CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XIV.THE REIGN OF TERROR—HARPOOT AND ZEITOUN.The Harpoot massacre was another butchery carried out under orders. Sixty Christians fled to a church in the vain hope that its walls would furnish them a shelter against those who were crying for the blood of Armenians. They were permitted for a time to believe themselves secure, but suddenly the church was surrounded by a great number of Kurds. The doors were then blown in, and the Christians thought that they would be massacred within the sacred structure. They were not. Their captors took them one at a time outside the church, and there, heedless of the cries for mercy from women and children, killed them, either by shooting or stabbing them. The first victim was the Protestant pastor of the church, who, as he was dragged out, bade the others, if they had to die, to die as Christians. He met his death like a martyr. Some of the refugees, in a very agony of terror, offered to abjure their faith and accept Islamism, thinking thus to save their lives. The offers availed them nothing, for their insatiable enemies, after accepting them, dragged the converts out and killed them one by one. The Armenian Church was turned into a mosque, and the Protestant Church into a stable.An eyewitness who saw the Christian quarter in flames and the houses of the American mission burning, said that he came on to Malatia (the ancient Melitene),and found not a house in the Christian quarter standing. In a khan there were about twenty wounded men, the sole survivors of a caravan of two hundred who had been traveling to Harpoot from Northern Syria and whose members had nearly all been slain by the Kurdish bands. There were one hundred and fifty bodies lying in the road. At Marash, the same witness, days after the massacre, counted eighty-seven dead Armenians in one spot, and there were hundreds of bodies strewn around in the near neighborhood. In the villages on the plains near Harpoot, each containing from fifty to one thousand houses, the evidences of slaughter were sickeningly abundant. The Kurdish butchers had slain fully half the population. The door of a house would be burst open, a volley fired upon the shuddering inmates, while those who rushed out were caught and killed in the fields. Then the houses were plundered, fired and left blazing. This was the fate of thousands of Christian homes.Several thousand Armenian Christians fell in the city of Harpoot under Kurdish and Turkish swords. In the Province of Harpoot were hundreds of small towns and villages, few of which escaped the terrible fate of slaughter and desolation that befell over two thousand other towns and villages throughout the country.Harpoot is one of the principal stations of the Eastern Turkey Mission, and is the seat of Euphrates College, a group of buildings, eight of which were badly wrecked during the riots. This institution had about five hundred and sixty-four pupils in all its departments, and was exerting a powerful influence for good throughout Eastern Turkey.It was estimated that the loss would not be less than$88,000. At Marash, the destruction of mission buildings was more complete. The Central Turkey Girls’ College and the Theological Seminary were both wrecked. There were in the former institution (which was organized in 1884), about thirty-five students. Both buildings were located a little distance outside of Marash.In February, 1896, the United States Minister, Mr. Terrell, demanded an indemnity of $100,000 for the burning and pillaging of the American missions at Marash and Harpoot. He also asked for the immediate granting of firmans for the rebuilding of them.Rev. Grigos Hachadoovian, the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Harpoot, when the Turkish soldiers commenced shooting all over the city, took his wife and children and went to church, where about sixty of his congregation joined him. Naturally good and earnest Christians as they were, they lifted their voices up to heaven for help. While in prayer the Turks rushed in and demanded of the minister to become a Mohammedan then and there, with his congregation. He refused promptly. The Turks removed the pulpit, made a butchering platform, cut off the head of the minister and actually cut him to pieces before his congregation. Mind you on the platform from which he had preached Christ for twenty years. This horrible spectacle had no effect upon the devout Christian Armenians, as they all refused to denounce Christ and pray to Mohammed, and all were killed in the church to the last man, woman and child. What do you think of that picture, Christian people of America? That is the Mohammedanism some people would like to have introduced into our county.Letters received from persons engaged in relief work among the Armenians, gave the following carefully prepared statistics concerning the recent massacres by the Turks under the tolerance of Christian powers in the year of our Lord, 1895–6. These statistics were given in detail for the several villages in Harpoot province.“Killed, thirty thousand six hundred and one; burned to death, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six; preachers and priests killed, fifty-one; died from starvation, two thousand four hundred and sixty-one; died unprotected in the fields, four thousand three hundred and forty; died from fear, six hundred and sixty; wounded, eight thousand; houses burned, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-two; forcibleconversions, fifteen thousand and sixty-six; women and girls abducted, five thousand five hundred and forty-six: forcible marriages, one thousand five hundred and fifty-one; churches burned, two hundred and twenty-seven; destitute and starving, ninety-four thousand seven hundred and fifty.” The account does not add the number of English and American cannon with the cobwebs left over their mouths. The Turks said that they killed too few the last time, and would kill more in the next massacre.When the Kurds were expelled from Diarbekir and the gates closed against them, they turned their attention to the villages. These, one after another, were taken, plundered, and in many instances, burned—massacre being generally in proportion to the degree of resistance made by the villagers. A district about ninety miles long and fifty broad, east of Diarbekir, and up to the boarders of Syert, in the vilayet ofBitlis, was swept by this hurricane of destruction, wherever Christian villages nestled among the billows of this rolling country. The first intimation that the wave of wanton wreckage was moving southward was given in the attack upon Tel-Ermin. This Armenian town of two hundred houses and sixty shops, five hours west of Mardin, was taken, plundered and burned. The next day Gorli, a Syrian village south of Mardin, and only two hours away, shared the same fate. About the same time the village of Abrahamiyeh fell into the hands of the Kurds and only Monsoruyeh, twenty miles north of the city remained intact. This they tried to capture, but were driven back. Serious attempts were made by the Kurds to enter the city in the hope that they would be aided from within. In this they were disappointed and obliged to draw off with severe loss. The Kurds persistently asserted that a firman for the slaughter of Christians had been given, but that the Christians of Mardin had bribed the government to conceal it and defend them. When the Kurds realized that the government and city garrison were a unit for the common defence, they drew off and the tide of attack swept further east taking Nisibin, and some twenty Christian villages in its way. Thousands of refugees collected near Mardin. In the village of Kulleth, three hundred refugees from the Diarbekir plain were begging food and clothing. The entire Christian population remaining in Syert was stripped of everything.Fully three thousand Armenians were massacred at Arabkir, and the widows and orphans of those killed were left in terrible distress from cold and hunger.The Armenians of Sivas and Cæsarea were in daily fear of massacre, and soon their fears were terribly realized,for the Kurds and Turks thoroughly performed their inhuman work of butchery and plunder, the former taking the booty as their pay, according to the permission granted from Constantinople.In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil, Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils, and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages, especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed, the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there is no sign that such places existed.At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders, who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a districtnot far from Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York, thus told the story:“You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women who would not accept Mohammedism.“They took all the articles which were useful and broke everything they had no use for. They tore up every place in the hope of finding something valuable.”A letter received from an Armenian resident on the seacoast of Cilicia, said:“The government has taken away all the arms from the Armenians of Chok Marsovan, who were armed to protect themselves against fifteen thousand Bashi-Bazouks, who were marching on them. Since then the Turks have reduced to ashes the villages of Engerli and Ojakli, which contained respectively three hundred and two hundred and fifty houses. They have plundered seventy-five houses in the Armenian village of Najarli. They set on fire the houses in the presence of the regular soldiers. Now all the villagers are reduced tothe utmost distress. More than one hundred farms have been plundered, and many people butchered in the houses and in the gardens.”Every account from survivors of the massacres who succeeded in reaching places of safety, disclosed some new and revolting trait of Moslem ferocity and hatred against Christianity. A veritable crusade of Mohammedan fanaticism ruled the hour. Whole villages and towns, and whole Christian quarters in cities were driven like helpless sheep into the Moslem fold.Aintab, a city of forty-five thousand inhabitants had its baptism of blood. The massacre and pillage began in the markets and in those parts of the city where Christian houses offered easy points of attack, crowds rushed in every direction while pistol and gun shots with cries of fear, anger and defiance made an exhibition of the most fearful tumult and confusion.After the Kurds and Turkish soldiers of Harpoot had plundered and burned nearly all of the Christian houses in the missionary quarter of the city, including eight of the mission buildings which were then in flames, when massacre was rife and the air was rent with the cry of the wounded and dying, nearly five hundred Christian refugees with the missionaries, driven from place to place by fire and bullet, found themselves in the large, new stone building of Euphrates College. The Turkish officers, seeing that in order to reach the refugees they must withdraw the Americans whom they feared to kill, attempted to induce the missionaries to come out from the building “that they might be the better protected.” Dr. Barnum (a missionary for thirty-nine years) replied, “You can protect us here better than anywhere else; we shall remainand if you burn the building we will die with these Christians.” They were all spared. Certainly the age of heroism is not past.The city of Oorfa is one of the most ancient in the world. It is the Edessa of the time of Christ where Abgar reigned as King (see Chapter I.)—the Ur of Chaldea, where the patriarch Abraham was born.It was one of the great heathen cities to which the disciples went immediately after Pentecost and where they were most gladly received. In this city, on October 27th, 1895, began an awful slaughter, which continued for two days. When the massacre was yet proceeding, a Muezzin ascended to the steeple of the Armenian church and began to call the faithful to prayer. During the two days’ disturbance three thousand Christians were slaughtered by a single Hamidieh regiment and a force of Bedouins and all their property was either looted or destroyed. Among other horrors, one hundred and fifty wounded Armenians were thrown down a well and petroleum having been poured over them the whole mass of human beings were set on fire and perished in most awful agony.For two months, the Christian population of Oorfa experienced all the vicissitudes of a veritable “Reign of Terror.” During all this time the Christians ventured beyond the precincts of their own homes only at the risk of their lives. Nor were they secure even in their homes. For six or seven weeks the soldiers of the government went from house to house almost daily, and after forcing an entrance, offered the inmates the option of becoming Moslems, or being killed on the spot.When the general onslaught began on December29th, the Christians sought the refuge of their churches and every other possible place which they hoped might shelter them from the fury of their fiendish assailants. Many took refuge in wells, some under manure heaps, while others had their friends cover them under piles of charcoal. For some of these their shelters proved to be a living grave. Two hundred and forty-six persons took refuge in the home of the American Missionary, Miss Shattuck.During the six weeks immediately following the first massacre, this devoted missionary heroine was obliged to keep all but constant vigil, and was unable through all this time to undress even once, and retire to her room for a night’s rest. Any rest or sleep obtained was on a lounge and for but short intervals, while others kept watch.This church was built entirely of stone and may be said to be absolutely fire-proof. It was to this edifice from fifteen hundred to two thousand of the people fled when the general massacre began, and the story of what took place within its walls on that awful day will never be fully known. These nearly two thousand victims were at the mercy of the merciless soldiers and the worse than merciless mob. The soldiers were first to enter, but they soon allowed the promiscuous rabble to follow and share with them in the carnival of debauchery and blood. The fiendish fanaticism of these Moslems had its climax in setting fire to the victims of their wild fury. There being no wood finishing on the inside of the church, and little or no inflammable furnishings, one can only conjecture how they succeeded in transforming this multitude of human sacrifices into the great mass of bones and ashes to which they wereall reduced by the following morning. For two or three days afterward a number of hammals (Turkish porters), were engaged in carrying the bones and charred remains of these victims from the church to a place close in the rear of the American mission premises, where they were dumped over a portion of the old wall of the city.Apart altogether from those killed and burned in the church, the bodies of over one thousand five hundred by actual count were dragged, usually by the legs, and in considerable numbers at a time, by animals, to a large trench dug for the purpose on the outskirts of the city. There they lie in one, irregular mass, awaiting the day when all wrongs shall be righted.As many as three hundred bodies were taken from one of the large cistern wells some days after the massacre, while another furnished over fifty and yet another about thirty. Scarcely a single Gregorian or Protestant home escaped the general pillage and bloodshed and the total number of victims in this last massacre in Oorfa must now be put down at four thousand.Read this farewell which seemed to come out from the tombs of the dead:Some days before the massacre at Oorfa the Armenians were warned that it was impending, but the officials prevented them from leaving the town. During the suspense the Gregorian clergy compiled a letter which they sent secretly to Aintab, whence it was forwarded to Europe. The Arch Priest Stephen and four other priests were subsequently slain before the altar while celebrating the Eucharist. The letter contained messages to the Sultan and to the Gregorian’s Moslem fellow-countrymen, and reproached their Europeanbrethren for standing by, watching the bloody work. It also contained the following:“To the Christians of the United States of America we say farewell. We have been strenuously opposed to your mission work among us, but these bloody days have shown that some of our Protestant brethren have been staunch defenders of our honor and our faith. You, at least, know that our crime, in the eyes of the Turk, has been that we adopted the civilization you commended to us. Behold now the missions and schools which you planted among us, at the cost of many millions of dollars and hundreds of precious lives! They are in ruins, and the Turk is planning to rid himself of the missionaries and teachers by leaving them nobody among whom to labor.”Zeitoun has the glory of being the only town that successfully resisted the Turkish troops and secured for itself an honorable capitulation.Peace having been secured through the Consuls of the various Powers, it was believed that the terms of the amnesty granted by the Porte would honestly be fulfilled.It would not have been a very easy thing to hush up another massacre, and if one had occurred it might at last have aroused the Powers that (ought to) be to some decisive action.The town of Zeitoun lies several hours’ journey over the mountains, to the north of Marash. Secluded in a deep valley, it is well protected on all four of the roads leading into it and could be defended against very great odds if there were a small force at each narrow pass.The Zeitounlis had early determined to make a standfor their lives and had succeeded in capturing the barracks, which are situated just at the edge of the town, after an attack of sixty hours and taking prisoners nearly six hundred Turkish soldiers, and then they proceeded to garrison and provision the town for a siege.In one of the battles which took place at Hot Springs, some five miles east of the city, the Zeitounlis made a stand at a stone bridge which there spans a rushing torrent. But after holding it bravely for awhile they slowly retreated up a steep hill until almost the entire Turkish army had crossed the bridge, when suddenly the bridge was blown up and the Zeitounlis turning, hurled down from the hills above great rocks and poured upon them a most destructive fire. Hemmed in as they were the loss was very great. The Turkish account was that fire burst out from the air or from the ground and destroyed the army. Seven distinct attacks were made in which the losses as sent through official sources to the Porte were placed at ten thousand men.On February 9th, 1896, the Porte communicated to the embassies of the Powers its reply to the proposals of the Zeitounlis for conditions of surrender. The Porte promised a satisfactory settlement, and on the 13th the terms were announced. Terrible distress and illness prevailed in the city as the consequence of the siege. Thousands died of cold and starvation.How the Turk began on the first day of 1896 to keep the oft repeated promises made to the Powers of Europe, was best told in the following account of the massacre at Birijik (province of Aleppo).“The assault on the Christian houses commenced at about nine o’clock in the morning, and continued until nightfall. The soldiers were aided by the Moslems ofthe city in the terrible work. The object at first seemed to be mainly plunder, but, after the plunder had been secured, the soldiers seemed to make a systematic search for men, to kill those who were unwilling to accept Mohammedanism. The cruelty used to force men to become Moslems was terrible. In one case the soldiers found some twenty people, men, women and children, who had taken refuge in a sort of cave. They dragged them out, and killed all the men and boys because they would not become Moslems.“After cutting down one old man who had thus refused they put live coals upon his body, and, as he was writhing in torture, they held a Bible before him and asked him mockingly to read them some of the promises in which he had trusted. Others were thrown into the river while still alive, after having been cruelly wounded. The wounded and children of this party were loaded up like goods upon the backs of porters and carried off to the houses of Mussulmans.“Christian girls were eagerly sought after, and much quarreling occurred over the question of their division among their captors. Every Christian house, except two claimed to be owned by Turks, was plundered. Ninety-six men were killed, or about half of the adult Christian men. The others became Mussulmans to save their lives, so that there was not a single Christian left in Birijik. The Armenian Church was made into a mosque and the Protestant Church into a Medresse Seminary.”Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.Massacres went on actively in Armenia for over sixteen months, dating from the terrible slaughter at Sassoun in August and September, 1894. A low estimate of those either killed, or in a state of actual starvation,was half the agricultural population of seven vilayets—two hundred and seventy-five thousand, according to Turkish statistics, two-thirds of the starving being women and children. The government completed its work in the vilayets by reducing the population and the remaining property under the forms of martial law, and by forcing the Armenians to declare themselves Mohammedans. Many died for their faith, but the greater number still held out, dying by inches.Turkish estimates, which, as can be readily understood, did not magnify the massacres, gave the following as the net result of the sanguinary work up to the middle of December:Armenian population in larger towns177,700Armenian population in villages538,500Number killed in towns (estimated)20,000Number of Armenian villages (about)3,300Villages destroyed2,500Number killed in villages, no data, but probably,60,000Number reduced to starvation in towns75,000Number reduced to starvation in villages366,600

CHAPTER XIV.THE REIGN OF TERROR—HARPOOT AND ZEITOUN.

The Harpoot massacre was another butchery carried out under orders. Sixty Christians fled to a church in the vain hope that its walls would furnish them a shelter against those who were crying for the blood of Armenians. They were permitted for a time to believe themselves secure, but suddenly the church was surrounded by a great number of Kurds. The doors were then blown in, and the Christians thought that they would be massacred within the sacred structure. They were not. Their captors took them one at a time outside the church, and there, heedless of the cries for mercy from women and children, killed them, either by shooting or stabbing them. The first victim was the Protestant pastor of the church, who, as he was dragged out, bade the others, if they had to die, to die as Christians. He met his death like a martyr. Some of the refugees, in a very agony of terror, offered to abjure their faith and accept Islamism, thinking thus to save their lives. The offers availed them nothing, for their insatiable enemies, after accepting them, dragged the converts out and killed them one by one. The Armenian Church was turned into a mosque, and the Protestant Church into a stable.An eyewitness who saw the Christian quarter in flames and the houses of the American mission burning, said that he came on to Malatia (the ancient Melitene),and found not a house in the Christian quarter standing. In a khan there were about twenty wounded men, the sole survivors of a caravan of two hundred who had been traveling to Harpoot from Northern Syria and whose members had nearly all been slain by the Kurdish bands. There were one hundred and fifty bodies lying in the road. At Marash, the same witness, days after the massacre, counted eighty-seven dead Armenians in one spot, and there were hundreds of bodies strewn around in the near neighborhood. In the villages on the plains near Harpoot, each containing from fifty to one thousand houses, the evidences of slaughter were sickeningly abundant. The Kurdish butchers had slain fully half the population. The door of a house would be burst open, a volley fired upon the shuddering inmates, while those who rushed out were caught and killed in the fields. Then the houses were plundered, fired and left blazing. This was the fate of thousands of Christian homes.Several thousand Armenian Christians fell in the city of Harpoot under Kurdish and Turkish swords. In the Province of Harpoot were hundreds of small towns and villages, few of which escaped the terrible fate of slaughter and desolation that befell over two thousand other towns and villages throughout the country.Harpoot is one of the principal stations of the Eastern Turkey Mission, and is the seat of Euphrates College, a group of buildings, eight of which were badly wrecked during the riots. This institution had about five hundred and sixty-four pupils in all its departments, and was exerting a powerful influence for good throughout Eastern Turkey.It was estimated that the loss would not be less than$88,000. At Marash, the destruction of mission buildings was more complete. The Central Turkey Girls’ College and the Theological Seminary were both wrecked. There were in the former institution (which was organized in 1884), about thirty-five students. Both buildings were located a little distance outside of Marash.In February, 1896, the United States Minister, Mr. Terrell, demanded an indemnity of $100,000 for the burning and pillaging of the American missions at Marash and Harpoot. He also asked for the immediate granting of firmans for the rebuilding of them.Rev. Grigos Hachadoovian, the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Harpoot, when the Turkish soldiers commenced shooting all over the city, took his wife and children and went to church, where about sixty of his congregation joined him. Naturally good and earnest Christians as they were, they lifted their voices up to heaven for help. While in prayer the Turks rushed in and demanded of the minister to become a Mohammedan then and there, with his congregation. He refused promptly. The Turks removed the pulpit, made a butchering platform, cut off the head of the minister and actually cut him to pieces before his congregation. Mind you on the platform from which he had preached Christ for twenty years. This horrible spectacle had no effect upon the devout Christian Armenians, as they all refused to denounce Christ and pray to Mohammed, and all were killed in the church to the last man, woman and child. What do you think of that picture, Christian people of America? That is the Mohammedanism some people would like to have introduced into our county.Letters received from persons engaged in relief work among the Armenians, gave the following carefully prepared statistics concerning the recent massacres by the Turks under the tolerance of Christian powers in the year of our Lord, 1895–6. These statistics were given in detail for the several villages in Harpoot province.“Killed, thirty thousand six hundred and one; burned to death, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six; preachers and priests killed, fifty-one; died from starvation, two thousand four hundred and sixty-one; died unprotected in the fields, four thousand three hundred and forty; died from fear, six hundred and sixty; wounded, eight thousand; houses burned, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-two; forcibleconversions, fifteen thousand and sixty-six; women and girls abducted, five thousand five hundred and forty-six: forcible marriages, one thousand five hundred and fifty-one; churches burned, two hundred and twenty-seven; destitute and starving, ninety-four thousand seven hundred and fifty.” The account does not add the number of English and American cannon with the cobwebs left over their mouths. The Turks said that they killed too few the last time, and would kill more in the next massacre.When the Kurds were expelled from Diarbekir and the gates closed against them, they turned their attention to the villages. These, one after another, were taken, plundered, and in many instances, burned—massacre being generally in proportion to the degree of resistance made by the villagers. A district about ninety miles long and fifty broad, east of Diarbekir, and up to the boarders of Syert, in the vilayet ofBitlis, was swept by this hurricane of destruction, wherever Christian villages nestled among the billows of this rolling country. The first intimation that the wave of wanton wreckage was moving southward was given in the attack upon Tel-Ermin. This Armenian town of two hundred houses and sixty shops, five hours west of Mardin, was taken, plundered and burned. The next day Gorli, a Syrian village south of Mardin, and only two hours away, shared the same fate. About the same time the village of Abrahamiyeh fell into the hands of the Kurds and only Monsoruyeh, twenty miles north of the city remained intact. This they tried to capture, but were driven back. Serious attempts were made by the Kurds to enter the city in the hope that they would be aided from within. In this they were disappointed and obliged to draw off with severe loss. The Kurds persistently asserted that a firman for the slaughter of Christians had been given, but that the Christians of Mardin had bribed the government to conceal it and defend them. When the Kurds realized that the government and city garrison were a unit for the common defence, they drew off and the tide of attack swept further east taking Nisibin, and some twenty Christian villages in its way. Thousands of refugees collected near Mardin. In the village of Kulleth, three hundred refugees from the Diarbekir plain were begging food and clothing. The entire Christian population remaining in Syert was stripped of everything.Fully three thousand Armenians were massacred at Arabkir, and the widows and orphans of those killed were left in terrible distress from cold and hunger.The Armenians of Sivas and Cæsarea were in daily fear of massacre, and soon their fears were terribly realized,for the Kurds and Turks thoroughly performed their inhuman work of butchery and plunder, the former taking the booty as their pay, according to the permission granted from Constantinople.In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil, Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils, and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages, especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed, the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there is no sign that such places existed.At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders, who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a districtnot far from Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York, thus told the story:“You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women who would not accept Mohammedism.“They took all the articles which were useful and broke everything they had no use for. They tore up every place in the hope of finding something valuable.”A letter received from an Armenian resident on the seacoast of Cilicia, said:“The government has taken away all the arms from the Armenians of Chok Marsovan, who were armed to protect themselves against fifteen thousand Bashi-Bazouks, who were marching on them. Since then the Turks have reduced to ashes the villages of Engerli and Ojakli, which contained respectively three hundred and two hundred and fifty houses. They have plundered seventy-five houses in the Armenian village of Najarli. They set on fire the houses in the presence of the regular soldiers. Now all the villagers are reduced tothe utmost distress. More than one hundred farms have been plundered, and many people butchered in the houses and in the gardens.”Every account from survivors of the massacres who succeeded in reaching places of safety, disclosed some new and revolting trait of Moslem ferocity and hatred against Christianity. A veritable crusade of Mohammedan fanaticism ruled the hour. Whole villages and towns, and whole Christian quarters in cities were driven like helpless sheep into the Moslem fold.Aintab, a city of forty-five thousand inhabitants had its baptism of blood. The massacre and pillage began in the markets and in those parts of the city where Christian houses offered easy points of attack, crowds rushed in every direction while pistol and gun shots with cries of fear, anger and defiance made an exhibition of the most fearful tumult and confusion.After the Kurds and Turkish soldiers of Harpoot had plundered and burned nearly all of the Christian houses in the missionary quarter of the city, including eight of the mission buildings which were then in flames, when massacre was rife and the air was rent with the cry of the wounded and dying, nearly five hundred Christian refugees with the missionaries, driven from place to place by fire and bullet, found themselves in the large, new stone building of Euphrates College. The Turkish officers, seeing that in order to reach the refugees they must withdraw the Americans whom they feared to kill, attempted to induce the missionaries to come out from the building “that they might be the better protected.” Dr. Barnum (a missionary for thirty-nine years) replied, “You can protect us here better than anywhere else; we shall remainand if you burn the building we will die with these Christians.” They were all spared. Certainly the age of heroism is not past.The city of Oorfa is one of the most ancient in the world. It is the Edessa of the time of Christ where Abgar reigned as King (see Chapter I.)—the Ur of Chaldea, where the patriarch Abraham was born.It was one of the great heathen cities to which the disciples went immediately after Pentecost and where they were most gladly received. In this city, on October 27th, 1895, began an awful slaughter, which continued for two days. When the massacre was yet proceeding, a Muezzin ascended to the steeple of the Armenian church and began to call the faithful to prayer. During the two days’ disturbance three thousand Christians were slaughtered by a single Hamidieh regiment and a force of Bedouins and all their property was either looted or destroyed. Among other horrors, one hundred and fifty wounded Armenians were thrown down a well and petroleum having been poured over them the whole mass of human beings were set on fire and perished in most awful agony.For two months, the Christian population of Oorfa experienced all the vicissitudes of a veritable “Reign of Terror.” During all this time the Christians ventured beyond the precincts of their own homes only at the risk of their lives. Nor were they secure even in their homes. For six or seven weeks the soldiers of the government went from house to house almost daily, and after forcing an entrance, offered the inmates the option of becoming Moslems, or being killed on the spot.When the general onslaught began on December29th, the Christians sought the refuge of their churches and every other possible place which they hoped might shelter them from the fury of their fiendish assailants. Many took refuge in wells, some under manure heaps, while others had their friends cover them under piles of charcoal. For some of these their shelters proved to be a living grave. Two hundred and forty-six persons took refuge in the home of the American Missionary, Miss Shattuck.During the six weeks immediately following the first massacre, this devoted missionary heroine was obliged to keep all but constant vigil, and was unable through all this time to undress even once, and retire to her room for a night’s rest. Any rest or sleep obtained was on a lounge and for but short intervals, while others kept watch.This church was built entirely of stone and may be said to be absolutely fire-proof. It was to this edifice from fifteen hundred to two thousand of the people fled when the general massacre began, and the story of what took place within its walls on that awful day will never be fully known. These nearly two thousand victims were at the mercy of the merciless soldiers and the worse than merciless mob. The soldiers were first to enter, but they soon allowed the promiscuous rabble to follow and share with them in the carnival of debauchery and blood. The fiendish fanaticism of these Moslems had its climax in setting fire to the victims of their wild fury. There being no wood finishing on the inside of the church, and little or no inflammable furnishings, one can only conjecture how they succeeded in transforming this multitude of human sacrifices into the great mass of bones and ashes to which they wereall reduced by the following morning. For two or three days afterward a number of hammals (Turkish porters), were engaged in carrying the bones and charred remains of these victims from the church to a place close in the rear of the American mission premises, where they were dumped over a portion of the old wall of the city.Apart altogether from those killed and burned in the church, the bodies of over one thousand five hundred by actual count were dragged, usually by the legs, and in considerable numbers at a time, by animals, to a large trench dug for the purpose on the outskirts of the city. There they lie in one, irregular mass, awaiting the day when all wrongs shall be righted.As many as three hundred bodies were taken from one of the large cistern wells some days after the massacre, while another furnished over fifty and yet another about thirty. Scarcely a single Gregorian or Protestant home escaped the general pillage and bloodshed and the total number of victims in this last massacre in Oorfa must now be put down at four thousand.Read this farewell which seemed to come out from the tombs of the dead:Some days before the massacre at Oorfa the Armenians were warned that it was impending, but the officials prevented them from leaving the town. During the suspense the Gregorian clergy compiled a letter which they sent secretly to Aintab, whence it was forwarded to Europe. The Arch Priest Stephen and four other priests were subsequently slain before the altar while celebrating the Eucharist. The letter contained messages to the Sultan and to the Gregorian’s Moslem fellow-countrymen, and reproached their Europeanbrethren for standing by, watching the bloody work. It also contained the following:“To the Christians of the United States of America we say farewell. We have been strenuously opposed to your mission work among us, but these bloody days have shown that some of our Protestant brethren have been staunch defenders of our honor and our faith. You, at least, know that our crime, in the eyes of the Turk, has been that we adopted the civilization you commended to us. Behold now the missions and schools which you planted among us, at the cost of many millions of dollars and hundreds of precious lives! They are in ruins, and the Turk is planning to rid himself of the missionaries and teachers by leaving them nobody among whom to labor.”Zeitoun has the glory of being the only town that successfully resisted the Turkish troops and secured for itself an honorable capitulation.Peace having been secured through the Consuls of the various Powers, it was believed that the terms of the amnesty granted by the Porte would honestly be fulfilled.It would not have been a very easy thing to hush up another massacre, and if one had occurred it might at last have aroused the Powers that (ought to) be to some decisive action.The town of Zeitoun lies several hours’ journey over the mountains, to the north of Marash. Secluded in a deep valley, it is well protected on all four of the roads leading into it and could be defended against very great odds if there were a small force at each narrow pass.The Zeitounlis had early determined to make a standfor their lives and had succeeded in capturing the barracks, which are situated just at the edge of the town, after an attack of sixty hours and taking prisoners nearly six hundred Turkish soldiers, and then they proceeded to garrison and provision the town for a siege.In one of the battles which took place at Hot Springs, some five miles east of the city, the Zeitounlis made a stand at a stone bridge which there spans a rushing torrent. But after holding it bravely for awhile they slowly retreated up a steep hill until almost the entire Turkish army had crossed the bridge, when suddenly the bridge was blown up and the Zeitounlis turning, hurled down from the hills above great rocks and poured upon them a most destructive fire. Hemmed in as they were the loss was very great. The Turkish account was that fire burst out from the air or from the ground and destroyed the army. Seven distinct attacks were made in which the losses as sent through official sources to the Porte were placed at ten thousand men.On February 9th, 1896, the Porte communicated to the embassies of the Powers its reply to the proposals of the Zeitounlis for conditions of surrender. The Porte promised a satisfactory settlement, and on the 13th the terms were announced. Terrible distress and illness prevailed in the city as the consequence of the siege. Thousands died of cold and starvation.How the Turk began on the first day of 1896 to keep the oft repeated promises made to the Powers of Europe, was best told in the following account of the massacre at Birijik (province of Aleppo).“The assault on the Christian houses commenced at about nine o’clock in the morning, and continued until nightfall. The soldiers were aided by the Moslems ofthe city in the terrible work. The object at first seemed to be mainly plunder, but, after the plunder had been secured, the soldiers seemed to make a systematic search for men, to kill those who were unwilling to accept Mohammedanism. The cruelty used to force men to become Moslems was terrible. In one case the soldiers found some twenty people, men, women and children, who had taken refuge in a sort of cave. They dragged them out, and killed all the men and boys because they would not become Moslems.“After cutting down one old man who had thus refused they put live coals upon his body, and, as he was writhing in torture, they held a Bible before him and asked him mockingly to read them some of the promises in which he had trusted. Others were thrown into the river while still alive, after having been cruelly wounded. The wounded and children of this party were loaded up like goods upon the backs of porters and carried off to the houses of Mussulmans.“Christian girls were eagerly sought after, and much quarreling occurred over the question of their division among their captors. Every Christian house, except two claimed to be owned by Turks, was plundered. Ninety-six men were killed, or about half of the adult Christian men. The others became Mussulmans to save their lives, so that there was not a single Christian left in Birijik. The Armenian Church was made into a mosque and the Protestant Church into a Medresse Seminary.”Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.Massacres went on actively in Armenia for over sixteen months, dating from the terrible slaughter at Sassoun in August and September, 1894. A low estimate of those either killed, or in a state of actual starvation,was half the agricultural population of seven vilayets—two hundred and seventy-five thousand, according to Turkish statistics, two-thirds of the starving being women and children. The government completed its work in the vilayets by reducing the population and the remaining property under the forms of martial law, and by forcing the Armenians to declare themselves Mohammedans. Many died for their faith, but the greater number still held out, dying by inches.Turkish estimates, which, as can be readily understood, did not magnify the massacres, gave the following as the net result of the sanguinary work up to the middle of December:Armenian population in larger towns177,700Armenian population in villages538,500Number killed in towns (estimated)20,000Number of Armenian villages (about)3,300Villages destroyed2,500Number killed in villages, no data, but probably,60,000Number reduced to starvation in towns75,000Number reduced to starvation in villages366,600

An eyewitness who saw the Christian quarter in flames and the houses of the American mission burning, said that he came on to Malatia (the ancient Melitene),and found not a house in the Christian quarter standing. In a khan there were about twenty wounded men, the sole survivors of a caravan of two hundred who had been traveling to Harpoot from Northern Syria and whose members had nearly all been slain by the Kurdish bands. There were one hundred and fifty bodies lying in the road. At Marash, the same witness, days after the massacre, counted eighty-seven dead Armenians in one spot, and there were hundreds of bodies strewn around in the near neighborhood. In the villages on the plains near Harpoot, each containing from fifty to one thousand houses, the evidences of slaughter were sickeningly abundant. The Kurdish butchers had slain fully half the population. The door of a house would be burst open, a volley fired upon the shuddering inmates, while those who rushed out were caught and killed in the fields. Then the houses were plundered, fired and left blazing. This was the fate of thousands of Christian homes.

Several thousand Armenian Christians fell in the city of Harpoot under Kurdish and Turkish swords. In the Province of Harpoot were hundreds of small towns and villages, few of which escaped the terrible fate of slaughter and desolation that befell over two thousand other towns and villages throughout the country.

Harpoot is one of the principal stations of the Eastern Turkey Mission, and is the seat of Euphrates College, a group of buildings, eight of which were badly wrecked during the riots. This institution had about five hundred and sixty-four pupils in all its departments, and was exerting a powerful influence for good throughout Eastern Turkey.

It was estimated that the loss would not be less than$88,000. At Marash, the destruction of mission buildings was more complete. The Central Turkey Girls’ College and the Theological Seminary were both wrecked. There were in the former institution (which was organized in 1884), about thirty-five students. Both buildings were located a little distance outside of Marash.

In February, 1896, the United States Minister, Mr. Terrell, demanded an indemnity of $100,000 for the burning and pillaging of the American missions at Marash and Harpoot. He also asked for the immediate granting of firmans for the rebuilding of them.

Rev. Grigos Hachadoovian, the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Harpoot, when the Turkish soldiers commenced shooting all over the city, took his wife and children and went to church, where about sixty of his congregation joined him. Naturally good and earnest Christians as they were, they lifted their voices up to heaven for help. While in prayer the Turks rushed in and demanded of the minister to become a Mohammedan then and there, with his congregation. He refused promptly. The Turks removed the pulpit, made a butchering platform, cut off the head of the minister and actually cut him to pieces before his congregation. Mind you on the platform from which he had preached Christ for twenty years. This horrible spectacle had no effect upon the devout Christian Armenians, as they all refused to denounce Christ and pray to Mohammed, and all were killed in the church to the last man, woman and child. What do you think of that picture, Christian people of America? That is the Mohammedanism some people would like to have introduced into our county.

Letters received from persons engaged in relief work among the Armenians, gave the following carefully prepared statistics concerning the recent massacres by the Turks under the tolerance of Christian powers in the year of our Lord, 1895–6. These statistics were given in detail for the several villages in Harpoot province.

“Killed, thirty thousand six hundred and one; burned to death, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six; preachers and priests killed, fifty-one; died from starvation, two thousand four hundred and sixty-one; died unprotected in the fields, four thousand three hundred and forty; died from fear, six hundred and sixty; wounded, eight thousand; houses burned, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-two; forcibleconversions, fifteen thousand and sixty-six; women and girls abducted, five thousand five hundred and forty-six: forcible marriages, one thousand five hundred and fifty-one; churches burned, two hundred and twenty-seven; destitute and starving, ninety-four thousand seven hundred and fifty.” The account does not add the number of English and American cannon with the cobwebs left over their mouths. The Turks said that they killed too few the last time, and would kill more in the next massacre.

When the Kurds were expelled from Diarbekir and the gates closed against them, they turned their attention to the villages. These, one after another, were taken, plundered, and in many instances, burned—massacre being generally in proportion to the degree of resistance made by the villagers. A district about ninety miles long and fifty broad, east of Diarbekir, and up to the boarders of Syert, in the vilayet ofBitlis, was swept by this hurricane of destruction, wherever Christian villages nestled among the billows of this rolling country. The first intimation that the wave of wanton wreckage was moving southward was given in the attack upon Tel-Ermin. This Armenian town of two hundred houses and sixty shops, five hours west of Mardin, was taken, plundered and burned. The next day Gorli, a Syrian village south of Mardin, and only two hours away, shared the same fate. About the same time the village of Abrahamiyeh fell into the hands of the Kurds and only Monsoruyeh, twenty miles north of the city remained intact. This they tried to capture, but were driven back. Serious attempts were made by the Kurds to enter the city in the hope that they would be aided from within. In this they were disappointed and obliged to draw off with severe loss. The Kurds persistently asserted that a firman for the slaughter of Christians had been given, but that the Christians of Mardin had bribed the government to conceal it and defend them. When the Kurds realized that the government and city garrison were a unit for the common defence, they drew off and the tide of attack swept further east taking Nisibin, and some twenty Christian villages in its way. Thousands of refugees collected near Mardin. In the village of Kulleth, three hundred refugees from the Diarbekir plain were begging food and clothing. The entire Christian population remaining in Syert was stripped of everything.

Fully three thousand Armenians were massacred at Arabkir, and the widows and orphans of those killed were left in terrible distress from cold and hunger.

The Armenians of Sivas and Cæsarea were in daily fear of massacre, and soon their fears were terribly realized,for the Kurds and Turks thoroughly performed their inhuman work of butchery and plunder, the former taking the booty as their pay, according to the permission granted from Constantinople.

In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil, Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils, and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages, especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed, the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there is no sign that such places existed.

At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders, who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.

The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.

Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a districtnot far from Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York, thus told the story:

“You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women who would not accept Mohammedism.

“They took all the articles which were useful and broke everything they had no use for. They tore up every place in the hope of finding something valuable.”

A letter received from an Armenian resident on the seacoast of Cilicia, said:

“The government has taken away all the arms from the Armenians of Chok Marsovan, who were armed to protect themselves against fifteen thousand Bashi-Bazouks, who were marching on them. Since then the Turks have reduced to ashes the villages of Engerli and Ojakli, which contained respectively three hundred and two hundred and fifty houses. They have plundered seventy-five houses in the Armenian village of Najarli. They set on fire the houses in the presence of the regular soldiers. Now all the villagers are reduced tothe utmost distress. More than one hundred farms have been plundered, and many people butchered in the houses and in the gardens.”

Every account from survivors of the massacres who succeeded in reaching places of safety, disclosed some new and revolting trait of Moslem ferocity and hatred against Christianity. A veritable crusade of Mohammedan fanaticism ruled the hour. Whole villages and towns, and whole Christian quarters in cities were driven like helpless sheep into the Moslem fold.

Aintab, a city of forty-five thousand inhabitants had its baptism of blood. The massacre and pillage began in the markets and in those parts of the city where Christian houses offered easy points of attack, crowds rushed in every direction while pistol and gun shots with cries of fear, anger and defiance made an exhibition of the most fearful tumult and confusion.

After the Kurds and Turkish soldiers of Harpoot had plundered and burned nearly all of the Christian houses in the missionary quarter of the city, including eight of the mission buildings which were then in flames, when massacre was rife and the air was rent with the cry of the wounded and dying, nearly five hundred Christian refugees with the missionaries, driven from place to place by fire and bullet, found themselves in the large, new stone building of Euphrates College. The Turkish officers, seeing that in order to reach the refugees they must withdraw the Americans whom they feared to kill, attempted to induce the missionaries to come out from the building “that they might be the better protected.” Dr. Barnum (a missionary for thirty-nine years) replied, “You can protect us here better than anywhere else; we shall remainand if you burn the building we will die with these Christians.” They were all spared. Certainly the age of heroism is not past.

The city of Oorfa is one of the most ancient in the world. It is the Edessa of the time of Christ where Abgar reigned as King (see Chapter I.)—the Ur of Chaldea, where the patriarch Abraham was born.

It was one of the great heathen cities to which the disciples went immediately after Pentecost and where they were most gladly received. In this city, on October 27th, 1895, began an awful slaughter, which continued for two days. When the massacre was yet proceeding, a Muezzin ascended to the steeple of the Armenian church and began to call the faithful to prayer. During the two days’ disturbance three thousand Christians were slaughtered by a single Hamidieh regiment and a force of Bedouins and all their property was either looted or destroyed. Among other horrors, one hundred and fifty wounded Armenians were thrown down a well and petroleum having been poured over them the whole mass of human beings were set on fire and perished in most awful agony.

For two months, the Christian population of Oorfa experienced all the vicissitudes of a veritable “Reign of Terror.” During all this time the Christians ventured beyond the precincts of their own homes only at the risk of their lives. Nor were they secure even in their homes. For six or seven weeks the soldiers of the government went from house to house almost daily, and after forcing an entrance, offered the inmates the option of becoming Moslems, or being killed on the spot.

When the general onslaught began on December29th, the Christians sought the refuge of their churches and every other possible place which they hoped might shelter them from the fury of their fiendish assailants. Many took refuge in wells, some under manure heaps, while others had their friends cover them under piles of charcoal. For some of these their shelters proved to be a living grave. Two hundred and forty-six persons took refuge in the home of the American Missionary, Miss Shattuck.

During the six weeks immediately following the first massacre, this devoted missionary heroine was obliged to keep all but constant vigil, and was unable through all this time to undress even once, and retire to her room for a night’s rest. Any rest or sleep obtained was on a lounge and for but short intervals, while others kept watch.

This church was built entirely of stone and may be said to be absolutely fire-proof. It was to this edifice from fifteen hundred to two thousand of the people fled when the general massacre began, and the story of what took place within its walls on that awful day will never be fully known. These nearly two thousand victims were at the mercy of the merciless soldiers and the worse than merciless mob. The soldiers were first to enter, but they soon allowed the promiscuous rabble to follow and share with them in the carnival of debauchery and blood. The fiendish fanaticism of these Moslems had its climax in setting fire to the victims of their wild fury. There being no wood finishing on the inside of the church, and little or no inflammable furnishings, one can only conjecture how they succeeded in transforming this multitude of human sacrifices into the great mass of bones and ashes to which they wereall reduced by the following morning. For two or three days afterward a number of hammals (Turkish porters), were engaged in carrying the bones and charred remains of these victims from the church to a place close in the rear of the American mission premises, where they were dumped over a portion of the old wall of the city.

Apart altogether from those killed and burned in the church, the bodies of over one thousand five hundred by actual count were dragged, usually by the legs, and in considerable numbers at a time, by animals, to a large trench dug for the purpose on the outskirts of the city. There they lie in one, irregular mass, awaiting the day when all wrongs shall be righted.

As many as three hundred bodies were taken from one of the large cistern wells some days after the massacre, while another furnished over fifty and yet another about thirty. Scarcely a single Gregorian or Protestant home escaped the general pillage and bloodshed and the total number of victims in this last massacre in Oorfa must now be put down at four thousand.

Read this farewell which seemed to come out from the tombs of the dead:

Some days before the massacre at Oorfa the Armenians were warned that it was impending, but the officials prevented them from leaving the town. During the suspense the Gregorian clergy compiled a letter which they sent secretly to Aintab, whence it was forwarded to Europe. The Arch Priest Stephen and four other priests were subsequently slain before the altar while celebrating the Eucharist. The letter contained messages to the Sultan and to the Gregorian’s Moslem fellow-countrymen, and reproached their Europeanbrethren for standing by, watching the bloody work. It also contained the following:

“To the Christians of the United States of America we say farewell. We have been strenuously opposed to your mission work among us, but these bloody days have shown that some of our Protestant brethren have been staunch defenders of our honor and our faith. You, at least, know that our crime, in the eyes of the Turk, has been that we adopted the civilization you commended to us. Behold now the missions and schools which you planted among us, at the cost of many millions of dollars and hundreds of precious lives! They are in ruins, and the Turk is planning to rid himself of the missionaries and teachers by leaving them nobody among whom to labor.”

Zeitoun has the glory of being the only town that successfully resisted the Turkish troops and secured for itself an honorable capitulation.

Peace having been secured through the Consuls of the various Powers, it was believed that the terms of the amnesty granted by the Porte would honestly be fulfilled.

It would not have been a very easy thing to hush up another massacre, and if one had occurred it might at last have aroused the Powers that (ought to) be to some decisive action.

The town of Zeitoun lies several hours’ journey over the mountains, to the north of Marash. Secluded in a deep valley, it is well protected on all four of the roads leading into it and could be defended against very great odds if there were a small force at each narrow pass.

The Zeitounlis had early determined to make a standfor their lives and had succeeded in capturing the barracks, which are situated just at the edge of the town, after an attack of sixty hours and taking prisoners nearly six hundred Turkish soldiers, and then they proceeded to garrison and provision the town for a siege.

In one of the battles which took place at Hot Springs, some five miles east of the city, the Zeitounlis made a stand at a stone bridge which there spans a rushing torrent. But after holding it bravely for awhile they slowly retreated up a steep hill until almost the entire Turkish army had crossed the bridge, when suddenly the bridge was blown up and the Zeitounlis turning, hurled down from the hills above great rocks and poured upon them a most destructive fire. Hemmed in as they were the loss was very great. The Turkish account was that fire burst out from the air or from the ground and destroyed the army. Seven distinct attacks were made in which the losses as sent through official sources to the Porte were placed at ten thousand men.

On February 9th, 1896, the Porte communicated to the embassies of the Powers its reply to the proposals of the Zeitounlis for conditions of surrender. The Porte promised a satisfactory settlement, and on the 13th the terms were announced. Terrible distress and illness prevailed in the city as the consequence of the siege. Thousands died of cold and starvation.

How the Turk began on the first day of 1896 to keep the oft repeated promises made to the Powers of Europe, was best told in the following account of the massacre at Birijik (province of Aleppo).

“The assault on the Christian houses commenced at about nine o’clock in the morning, and continued until nightfall. The soldiers were aided by the Moslems ofthe city in the terrible work. The object at first seemed to be mainly plunder, but, after the plunder had been secured, the soldiers seemed to make a systematic search for men, to kill those who were unwilling to accept Mohammedanism. The cruelty used to force men to become Moslems was terrible. In one case the soldiers found some twenty people, men, women and children, who had taken refuge in a sort of cave. They dragged them out, and killed all the men and boys because they would not become Moslems.

“After cutting down one old man who had thus refused they put live coals upon his body, and, as he was writhing in torture, they held a Bible before him and asked him mockingly to read them some of the promises in which he had trusted. Others were thrown into the river while still alive, after having been cruelly wounded. The wounded and children of this party were loaded up like goods upon the backs of porters and carried off to the houses of Mussulmans.

“Christian girls were eagerly sought after, and much quarreling occurred over the question of their division among their captors. Every Christian house, except two claimed to be owned by Turks, was plundered. Ninety-six men were killed, or about half of the adult Christian men. The others became Mussulmans to save their lives, so that there was not a single Christian left in Birijik. The Armenian Church was made into a mosque and the Protestant Church into a Medresse Seminary.”

Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.

Refugees and Policemen at an Armenian Church.

Massacres went on actively in Armenia for over sixteen months, dating from the terrible slaughter at Sassoun in August and September, 1894. A low estimate of those either killed, or in a state of actual starvation,was half the agricultural population of seven vilayets—two hundred and seventy-five thousand, according to Turkish statistics, two-thirds of the starving being women and children. The government completed its work in the vilayets by reducing the population and the remaining property under the forms of martial law, and by forcing the Armenians to declare themselves Mohammedans. Many died for their faith, but the greater number still held out, dying by inches.

Turkish estimates, which, as can be readily understood, did not magnify the massacres, gave the following as the net result of the sanguinary work up to the middle of December:

Armenian population in larger towns177,700Armenian population in villages538,500Number killed in towns (estimated)20,000Number of Armenian villages (about)3,300Villages destroyed2,500Number killed in villages, no data, but probably,60,000Number reduced to starvation in towns75,000Number reduced to starvation in villages366,600

Back to Index Next