According to the figures presented in the previous chapter, of the 2,925 towns and villages of the empire in which Armenians lived, no fewer than 2,084 were located on the Armenian high plateau, properly speaking – that is, in the vilayets of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Mamuret ul-Aziz, and Dyarbekir. In these basically rural regions, 762,848 Armenians, 90 per cent of them peasants, lived side by side with the Turkish population and their turbulent Kurdish neighbors. In the adjacent regions, in the vilayets of Sıvas, Trebizond, and Angora, 413,736 Armenians lived alongside Turks, Greeks, and Kurds. Peasants represented a somewhat smaller proportion of the population of these provinces: according to figures provided by the Patriarchate’s 1913–14 census, approximately 80 per cent of the Armenians there lived in the countryside. To the south in Cilicia, in the vilayet of Adana and the northern part of the vilayet of Aleppo, this figure fell to 60 per cent. Of the half a million other Armenians scattered throughout the other regions of the empire, 180,667 lived in the towns and villages of Bithynia, from Ismit through Kütahya to Bursa, 60 per cent of whom earned their living by tilling the soil. Another 215,131 lived mainly in urban environments in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Thrace. Thus, it clearly appears that Armenian society was predominantly rural on the eve of the First World War, not only on the high plateau, but also in the regions beyond it.
To date, there has been no serious study of the socio-economic situation of the vilayets of the Armenian high plateau in the early twentieth century. Aside from the fact that the Armenians lived in a basically rural society that was largely autarchic, even if they also boasted a few urban centers that exported manufactured products, we know virtually nothing about the macroeconomic equilibria prevailing at the time. Nor do we know how much each of these regions contributed to the budget of the Ottoman state. The modernization of the state had, however, made it necessary to gather statistics on a regular basis. The first such statistics to be released were for fiscal years 1326 and 1327 of the Hegira (14 May 1909 to 13 May 1910 and 14 March 1910 to 13 March 1911); they appeared in the Annual Statistical Bulletin (later quarterly), published by the Ministry of Finance. These official statistics allow us to draw a few conclusions about the economy. First of all, expenditures and receipts were more closely balanced in the five Armenian vilayets than elsewhere. For calendar year 1326 of the Hegira (1910–11), the vilayet of Erzerum (which, according to the official statistics for the year, had 781,071 inhabitants) contributed 48,324,826 piasters to the state budget and spent 49,040,755 piasters. The vilayet of Bitlis (410,079 inhabitants) paid out 20,756,439 piasters and received 19,316,833 in exchange; the vilayet of Dyarbekir (424,760 inhabitants) contributed 27,840,936 piasters and got back 24,184,027; the province of Mamuret ul-Aziz (455,579 inhabitants) paid in 21,842,050 piasters and received 22,050,358; and finally, the vilayet of Van (285,947 inhabitants) paid out 12,998,311 piasters and had expenditures of 18,623,690. One can see at a glance that the average per capita contribution was much the same from vilayet to vilayet. By contrast, expenditures for these eastern vilayets were proportionally twice as high as in the other provinces of the empire, with the exception of Albania, the Edirne region, and certain Arab provinces. In theory, this should have facilitated development of the basic structures and economy of these regions. A closer look at expenditures in the east shows why it did not: of a total of 133,215,663 piasters allocated to the region, no fewer than 58,136,107 went to cover the expenditures of the Ministry of War in these five vilayets, while 17,010,324 piasters went to the gendarmerie and another 10,655,062 were allocated to local agencies of the Ministry of the Interior. Thus a total of 85,801,493 piasters – two-thirds of the total expenditures in the five vilayets – went exclusively to financing repressive apparatuses: to the army as well as the gendarmerie and other agencies of the Interior Ministry. This speaks volumes about the policies of the state in the eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire. Plainly, these non-productive “investments,” proportionally three times higher than in the rest of the empire, left no leeway for collective or social programs. The absence of such state investments probably reflects the state’s intention to block the economic development of these regions, among the most neglected in the empire, in which half of all tax revenues emanated from the agricultural sector.1
Families and Communities: Organization and the Economy
In Armenian society, the family is more than just a solidarity network based on blood ties. It is a community in itself, with a strict hierarchy that still bears the marks of Indo-European heritage.2 It is patriarchal and assigns a very important place to the head of the household, the danuder, who determines the way the family’s land or other property is used. All the male descendants of a family are grouped around the danuder, together with the wives of his younger brothers and his sons. The whole thus formed functions in accordance with well-established rules and a precise hierarchy. In the absence of this strict form of social organization, survival would have been all but impossible in the harsh climate of many Armenian provinces, as nomads of different origins have observed throughout history. This no doubt explains why certain regions remained Armenian down to the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the Ottoman authorities’ attempts to colonize them from the sixteenth century on. The partial integration of the Kurdish nomads there was made possible only by the “symbiosis” imposed by the national government. Is eastern Turkey not very sparsely populated even today? Indications are that the sedentarization of the Kurds’ descendants was not successful everywhere it was attempted. It doubtless took all the know-how of an ancient agricultural civilization such as the Armenians’ to produce everything that was needed to survive in these climes.
In the region of Kayseri, a couple had on average “only” slightly over four children. In Erzerum, couples had five; in Pasın, Bayburt, Kemah, Hizan, Genc, Muş, Sasun, and the vilayet of Van, couples had eight. Households were correspondingly large. As many as 70 members of the same family lived together in some mountain districts – that is, several couples and their children, as in Sasun or Moks. In the plains and valleys, an average household generally contained 30 to 40 people. In urban centers, where tradition was weaker, the brothers or the youngest sons in a family often founded households of their own. Finally, in cities such as Smyrna or Constantinople, many families consisted only of a couple and their children; the eldest son would continue to live with his parents, or the other way around.
Statistics gathered during the 1913–14 census indicate that the average number of inhabitants in a village community also varied sharply from one region to the next. In high mountain districts, many villages contained only 250 to 500 people. Yet households containing from 50 to 150 individuals were not rare there. On the plain of Muş or Harput, in contrast, villages were much larger, containing on average 700 to 800 inhabitants. In such villages, mixed populations of Christians and Muslims were more frequent than in the mountains.
In villages with fewer than one thousand inhabitants, the Ottoman administration was nonexistent. The social hierarchy was organized around the “mayor,” clergy, and a “council of wise men.” After 1908, schoolteachers began to occupy an ever more important place in the social life of rural communities, as both educators and activists in the political parties. The “mayor,” the danuder, was, as the title indicates, the head of a household – the richest or the most respected. It fell on him and his peers to run community affairs, whether it was a question of the equitable distribution of water for irrigation of the fields, relations with Ottoman officialdom in the kaza to which the village belonged, disputes between individual peasants, distribution of the collective tax burden among the households of the village, or renovation of the village church and construction of a school. This council of wise men maintained close relations with the village priest, who was, when he was not attending to his religious duties, himself a farmer and paterfamilias like the others. Deeply attached to its Christian faith, the rural world lived a life punctuated by religious holidays, which also marked off the seasons and thus the rhythms of farm life. When nomadic Kurdish brigands attacked a village, the church served as a refuge, for it was always the most solid building in the village.
The nature of the rural economy varied, of course, from region to region. In high mountain districts such as Sasun, Moks, or Şatak, the villagers raised sheep, pigs, horses, and water buffalo. These activities, very important economically, were practiced along with agriculture. The long, snowy winters condemned most of the villages in these regions to autarchy for several months of the year, and also favored the exercise of crafts such as rug-making, pottery, carpentry, and so on. Agricultural instruments were basically made of wood, but had certain metallic parts. Plows were drawn by animals, generally oxen or water buffalo, as on the plateaus or plains. On the plains, agriculture was naturally more highly developed than elsewhere, typically consisting in the cultivation of cereal plants, grapevines, fruit trees, and vegetables. The purpose of all this activity was, as a rule, the production of an autonomous food supply rather than a marketable surplus. It was rounded off by beekeeping, which furnished sugar as well as wax for candles. As for the salt needed to preserve food, it was found in surface mines or on the shores of Lake Van. The iron and copper used by blacksmiths, tinsmiths, silverers, and so on were extracted from lodes exploited with the help of primitive techniques already in use in ancient times. Over the centuries, in short, the rigorous climate and rugged relief helped forge a nearly self-sufficient society that was inward-looking, attached to tradition, and above all concerned with living under secure conditions.
It was precisely the quest for security, which was often severely threatened, that brought Armenian peasants to abandon their land, whether it was a question, as in the sixteenth century, of deportations and deliberately induced famines, or the policy of depopulation systematically pursued by Abdülhamid and the Young Turks in his wake. Rural areas were particularly vulnerable to the talan, the annual raid that was most often carried out by Kurdish nomads, who did not always content themselves with the payment of tribute. Thus, every year, as if subject to a ritual, the peasants would be confronted by their nomadic neighbors, who had for centuries been accustomed to living off the sedentary inhabitants of their region.
The Armenian population, although it was robust, lived in a land with an austere climate. Nature – especially epidemics – had eliminated the weakest. Until 1844, the plague regularly raged on the Armenian high plateau, sometimes mowing down as many as half of the inhabitants of urban centers, and a somewhat smaller proportion of the population in the countryside.3
The Urban Centers and the Beginnings of Industrialization
In the Armenian provinces, villages were often entirely Armenian or had mixed Armenian-Kurdish and, less frequently, Armenian-Turkish populations. A very different situation prevailed in the urban centers, which were military garrisons and the seats of the Ottoman administration. Here, Christians were not always in the majority but in almost every case lived side by side with their Muslim neighbors. The Armenians, clustered together outside the city walls in neighborhoods of their own, went downtown only to exercise their professions in their craftsmen’s shops or their stands at the bazaar. At the turn of the century, they still held a virtual monopoly on local and interregional commerce, and had unchallenged control of the craft guilds. Here they perpetuated traditions and craft techniques handed down over the centuries. In the little towns, however, a significant portion of the population engaged in agricultural work: they cultivated, notably, vegetable gardens, orchards, and vineyards, with the result that these towns had something of a rural air.
As far as craftsmanship went, every region had its specialties. Thus, Eğin/Agn was famous for its goldsmiths, who plied their trade in Constantinople as well; Van was known for its skilful tailors, tinsmiths, goldsmiths, and saddle-makers; Sıvas was celebrated for the dexterity of its blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and weavers; Kayseri’s architects, masons, carpenters, stone-cutters, and tapestry-makers had an excellent reputation, as did the shoemakers of Harput; Amasia, Malatia, and Hacın were known for their textiles, Muş and Bitlis for their woolens, Gümüşhane and Erzerum for their silversmiths, Erzincan and Kemah for their wholesalers, and so on. These craftsmen, the esnafs, who had for centuries been organized in guilds governed by statutes, also played a significant political and social role in the Ottoman Empire.
Early in the twentieth century, Armenians were also still very active in the crafts in Constantinople. In Büyükçarşi, Vezirhan, Çuhacihan, Kürkçühan, and Çarsambabazar, there were no fewer than 1,850 Armenian workshops in which some 15,000 master artisans, journeymen, and apprentices plied their trades. In the city as a whole, there were 5,000 shops and 35,979 professional craftsmen. Competing Western products, however, made the industrialization of Turkey an imperative. As early as the 1870s, certain forms of craft production, notably in the textile branch, had begun to die out because they were unable to compete with European production. The first Ottoman “industrial” enterprises appeared in this context. The Armenians quite naturally joined the new movement, unhesitatingly introducing Western technical innovations into the empire. The Armenian bourgeoisie of Constantinople and Smyrna was at the front ranks here, but notables from Bithynia, Cilicia, and to a lesser extent the Armenian high plateau were also very dynamic. Inhabitants of the high plateau, lacking means of transportation and practicable roads, lived, as we have pointed out, in a state of permanent insecurity, and it did not easily lend itself to large-scale industrialization.
Steam engines, power looms, iron furnaces, and so on were slowly making their way into the empire. Tobacco factories, flourmills, textile factories (cotton mills, silk mills, and wool mills), as well as shipyards, were largely in Armenian hands.
Armenians also took an active part in trade and finance. The monopoly of local trade and international commerce characteristic of Armenians in the east was no less striking in Istanbul, Smyrna, and other cities in the west of the empire. These individual successes, which some tend to celebrate as proof of the benevolent attitude of the Ottoman government towards the Armenians, in no way reflect the policy of the sultans vis-à-vis the Armenian population.
As a result of local conditions as well as the subordinate status that the Armenians had had for centuries, even affluent Armenians rarely made a show of their wealth by building outwardly resplendent homes. The interiors of their homes, on the other hand, were often marked by great refinement, with harmonious inner courts, murals, and libraries fitted out with elaborately worked wainscoting. The sumptuous homes of the Armenian quarter of Kayseri, which were only recently torn down, bore witness to the affluence and tastes of this provincial bourgeoisie, as do the many still extant, albeit dilapidated and sometimes completely neglected, mansions in Sıvas, Erzerum, and Kars.