Birth of Maria Jacobsen (November 6, 1882)

Maria Jacobsen in Lebanon and Karen Jeppe in Syria. Two Danish missionaries among several colleagues who became surrogate mothers to the Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide, selflessly offering their entire life to them. In the meantime, they also became living testimony of what had happened in 1915.

Jacobsen was born in the town of Siim (central Denmark) on November 6, 1882. During her childhood, she lived in the town of Horsens, on the eastern coast of the country, with her parents. She learned about the Hamidian massacres (1895-1896) from the Danish media. Feminist activist Jessie Penn-Lewis, coming to Denmark from England in 1898, helped form the Women’s Missionary Workers (KMA; Danish: Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere ) two years later. The new organization supported Armenian orphans sheltered in German orphanages of Mush, Van, Marash, and Kharpert. After completing nursing courses, Maria Jacobsen became a member of KMA in 1906. She left for Kharpert the next year, at the age of twenty-five, as a missionary. She was appointed as director of a small hospital there, and in a short time she learned Armenian in order to communicate with local people. She started writing her 600-page valuable diary in September 1907 and would continue it for the next twelve years.

Jacobsen stated in an entry about the deportation of Armenians (June 26, 1915) that, “It is quite obvious that the purpose of their departure is the extermination of the Armenian people.” She added that what could have been done in 1895 was impossible twenty years later: “The Turks know very well about the war raging in Europe, and that the Christian nations are too busy to take care of Armenians, so they take advantage of the times to destroy their ‘enemies.’” Her diary mainly describes the deportation and exile of the Armenians of Kharpert, and scenes of murders perpetrated by the Turks from 1915-1919: “These poor people did not look like humans any more, not even animals could be found in this state, people would be merciful and kill them.” She reported that the Turkish authorities demanded to hand over the orphans from the American missionaries, but many of them were killed when this happened. During this period, Jacobsen adopted three children.

After World War I, with the support of Near East Relief workers, Maria Jacobsen gathered more than 3,600 Armenian wandering orphans, most of them suffering from infectious diseases and reduced to skeletons. In 1919 she left the Ottoman Empire after contracting typhus from the orphans. After going to Denmark, she was invited to visit the United States, where she had public lectures about the massacres and raised money for the orphans. She tried to go back to Kharpert in 1920-1921, but she was not allowed to enter the Ottoman Empire. She subsequently went to Lebanon, where she continued her activities.

In July 1922 she settled in Zouk Michail which was between the cities of Byblos and Beirut (this was the first orphanage of K.M.A.) with 208 children from Cilicia. They later moved to Saida. In 1928 K.M.A. acquired the building of the Armenian orphanage of Jbeil from the American Near East Relief, establishing the Danish orphanage “Birds’ Nest.” By its status “Birds’ Nest” was more like a school than an orphanage. The same subjects of public schools of Lebanon were taught, along with different crafts.

The Armenian orphans referred to Maria Jacobsen as “Mama Jacobsen.” She often read the Bible to the orphans in Armenian. Her humanitarian activities were deservedly acknowledged by her homeland. She was awarded the golden medal of the Danish Kingdom in 1950, becoming the first woman in the country who earned that highest state award. She was granted the Gold Medal of Honor by the Lebanese government in 1954 for her service and dedication to the Armenian community.

Maria Jacobsen died on April 6, 1960, and, according to her will, she was buried in the courtyard of the Birds' Nest. Her diary, which she had secretly smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire, was translated into Armenian and published in Danish original and Armenian translation in 1979. An English translation was published in 2001. Her bust was inaugurated in California in 2016 and a kindergarten in the town of Ijevan (Armenia) bears her name.

Birth of Yervant Odian (September 19, 1869)

A century and a half ago, “the greatest Armenian satirist born for laughter” after Hagop Baronian, in the words of novelist Shirvanzade, was born in Constantinople. Yervant Odian would surpass Baronian, the premier name in Armenian satirical literature, by the sheer number and variety of his works. His ability to write stories at any given instant was unique. Many of Odian’s works were published in daily installments, following the French model of the feuilleton, and some of them remained unpublished as books for long decades.

Born on September 19, 1869, Օdian grew up at the home of his uncle, the statesman and political figure Krikor Odian, where he witnessed the debates of famous literary names. He attended the Berberian Lyceum from 1882-1883, but he dropped out due to his weakness and completed his education with private tutors and insatiable reading in Armenian and French.

He started his literary career in 1887 with translations and literary studies. Five years later, he became assistant editor of the famous daily Hairenik of the Ottoman capital. He was producing a steady flow of chronicles, short stories, and novellas, drawing upon social and political issues. In 1896 Odian became editor of Hairenik, but in the same year, the persecutions and massacres started in Constantinople prompted him to leave the Ottoman Empire. For the next twelve years he would live as an exile in Greece, Paris, England, Austria, Egypt, and India, which he later portrayed in a memoir entitled Twelve Years Out of Constantinople (1912-1913). He published several newspapers in Greece, Paris, and Egypt, and wrote many works, including a series of stories under the title of The Parasites of the Revolution (1899).

After the Ottoman Revolution, Odian returned to Constantinople in 1909. He continued writing and publishing several satirical newspapers. In the period 1909-1915 he wrote several of his masterpieces of political and social satire: the first two parts of his novel The Comrade Panchooni (1910 and 1914), Family, Honor, Moral (1910), The Letters of a Trader (1914), The Wife of the Councilman (1915), two detective novels about the tyrannical rule of Abdul Hamid, Abdul Hamid and Sherlock Holmes (1911) and Saliha Hanum or the Army against the Tyrant (1912), his satirical profiles of Armenian political representatives ( Our Deputies, 1913). He also translated from French into Armenian Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1910) and Anna Karenina (1911), as well as works by Emile Zola, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky, Mark Twain, and others. He also wrote a series of profiles of Armenian politicians, called Our Deputies (1913).

Odian avoided the roundup of April 24, 1915, but was arrested in August 1915 and deported. However, he survived three years and a half of a deportee life, and he depicted his recollections in the memoir Accursed Years (1918-1919). He returned to Constantinople after the armistice of October 1918 and resumed his literary activities, again contributing to newspapers (he contributed daily columns to various newspapers simultaneously) while editing some newspapers of his own and writing more novels, such as the three-volume The Spy Number 17 (1919-1921) and several others.

Like many other intellectuals, Odian abandoned Constantinople in 1922 after the triumph of the Kemalist movement and moved to Bucharest (Romania). Two years later, he moved to Tripoli (Lebanon), and then to Cairo (Egypt). He passed away օ n October 3, 1926, and was buried at the cemetery of Mar Mina.

The works of Yervant Odian have been translated into many languages (Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish, and others). Both Comrade Panchooni and Accursed Years have been translated into English.

In 1964 Odian’s story “The False Spy,” directed by Henrik Malian, became one of the episodes of the film Monsieur Jacques and the Others, produced by Armenfilm. Almost three decades later, in 1992, Arman Manarian directed a cinematographic version of Comrade Panchoon that was also released by Armenfilm in Armenia. A street of Yerevan and a school in Vagharshapat have been named after Yervant Odian.

Opening of the Genocide Memorial in Bikfaya (April 24, 1970)

Before 1965, there were only three memorials dedicated to the genocide of 1915 worldwide: the Martyrs’ Chapel in the monastery of Antelias (1938), the stele at the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate in Beirut (1939), and the memorial at the courtyard of the San Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral in Buenos Aires (1961). Starting in 1965, there would be a true explosion in the construction of memorials, both in Armenia and in the Diaspora.



Inauguration of the Bikfaya memorial. This picture appeared on the cover of the special issue of the daily Aztag (May 9, 1970) and was taken by AP late photographer (and later New Yorker) Harry Koundakjian.

The commemoration of 1965 in Lebanon acquired a particular resonance. Even though the government yielded to Turkish pressure and did not authorize a projected march, the gathering of 85,000-90,000 Armenians in the sports complex of Bourj Hammoud became proof that from here on the commemorations would take a different direction.

 

As the end of the fiftieth anniversary, in April 1966, the Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, Khoren I announced that a monument would be built at the St. Mary’s Monastery in Bikfaya, which belongs to the Catholicosate. The “Monument to the Fiftieth Anniversary” would be located on a rock near the chapel of St. Mary and the Seminary. It was commissioned to sculptor Zaven Khedeshian (1932-2018), already a noted name in Lebanese art.

The groundbreaking ceremony was held on April 23, 1967, by the three Armenian spiritual leaders, Catholicos Khoren I, Patriarch Ignatius Peter XVI Batanian of the Armenian Catholic Church, and Rev. Hovhannes Aharonian. Bishop Karekin Sarkissian (future Catholicos Karekin II of Cilicia and I of All Armenians), the dean of the seminary, read a message on behalf of the memorial committee. He said:

“I want that the eyes of soul see with equal truth and joy the bronze statue of more than twelve meters of height elevating to the sky, which, through the image of the restoration of a human body, symbolizes the triumphant restoration of an entire people, from the terrorizing world of sand and ruins, rags and wounds, suffering and torture towards the world of healthy revival, febrile creation, and insatiable construction.”

A popular fundraiser was held to finance the construction of the memorial, a bronze abstract figure of a woman standing with hands toward the sky. The figure is mounted on a clef-like rock of five meters high, beyond which is located the public space for public assembly. The inauguration was anticipated for April 24, 1969, but recurrent political crisis in Lebanon prevented the public commemoration of the genocide that year.

The inauguration was postponed for April 24, 1970, when it became one of the main features of the 55 ^th anniversary of the genocide. The huge multitude, which by some estimates surpassed the number of 20,000, went from the ceremony held at the monastery of Antelias to Bikfaya for the inauguration. At one point, the traffic flow forced the mass to leave their cars on the road ascending to the Armenian monastery and reach the place by foot. People flooded the courtyard of the monastery around the memorial. After a stirring “hokehankisd” ceremony, the first speaker was Boghos Douzjian, representing the Memorial Committee, followed by Rev. Aharonian, Bishop Mesrob Terzian (in representation of Patriarch Batanian), and Catholicos Khoren. The keynote speaker was Khachig Babikian, Minister of Tourism, on behalf of the President of Lebanon, Charles Helou, who sponsored the inauguration.

During the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, the memorial underwent a sabotage bombing by the Phalange, a Christian militant party, and the lower portion of the monument was heavily damaged. The monument was heavily damaged but it did not fall. It was later repaired.

On the centennial of the genocide, the memorial was renovated and an altar dedicated to the martyrs was built nearby. The rocks and walls leading to the memorial were ornamented with symbols related to Armenian history, the Armenian Church, and the genocide, and a map of the Armenian Genocide was added near the monument. 

Death of Shavarsh Missakian (January 26, 1957)

Shavarsh Missakian was a veteran journalist and political activist who played an important role both in the history of the Armenian press and the organization of the Diaspora.

He was born in August 1884, on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, in the village of Zimara, near Sepastia (Sivas). He moved to Constantinople in 1890 with his family, where he studied at the Getronagan School, and became a journalist at the age of sixteen.

He started his career in the daily Surhantag (1899-1908). During the early 1900s, in the last year of the tyrannical regime of Abdul Hamid II, he published and distributed revolutionary literature, and contributed to the journals Droshak (in Geneva) and Razmig (in Plovdiv, Bulgaria) of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which he joined in 1907. After the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, he published the literary weekly Aztag, with Zabel Essayan, Kegham Parseghian, and Vahram Tatoul from 1908-1909. He also founded a bookstore called Ardziv, which doubled as a publishing house.

In 1911-1912 Missakian settled in Garin (Erzerum) as the editor of the A.R.F. newspaper Haratch. Afterwards, he returned to Constantinople and became a member of the editorial board of the A.R.F. daily Azatamart.

He initially escaped the arrest of Armenian intellectuals on the fateful night of April 24, 1915. He lived clandestinely until March 1916, heading a group of A.R.F. militants who had also escaped the arrests. He provided valuable information and articles to the journal Hayastan of Sofia (Bulgaria), published during 1915, about the ongoing Turkish repression and deportations. The Ottoman authorities could not locate him, and decided to deport his father to Konia, but the latter managed to escape. Shavarsh Missakian was denounced by a Bulgarian spy and arrested on March 26, 1916, when he tried to go to Bulgaria. He was imprisoned and tortured; he tried to escape by throwing himself from the third floor of the prison, but he broke his leg and was captured. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to five years of prison. In the end, he was freed after the armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918.



He soon became the editor-in-chief of the daily Djagadamart, which replaced Azatamart, closed on April 24, 1915. In 1919 he traveled to Armenia, where he participated in the ninth General Assembly of the A.R.F. in Yerevan.

The impending advance of the Kemalist forces over Constantinople compelled many Armenians, including Missakian, to take the route of exile. In November 1922 he left the Ottoman capital and moved to Sofia, where he married Dirouhi Azarian (1891-1964), whom he had known when she worked as the bookkeeper for Djagadamart. In November 1924 he was sent to Paris, where he participated in the tenth General Assembly of the A.R.F. (November 1924-January 1925) and was elected a member of the party Bureau, a position that he held until 1933.

In August 1925 he launched the daily Haratch as a personal undertaking. The daily soon became the main voice of the Armenian community of France, with a circulation of 5,000 copies and the sought-after articles of its publisher and editor. Haratch became also a gathering place for the young generation of Armenian writers in the 1920s and 1930s that would be known as the “Paris boys.” It appeared without interruption until the Nazi occupation of Paris, when Missakian decided to voluntarily close the newspaper in June 1940.

Haratch was reopened in April 1945, after the Liberation. Eight months later, in an editorial of December 1945, Missakian coined tseghasbanutiun, the Armenian word for an almost unknown term, “genocide.” He would be one of its frequent users in the press. In the same year, the editor of Haratch would undertake the organization of the new generation with the foundation of the A.R.F.-affiliated “Nor Seround” (equivalent to the Armenian Youth Federation in North America) and its journal Haiastan, which continues its publication.

Shavarsh Missakian directed Haratch until the last day. He passed away on January 26, 1957, and was buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. His daughter Arpik Missakian would succeed him in the direction of the journal, which she would publish for fifty-two more years, until May 2009, continuing her father’s traditions.

Missakian’s short memoir of his survival in the Ottoman prison, Leaves from a Yellowish Journal, was published in 1957, and a collection of his articles scattered in the Armenian press, entitled Days and Hours, in 1958. His memoir was translated into French by his daughter and published in 2015. A square named after him was inaugurated in the ninth arrondisement of Paris in 2007.

Birth of Yousuf Karsh (December 23, 1908)

One of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century, Yousuf Karsh rose from his status of Armenian Genocide survivor to photograph “anyone who was anyone.”

He was born on December 23, 1908, in Mardin, in the province of Diarbekir, to the family of Massih Karsh, a merchant, and Bahai Nakash. The Armenian population of Mardin was mostly Arabic-speaking, and their names were Arabic-looking (Yousuf was the Arabic variant of his Armenian name Hovsep.) In its obituary, The Economist noted that Karsh “thought of himself as an Armenian.”  

After the genocide, Karsh and the surviving family members managed to escape to a refugee camp in Aleppo (1922). He migrated to Canada in 1925: “For the moment, it was enough to find myself safe, the massacres, torture, and heartbreak of Armenia behind me,” he wrote in his last years. He went to live and work in Sherbrooke (Quebec) with his maternal uncle George Nakashian (Nakash), a portrait photographer, who taught photography to him. For three years, from 1928 to 1931, Karsh apprenticed in Boston for John H. Garo, the most prominent Armenian photographer in America at the time.

Back to Canada, Karsh opened his first studio in Ottawa in 1932, where he remained for the next forty years. He married French-born actress Solange Gathier (1902−1961) in 1939. After losing his wife to cancer in 1961, Karsh remarried to Estrellita Maria Nachbar, a medical writer, in 1962.

Karsh specialized in photographing almost exclusively famous people. Asked about this, he replied: “I am working with the world's most remarkable cross-section of people. I do believe it's the minority who make the world go around, not the majority.” His initial success came after capturing the attention of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who helped him arrange photography sessions with visiting dignitaries.

Such an arrangement in 1941 derived in his iconic photo of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (picture). It was taken after a speech on World War II to the Canadian Parliament members. The British politician is particularly noted for his posture and facial expression, which have been compared to the wartime feelings of persistence that prevailed in Great Britain in the face of an all-conquering enemy. The photo, characterized by The Economist as the “most reproduced portrait in the history of photography,” now hangs on the wall of the chamber of the Speaker of the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament, where it was taken.

During World War II, Karsh photographed political and military leaders, and in the post-war period he began capturing photos of writers, actors, artists, musicians, scientists, and celebrities. Some of his notable portraits included George Bernard Shaw (1943), Dwight Eisenhower (1946), Georgia O’Keeffe (1956), Ernest Hemingway (1957), and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushshev (1963).

Karsh was a visiting professor at Ohio University and at Emerson College in Boston. He earned numerous honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Ohio University, Tufts University, Syracuse University, Ohio State University, and others. He was awarded the Canada Council Medal in 1965 and the titles of Officer (1967) and Companion (1990) of the Order of Canada. He published around twenty collections of his photographs. The National Archives of Canada acquired his complete collection in 1987, which currently has his 150,000 negatives and a total of 355,000 items.

More than twenty of his photos had been published on the cover of Life magazine by the time he closed his second studio in 1992. He moved to Boston in 1997 with his wife and passed away on July 13, 2002. He was buried in Ottawa.



A bust of Karsh by Canadian-Armenian sculptor Megerditch Tarakdjian was unveiled before Château Laurier, Ottawa, his second studio, on June 9, 2017. It depicts Karsh with his famous camera and was a gift to Canada from Armenia on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations and the 150^th anniversary of Canada. The City of Ottawa awards biannually the Karsh Award, dedicated to Yousuf and his brother Malak Karsh to an established professional artist for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.

Death of Zareh Vorpouni (December 1, 1980)

The best figures of Armenian literature in the Diaspora gathered in France in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Besides Shahan Shahnour, Nigoghos Sarafian, and Vazken Shousanian, the name of Zareh Vorpouni, although much less known to the general public, managed to gain some critical attention until the 1970s.

He was born Zareh Euksuzian on May 24, 1902, in Ordu (Turkey), a city on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea. He studied at the local Movsesian school. His father was killed during the genocide, but his mother managed to flee to Crimea with her family. At the end of the war, the family moved to Constantinople, where Zareh attended the Berberian School from 1919-1922. He published his first literary pieces in the newspaper Joghovourti Tzayne, which he signed Zareh Vorpouni (vorp “orphan” is the Armenian translation of Turkish öksüz).

Like thousands of Armenians leaving the Ottoman Empire as refugees during the turmoil of the Kemalist massacres before the founding of the Turkish Republic, Vorpouni and his family departed for France in August 1922. They settled in Marseilles, where they lived for two years. In 1924 the aspiring writer moved to Paris. In the same year, he jointly edited the short-lived literary periodical Nor Havadk with another aspiring writer, Bedros Zaroyan (1903-1986). From his early days in France, he was an avid reader who acquainted himself with European intellectual trends and prominent works of French literature. He would also enter the French Communist Party, which he left in the 1930s.

Vorpouni, who started publishing short stories and essays in the French-Armenian press, soon conceived a cycle of novels entitled The Persecuted. The first volume, The Attempt, would be published in 1929. It depicted the hard life of an Armenian immigrant family transplanted to Marseilles, where they endured the impact of a totally strange environment.

The novelist entered the group Menk (We), which included a number of young intellectuals (also called “the Paris boys”), mostly genocide survivors, bound to achieve a renewal of Armenian literature by reflecting the social, cultural, and psychological distress undergone by the newly-formed Diaspora and the perils of identity loss. They published the journal Menk from 1931-1932 and then scattered away. Vorpouni moved to Strasbourg from 1930-1937 and, upon his return to Paris, he co-edited another short-lived journal with Zaroyan, Lousapatz (1938-1939). He printed a volume of short stories, Room for Rent (1939), which was only distributed after the end of World War II. Drafted by the French army at the outbreak of the war, he was captured by the Germans and held as prisoner of war in Magdeburg until 1945.

Returning to Paris, in 1946 Vorpouni visited Soviet Armenia upon an invitation to participate in the Second Congress of Soviet Armenian Writers. He published his impressions in a volume, Toward the Country (1948). He returned to literature with a new collection of short stories, Rainy Days (1958), which was followed by another collection, Koharig and Other Stories, in 1966. He explored the psychological features of his characters and identity disintegration, with the trauma of genocide subtly felt through these narratives.

In the 1960s Vorpouni also resumed his novelistic project after a hiatus of more than thirty years. After publishing And There Was Man (1964), which was independent of his cycle of novels, he wrote and published the following three novels of The Persecuted in the space of seven years: The Candidate (1967), Asphalt (1972), and An Ordinary Day (1974). The Candidate presented the main character, Vahakn, embodying the tormented young generation that bore the psychological trauma of the genocide and remained its victim through their actions. The next two volumes probed the sources for the anguish of their main characters. An anthology containing The Attempt, And There Was a Man, and some short stories was published in Yerevan in 1967.

Vorpouni passed away on December 1, 1980, in Bagneux, a suburb of Paris. Two of the last three novels of The Persecuted were posthumously published in literary journals in 1980 (Death Notice) and 1982 (For Thine Is the Power), while the seventh novel remains unpublished. An English translation of The Candidate, by Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian, appeared in 2016.

Death of Enver Pasha (August 4, 1922)

Anyone who is aware of the history of the Armenian Genocide has heard the name of Enver Pasha as one of its key executors.

Unlike its mastermind, Talaat, Ismail Enver Pasha was a military officer, born in Constantinople on November 22, 1881. He studied in different military schools and graduated in 1903 with distinction. In 1906 he was sent to the Third Army, stationed in Salonica. He became a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) during his service.

When the Young Turk coup broke out in June 1908, Enver became one of its military leaders. He was actively involved in the suppression of the attempt of countercoup of April 1909, which tried to restore Abdul Hamid’s absolute powers. Afterwards, he was sent to Berlin as a military attaché, where he strengthened the ties between German and Ottoman military.

During the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, Enver left Berlin and organized the defense of Libya, where he was appointed governor of Benghazi. He was called back to Constantinople when the First Balkan War started in October 1912 and ascended to the grade of lieutenant colonel. In the same year, the CUP fell from government and was replaced by the Liberal Union party. However, the severe Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War weakened the government and Enver organized a coup in January 1913. The power returned to the CUP and the triumvirate formed by Enver, Talaat, and Jemal Pasha took charge until the end of World War I. Enver became Minister of War and married into the royal family. When in June 1913 the Second Balkan War broke out, he reversed some of the losses by recapturing Adrianople (nowadays Edirne) from the Bulgarians. 

Enver was an architect of the Ottoman-German alliance in World War I, expecting a quick victory that would benefit the empire. He assumed command of the Ottoman forces in the Caucasus. Pursuing his quest for a Pan-Turkic empire stretching to Central Asia, he wanted to force the Russians out and take back Kars and Batum, which had been ceded after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. His offensive in the thick of winter ended with a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Sarikamish in December 1914 – January 1915 and tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers dying in the subsequent retreat. On his return to Constantinople, Enver blamed his failure on his Armenian soldiers, although in January 1915 an Armenian soldier had carried him through battle lines on his back and saved his life, and a letter written by Enver himself to the Prelate of Konia, Bishop Karekin Khachadourian, praised the Armenians for their bravery and faithfulness in February 1915.

Enver played a major role in the Armenian Genocide. He took the first steps by ordering the Armenian recruits in the Ottoman army to be disarmed and reassigned to labor battalions before their summary executions. These instructions were explained on the basis of accusations of treasonous activity, but the defeat of his army only provided the pretext for escalating a campaign of extermination that was also unleashed against the civilian population with the use of the secret paramilitary Special Organization ( Teshkilât-i-Mahsusa ) to systematically massacre deported Armenians.

After the collapse of the Russian front in 1918, the Ottoman armies advanced into the Caucasus. The Third Army, commanded by Vehib Pasha, entered the territory of Eastern Armenia, and was halted at the battles of Sardarabad, Bash Aparan, and Gharakilise in May 1918. A new military force called the Army of Islam, commanded by Enver’s half-brother Nuri, advanced towards the territory of today’s Azerbaijan and, in combination with the Tatars (Azerbaijanis), occupied Baku on September 15, organizing a massacre of the local Armenian population.

However, the Ottoman Empire was faced with defeat. Enver was dismissed from his ministerial position in October 1918, and a month later he fled into exile together with other CUP members. Tried in absentia by a postwar courts-martial for crimes of “plunging the country into war without a legitimate reason, forced deportation of Armenians, and leaving the country without permission,” he was condemned to death in July 1919.

Enver first went to Germany, and shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Moscow trying to build a German-Soviet alliance. He went to Baku in September 1920 and took part in the Congress of Eastern Peoples. In July 1921 he tried to return to Turkey, but Mustafa Kemal did not want him among his forces, as he explicitly rejected Enver’s Pan-Turkic ideas. He traveled to Moscow where he managed to win the trust of the Soviet authorities. In November 1921 he was sent by Lenin to Bukhara, in Turkestan, to help suppress a revolt against the local Bolshevik regime. Instead, along with a small number of followers, he defected to the rebels and united their different groups under his own command to fight against the Red Army.

On August 4, 1922, a cavalry brigade of the Red Army under the command of Hakob Melkumian (known in Russian sources as Yakov Melkumov) launched a surprise attack over Enver’s headquarters near the village of Ab-i-Derya. The attack ended with Enver’s death. There are different versions. According to Melkumov’s memoirs, Enver managed to escape on horseback and hid for several days in the village of Chaghan. After the hideout was located, the Soviet troops stormed the village and Enver was killed by Melkumov himself in the ensuing combat.



Enver’s body was buried near Ab-i-Derya. As it happened with Talaat in 1943, the remains of this executioner of the Armenian people were brought to Turkey in 1996 and reburied at the Monument of Liberty cemetery in Shishli, Istanbul. 

Birth of Anatole France (April 16, 1844)

Anatole France was a Nobel Prize winner and a member of the French Academy, but he also was a humanist, and as such, a staunch defender of the Armenian Cause.

He was born François-Anatole Thibault on April 16, 1844 in Paris. He was the son of a bookseller, who also became a bibliophile. He studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduation he worked at his father’s bookstore, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution, and frequented by many notable writers and scholars. He later secured the position of cataloguer at various libraries, and was appointed librarian for the French Senate in 1876. The next year, he married Valérie Guérin de Sauville. They had a daughter in 1881 and would get divorced in 1893. He would have various relationships and affairs, and finally he married his governess, Emma Laprévotte, in 1920.

He started his literary career in 1867, writing articles and poetry with the pseudonym Anatole France. He became famous with his novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881) , which earned him a prize from the French Academy. Other novels cemented his fame, and he was elected as one of the “forty immortals” of the French Academy in 1896, at the age of fifty-two.

In 1896 the country was rocked by the Dreyfus affair; Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish army officer who had been falsely convicted of espionage in a case that had anti-Semitic overtones. France fought along another fellow novelist, Émile Zola—the author of a famous piece, “J’accuse” (I Accuse)--in defense of Dreyfus. He wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret. The scandal ended with Dreyfus being proven innocent.

In the aftermath of the Hamidian massacres of 1895-1896, Anatole France, always an activist for human rights and just causes joined the pro-Armenian movement and raised his voice to condemn Sultan Abdul Hamid II and defend the Armenian rights. In 1901 was one of the co-founders of the periodical Pro-Armenia, sponsored by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and continued his speeches and political rallies in favor of Armenian until 1907. Anatole France also had a close friendship with famous writer Arshag Tchobanian and painter Edgar Chahine.

In 1908 France published his novel Penguin Island, which satirizes human nature by depicting the transformation of penguins into humans, after the animals were baptized by mistake by a nearsighted ecclesiastic. It was actually a satirical history of France from the Medieval time to the novelist’s own time, concluding with a dystopian future. Another celebrated novel, The Gods Are Thirst (1912), was a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism. It depicted a true-believing follower of revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793-1794, following the French Revolution of 1789. He published his most profound novel, Revolt of the Angels (1914), at the age of eighty. It was loosely based on the Christian understanding of the War in Heaven, and told the story of a guardian angel who fell in love and joined the revolutionary movement of angels.

After the beginning of World War I and the Armenian Genocide, Anatole France returned to the political scene and was one of the keynote speakers at the April 1916 “Homage to Armenia” held at the Sorbonne amphitheater with the assistance of 3,000 people. In his speech, France included the much-quoted passage: “Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that is left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.”

Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921 in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament.” He passed away on October 12, 1924, and his funeral was attended by a crowd of two hundred thousand people. He is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine cemetery near Paris. A few days ago, on March 30, 2018, the French International School in Armenia, founded in 2007 in Yerevan, was renamed after him.

Birth of Giacomo Gorrini (November 12, 1859)

Sympathies for the Armenian plight and cause were not a rare issue in Europe, frequently born from humanitarian concerns. One of those cases was that of Italian diplomat and historian Giacomo Gorrini.

Gorrini was born in Molino dei Torti, near Alessandria, on November 12, 1859. He graduated from the Scientific-Literary Academy of Milan in 1882 with a degree in literature and philosophy, and, after a competition, he entered the two-year advanced course at the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence. In 1884 he published his dissertation, Il comune astigiano e la sua storiografia. Saggio storico-critico (The Commune of Asti and Its Historiography: Historical-Critical Study). After studying for a year at Berlin University, in 1886 he won the concourse for the position of director of the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

For more than twenty years, Gorrini worked in the organization of the archives and published several collections of documents, as well as books and articles of his own derived from his work as a historical consultant. His initial interest in Armenians was reflected in a short study entitled Antichi diritti di casa Savoja sopra l'Armenia (Ancient Rights of the Savoia House over Armenia, 1895), where he outlined the relations between Armenia and the Italian ruling dynasty, and also made reference to Rome and Venice as “remarkable centers of Armenian culture and civilization.” His academic workload did not prevent him from continuing his studies. He obtained a second degree in law from the University of Napoli (1892) and a habilitation to teach modern history from the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence (1894) and the University of Rome (1900). In 1897 he became member of the Higher Council of the State and Kingdom Archives, where he would remain for almost forty years.

In November 1909 Gorrini was designated Italian consul in Trebizonda, but took his new position in September 1910. For the next five years—except for a hiatus due to the Italian-Turkish war of 1911-1912—he was actively involved in the promotion and teaching of the Italian language and the development of commercial initiatives. His reports followed the situation in the region, and also made reference to Armenians and Kurds, and their relations with the central government in Constantinople.

Italy was neutral at the beginning of World War I, but the worsening of relations between Italy and Turkey forced Gorrini to leave his post on July 23, 1915. He would reach Rome on August 19, two days before Italy declared war to the Ottoman Empire. The influential daily Il Messaggero published an interview with the former Italian consul on August 25, 1915, which was published in an English translation in Viscount James Bryce’s and Arnold Toynbee’s Blue Book in 1916. Gorrini was among the first witnesses to give a first-hand account of the massacres and deportations already carried out by the Ottoman government. The interview, revealed his horror and compassion for the victims. He returned to the Foreign Service, where he executed diverse and delicate administrative tasks until 1919.

He reached the rank of general consul in November 1919 and departed to Trebizond for a short mission in April 1920 to close his consular activities, which had been cut short five years before. Upon his return, he was informed of his new destination as Italian representative in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia. However, due to the political situation, he only reached Yerevan in April 1921, when the Soviet regime had already been installed. In June 1921 he obtained some railway and mineral concessions from the Soviet Armenian government and returned to Italy for consultations. However, he was ill with malaria and remained in Rome, where he still worked for two more years, until his retirement in January 1923.

He nevertheless continued his archival and academic work, and he also contributed scholarly articles and commentaries to newspapers and journals. He also continued supporting the Armenian Cause. In 1940, at the age of eighty, he published the book Armenia. Testimonianze (Armenia: Testimonies) on the anniversary of the first Armenian independence. He supported the right of the Armenians to an independent homeland, which was inscribed within a future redrawing of the Mediterranean territories according to the imperial goals of Benito Mussolini’s Italy.

Giacomo Gorrini passed away in Rome on October 31, 1950, at the age of ninety-one. Soil from his tomb was deposited in the “Memory Wall” of the memorial complex of Dzidznergapert, in Yerevan, on May 25, 2001.

Birth of Rafael Nogales Méndez (October 14, 1879)

Among the many sources about the Armenian Genocide, the memoirs of Venezuelan soldier Rafael de Nogales Méndez occupy a particular place. Firstly, Nogales served in the Ottoman army, and secondly, his writings
did not show him as particularly appreciative of Armenians. This makes his testimony more compelling and trustworthy.

 

Nogales (his birth name was Rafael Inchauspe Méndez) was born in San Cristóbal, state of Táchira, on October 14, 1879. His father sent him to Europe, where he studied in Germany, Belgium, and Spain, and spoke German, French, and Italian fluently.

 

The thirst for adventure and the attraction of the military profession turned him into a soldier of fortune from the late nineteenth century. In 1898 he fought with Spain during the Spanish-American War. He returned to Venezuela in 1901, but he was critical of Cipriano Castro’s dictatorship. In 1902 a revolution started and Castro tried to have him arrested, but Nogales escaped to Nicaragua, where President Zelaya supported him in a failed expedition to overthrow the Venezuelan dictator. After spending time in Mexico, where he enjoyed the protection of another dictator, Porfirio Díaz, he went to China and then he was involved as a double spy in the Russo-Japanese war. In 1904-1905 he mined gold in Alaska. Then he returned to California, where he fought along the forces of Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón. After the military coup of Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, which overthrew Castro’s dictatorship, Nogales returned to his homeland (1908). He was appointed governor of the state of Apure, but two months later he made himself an enemy of the new president and had to go into exile.

 

He tried to join the French army at the outbreak of World War I, but he refused to renounce his Venezuelan nationality. In the end he enlisted in the Ottoman Army and was assigned to the Caucasus Front, where he reached the rank of major. During the siege of Van in April-May 1915 he led gendarmerie troops, but asked to be relieved for what he characterized as “unjustified massacres of Christians.” He wrote that the massacres were executed by Halil Bey, the commander and chief of the expeditionary army he had volunteered to serve. (Halil Bey was Minister of War Enver Pasha’s uncle.).

In his book Four Years Beneath the Crescent (1924), Nogales recounted the massacres perpetrated against the Armenian population of Van by order of Governor Jevdet bey (Enver’s brother-in-law): “Supported by the Kurds and the rabble of the vicinity, they [the civil authorities] were attacking and sacking the Armenian quarter. I succeeded at last, without serious accident, in approaching the Beledie reis of the town, who was directing the orgy; whereupon I ordered him to stop the massacre. He astounded me by replying that he was doing nothing more than carry out an unequivocal order emanating from the Governor-General of the province to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over.”

 

Nogales visited Diarbekir (Diyarbakir) in June 1915, and was a witness to the widespread massacres of the local Armenians. According to his conversation with Governor Mehmet Reshid, the orders to massacre had been sent by Interior Minister Talaat Pasha.

 

The Venezuelan soldier was transferred from the Caucasus and continued fighting in Mesopotamia and Palestine. He was awarded the Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and earned several Ottoman medals.

 

After the end of the war, Nogales worked with Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto César Sandino and wrote Spanish books, including his memoirs of World War I, Four Years beneath the Crescent (1924), translated into English and German, The Robbery of Nicaragua (1928), and Memories of a Soldier of Fortune (1932). After the death of Gómez, he returned to Venezuela and was appointed to study the army of Panama, but died in Panama City on July 10, 1936.

Birth of Krikor Zohrab (June 26, 1861)

Known as the “prince of the Armenian short novel,” he was also a skillful and highly regarded lawyer, as well as an experienced member of the Ottoman Parliament. His parliamentarian immunity, however, was violated to turn him into one of the victims of the first wave of arrests and killings of intellectuals that began on April 24, 1915.


Krikor Zohrab was born into a wealthy family in the district of Beshiktash (Constantinople) on June 26, 1861. He started his elementary studies at the local Makruhian School. In 1870 his father passed away and his mother remarried, this time to a noted lawyer. Zohrab’s family moved to Ortakeuy, where he and his brother Mihran continued their education at the local Tarkmanchats School. In 1876 he entered the Galatasaray Institute, sponsored by the French government, which was the only institution of higher education in the Ottoman Empire at the time. He graduated in 1880 with a degree in civil engineering, but rather than working in that field, he went to work in his stepfather’s law office, and entered the law section of the Galatasaray Institute, which was soon closed due to lack of Muslim students (it had 45 Armenian, 2 Muslim, 2 Jewish, and 3 Greek students). In 1882 he enrolled in a newly opened law school, the Imperial University of Jurisprudence, but left two years later without graduating. In 1884 he passed an exam in the city of Edirne and obtained the title of lawyer.

Zohrab had already entered the literary field in 1878, becoming a contributor to the daily Lrakir at the age of 17. In the 1880s he would become one of the prolific names in the literary movement of the time. In 1885 he was the publisher of the journal Yergrakount of the Asiatic Society, edited by the famous satirical writer Hagop Baronian. He published there his first novel, A Disappeared Generation, which he released in book format in 1887. He edited the literary journal Masis in 1892-1893, to which he also frequently contributed with novellas. He also wrote for the dailies Arevelk and Hairenik. He joined the trend of realism, propelled by French writers such as Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola, and became the master of this current genre, which became the only one to be called “school” in Armenian literature. 


Zohrab married Clara Yazejian in 1888. They had four children: Levon, Dolores, Aram, and Hermine. Dolores Zohrab-Liebmann would later become a philanthropist in New York City. In 1891 he was elected delegate to the National Assembly, but his election was annulled in a session of the Assembly because he was not yet thirty years old.


He took a long break from literature in 1893-1898, which included the impact of the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896, devoting himself to his profession. He was well known to foreign citizens living in Constantinople, because he often represented them in the first commercial court, due to his knowledge of French. He was also a translator and legal advisor to the Russian embassy in Constantinople, and managed cases for Russian citizens. He also had the right to freely travel in Europe.

Masis, now a daily, made a comeback in 1898, again edited by Zohrab, who returned to his literary endeavors, coupling them with his professional activities, where he had already acquired a prestigious name. However, in 1906, after he defended a Bulgarian revolutionary in a criminal case, accusing a Turkish official of torture, he was disbarred. He went to Paris, where he published a law monograph in French. He was planning to settle in Egypt with his family when the Young Turk coup d’état of 1908 and the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution changed his plans. He returned to Constantinople, where he was elected member of the Ottoman Parliament. He was known for his eloquent speeches.  He vehemently defended Armenian interests and rights. After the double Adana massacre of April 1909, he strongly criticized the Turkish authorities for their actions and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.

To serve the Armenian cause, he wrote an influential paper in French called “La question arménienne à la lumière des documents” (The Armenian Question under the Light of Documents), published in 1913 under the pseudonym Marcel Leart in Paris. It dealt with many aspects of the hardships endured by the Armenian population and denounced the government’s inaction.

Also in 1909-1911 he gathered his novellas and short stories in three volumes, Life as It Is, Silent Pains, and Voices of Conscience. He also published Known Figures, portraits of contemporaries, and From the Traveler’s Journal, a series of travelogues.


Simultaneously with the Ottoman Parliament, Zohrab also became a member of the Armenian National Assembly. He raised the issue of reforms for the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which led to the signature of the Russo-Turkish agreement in January 1914, thwarted after the beginning of World War I. 

After the wave of arrests of intellectuals on April 24 and the following days, Zohrab pleaded for the liberation of his compatriots and the cessation of the ongoing atrocities. He was personally acquainted and friends with many officials, including Ministry of Interior Talaat Pasha. However, his efforts were useless. Despite their parliamentary immunity, Zohrab and his colleague Vartkes Serengulian were both arrested on May 21, 1915, and dispatched to Diyarbakır for a purported trial by court martial. They were sent to Aleppo, where they remained for a few weeks, waiting for the result of attempts to have them sent back to Constantinople, to no avail. They were dispatched to Urfa, and killed in the outskirts of the town between July 15 and 20, 1915.


Krikor Zohrab’s memory as an outstanding writer and lawyer has remained alive for a century. His books have been widely published in popular and critical editions and his short stories have been included in many school textbooks. Most recently, on May 3, 2017, a plaque honoring him, in memory of the Armenian Genocide, was inaugurated at the School of Lawyers of the Appellate Court of Paris.

Birth of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (April 26, 1856)

Righteous men were a plenty during the years of the Armenian Genocide, and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Ambassador of the United States to the Ottoman Empire, was the prominent American name among them.

Morgenthau was born in Mannheim (Germany) on April 26, 1856. He was the ninth of eleven children to a Jewish family. His father, Lazarus Morgenthau, was a prosperous manufacturer and merchant, who bought tobacco from the United States and sold it back as cigars. However, the American Civil War hit him severely: German cigar exports ceased after a tariff on tobacco imports was set in 1862. Four years later, the family migrated to New York. Despite his father’s unsuccessful attempts to re-establish himself in business, Henry Morgenthau—who knew no English on his arrival at the age of ten—graduated from City College in 1874 and from Columbia Law School in 1876. Beginning a career as a successful lawyer, he would later make a substantial fortune in real estate investments. He married Josephine Sykes in 1882 and had four children. He served as a leader of the Reform Jewish community in New York.
In 1911 Morgenthau, then 55, left business to enter public service. He became an early supporter of President Woodrow Wilson’s election campaign in 1912. He had hoped for a cabinet post, but Wilson offered him the position of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, with the assurance that it “was the point at which the interest of American Jews in the welfare of the Jews of Palestine is focused, and it is almost indispensable that I have a Jew in that post.” The encouragement of his friend, Rabbi Stephen Wise, led him to reconsider his decision and accept the offer, although Morgenthau was no Zionist himself.
The United States remained neutral after the beginning of World War I, and since the Allies had withdrawn their diplomatic missions following the outbreak of hostilities, both the American embassy and Morgenthau himself additionally represented their interests in Constantinople. American consuls in different parts of the Empire, from Trebizond to Aleppo, reported abundantly about the Armenian plight and documented the entire process of the Armenian Genocide. Morgenthau continuously kept the U.S. government informed of the ongoing annihilation and asked for its intervention. His telegram to the State Department, on July 16, 1915, described the massacres as a “campaign of race extermination.” He intervened upon the Young Turk leaders to stop the mass killings, although unsuccessfully. His friendship with Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, ensured a wide coverage of the Armenian atrocities throughout 1915.
Morgenthau reached out to his friend Cleveland H. Dodge, a prominent American businessman, who was instrumental in the foundation of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief in 1915 that would later become Near East Relief (nowadays the Near East Foundation). Finding “intolerable” his “further daily association with men . . . who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings,” as he wrote in his memoirs, he returned to the United States in February 1916 and campaigned to raise awareness and funds for the survivors, resigning from his position as ambassador two months later. In 1918 he published his memoirs, including his account of the genocide, as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (published in Great Britain as The Secrets of the Bosphorus).
He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and worked with various war-related charitable bodies. He also headed the American fact-finding mission to Poland in 1919 and was the American representative at the Geneva Conference in 1933. He died on November 25, 1946, in New York City, at the age of 90, following a cerebral hemorrhage, and was buried in Hawthorne, New York. Morgenthau was the father of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, and the grandfather of Robert Morgenthau, long-time District Attorney in Manhattan, and historian Barbara Tuchman. He appeared in “Ravished Armenia,” the film based on the memoirs of survivor Aurora Mardiganian, commissioned by the Near East Relief. One of his dialogues with Talaat is portrayed in the forthcoming film The Promise.