Chapter 8

Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Sıvas

The vast Sıvas vilayet, one of the most densely populated in Asia Minor, had approximately 1 million inhabitants in 1914, including 204,472 Armenians and about 100,000 Greeks and Syriacs. The Armenians in the urban centers were the most conspicuous, but non-negligible numbers of Armenians inhabited the countryside as well; they lived in some 240 villages and hamlets, boasting 198 churches, 21 monasteries, and 204 schools with a total enrolment of 20,599.1 Unlike the vilayets we have examined so far, the Armenians in the Sıvas vilayet lived side-by-side with a Turkish-speaking (rather than Kurdish-speaking) Sunni Muslim population, including 10,000 muhacirs who had settled in the region in the wake of the Balkan War.²

The 30 March 1913 nomination of a new vali, Ahmed Muammer Bey – he held his post until 1 February 1916³ – seems to have exacerbated the degradation of the non-Muslims’ situation. In accordance with the wishes of Young Turk circles, as soon as he took office the vali initiated a policy of boycotting Christian entrepreneurs and merchants after the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Balkan coalition. Muammer, a native of Sıvas and the son of a magistrate, played a decisive role in creating a network of Ittihadist clubs in his native vilayet from 1908 on.⁴ Thirty-two years old when he assumed his post, the vali was the very prototype of the new sort of man the CUP needed to implement its policy of creating a “national economy” in the provinces: he was simultaneously the vali and the representative of the Unionist Central Committee in this vilayet in the middle of Asia Minor, through which he traveled extensively in order to broaden the circle of Ittihadist party activists and spread party propaganda.⁵ According to Armenian sources, the real problems began only after the adoption of the reforms in the eastern provinces. Like the Greek populations living on the coasts of the Aegean, the Armenians of the Sıvas vilayet were the victims of the increasingly harsh policies of the Young Turks. In particular, Ahmed Muammer carried out a plan of economic harassment, the objective of which was to put an end to the Armenians’ “prosperity” and bring Turkish cooperatives into existence.⁶ He even seems to have called on the hojas of the vilayet to give their sermons a corresponding slant.⁷ This determined vali also created schools in which Armenian teachers trained apprentices.⁸ He thus sought to eliminate what seemed to him to be an Armenian monopoly over craft production. But Muammer also attacked religious institutions; such as when he confiscated the land belong to the monastery of St. Nshan, located near the city, in order to build a barracks for the Tenth Army Corps on it.⁹ But the veiled economic boycott imposed by the authorities apparently did not completely ruin the Armenians. In April and May 1914, several suspect fires broke out, one after the next, in the bazaars of Merzifun/Marzevan, Amasia, Sıvas, and Tokat. In Tokat, according to an Armenian middle school teacher, 85 stores, 45 homes, and three khans were reduced to ashes by a fire that raged in Baghdad Cadesi, the street where many of the city’s businesses were located, on 1 May 1914.¹⁰ Three big flourmills were also ravaged by fires in Merzifun, Amasia, and Sıvas.¹¹ We have no proof that the local authorities had a hand in these criminal fires, but Armenian circles were not unduly persuaded to believe that the fires had been set on Ahmed Muammer’s initiative. When the general mobilization order, the seferbelik, was announced in Sıvas on 3 August, every male of draftable age went to enroll at the recruitment center that had been set up in the Ulu Cami mosque, formerly the Church of St. Eranos. Over the next few weeks, the Church of the Holy Cross and some of the schools that belonged to the 20,000 Armenians of Sıvas – such as the Aramian middle school or the Sanasarian lycée – were gradually confiscated by the military authorities, who wished to use them as barracks.¹² By paying the bedel, some of the Armenian conscripts avoided mobilization or were assigned to the Red Cross. As elsewhere, the Teklif-i Harbiyye provided an opportunity for obvious abuses, to Armenian merchants’ cost: all means of transportation in both the cities and the villages were requisitioned.¹³ Furthermore, the national Armenian hospital assumed the costs of maintaining 150 hospital beds, which were put at the army’s disposal.¹⁴

Among the striking measures observed in Sıvas after the Ottoman Empire entered the war was to dispatch to the Caucasian front the Tenth Army Corps, made up of recruits from the vilayet, including some 15 Armenian doctors and numerous Armenian soldiers.¹⁵ In addition, 2,500 worker-soldiers were assigned to two labor battalions. The first improved the road leading from the konak to the stone bridge at Kızılırmak; the second built a pipeline two kilometers long to provide the city with drinking water.¹⁶ Sıvas also served as a rear base for the Army of the Caucasus; in particular, the soldiers who fell victim to the dysentery and typhus epidemics decimating the army because of catastrophic sanitary conditions were sent here.¹⁷ Once the French Jesuit fathers had left,¹⁸ Reverend Ernest Partridge’s American mission was the only foreign institution remaining in Sıvas. The national Armenian hospital and the establishment of the American Red Cross, directed by Dr. Clark, played a major part in fighting the epidemics. Nevertheless, 25,000 epidemic victims were recorded.¹⁹

Two events that occurred in the Sıvas vilayet attest to the tension-fraught atmosphere reigning in the regional capital. Since no one held the office of primate in the region, the Armenian Patriarchate had named two auxiliary primates to head the dioceses of Sıvas and Erzincan – Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian and Father Sahag Odabashian. In this troubled period, the patriarchate deemed it indispensable to maintain an official presence in these areas, in which the authorities recognized its right to represent the community. On 20 December, the two prelates arrived in Sıvas together. Odabashian, a native of the city, stayed with his family for a few days while waiting to find a vehicle that could take him to his new post. It seems, however, that the Interior Ministry had raised doubts as to the prelate’s real mission. An encrypted telegram that it sent Muammer on 21 December 1914 informed the vali that, “there are serious reasons for thinking that [Odabashian] plans to precipitate disorders among the Armenians” and requested that he “put him under surveillance as soon as he arrives.”²⁰ The task of watching the 38-year-old vicar was entrusted to Halil Bey, the commander of the çete squadrons; Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid, the leader of the Çerkez of Uzunyayla; and the çetes Bacanakoğlu Edhem, Kütükoğlu Hüseyin, and Zaralı Mahir. They assassinated Odabashian on the road between Suşehir and Refahiye, near the village of Ağvanis, on the morning of 1 January 1915.²¹ The investigation that followed this murder, which had also taken the life of Odabashian’s driver, Arakel Arslanian, offers a striking example of the formalism and duplicity of the administration.²² The initial evidence indicated that “the weapons used were of two different kinds, resembling a Mauser and a Martini”; however, “since weapons of this kind are not just lying around, except in the Armenians’ homes, it is possible that the authors of these murders are Armenians who committed the crime with a particular purpose in mind.”²³ The investigation proceeded to focus on the surrounding Armenian and Greek villages, asking how people who had been absent from their village on the day of the murder had “spent their time.”²⁴ The kaymakam of Suşehir, the investigating magistrate, and the commander of the gendarmerie went to the scene of the crime and interrogated witnesses. Thus, it was established that the murder was “committed by two individuals riding gray horses, while the other mounts were of various colors,” that this band was armed with “Mauser Gras and Martini” rifles, and that the individuals in question had spoken Armenian, Greek, and Turkish. Zehni, the judge, observed, “the fact that they had not touched the victim’s seven piasters gold, watch, baggage, or other personal belongings seems to indicate that the motive for the crime was not theft, but that the murderers had some other objective.”²⁵ Suspicion focused on a Greek, Kristaki Effendi, from the village of Alacahan in the kaza of Refahiye, who had been “recognized by his voice”; however, the kaymakam of Suşehir thought that “the guilty parties were Armenians or Greeks from the region of Erzincan.”²⁶ The Armenians of Sıvas understood very well that this “investigation” was a masquerade staged by the authorities to cover up their own role in the murder of the prelate, an event that, under other circumstances, would have caused a commotion. Yet no one dared protest, whether in Constantinople or Sıvas.²⁷ The accusations were, to be sure, so implausible that Muammer felt a need to engage in diversionary tactics. Patriarch Zaven notes in his memoirs that immediately after the murder of Sahag Odabashian, the local authorities accused the Armenians of taking revenge by poisoning the bread delivered to the Turkish soldiers, an accusation that spread through the population, leading to open hostility toward the Armenians.²⁸ On the night of 5/6 January, several soldiers from one of the Kavakyazı barracks had shown signs of indigestion. This “poisoning” was blamed on the bread, in which there were blue streaks, and taken as proof that a suspect substance had been mixed in with the dough. Ahmed Muammer, who went to the barracks without delay, observed that the Armenian soldiers there did not have the same symptoms, and concluded that the Armenians had doubtless committed a crime against the Turkish recruits. The Armenian soldiers were immediately confined to the basement of the barracks, while their Turkish colleagues were put on a state of alert; armed men surrounded Armenian neighborhoods and the authorities told the Turkish populace to get ready to react if the Armenians staged an “insurrection.” In the course of the night, the accused bakers were arrested and tortured in order to make them confess as to which party, the Dashnaks or the Hnchaks, had ordered them to poison the soldiers’ bread.²⁹ In the space of a few hours, Sıvas was transformed into a city under siege; massacres would probably have ensued if Constantinople had not stepped in to prohibit them. The investigation conducted the next day by Haci Hüsni, an army physician, Dr. Harutiun Shirinian, and Turkish and Armenian pharmacists revealed that the bread in question had been made from a mixture of wheat and rye flour, which caused the blue streaks in it, but that it was perfectly safe to eat. They further noted that the symptoms that had cropped up the night before had disappeared and that no one had been poisoned.³⁰ The local press, which was soon echoed by the press in Istanbul, nevertheless reported the official version of events, according to which Armenian bakers had poisoned the soldiers. This version was never retracted, despite Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian’s repeated appeals to the vali.³¹ A witness also reported that a mutilated body found near the suburb of Hoğtar had been exhibited in front of the town hall for 24 hours “in order to incite the Turks against the Armenians.”³²

The Armenians’ situation was not improved by the event that occurred shortly thereafter – an 18 January 1915 reception held in Sıvas for Vice-Generalissimo Enver, who was on his way back from the front after the Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamiş. The famous Murad Khrimian (Sepastatsi Murad), a former Dashnak fedayi who had been rehabilitated after the proclamation of the Constitution,³³ went out to greet Enver and had a conversation with him. The minister emphasized that two members of the Dashnak leadership in Sıvas, Vahan Vartanian and Ohannes Poladian, had shown great courage during the fighting, but also stressed that the troops had been poorly trained.³⁴ When Enver received a visit by the Armenian religious and political leaders, he reminded them that he had been saved a few days earlier by Lieutenant Hovhannes Aginian, who had died of his wounds shortly thereafter, adding that the Armenian recruits had fought bravely.³⁵ These remarks, however, remained confined to the context of this courtesy visit. As was the case in other provinces, the Dashnaks remained the local authorities’ privileged interlocutors in the first few months of the war. Murad Khrimian often met with Muammer to clear up “misunderstandings” with him – that is, to defuse provocations. Thus, in fall 1914, he was able to negotiate the staggered mobilization of different age cohorts with the authorities, the vali’s hostility to the idea notwithstanding.³⁶ Yet mistrust continued to be perceptible on both sides. Like the valis of Dyarbekir and Trebizond, Ahmed Muammer too was the local leader of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It was on his orders that, in November 1914, the president of the vilayet court released 124 criminals from the prison of Bünyan to incorporate them into a unit then being formed.³⁷ An Armenian source observed that the squadron of çetes created in late fall 1914 had initially conducted operations “amid the greatest possible secrecy, and, later, in the open.”³⁸ But Sıvas was also a city through which irregular troops sent from the western parts of the empire passed in transit. For example, on 10 December 1914, a unit of 1,200 çetes en route for Erzerum arrived in Sıvas and was given a hero’s welcome by the Turkish populace. In contrast, the Armenian villagers’ memory of these men’s passage through the area was a much less happy one, for they wreaked havoc on the villages of the plain.³⁹ Bekir Sâmi Bey’s group, comprising 800 irregulars, 20 of them officers, spent the month of January in Govdun, the village near Hafiz in which Murad Khrimian lived. The çetes were, however, careful not to mistreat the population, with which they were billeted, and even showed the celebrated former fedayi respectful deference.⁴⁰ The handful of abuses noted in this period may, moreover, be put down to these men’s criminal past. The vilayet of Sıvas did not really begin to feel the effects of the war until after the failure of the Sarıkamiş offensive. Thus, from 2 February on, the Armenian villages on the plain of Sıvas were surrounded by what was left of the Third Army, which took up quarters there and lived off the residents. Typhus raged among these soldiers and soon spread to the villagers as well. The villages of Kızılbaş also had to help feed and lodge these men. Turkish localities, however, were spared.⁴¹ Govdun seems to have been required to make a particularly heavy contribution to the war effort, perhaps because Murad lived there. Although one-and-a-half battalions of the regular army had already been billeted in the village, a new squadron of çetes arrived from Istanbul to take up quarters there on 30 January. Now, however, the tone changed: the Çerkez officer in command of the unit immediately attacked Murad for having struggled “against Islam for twenty years,” and threatened the villagers. The fedayi answered that the sole purpose of his fight had been to establish the “constitution,” adding that “the village was not in revolt” and appealing for corroboration to the officer responsible for the regular troops stationed in the village. The next day, when Murad visited the commander of the brigade posted in the sector in order to request that he send these çetes away, he was told that this squadron answered directly to the vali, not to the military authorities.⁴² Murad therefore left for Sıvas in order to meet with Muammer. He described the unbearable situation of the rural populations of the vilayet, who were expected to feed and quarter thousands of soldiers. By way of his answer, the vali remarked: “It seems that the Armenian population is unhappy over our successes.” In other words, the Ottoman “successes” – the defeat at Sarıkamiş had not yet been publicly announced – supposedly irritated the Armenians, who were suspected of harboring sympathies for the Russians. Murad understood the message very clearly and immediately convoked a meeting of the Armenian representatives of all confessions in order to evaluate the authorities’ intentions, which were deemed alarming. The Armenian leaders decided to remain vigilant in order to defuse provocations,⁴³ the more so in that they had already observed that the authorities had not reacted when, during the January 1915 debacle, Armenian soldiers responsible for transport had been massacred near the Erzincan-Sıvas road.⁴⁴ The Armenians’ alarm was heightened when they learned on 8 February that the village of Piurk, located in the kaza of Suşehir, had been destroyed under suspect circumstances by a recently formed group of çetes that included Zaralı Mahir, one of the men who had murdered Sahag Odabashian.⁴⁵ This massacre, during which several men had been killed, was all the more symbolic in that Piurk had had a reputation as an Armenian fedayi center in Abdülhamid’s day.⁴⁶ The Armenians were also worried because of alarmist remarks that German officers stationed in Sıvas were supposed to have made, according to Dr. Hayranian, an army doctor educated in Germany who was a friend of Dr. Paul Rohrbach’s.⁴⁷ A German doctor, whom Hayranian had asked to intercede with the authorities after the attack on Piurk, had answered: “What can I do? What can I say? Think rather about how to die with honor.”⁴⁸

In the first half of February, the arrival of between 1,500 and 1,700 Russian prisoners-of-war on the plain of Sıvas offered the local authorities another opportunity to paint the Armenians as suspect. Certain villages had been asked to lodge and feed these Russians. Eight men who had arrived in terrible condition, suffering from typhus, died the first night, despite the care the villagers gave them. The soldiers escorting them were nevertheless opposed to the idea of burying them. Having ignored this prohibition to bury them, the Armenian villagers were immediately accused of rebelling and treated accordingly.⁴⁹ The authorities pretended not to know that the Christian funeral rite required that the dead be buried regardless of identity. It is, however, also possible to chalk these events up to the bitterness engendered by the defeat at Sarıkamiş.

In March, the Young Turk members of parliament from Çanğırı, Harput, and Erzerum were invited to come to Sıvas by the CUP’s responsible secretary, Erzrumlı Gani, in order to speak before the Young Turk club and in the mosques.⁵⁰ According to a number of concurring sources, Fazıl Berki, the representative from Çanğırı, declared: “Our true enemies are close to us, among us – they are the Armenians … who are sapping the foundations of our state. That is why we must first wipe out these domestic foes.”⁵¹ These remarks, based on a speech that Bahaeddin Şakir had made in the same period,⁵² circulated so openly in Sıvas that Bishop Kalemkiarian felt the need to go to see the vali and ask what they meant.⁵³ The role of Erzrumlı Gani Bey appears here for the first time. This Young Turk leader, a native of Erzerum who had received his officer’s training at Istanbul’s Military Academy (Harbiye), arrived in Sıvas in fall 1914.⁵⁴ There, he organized a lecture that Dr. Şakir had delivered before the Ittihadist club, probably on his way back to Istanbul in early March 1915.⁵⁵ Gani worked with the vali, Muammer, and his henchmen – the parliamentary representative from Çanğırı, Dr. Fazıl Berki; the representative from Sıvas, Rasim Bey; and Colonel Ali Effendi, the deputy commander of the Tenth Army Corps – on the plan to extirpate the Armenians.⁵⁶

Muammer, however, entrusted the organization of new squadrons of çetes in the vilayet to the parliamentary representative Rasim Bey in March 1915.⁵⁷ Approximately 4,000 çetes were recruited and given gendarmes’ uniforms. This group was drawn, notably, from the Kurdish population of Darende, Karapapak who had come from the Caucasus, and freed felons. Two thousand of these “gendarmes” were to go to Sıvas, while the others were to be dispatched to the neighboring villages.⁵⁸ In the same period, there was a sharp rise in desertions among the Armenian recruits, who had suffered increasing harassment and persecution. The medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök were converted into detention centers for Armenian soldiers.⁵⁹ Thus, by March, the first signs of the events to come could be discerned. The most symbolic act was the arrest, around 15 March, of 17 political leaders and teachers in Merzifun and Amasia – among them Kakig Ozanian, Mamigon Varzhabedian, and Khachig Atamian – who were immediately transferred to Sıvas and interned in the medrese of Şifahdiye.⁶⁰ The Armenian sources say nothing about the motives that the authorities invoked to justify these arrests, but note that they preceded the arrests of the political and intellectual elites of Sıvas by two weeks. In the provincial capital, the alleged flight of a Russian officer served as a pretext for the arrests of a hotelier, Manug Beylerian; Cholak Hampartzumian; and, on 28 March, of the pharmacist and Dashnak leader Vahan Vartanian, along with his colleagues Hovhannes Poladian and Harutiun Vartigian; the Hnchaks’ Krikor Karamanugian, Murad Gurigian, and Dikran Apelian; and the dragoman of the vilayet, Mardiros Kaprielian, all of whom were summoned before Muammer and then immediately placed under arrest. On 7 May, after spending 40 days in the central prison, these men were put in chains and sent to Yeni Han on the Sıvas-Tokat-Samsun road. Muammer, the CUP’s responsible secretary Gani Bey, and Colonel Pertev, the commander of the Tenth Army Corps, joined them in a place called Maşadlar Yeri, where they interrogated the Armenian leaders about their plans for an insurrection and the quantity of arms in their possession, and then put them to death.⁶¹ Bishop Kalemkiarian’s protests to the vali proved to be in vain, as did the request from Dr. Haranian to liberate the detainees; indeed, Haranian’s bold intervention cost him his life.⁶² It was Murad Khrimian, however, who was Muammer’s greatest cause of concern. On Monday, 29 March – that is, the day after the Sıvas leaders were arrested – the vali sent Keleş Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie, to Sıvas, accompanied by a squadron. Keleş Bey told Murad to go with him to Sıvas because Muammer “wished” to see him. After giving orders to set a resplendent table for his guests, the fedayi disappeared without a trace.⁶³ The forces of the gendarmerie sent to look for him arrested the male population of the village of Khandzar, which was suspected of having given Murad shelter, and proceeded to kill the men in the Seyfe Gorge, a spot two hours to the east of the village.⁶⁴ This massacre, which occurred in early April, marked the end of the first phase of operations, the main target of which had been the political elites of Sıvas and conscripts from the city.

Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Sıvas

In 1914, the Armenian population of the sancak of Sıvas alone was 116,817. The Armenians lived in 46 towns and villages.⁶⁵ The kaza of Sıvas had 37 towns and villages, with a total Armenian population of 31,185, almost 20,000 of whom lived in the regional capital.⁶⁶ Demographic considerations perhaps explain why the first operations, the official purpose of which was to track down deserters and collect weapons, targeted only the Halys/Kızılımak valley, focusing on the villages in the northern part of it. Moreover, early in April 1915 the authorities took all the measures required to completely cut off relations and correspondence between Sıvas and the neighboring villages: “no one knew what was going on, even in a village just an hour away.”⁶⁷

We have information about one of the battalions of çetes created on Muammer’s initiative, the one commanded by Kütükoğlu Hüseyin and Haralı Mahir, the murderers of Father Sahag Odabashian.⁶⁸ This battalion conducted its operations in the localities of the Kızılırmak valley from 2 April onward.⁶⁹ It had been given the mission of arresting the adolescents, village priests, schoolteachers, and notables who had not been conscripted. According to Armenian sources, these operations were accompanied by looting, rapes, and murders, and were followed by the transfer of the men who had been arrested to Zara/Koçhisar or Sıvas. Some of these men were killed in the Seyfe gorge or at the level of the Boğaz bridge. The others were interned in the city, in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök.⁷⁰ We also know that a battalion of gendarmes commanded by Ali Şerif Bey carried out operations in this valley. The killing of the men of the villages of Khorasan and Aghdk, located on the outskirts of Koçhisar, were its work; the villagers were put to death in the Bunağ Gorge.⁷¹ It is probable that the 4,000 çetes stationed throughout the sancak were given similar missions in other districts during these operations, which took place in April and May. A squadron even took up a position near Sıvas, on the banks of the Kızılırmak in a place called Paşa Çayiri, which was converted into a slaughterhouse for prisoners who had been interned in the regional capital.⁷²

The Armenians of the city of Sıvas were not really targeted until May 1915. One of the first measures taken concerned the Armenian employees of the Post and Telegraph Office. The minister responsible for it issued an order by telegraph calling for their immediate dismissal,⁷³ which was followed by that of all other Armenian civil servants, such as municipal physicians and pharmacists, gendarmes, and so on.⁷⁴ The monastery of St. Nshan came under full army control. Finally, the authorities ordered that the population turn in its weapons on pain of court-martial. At the vali’s request, Bishop Kalemkiarian asked his flock in a Sunday sermon to obey the government’s orders. Armenians and Turks handed over their weapons (for the sake of appearances, the decree applied to the entire population). Of course, Muammer invoked the Armenians’ lack of cooperation to justify launching a vast confiscation campaign that led in turn to the arrests of the city’s notables (one of the first to be imprisoned was the famous arms-maker of Sıvas, Mgrdich Norhadian).⁷⁵ The government’s propaganda now took on a more vehement tone. The authorities began by putting the weapons turned in by the Armenians on display, adding to these the battle arms in the barracks and photographing the pile. The vali also sent a report to the Sublime Porte in which he accused the Armenians of treason.⁷⁶

There also exist reports of a meeting held in Sıvas sometime in May that was attended by Turkish notables and Çerkez and Kurdish chiefs (from the kaza of Koçkiri), to whom the vali issued directives about the treatment to be meted out to the Armenian population. After the Armenians had been demonized for several weeks, the situation seemed ripe for the transition to the practical phase of the extermination. A Turkish liberal, Ellezzâde Halil Bey, told one of his Armenian friends, “You cannot imagine what they are preparing to do to you.”⁷⁷ Among the Armenians, a rumor was making the rounds about how “black lists” containing the names of the first men to be arrested were being drawn up for every quarter of the city. It would appear that a general list was produced by combining material from three sources: the heads of the various neighborhoods; artisans’ associations, which the CUP club had asked to produce names; and the police. Hnchak Party and Dashnak Party clubs were searched and their archives impounded.⁷⁸ Down to the end of May, however, the arrests carried out across the vilayet had involved only 400 to 500 men.⁷⁹ Finally, there are indications that Muammer made a tour of the kazas of his vilayet, notably Merzifun⁸⁰ and Tokat,⁸¹ in late May and early June.

Here, too, the first victims of this operational phase were those people most deeply involved in local political and social life, as well as those with connections to foreign institutions, such as the physicians at the American hospital or the teachers at Merzifun’s Anatolia College. Thus, the authorities sought to isolate these establishments. They gradually requisitioned their buildings and then forced the missionaries to leave the region.⁸² On 15 June, 12 people were publicly hanged. These men were political activists, four deserters from Divrig/Divriği, and people who had been accused, apparently unjustly, of a murder that had occurred several years earlier.⁸³ This spectacle took place shortly before the beginning of the systematic operations conducted by the police and the gendarmerie that began on Wednesday, 16 June 1915. On that day, 3,000 to 3,500 men were arrested in their places of work or their homes and interned in the central prison or the cellars of the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök.⁸⁴ Among them were teachers from the Aramian and Sanasarian lycées, including Mihran Isbirian, Mihran Chukasezian, Hagop Mnjugian, and Hayg Srabian; Mikayel Frengulian, a teacher from the American middle school; Avedis Semerjian, Krikor Gdigian, and Senig Baliozian from the Jesuit middle school; the members of the Diocesan Council, including its leading members Voskan Aslan and Benyamin Topalian; and staff members of charitable organizations, political activists, doctors, pharmacists, and all those who counted in Sıvas, such as the police officers Ara Baliozian and Mgrdich Bujakjian, the surveyor Serope Odabashian, the lawyer Mgrdich Poladian, the Telegraph Office employee Aram Aginian, the municipal architect Hovhannes Frengulian, the photographer H. Enkababian, and the former dragoman of the French consulate, Manug Ansurian.⁸⁵ Ernest Partridge notes that no proof whatsoever of the guilt of these men was put forward, that they were never indicted, and that no one knew why the authorities had arrested them. The vali repeatedly assured the American minister that they would be “freed and sent on their way with their families.”⁸⁶ The Armenian bishop was given a more original explanation: Muammer told him that he had had the men interned to protect them from the possibility of a massacre, since “prison was the safest place” for them. He also advised the prelate not to get involved in these matters, especially because he was not yet acquainted with the Armenians of Sıvas. Only he, the vali, knew “just how dangerous this element was.”⁸⁷

The first round-up was followed by a second wave of arrests, launched on 23 June, that led to the apprehension of around 1,000 men. Thus, a total of some 5,000 people were crammed into the city’s central prison and the cellars of the medreses.⁸⁸ Similar operations were conducted in the second half of June in Tokat, Amasia, Merzifun, Zile, Niksar, Hereke, and so on, with the apprehended men rapidly killed in the environs of these localities.⁸⁹ In Sıvas, Muammer seems to have opted for another method: as we shall see, it was only after carrying out the deportations that he concerned himself, early in August, with the fate of these prisoners. Despite its proven utility, Sıvas’ Armenian national hospital, which had put 150 beds at the army’s disposal and played an important role in fighting the typhus epidemic, was confiscated by the authorities. Most of its staff were arrested⁹⁰ and put to death shortly thereafter.

The pretrial investigation of Gani Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Sıvas, mentions a trip that he made to Istanbul in the second half of June 1915 in order to take part in a coordinating meeting with his colleagues from other vilayets.⁹¹ We do not have further details about the directives that were issued to the Ittihadist delegates there, but it seems reasonable to suppose that they bore on the deportations that began in very many different locales in early July.

The first to be deported were the inhabitants of the villages located in the upper part of the Halys/Kızılırmak valley in the kazas of Koçhisar and Koçkiri. These deportees were put on the road in the latter half of June, before the official publication of the expulsion decree. As elsewhere, first the adolescent and adult men were arrested and killed, after which women and children were set marching southward. By 29 June, the deportation of the villagers from the Kızılırmak valley had already been completed.⁹²

The official deportation order was not promulgated until late June – 30 June, to be exact.⁹³ On 1 July, Ahmed Muammer convoked the Armenian orthodox primate, Bishop Kalemkiarian, as well as his Catholic counterpart, Bishop Levon Kechejian, to inform them that the first convoy would have to leave the city on Monday, 5 July, bound for Mesopotamia. On Kalemkiarian’s account, the vali justified this measure by recalling that the Armenians had been living “for six hundred years under the glorious protection of the Ottoman state” and had profited from its sultans’ tolerance, which had enabled them to preserve their language and religion and to prosper to the point that “trade and the crafts were entirely in [their] hands.” Finally, Muammer pointed out that if he had not been vigilant and anticipated developments, an “insurrection would also have broken out and you would have – God forbid – stabbed the Ottoman army in the back.”⁹⁴ This condensed historical overview no doubt reflected the sentiment prevailing among the Young Turks at the time, as well as the leitmotif of official propaganda.

Armenian sources depict the desperate attempts of some Armenian women to intervene with the vali and Sıvas’s Turkish dignitaries, who advised them to convert while waiting for “the storm to blow over.” It would appear that a few dozen craftsmen at most were authorized to remain in the city after agreeing to become Muslims. In any event, this possibility of escaping deportation was briefly but vigorously⁹⁵ debated by the detainees, who brought the debate to a swift close since they seemed to have understood that this semi-official opening was a lure. On Sunday, 4 July, a final church service was held in the cathedral. When it was over, the bishop took the keys of the building to the vali, who refused to accept them.⁹⁶ According to G. Kapigian, who observed these events with a certain perspicacity, Muammer had deftly profited from the general despair in order to spread rumors to the effect that the anti-Armenian measures were just temporary, even justifying the deportees’ hopes of a swift return. Indications are that the vali had worried until the last moment that the Armenians might rise up in revolt despite the fact that the community’s most vigorous elements had been jailed. As in Harput/Mezreh, the Armenians tried to put their most valuable belongings in the safekeeping of the American missionaries, especially Dr. Clark and Mary Graffam, but the police limited their ability to do so by blocking the entrance to the American mission. Funds deposited with the Banque Ottomane were also frozen and then confiscated on Muammer’s orders. The vali recommended that the Armenians register their property and deposit it in the cathedral, which had been transformed into a warehouse to that end. Many Armenians, however, chose to bury their savings. It must be added that the authorities had prohibited the sale of moveable property in advance and this ordinance was, by and large, respected.⁹⁷ In other words, the Armenians’ assets were turned over in their entirety to the commission charged with “administering” them. It must finally be noted that, shortly before the departure of the first convoy, three regiments commanded by Neşed Pasha set out for Şabinkarahisar in order to put down the Armenian resistance that had been organized there.

The Deportation of 5,850 Families from Sıvas

Between Monday, 5 July and Sunday, 18 July, Sıvas’s 5,850 Armenian families were deported in a total of 14 convoys, at a rate of one convoy daily, with an average of 400 households in each caravan.⁹⁸ The operation was carried out neighborhood by neighborhood – even street by street – in an order that suggests the most affluent families were deported first and the most modest quarters dealt with last. However, some 70 artisan households were allowed to remain behind, along with nine students from the Sanasarian lycée, the vali’s son’s violin teacher K. Koyunian, four physicians (Harutiun Shirinian, Karekin Suni, N. Bayenderian, and Gozmas Mesiayan), the 80 orphans in the Swiss orphanage, three officers (Dikran Kuyumjian, Vartan Parunagian, and Vartan Telalian), the pharmacists Hovhannes Mesiayan and Ardashes Aivazian, and above all the approximately 4,000 recruits from the region assigned to labor battalions.⁹⁹ The inhabitants of a village near the city, Tavra – millers who provided the city and the army with its flour – were also temporarily allowed to stay behind, as were the peasants from Prkenik, Ulash, and Ttmaj, who produced the bulk of the vilayet’s wheat.¹⁰⁰

On the morning of 5 July, Muammer oversaw the departure of the first convoy from the balcony of his residence. A dense crowd watched the spectacle, apparently with satisfaction, exclaiming, “The thermalistes [hydrotherapists] are leaving.” A bridge known as Twisted Bridge served as a checkpoint: the government officials stationed there recorded the names of men, women, boys, and girls on separate lists.¹⁰¹

The first measure taken by the vali was to post a squadron of the Special Organization in the Yırıhi Han Gorge on the other bank of the Kızılırmak river. This group, dubbed Emniyet Komisioni, was commanded by Emirpaşoğlu Hamid, the chief of the Çerkez of Uzunyayla; Halil Bey, the commanding officer of the squadrons of çetes and Muammer’s yaver (assistant); Bacanakoğlu Edhem; Kütükoğlu Hüseyin, who spoke Armenian and was the most knowledgeable about Sıvas’ Armenians; and Tütünci Haci Halil. These çetes’ mission was to single out the men still present in the convoys, especially if they were young, and to suggest that the deportees leave their money and valuables behind. They first looted the groups of deportees even before they were put on the road.¹⁰² All the convoys from the sancak of Sıvas followed, grosso modo, the same trajectory and were subjected to the same fate. The deportations were carried out along a route that ran through Sıvas, Tecirhan, Mağara, Kangal, Alacahan, Kötihan, Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Hasanbadrig, Aruzi Yazi, the Kirk Göz Bridge, Fırıncilar, Zeydağ, and Gergerdağ (the mountains of Kanlı Dere where the Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan tribe, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, officiated), then headed toward Adiyaman and Samsat, crossed the Euphrates near Gözen, and took the road running through Suruc, Urfa, Viranşehir, and Ras ul-Ayn, or the road to Mosul, or, again, the road that led to Aleppo via Bab and Mumbuc. The few known survivors were those who reached Hama, Homs, or, in the case of the most unfortunate, Rakka or Der Zor.¹⁰³ We shall here content ourselves with describing in detail the fate of the eleventh caravan, which left Sıvas on 15 July, which comprised 400 families from Karod Sokak, Dzadzug Aghpiur, Holy Savior, Ğanli Bağçe, Hasanlı, Taykesens, and Han Paşi. Among them was the family of Garabed Kapigian, a privileged witness to the events that transpired in Sıvas. Kapigian, a former Hnchak party activist who had lived for a long time in Istanbul, was one of the rare adult men over 40 still “free.” The escort of gendarmes was commanded by Ali Çavuş, a Turk well known by a certain number of the deportees.¹⁰⁴ After being looted for the first time in the outskirts of Sıvas, the eleventh convoy continued its journey via Maragha and Kangal, whose Armenians had already been deported. Kapigian notes, however, that a banker from Sıvas, Ghazar Tanderjian, who had left with the first convoy, managed to remain in Kangal by converting with his whole family to Islam. In the field near the village that served as a campground, the deportees from Sıvas discovered two caravans who had arrived the day before from Samsun, Merzifun, Amasia, and Tokat. The scant information that they gleaned from the deportees of these convoys confirms that the same scenario had unfolded in those towns as well. It should be noted, however, that all males over the age of eight in these convoys were separated from the others and killed in Şarkışla by Turkish and Çerkez villagers on the orders of Halil Bey. Before the convoy left, Kapigian saw a brigade of Armenian worker-soldiers arrive. They had been charged with demolishing the church in Kangal.¹⁰⁵

On 24 July, the eleventh convoy from Sıvas arrived in the Yırıhi Han Gorge, located outside the village of Alacahan. Like the groups that had preceded it, the caravan had to pass through this filter, where the çetes commanded by Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid Bey were waiting for it. Hamid immediately ordered the men to step out of the convoy and line up in front of the khan because he wished to address them. His remarks, reported by Kapigian, are worth briefly pausing over. Very courteously, the çete leader apologized for his failure to safeguard the roads against “the permanent attacks of the Kurdish savages.” It was because of these attacks, he went on, that the government, “always solicitous of your welfare,” had dispatched the Emniyet Komisioni to the Yırıhi Han Gorge and charged it with taking in hand and registering in the deportees’ names all the gold, money, jewels, and other valuables they had with them (“everything you have in your possession”). Hamid Bey promised that these items would be restored to their owners as soon as the convoy reached Malatia. In a less friendly tone, he warned everyone that systematic body searches would be conducted and that anyone discovered to have held back the least little coin would be shot on the spot. Even before the group was dispersed, Kapigian reports, a mounted “gendarme” galloped onto the scene and announced that the convoy from Samsun, which had set out that very morning, had been attacked by Kurds, who had looted the deportees and massacred a number of people. Kapigian says that this carefully staged show, which was supposed to illustrate the dangers to which the deportees were exposed around Yırıhi Han, hardly convinced the deportees. Rather, it plunged them into a dilemma:¹⁰⁶ how, in such an environment, should they hide their possessions, the means of guaranteeing their survival? Obviously, this question confronted all the deportees – or at any rate, all who possessed means. In this curious game that consisted in relieving the deportees of all their possessions in order gradually to deprive them of the means of survival, the victims and their executioners were in a one-way face-off. Kapigian lists the stratagems to which the Armenians resorted: some swallowed gold coins, others hid jewels on their children, and still others hastily buried their purses. The government’s solicitude evaporated at this point. The çetes proceeded to carry out systematic body searches on the deportees. Already experienced, they no doubt knew better than the victims the various ways of hiding money and jewels. Threats, blackmail, and violence were enough to change the minds of those deportees who had been trying to hold back at least some of their possessions in order to be able to proceed on their way.

Thus, the Emniyet Komisioni served as a framework for the official pillage of the deportees before they were turned over to the looters. In other words, the system that Muammer had put in place in Yırıhi Han was designed to secure the lion’s share of the booty for the Ittihadist party-state before the deportees were turned over to the çetes or peasants mobilized along the routes that the convoys went down. However, the CUP’s official bodies had to overcome the recurrent problem of the indelicacy or cupidity of the “civil servants” in charge of these official stations set up for the seizure of Armenian property. This explains the extraordinary formality that characterized the operations by which the deportees were stripped of their property and the fact that someone close to the vali was generally on hand with the obvious mission of supervising the operations. Kapigian notes the great care taken by the commission to register the deportees’ property, counting and recounting their cash and describing their jewels in great detail.

This formality, however, gave way to more muscular methods when the family heads were summoned, one by one – a few of them were men, but most were women – to appear before the members of the commission presided over by Hamid Bey in order to relinquish their possessions. Systematically, they were told that what they had turned over was far from being everything they owned, a remonstrance that was usually accompanied by a bastinado with which the commission obtained an additional effort from the deportees. The commission worked all the more effectively because its members knew their victims rather well; they were aware of the position they occupied in society and consequently had a rather precise notion of the means at their disposal. After this ritual, which lasted for several hours, the çetes conducted searches of the other members of the convoy, down to the most private parts of their bodies. In the final stage of the operation, the notables who had escaped the round-ups in the city were removed from the convoy and summarily killed.¹⁰⁷ Kapigian’s brief description of the fates reserved for the preceding and following convoys shows that the same procedure was followed every time.

When the convoy reached Kötü Han on the boundary between the vilayets of Sıvas and Mamuret ul-Aziz, its escort was relieved. Kurdish gendarmes now took the place of the Turkish gendarmes. According to Kapigian, bakshish in the usual amount was not enough to satisfy this new escort and convince it to step in when local villagers tried to profit from the passage of a convoy by acquiring a few valuables or abducting a girl. The intervention of a mullah made it possible, however, to curb these appetites, so that the profits were made by the sale of fresh produce – at obviously exorbitant prices.¹⁰⁸

It was, however, only after they reached Hasançelebi, in the northern part of the sancak of Malatia, that the convoys began to be systematically decimated. In theory, it was a 30-hour journey from Sıvas to Hasançelebi, but the eleventh convoy from Sıvas needed no fewer than 15 days to make the trip, indicating that the individual stages of the journey were not long and were probably even bearable for old people. Moreover, during this first stage of the trek, human losses were limited to the dignitaries killed at Yırıhi Han. It was as if it had been decided to bring the deportees out of their native sancak before moving on to the exterminatory phase in the proper sense of the word; it was as if the local authorities wished to pin the blame for the programmed crimes on the civil servants of the neighboring region or the Kurdish population, which systematically took the role of the “black sheep.”

Hasançelebi was a site that had been chosen for the systematic extermination of all the males in the convoys from Samsun and the kazas of the Sıvas vilayet. The advantage of the valley that ran from the village outward was that it lay squeezed between high mountains: deportees from the convoys that had arrived from Samsun, Tokat, Amasia, Sıvas and their rural zones in the preceding days were concentrated in the immense camp located in it. Amid indescribable chaos, the groups camped in two distinct areas. Kurdish çetes crammed in young boys, adolescents, adults, and old men from this multitude; they were escorted from the camp in small groups and briefly interned in a stable pressed into service as a prison. According to Kapigian, those in charge of the camp granted the new arrivals a day’s respite – that is, enough time to unload their carts and pitch tents. Around 300 men in the eleventh convoy from Sıvas were led off in this fashion.¹⁰⁹ Here, too, the procedure followed was almost mechanical. Every night, the people arrested in the morning were removed from the stable, tied together in pairs, and escorted to a spot behind a promontory in a gorge. There the executioners killed their prisoners with knives or axes and threw them from the promontory. The next morning new arrests were made, and so on. On Kapigian’s estimate, more than 4,000 males in the 14 convoys from Sıvas were killed in Hasançelebi. Boys under ten, however, were spared.¹¹⁰

Reverend Bauernfeind, who left his mission in Malatia on 11 August, went to Kırk Göz at dawn the same day,¹¹¹ and better understood

why our coach-drivers wanted to reach Hasanbadrig before the heat of noon at all costs. The stench of the corpses – which is all too familiar to us – from about a hundred, or perhaps more, individual and mass graves to the left and right, were so poorly dug that, here and there, parts of the bodies stuck up out of them. Further on, the graves disappear, but not the dead: men, women, and children lie stretched out beside the road, in the dust, either in rags or stark naked, in terrible condition, more or less decomposed. In the space of a four hours’ journey to Hasanbadrig (roughly twenty kilometers), we counted one hundred bodies. It goes without saying that in this region full of valleys, many of the corpses escaped our gaze.

Further north, shortly before Hekimhan, Bauernfeind again saw corpses, “as a rule, in pairs – again, males – in a state that inevitably led one to suspect that they had met a violent death. Because the terrain was so rugged, we were not able to see many others, but we could smell them.” However, subsequent observations made by the German minister, who went the other way, down the route the convoys had taken, confirm that no significant violence had been inflicted on the deportees beyond Hasançelebi.¹¹²

Hekimhan, the next stage, seems above all to have served to eliminate the handful of men who escaped being killed at Hasançelebi.¹¹³ For its part, the transit camp, located further to the south, near the Kırk Göz Bridge over the Tohma Çay, where the secretary of the Malatia gendarmerie Tayar Bey presided over operations with a squad of çetes “disguised as gendarmes,”¹¹⁴ served to regulate the flow of convoys that converged on it from the regions of the Black Sea coast, Erzerum, and the northern part of Harput. This no doubt explains why the authorities appointed a Sevkiyat Memuri (“director of the deportation”) there.¹¹⁵ From that point on, the convoys from Samsun and the different kazas of Sıvas took the route followed by everyone, else and shared their fate.

The deportees from Sıvas, like their compatriots from other regions, were also concentrated in the immense camp at Fırıncilar, one of the main killing fields chosen by the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It was supervised by Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri Bey, a parliamentary representative from Dersim, and his brother Ali Paşa.¹¹⁶ As was the case with other groups, the authorities removed the boys under ten and the girls under 15 from the convoys in order to send them on to Malatia, where they were ultimately killed.¹¹⁷ Kapigian, who had survived up to this point by disguising himself as a woman, confirms the miserable plight of the refugees, who had been weakened by the journey, deprived of means of transport, and stripped of virtually all their belongings as a result of the successive acts of pillage to which they had been subjected.¹¹⁸ It was in Fırıncilar that the deportees from Sıvas had been deprived of their means of transport, which were officially confiscated by the requisitions commission to meet the needs of the army.¹¹⁹

Here Kapigian observed the arrival of caravans of deportees from the Black Sea coast – particularly Kirason, Ordu, and Çarşamba – as well as the villages of Şabinkarahisar. They were in a more than wretched state because the women and children – there was not a single man in these groups – had made the entire journey on foot. Fırıncilar also served as a graveyard for the oldest deportees, who were unable to go on, and the small children abandoned by their mothers because they could no longer carry them.¹²⁰

Kapigian’s convoy left Fırıncilar on 18 August, just before the third caravan from Erzerum arrived there. All the groups took a mountain trail known as Nal Töken (“which makes the horseshoes fall off”), then entered the appropriately named Kanlı Dere (“blood valley”) Gorge, where Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, two Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan tribe, were waiting for them with their squadrons of çetes.¹²¹ One by one, the deportees were stripped of their clothing and divested of their last possessions. The handful of men still among them was killed, and the most attractive girls and young women were carried off.¹²² The sites of Fırıncilar-Kanlı Dere went out of operation in September once the flood of convoys had tapered off. According to Mrs. Aristakesian, who worked as a cook for the commander in charge of the Fırıncilar “camp,” the last deportees who left, basically the sick and elderly, were put to death in a nearby valley.¹²³

Thus, the deportees who arrived at the next way-station, Samsat, were physically diminished and psychologically weakened, if not traumatized. From Samsat, they took the road to Urfa through Karakayık Gorge. On the way, these groups were attacked at precise points and gradually decimated, with the killing taking place notably on the banks of the Euphrates south of Samsat, near the village of Oşin. A few remnants of these convoys nevertheless managed to reach Suruc, Urfa, and then Ras ul-Ayn or Der Zor.¹²⁴ In the fifth part of the present study, we shall see the fate reserved for these survivors in the second phase of the genocide.

The Kaza of Koçhisar

This kaza, which borders on Sıvas, was located in the upper Halys/Kızılırmak valley. In 1914, it boasted 30 Armenian localities with 13,055 inhabitants and 28 schools with a total enrollment of 2,483. The principal town in the kaza, Koçhisar, had barely 3,000 inhabitants, 2,037 of whom were Armenian.¹²⁵

The main organizers of the deportations and massacres here were Vefa Bey, the interim kaymakam; Kukuşoğlu Şükru, the mayor and a member of the Ittihad; Salaheddin, a sergeant in the gendarmerie in Koçhisar; Mustaf, an employee in the Tobacco Régie; Adalı Hasan, who organized the deportations in the kaza itself; the Turkish notables Hamdi Effendi, Rıza Effendi, and Sehid Osman Nuri; and the chief of the çetes, Mehmed Çavuş.¹²⁶

As we have already noted,¹²⁷ the first arrests here came at the very beginning of April, in both the city and the villages. They were carried out under the leadership of the çete leaders Kütükoğlu Hüseyin and Zarah Mahir. Some of those arrested were put to death in Seyfe Gorge or near the Boğaz Bridge; others were interned in the city in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök. But the systematic arrest of the males did not begin until June, particularly in the villages, when 2,000 men, including all the village priests in the kaza, were confined in Koçihisar’s prison and slain before the deportations, in line with the usual procedure. Every night, these men were taken from the city in groups of 100 and killed in Seyfe Gorge or near the Boğaz Bridge.¹²⁸

The first convoy, made up of villagers, left around 20 June. It was followed by a caravan made up of inhabitants of Koçhisar, 500 of them males. After suffering a first attack by Çerkez from Kuştepe, this convoy reached the village of Ulash, the population of which had, for the time being, been allowed to remain so that it could bring in the wheat harvest. Here the convoy was combined with another comprising 1,000 women and 200 men from the rest of the kaza. Two days later, the group arrived in Hasançelebi, where 200 adolescents were removed from the convoy and killed. The next day, at Hekimhan, the old men were removed from the convoy and massacred. After crossing the Kırk Göz Bridge on the fifth day, the deportees reached Fırıncilar in 36 hours. They remained there for seven days, during which a number of girls and boys were abducted.¹²⁹ This convoy was in fact one of the first to test the system put in place by the authorities crossing the mountains of Nal Töken. According to a survivor, Zeynel Bey – not Haci Bedri Ağa – ordered that the 200 men still alive be killed, the deportees be pillaged, and the women be stripped in Kanlı Dere Gorge, where thousands of corpses were already strewn over the ground.¹³⁰ After passing through Adiyaman, the convoy reached the Göksu, near Akçadağ. A number of women were thrown into the river there by Kurds; others were abducted. As they went on toward Suruc, the survivors were combined with what was left of other convoys, thus forming a caravan of 1,500 people. About half of them remained in Suruc, while others continued their trek toward Birecik, Bab, and finally Hama, their “place of residence,” which a few dozen women from Koçhisar managed to reach in fall 1915.¹³¹

The Kaza of Koçgiri/Zara

In this rather mountainous kaza in the upper valley of the Halys there were, in 1914, a mere dozen Armenian localities with a total population of 7,651. The principal town in the kaza, Zara, had 6,000 inhabitants, 3,000 of them Armenian. Traversed by the road leading from Sıvas to Erzerum, Zara was mainly a farming town, but it also served as a way-station, with an immense khan that belonged to the Chil Hovhannesians.¹³²

As we have seen, the Armenians in this region were attacked very early on by çetes, notably by the squadron commanded by Zaralı Mahir, a native of the region who, from 2 April 1915, played a crucial role in putting the men of the kaza to death in Seyfe Gorge or near the Boğaz Bridge.¹³³ We do not know the exact date on which the convoys left Zara, though it was probably between 20 and 29 June. We do know, however, that they took a different route than the deportees from Sıvas, because they headed toward Divrig/Divriği and then Harput, Maden, Severek, Urfa, Viranşehir, and Rakka.¹³⁴

Apart from Mahir, those mainly responsible for the persecutions were the kaymakam, Hüseyin Hüsni (who served in this post from 13 October 1912 to 5 August 1916), Kör Hakkı, Kebabci Ahmed, and Bakkalci Ahmed.¹³⁵ Because the army needed their services, a few craftsmen, notably a blacksmith, were allowed to remain in the kaza on the condition that they convert to Islam.¹³⁶

The Kaza of Yeni Han

The two Armenian localities in the kaza, the administrative seat Yeni Han (pop. 1,461) and Kavak (pop. 630), were located near the road leading from Sivas to Tokat and Samsun.¹³⁷ Responsible for organizing the deportation of the kaza’s Armenians toward the end of June 1915, after the men had been put to death in Maşadlar Yeri, near Yeni Han, was its kaymakam, Reşid Bey, who held his post from 2 December 1914 to 12 November 1915.

The Kaza of Şarkişla/Tenus

This agricultural kaza, close to Sıvas and traversed by the Halys, boasted 26 Armenian localities in 1914, with a total population of 21,063. The most important of these was Gemerek, which was then home to no fewer than 5,212 Armenians. The kaza had some 20 churches and 21 schools with a total enrolment of 1,988.¹³⁸

The kaymakam, Cemil Bey, who served from 8 May 1914 to 4 September 1915, first organized the arrest of 400 villagers in the environs of Şarkışla, who were killed there night after night in groups of twenty. The deportation took place early in July. In Kangal, one of the first convoys was combined with a caravan from Sıvas, forming a group of 5,000 Armenians. This convoy then followed the usual route, passing through Alacahan, where the men were removed and liquidated, and Kötü Han, where Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid Bey’s çetes were waiting for them. There, 2,000 men from Sıvas and the environs of Şarkışla were seized, tied up, and brought before Hamid, who knew most of them from Sıvas and thus how much each of them possessed. He managed to extract seven bags of gold from them before dispatching convoys toward Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Hasanbadrig, Kırk Göz, and Fırıncilar. Almost all were eliminated during these stages of their trek; none reached Samsat.¹³⁹

Gemerek, which together with the surrounding villages formed a dense group of Armenians, was given separate treatment. Its müdir, Çerkez Yusuf Effendi, called on his Çerkez compatriots from Yayla (in the kaza of Aziziye) for help in slaying the men of Gemerek, Çisanlu, and Karapunar. A few notables from Gemerek were even publicly hanged, after which the women and children were put on the road to Kangal, joining the flood of deportees from Sıvas and regions to the north.¹⁴⁰ Besides the müdir of the nahie of Gemerek, the main organizers of the massacre of the males – adolescents over age 13 met the same fate as adults – were Kör Velioğlu Ummet, Kayserlı Cemal Effendi, Talaslı Mükremin, Şarkışlayi Mehmed Effendi, Colonel Talaslı Behcet Bey, and the müdir Ahmed Effendi.¹⁴¹

Approximately 3,000 Armenians from the villages of Shepni, Dendel, Burhan, and Tekmen took refuge in a huge cave in the highlands around Ak Dağ, where they fought off some 2,000 regular soldiers backed up by irregulars for several days. Some 15 men survived the massacre that followed the fighting. The women and children were deported.¹⁴²

The Kazas of Bünyan and Aziziye

On the eve of the First World War, there were only 5,887 Armenians in Bunyan and Aziziye; 1,106 lived in the latter kaza, almost all of them in the principal town.¹⁴³ The arrest of the Armenian notables here was orchestrated by the head of the local Ittihad club, Havasoğlu Haci Hüseyin, with the support of the kaymakam, Hamid Nuri Bey (who held his post from 17 October 1914 to 22 October 1915). The pillage of Armenian property was directed by Hayreddin Bey, the head of the emvalı metruke. It mainly benefited, however, a few Turkish eşrefs from the district: Sofoyoğlu Mehmed, Feyzi Effendi, Haznedarzâde Kadir, Imamzâde Hakkı, Haci Ahmed Arif, Yusufbeyzâde Adil, Yusufbeyzâde Sadık, Çarçi Hasanin Ali, and Hacimusaoğlu Haci Ömer.¹⁴⁴ The deportation route led through Gürün and Akçadağ to Fırıncilar.

Armenians from five localities in the neighboring kaza of Bünyan – Bunyan, the seat of the kaza, with its 500 Armenians, as well as Gigi (pop. 350), Sarıoğlan (pop. 336), Seveghen (pop. 829), and Ekrek/Akarag (pop. 2,700) – were also deported toward Gürün on orders from the kaymakam, Nabi Bey, who held his post from 4 June 1915 to 31 August 1916.¹⁴⁵

The Kaza of Kangal

In 1914, the kaza of Kangal had an Armenian population of 7,339; 1,000 of these Armenians lived in the administrative seat of the kaza, Kangal, from which they were deported in late June. The others lived in the district’s villages: Magahar (pop. 951), Yarhisar (pop. 703), Bozarmut (pop. 224), Komsur (pop. 343), and Mancılık (pop. 1,919).¹⁴⁶ In the last-named village, the liquidation of the men took place in May and early June. One of the notables, Stepan Hekimian, was even nailed to a cross and paraded through the village. The execution of some 100 men in Daşli Dere was personally supervised by the leader of the squadron of çetes in Sıvas, Kütükoğlu Hüseyin. Among those killed were Murad, Asdur, and Hovhannes Karamanugian, Misak Dzerunian, and Vartan Stepanian. The rest of the population, including the men, was deported on 14 June. Only the 2,000 inhabitants of Ulash were temporarily spared, so that they could bring in the wheat harvest needed by the army. In September 1915, they were deported in turn toward the Syrian desert by way of Malatia, Adiyaman, and Suruc, on orders from the kaymakam, Mohamed Ali Bey, who held his post until 11 March 1917.¹⁴⁷

The Kaza of Divrig

The administrative seat of this kaza, Divrig/Divriği, had a population of 12,000, almost one-third of whom were Armenian. Together with its 18 Armenian-inhabited villages, the district boasted a total Armenian population of 10,605.¹⁴⁸ Among the countless vestiges of the medieval period sprinkled through the region was the monastery of St. Gregory the Illuminator, a jewel of medieval Armenian architecture build in the eleventh century that was perched on a rocky outcrop three hours north of Divrig near the village of Khurnavil (pop. 320). The neighboring village of Kesmeh (pop. 580), and the native village of the Noradounghians also boasted medieval churches, as did Zimara/Zmmar (pop. 1,250). Binga/Pingian (pop. 1,300), on the right bank of the Euphrates, was a medieval citadel that was nearly inaccessible because it was pressed up against a rock face close to the Euphrates. Its only access route ran over a suspended bridge that had been built in the eleventh century. In the southwestern part of the kaza was a string of Armenian villages on the two banks of the Lik Su: Arshushan (pop. 310), Kuresin (pop. 240), Odur (pop. 215), Parzam (pop. 510), and the village around the monastery of St. James that the Turks called Venk (from the Armenian word vank, monastery) (pop. 290). Finally, there were five Armenian villages on the right bank of the Çaldi çay, in the easternmost part of the district: Armdan (pop. 1,605), Palanga (pop. 480), Sinjan (395 Armenians), Mrvana, and Shigim.¹⁴⁹ When the general mobilization order was issued, the recruits from the district of Divrig were assigned to an amele taburi based in Zara.¹⁵⁰

In the administrative seat of the kaza, Divrig, the primate Krikor Zartarian was summoned before the kaymakam Abdülmecid Bey (who held his post from 1 March 1914 to 29 November 1915) in late March. Abdülmecid demanded that the weapons held by the Armenians in the town and the villages be handed over to him in one week’s time, along with the deserters. The Armenians’ response was apparently judged unsatisfactory, because the auxiliary primate, Father Serovpe Prigian, and several political leaders, such as Khachadur and Armenag Menendian; Garabed Hayranian; Mgrdich and Hagopos Kljian; Krikor, Dikran, and Mgrdich Kakanian; Melkon and Suren Guzelian; Mihran Doktorian; Kevork, Haig, Toros, and Tatul Hayranian; Nshan Tahmazian; Sarkis Lusigian; Hovhannes Shahabian; Khachadur Deombelekian; and Karekin and Aram Torigian, among others – a total of 45 people – were arrested, tortured for two weeks (some, including the auxiliary primate, died as a result), and then dispatched to Sıvas.¹⁵¹

The victims of the second wave of arrests were Divrig’s craftsmen and merchants, as well as its adolescents under draft age – a total of some 200 people. After being tortured for several days running, these men were taken from the village, tied up, and led an hour’s distance to the Deren Dere Gorge, where they were killed with axes. According to our witnesses, the men were all eliminated in this fashion, with the exception of 200 who managed to flee to the mountain villages inhabited by Alevites; some of them survived by pillaging Turkish localities in the region.¹⁵²

The deportations from the kaza’s villages, however, did not begin until 28 May 1915. The peasants were first of all concentrated in Divrig, where the men and adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 were separated from the others and confined in a church before being killed. The rest of the rural population was deported toward Malatia by way of Agn/Eğin and Arapkir.¹⁵³ The townspeople of Divrig were put on the road a little later. On 28 June, the city was practically emptied of its men. On the morning of 29 June, the town criers announced the deportation order, which gave people three days to make preparations to leave. On 1 July, the Armenian quarters of Divrig were surrounded by regular troops who proceeded to expel the inhabitants. They were regrouped near the southwestern exit from the town and were dispatched from there toward Arapkir after the abduction of young women and girls for the harems of local dignitaries. The convoy was pillaged shortly after it set, at Sarı Çiçek, by Kurdish villagers from the surrounding area.¹⁵⁴

According to Hmayag Zartarian, the anti-Armenian operations in the region were conducted by a squad of çetes commanded by Kör Adıl, a native of Trebizond. He was backed up by Çadıroğlu Abdüllah, Topcuoğğlu Hüseyin, Ğasab Süleyman Çavuş, Hafız Effendi, Leblebici Polis Mohamed, Köroğlu Polis Ülusi, İzet Bey, Sıvaslı Küregsiz Hafız, and others.¹⁵⁵

We also know about the fate of the 1,300 Armenians of Binga/Pingian, located on the right bank of the Euphrates, thanks to the testimony of a survivor named L. Goshgarian. According to Goshgarian, 100 recruits from the village were put to work on the Erzincan- Erzerum road in a place called Sansa Dere, sharing the fate of the 4,000 to 5,000 worker-soldiers assigned to the amele taburis stationed in the region. However, a few dozen young men and adults did manage to flee to the mountains and go to Dersim. The rest of the population was deported toward Arapkir on 23 June 1915.¹⁵⁶

The Kaza of Darende

In 1914, the kaza of Darende had a population of only 3,983 Armenians. Somewhat more than 2,000 of them lived in the seat of the kaza, also called Darende, while another 1,100 lived in the neighboring village of Ashodi.¹⁵⁷ The kaymakam, Receb Bey, who had been appointed on 8 February 1913, was dismissed on 21 May 1915 and replaced by Süleyman Bey on 14 June. This might be taken as an indication that Receb refused to carry out Muammer’s orders. We do not know anything at all about the circumstances under which the Armenian population of the kaza of Derende was eliminated. The fact that it lies on the road between Gürün and Malatia, however, suggests that it was dealt a fate similar to that meted out to the Armenians of its northern neighbor.

The Kaza of Gürün

With its five exclusively Armenian villages and a handful of dispersed communities, the kaza of Gürün had a total Armenian population of 13,874 in 1914. The seat of the kaza, Gürün, isolated in a narrow, steep-sided valley, had 12,168 inhabitants, 8,406 of whom were Armenian. The town was strung out along the two banks of the Melos/Tohmak, made up of a succession of neighborhoods scattered through little valleys. The Armenians had 12 schools in Gürün. The town preserved its prestigious past, seen in the ruins of a medieval citadel that had been restored early in the eleventh century and the “desert” (monastery) of the Holy Mother of God in Saghlu. It was known not only for its commerce and craftsmanship, but also for the manufacturing of rugs, cotton fabric, and wool products. There were three Armenian villages in the immediate vicinity of Gürün – Kavak (pop. 220), Karasar (pop. 410), and Kristianyören (pop. 80) – and two more villages to the north on the road to Manclık: Karayören (pop. 560) and Çahırınköy (pop. 140).¹⁵⁸

In contrast with what happened in many other regions, the kaymakam, Şahib Bey, who held his post from 30 August 1912 to 7 November 1915, does not seem to have played a determining role in the persecutions. According to Armenian sources, it was the military commander of Sıvas, Pertev Bey, who went to Gürün personally to transmit the order to begin the operations against the Armenian population. Avundükzâde Mehmed Bey, a Turkish notable from the town, and his three sons, Özer, Hüseyin, and Eşref, organized a meeting at which, with the help of the local Ittihadist club, a local branch of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was formed under the name of Milli Cendarma. Captain İbrahimoğlu Mehmed Bey was appointed the commander of this militia. The group charged with carrying out the massacres and deportations brought together other notables who were members of the Young Turk club: İbrahimbeyoğlu Dilaver, Küçükalizâde Bahri, Eminbeyoğlu Mehmed, Mamoağazâde Emin, Köseahmedzâde Abdüllah, Sadık Çavuş, who was also the commander of a squadron of çetes, Yehyaoğlu Mehmed, Karamevlutoğlu Talât Effendi, and Nacar Ahmed Abdüllah Karpuzzâde.¹⁵⁹ This committee charged Kâmil Effendi, the commander of the gendarmerie and a well-known Young Turk, with drawing up the lists of Armenian notables to be arrested. The first arrests took place in May. The first to be detained were the Armenian primate Khoren Timaksian and Reverend Bedros Mughalian,¹⁶⁰ followed by the town’s notables, who were imprisoned in the Minasian khan, located in the Sagh neighborhood, and also in the Turkish baths at Karatepe. Delibekiroğlu Mehmed Onbaşi in particular was charged with supervising the torture sessions, which here too were designed to make the victims confess the location of possible arms caches and the nature of the “plot” they were supposed to have hatched.

The killing of the notables of Gürün began on 10 June 1915. Seventy-four men were massacred in the Ulash/Ulaş valley near the village of Kardaşlar by 12 çetes in gendarme’s uniforms under the command of Cendarma Ali Çavuş. On 27 June 40 more notables met the same fate near Çalikoğlu.¹⁶¹ On 22 June 1915, some 20 men were put to death on the road to Albistan by Tütünci Hüseyin Çavuş and his irregular troops.¹⁶² İbrahimoğlu Mehmed, the leader of a squadron of çetes, as well as Gürünlı Üzeyer Effendi, Ömer Ağa from Setrak (a village in Albistan), and Hakkı Effendi, a native of Ayntab, also played outstanding roles in slaughtering the males of the region of Gürün and then Akşekir.¹⁶³

It would appear that the committee subsequently decided to have boys between ten and 14 arrested and killed. Kasap Osman, one of the Special Organization’s killers, indeed took on the job of dispatching a group of 120 boys to the valley of Saçciğaz, a Turkish village located two hours from Gürün, where they were slain with knives and axes.¹⁶⁴

Küçükalizâde Bahri, one of the most influential members of the local Ittihad and the Milli Cendarma, personally murdered three of the principal Armenian leaders of the main town in the kaza – Hajji Hagop Buldukian, Hagop Shahbazian, and Haji Artin Gergerian – in Tel, near Aryanpunar. It was also Bahri who supervised the looting of the two convoys of deportees from the kaza in Kavak, a Turkish village located on the road to Albistan. Early in July, after the males were liquidated, the deportations were carried out under Bahri’s supervision with the help of local policemen (Abdüllah, Hamdi, and Sabri). Katırci Nuri Effendi, the inspector of the convoys, and Deli Bekir Mustafa, aided by Hacioğlu Yusuf, conducted the two convoys.¹⁶⁵ The first passed through Albistan, Kanlı Dere, Kani Dağ, Ayranbunar, Sağin Boğaz, Aziziye, Göbeg Yoren, and Fırıncilar, and then through Ayntab, Marash, Urfa, and Karabıyık to Der Zor. The second convoy started off on the same route, but was then set marching in the direction of Hama, Homs, and the Hauran. Many of the deportees from Gürün were massacred in the vicinity of Marash.¹⁶⁶

Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Tokat

The statistics compiled by the Patriarchate indicate that the sancak of Tokat had an Armenian population of 32,281 in 1914, which lived in 27 towns and villages that boasted 28 churches, two monasteries, and 14 schools with a total enrolment of 3,175.¹⁶⁷ Thus, the Armenian presence in this western district of the vilayet of Sıvas was relatively modest, although, from an economic point of view, it was not negligible. Tokat, where the prefecture was located, was spread over a valley two kilometers long; its various neighborhoods lay on the sides of the valley, forming a sort of amphitheater. On the eve of the war, there were 11,980 Armenians and about 15,000 Turks in the city. But there were another 6,500 Armenians in the rest of the kaza of Tokat. They lived in 17 rural communities: west of the city, in the valley of the Tozanlu Su and on the plain of Ğanova, in Endiz (Armenian pop. 280), Gesare (pop. 100), Söngür (pop. 160), Varaz (pop. 90), Çerçi (pop. 220), Biskürcuk (pop. 550), Bazarköy (pop. 130), Kurçi (pop. 80); south of the city, in the Artova valley, on the road to Yeni Han, Bolus (pop. 300), Yartmeş (pop. 400), Kervanseray (pop. 350), Çiflik (pop. 326), Tahtebağ (pop. 262), Gedağaz (pop. 308); and, east of the city, near the road between Tokat and Niksar, in Krikores (pop. 600), on the left bank of the Iris, and on the right bank, Bizeri (pop. 280).¹⁶⁸

The most striking event in the months preceding the outbreak of the war was the fire on 1 May 1914 that ravaged the street where many of Tokat’s businesses were located, Baghdad Cadesi. As we have seen, this was not an isolated act.¹⁶⁹ There is even every reason to believe that these events reflected the general strategy adopted by the Ittihad in February 1914 with a view to diminishing the economic importance of the Greeks and Armenians. When the general mobilization was announced, many Armenians paid the bedel in order to avoid conscription; hence there were only 280 worker-soldiers from Tokat and Krikores in the amele taburi that was formed to build a barracks in the city. In line with directives issued by the Patriarchate, the military requisitions, despite the abuses to which they gave rise, did not occasion protests.¹⁷⁰ The situation deteriorated in late April 1915, when the CUP sent its parliamentary representatives into the provinces of Asia Minor to preach elimination of the “domestic foe.” Several Armenian witnesses attended a meeting organized in the Paşa Cami at which a CUP representative attacked “those who, in our midst, seem to be friends,” but whom “the Turkish people must make it a priority to purge.”¹⁷¹ This declaration led the young Armenian primate, Father S havarsh Sahagian, to multiply gestures of goodwill toward the local authorities. The decree summoning the population to turn in all the weapons in its possession, pasted up in every public building, compelled the primate to organize a discussion with all the community leaders. According to Hovhannes Yotghanjian, who took part in this meeting, all were aware of the impending threat, but there was disagreement as to what to do about it. Shavarsh Sahagian and the local Hnchak leader M. Arabian were opposed to giving up the weapons and suggested taking measure to organize the self-defense of the Armenian neighborhoods. A majority of those present, however, pointed out that there were no Armenian fighters available in the city apart from a few deserters who had taken refuge there. The weapons were finally deposited in the Church of St. Stepanos and delivered up to the authorities.

The subsequent events resembled those we have seen elsewhere. Irregulars carried out search and seizure operations in the rural areas while gendarmes or soldiers ransacked the Armenian households in Tokat for arms and all documents printed in Armenian. Early in May, the Hnchak leaders Beyekh Simon and Garabed Gövjian and the Dashnaks Khachig Seraydarian (an army pharmacist) and Garabed Arenderian were arrested, tortured, and executed in prison.¹⁷² During a visit that Muammer paid to Tokat in this period, the vali demanded that the Armenian primate turn over “imported arms” and dismissed all the Armenian civil servants in the police force and gendarmerie. Apparently, the authorities considered the situation sufficiently ripe by this time: on 18 May 1915, they proceeded to arrest all of Tokat’s Armenian notables and teachers. The method they employed in carrying out this round-up was also rather classic. The mutesarif, Cevded Bey (who held his post from 2 May 1915 to 4 February 1916),¹⁷³ very courteously summoned all these notables – Kevork Pasbanian, Hagop Boyajian, Hovhannes Kazanjian, Avedis Khdrian, Nazar Shishmanian, and others – to the konak, but at the end of the meeting had them arrested and interned in police stations. In the course of the day, the adolescents were also arrested in the streets and confined in the food warehouse near the central square, where they were systematically tortured.¹⁷⁴ The remarks that Ahmed Muammer made to the Armenian primate early in June during a working visit to Tokat clearly show that the authorities did not judge the number of weapons they had so far confiscated to be satisfactory. The vali demanded that the prelate, “on whom everything depends,” do what he had to convince his flock to give up their arms. On Sunday, 13 June, Sahagian, in the last sermon he delivered, stated his conclusions, as it were, before a distraught multitude: he told them that he had discreetly met with Muammer three times, that the vali had tried to convince him to turn over “arms and deserters,” and that the community leaders had decided to submit to the government’s orders “in order to ward off the danger” threatening them, but that he could still not utter “the least little word of consolation, because we are lost.”¹⁷⁵ The prelate seems to have made an accurate assessment of the situation. The next morning, when 300 deserters gathered before the cathedral, ready to turn themselves in, he refused to go with them to the military authorities “so as not to be their executioner.” On Wednesday, 16 June, a new stage opened with the systematic arrest of the men, beginning with Father Sahagian. That afternoon, Sahagian was summoned to the konak, where the police chief Mehmed Effendi informed him that he had to go to Sıvas immediately to meet with the vali. He was killed that very evening on the way there, in Kızın Eniş.¹⁷⁶

Arrests continued to be made on 17 June. Died together in groups of ten, 1,400 men were conducted out of the city in four convoys to Ardova, Ğazova, and Bizeri, where they were shot. According to Lusia Zhamgochian, 17 clergymen, including the auxiliary bishop Nerses Mgrdichian (1861–1915) and Father Andon Seraydarian, were murdered on 18 June in Tokat’s citadel, after having been subjected to refined tortures. Subsequently, the young men between 14 and 20 were put to death. By the end of June, only the 280 worker-soldiers employed in constructing the Şube barracks, three army doctors – Seraydarian, Eminian, and Misak Panosian – and a few artisans working for the army or the authorities, were still “free.”¹⁷⁷

The rest of the population was not deported all at once but according to age cohorts. The Azar khan served as a detention center for older women, who were arrested by the police and put on the road two days later; they were followed by the young women and then the last remaining Armenians, who were marched down the Sıvas road by way of Çiftlik-Yeni Han toward Şarkışla-Marash or, more frequently, Kangal-Malatia.¹⁷⁸

Besides the mutesarif, Cevded Bey, those primarily responsible for the violence in Tokat were Hoca Fehmi, a parliamentary deputy and member of the Ittihad; Osman Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Mehmed Effendi, the police chief; Muteveli Nuri Bey, a notable and member of the commission responsible for “abandoned property”; Latifoğlu Ibrahim, a CUP member; the policemen Uzun Mahmud, Nuri, Ziya, and İbrahim; the gendarmes Reşidoğlu Fehmi (a sergeant), Salih, Muftioğlu Asem, and Hayreddin; the müdir of Ğazova, Gurci Ahmed, who oversaw the massacres in his district; the çetes of the Special Organization Salih Ağa, a butcher, Çerkez Mirza Bey, Çerkez Osman Bey, Çerkez Mahmud Bey, Çerkez Elmaylizâde Haci Effendi, Salih Mehmed Bey, Alipaşazâde Enus Bey, Debelege Effendi, Elmaylizâde İzzet, Elmaylizâde Tevfik, Elmaylizâde Osman, Karaderviş Şükrü, Ekmeci Güzeller, Haci Bey Apulçavusoğlu Mustafa, Geproğlu Osman Nazıf, Abdüllah, Kör Binbaşi Ferid, Cinçoğlu Ahmed, Latifzâde Osman, Latifzâde Filmi, Kaimakamzâde Tacir Bey, Celani Haci, Istambolu Hikmet Bey, Muftizâde, and Cigeroğlu Osman Bey, the son of Osman Bey.¹⁷⁹

The Kaza of Niksar

Of the 3,560 Armenians in the kaza of Niksar, 2,830 lived in the principal town, also called Niksar. Known in antiquity as Neocaesarea, Niksar lay 53 kilometers northwest of Tokat in the fertile plain of the Kelkit Çay. Almost all the Armenians here were Turkish-speaking, and, with few exceptions, earned a living as craftsmen, businessmen, or farmers. The 8 June 1896 massacres ruined the community, whose property was systematically pillaged; thereafter, the Armenians failed to recover the prosperity that they had enjoyed in the past. There were also two Armenian villages in the kaza: Kapuağzi (with an Armenian-speaking population of 650) and Karameşe (pop. 80).¹⁸⁰ Here the men were slain and the rest of the population deported in late June;¹⁸¹ the operations were carried out under the direction of the kaymakam, Rahmi Bey, who held his post from 4 May 1914 to 8 August 1915.

The Kaza of Erbaa

In this kaza in the northern part of the vilayet, long a part of the vilayet of Trebizond, there were nine Armenian localities in 1914 with a total population of 6,948. Half of the kaza’s Armenians lived in its principal town, Herek, located on the left bank of the Iris river 55 kilometers from Tokat. In addition to their traditional crafts, the Armenians of Herek, who were Turkish-speaking, cultivated hemp and opium. The kaza’s eight Armenian villages were all inhabited by Armenian-speakers from Hamşin who had settled in the region early in the eighteenth century: Ağabağ (pop. 279), Çozlar (pop. 292), Ayvaza (pop. 313), Sarıkaya (pop. 263), Saharçal (pop. 180), Hayatgeriz (pop. 120), Gerasan (pop. 220), and Cibrayl (pop. 320).¹⁸² The procedure applied by the authorities was the same as was followed elsewhere; here, too, the women and children were put on a trajectory leading through Sıvas-Kangal-Hasançelebi-Fırıncilar and beyond.¹⁸³ Apparently, the kaymakam, Abdel Settar Bey, who had assumed his post on 19 April 1914, disobeyed orders, for he was dismissed on 1 June 1915 and replaced on 9 August 1915 by Rahmi Bey, who was transferred from Niksar.

The Kaza of Zile

In 1914, 4,283 Turkish-speaking Armenians lived in the kaza of Zile, located 30 kilometers west of Tokat. All of them lived in the seat of the kaza; their principal occupation was rug-making.¹⁸⁴ The men, among them the Hnchak pharmacist Dikran Seraydarian, were arrested in June and conducted, with their local priest at the head of the procession, to the marsh of Ğaz Göl, where they were killed.¹⁸⁵

Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Amasia

The sancak of Amasia, with its roughly 200,000 inhabitants, including 31,717 Armenians and 39,676 Greeks, was on the eve of the First World War an extraordinary museum of the customs of the native populations of Asia Minor. In the kaza of Amasia, all 13,788 Armenians lived in the administrative seat of the kaza, also called Amasia, which was strung out in a narrow valley traversed by the Iris. The biggest Armenian neighborhood, known as Savayid, covered both slopes of a little dale. Located here were the Cathedral of Our Lady, the bishopric, the Church of Saint James, the Armenian hospital, the big Bartevian middle school, a Protestant church, a Jesuit middle school, and an Armenian Catholic church. There was also a big Armenian population in the Deve neighborhood. Altogether, there were 12 schools attended by more than 1,600 children. At the time, Amasia owed its prosperity in large measure to weaving, which the Armenians had partially mechanized.¹⁸⁶

We have already noted that the first arrests occurred early in Amasia, around 15 March. The targets were political leaders and teachers: Krikor Jerian, Minas Ipekjian, Harutiun Baghchegiulian, Nshan Adzigian, the pharmacist Toros Kaymakian, Tateos Mserian, the elementary schoolteacher Krikor Vartabedian, and others. These men were systematically tortured in order to induce them to turn over the archives of their parties and reveal where the weapons they supposedly had were located. Shortly thereafter, they were transferred to Sıvas and interned in the medrese of Şifahdiye.¹⁸⁷ The other notables of Amasia were arrested on 18 May, tortured for a few days, and then killed with axes on 23 May in an isolated spot three hours from the city at Saz Dağ.¹⁸⁸ Only after the vali had expressly paid a visit to the city on 14 June did the arrests, torture, and systematic killing of the men – especially the craftsmen – begin. On 29 June, 360 of them were taken from the city by night and tied together in groups of four, with four other convoys of this sort having to be organized before all were liquidated.¹⁸⁹ The city, however, was unaware of the fate reserved for these men. Rumor had it that they were safe and sound. There was even talk of an imperial pardon in the air, but in the end the mutesarif Celal Bey announced the deportation order to the auxiliary primate, Mampre Fakhirian. Fakhirian ordered that the bells of the cathedral be rung; the population streamed to the cathedral, where it learned that it would have to leave the city in short order.¹⁹⁰

The deportations began on 3 July and proceeded at the rate of one convoy per day for five days. The last caravan, our witnesses, comprised approximately 1,000 people, among them 200 adolescents and old men who had not been killed with the rest of the men.¹⁹¹ After passing through Kangal, all the males over the age of eight in the convoys from Amasia were slain in Şarkışla around 15 July by Turkish and Çerkez villagers under the orders of Halil Bey, the commander of the squadrons of çetes in the vilayet of Sıvas. The killings took place in the presence of the kaymakam.¹⁹² Thereafter, these convoys took the route that the deportees usually followed, but did not arrive in Hasançelebi until 28 August, or in Fırıncilar until 7 September, which shows how slowly the authorities led them on.¹⁹³ Zeynel and Bedri were waiting for them further on, in the Kanlı Dere gorge, where, our witnesses confirm, not a single male over eight was left alive.¹⁹⁴ The remainder of the trajectory of these convoys from Amasia was classic: they passed by way of Suruc and Arabpunar, after which the handful of survivors moved on to Bab, Aleppo, or Meskene-Der Zor.¹⁹⁵

As one can readily imagine, the considerable economic stake represented by the seizure of Armenian property commanded the authorities’ undivided attention. Celal Bey the mutesarif; Serri Bey, a member of the deportation commission (he became the mutesarif of Çanğırı in 1919); Osman Nuri, also known as Körguzi Raşi Nuri, the commander of the gendarmerie; the muftis Müneverzâde Haci Tevfik Hafiz and Ğüzluglu Hafız Hoca; Rüşdi Hafız; Salim or Saleh Bey, the president of the local Ittihad club; Nalband İzzetoğlu Kâmil; Tıntin Hasan and Haci Tevfik, two Unionists; Nalband İzzetzâde Haci Kismil, a Unionist and the mayor of Amasi; Nafız Bey, a parliamentary representative from Amasia; Fatar Rezmi, an engineer; Hamdi Bey, the head of the belediye; Topcioğlu Mustafa, the secretary general in the town hall; Kürdoğlu Serhoş Hasan, a former parliamentary deputy from Amasia; and Ali Effendi, the director of the orphanage, all bore a large share of the responsibility for the arrests, house searches, torture, and the pillaging of the Armenians’ property.¹⁹⁶

The Special Organization’s representative in Amasia, Timarhaneci Halil, who was also an eminent member of the local Ittihad club and responsible for the squadron of çetes based in the city, as well as Topcioğlu Şükrü, an officer in this squadron, played a central role in the massacre of the men and boys of Amasia, along with their main collaborators: Topcizâde Halil, Osman, Konfikten Rıza, Tlatıs Hasan, Kontraci Hasan and his brother, Ğabaş Ali; Cin Sarac; Tatar Arabaci Mehmed; Topcioğlu Ziya; Göv Ömeroğlu Hasan; Bakal Kör Ahmed; Kel Osmanoğlu Besim; Arpacızâde Haci Osman and his four sons; Tutunci Mustafa; Bazadoğlu Mehmed and his brothers; Deli Beyler; Çaycızâde Nuri Bey; Abdoğlu Hulusi; and Ladikli Ekizler.¹⁹⁷

The Kaza of Merzifun

In 1914, the seat of the kaza of Merzifun, Marzevan/Merzifun, had an Armenian population of 10,381, with eleven schools boasting a total enrolment of 1,221. There were also small numbers of Armenians in the only two Armenian villages in the district – Yenice (pop. 140) and Lidj/Korköy (pop. 145), located near the monastery of the Holy Mother of God, which served as the seat of the bishop of the joint diocese of Amasia and Marzevan.¹⁹⁸

Thanks to fuller documentation than we have for other areas, we may note a concrete case of despoliation of Armenian property for the benefit of a few local notables. It occurred even before the outbreak of the war. When, in autumn 1914, military requisitions began, four men set out to appropriate 8,000 to 10,000 sacks of flour produced by seven large flour mills owned by Armenians from Merzifun. Salihbeyzâde Hüseyin, the president of the municipality; the CUP’s local responsible secretary; the commander of the gendarmerie, Mahir Bey; and a Young Turk merchant named Kiremicizâde Hadi officially confiscated these stocks of flour to meet the “needs” of the army before quickly reselling them “at high prices” and dividing up the profits among themselves.¹⁹⁹ There is every reason to believe that this documented episode hides abuses on a much larger scale that were committed by local Young Turks who took advantage of their status as activists in the party in power.

The first arrests in Merzifun came in April: the targets were some 50 notables who were either tortured to death or dispatched to Sıvas to answer for acts endangering state security. In May, the local authorities proceeded to recruit 100 çetes from among the villages. Meanwhile, the decree ordering that people turn in any weapons they kept at home was published, providing the çetes with an opportunity to conduct house searches and make arrests in the Armenian community.²⁰⁰ Muammer, after visiting Amasia on 14 June, also paid a visit to Merzifun, apparently to accelerate the elimination of the men there. Indeed, the 1,200 men arrested on 12 June, shortly before his arrival in the city, were eliminated on Monday, 15 June.²⁰¹ The first group, comprising 300 young men, was conducted to Elek Deresi, near the village of Tenik on the road to Çorum, under the direct supervision of Fayk Bey, the kaymakam,²⁰² and Mahir Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie. The men were stripped and killed with axes. Over the next few days, the other men met the same fate.²⁰³

The deportation order was made public shortly thereafter, on 21 June. The convoys were rapidly put on the road and followed the same route as those from Amasia. Around 20 men and fewer than 100 women and children reached Aleppo.²⁰⁴ According to an anonymous witness who remained in the city,

the furniture and the other properties abandoned [by the women], without being officially inventoried in any way, was loaded on carts and piled up in the city’s Armenian church, while the Armenians’ stores were looted by Turkish officials and the populations. The stores that were thus emptied were put under seal as ‘abandoned property.’²⁰⁵

Aside from the few Armenians who were allowed to remain in Merzifun because they had agreed to convert to Islam, a non-negligible number of schoolchildren, teachers, and members of the Anatolia College medical staff, directed by Dr. George E. White, were also left in the city. These people benefited from the protection of the American embassy and the consular agent in Samsun, William Peter, who was responsible for watching over the interests of these institutions and had repeatedly traveled to Merzifun to negotiate with the kaymakam.²⁰⁶ The authorities had soon set their sights on Anatolia College, administered by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They wished to take control of it and at the same time get rid of the Armenians they found there. For the Americans, however, there could be no question of accepting the least encroachment by the authorities. Dr. White and Dr. Marden, responsible for the college and the hospital, reminded the kaymakam of Merzifun in a letter that, “the Embassy telegraphs that necessary and precise orders have been given, by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Pasha the Minister of War to the local authorities, assuring in definite form the protection of our institution, the College, together with all the persons connected with it without exception.”²⁰⁷ Refusing to make an exception for Anatolia College, the Turkish administration demanded that all the Armenians on its staff and all the Armenian students be deported with their compatriots in the rest of the city. The question was therefore referred to the vali of Sıvas, to whom Marden and White sent a telegram in which they declared:

on the ground that it is necessary for all Armenians to go to an appointed place, the kaimakam had informed us regarding certain of our workers, ministers and professors, who have been many years in our congregation and are graduates of advanced schools … that the local government has no authority to give them exemption.²⁰⁸

Marden and White also tried the same day to send a wire to the American ambassador Morgenthau. The kaymakam, however, refused to transmit their cable, which pointed out that “the employees of our Hospital would be included in the general despatch of Armenians to an appointed place,” and, furthermore, that “if these persons are sent away without regard to the needs of the institution, all our buildings for philanthropic purposes and our place of worship for religious exercises will be closed and useless.”²⁰⁹

On 31 July, William Peter arrived in Merzifun in hopes of changing the minds of the local authorities – specifically, the kaymakam Fayk Bey – so that the Armenians working at the college would be spared deportation. The record of his interviews with the kaymakam, related carefully and in detail by the American consular agent in his dispatches to Morgenthau, illustrate the obstinacy with which the authorities endeavored to have the teachers, medical personnel, and young girls of the college handed over to them.²¹⁰

In the long report that Peter addressed to Morgenthau after his first visit to Merzifun,²¹¹ he noted that Professors Manisajian and Hagopian, both of Anatolia College, were among the first to be arrested and that they had been “set free, after interventions on their behalf, but only temporarily,” after he had “greased the palm of the commander of the gendarmerie, Mahir Bey, arranging for him to be given the sum of 275 Turkish pounds by their lawyer.” It seems that the American believed that, as a result, “the Armenian question had been settled as far as they were concerned, but this was a royal error, for this was only the prelude to further maneuvers.” The kaymakam accused the Americans of agreeing to safeguard “a mass of objects belonging to the Armenians” and giving refuge to “a mass of refugees.” According to the reports of the American doctors, the kaymakam, the commander of the gendarmerie Mahir, and the mayor Hüseyin Effendi, “consoled the Armenians,” assuring them that “they could remain where they were, while relieving them of as much money as possible and, when no more was to be had, sending them off.” Emin Bey, the military commander, also gave him certain indications about the methods used by these unscrupulous civil servants to pillage the Armenians: “this trio had pried at least 500 Turkish pounds per capita from thirty-five individuals, which amount to the neat sum of no less than 17,500 Turkish pounds.” Emin, apparently shocked by these methods, had declared that he was ready to testify and suggested that the American diplomat inform his superiors. The consul’s report reveals that the kaymakam had indeed held “a few hundred Armenians in a monastery” for some time [undoubtedly the monastery of the Holy Mother of God near Korköy] where they were “again shaken down for as much as possible before being sent off.”²¹²

In a conversation that took place on 2 August, Peter asked the kaymakam not to interfere in “American interests”; Fayk answered that he had to deport “all the Armenians in the college and hospital – nurses and so on – and that nothing could be done about that.” Peter’s remark, the purpose of which was to show that under these circumstances Dr. Marden would have no choice but to shut down the hospital, with the result that Merzifun would remain “without medical help,” obviously did not suffice to save the medical staff. “He was, moreover, at a loss to understand what call foreigners had to be in [and] I could see that we had to do with a very fanatic individual here.”²¹³ Indeed, the authorities in Merzifun seemed to be applying methods that had been tried and tested elsewhere, methods calculated to precipitate the immediate departure of the missionaries, to make it possible to take over their buildings, and to liquidate the Armenians connected with their institutions. On 10 August, the police chief and his men turned up at Anatolia College and demanded that the Armenians in the college and hospital be turned over to them. According to White, 72 people, including a number of professors, turned themselves over in order to prevent the police from investing the institution. They were immediately put on the road to Zile, escorted by gendarmes. The men were removed from the group in Yeni Han, tied up, and killed.²¹⁴

According to information gathered by Peter, the kaymakam “demanded another 2,000 to 3,000 Turkish pounds in exchange for letting the girls in the school go.” The diplomat, however, was persuaded that “it was pointless to give him any more money, since, ultimately, they were going to send everyone away.”²¹⁵ His prediction was on the mark: on the morning of 12 August, policemen and gendarmes entered the college by force and took the 73 student boarders into custody, along with a number of teachers. Apparently, Peter observes, “the kaymakam, the commander of the gendarmerie, and the beledier-reis could not agree as to how the money was to be divided up … and, while they were arguing over it, the girls were put on the road.”²¹⁶ According to White, the kaymakam came to see him in order to suggest that the girls “change their names” – that is, convert to Islam – since most of them no longer had fathers and were “subjects of the Turkish government and were the objects of particular attention from the Turkish officials.” Apparently the officers, gendarmes, and officials working in Merzifun had shown an inclination to “take in” these schoolgirls from the American school, who had a reputation for being well bred. But, none of them agreed to convert, and they “were sent off in the direction of Amasia.” Miss Gage, Miss Willard, and Dr. White managed to accompany their wards as far as Amasia, where the mutesarif Celal Bey had tried to arrest them. However, the Americans were able to accompany them further, as far as Sıvas.²¹⁷

After Anatolia College had been liquidated, only the American hospital remained (briefly) in operation, thanks to a medical staff of 52 Armenians, on whose behalf White and Peter interceded with the authorities, pointing out that deporting them would mean closing the hospital. Nevertheless, during the night of 18/19 August, the first attempt was made to arrest the Armenians. “However,” Peter notes, “since I was present, they did not dare risk it.”²¹⁸ The second attempt proved successful. In a letter that Peter sent the vali on 26 August, he told him that he “deeply regretted that you did not make an exception for the American college and hospital … which have brought only blessings and benefits to the region. How many of your soldiers were welcomed [to them] last winter and given all the care they needed.”²¹⁹

According to Peter and White, some 1,000 Armenians, nearly all girls and young women, agreed to “register” as Muslims and enter harems, thus escaping deportation.²²⁰

The Kazas of Vezirköprü and Gümüşhaciköy

Constructed on the ruins of the ancient Neapolis, the seat of the kaza of Vezirköprü (also called Vezirköprü) had only 6,300 inhabitants in 1914, 1,612 of them Armenians. The Armenians had two schools (with an enrollment of 150) and the Church of Saint George. The kaymakam, Bekir Bey, who held his post from 16 May 1914 to 21 January 1916, organized the elimination of the men and, thereafter, the deportation of the rest of the Armenian population toward Sıvas and Malatia by way of Havza, Amasia, and Tokat.²²¹ In 1914, the 4,064 Armenians of the kaza of Gümüşhaciköy all lived in the principal town of the kaza, near Merzifun, which boasted two churches and six schools. This district was well known for its silver and copper mines. The kaymakam, İbrahim Niyazi Bey, who held his post from October 1914 to 2 July 1916, oversaw the massacres and the deportation along the same route taken by the Armenians of Merzifun.²²²

The Kazas of Ladik, Havza, and Mecitözü

In the kazas of Ladik and Havza, which lay on the Amasia-Samsun road, there were no more than 250 Armenians: 300 of them lived in Ladik and 50 more at an hour’s distance in Yaremcaköy. Another 333 Armenians lived in the seat of the kaza of Havza, which was known for its spa, constructed near the ancient Roman baths. Seven hundred Armenians lived in the last of the kazas in the sancak of Amasia, Mecitözü, all of them in Haciköy.²²³ We have no information about the fate of these small communities; they were probably swept up in the flood of convoys from Samsun.

Resistance and Massacres in the Sancak of Şabinkarahisar

In 1914, the sancak of Şabinkarahisar, located in the easternmost part of the vilayet of Sivas, had 23,169 Armenian inhabitants. They lived in 44 towns and villages, placed under the jurisdiction of a diocesan council based in Şabinkarahisar that administered 38 parishes, two monasteries, and 36 schools with a total enrollment of 3,040. In this mountainous, wooded region, there was only one plain of any importance, the plain of Akşari/Sadağa, which lay south of Şabinkarahisar. The town of Enderes/Suşehir lay in the western part of this plain. Almost all of the sancak’s Armenian population was concentrated there.²²⁴

On the eve of the First World War, Şabinkarahisar, where the prefecture was located, had an Armenian population of 4,918; the Armenians formed a majority here. They were concentrated at the foot of the medieval citadel, perched on a rocky outcrop in the upper quarter around the Cathedral of Our Lady. Piled up one beside the next, their houses, with contiguous flat roofs, were all interconnected: the roofs of one row of houses served as a street for the next-highest row. To the northwest, a new Armenian neighborhood, known as Kopeli, had sprung up in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In 1914, there were also five big Armenian villages in the immediate periphery of Şabinkarahisar, with a total population of 9,104. Four kilometers northwest of the city lay Tamzara (with an Armenian population of 1,518). Buseyid (pop. 510) and Anerği (pop. 646) lay five kilometers southwest. Ziber (pop. 752) and Şirdak (pop. 667) were located to the south.²²⁵

According to our main witness, who took part in the resistance in Şabinkarahisar, 300 Armenian conscripts left for Erzincan and Bayburt in November 1914, after the general mobilization (a good many older men were able to pay the draft exemption tax of 43 Turkish pounds).²²⁶ In a report to the patriarch in Constantinople, the primate of Şabinkarahisar, Father Vaghinag Torigian, noted that “every day brings fresh proof of rancor toward the Armenians” in the form of requisitions resembling pillage, especially in the villages in the vicinity of the city, which the authorities required to transport the requisitioned goods using means of their own, despite most of their carts, horses, and oxen having already been taken by the army.²²⁷ This, however, could hardly be called shocking in a country in which the state had a reputation as a predator. The news of the 1 January 1915 murder of the designated primate of Erzincan, Sahag Odabashian, between Suşehir and Refahiye²²⁸ – that is, very close to the city – was obviously much more alarming for the Armenian leaders of Şabinkarahisar. It was, moreover, Father Torigian, who went to the scene of the crime to make arrangements for the victim’s burial.²²⁹ On his return, the prelate informed the political leaders about his apprehensions. The massacre of Armenians soldiers that took place on the road between Erzincan and Sıvas in January 1915, after the debacle at Sarıkamiş, followed by the 8 February destruction by a band of çetes, under alarming circumstances, of the village of Piurk, located in the neighboring kaza of Suşehir,²³⁰ convinced the Armenians of Şabinkarahisar that preparations were being made to massacre them. However, as A. Haygaz observes, no one anticipated the scope of the Young Turks’ extermination plan. Rather, the Armenian leaders were expecting “traditional” massacres of the Hamidian kind, which generally lasted from one to three days, and against which well-organized resistance could prove effective if it held out until orders came from the capital to put an end to the violence.²³¹

The assassination in May of the priest of the nearby village of Anerği, Father Seponia Garinian,²³² the arrest and murder of Nazaret Hiusisian, an emblematic figure in the city, and the arrest of well-known personalities such as Asadur Tiutiunjian, Ardashes and Mirijan Burnazian, Krikor Dakesian, Garabed Garmirian, Rafayel Odabashian, and Garabed Skhdorjian, compelled the Armenian leaders to take refuge in the quarter around the citadel. Khosrov Medzadurian, Hmayag Margosian, Pitsa, Ghugas Deovletian, Hmayag Karageozian, Vahan Hiusisian, and Shabuh Ozanian went underground.²³³ The authorities thereupon launched the next phase of operations, which consisted in confiscating weapons and hunting down deserters. This led to extremely violent search-and-seizure operations. Torigian went to see the mutesarif, Mektubci Ahmed Bey, in an attempt to bring them to a halt. He proposed to the mutesarif that he personally see to the confiscation of weapons,²³⁴ obviously a matter of crucial importance for both parties. The Armenians finally decided to turn in their handguns, hunting rifles, and a few Martinis, bringing them to the prefecture in a cart escorted by two gendarmes. Haygaz wonders if the authorities really believed that this charade meant that the Armenians were laying down their arms. The fact that the authorities proceeded to recruit a militia of “volunteers” (gönülüler) made up of social outcasts, whose pitiful condition was a subject of comment by witnesses,²³⁵ suggests that the mutesarif deemed it necessary to reinforce his troops before taking new initiatives. The feeble potential of these recruits, however, led him to increase the military capacity of the militia by freeing common-law criminals.²³⁶ These initiatives left little doubt as to his intentions, which took concrete form when, on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 1915, the mutesarif summoned his traditional interlocutor, the prelate, to the konak “for consultations.”²³⁷ He “consulted” Torigian by interning him upon his arrival and having him tortured in the cellar of the konak. After undergoing this ordeal, the prelate was dragged by two policemen – a Zaza and a Çerkez – into Ahmed Bey’s office.²³⁸ With the mutesarif in his office was a delegate of the Young Turk Central Committee, Nuri Bey, “an educated native of Istanbul,” who had arrived in Şabinkarahisar only recently. Ahmed Bey mockingly asked the prelate how he was, without provoking the slightest reaction from him. Then, more aggressively, he demanded that Torigian provide him with a list of the insurgents and the number of weapons in the Armenians’ possession. The exchange that followed showed that each man was perfectly well aware of his own position.

Torigian: Pasha, I know what you are going to do; give the order to have me killed right now.

Ahmed Bey: We are interrogating you.

Torigian: I am not in a condition to answer.

Ahmed Bey: To refuse to respond to representatives of the law is a crime of treason that merits appropriate punishment.

Torigian: Gentlemen, what do you expect from a miserable clergyman who has been broken, crushed, and dishonored? You speak in the name of the law. But what law authorized you to turn a prelate over to policemen and order that he be beaten to death? By what right do you accuse a whole nation of crimes that it has not committed? Over the centuries, the Armenians have more than once experienced the justice of this country and are convinced that justice has never existed in the Ottoman Empire and never will … We Armenians are guilty of having failed to understand, over the centuries, that this is a system that has been at work from the outset. After the constitution was restored, not only ordinary people, but even our Hnchak and Dashnak revolutionaries were duped; they believed that an end would be put to unjust practices … But the Adana events go to show that, in this country, in which neither conscience nor God exists, there can be no justice.²³⁹

Several blows from the Ittihadist delegate, accompanied by the exclamation “Shut up, dog,” led to a new reply from the prelate: “You see, effendi, you have proved that I am right. An educated, cultivated young man, ci-devant an official representative of the Istanbul Ittihad, raises his hand against a people’s spiritual shepherd.”²⁴⁰ It would be an understatement to say that these exchanges express all the accumulated rancor of the Armenians toward the regime and the predator’s mentality of the young delegate of the Ittihad and the high-ranking official, both fully aware of how much power they had.

The Armenian clergyman, who was 45 years old, understood perfectly well the fate that awaited him and refused to play the role of the guilty party any longer. On Monday, 7 June, he left the city, guarded by some 15 gendarmes, and was murdered the same day near Enderes, the seat of the kaza of Suşehir, by Kucurzâde Kâmil Beg.²⁴¹ It was not until the morning of 16 June that the population of Şabinkarahisar learned what had happened to its primate.²⁴²

In this densely populated urban center with an Armenian majority, the systematic arrest of the men, the prelude to deportation, required that the authorities display a certain tactical skill. The meager results of the searches conducted in the upper quarter around the citadel compelled the mutesarif to limit himself to launching an operation against the centers of craft and commerce located below the city. On 14 June, soldiers and çetes surrounded these buildings and hurriedly arrested 300 men, who were then imprisoned in the basement of the konak. A squadron of çetes, commanded by someone named Kel Hasan, also made its way into the city’s lower quarters and carried out arrests throughout the night. Hasan was, however, unable to penetrate the quarter around the citadel.²⁴³ On the morning of 15 June, an Armenian commando tried to free the prisoners confined in the konak; the prisoners, however, were executed when the commando reached the area.²⁴⁴ On 16 June, the inhabitants of Şabinkarahisar saw, in the distance, the village of Anerği in flames, while the news of the murder of the primate made the rounds. According to Haygaz, the inhabitants of the city now spontaneously barricaded themselves in their neighborhoods; people from nearby villages, attacked by irregulars, took refuge in the city; and the Armenians of the city’s lower quarter, known as the “Orchards,” began to withdraw to the heights.²⁴⁵ There were, moreover, skirmishes between the squadron of çetes commanded by Kel Hassan and Armenian butchers in the city’s Middle Quarter. On Thursday, 17 June, more villagers from the vicinity arrived in Şabinkarahisar. A military council was then created, made up of Ghugas Deovletian, Hmayag Karageozian, Vahan Hiusisian, Hmayag Margosian, Krikor Baronvartian, Aleksan Dakesian, and Khosrov’s lawyer, Divrig.²⁴⁶ The fire that had broken out that same day in the lower quarters, where the houses were mainly built of wood, spread, accelerating the concentration of the Armenian population in the upper quarter and, later, in the citadel, where according to Armenian sources between 5,000 and 6,000 people, three-quarters of them women and children, found refuge.²⁴⁷ An abrupt shift in the wind drove the flames toward the Turkish quarters, destroying all the government buildings located in the city’s lower quarters.²⁴⁸ The Armenians were, however, unaware of the extent of the panic that had swept over the local authorities. It should further be noted that during the massacre of the prisoners in the konak, when someone named Karnig Beylerian seized a gendarme’s rifle and killed the commander of the gendarmerie and his assistant, the mutesarif and the mayor fled.²⁴⁹

The main problem confronting the military council, which was made up of local notables, was the lack of fighters, especially young men. According to Haygaz, there were fewer than 500 people capable of “bearing arms,” and they had only 200 weapons in their possession, including 100 Mauser rifles.²⁵⁰ The other problem was the lack of water: the Armenians were forced to go down to the springs every night in order to procure enough to meet their minimum needs.²⁵¹

After five days of relative calm, Vali Muammer of Sıvas arrived in Şabinkarahisar on 20 or 21 June, with army units equipped with cannons in order to conduct the siege of the citadel. He immediately sent a message to the insurgents, demanding that they lay down their arms and surrender, promising that their lives would be spared in exchange.²⁵² The military council rejected the offer, and the Ottoman artillery began to pound the Armenians’ positions. It seems, however, that this shelling did not produce the anticipated results. Rather, the scraps of metal from the hundreds of shells that came raining down on the citadel appear to have served as raw material with which to make crude bullets.²⁵³ The army units that had come from Suşehir launched the first assault on 25 June.²⁵⁴ They pressed the attack for several days, affording the Armenians an opportunity to recover arms and ammunition from the attackers killed beneath the citadel. On 27 June, Muammer sent a new message to the military council, this time threatening to inflict exemplary sanctions on the men who had precipitated these “disorders” and were responsible for the fire and the destruction of the city.²⁵⁵ Thus, he blamed the fire on the Armenians, even though it had broken out in the Armenian quarters and wreaked havoc there before spreading to the lower part of the city.

As far as the strategy adopted by the two parties is concerned, it would seem that Muammer favored a massive assault aimed at quickly crushing the Armenian resistance, whereas the local notables wanted to conduct a classic siege that would inevitably lead to water and food shortages. At all events, the authorities waited for several army battalions that had been dispatched from Erzincan to arrive, along with several squadrons of çetes²⁵⁶ and three regiments from Sıvas commanded by Neşed Pasha,²⁵⁷ before launching the assault to break the Armenian resistance. This offensive was opened on Sunday, 4 July, with 6,000 men thrown into the battle.²⁵⁸ Around 300 Armenian combatants and, probably, more than 300 attackers fell in the course of these violent clashes. The citadel was now defended by only 200 men, many of them adolescents.²⁵⁹ On the night of 8 July, the last Armenian fighters, running out of food and ammunition, attempted a sortie. On the morning of the 11th, the twenty-seventh day of the siege, a white flag was hoisted above the citadel.²⁶⁰ After hesitating, soldiers and çetes surround the citadel: the handful of males over fifteen were shot on the spot, while some 300 boys between the ages of three and 15 were separated from the others.²⁶¹ According to our witness, who was in this group, there followed heated discussions involving a hoca, the military men, and the local notables about what to do with these children, who were ultimately reintegrated into the group of women assembled in the cathedral and the adjacent buildings. Some of the women chose to take poison. The rest were exiled to the deserts by way of Agn and Fırıncilar.²⁶²

Among those who bore the main responsibility for what happened in the sancak of Şabinkarahisar, in addition to the mutesarif Mektubci Ahmed Bey, the CUP delegate Nuri Bey, the lawyer Edhem Bey, Pel Hasan, Gugug Mustafa, Tatar Haliloğlu Tahsin, Hacihaliloğlu Mahmud, Ciğuloğlu Şerif, Aydınoğlu Şerif, Saleh Kasab Asim, Karamil Azımzâde İsmail, Faik Çavuş, Tamzaralı Müdir Ali Osman, Ömer Feyzi (a deputy in the Ottoman parliament), and Tokatlı Komiser Sâmi played crucial roles in arrest and killing the men of the city, and also in the looting and deportations that took place in the rest of the region.²⁶³

The Kaza of Suşehir

The 35 Armenian villages in the kaza of Suşehir, almost all of which lay in the plain of Sadağa to the east of the seat of the kaza, Andreas/Enderes, had in 1914 a total Armenian population of 13,430. Located some 30 kilometers southwest of Şabinkarahisar, Enderes had an Armenian population of 2,784 in 1914. Together with the inhabitants of the 18 biggest Armenian villages in the kaza – Sis (pop. 785), Piurk (pop. 1,716), Mshagnots/Muşagemiz (pop. 844), Gtanots/Krtanos (pop. 325), Alamlik (pop. 219), Ezbider (pop. 352), Ğaraş (pop. 104), Sevindig (pop. 375), Aziller (pop. 2,489), Abana (pop. 444), Yeniköy (pop. 214), Tmluc (pop. 173), Aghvanis (pop. 700), Komeshdun (pop. 107), Beyçiftlik (pop. 76), Aghravis (pop. 923), Avand (pop. 126), and Hamam (pop. 197) – the Armenians of Enderes were massacred or deported by way of Agn and Fırıncilar in the latter half of June 1915, under the supervision of the kaymakam, Ahmed Hilmi, who held his post from 10 November 1913 to 23 November 1915.²⁶⁴

The Kaza of Mehsudiye

The Armenian population of this kaza, put at 627, was essentially concentrated in the seat of the kaza, Mehsudiye (pop. 140), and in Karamahmud (pop. 350). These Armenians too were massacred or deported late in June 1915 by the kaymakam, Nafi Bey, who held his post from 9 April 1914 to 19 July 1916.²⁶⁵

The Kazas of Köyulhisar/Kızılhisar and Hamidye

In these two districts in the western part of the sancak of Şabinkarahisar there were only a few dozen Armenian households left by 1914: 20 in Köyulhisar, the seat of the kaza (pop. 100), 15 in Mushal (pop. 90), and 70 in Masudiya, the seat of the kaza of Hamidye.²⁶⁶

The kaymakam of Kızılhisar, Sermed Yaşar, who held his post from 1 June 1915 to 9 July 1916, and the kamaykam of Hamidiye, Celal Bey, who held his post from 7 April 1914 to 11 April 1916, organized the massacre of the men and the deportation of the rest of the population by way of Agn and Fırıncilar in these two kazas.²⁶⁷

Sıvas in the Aftermath of the Deportations

As we have seen, the system used to eliminate the Armenians of the vilayet of Sıvas had a distinctive feature: some 5,000 men were held in the central prison and the cellar of the Şifahdiye and Gök medreses in Sıvas for almost a month after the departure of the convoys of deportees.²⁶⁸ We do not know what brought Ahmed Muammer to leave them alive for so long, and we have no information about the conditions in which they lived in prison. We do know, however, how these men were methodically liquidated in two stages, at two different sites relatively close to Sıvas. Those interned in the medrese of Gök were the first to be massacred. From 2 to 7 August, groups of 100 to 200 men were taken from this medrese every night and led up to Karlık, on the heights of the monastery of St. Hagop in the Çelebiler valley, approximately four hours northwest of Sıvas. There they were killed with axes.²⁶⁹ The second group, the prisoners held in the medrese of Şifahdiye, was liquidated between 8 August and 12 August. These men were led in groups of 200 to 300 to a school for apprentices located near a farm three hours away from Sıvas. There they were put to death under the supervision of the Ittihad’s responsible secretary, Gani Bey,²⁷⁰ Şekeroğlu İsmail, Halis Bey, Sobaci Şükrü (the müdir of Sğcakışla), Ğarza Dürger Hasan – Şükrü and Hasan destroyed the villages of Dendil, Burhan, Karagöl, and Chepni – as well as the commander of the garrison, Ali Bey; Haci Ömer; Ömer’s sons Veysel and Hanif; Nurioğlu Süleyman; Tekkeşin İbrahim; Evilya Effendi; Tayib Effendi; the grocer Nuri; Arpacı Şükrü; Ziya Effendi, the director of the Sultaniye middle school; and the Unionists Bakal Aziz and Bakal Behcet.²⁷¹

Around the middle of August, according to the Islamicized craftsmen who were allowed to remain in Sıvas, Muammer organized a big banquet after liquidating all the Armenian men, expressing his satisfaction over his accomplishment.²⁷² It is possible that the slaughter of these men was postponed until the vali’s return from Erzincan, where he participated, around 31 July, at the meeting of the valis of Erzerum, Trebizond, Harput, and Sıvas chaired by Bahaeddin Şakir.²⁷³ It is reasonable to suppose that the meeting was held to assess the first phase of operations and decide on complementary measures, such as the fate of the worker-soldiers.

Reverend Bauernfeind, who traveled through Ulash and Sıvas on 16 August 1915, wrote in his diary, “There are no more corpses, but adult Armenians working to bring in the harvest.” Of course, Bauernfeind could not know that these peasants from Ulash would be dispatched southwards a few days later, after the harvest had been brought in.²⁷⁴ He observed at the entrance to the city that “the road [had] been repaired by Armenians” (who would be killed the following year) and that “male and female Armenian employees, including adult males, are still employed at the [American] hospital,” but would “have to leave in the next few days.”²⁷⁵ The German minister thus saw the last traces of the Armenian presence in Sıvas, which Vali Muammer, who had made judicious use of these Armenians’ labor power, was now preparing to eliminate by overcoming the resistance of the American missionaries.²⁷⁶

Arriving in Gemerek, on the road to Kayseri, on 18 August 1915, Bauernfeind discovered a city “whose Armenians [had] now departed”; it “gave him the impression of being deserted and destroyed.” He had nevertheless been able to converse “in French and in Turkish with the commander and an army doctor,” an Armenian “who belonged to a battalion of Armenian laborers.” Bauernfeind had encountered an amele taburi in Gemerek that comprised 900 men from Kayseri.²⁷⁷

On 28 September 1915, Muammer sent a coded wire to the interior minister, informing him that so far 136,084 Armenians from Sıvas and the areas administratively attached to it had been deported toward Mesopotamia (the vali wrote “Cizre”).²⁷⁸ If we make allowance for those who were massacred locally, the conscripts incorporated into labor battalions, and the Islamicized young women and children, this figure seems altogether plausible.

In the written deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission in December 1918, General Vehib Pasha, who had succeeded Mahmud Kâmil as the head of the Third Army in February 1916, observed: “In the province of Sıvas, all the Armenians, with the exception of those who had converted to Islam, were deported … The officials employed in this province had a direct, pernicious relation with the crimes committed and knowingly helped perpetrate them. That is my conviction.”²⁷⁹ He also noted that, “as ‘abandoned property,’ the sums collected and precious objects and jewels transformed into cash were amassed and preserved, and, consequently, were not looted.” This, he said, confirmed that Muammer, someone with “an exalted sense of honesty, honor, and loyalty,” had followed the instructions he had received from the capital.²⁸⁰ Other sources, to be sure, incline us to make a less flattering assessment of Muammer’s activities. While it seems to be an established fact that the vali, defending the interests of the party-state, succeeded in preventing in the area under his jurisdiction the kind of pillage that went on elsewhere, as we have seen, indications are that he nevertheless imitated a number of his colleagues, personally appropriating the property of some of those under his administration. He also managed to cover up, with undeniable skill, the massacres perpetrated on his orders, thus creating the impression that he had carried out an administrative deportation in legal form. From this point of view, Muammer Bey proved to be one of the most effective valis, the one who executed the orders he received from the capital with the greatest fidelity, the debacle of Şabinkarahisar aside.

Shortly after the Mudros Armistice was signed, at a time when Turkey was still endeavoring to settle its accounts with its Young Turk elite, a Turkish officer posted in Sıvas during the war wrote an open letter to the ex-vali of Sıvas. “In the name of humanity,” he declared, “I have the right to ask you for an account of the number of people you massacred.”²⁸¹ To make what he said more credible, this witness reminded the vali of the acts of theft he had committed and “made others commit,” and went on to ask him, “where are the twenty-eight rugs that belonged to the money-changer Dikran Effendi? Or the eighteen jewels of various kinds that belong to Baghchegiulian Effendi? Or the jewels worth four thousand pounds that belonged to Miss Virgin, Mgrdich Effendi Mardikian’s sister-in-law?” Finally, this officer, whom Muammer had had brought before a court-martial in Sıvas, recalled that he had been in the vali’s office when Muammer had summoned the “jeweler Lifter and asked him to assess the value of the jewels contained in eleven walnut chests,” threatening to kill Lifter “if he dared reveal anything about the matter.”²⁸²

In a report submitted to the Istanbul court-martial, Captain Fazıl was hardly more tender with the vali of Sıvas: he portrayed him as the main culprit in the destruction of the Armenians, a man who had ordered the “gendarmes” to kill and had amassed a fortune of 60,000 Turkish pounds at the deportees’ cost.²⁸³

These revelations, doubtless inspired less by moral considerations than by a spirit of revenge, do not only tarnish the bright image of an exemplary vali, but also illustrate the day-to-day practice of most of the Young Turk leaders. General Vehib’s favorable declaration about Ahmed Muammer remains a mystery, especially in view of the vehemence with which the general denounced the vali’s role in the destruction of the Armenians of the region, and in light of the serious conflict between the two men after the July 1916 massacre of several thousand Armenian worker-soldiers in a gorge lying between Sarkışla and Gemerek.

The July 1916 Liquidation of the Amele Taburis of Sıvas

We have noted that the great majority of Armenian worker-soldiers who served in the amele taburis of the five other eastern vilayets, including those males under 18 and over 45 who were recruited late in the day, were put to death in the wake of the deportations. It must be emphasized that, in contrast, Armenians in the labor battalions who were liquidated in the vilayet of Sıvas perished a full year after the deportations had come to an end.

Aside from the amele taburi, comprising 900 men from Kayseri who were put to work in Gemerek,²⁸⁴ a labor battalion of some 500 men was present in Hanlı, halfway between Sıvas and Gemerek.²⁸⁵ Additionally, a considerable number of craftsmen-soldiers were employed by the army, especially in Sıvas. These units were under the orders of Colonel Behcet Bey and the commanding officers Hikmet Bey, Nuri Bey, and Ali Şefik Bey.²⁸⁶

For as long as the Third Army was under the command of Mahmud Kâmil, it seems that the elimination of the worker-soldiers posed no problems for the military authorities. When, however, General Vehib Pasha became the commander-in-chief of the Third Army, it is clear that the Special Organization, the CUP delegates, and the valis were no longer able to decide the fate of these men without first consulting the supreme commanding officer under whose orders these recruits were serving. We have virtually no official documents about the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the amele taburis in fall 1915; virtually all our information comes from survivors’ reports. Thus, the military inquiry into the massacre of the worker-soldiers from the vilayet of Sıvas that was conducted in fall 1916 on Vehib’s orders, and reopened by the Mazhar Commission in November 1918, is of even greater interest than it otherwise would be.

In the deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission, Vehib stated, “Military imperatives made it necessary to send Armenians serving in the labor battalions to the Fourth Army. It was decided to bring them together in Sıvas in order to send them from there to Aleppo. Orders to this effect were issued to the vali.”²⁸⁷ It can clearly be inferred from this formulation that the military authorities deemed it necessary to remove these men from the front line, which ran through Enderes/Suşehir at the time. Muammer, who often appeared at the headquarters of the Third Army to resolve problems having to do with provisioning the troops, was precisely at Zara when this decision was made. According to Armenian sources, he had even telephoned orders from Zara to concentrate the Armenian worker-soldiers in Sıvas in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök in order to send them from there to Bozanti and Syria.²⁸⁸ While grave charges weighed against the commander of the gendarmerie of Şarkışla, Mescizâde Nuri, who carried out the massacre of the Armenian worker-soldiers of Sıvas, the vali of Sıvas was also under heavy suspicion. Thus, Nuri declared that Muammer had telephoned him and told him to send the amele taburis “to Kayseri in one hour.”²⁸⁹ Translated into plain language, this was an order to liquidate them (it was a several days’ march from Kayseri to Sıvas). In response to inquires by the Mazhar Commission into the death of these soldiers, Vehib declared that he had demanded an explanation from Nuri and that the commander had “said that the order had been communicated to him orally by Muammer Bey in the course of a telephone conversation”; however, Vehib added, Muammer had denied “ever having issued such an order.”²⁹⁰ In view of the special position of the vali, who was also the head of the Special Organization in the region under his jurisdiction, it is more probable that Muammer did indeed issue orders to massacre these thousands of men after himself receiving such orders from his superiors. The decision of the Third Army’s commander to assemble the worker-soldiers under his jurisdiction in the vilayet of Sıvas with a view to putting them at Cemal Pasha’s disposal was certainly perceived by the Young Turk network as an opportunity to eliminate them. Doubtless, Istanbul assumed that it would not occur to the commander of the Third Army to inquire into the fate of these men who were supposed to have been transferred to Syria. However, three months after the departure of these labor battalions, Vehib, who had “received no news indicating whether or not they had arrived at Aleppo,” began to wonder what had become of them.²⁹¹ He asked Ahmed Cemal, the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, for “an explanation.” Cemal replied that these “soldiers had not arrived in the area under his jurisdiction.” Vehib therefore turned to Muammer, who “informed [him] that all the Armenian soldiers had been massacred between Şarkışla and Gemerek by Nuri Effendi, a captain in the gendarmerie who was under orders to dispatch them [to Aleppo].” The inquiry conducted by Vehib “established that he had intentionally massacred the soldiers in question.”²⁹² Nuri Bey was summoned to the headquarters of the Third Army in Suşehir and brought before the Military Council, which condemned him to death. “I took the responsibility,” Vehib wrote, “before my conscience, of issuing an order to carry out the sentence, so that this would serve as a clear example for others.”²⁹³

But Vehib did not content himself with punishing someone who had merely carried out orders. He demanded that the man who had given the order, Ahmed Muammer, be brought before a military court. According to Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian, who met with Talât in this connection, the fact that the interior minister and İsmail Hakkı visited Sıvas on 29 November 1916 was directly related to this affair.²⁹⁴ On the pretext of carrying out a “general inspection tour,” the two Young Turk leaders “in fact came in order to smooth over the dispute between Vehib Pasha and Muammer.” Vehib supposedly demanded that the capital “immediately relieve [Muammer] of his duties” and is said to have remained “inflexible to the end,” so that the interior minister was finally forced to transfer the vali to Konya.²⁹⁵

After the Mudros Armistice, when the governmental commission of inquiry began to investigate Muammer’s activities during the war, its president, Hasan Mazhar, turned to Vehib for additional information on the vali’s role in the murder of the worker-soldiers. He notably asked him whether there was “anything having to do with Muammer Bey in the minutes of the interrogation of Nuri Effendi” and, furthermore, whether the vali had “interceded in his favor” with Vehib when the death sentence was handed down. The general responded: “Nuri Bey simply declared that he had received the liquidation order from Muammer Bey.” However, Vehib went on, Nuri had not been able to show him a written order, so that “Nuri’s affirmations remained mere words, without the least proof to back them up and lacking all legislative or official character; thus they were considered to be worthless.”²⁹⁶ The prudent general was, however, careful to say nothing about the steps he had taken in Istanbul with a view of obtaining Muammer’s resignation after the Armenian soldiers’ “lamentable end.” He did, however, testify that when he asked the vali to send Captain Nuri to his headquarters, Muammer had wanted to “know why he was being sent for.” A few days later, when Muammer went to the headquarters in Suşehir to resolve “problems having to do with provisioning the army,” the vali “stated orally that the investigation that he had conducted had revealed that Nuri Effendi was the author of the crime in question ... and that he had informed the interior minister of this.”²⁹⁷ These confidences in the form of justifications were apparently not enough to convince the general. They reflect a concrete situation of a kind we rarely have the opportunity to observe, one in which a Young Turk leader, suddenly confronted with his responsibility for issuing orders to commit a crime, unhesitatingly sacrificed one of his subordinates to protect himself and his party.

According to reports collected by N. Kapigian, 500 craftsmen-soldiers from the city of Sıvas, among the 3,000 men interned in the city’s medreses early in July 1916, were quite promptly released. The others were sent to the gorge located on the southern slopes of the Dardaşlar mountain chain and massacred at Taşlı Dere, on the road to Şarkışla, near Gemerek, on Captain Nuri’s orders.²⁹⁸ It seems that German officers witnessed these summary executions.²⁹⁹ Bishop Kalemkiarian reports that, accompanied by the German vice-consul, Karl Wert, he went to see the vali, who had returned from the headquarters of the Third Army the day before, to ask why the Armenians had been imprisoned. The vali declared that “the commander of the Fourth Army had asked that the soldiers be sent to him so that they could be put to work on building the railroad in the Bozanti area,” but that they had in fact “been massacred with unimaginable savagery, with axes, swords, clubs, and bullets, or were thrown over cliffs by criminals.”³⁰⁰

According to a file assembled by the British authorities, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Sıvas, Gani Bey, participated personally in the liquidation of another amele taburi in Yon Yukuş, three hours from Sıvas.³⁰¹ In the same period, the 500 worker-soldiers working near Hanlı were put to death at Kayadipi, seven hours from Sıvas,³⁰² while the 900 men in the battalion based in Gemerek met the same fate near the Ortaköy spring.³⁰³

Three army doctors, Baghdasar Vartanian, Maksud, and Hayranian, were the last victims of these mass murders; they were first relieved of their duties and then murdered in Sıvas’s central prison. High-ranking German friends of Hayranian’s, who had close relations with German officers based in the city, had interceded directly with Enver Pasha on his behalf. But even this powerful protection does not seem to have sufficed to restrain Muammer.³⁰⁴ There is every reason to believe that the vali did not want to see a physician on such good terms with the empire’s German allies survive, the more so as Hayranian had been a witness to the vali’s criminal activities.

Thus, a total of around 5,000 Armenian recruits, who may be considered the remnants of the Third Army’s amele taburis, were liquidated in the course of July 1916.

Those Responsible for the Massacres in the Vilayet of Sıvas

In a document addressed to Sıvas’s police chief, Rifat Bey, in December 1918, Hasan Mazhar, the head of the government commission of inquiry, asked 39 questions that, as it were, outline the basic structure of the program to liquidate the Armenian population of the region.³⁰⁵ We do not know if Rifat Bey responded to this questionnaire. But some of the questions are virtually answers in and of themselves. They not only echo a number of the events we have just reviewed, but also provide more precise information about them, and show, in the process, how familiar Hasan Mazhar was with the mechanism put in place by the CUP. We list below all these questions. Some have been followed by the beginnings of an answer or more precise information, when we were in a position to supply it.

1) Who was the president of the Union and Progress Club in Sıvas? Şekerlıoğlu İsmail.³⁰⁶ 2) Who were the members of the Committee of Union and Progress in Sıvas? Kol Agasi Ali Effendi, Sopaci Şükrü, police lieutenant Hafız, police lieutenant Mahmud, Muammer’s yaver, his hit-man, Çerkez Mahmud, who executed Manuel Dedeyan and his students at the Sanasarian lycée, Ali Şerif Bey, who supervised arrests and tortures, as well as search-and-seizure missions in the villages, Sadullah Bey, Behcet Bey, the commander of the amele taburis, and Pertev Bey, the commander of the Tenth Army Corps stationed in Sıvas.³⁰⁷ 3) Did the vali, Muammer Bey, go to the Club every day? Very probably. 4) How many days did Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, a member of the Central Committee, spend in Sıvas, and in whose house did he stay? This corroborates that the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa paid a visit to Sıvas. 5) What did he say when he was there? 6) How many days did Talât Bey, the minister of the interior, spend in Sıvas, and in whose house did he stay? We do not know if this is an allusion to Talât’s visit of November 1916, connected to the decision about Muammer’s fate, or an earlier stay. 7) Who formed the bands of çetes known as the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa? Muammer, with Rasim Bey, the parliamentary deputy from Sıvas who organized the squads of çetes in the vilayet.³⁰⁸ 8) What is the name of the parliamentary deputy from Kangal who made a speech before the Union and Progress Club and in the mosques (in Sıvas)? He said there: “O Muslims, your enemies are not the foreigners, not the Russians or the British. Your enemies are in your midst.” This was most likely the deputy from Çanğırı, Dr. Fazıl Berki Bey, who made more or less the same remarks in Uli Cami.³⁰⁹ 9) How did Muammer Bey react when Talât gave speeches in the mosque and before the Club? In them, he said: “O Muslims, we have completely exterminated the Armenians; we give you all their property, their shops, stores, and houses. From now on, trade is in your hands and will be exclusively yours.” 10) Who released the convicts (from prison) so that they could be enrolled in the Special Organization? 11) How many prisoners were recruited by the Special Organization, and how many were recruited by the gendarmerie? 12) What tasks were the battalions of worker-soldiers assigned? 13) How many churches were demolished in Sıvas? 14) Why did Muammer Bey demolish all the houses in the village of Tavra and transform this village of 300 households into farmland? 15) What is the secret of the destruction of the big Armenian churches and the 300 to 500 houses of the Hülluklik neighborhood (in Sıvas)? 16) Of you and Muammer Bey, who issued the order to replace the crosses on the church belfries with crescents and called on the people to pray from these belfries? 17) The gravestones in the (Armenian) cemetery were torn down and their epitaphs were effaced by certain people. Then these monuments and stones from the destroyed churches were brought to the area in front of the prefecture building, where the Turan Hotel, the Committee of Union and Progress Club, the prefecture’s printing-house, and the draftsmen’s office was constructed. Was this operation carried out on orders from Muammer Bey? 18) Were worker-soldiers employed (for this purpose)? When were they summoned to Sıvas to build these buildings, before their deportation and massacre? 19) Was it not on Muammer Bey’s orders that 52 Armenian soldiers who had fought in Çanakkale and been wounded in battle were forced to join a labor battalion? 20) Who presided over the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Turan Hotel and the Union and Progress Club? 21) Who presided over the inauguration of these buildings when they were completed? 22) Who attended the groundbreaking and inauguration (ceremonies) of these buildings? 23) When did you learn, in Sıvas, the news of the massacres and liquidation of the workers of the battalions that was carried out by Nuri Effendi in the Tenus district? 24) When did Muammer Bey learn of these major crimes? Did he order that investigations be conducted, and were they really carried out? 25) Were the mutesarifs of Azizyie, Kerdun, and Tenus questioned? 26) If an investigation really was carried out, what was the reason for it? 26) When were weapons collected? How many days after the deportation did this procedure begin? 27) We have been apprised that, during the deportation of the Armenians from Sıvas, Muammer Bey declared to the populace: “Any Muslim who hides an Armenian in his house will be hanged in front of it.” This proclamation was published in the provincial newspaper by the Şeyh press. Do you have this newspaper? 28) In your capacity as director of the police, did you issue travel permits (vezika) to nine people who were with the Bishop, Mr. Karnig Tughlajian, and Aram Musheghian, who wished to use these permits to Constantinople? 29) What happened in the monastery of Saint Nshan? 30) What was the role of the Special Organisation? What was the position of Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, the president of this organization? 31) What was the date on which the head of the postal service between Kayseri and Sıvas laid down his functions? 32) How many Armenian officials were serving in the administration of the vilayet? How many Armenian judges were there on the bench? What were their names? 33) Who was the dragoman of the vilayet? 34) Which judges were relieved of their official duties and deported with Oskan Aslan Effendi, the director of the forests and mines? 35) Why were these judges and Oskan Aslan Effendi imprisoned before being deported? Who ordered that they be deported? 36) Is it true that Vartanian, Vartoyan, and Manug Beylerian, the dragoman of the vilayet, were deported and murdered with four or five other Armenians? 37) Twenty or twenty-five days after they were deported, were other men arrested and imprisoned? 38) Hulusi Bey, with 150 of his men, went to Kangal to find the caravan of Armenian women deported from Sıvas; he mistreated them and took from them a considerable quantity of gold and precious objects which were loaded into three vehicles, one with springs and two without. What portion of this plunder was allotted to the vali? Do you know if a register was established in which the quantities of gold and valuable objects were noted? 39) The Union and Progress delegate in Sıvas was Gani Bey. Who asked you to include him on the police commission?³¹⁰

This “questionnaire” reconstructs the mechanism that was set in motion at the regional level while spelling out the role played by the administration, on the one hand, and the secret centers, on the other, in the plan to liquidate the Armenians and seize their property. It is usefully completed by a list of those who bore the main responsibility for the massacres and deportations in the vilayet.³¹¹ In addition to the leader of the local Ittihad Club, Muammer, and the CUP representative, Gani, the following people were involved: Bacanakzâde Hamdi, the president of the municipality; Mustafa Hoca of Turkal, a member of the Deportation Committee that compiled a list of the city’s Armenian elite to be liquidated; Colonel Ali Effendi, a member of the Deportation Committee; Rıza Effendi, Colonel Ali’s brother, the leader of a squadron of çetes; the mullahs Derindeli Hoca, Gamalı Hoca, İzzet Hoca and Öçenoğlu Mustafa, who urged that the Armenians be eliminated in the sermons that they preached in the mosques; Halil Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Ali Şevfik, a major in the gendarmerie, one of those who organized the massacres in the kaza of Suşehir; Rifat Bey, the police chief, who had the Armenian notables arrested and organized the seizure of their property; the defterdar (administrator of the land register) Tevfik, a member of the commission responsible for abandoned property; Akıpaşazâde Murteza, Tevfik’s secretary; Nür Bey, the director of the newspaper Sıvas, “who published many articles about the atrocities that Armenian çetes inflicted on Turks”; Emin Bey, an auditor; Hayri Effendi, an official on the committee to sell “abandoned property” who was responsible for settling muhacirs in houses that had belonged to Armenians; Mahmud Çete, a police lieutenant at the head of the convoys of deportees who engaged in pillage and perpetrated massacres near Hasançelebi; Celal, an assistant of Muammer’s who perpetrated massacres at Çelebiler and Tavra; Keleş Bey, an officer in the gendarmerie who ordered and supervised massacres; Halis Bey, an officer in the squadron of çetes, the director of the commission of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in the vilayet; Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid, the chief of the Çerkez of Uzunyayla; Bacanakoğlu Edhem, a çete; Kutugünoğlu Hüseyin, a çete; Zaralı Mahir, a çete (the last five people were all implicated in the murder of the vicar Sahag Odabashian); Cizmeci Haci, a carrier or car; Çerkes Kadir, a çete accused of having received and transferred, along with the five last-named people, 48 sacks full of jewels and a sack containing 30,000 (Turkish) pounds in gold from Hasançelebi and Hekimhan to Sıvas, where they were turned over to Muammer; Sobaci Çil Şükrü, an auxiliary gendarme who was charged with establishing the whereabouts of the people to be arrested; the müdirs of Ulaş/Ulash and Agcakışla, who were implicated in the massacres in their districts; Ğarga Durğere Hasan, a çete who perpetrated massacres in the Armenian villages around Ulaş; Haciömeroğlu Veysel, a çete; Hanif; Nuribeyoğlu Süleyman and Nuribeyoğlu Kâzım, who slit the throats of people interned in the prison of Sıvas near the farm of the Balahor, on the road leading from Eni Han to Sıvas, together with Kurdish emigrés; Tekeşen İbrahim, an accomplice of the people just named, along with Tayib Effendi, an official at the town hall; Nuri, the grocer; Arpaci Şükrü; Bakal Aziz; Bakal Behcet; and Berber Şükrü (one of those who murdered a Sanasarian lycée teacher named Menjukian).

We should also mention the activities of Sâdullah, an officer in the gendarmerie and the head of the prison guards in the fortress of Sıvas (the prison of the court-martial), where he murdered Armenian prisoners in July 1916, as well as Colonel Pertev Bey, the military commander of the Tenth Army Corps; Tevfik Bey, the director of farms (çiftlik müdüri); Aherpaşazâde Halid, his secretary, who took part in the massacres of worker-soldiers in the gorge of Çelebiler; Aherpaşazâde Murteza, one of those who stole Armenian property in Sıvas; Avndukzâde Nusin and Handenezâde Hasan, who looted stores; Kâzım, an assistant to the vali and a çete who was implicated in the massacres in Kangal; and Ahmed Bey, the head of the Turkish orphanage in Sıvas, who was implicated in the murder of Armenian children.³¹²

The French-language Istanbul daily announced in its fifth issue, published on Friday, 13 December 1918, that Muammer Bey had been arrested in the Ottoman capital. With his colleague from Dyarbekir, Dr. Reşid, he was one of the first of the accused to be placed under arrest.