In exterminating the Armenians of Turkey, the CUP sought to wipe out the Armenian cultural leadership as early as possible. By killing the cultural and community leaders, the Young Turks hoped to silence Armenia’s most accomplished and potent civic voices. The plan was to eliminate all Armenian writers, political activists, artists, teachers, and church and civic leaders. The able-bodied men were being massacred in the labor battalions of the Ottoman infantry as early as the winter of 1915, and if the cultural leadership could be silenced in the spring and summer, the CUP hoped to render the Armenians totally helpless and vulnerable.
What happened on the night of April 24, 1915, in Constantinople was a seminal event in the Armenian Genocide, and it was part of a pattern that would be established all over Turkey as the genocide progressed. In cities, towns, and villages everywhere, Armenian cultural leaders were arrested, tortured, and killed as quickly as possible. Some who survived, like the distinguished composer and musicologist Gomidas Vartabed, went insane. In the end thousands of Armenian cultural leaders were killed, and the core of Armenia’s intellectual life was destroyed. In Van, Dr. Ussher recorded the roundup and arrests of Armenian professors and cultural leaders in late April and May 1915, and in Harput, American consul Leslie Davis reported that in June and July, Armenian intellectuals and professors were among the first to be imprisoned and murdered.
What happened in Constantinople was dramatic. Since the mid–nineteenth century the capital had been home to the richest and most influential Armenian community in the empire, and the center of Armenian intellectual and cultural life.1 This made it the obvious target for the CUP to begin its formal eradication of Armenian cultural leaders. On the night of April 24 and into the following day, about 250 cultural leaders were seized in a first round of arrests, and in the coming weeks another several hundred from the city and its vicinity would be arrested.
“On the night of Saturday, April 24, 1915,” the priest Krikoris Balakian wrote, “the Armenians in the capital were snoring in a calm sleep—exhausted from their Easter celebrations, there on the heights of Stambul near Hagia Sophia—while in the central police station a secret project was in motion.”2 Weeks earlier SO member and Constantinople chief of police Bedri had sent letters to all police officers containing the list of Armenians to be arrested—a list that had been compiled with the help of Armenian spies, most notably one Artin Mugerditchian.3
Krikoris Balakian wrote the most detailed and reliable account of the April 24 arrests in Constantinople. One of the 250 arrested on that night, he was sent to prison in the interior, escaped, and spent the next four years outwitting CUP officials. His memoir, Armenian Golgotha, is a vivid account of those four years and was written immediately after his escape from Turkey to Manchester, England, where he served for a while as pastor of the Armenian church there. A man of considerable learning, Balakian was an ordained priest and had done graduate study in architecture in Germany. He wrote several books on Armenian architecture, religion, and culture, and after several years in Manchester, went to France, where he became a bishop of the Armenian church, spending most of his remaining years in Marseilles.
On the evening of April 24, Armenian leaders were arrested all over the city and found themselves in large red military buses headed first to the military barracks at Selimiye, a town on Constantinople’s Asiatic side, and then by a steamboat “to the rocky shores of Sirkedji,” on the European side, where they were taken to the central prison. There, behind “gigantic fences and iron bolted gates,” they were led to a wooden shack in the center of the prison grounds, in which they sat stunned under the light of a lantern.4
Balakian describes the iron gates of the prison creaking open and shut all night, and watching as the familiar faces of friends and colleagues kept being shoved inside the shack. They were political leaders, public servants, and nonpartisan intellectuals. “Like some dream,” Balakian wrote, “it seemed as if on one night, all the prominent Armenians of the capital—assemblymen, representatives, progressive thinkers, reporters, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, and bankers—had made an appointment in those dim cells of the prison. More than a few people were still wearing their pajamas, robes, and slippers.”5
Another survivor of the Constantinople group of leaders, Dr. Khachig Boghosian, a physician, recalls being taken to that same central prison, where he too sat in disbelief.6 “So, here we were, the majority of the Armenian intellectuals and public figures of Constantinople.” Balakian recorded, “on the Sunday after Easter 1915, sitting in the central prison, scared and waiting for any news of help from anywhere. And we kept asking each other: why is this happening?”7
It wasn’t until the next evening that the warden checked off their names and they were marched by a troop of military police to the administration office. There they were searched, and the police confiscated “everything from us—money, small insignificant pieces of paper, pocket knives, pencils, diaries, even our umbrellas and canes, and always they pretended that they would be returning them to us later.”8 The military police then put them on buses in groups of twenty—with about a dozen soldiers in each bus—and a caravan of military buses, led by the general police chief in his own car, proceeded from Hagia Sophia Boulevard toward Sirkedji.
Balakian described “the terror of death” that hung in the air of the bus, especially as they passed the rocky coast where in previous decades the sultan’s military police had thrown to their deaths hundreds of Armenian and Turkish intellectuals and political activists. The group was then put on a steamship that normally held about 65 people, but was now loaded down with about 250 Armenians and dozens of military police—young soldiers, commissars, army spies, and police officials of various ranks.9
They sailed out on the rough waters of the Sea of Marmara and finally landed at Haydar Pasha’s wharf, where they were marched out of the steamship in pairs to a huge embarkation station. As the ornate process continued, the Armenian leaders were then taken to a special train, which was, as Balakian put it, “waiting and ready to take us to the depths of Asia Minor, where, except for a few rare cases, we would all meet our deaths.
“With the lights out,” Balakian wrote, “the doors of the cars shut, and with police and military police posted everywhere, the train started. And so we began to move further and further away from the places of our lives, each of us leaving behind grieving and unprotected mothers, sisters, wives, children, possessions, wealth, and everything else. We headed out to a region unnamed and unfamiliar. To be buried forever.”10
Sometime past midnight an official on the train, who happened to be Armenian, whispered in Balakian’s ear: “Reverend Father, please write down the names of your arrested friends on this piece of paper and give it back to me.” The man then “slid a piece of paper and a pencil into my hand, and leaving the lamp by me, he went off to the busy policemen who were in charge of us…my heart was pounding and in haste I wrote, in the flickering dim light, the names I could remember, and slid the list back to the Armenian official.”11 It was at this point that Balakian began to bear witness in a more formal way, and perhaps the writing down of the names was part of the process that led him to write his memoir.
The train proceeded south along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and by dawn they were passing through Nicomedia (Izmit) and Bardizag. At dusk they came to the town of Eskishehir, where the Ankara and Konia railway lines separate, and then, after some delay and much apprehension among the prisoners, the train veered off toward Ankara. Around midday on Tuesday they arrived at the Sinjan Koy railroad station, near Ankara. At the station Ibrahim, the chief of the central prison, who had been with them since Constantinople, stood up and began to read off the list of names: “Silvio Ricci, Agnuni, Zartarian, Khazhag, Shahrigian, Jihangiulian, Dr. Daghavarian, Sarkis Minasian,” the names were shouted out. They were mostly progressive intellectuals, nonpolitical party people, conservatives, Balakian recalled, “some seventy-five in all. We were riveted on each name as it was called,” he wrote, “and then we kissed those who were leaving us. In that instant, we began to weep, and as one person wept, others began to weep too, and we had this feeling that we were being separated from each other forever.”12
The first group was taken to Ayash, northwest of Ankara, while Balakian’s group would be taken to Chankiri, to the northeast of Ankara. In both places the men were imprisoned, tortured, and most of them killed in the subsequent few months in the desolate countryside of the region.13 Balakian describes many of their deaths, among them the murders of the famous poet Daniel Varoujan and the novelist and Ottoman parliament member Krikor Zohrab. Varoujan and four colleagues had been with Balakian in prison in Chankiri, and on Thursday August 12, Jemal Oguz, the CUP responsible secretary, telegraphed the police guard office on the Chankiri-Kaylajek road to inform them of the coming of the deportees. When the carriages carrying Varoujan and his colleagues reached the Chankiri-Kalayjek road, they were ambushed by four Kurdish chetes. “The whole thing,” Balakian wrote, “had been arranged in advance, and in secret.”14
The chetes then took the five Armenians to a nearby creek, undressed them, and folded up their clothing for themselves. Then “they began to stab them to death, slashing their arms and legs and genitals, and ripping apart their bodies.” Only the thirty-three-year-old Daniel Varoujan tried to defend himself, and this provoked the killers further; they not only “tore out his entrails, but dug out the eyes of this great Armenian poet.”15 The killers then divided the pillage among themselves, taking more than 450 Ottoman gold pieces that were sewn into the clothing of Dr. Chillingerian and Onnig Maghazadjian. They paid off the police, and after dividing up the belongings, left in the carriages.16
Balakian learned the details of the killings from one of the Turkish carriage drivers—the twenty-year-old son of the local bathhouse keeper—who returned to Chankiri depressed and shaken. Sobbing as he spoke, he said to the Armenian priest, “I don’t want to be in this trade anymore. I’m going to sell my horse and carriage and get out of this town. I don’t want this kind of profit.” When the carriages returned to Chankiri without Varoujan and the others on Friday, the news of their murders spread terror among the deportees and the Armenian families of the town. The interim governor, who had guaranteed that the men would reach Ankara safely, went immediately to Tuney (the town where they were killed) with the chief of police from Kastamouni and an investigative team. There, they “found the five dead men in unrecognizable condition in the creek.”17
Dr. Boghosian described similar scenes. His group of deportees was led out of the Chankiri prison, he recorded, on Assumption Sunday in August 1915. Marched out of town, tied to each other by ropes, and joined with a group of several hundred more men, they were sent out into the “bright moonlit night,” with three carts filled with “spades, hoes, pickaxes, and shovels.” Along the way more than two dozen of them were killed by the gendarmes, who bludgeoned them to death with their rifles. They were spared for the moment when a Turkish captain redirected their caravan south to Kayseri. Along that route more than 200 died of starvation and dysentery—familiar ways of dying in the extermination process.18 Most of them would die in the coming months, but Dr. Boghosian, like Krikoris Balakian, was among the lucky survivors.
What happened to these deported Armenian cultural leaders happened to Armenian intellectuals all over Turkey. In this calculated way the CUP destroyed a vital part of Armenia’s cultural infrastructure, and succeeded in practically silencing a whole generation of Armenian writers. The death toll shows that at least eighty-two writers are known to have been murdered, in addition to the thousands of teachers and cultural and religious leaders. It was an apocalypse for Armenian literature, which was in its own moment of a modernist flowering. Daniel Varoujan, Siamanto (Adam Yarjanian), Krikor Zohrab, Levon Shant, Gomidas (Soghomon Soghomonian), and many others had taken Armenian poetry, fiction, drama, and music into a new era. Fortunately many of the poems, novels, plays, and essays survived and are an important part of the Armenian literary tradition today.19 But it may nevertheless be that the Young Turk government’s extermination of Armenian intellectuals in 1915 was the most extensive episode of its kind in the twentieth century. In many ways it became a paradigm for the silencing of writers by totalitarian governments in the ensuing decades of the century. After April 24 it would be easier to carry out the genocide program, for many of the most gifted voices of resistance were gone.