Note- According to the Constantinople’s Armenian Patriarchate’s Information Bureau, in the Vilayet of Erzerum, before the Armenian Genocide, the Armenians lived in 425 localities, had 406 churches and 76 monasteries, 322 schools with 21.348 schoolboys and schoolgirls. The total Armenian population was 202.391.
The third caravan left Erzerum on 29 June 1915. Made up of from 7,000 to 8,000 individuals, including 500 families from the Khodorchur district, it was conducted toward Bayburt and Erzincan. In Içkale, a ten-hour march from the city, 300 men were separated from the others and slain. Further on, in Kemah, all the remaining males were separated from the rest of the convoy and led into the gorges of the Euphrates, where they were supposed to be killed. However, hundreds of the men in this group defended themselves against the çetes’ attacks before finally surrendering. The famous Zeynel Bey later liquidated the survivors in a gorge south of Malatia. Only a few dozen women and children in this convoy ever reached Mosul.
The Fourth Convoy from Erzerum
The fourth caravan left Erzerum for Bayburt on 18 July. It was made up of 7,000 to 8,000 people, basically workers in military plants, the families of soldiers, army doctors and pharmacists, together with bishop Smpat Saadetian, the primate of the diocese, and Father Nerses, the prelate in Hasankale. Saadetian was one of the first victims in this group; the çetes made him dig his own grave in the Erzincan cemetery before “tearing him to pieces and tossing him into it” under the gaze of a Greek army veterinarian, M. Nikolai. The Special Organization’s well-oiled apparatus then took charge of the convoy: the men were dispatched in Kemah and the women and children in Harput. Roughly 300 survivors, including two men disguised as women, managed to reach Cezire and then Mosul.
Deportations from the Plain of Erzerum: the Kazas of Pasın, Tortum, Ispir and Erzerum As we have seen, the rural areas of the vilayet of Ererum were emptied of their Armenian population well before the cities. Most of the population of the sancak of Bayazid found refuge in the Caucasus, whereas the last villages of the Pasın district began to be “displaced toward the interior” late in March.
However, the towns and villages in Pasın lying near the Russian border that were evacuated in December 1914 or January 1915 were not spared atrocities. Half of the livestock (800 sheep, 1,400 cows, and 230 water buffalo) belonging to the villagers of Khosroveran, where 40 families earned a living mainly from animal husbandry, were seized during the military requisitions in fall 1914 without the compensation provided for by the law. Eleven men were massacred during the Turkish army’s retreat, the Mgrdichian family was Islamicized, seven people were killed while fleeing toward the Russian border, and five children were abandoned en route.
In the neighboring village of Ishkhu, where 1,100 Armenians lived before the war, 70 per cent of the community’s livestock (2,600 cows and 2,700 sheep) was confiscated to meet the army’s needs at the very outset of the mobilization. The village also contributed 45 conscripts and 20 to 30 porters to the war effort; the porters carried supplies to the front on their backs. Moreover, 30 adults were massacred on the spot during the January 1915 debacle, another 45 people died on the way to the Caucasus, and eight children were abandoned along the way.
We have only an indirect account about the kaza of Ispir, which comprised 17 small villages with a total Armenian population of 2,602. Thanks to this account, we know that these villagers were exterminated where they were found toward mid-June 1915 under the direct supervision of Bahaeddin Şakir and the çete leader Oturakci Şevket.
Of the fate of the 13 villages in the kaza of Tortum (pop. 2,829), where the Third Army had its headquarters, and the two neighboring localities in the kaza of Narman (pop. 458), we know nothing at all. At most, we can hazard a guess that the presence of Armenian peasants in the immediate vicinity of the army’s headquarters was not tolerated for long.
The complete absence of eyewitness reports even suggests that there were no survivors from these districts – that their fate was similar to Ispir’s. We know more about the fate of the 53 villages of the plain of Erzerum, with a total Armenian population of 37,480.
While the population of the localities in the immediate vicinity of Erzerum was deported at the same time as that of the city itself, those remaining, roughly 30,000 people, were deported in the direction of Mamahatun in three convoys, beginning on 16 May 1915. There seems, however, to be no geographical logic to the route taken by one of the three caravans, given the location of the deportees’ villages.
Inhabitants of localities west of Erzerum were put in the same convoy as inhabitants of others north of it. Thus, it is likely that the authorities’ strategy consisted – as in the case of the plain of Erzerum, to be discussed later – in making their system invulnerable to attack by treating the villages independently of each other, concentrating their forces on just a few villages or little towns at a time and evacuating villages located far apart from one another, probably to avoid all risk that the villagers would pool their forces and fight back.
The first convoy included the inhabitants of the villages of Chiftlig, Gez, Kararz/Ghararz, and Odzni; it seems to have reached Erzincan without losses. The second was made up of villagers from Ilija, Tsitogh, Mudurga, Hintsk, Tvnig, and a few other places; they were massacred as soon as they reached Mamahatun. The third and final convoy evacuated the peasants of Umudam, Badishen, Tarkuni, Ughdatsor, Norshen, Yergnis and a few other villages. A good many of its members were cut down in Piriz, a locality close to the banks of the Euphrates a short distance north of Tercan. A few survivors nevertheless managed to return to the plain, and eventually found refuge in the cathedral in Erzerum.
Unlike the convoys that left the city in June, these caravans passed directly through Mamahatun and proceeded to Erzincan without taking the route that led through Bayburt. That difference aside, the treatment meted out to them was much the same as that to which the other Armenians of the vilayet were subjected. Their numbers were first reduced as they passed through the Kemah gorge.
The survivors were then conducted toward Eğin and Malatia and massacred in the Kahta gorge. Finally, the remnants of the convoys arrived in the deserts near Rakka, Mosul, or Der Zor. Because Dersim was so close, a few hundred people managed to escape death by taking refuge with the Kurdish Zaza/Kızılbaş population of that district.
A few eyewitness accounts by survivors from these villages, collected after the arrival of Russian troops in the region in spring 1916, provide information about the experiences of the Dersim refugees. Thus, we learn that of the 2,050 people who lived in the village of Mudurga before the war, 36 saved their lives by fleeing to Dersim. As for the inhabitants of Shekhnots, which had a population of 700 before the deportation, there were no indications one year later that any had survived.
It seems that only a few women from Tuanch, which had 695 Armenian inhabitants, 50 of whom had been drafted, managed to survive in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Of the surviving inhabitants of Hinsk, we know of only three Islamicized families who reverted to their original faith after the Russians arrived, and 33 refugees who fled to Dersim. Seventy-five survivors from Otsni/Odzni arrived in Syria, and two more found refuge in Dersim.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 298-300.
