Birth of Armen Garo (February 9, 1872)

Armen Garo was an active participant in the Armenian liberation movement, and a protagonist of some of its more important moments. Leader of the occupation of the Ottoman Bank, deputy to the Ottoman Parliament, organizer of the Nemesis Operation, first ambassador of the Republic of Armenia to the United States; these were just a few highlights of his public life, which ended prematurely.

He was born in Karin (Erzerum) on February 1872 as Karekin Pastermadjian. He was one of the first graduates of the Sanasarian College of his hometown in 1891. Three years later, he went to France to study at the Agricultural School of the University of Nancy. In this period, he became a member of the newly founded Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

His plan to return to his hometown after graduation was thwarted when massacres began in Zeitun (Cilicia), and he left his studies to help his compatriots. He soon found himself in Geneva, and then he was sent to Egypt to assist the resistance in Zeitun. Afterwards, he returned to the Ottoman Empire. Around this time, he took the nom de guerre Armen Garo.

 

He was one of the organizers of the takeover of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople by a group of A.R.F. revolutionaries on August 26, 1896. When Papken Siuni, the group leader, was killed, Armen Garo took over for the rest of the standoff.

When the occupation of the bank ended and the group of revolutionaries was sent to Marseilles, French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux declared them as persona non grata and denied their stay in France. Armen Garo moved to Switzerland and studied natural sciences at the University of Geneva.

He continued his active participation in the A.R.F. and was on the delegate roster of the second General Assembly of 1898. He graduated in 1900 and received a doctoral degree in physical chemistry. In 1901 he founded a laboratory in Tiflis for chemical research.

The scientist could not leave aside the patriot, and Armen Garo organized the self-defense of the Armenians in Tiflis during the Armeno-Tatar conflict of 1905-1907 with a group of 500 volunteers.

After the situation in the Caucasus returned to normalcy, he was able to create a fairly prosperous life for himself. He secured the right to develop a copper mine, and worked towards a partnership with a large company.

After the Ottoman Revolution of 1908, Armen Garo was elected deputy from Erzerum to the Ottoman Parliament, representing the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. During his four-year mandate, he worked tirelessly for a railroad bill whose main goal was to build railroads in Western Armenia.

After he finished his mandate in 1912, he participated actively in the organization and implementation of the Armenian reforms in the six Eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire in 1913-1914. In the autumn of 1914, a month and a half before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Armen Garo went to the Caucasus on a special mission after the A.R.F. 8^th General Assembly at Erzerum. He joined the committee that had been appointed by the Armenian National Council of the Caucasus to organize the Armenian volunteer units.

In November of the same year, Armen Garo accompanied the second battalion of Armenian volunteers, commanded by Dro (Drastamat Kanayan), as representative of the executive committee of Tiflis. When Dro was seriously wounded in combat, Armen Garo replaced him from November 1914-March 1915 until he returned to active duty.

He went to Van in the summer of 1915, becoming one of the first to enter the city after the Russian troops and the Armenian volunteer battalions liberated it following the Van resistance.

After the Russian Revolution of February 1917, Armen Garo and Dr. Hakob Zavriev were sent to Petrograd in the spring to negotiate about Caucasian affairs with the Russian provisional government. In June he left for America as a representative of the Armenian National Council of Tiflis, which in May 1918 would declare the independence of Armenia. In 1919 Armen Garo was designated ambassador of Armenia to the United States.

He settled in Washington D.C., where he engaged in political and diplomatic action. He published three pamphlets in English: Why Armenia Should Be Free (1918), Armenia and Her Claims to Freedom and National Independence (1919), and Armenia a Leading Factor in the Winning of the War (1919).



He would also engage in covert action, as one of the main leaders of the Operation Nemesis, along with Shahan Natalie and Aharon Sachaklian, ensuring the logistics and the organization of the liquidation of Turkish genociders from 1919-1922.

After the fall of the Republic of Armenia, Armen Garo returned to Europe in November 1922, heartbroken and sick. He passed away in Geneva on March 23, 1923. His memoirs, Days that I Lived, were first serialized in the monthly Hairenik (1923-1924) and posthumously published in 1948 (there is an English translation by Haig T. Partizian, published in 1990 as Bank Ottoman).

Several organizational chapters have been named after him, including the AYF “Armen Garo” chapter (Racine, Wisconsin), the “Armen Karo” ARF Student Association of Canada, and the ARF "Armen Garo" committee (New York).

Death of Tigran Yergat (December 1, 1899)

A short-lived and forgotten name of Armenian letters and political struggle in the late nineteenth century, Garabed Bilezikji was born in Constantinople from a Catholic family of amiras (upper class merchants) in 1870. His father died at the age of 28 and his mother, who belonged to the well-to-do Tingir family, returned to her father’s home with her children.

Little Garabed was given private lessons of Turkish and Armenian, and learned Greek through his nanny. In 1880 he moved to Paris with his mother and entered the boarding school of the Dominican fathers in Argueuil. He graduated in 1887 with honors. After spending a year in the United States, where he studied American literature and perfected his English, he came back to Paris in 1889 and took a modest position at a bank, while devoted to literary and political activities, and adopted the pseudonym of Tigran Yergat.



He maintained close relations with Emile Zola, Jean Jaures, Maurice Barres, and other remarkable figures of French intellectual life, which opened the doors of the press to him. He published many articles in French journals about the peoples of the Orient, Oriental life and customs, and the Armenian Question. He contributed to Nouvelle Revue, Le Figaro , and other publications, and was a much-sought lecturer.

In 1893 the Tingir family lost most of its fortune due to the economic crisis in Turkey, and Yergat was forced to return to Constantinople. He taught French and clandestinely contributed to Revue des Revues with patriotic poems by Kamar Katiba in French translation and articles denouncing the anti-Armenian policies of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He also wrote articles calling for revolutionary action in the newspaper Hairenik of Constantinople. In August 1896, when the Armenian Revolutionary Federation executed the occupation of the Ottoman Bank, Tigran Yergat’s brother, Mardiros Bileziji, a bank employee, was persuaded by the leaders of the group, Armen Garo and Hrach Tiryakian, to write in Turkish the famous warning to the sultan by the Armenian revolutionaries. Yergat would tell his mother: “They entered the bank like heroes, but they should have exploded the building rather than leaving it like that, without any result. Would my brother have been lost there? Who cares, it would have been for the glory of Armenia…” 

Tigran Yergat also showed his capacities for political and lobby efforts. He was in close contact with Patriarch Mateos Izmirlian (1892-1896), who was finally exiled to Jerusalem by Hamid due to his continuous protests against the “Red Sultan.” He also was the subject of persecution, which forced him to leave Constantinople in October 1896 with help from the secretary of the British embassy.

He went to Greece, where he would mostly spend the next years. He actively cooperated with the Crete rebellion of 1897 and the subsequent Greek-Turkish war, becoming a member of the political organization “Eteria” and working to create a rapprochement between Greek and Armenian revolutionaries. In 1898 he took upon himself the organization of a French military expedition to Cilicia, which remained unfinished due to his death. In fact, his health took a fast turn to the worse early that year. He was forced to move to Cairo, near his brothers, looking for a recovery. During his short sojourn in Egypt, he became a member of the A.R.F.

However, in the spring of 1899, upon his mother’s entreaties, Tigran Yergat returned to Constantinople, physically devastated. He was taken to the hospital, where he passed away on December 1, 1899. An obituary published in the A.R.F. organ Droshak stated: “The storm of revolution, the adoration of epic feats existed in Tigran Yergat as an embodiment of protest, framed within a tender smile. Alas! A wild disease, tuberculosis, destroyed that kind and honorable life.”

August 14, 1896: Occupation of the Ottoman Bank

The occupation of the Ottoman Bank of Constantinople, organized by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in 1896, was an audacious attempt to attract the attention of the European great powers towards the Armenian Question.

Europe was the guarantor of article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin (1878), which obligated the Ottoman Empire to carry out reforms to improve the situation of Armenians living in their historical territories. The May 1895 plan presented by the European powers to Sultan Abdul Hamid II was never executed. Instead, Abdul Hamid perpetrated a massacre of its Armenian subjects with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 victims in 1895-1896.

The headquarters of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Istanbul, 1896.

The Central Committee of the A.R.F. in Constantinople organized the strike against the bank, which was a joint venture of Ottoman, British, and French capitals, in order to have the reforms executed. The action was also intended to show the sultan that Armenians were not ready to give up on their rights.

Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermadjian)

The preparations to occupy the bank started in February 1896. The idea had been conceived by 23-year old Papken Siuni (Bedros Parian), who would lead the operation. Hrach (Haig) Tiryakian, 25-years old, was his lieutenant, and Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermadjian), also 23, would take care of maintaining order in the bank and among the staff. Armen Garo wrote in his memoirs: “We transported close to 400 empty bombs during eight days from our secret foundry in Scutari to our workshop of Pera, in the house of Miss Iskouhi. After filling those bombs there, we transported them to various neighborhoods of Constantinople. We were only 10-15 trustworthy comrades to all this, teachers and students, twenty- to twenty-five-year-old young people, including three young ladies."

After several changes of date, the operation was finally carried on August 14. At noon, a discharge of guns and the thunder of bombs started the occupation. The group of militants included 28 people. The attacking group killed the guards, although four Armenians were also slain and another five were wounded. A very important loss was that of the head of the operation, Papken Siuni, who was wounded and the bombs on his body exploded when he fell.
Armen Garo took the command of the group and the fight started between the occupiers and the Ottoman forces. Meanwhile, a Turkish mob had started to kill innocent Armenians throughout the city. The A.R.F. militants sent a note with their demands to the European embassies: a) 1. To stop the massacre of innocent Armenians; b) To stop the attack against the bank, otherwise the building would be blown; c) To give written guarantees about the reforms to be carried in the Armenian provinces; d) To liberate all Armenian political prisoners.

At 1 a.m., Russian consul Maximov arrived in the bank and proposed to evacuate it, guaranteeing safe passage for Armen Garo and his companions. The young Armenian answered Maximov: “Mr. Ambassador, we didn’t enter here so you take the trouble of saving us from here...” He meant that he had clear demands, which they expected to be accomplished by the diplomatic representatives and the Sultan. Maximov answered back that the massacre and the attack had stopped; the ambassadors promised to do their best to ensure the reforms and he promised to have the jailed Armenians freed. After long negotiations, the revolutionaries agreed to leave the bank, receiving guarantees about their demands.

After 14 hours of occupation, the seventeen surviving revolutionaries came out of the bank at daybreak. To Maximov’s question of why the others were not coming out, Armen Garo answered that there was no one else; the Turks had convinced Maximov that 200 Armenians had occupied the building. The group, still armed, passed through the Turkish troops, led by Maximov, and was taken to the French ship “Gironde.”

The young Armenians were disarmed and taken to Marseilles, where they stayed 17 days in prison. Afterwards, Armen Garo and Hrach were sent to Switzerland, while the French government promised to send the others to New York. The remaining fifteen revolutionaries were sent to America; however, their destination was South America. They were dispatched to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they stayed until November 1896, when they were able to catch a British ship that took them to London.

The takeover of the Ottoman Bank, with its extraordinary circumstances, was widely reported in the international press. However, the act did not have any positive consequence, since the reforms were not implemented and Armenians would continue to be in dire straits under Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, the action reinforced the determination of the Armenian revolutionaries to continue their struggle in order to achieve political and social freedom for their people.

The surviving members of the Ottoman Bank takeover after arriving in Marseilles, France