Demonstration of Bab Ali - September 30, 1895

The three great powers (Great Britain, France, and Russia), backed by Germany, Austria, and Italy, had demanded that Sultan Abdul Hamid II introduce the reforms in the “provinces inhabited by Armenians,” as stipulated by the Treaty of Berlin (1878) in what was called the Armenian Reform Program of May 11, 1895. The refusal of the sultan to carry the reforms led the Social Democratic Hnchakian Party to stage the demonstration of Bab Ali (Great Door or Sublime Porte) in Constantinople on September 30, 1895.

 

The party was represented in the Ottoman capital by the Board of Directors, that give instructions for nearly all party activity in Turkey with the approval of general headquarters at Geneva, and the Executive Committee, which directed the organization work according to the instructions of the Board of Directors.

 

The Executive Committee chose three men to supervise the demonstration after receiving the order from the Board of Directors. The leader was Garo Sahakian. After various discussions, the Board of Directors decided that the demonstration should be peaceful. Months of preparations were ended on September 28, when the Hnchakian Party presented a letter in French to the foreign embassies and to the Turkish government. The letter stated that the demonstration would be “of a strictly peaceful character” and would be aimed to express Armenian wishes with regard to the reforms. It added that “the intervention of the police and military for the purpose of preventing it may have regrettable consequences, for which we disclaim beforehand all responsibility.”

 

The demonstration took place two days later. The Turkish government had taken security measures; soldiers were posted on the streets around administrative buildings, and the police were alerted. Around noon, the Hnchakian leaders entered the Armenian Patriarchate, from where they led thousands of demonstrators to the palace of the Sultan.

 

Garo Sahakian, head of the demonstration, was to present the petition to the Sultan on behalf of both the Armenians of Constantinople and of the six Armenian provinces. The petition, written by the Hnchakian Board of Directors, complained against massacres, unjust arrests, Kurdish injustices, corruption of tax collectors, and the massacre in Sasun (1894). It demanded: (a) equality before the law; freedom of the press; freedom of speech; and freedom of assembly; (b) right of habeas corpus to all persons under arrest, and permission to Armenians to bear arms if the Kurds could not be disarmed; (c) a redrawing of the six Armenian provinces; (d) an European governor for the provinces; and (e) financial and land reforms.

 

Garo Sahakian and some demonstrators, after reaching the gates of Bab Ali, were denied entrance by the officer in charge, and Sahakian was seized by the zaptiehs (Turkish police). Brought before a Turkish official, he was imprisoned after delivering the petition. Fighting and violence had already broken out. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested on that day and for several days ensuing. The prisons became crowded with wounded men and scores of dead bodies were collected from the streets of Constantinople.

 

The rioting and bloodshed in Constantinople alarmed the Turkish government and disturbed Europe. The Ottoman Council of Ministers assembled to discuss the situation, while some of the leading European papers gave much attention to the rioting in Constantinople. Finally, pressure by European governments induced Sultan Abdul Hamid to sign the Armenian Reform Program on October 17, 1895, about a month after the bloody demonstration. The Hnchakian Revolutionary Party considered this a great victory. However, this signature did not bring peace to Ottoman Armenians. Like so many decrees by the Sultan, this one too became a dead letter.

Birth of Nahabed Rusinian - September 23, 1819

The name of amateur poet Francis Scott Key would not have gone down in history if it not were for his poem “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which later became the U.S. national anthem. Equally, the name of amateur poet Nahabed Rusinian would have not reached us if not for his popular poem “Cilicia,” which later became a cherished song. Rusinian was born in 1819 in the village of Efkere, a few miles northeast of Caesarea (Kayseri). He received his primary education in his birthplace, and at the age of ten he moved with his father, who was a palace painter, to Constantinople. He attended the Armenian school of Scutari, one of the suburbs of the Ottoman capital, where his interest for Armenian language, history, and culture flourished. However, his father’s premature death forced him to leave school and get a job as a translator for a Turkish pasha.

 

The promising Rusinian had gone under the radar of wealthy Armenians, such as Garabed Balian (the imperial architect who built the renowned palace of Dolmabahçe) and writer Krikor Odian’s father, who helped him financially to pursue higher studies. He traveled to Paris, where he attended medical school at the Sorbonne and also followed courses of literature and art as an auditor.

 

The environment of Paris in the 1840s nurtured Rusinian with the elements to develop his interests in language, arts, and philosophy, but also shaped his liberal views, particularly with the 1848 revolutionary wave that swept over Europe. After obtaining his medical degree in 1851, Rusinian returned to Constantinople and, along with his daily work and his teaching duties at the university became an active participant in the political life of the Armenian community. His penchant for free expression and democratic participation threw him into the struggle for democratization of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire. He joined efforts with his comrades from Paris, Stepan Voskan and Krikor Odian, to put forward the project of a National Constitution (Azkayin Sahmanatrutiun), a legal instrument that would establish the grounds for internal administration within the community. It would also reflect the need for modernization and democratic change that was the driving force of that generation.

 

As part of his quest of modernization, Rusinian was also very active in the promotion and development of the Modern Armenian language (ashkharhapar) as a written language instead of Classical Armenian (krapar). He was a member of the Armenian Educational Council in 1854 when he published his textbook “Orthology” (Ughghakhosutiun), where he made quite radical proposals for the grammar of the language. The heated debates between the partisans of krapar and ashkharhapar would continue for several decades.

 

In 1855, the Armenian Patriarchate forbade the use of Rusinian’s textbook, as well as of his other book, “Calendar of Feasts” (Donatsuyts), because of their eccentric proposals which modified radically both Armenian grammar and calendar.

 

Nahabed Rusinian was among the group of seven intellectuals who drafted the Armenian National Constitution, which was finally approved by Sultan Abdülaziz in 1863. Rusinian passed away in 1876, at the age of 57, victim of a cerebral hemorrhage.

 

The song “Cilicia,” which he wrote and was later put to music by Kapriel Yeranian, has become a cherished song for Armenians from Armenia to the latest corner of the Diaspora. It has also become, unofficially, a hymn of sorts of the Catholicate of the Holy See of Cilicia.

 

As a side note, Armenian scholars have shown a long time ago that “Cilicia” was strongly inspired by French composer and songwriter Frédéric Bérat’s (1801-1855) poem “Ma Normandie,” written in 1836, which incidentally has been used as the semi-official hymn of Jersey, one of the islands of the British Channel, and sometimes as an unofficial hymn of Normandy, in France.

  

For the French text of the song and its English translation, click here. 

 

To hear Cilicia (Giligia) rendered by the Chamber Choir of Yerevan with the Alan Hovhannes Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Krikor Pidedjian, click here.

Battle of Arara - September 19, 1918

The Battle of Arara, on September 19, 1918, was the most remarkable performance of the Armenian Legion. Initially named Légion d’Orient (Eastern Legion), the Armenian Legion was formed in November 1916 as the result of an agreement between Boghos Nubar Pasha, president of the Armenian National Delegation, and the French government. It would be a foreign legion unit within the French army, originally formed by Armenians and Syrians of Ottoman nationality, under the command of French officers.
 

The aim of creating the Legion was to allow Armenians to contribute to the liberation of Cilicia and to help them realize their national aspirations towards the creation of a state in that region, under Ottoman domination. The Legion was to fight only Turks and only in Cilicia.

 

Six battalions were formed, each containing 800 volunteers. Most soldiers were recruited from the survivors of the self-defense of Musa Dagh in 1915, living in refugee camps in Port Said, Egypt. Others were volunteers who came from France, the United States, and even South America.

 

Legionnaire Hovhannes Garabedian (seated)

The Legion was first deployed in Palestine, to help the French and British armies against the Ottoman and German alliance. The Palestinian front was crumbling upon the advance of the British expeditionary forces. The Armenian volunteers had a decisive role in the Battle of Arara, which was part of the Battle of Megiddo. British general Edmund Allenby commended Armenian forces in his official dispatch to the Allied High Command, "On the right flank, on the coastal hills, the units of the Armenian Legion d'Orient fought with great valor. Despite the difficulty of the terrain and the strength of the enemy defensive lines, at an early hour, they took the hill of Dir el Kassis.” Allenby remarked, "I am proud to have had an Armenian contingent under my command. They have fought very brilliantly and have played a great part in the victory.”

 

The Allied victory over the Ottoman-German troops opened the doors for the occupation of Palestine and Syria. After the campaign was ended, the Armenian Legion was deployed in Cilicia. They were active around the cities of Adana and Mersin involved in skirmishes with local civilians and unorganized Turkish militia, as well as protecting the surviving members of the local Armenian population which was returning from the deportation of 1915.

 

In May 1920, Armenians declared an independent state in Cilicia. However, this state was short lived as France disbanded the Armenian Legion and recognized Turkey's sovereignty over the region in 1920. The advancement of the forces of Mustafa Kemal provoked new massacres of the Armenian population and the evacuation of Cilicia by the survivors in 1920-1921.

 

A monument for the Armenian troops killed during the battle of Arara was moved from its original location on the battlefield to Mount Zion in October 1925.

The Catastrophe of Smyrna (September 9-22, 1922)

Smyrna was the second city of the Ottoman Empire and its Armenian population, together with most Armenians from Constantinople, had been spared deportation in 1915. But in 1922, after the success of the Kemalist movement, Armenians and Greek residents were not spared. According to American Consul General George Horton, before the fire of 1922 there were 400,000 people living in the city of Smyrna, of whom 165,000 were Turks, 150,000 Greeks, 25,000 Jews, 25,000 Armenians, and 20,000 foreigners from Italy, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

Greek troops had landed in Smyrna in May 1919. The Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 ended with the complete victory of the nationalist army headed by Mustafa Kemal. On September 9, 1922, the Kemalist troops occupied Smyrna. Four days later, on September 13, the fire began. It continued for nine days. Estimated Greek and Armenian deaths resulting from the fire and massacres range from 10,000 to 100,000.

The Smyrna Catastrophe Painting by Vasilis Bottas

The fire completely destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city; the Muslim and Jewish quarters escaped damage. There are different claims about who was responsible for the fire; however, numerous eye witness accounts singled out uniformed Turkish soldiers setting fire to Greek and Armenian homes and businesses.

The testimony of Fatih Rifki Atay, a well-known Turkish writer, editor, Parliament member, and close friend of Mustafa Kemal, is quite important:

“Gavur (infidel) Izmir burned and came to an end with its flames in the darkness and its smoke in daylight. Were those responsible for the fire really the Armenian arsonists as we were told in those days? ... As I have decided to write the truth as far as I know I want to quote a page from the notes I took in those days. ‘The plunderers helped spread the fire... Why were we burning down Izmir? Were we afraid that if waterfront konaks, hotels and taverns stayed in place, we would never be able to get rid of the minorities? When the Armenians were being deported in the First World War, we had burned down all the habitable districts and neighborhoods in Anatolian towns and districts with this very same fear. This does not solely derive from an urge for destruction. There is also some feeling of inferiority in it. It was as if anywhere that resembled Europe was destined to remain Christian and foreign and be denied to us.’

“. . . If there were another war and we were defeated, would it be sufficient guarantee of preserving the Turkishness of the city if we had left Izmir as a devastated expanse of vacant lots? Were it not for Nureddin Pasha, who I know to be a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic and rabble rouser, I do not think this tragedy would have gone to the bitter end. He has doubtless been gaining added strength from the unforgiving vengeful feelings of the soldiers and officers who have seen the debris and the weeping and agonized population of the Turkish towns which the Greeks had burned to ashes all the way from Afyon.

“. . . At the time it was said that Armenian arsonists were responsible. But was this so? There were many who assigned a part in it to Nureddin Pasha, commander of the First Army, a man who Kemal had long disliked ....”

Despite the fact that there were at least 21 Allied warships and other ships in the harbor of Smyrna, the vast majority, citing "neutrality," did not pick up Greeks and Armenians who were forced to flee from the fire, and Turkish military bands played loud music to drown out the screams of those who were drowning in the harbor and who were forcefully prevented from boarding Allied ships. A Japanese freighter, however, dumped all of its cargo and filled itself to the brink with refugees, taking them to safety at the Greek port of Piraeus.

The catastrophe of Smyrna became the last link in the Turkish genocidal chain that had unfolded in 1915.

Death of General Antranig - August 31, 1927

From Armenia to Argentina, there are statues, memorials, streets, metro stations, even a highway section (in Connecticut) which remember General Antranig’s name. Perhaps the most recognizable Armenian hero of the twentieth century, he was highlighted in 1920 by The Literary Digest as "Armenia's Robin Hood, Garibaldi, and Washington, all in one. He is the ideal patriot of whom broadside ballads are published, and whose name inspires songs sung by the Armenian at his workbench, by the Armenian housewife at her tasks, by their children at play.”

Antranig Ozanian was born on February 25, 1865, in the city of Shabin-Karahisar, in the vilayet of Trebizonda. He was the son of a carpenter, Toros; his mother Mariam died when he was one-year-old. He married at the age of 17, but his wife died a year later, after giving birth to their son, who also died days later.

He was 23 when he joined the revolutionary groups of the Social Democratic Hunchakian Party (founded in 1887), and became a party member in 1891. In 1894 Antranig left the Hunchakian Party and joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (founded in 1890). The next year he met the fedayee commander Aghpiur Serop and joined his group. After Serop’s death in 1899, Antranig became the leader of fedayee groups of Vaspurakan and Taron in Western Armenian. His first mission was to capture and kill Beshara Khalil, a Kurdish soldier of the Ottoman Hamidiye regiments and tribal chief who had murdered Aghpiur Serop and was notorious for his atrocities against the Armenian population. 

Antranig’s most famous battles were the battle of the Monastery of Holy Apostles in Mush (1901) and the second resistance of Sasun in 1904. In November 1901, Antranig barricaded himself in the Monastery of Holy Apostles in Mush with 30 fedayees, including the famed Kevork Chavush, and some ten peasants. The well-fortified monastery was besieged by five Turkish battalions with a total of 1,200 men. After a nineteen-day resistance and causing substantial losses to the Turkish army, the group was able to leave the monastery and flee in small groups. Antranig gained legendary stature among Armenians after breaking through the siege. In 1924 he would write in his memoirs that “it was necessary to show to the Turkish and Kurdish peoples that an Armenian can take a gun, that an Armenian heart can fight and protect his rights.” 

He participated in the second insurrection of Sasun in 1904. He was pressed by Armenian leaders to allow temporary peace in the region. He moved to the Caucasus through Iran and then traveled to Europe, where he was engaged in advocacy in support of the national liberation struggle. In 1906 he published a book of military tactics in Geneva. In 1907 he settled in Bulgaria. During the fourth Congress of the A.R.F. (Vienna, 1907), Antranig announced his decision to leave the party due to his disagreement about the establishment of cooperation with the Young Turks. 

He participated in the First Balkan War of 1912-1913 within the Bulgarian army, together with Karekin Nzhdeh and a detachment of 273 Armenian volunteers. Antranig was honored with the Order of Bravery for his heroic participation in the war. 

During World War I, Antranig returned to the ranks of the A.R.F. and participated in the Caucasus Campaign as head of the first Armenian volunteer battalion, which helped lift the siege of Van on May 6, 1915. He participated in twenty different offensives where he gained fame due to his courage and his tactics to defeat the Ottoman forces. The Russian authorities made him a Major General in 1918 and decorated him five times for bravery. 

After the disbandment of the six volunteer battalions in 1916, Antranig resigned his commission and departed from the front. He left the ranks of the A.R.F. for the second time in 1917 and organized the First Congress of Western Armenians; he also published the newspaper Hayastan in Tiflis in 1917-1918, with writer Vahan Totovents as its editor.

After the Russian army left the Caucasus following the Revolution, Armenian forces were created in a rush to try to fill the vacuum against the Turkish offense. In March-April 1918, Antranig was the head of a provisional government created in the areas of Western Armenia formerly occupied by the Russians. His military leadership allowed the Armenian surviving population to escape to Eastern Armenia. 

After the foundation of the Republic of Armenia in May 1918, Antranig fought along volunteer units against the Ottoman army. In July of the same year, he arrived in Zanguezur, in the south, to participate in the inter-ethnic warfare between Armenians and the local Turkish population. He also tried several times to seize Shushi, the most important city of Karabagh, but was prevented by British troops in the area. 

In April 1919, Antranig arrived in Holy Etchmiadzin. His 5,000-strong division had dwindled to 1,350 soldiers. As a result of disagreements with the government of the Republic and British diplomatic machinations in the Caucasus, Antranig disbanded his division and handed over his belongings and weapons to Kevork V, Catholicos of All Armenians. In late 1919 he led a delegation to the United States to lobby in support of an American mandate. He was saluted as “the George Washington of Armenians.” 

He married again in Paris in 1922, with Boghos Nubar Pasha as best man. Antranig and his wife, Nevarte Kurkjian, settled in Fresno, California, where a young William Saroyan met him and later described the meeting in his short story “Antranik of Armenia” (Inhale and Exhale, 1936). He passed away near Chico, in northern California, on August 31, 1927, of a heart attack. His remains were moved to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in early 1928. They were set to be buried in Armenia, according to his desire, but Soviet authorities refused entry. His body was eventually returned to Armenia in 2000 and was reburied at the Yerablur Military Cemetery.

Death of Franz Werfel - August 26, 1945

Writer Franz Werfel (1890-1945) had no Armenian connections whatsoever, and probably he was little known among Armenians until his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh turned him into a world celebrity at the age of 43. 

Born in Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a wealthy Jewish family, Werfel was educated in a Catholic school. He published his first book of poetry in 1911. During World War I, Werfel served in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Russian front as a telephone operator. In 1917, he left the army and moved to Vienna, where he fell in love with Alma Mahler, widow of composer Gustav Mahler and wife of architect Walter Gropius. Mahler divorced in 1920, but she refused to marry Werfel for the next nine years. Meanwhile, the latter became one of the well-established German and Austrian writers by the end of the 1920s. 

In the winter of 1930, Werfel and Alma Mahler made a trip to the Middle East. In Aleppo, they met a group of Armenian children working in a carpet factory. He was told that they were orphans. On his way in Lebanon, he heard the story of the seven villages of Musa Dagh. The plot for a future novel started to thicken in his mind.

During the next two years and a half, the writer researched feverishly to write a novel that would become the most popular literary text about the Armenian genocide. The story of how the 5,000 villagers living in seven villages in the southern corner of Cilicia had defied the Turkish order of deportation captured Werfel imagination. The 53 days of resistance and final rescue by French ships on the “Mount of Moses” (Musa Dagh) took a Biblical resonance with the use of the 40 days that would parallel the 40 years that the Jews spent in the desert before arriving in the Promised Land. Many other symbolisms and parallel may be found in a novel that was said at the time to have foreseen the destiny of the Jews in Europe.

It was 1933, and Werfel’s books were among the ones burned by Nazi students. The publication of the novel in November 1933 led to its prohibition three months later in Germany by Turkish pressure; the book was also forbidden and condemned in Turkey.
 
Meanwhile, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh became a worldwide success and translations into English and French soon were published. Hollywood’s Metro Goldwyn Mayer bought the rights to the movie, but Turkish pressure on the U.S. State Department had that project shelved, as well as several other attempts in the following years. Werfel was triumphantly received by Armenians in France and in the United States during a trip to both countries in 1935-1936.

In 1938, the writer and his wife left Vienna after the Nazi occupation of Austria and settled in France. But the defeat of France to Germany in 1940 and the Nazi occupation forced them to narrowly escape to the United States. Werfel died in Los Angeles in 1945 and was buried there. By the initiative of Armenian American historian and educator Vartan Gregorian, Werfel’s remains were returned to Vienna and reburied in 1975. 

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was translated into English by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1934 and became an immediate best-seller in the United States, with several reprints over the decades. However, the translation was not faithful to the German original, as Haigaz Kazarian had already discovered in 1951 in an article translated in 1963 in the Armenian Review. The equivalent of ninety pages of text had been excised by Dunlop. The recent publication of the unabridged English version of the novel (Boston, 2012), with the missing text restored by James Reidel, allows Anglo-American readers to savor this classic at a time when literary works on the Armenian genocide are quite fashionable.

Birth of Shushanik Kurghinian - August 18, 1876

Quite a neglected name in the literary canon, Shushanik Kurghinian was one of the earliest figures of Armenian feminist literature. Shushanik Popoljian was born in Alexandropol (today Gyumri) into a poor family. She wrote in her autobiography, “Sometimes father would bring his shoe-repair ‘workstation’ home, in order to save money, and I would work for him demanding my wages, every single kopeck. Mother, being raised in a traditional household, would reprove of my ‘ill behavior toward my parent,’ blaming those harmful books for corrupting me.”

She first studied at an all-girls school. In 1893, at the age of 17, she organized the first female faction of the Social Democratic Hnchakian Party (founded in 1887). She was twenty-one when she married Arshak Kurghinian, a businessman and a member of the socialist underground in the Caucasus. She published her first poem in 1899 in the monthly Taraz. Her activities against the Russian czar blacklisted her. In 1903 she escaped to Rostov-on-Don, in the northern Caucasus, with her two children, while her husband stayed in Alexandropol. Living in utmost hardship and poverty, Shushanik Kurghinian immersed herself in the Russian revolutionary milieu and some of her most powerfully charged poetry was written from1907–1909, during the years of her affiliation with Rostov's proletarian underground. 

She managed to clandestinely publish her first collection of 43 poems, Ringing of the Dawn, assisted by Alexander Miasnikian, the future leader of the communist party in Soviet Armenia. Her second forthcoming volume, however, was rejected by the censors and never released. Her poetry brought out the most silenced voices and raised such issues as the unjust social conditions that forced poor women to lives of prostitution and exploitation. Kurghinian used poetry to promote feminist ideals, envisioning a social revolution through women’s struggle for equal rights and emancipation. 

She continued to write and participate in social projects, but her fragile health became an issue. She moved back to Alexandropol in 1921, a year after the sovietization of Armenia. She traveled to Kharkov and Moscow in 1925 for medical treatment, but returned home disappointed. After the earthquake of Leninakan (the name of Alexandropol from 1924-1990) in 1926, she settled in Yerevan. She died the next year at the age of fifty-one. 

During the Soviet era, Kurghinian’s poetry was used only for socialist propaganda, thus undermining the artistic merit of this writer and activist. Her feminist works were marginalized. As Victoria Rowe writes in A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880-1922, “Soviet literary criticism ignored the gender specific aspects of Kurghinian’s works because they posited that socialist society would eliminate women’s problems, and any specific addressing of women’s issues was condemned as ‘bourgeois’.” Her works have started to be seen under a new light over the past few years.