In 1915, there were 25 Armenian villages in the last kaza on the north shore of Lake Van – the one furthest west, Adilcevaz/Ardzge, which had a total population of 6,460.
As we have already seen, Rafaël de Nogales, a captain who had been assigned to the Third Army, arrived in Adilcevaz on the evening of 20 April, where he witnessed the massacre of the 500 Armenians who lived in the administrative seat of the kaza.
The next morning, he watched as their quarter was looted and then burned down on direct orders from the kaymakan, who “thanked me effusively for having saved the town from the tremendous Armenian attack.”
The villages of the kaza of Adilcevaz had already come under attack on 19 April.
In Norshechur, 40 men managed to flee to a mixed Kurdish-Armenian village, Kızıl Yusuf, located in the neighboring kaza of Manazgerd/Melazkırt (in the vilayet of Bitlis), where the massacres had yet to begin.
The kaymakam of Adilcevaz, however, sent gendarmes after them; they killed the 40 fugitives in the village. It thus appears that the orders received from Erzerum and Istanbul concerned only the Armenians of the vilayet of Van, and not at all those of the neighboring districts.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, p. 324.
