In the fall of 1895 mass violence between Muslims and Christians erupted throughout the Ottoman realms. This contagion of violence, presaged by fearful rumors, spread swiftly across the breadth of the Empire. Within the course of three months, tens of thousands of people were dead, many killed by their former neighbors. Until recently, the mid-1890s have been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the late Ottoman Empire. This is particularly striking given the critical importance of those years for the history of the Empire. We will examine how mass imprisonment, violence, and radicalization, coupled with the threat of European intervention, created an era of crisis that threatened to tear the Empire asunder. Despite certain broad patterns, such as concentration of power in the hands of Sultan Abdülhamid's Palace System, there were differences that varied from one locale to another. Our panel proposes to investigate this massive history of violence from the vantage point of four localities across the Ottoman Empire: Crete, Aintab, Bitlis and Trabzon. Each episode of violence gave rise to different questions. In Crete, the news and rumors originating from Anatolia precipitated an episode of inter-religious strife which spiraled out of control in 1895. To what extent did these rumors provide a background for the European intervention that terminated the Ottoman administration on the island? Meanwhile, in Bitlis, in the mountainous eastern part of the Empire, the violence was carried out in a strikingly organized fashion. Many observers wondered, in the aftermath of that violence, what role was played by missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In Aintab, in the southern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, it is critical to account for the consent and popular participation of large numbers of people. To what extent was that participation viewed as duty to the sovereign? Finally, in Trabzon, on Black Sea coast at the northern edge of the Ottoman Empire, the massacres were carried out fairly early. Were the massacres here linked to an earlier dramatic attempted assassination of an unpopular Ottoman official? Underlying all of these episodes of violence were the complex web of local relationships that determined how rumors of earlier episodes of violence, borne by word-of-mouth and telegraphs, were interpreted.
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Dr. Owen Miller
As if arranged by a signal, at around noon on October 25, 1895, massacres broke out in the city of Bitlis. Within 24 hours, entire neighborhoods were looted and hundreds lay dead. As with most individual cases of Hamidian massacres, the Bitlis killings have been almost entirely overlooked in the existing scholarship. When the massacres are discussed at all, descriptions generally follow either the official accounts of the Ottoman State or the reports collected by British consuls. Yet, central to both sets of accounts are the central role of George Perkins Knapp and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).
On the one hand, for the British, the ABCFM were key repositories of local information as many of the missionaries had lived in the Ottoman Empire for decades. Any perusal of the parliamentary Blue Books would make it clear that the British accounts of the Hamidian massacres were often based heavily on missionary observations. It is not surprising that of the first accounts of the Bitlis violence that reached the British Ambassador Philip Currie was from the pen of Rev. George Perkins Knapp. Those accounts described how crowds of armed Muslims killed “every Armenian that they could get a hold of” and that local troops condoned the killing.
On the other hand, the Ottoman State placed the blame of the killings on the ABCFM missionaries themselves. At first, the Ottoman State depicted the Bitlis violence as simply the responsibility of seditious Ottoman-Armenians, working to incite violence and gain the attention of the European powers. But within a matter of weeks, another culprit had been found: the ABCFM missionary, George Perkins Knapp. In February 1896, the Bitlis-born-and-raised, Harvard-educated Knapp was openly charged with inciting “the credulous Armenians to attack the mosques during the Friday prayers and kill the faithful, and to assassinate Muslim officials and notables whom they meet in lonely places.
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Mr. Emre Can Daglioglu
The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire witnessed a great wave of anti-Armenian riots that took place in the autumn of 1895 and sporadically continued throughout 1896. While several tens of thousands of Armenians were forced to convert to Islam in order to escape certain death, these extensive massacres also took the lives of tens of thousands of Armenians.
The riots took place in the weeks following Sultan Abdulhamid’s decree on October 20th, 1895 promulgating, under the diplomatic pressures of the British, French, and Russian governments, the implementation of internal reforms intended to improve the sociopolitical conditions of the Christian Armenian population inhabiting the empire’s eastern provinces. The virulent mix of an anti-Armenian political atmosphere, the Muslim resentment of reforms in favor of Armenians, and the fear of a general Armenian uprising disseminated through bureaucratic channels plunged the region into a spate of mass murder, pillage, and forced conversion in the autumn of 1895.
Trabzon was, however, chronologically the only exception of this great wave of violence. The chainlike of unfolding cataclysm first appeared evident in this city on the Black Sea coast and crossroad of significant trade routes. The massacre in Trabzon began on October 12th and appeared to be precipitated by two Armenian revolutionary unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Bahri Pasha, the ex-Governor of Van. Yet, although the promulgation of the reform itself was obviously not a prime mover, even the rumor of the reforms poured petrol on the fires of ethnic tension in the city.
This paper mainly investigates how the mechanism of violence against Armenians was engineered under the impact of local, national, imperial, and international factors and how these factors played out in Trabzon. In the paper, the role of reform rumors is examined to shed some light on the extent to which the reform demands of Armenians and reform declaration by the Sultan Abdulhamid played a critical role in the massacre and how the idea of reform resonated among the Muslim population.
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Dr. Umit Kurt
Although there have recently been a few remarkable interventions made in the origins, dynamics, extent, and repercussions of 1895 Hamidian massacres in the eastern vilayets, there has been a lack of research to date into the issue of unfolding these massacres in the region of Cilicia (southern Anatolia). The city of Aintab, surrounded by lesser extensions of the Tarsus mountains in the west and the north and being a part of Cilicia, was affected by this atmosphere of violence. The massacres of November 1895 in Aintab, remembered as Balta Senesi (The Year of the Ax), as most of the Christians were killed by cutting tools like knives, axes, and bayonets—though firearms were also used, began on the morning of 16 November and continued until the evening of 19 November. A number of local elites and state officials played an active role in the massacres and plundering. The Armenians of Aintab were not all passive victims of this persecution. They resisted the Muslim mob’s assaults, particularly in the Armenian quarters. The exact number of victims is unknown. According to various records, the approximate number of Armenians killed from 16 to 19 November in Aintab is between 300 and 400 out of an Armenian population of 15,390 recorded in the 1895 Yearbook of Aleppo (the total population of Aintab was recorded as 84,135). The official Ottoman sources report that approximately sixty Muslims and 110 Christians died. The estimated number of plundered shops ranges from 900 to 1,500 and that of pillaged houses from 500 to 600. In addition, Christian graveyards were desecrated, the bones carried off and scattered, and Christian-owned trees were destroyed. Drawing upon primary sources from Ottoman-Turkish, Armenian and British archives as well as memoirs and personal papers, this paper explores the massacres of 1895 in Aintab, unveiling the immediate context, scope, the role of rumour, actors, Armenian resistance and momentous consequences of the anti-Armenian violence. It also aims to disclose how the Zeitun incident affected Armenians of Aintab and to discuss the peculiar dynamics and socio-political atmosphere in the city in the aftermath of the massacres.
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Ugur Z. Peçe
As the Armenian massacres were unfolding across Anatolia, Crete witnessed an increase in the number of murders between its Christian majority and Greek-speaking Muslim minority populations. With vivid memories of previous episodes of large-scale violence on the island, Cretans grew fearful that the murders portended a tumultuous period. As the year 1895 wore on, these fears materialized and an inter-religious conflict engulfed the island for the next three years. The conflict in Crete has received scant scholarly attention and, accordingly, the Ottomanists have not usually treated the island as a locale central to the understanding of crucial transformations that the empire experienced during its final decades. The eventful history of the island does not warrant such disinterest. The conflict in Crete caused a war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in 1897—a war that resulted in an Ottoman military victory but diplomatic defeat. In addition, it generated an international crisis that led to the occupation of the island by four European powers—Britain, France, Italy, and Russia—and the removal of the Ottoman troops from Crete by these states. This paper has two objectives. First, it seeks to grant Crete its due importance by showing how a local conflict on it pitted the Ottoman State against European powers in a desperate attempt to preserve its sovereignty on the strategic island. Second, the paper argues that the outbreak of violence in Crete at the time of the Armenian massacres was not a coincidence but a calculated move by the Christian Cretan insurgents aiming to end the Ottoman rule on the island. In this paper, I also discuss how the news about the Armenian massacres reached Crete and, in the process, was blended with wild rumors circulating among its inhabitants. In so doing, I demonstrate how the islanders saw the destiny of Crete intertwined with the blood-soaked Anatolia and regarded the local violence through the trans-regional lens of Armenian massacres in 1895.
