatuner – the Famous Cats of Van
Van Cat (Vanakatu)
And from the background of such brighter memories
Shine the eyes of the great Van cats –
As large as terriers, with magnificent tails and long fur,
With the gait and fearlessness of dogs.
Source: H.F.B. Lynch: Armenia: Travels and Studies, Vol. II, p. 91
Van cats (Turkish: Van kedisi; Armenian: Վանա կատու – Vana katou, Western Armenian: Vana gadou; Kurdish: pisîka Wanê) are not bred by humans, but represent a landrace. With their semi-long white fur, they resemble another regional cat breed, the Angora cats of Asia Minor. However, the genuine Van cats differ from the Angorans by a stronger physique, a chestnut brown curly tail as well as a likewise chestnut brown facemask. Some Van cats also have asymmetrical brown patches on their shoulders in memory of God’s blessing that the Van cats had liberated Noah’s ark from mice. The Van cat’s eye color varies between amber, green or blue. The often-ascribed eyes of two different colors (‘odd-eyes’) are rather a result of inbreeding or a too small gene pool. As the only domestic cat breed, the Van cat swims, probably thanks to the special characteristics of its fur and its need to catch fish. Van cats are also celebrated for their intelligence.
Today, all peoples connected with the region of Van claim these cats as ‘theirs’. Most convincingly, however, seems the Armenian claim, for Armenians possess the longest history in the area, and as settled farmers always had a need for reliable mouse hunters. This close relationship to Van cats expressed itself also in literary works by authors from Van. For Vrtanes Papazian (1866-1920), the Van cat embodied the will for freedom and courage of the Armenian people; his well-known short story ‘Vanakatu’ depicts a Van cat mother avenging her murdered children. In his less idealizing interpretation Gurgen Mahari (1903-1969), in his autobiographical novel Ayrvoġ aygestanner (Burning Orchards, 1966), emphasized the splendid loyalty and devotion of Van cats, for which his feline protagonist Nana is ungratefully shot by her Armenian owner Mihran Manasserian before his flight from Van. This revolutionary had named Nana after his Turkish lover, the charming, educated wife of Hayots Dzor’s district governor Kamal.
Many have heard of it, but few have seen it. Moreover, even fewer have studied it.
The Van cat is beautiful, full of wool. She has a graceful round head and expressive, shiny eyes. Her wool reaches up to her legs, and full of comfort you stroke her dense silky fur.
My aunt owned a Van cat, which one day gave birth to two kittens.
2.
We found our Pisik stretched out, with the kittens in her embrace. The kittens were as beautiful as she was, but they did not move. The mother cat licked them. I tried to pet them, pushed the mother aside and lifted the two suffocated siblings. How the sight of them grieved me! The mother cat approached her kittens, licked them and tried to move them. When she realized that they were no longer alive, she took a step back and looked at us. We stroked her, and she approached her babies again, began to lick them. Then I noticed tear drops in the cat’s eyes. The poor little ones! The tomcat had strangled them. The mother cat watched us calmly and then disappeared without looking back. My aunt’s children dug a hole and buried the kittens there.
3.
On that day, the cat kept hidden. I searched everywhere for her without finding her. The next morning I saw a ruffled grey cat standing where the strangled kittens were buried. The vicious, cruel tomcat! He was the murderer of those puppies. I looked around and discovered their mother a few steps away, huddled together and looking at the male with frightening eyes. The tomcat noticed this and ran away with two jumps. I returned, looked up and heard the meowing of the two cats facing each other. They spoke to each other. In the beginning, they meowed gently. Perhaps the mother cat had questioned the tomcat for what he had done. The tomcat tried to justify himself. ‘No,’ the mother cat shouted angrily and said meowing, ‘You are merciless!’ – ‘I won’t do it again,‘ the tomcat shouted with the voice of an offender while his tail whipped back and forth. However, the mother cat calmed down and her meowing became gentle as well. The two jumped down and separated.
4.
A week later my aunt complained that our beautiful Pisik had pushed the lid of the pot aside and eaten the meat. I looked at the cat sitting calmly at the edge of the newly built oven, smiling as if she had understood the charges. ‘I will punish her’, my aunt said, took a branch and attacked the cat, which did not move at all. She looked at my aunt majestically and took the blow without making a sound or changing her posture. My aunt hit her again. The cat rose, looked at my aunt with contempt and left the room quietly meowing. From this, I understood that our Pisik was innocent and her enemy, the tomcat, must have been the meat thief.
5.
Pisik was very grieved at the death of her babies and did not eat anything. I asked a neighbor to give us a kitten from his cat. This kitten I brought to our cat. She looked at the kitten for a few minutes with a sad look and contemplated, as it seemed to me. Then she suddenly took it in her mouth and carried it to her basket where she slowly started to lick it. Although Pisik knew that this was not her own baby, she had adopted it. Our Pisik no longer had her own milk. Therefore, we fed the kitten with sheep’s milk.
6.
One Sunday I was sitting next to my aunt. We talked when my cousin informed us that the tomcat had strangled the kitten again. We rushed out of the room and ran to the cat basket. This time Pisik did not cry, but looked angrily and then rushed out of the room.
This time the evil tomcat had bitten off the kitten’s head. Outraged we left the room and then witnessed a terrible scene: Our Pisik had grabbed the male by the throat and hit him, back and forth, against the walls with a hoarse roar. She had turned into a lioness. The tomcat tried to fend off Pisik with his claws, but she hurled him against the wall again and again with extreme speed until he was dead. Only then did she let him go.
Triumphantly she looked at us and drilled her sharp claws into the dead cat’s throat. Then she withdrew. The vicious tomcat had received his just punishment.
Having slipped out of sight, Mihran Manasserian slapped his knee-high boot with his cane and entered the home of a Turk. It was a one and a half storied house. The rooms were full of empty trunks, pieces of wood and cotton, battered furniture, broken crockery, rusted garden tools, and some old slippers lay about here and there. There was a worn-out saddle in the corner of the yard and a twisted bucket by the well – the rope had been probably taken away.
Mihran came out into the street. He went from house to house, always hoping to find a better one.
(…)
He stood for a long time in a corner in one house. There was something shining on the floor; he bent down and picked it up. It was a button, perhaps a beautiful women’s button. Perhaps Nana had lived in this very house with her husband Kamal, the district governor of Hayots Dzor. What evidence was there for such a conclusion? Of course not! He felt something soft touch his feet, even through his knee-high boots. He trembled, well, almost trembled. It was a white house cat, a shaggy cat with one eye yellow and the other blue. It was a Van cat, but it had belonged to a Turk. He picked it up, it was heavy, but well groomed. He looked at its eyes, and he saw Nana! Mihran pocketed the shiny button, left the abandoned house with the cat in his arm, and went home.
(…) Van was emptying. (…)
Mihran frowned and pretended not to notice, but made everybody understand that this was a migration which was a flight, and that everyone would have to rely only on themselves, that young and old should all try to keep their head. ,It’s a matter of life and death,‘ he said. Once all of them were in the street, so was Nana who was always inseparable from Mihran. Deeply enraged, and maddened in his soul, Mihran cast a malicious glance at his sister’s sorrowful orphans, then at Nana and went into the garden with an ominous book. Nana followed him. Mihran went towards the rose garden. Nana was very delighted with and besotted by the sharp scent of the marjoram. She turned a somersault at Mihran’s feet and stood up at her two hind legs like a trained dog. Mihran took a revolver out of his pocket and shot Nana, without blinking an eye. She fell to one side, coating her snow-white fur and the green marjoram with her crimson blood. Nana’s charming looks and her tragic demise will never be forgotten in the history of Van cats. (…)
Source: Mahari, Gurgen: Burning Orchards. Translated by Dickran and Haig Tahta and Hasmik Ghazarian. Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2007, pp. 471 and 513 f.
Until the 19th century, Urartu belonged to the ‘forgotten cultures’, at least from the point of view of European archaeology. Since then, numerous excavations, finds and the deciphering of its cuneiform inscriptions have made it possible to get quite precise ideas about this ancient Near Eastern culture. However, the treatises often give the impression as if this empire had suddenly emerged from the darkness of early history without any connection, in order to extinguish itself just as meteorically after three hundred years of existence. If, on the other hand, the obvious continuities are taken into account, Urartu appears as a link between the Bronze Age cultures of the South Caucasus and the Armenian Plateau, but especially between the Hurrians of the third and second millennia B.C .and the Armenians. Even if Urartu, especially at the zenith of its development of power, was not an ethnically uniform state, the stratum supporting the state probably was Hurrian.
that the only improvement would be to free Armenia from foreign rule. Above all, however, one had to take the defense of the rural population into one’s own hands. Between 1872 and 1885, small, mostly short-lived secret societies such as Miut’yun ou Prkut’yun (‘Unity and salvation’, Van, March 1872-1874), Sev Khach (‘Black Cross’, Van, 1878/79 – approx. 1885) and Pashtpan Hayrenyats (‘Defender of the Fatherland’, Erzurum, 1881-1882) emerged, whose spiritual father and co-founder was the clergyman Mkrtich Khrimian (1820-1907). Deeply revered among the people as ‘Hayrik’ (‘little father’), the later patriarch (1869-1873) and Catholicos (since 1893), who came from Van, initially stood in the educational idealistic tradition of the Armenian enlightenment (zartonk), whom he tried to serve as a pedagogue and publicist until he was radicalized above all by the disappointments emanating from the Berlin Congress (1878).
to flee in 1915. He then grew up in Armenian and American orphanages in Yerevan and Dilidjan, studied and published his first poems in 1917; his first book followed in 1924. In 1926, he joined the literary group Noyember, since 1934 he was a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1936, Mahari was sentenced to ten years exile for ‘nationalism’ and from November 1938 to August 1947, he was imprisoned in the special prison Vologda near Moscow as well as in the camp Novo-Ivanovsk (East Siberia). Arrested again in Yerevan in November 1947, he was sentenced to exile in the Krasnoyarsk region (Central Siberia) for ‘unreliability’. In 1954, he was released and ‘rehabilitated’. Mahari died on 17 June 1969 at the age of 66 in Palanga (Lithuania). He had married the Lithuanian Antonina Povilaytite (1923-2018), who had been arrested at the age of 22 years as a law student and member of a patriotic Lithuanian organization and had been exiled to Siberia. With this biography, G. Mahari forms a typical fate for the double victimization of numerous Armenian genocide survivors who fled the Ottoman Empire and fell victim to Stalinist persecutions in the Soviet Union as alleged nationalists.
