In the Ottoman epoch, the Armenian community in the vilayet of Edirne developed from the sixteenth century on, when the famous architect Sinan called on 250 of his compatriots to help build the mosque of Sultan Selim in Edirne. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Armenians from the Kemah and Erzincan areas, victims of the series of famine years that had followed the looting by the celali (revolts), also settled in Tekirdağ/Rodosto and Malgara on the shores of the Sea of Marmara and further west in Çorlu and Silivri.
On the eve of the war, 800 Armenian families (4,536 Armenians) were living in Edirne, the seat of government of the vilayet of the same name.1 They were concentrated in two inner city neighborhoods, Kale Içi and At Bazar, and also in the suburb of Kara Ağac. The inhabitants of Kara Ağac were truck farmers, whereas the Armenians who lived in the inner city were craftsmen, tradesmen, or railroad employees when they were not employed in tobacco manufacture.2 The biggest Armenian colony was to be found in the port of Rodosto, the principal town of the kaza of Tekirdağ; the approximately 17,000 Armenians who lived in the town represented half its total population. Rodosto’s Armenian community, founded in 1606, had settled on the shore, in the Takavor neighborhood in the southwestern part of the city, and also to the northeast in the suburb known as Çiftlik, the name of which indicates its connection with agricultural activities. The Armenians here were tinsmiths, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and millers, but also ship captains or even fleet owners and bankers.3
In 1914, some 3,000 Armenians lived in the town of Malgara, which lay northwest of Rodosto. Almost all were descended of natives of Pakarij (a district of Kemah). They, too, had settled in the region in 1606.4
To the south lay the kaza of Gallipoli, which formed a slightly elevated peninsula. Its population was overwhelmingly Greek, with a mere 1,190 Armenians living there in 1914.5 They worked principally in commerce and the crafts.
On the road that led to Constantinople, in Çorlu, there lived in 1914 from 1,678 to 3,005 Turkish-speaking Armenians, whose ancestors had come from Yozgat. Finally, 1,000 Armenians lived in Silivri, in the easternmost part of the vilayet; they were reputed to be among the best kayıkci (boatsmen) on the Sea of Marmara.6
The Deportations in Edirne
During the Balkan Wars, the city of Edirne, which had passed from Turkish to Bulgarian hands and then won back by the Young Turks, had been the scene of violent acts that had affected all the groups in the city. The bitterness that had accumulated in the course of these events, especially among the Muslims, resurfaced in fall 1915, when the fate of Edirne’s Armenians was hanging in the balance. Here the deportation order was made public much later than elsewhere, on 14 October. There was at least one objective reason for this. Bulgaria’s late entry into the First World War on the Ottoman side probably forced the Young Turk authorities to postpone anti-Armenian operations in European Turkey, so as not to impede the negotiations aimed at inducing Bulgaria to rally to the Ottomans. Moreover, a 24 October 1915 note from the Austrian Ambassador to the empire reveals that, “With the cession of Kara-Agatsch [Kara Ağaç] to Bulgaria, all the Armenian families in that locality were expelled to Anatolia.”7 The expulsion orders had been issued by the vali of Edirne, Haci Adıl Bey [Arda],8 a jurist of Cretan origin, Unionist parliamentary deputy from Edirne, former general secretary of the CUP, close friend of Talât’s, and, for a time, minister of the interior, who had, moreover, been implicated in the 1909 Cilician events.9 The choice of so eminent a CUP leader as vali was probably also a sign of the importance that the Ittihad attached to this vilayet. In addition to Adıl Bey, the CUP had sent Abdül Ğani to serve in Edirne as its responsible secretary, with Hayrullah Bey as his assistant. The Ittihad could also count on Haci Ali Bey, the president of the Unionist club in Edirne, and two influential Young Turks from the city, İzzeddin Bey, the head of the Health Department, and Rifât Bey, the mayor. Among the military men involved in the anti-Armenian violence, Dr. Ertogrül Bey, an army doctor who worked in the Kalayçi hospital, also played a role in liquidating the soldiers in the labor battalions. Among the magistrates and civilian state officials, Tevfik Bey, the chief prosecutor at the court-martial and a member of Edirne’s emvalı metruke; Şakir Effendi, the mektubci (head of the correspondence bureau); Emin Bey, the vilayet’s defterdar and the president of the emvalı metruke; Tevfik Effendi, the assistant police chief; and the police lieutenants Niazi Effendi and Nuri Effendi all had a hand in organizing the deportations and pillaging the Armenians’ “abandoned property.”10
Departing from the methods employed in Anatolia, the local authorities here did not give the Armenians any time at all to prepare for the deportation. The order for immediate deportation was issued on the night of 27–28 October 1915, giving rise to acts of pillage that profited the local Ittihad club and Turkish schools. Three hundred Armenian shops in the Ali Paşa bazaar were demolished.11
A report written “of a common accord” by the Bulgarian general consul M. G. Seraphimoff and the Austro-Hungarian consul Dr. Arthur Nadamlenzki and sent to the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Constantinople on 6 November 1915, reveals how the CUP organized the liquidation of the Armenians of Edirne:12
The fact that what is happening is obviously only the implementation of a carefully meditated program, a program the aim of which is the “annihilation of the Christian elements in Turkey,” is so serious that the undersigned believe it their duty to refer the matter to the interested powers ... The new system adopted by the ruling circles, which frightens not only the Jews and the other Christians living here, but also the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population, was exhibited in all its cruelty and cynicism on the occasion of the expulsion of the Armenians of Adrianople ... The procedures that the undersigned were able to observe here bear witness to a desire, not merely to expel, but, clearly, to eradicate an entire race. On the night of 27–28 October, the organs of the police knocked at the doors of the city’s rich Armenian families and forced them to abandon, without delay, their homes, their belongings, and all their assets in order to be transported to an unknown destination. The scenes that took place on that and the following nights defy description. There took place things that only an altogether deprived mind and a barbaric, brutal soul could conceive.
Women still bed-ridden because they had given birth the day before were torn from their beds; small children who were seriously ill were carried off by force in carts; semiparalysed old men were forced to leave their homes. Little girls in the city’s boarding schools had no idea that their parents had been forced to leave and were thus separated forever from their fathers and mothers. The unfortunates did not even have the right to take money or objects dear to them when they left. With a few piasters in hand, men who had considerable fortunes – four thousand Turkish pounds were discovered in the chest of one Armenian alone – had to leave the house of their fathers in order to be led off into dire poverty ... The belongings of those expelled were sold off at ludicrously low prices in public auctions at which the Turkish buyers were once again privileged over the others. Thus fortunes were squandered which, by rights, ought to have been inventoried.
On the very night on which the Armenians were expelled, the Turkish authorities staged little feasts in homes bereft of their masters: people played the piano there, emptied the cellars, and ate whatever provisions they found. The same scenes were repeated in broad daylight the next day. We were told by a completely reliable source that many valuables and a great deal of money have disappeared. The only salvation the Turks offered the Armenians was to embrace Islam! So far, not a single family has bowed to this pressure.
The vali and the police chief have declared that widows and their children will be spared. The Young Turk Committee has found a way to make even this category of people miserable. It is trying to abduct the young girls and marry them off to Turks. Two of the Menziljian daughters were able to escape these new dangers only because they happened to be at the school of the Sisters of Agram and were protected by the consulate of I. and R. Austria-Hungary. The Bulgarian authorities are doing everything they can to obtain the return of all the Armenian families whose sons and husbands are fighting in the Bulgarian army for the common cause. The fact that the children enrolled in the Turkish schools and, in particular, those in the Committee’s schools were taken out to watch the departure of hundreds of Armenians crazy with sorrow and despair as if it were a spectacle is, in the opinion of the undersigned, a matter of extreme gravity! It makes it possible to infer and gives us a glimpse of the secret designs animating the domestic policy Young Turk Committee, which is inculcating a spirit of hatred for the Christians in children’s hearts and minds, a hatred that may one day also be directed against the friends of today. That this circumstance is no mere accident, but itself part of a pre-established program, is proven by the fact, known to one and all, that during the persecutions of the Greeks, Turkish schoolchildren were made to take part in the looting of the Greek villages on the city’s outskirts ... Here, in the vilayet of Adrianople, almost all the big, wealthy trading houses were, in the past few years, in Armenian hands. Almost all the rich Jewish and Greek bankers and merchants left the vilayet after the Balkan War. With the expulsion of the Armenians who worked together with the big Austro-Hungarian and German factories, the most important merchants have left Adrianople, without, of course, first settling accounts with their suppliers, creditors, or debtors.13
This remarkable report needs no comment. Let us point out only that these deportees took the Istanbul-Konya-Bozanti route, by foot or rail, and ended up in Syria or Mesopotamia. A last wave of deportations, which targeted the families of craftsmen and soldiers, was carried out during the night of 17–18 February 1916 on the initiative of the interim vali, Zekeria Zihni Bey, formerly the mutesarif of Tekirdağ.14 It emptied the city of its last Armenians.
Deportations in the Sancak of Rodosto
In the most important Armenian colony of the region, that of Tekirdağ/Rodosto, with an Armenian population of roughly 17,000 in 1914, the deportations were preceded by a number of alarming events. We must first recall the massacres perpetrated from 1 to 3 July by soldiers in Rodosto, which the Istanbul press quickly painted as a revolt that the army had had to “put down.”15 We cannot ignore the fire in the Armenian quarter that broke out on 26 August 1914, in the midst of the general mobilization – it was, to say the least, of suspicious origin.16 Nor can we ignore the direct threats hanging over the heads of the Armenian population in the same period, which had compelled the interior minister to come to the port in person, accompanied by the patriarchal vicar, Perhajian, to reduce tensions.17 According to a survivor, most of the conscripts from Rodosto were assigned to the region’s labor battalions from fall 1914 on; very few managed to avoid them.18 Yet, the first arrests, which targeted the city’s notables, were not made until Monday, 20 September. Officially, it was a question of “punishing” people who were said to have “facilitated the Bulgarians’ entry into Terkirdağ” during the Balkan war. The day after they were arrested, these men and their families were put aboard trains bound for Anatolia.19 On Wednesday, 22 September, a second wave of arrests took place, targeting once again entrepreneurs such as the Keremian Brothers, Krikor Shushanian, the Jamjian brothers, Hovagim Karanfilian, Hovhannes Papazian, or the lawyer Bedros. All were immediately put on the road.20 Thereafter, the deportations took a more systematic form. They went on until 31 October and affected nearly 10,000 people, who followed the Istanbul-Konya-Bozanti-Aleppo route and ended up in the Syrian Desert. By 10 November, 3,000 more people had been expedited; only the families of a few dozen soldiers were spared.21 On 20 February 1916, a final group of 120 was sent to Ismit by ship, where it was then sent on its way to Syria.22
The soul of these operations was the former mutesarif of Tekirdağ and the interim vali of Edirne, Zekeria Zihni Bey, an Ittihadist of Circassian origins and a graduate of the Mulkiye.23 He was assisted by İsmail Sidki Bey, an evkaf official and CUP delegate in Rodosto, and also by two local Unionists, Ahmed Hilmi Bey and İbrahimzâde Ahmed Tevfik. The mutesarif also benefited from the collaboration of Kâzım Bey, his assistant; Ömer Naci, Rodosto’s mufti; Mehmed Effendi, a civil servant employed in the Registrar’s Office; Nahir Bey, a captain in the fortress; Arif Bey, the head of the Department of Public Education; Ziya Bey, the head of the Agriculture Department; Remzi Bey, the head of the Department of the Public Debt; and Ferdi Bey, the head of the Tobacco Régie. Among those implicated in the pillage of Armenian property, we must note, above all, the activities of Sahir Bey, the president of the committee responsible for “abandoned property”; İbrahim Nâzım Bey Zâde, the auctioneer; and Süleyman Bey, Fuad Bey, Haci Mehmed, and Tutunci Eyub Osman, members of the committee. Among the military men, Natan Bey, the commander of the local brigade; Haci Hüseyin Bey Baban, the head of the military workshops; Derviş Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie in Rodosto; and Mehmed Bey, the Head of the Recruitment Office, carried out the deportations. The men were arrested and tortured by Tahir Bey, Rodosto’s police chief, who was responsible for recruiting the squadrons of the Special Organization. He was assisted in turn by Süleyman Bey and Ali Rıza Bey, the assistant police chiefs; Sandalci Hasan Bey; Nusret Bey; Fehmi Bey, the son of the parliamentary deputy Haci Adıl Bey; Hilmi Bey, a lawyer; Haci Norheddin; Selanikli Haci Mehmed; and Selanikli Haci Hilmi.24
According to statistics published by the Armenian Patriarchate, approximately 3,500 Armenians from Rodosto survived the deportations.25
Deportations in the Kazas of Çorlu and Gallipoli
What we know of the fate of the Armenians of Çorlu is that they too were deported rather late, on 15 October 1915, initially by ship to Ismit, and then on foot or by rail to Bozanti and Syria via Konya.26 Among those chiefly responsible for the exactions perpetrated in Çorlu were, of course, the Unionists and çetes who were active in Tekirdağ as well. Among the Ittihadists, the main instigators of these exactions were Sandalci Hasan Bey; Nusret Bey; Rahmi Bey, the son of the parliamentary deputy Ali Bey; Tahir Bey; Hilmi Bey, a lawyer; Furuncizâde Fuad; Ahkincizâde Haci Nusreddin; Selanikli Haci Mehmed; and Selanikli Kanlı Hilmi. Among the civilian and military officials, we should note the roles played by Ali Sakıb Bey, the kaymakam of Çorlu; Cemal Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Eşref Hasan Bey, Cemal’s second in command; General Osman Nuri Bey, the head of the railroad; Mehmed Nesip Bey, a judge; Şefik Bey, the police chief; Enver Effendi, the president of the municipality; Dr. Mustafa, a municipal physician; and Rahim Effendi, a tax collector. The committee responsible for “abandoned property” was in the hands of Zöhdi Bey, a lawyer; Mehmed Nazmi Halim; Ağazâde; and Mehmed Şefik Yegenzâde.27
The fate of the Armenians of the peninsula of Gallipoli was sealed in early April 1915. When the battle for the Dardanelles began, they were temporarily transferred to Biğa and Lapsaki, and, later, deported.28
According to an Armenian source, several thousand of the more than 30,000 Armenians of the vilayet of Edirne escaped deportation thanks to the energetic intervention of the Bulgarian authorities.29
Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Biğa/Dardanelles
In 1914, the Armenian presence in the Dardanelles was limited to some 2,500 people, half of whom lived in Çanak Kale and the environs. This port, long simply a fortress defending the entry to the Sea of Marmara, had gradually grown in size and importance, attracting artisans and merchants who had come from Persia in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Armenians in the rest of the peninsula were to be found in 1914 in Ezin (pop. 670), Ayvacık, Bayramiş (pop. 200), Biğa (pop. 409), and Lapsaki.30 As in the case of the Armenians of Gallipoli, the battle for the Dardanelles precipitated an evacuation of the district’s entire civilian population. The Armenians were later deported to Syria.31