CHAPTER XIV

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THE REIGN OF TERROR--HARPOOT AND ZEITOUN.

The Harpoot massacre was another butchery carried out under orders. Sixty Christians fled to a church in the vain hope that its walls would furnish them a shelter against those who were crying for the blood of Armenians. They were permitted for a time to believe themselves secure, but suddenly the church was surrounded by a great number of Kurds. The doors were then blown in, and the Christians thought that they would be massacred within the sacred structure. They were not. Their captors took them one at a time outside the church, and there, heedless of the cries for mercy from women and children, killed them, either by shooting or stabbing them. The first victim was the Protestant pastor of the church, who, as he was dragged out, bade the others, if they had to die, to die as Christians. He met his death like a martyr. Some of the refugees, in a very agony of terror, offered to abjure their faith and accept Islamism, thinking thus to save their lives. The offers availed them nothing, for their insatiable enemies, after accepting them, dragged the converts out and killed them one by one. The Armenian Church was turned into a mosque, and the Protestant Church into a stable.

An eyewitness who saw the Christian quarter in flames and the houses of the American mission burning, said that he came on to Malatia (the ancient Melitene), and found not a house in the Christian quarter standing. In a khan there were about twenty wounded men, the sole survivors of a caravan of two hundred who had been traveling to Harpoot from Northern Syria and whose members had nearly all been slain by the Kurdish bands. There were one hundred and fifty bodies lying in the road. At Marash, the same witness, days after the massacre, counted eighty-seven dead Armenians in one spot, and there were hundreds of bodies strewn around in the near neighborhood. In the villages on the plains near Harpoot, each containing from fifty to one thousand houses, the evidences of slaughter were sickeningly abundant. The Kurdish butchers had slain fully half the population. The door of a house would be burst open, a volley fired upon the shuddering inmates, while those who rushed out were caught and killed in the fields. Then the houses were plundered, fired and left blazing. This was the fate of thousands of Christian homes.

Several thousand Armenian Christians fell in the city of Harpoot under Kurdish and Turkish swords. In the Province of Harpoot were hundreds of small towns and villages, few of which escaped the terrible fate of slaughter and desolation that befell over two thousand other towns and villages throughout the country.

Harpoot is one of the principal stations of the Eastern Turkey Mission, and is the seat of Euphrates College, a group of buildings, eight of which were badly wrecked during the riots. This institution had about five hundred and sixty-four pupils in all its departments, and was exerting a powerful influence for good throughout Eastern Turkey.

It was estimated that the loss would not be less than $88,000. At Marash, the destruction of mission buildings was more complete. The Central Turkey Girls' College and the Theological Seminary were both wrecked. There were in the former institution (which was organized in 1884), about thirty-five students. Both buildings were located a little distance outside of Marash.

In February, 1896, the United States Minister, Mr. Terrell, demanded an indemnity of $100,000 for the burning and pillaging of the American missions at Marash and Harpoot. He also asked for the immediate granting of firmans for the rebuilding of them.

Rev. Grigos Hachadoovian, the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Harpoot, when the Turkish soldiers commenced shooting all over the city, took his wife and children and went to church, where about sixty of his congregation joined him. Naturally good and earnest Christians as they were, they lifted their voices up to heaven for help. While in prayer the Turks rushed in and demanded of the minister to become a Mohammedan then and there, with his congregation. He refused promptly. The Turks removed the pulpit, made a butchering platform, cut off the head of the minister and actually cut him to pieces before his congregation. Mind you on the platform from which he had preached Christ for twenty years. This horrible spectacle had no effect upon the devout Christian Armenians, as they all refused to denounce Christ and pray to Mohammed, and all were killed in the church to the last man, woman and child. What do you think of that picture, Christian people of America? That is the Mohammedanism some people would like to have introduced into our county.

Letters received from persons engaged in relief work among the Armenians, gave the following carefully prepared statistics concerning the recent massacres by the Turks under the tolerance of Christian powers in the year of our Lord, 1895-6. These statistics were given in detail for the several villages in Harpoot province.

"Killed, thirty thousand six hundred and one; burned to death, one thousand four hundred and thirty-six; preachers and priests killed, fifty-one; died from starvation, two thousand four hundred and sixty-one; died unprotected in the fields, four thousand three hundred and forty; died from fear, six hundred and sixty; wounded, eight thousand; houses burned, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and forty-two; forcible conversions, fifteen thousand and sixty-six; women and girls abducted, five thousand five hundred and forty-six: forcible marriages, one thousand five hundred and fifty-one; churches burned, two hundred and twenty-seven; destitute and starving, ninety-four thousand seven hundred and fifty." The account does not add the number of English and American cannon with the cobwebs left over their mouths. The Turks said that they killed too few the last time, and would kill more in the next massacre.

When the Kurds were expelled from Diarbekir and the gates closed against them, they turned their attention to the villages. These, one after another, were taken, plundered, and in many instances, burned--massacre being generally in proportion to the degree of resistance made by the villagers. A district about ninety miles long and fifty broad, east of Diarbekir, and up to the boarders of Syert, in the vilayet of Bitlis, was swept by this hurricane of destruction, wherever Christian villages nestled among the billows of this rolling country. The first intimation that the wave of wanton wreckage was moving southward was given in the attack upon Tel-Ermin. This Armenian town of two hundred houses and sixty shops, five hours west of Mardin, was taken, plundered and burned. The next day Gorli, a Syrian village south of Mardin, and only two hours away, shared the same fate. About the same time the village of Abrahamiyeh fell into the hands of the Kurds and only Monsoruyeh, twenty miles north of the city remained intact. This they tried to capture, but were driven back. Serious attempts were made by the Kurds to enter the city in the hope that they would be aided from within. In this they were disappointed and obliged to draw off with severe loss. The Kurds persistently asserted that a firman for the slaughter of Christians had been given, but that the Christians of Mardin had bribed the government to conceal it and defend them. When the Kurds realized that the government and city garrison were a unit for the common defence, they drew off and the tide of attack swept further east taking Nisibin, and some twenty Christian villages in its way. Thousands of refugees collected near Mardin. In the village of Kulleth, three hundred refugees from the Diarbekir plain were begging food and clothing. The entire Christian population remaining in Syert was stripped of everything.

Fully three thousand Armenians were massacred at Arabkir, and the widows and orphans of those killed were left in terrible distress from cold and hunger.

The Armenians of Sivas and Cæsarea were in daily fear of massacre, and soon their fears were terribly realized, for the Kurds and Turks thoroughly performed their inhuman work of butchery and plunder, the former taking the booty as their pay, according to the permission granted from Constantinople.

In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil, Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils, and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages, especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed, the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there is no sign that such places existed.

At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders, who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.

The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.

Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a district not far from Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York, thus told the story:

"You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women who would not accept Mohammedism.

"They took all the articles which were useful and broke everything they had no use for. They tore up every place in the hope of finding something valuable."

A letter received from an Armenian resident on the seacoast of Cilicia, said:

"The government has taken away all the arms from the Armenians of Chok Marsovan, who were armed to protect themselves against fifteen thousand Bashi-Bazouks, who were marching on them. Since then the Turks have reduced to ashes the villages of Engerli and Ojakli, which contained respectively three hundred and two hundred and fifty houses. They have plundered seventy-five houses in the Armenian village of Najarli. They set on fire the houses in the presence of the regular soldiers. Now all the villagers are reduced to the utmost distress. More than one hundred farms have been plundered, and many people butchered in the houses and in the gardens."

Every account from survivors of the massacres who succeeded in reaching places of safety, disclosed some new and revolting trait of Moslem ferocity and hatred against Christianity. A veritable crusade of Mohammedan fanaticism ruled the hour. Whole villages and towns, and whole Christian quarters in cities were driven like helpless sheep into the Moslem fold.

Aintab, a city of forty-five thousand inhabitants had its baptism of blood. The massacre and pillage began in the markets and in those parts of the city where Christian houses offered easy points of attack, crowds rushed in every direction while pistol and gun shots with cries of fear, anger and defiance made an exhibition of the most fearful tumult and confusion.

After the Kurds and Turkish soldiers of Harpoot had plundered and burned nearly all of the Christian houses in the missionary quarter of the city, including eight of the mission buildings which were then in flames, when massacre was rife and the air was rent with the cry of the wounded and dying, nearly five hundred Christian refugees with the missionaries, driven from place to place by fire and bullet, found themselves in the large, new stone building of Euphrates College. The Turkish officers, seeing that in order to reach the refugees they must withdraw the Americans whom they feared to kill, attempted to induce the missionaries to come out from the building "that they might be the better protected." Dr. Barnum (a missionary for thirty-nine years) replied, "You can protect us here better than anywhere else; we shall remain and if you burn the building we will die with these Christians." They were all spared. Certainly the age of heroism is not past.

The city of Oorfa is one of the most ancient in the world. It is the Edessa of the time of Christ where Abgar reigned as King (see