On Friday, February 6, Dr. Anna Aleksanyan, the Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies, delivered a lecture on behalf of the Armenian Studies Program titled, “Trabzon Armenian Women’s Experiences During the Genocide.”
Dr. Aleksanyan’s discussion was centered around women who were not deported and were left in the city of Trabzon in 1915-16, and what life looked like for them during the Genocide. She explained that the Trabzon genocide is among the most well documented events of the Armenian genocide.
This is attributable to the availability of documents and records from the Turkish Courts-Martial in Constantinople. The Trabzon trial convened for twenty sessions from March 26 to May 20, 1919 during which witnesses and survived women testified. Even though most of these women had just been liberated from their captivity, they came to the court and testified in detail about their experiences.
Trabzon is a port city on the Black Sea coast, in a strategic position that facilitated the export of goods to the Empire’s European regions and to the Mediterranean Sea. Additionally, Trabzon served as a border city on the edge of the Russian Empire. Trabzon Armenians were actively involved in industrial and commercial life in the port towns of the Black Sea. Using their cultural and commercial ties with Europe, and being able to communicate in several languages, Armenians were connected to foreign representatives at different levels in the city. Representatives of Armenian political parties were active in the city, and the Turkish authorities were well aware of the Armenian community’s significant influence and importance.
“It is not a coincidence that the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s, when 300,000 Armenians were killed, started from this very city,” Dr. Aleksanyan said. “So they knew what they were doing.”
In May of 1915, Armenian communities of different provinces began receiving orders of deportation and the Trabzon Armenians found themselves in trouble. Word began to spread rapidly throughout the city. On June 26, the official order of deportation was hung on the walls of the Armenian quarters in the city, with a 4-day limit to prepare for the deportation.
Some of the Armenian women were convinced they could and had to do something. They gathered and went to meet with the German Consul’s wife, who refused to meet them. They tried going to others for support, all the doors were closed.
The women held a public demonstration, pleading for mercy as they had been supporters of the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the Vali of Trabzon, Djemal Azmi, made an “exemption” for Armenian women in the later stages of pregnancy and for children “when the parents so desired.”
Approximately three thousand children (girls up to 15 years old and boys up to 10) and several dozen women remained in the city. To protect their children, Armenians entrusted them to their non-Armenian friends: the Greek metropolitan, American missionaries, and other Christian organizations operating in the city. Following the departure of Armenian deportees, those who remained in the city were removed from Christian care, placed in special institutions, subjected to neglect, starvation, murder, and institutionalized rape. After a year, all male children disappeared, and the girls who mainly survived did so in Turkish households, to which they were given as gifts or sold to serve as servants or sex slaves.
The fate of the deported individuals was equally dire. Women and children were separated from the men, who were executed near the city, and the rest were compelled to continue their journey while enduring plunder, starvation, physical and emotional torture, sexual violence, forced marriage, and coerced conversion.
“For days we walked along the banks of the Euphrates, where we saw thousands of corpses of women, men, and children in a swollen state,” wrote survivor Nuard Makhokhian. “We walked over corpses and skulls for days. Sometimes those corpses appeared in such tortured forms that we closed our eyes to avoid seeing them. On our way, we met groups of women looking like skeletons, dried up like ghosts from the graves.”
Only a few Trabzon Armenian deportees reached Aleppo, and none arrived at their intended destination, Mosul.
When Russian forces took over the city in 1916, from about 16,000 Armenians, only several hundred remained alive. Some of them were hiding in the mountains and the rest were captives in the Muslim households. The efforts to rescue the converted women and children from the Turkish households were composed of many ongoing struggles, however they proceeded.
Even though the genocidal policy was designed to destroy Armenian women both physically and via forced assimilation, most women did not become passive victims by accepting their fate. They organized demonstrations, escaped their captivity, joined the armed forces, and after the war, fought to bring criminals to justice.