Armenian Martyrs' Day
April 24, 1915 began the Armenian Genocide in Constantinople
On April 24, 1915, in Constantinople, the Young Turks began the ethnic cleansing, or genocide, of the Turkish Armenian population.
Armenians mark April 24th as “Armenian Martyrs’ Day” because on the day, in 1915, approximately 235 Armenian community leaders, artists, intellectuals, and businessmen were rounded up in the Turkish capital of Constantinople, taken from their families and, eventually, murdered. The event is often referred to as the “tripwire” of the first ethnic cleansing of the 20th Century.
Ultimately, the Turkish government, then led by a coalition of players collectively known as the “Young Turks,” were responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children. Those few that did not perish lost most of their extended family, their homes, their wealth and their livelihoods. The remaining Armenian population that had lived for thousands of years on the Anatolian Plain, in a region of Turkey once known as “Lesser Armenia,” were scattered in a Diaspora that has reached around the world.
These are matters of fact – not rumor, interpretation or folklore – as some revisionist Turkish historians have suggested. In addition to the thousands of survivor statements that have been collected and published over the years, there are hundreds of eyewitness accounts from missionaries, European merchants, Western teachers and professors, journalists, and even the U.S. Ambassador to the Turkey at the time, Henry Morgenthau. There are also thousands of photographs, bearing silent – if potent witness – to the terror.
Although Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the man known as modern Turkey’s Founding Father had not yet to come into power in 1915, a ruling triumvirate consisting of Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha were fully in charge of the Turkish government at the time. These three, with the approval of the aging, powerless – but still influential - Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the encouragement of the German government (who wielded great influence over the Young Turks) plotted a campaign to rid the country of all Christians and Jews in what was seen as a “Turkification” movement to foster a single Turkish national identity.
Some, like the thousands killed in Smyrna (now Izmir) in September 1924, when the Turkish Army moved into the Greek-occupied city and burned it nearly to the ground, setting fires in the Armenian, Jewish and Greek areas and trapping its inhabitants in the flames, were deliberately slaughtered.
Hundreds of thousands more died from the forced deportations, during which they were maltreated by their Turkish guards and allowed to be murdered, raped and tortured by bands of marauding Kurds and bandits, as they were forced to move in long caravans (with no provisions made for food, water or shelter) around the Anatolian desert. Of those that were “deported,” only a remnant actually survived to bear witness and to pass the story to their children and grandchildren.
And what of Enver, Talaat and Djemal? All three were ultimately convicted in absentia of war crimes in a Turkish tribunal held in July 1919. By the time of the trial, the three had fled to Germany.Talaat was killed on March 16,1921 on the street of a Berlin suburb, by an Armenian student, whose family had been murdered during the ethnic cleansing campaign Talaat and the others had orchestrated.
Enver eventually returned to Turkey and joined the Turkish nationalists. He became involved in a revolt by the Basmachi against the Bolsheviks and in the course of which he was killed, fighting with the White Russians against the Red Army on August 4, 1922; he was 40.
Djemal also eventually left German exile. After spending a brief period acting as a military advisor to Afghanistan, he was killed by Armenian assassins at Tbilisi on July 21, 1922.
While Armenians around the world remember their past and the pain, their essential culture is a celebration of a rich a wonderful history. To learn more about Armenian food, for example, and to try some recipes, please see: Yogurt Soup, Essential Armenian Food
Shish Kebab
