1915: the Armenian Genocide

Armenians had lived in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus for well over two thousand years. In the Ottoman Empire they were a recognised Christian community, prominent in trade, crafts and the professions, but in the eastern provinces they were largely peasants exposed to the power of Kurdish tribal chiefs and local officials. As the empire shrank and Armenian political parties demanded reform, tensions rose. In the massacres of 1894–96 under Abdülhamid II, tens of thousands, perhaps far more, were killed; in 1909 thousands more died in Adana.^•

War and deportation

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914. That winter Enver Pasha’s offensive against Russia in the Caucasus ended in disaster at Sarıkamış, and Allied forces were preparing to attack the Dardanelles. The Committee of Union and Progress government, led by Talat, Enver and Cemal, came to see the empire’s Armenians as a dangerous internal enemy; some Armenians did fight with Russia, and in April 1915 Armenians in Van rose in self-defence against massacres.^•

On 24 April 1915, the date Armenians now commemorate, the government arrested more than two hundred Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul; most were later killed. At the end of May a “temporary law” authorised deportations. Over the following months, Armenian communities across Anatolia were ordered to leave. Men were often separated and shot; women, children and the elderly were marched south through mountains and deserts towards Aleppo and the camps of Deir ez-Zor in Syria. Many were murdered on the way by gendarmes, irregulars of the “Special Organisation” and local bands, including Kurdish tribesmen; others died of hunger, thirst and disease. Thousands of women and children were abducted or converted and absorbed into Muslim households.^•

A second wave of killing in 1916 struck survivors in the Syrian camps. Assyrian and other Syriac Christians, who remember these years as Seyfo, “the sword”, and Ottoman Greeks also suffered massacres and deportations.^•

How many died

Estimates of Armenian deaths in 1915–16 range from about 600,000 to 1.2 million or more; many historians put the figure around one million, and Armenia commemorates 1.5 million. The Turkish state cites much lower figures. Either way, the Armenian presence in most of Anatolia, thousands of years old, was almost entirely ended.^•

Responsibility

In 1919–20, under Allied occupation, Ottoman courts-martial tried CUP leaders and condemned several, including Talat in absentia, for organising the massacres. Talat was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian survivor. The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” in 1944, cited the Armenian case as one of his inspirations.^•

Memory and denial

The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923 by many former CUP members, built its identity on a different story, of a nation that survived attempts to dismember it. The Turkish state acknowledges that many Armenians died but rejects the term genocide, stresses wartime context, Armenian rebellion and the very large Muslim losses of the same years, and has called for a joint commission of historians.^•

Around 30 countries, including France, Germany (2016) and the United States (2021), have formally recognised the genocide; Turkey protests each recognition.^•

How Armenians remember

For Armenians, 1915 is not only a historical event but a family one. Survivors scattered to Aleppo, Beirut, Marseille, Fresno and the Russian Caucasus, and the modern diaspora was born from their flight. Many grandparents spoke little of what they had seen; others told the story over and over. The composer Komitas, arrested on 24 April 1915, survived but never recovered, and became a symbol of a culture destroyed. Armenians often call the genocide the Medz Yeghern (“Great Crime”), and the Armenian Church canonised the victims as martyrs in 2015, the centenary.^•

Recognition became a cause that united the diaspora from the 1960s onwards, and in the 1970s–80s a small Armenian militant group, ASALA, assassinated Turkish diplomats, a violent chapter that is still debated among Armenians and remembered bitterly in Turkey. Today the demand is above all for acknowledgement. Many Armenians also carry the losses beyond the human toll: churches turned to stables or ruins, Western Armenian as a language now endangered, and a homeland in eastern Anatolia that most will only ever visit as tourists.^•

Why it matters today