Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918

621 Pages·2009·4.28 MB·English

by  Grigoris Balakian

Grigoris Balakian, Vienna, 1913

Contents
Map
Introduction
Map
Chronology
Translator's Note
The Life of an Exile
VOLUME I
–
JULY 1914 APRIL 1916
July-October 1914
PART I
1 In Berlin Before the War
2 In Berlin
3 Return to Constantinople from Berlin
The First Deportation, April 1915-February 1916
PART II
4 The General Condition of the Armenians at the Beginning of 1915
5 The First Bad News from Cilicia: The Secret Messenger
Map
6 The Night of Gethsemane
7 Red Sunday
8 Toward a Place of Exile: The Names of the Exiles in Ayash
9 Life in Chankiri Armory: The Names of the Deportees in Chankiri
10 Life of the Deportees in the City
11 Plan for the Extinction of the Armenians in Turkey
12 The Armenian Carnage in Ankara
13 The Tragic End of Deportee Friends in Ayash
14 The Tragic End of the Chankiri Deportees
15 The Deportation and Killing of Zohrab and Vartkes
16 The Armenians of Chankiri in the Days of Horror
17 The General Condition of the Armenians at the Beginning of 1916
18 Second Arrest and Imprisonment
19 Departure from Chankiri to Choroum
20 From Choroum to Yozgat
21 From Yozgat to Boghazliyan: The Skulls
The Second Deportation: The Caravan of Death to Der Zor,
PART III
February-April 1916
22 The Confessions of a Slayer Captain
23 Encountering Another Caravan of the Condemned
24 From Boghazliyan to Kayseri: The Halys River Bridge and the
Bandits of the Ittihad
25 Kayseri to Tomarza
26 Tomarza to Gazbel
27 Gazbel to Hajin
28 Hajin to Sis
29 Sis to Garzbazar
30 Garzbazar to Osmaniye
31 Osmaniye to Hasanbeyli and Kanle-gechid
32 Hasanbeyli to Islahiye: The Sweet Smell of Bread
33 Islahiye: A Field of Mounds for Graves
34 Bad News from Der Zor
35 Escape from Islahiye to Ayran
The Life of a Fugitive
VOLUME II
–
APRIL 1916 JANUARY 1919
In the Tunnels of Amanos
PART I
1 Escape on the Way to Ayran-Baghche (Vineyard)
2 The Remnants of the Armenians in the Amanos Mountains
3 Signs of Imminent New Storms
4 The Treatment of the Armenians by the German Soldiers
5 The Ghosts of Ten Thousand Armenian Women in the Deserts of Ras-
ul-Ain
6 The Deportation and Murder of the Armenian Workers of Amanos
7 Bloodshed on the Way from Baghche to Marash: A German Nurse
Goes Insane
8 The Suffering of British Prisoners of War at Kut-al-Amara
9 The Program of Forced Islamization: Escape from Baghche to Injirli
10 In the Forests of Injirli: Escape from Amanos to Taurus
In the Tunnels of the Taurus Mountains Map
PART II
11 The Self-Sacrifice of the Armenian Workers of the Baghdad Railway
12 Fragments of Armenians in the Taurus Mountains
13 In the Deep Valley of Tashdurmaz
14 Life in Belemedik
15 The Deportation of Patriarch Zaven Der Yeghiayan from
Constantinople to Baghdad
16 Legions of Armenian Exiles in Konya and Bozanti
17 Meeting Armenian Intellectuals on the Road to Belemedik
18 Escape from Belemedik to Adana
In Adana, January 1917–September 1918
PART III
19 The General Condition of the War at the Beginning of 1917
20 A Mysterious Patient in Adana's German Hospital
21 The Condition of the Remaining Armenians in Adana
22 The Curse of Murdered Armenian Mothers
23 The Natural Beauty of Cilicia: The Disguised Vine Grower
24 The Clerk of the Office: Disappearance
25 The General Condition of the Armenians at the Beginning of 1918
26 The Turkish Army Invades the Caucasus, and the Armenians at
Sardarabad
27 The Declaration of the Armenian Republic
28 The Hospital-Slaughterhouse of Turkish Soldiers
29 The Victorious British Army Occupies Damascus: The Battle of
Arara
30 The National Vow of the Turks to Exterminate the Surviving
Armenians: The General Massacre in Der Zor
31 Escape from the Land of Blood
32 The Disguised German Soldier Toward Constantinople: The
Longing of a Mother
33 Armistice: The Allied Fleet Victoriously Enters the Turkish Capital
34 Did the Victors Come to Punish, or to Loot?
35 The General Condition of Constantinople on the Eve of the
Armistice
36 Irrevocable Departure from Turkey: From Constantinople to Paris
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Biographical Glossary
Appendix: Author's Preface
Map
Notes
Bibliography

Introduction
The literature of witness has had a significant impact on our understanding of the
twentieth century. What we know about our age of catastrophe we know in crucial part
from memoirs such as Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel's Night, Michihiko
Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary, Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope, and many others,
stories that have taken us inside episodes of mass violence and killing, genocide and
torture. They have allowed us acquaintance with individual victims and perpetrators,
offering insights into the nature of torture, cruelty, suffering, survival, and death. By the
end of the twentieth century some scholars had referred to our time as an age of
testimony.
Grigoris Balakian's memoir Armenian Golgotha, for decades an important text of
Armenian literature, belongs to this group of significant books that deal with crimes
against humanity in the modern age. Balakian, a priest and later a bishop in the
Armenian Apostolic Church, was an esteemed clergyman and intellectual. On the night
of April 24, 1915, along with about 250 other Armenian cultural leaders (writers, clergy
teachers, journalists), he was arrested in Constantinople, the cultural center of Ottoman
Armenians, and deported by bus and then train to a prison in Chankiri, about two
hundred miles east, in north central Turkey. Bewildered and terrified, he could not have
imagined that he was at the beginning of an odyssey that would last nearly four years,
the duration of World War I. He was one of only a handful of the original group to
survive the ordeal; against all odds, he would manage to escape Turkish officials, police
soldiers, and killing squads.
From Chankiri, he was driven south on a forced march amid continual horrors and
extremity. At various intervals he lived amid bedraggled groups of survivors; he listened
to escapees, often children, tell stories of massacres and atrocities; he spent time with
Islamized Armenians who poured out their anguish and inner conflicts over their
predicaments. He also listened carefully to Turkish perpetrators and collaborators who,
knowing that he was marked for death, opened up to him with candor that was tinged
at times with gloating and at other times with guilt. His long interview with Captain
Shukri, on the road from Yozgat to Boghazliyan, is particularly poignant. He spoke as
well with righteous Turks, like the mutasarrif Asaf of Chankiri, who, revolted by the plan
to exterminate the Armenians, warned Balakian of what was about to happen.
Along his many roads of exile, Balakian witnessed slaughter, fields of corpses, and
starving women and children. He gathered invaluable firsthand testimony from
numerous survivors as well as eyewitness accounts from German, Swiss, and Austrian
engineers and administrators who were constructing the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway
through the Amanos and Taurus mountains. Through an unusual encounter with
mutasarrif Asaf in the summer of 1915, he read an official telegram from Talaat
inquiring about the efficiency of massacres in the region—a moment he would recall
when he testified at the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated Talaat Pasha in
Berlin in 1921.
For about two months Balakian was one of a group of threadbare survivors forced to
walk hundreds of miles south along a central deportation route. Traveling from Chankiri
through Choroum, Yozgat, Kayseri, Hajin, and Sis, all the way to Islahiye (not far from
today's northern Syrian border), he became the unofficial leader of these deportees, who
were being taken by Turkish police soldiers to die in the desert region of Der Zor, in
northe astern Syria—a place that was to become the epicenter of death in the Armenian
Genocide. Through wild, harsh, and remote terrain, he helped keep them alive, caring
for their physical and spiritual needs. For the next year and a half he was a fugitive.
In order to understand the circumstances of Balakian's survival, it is important to
understand the political and cultural role the Armenian Apostolic Church (the mother
church, as Balakian commonly refers to it) played in Armenian life in the Ottoman
Empire. The Church was the basis of much of Armenian political power in Turkey, and
the Church and particularly the patriarchate in Istanbul conducted its own diplomatic
relations with officials in foreign countries. Balakian, who was an emissary for the
patriarchate, had considerable experience as a church diplomat with both Ottoman and
foreign officials. As a vartabed (a celibate priest), he occupied a position of leadership
and prestige in Armenian life, and so it is not surprising that fellow Armenians went to
great lengths to protect him and aid in his escapes, often risking their own lives.
Because he had been educated in Germany, first as an engineering student at
Mittweida University in Saxony and later as a graduate student in theology at the
University of Berlin, his fluency in German enabled him to engage the German
engineers and administrators along the railway; it would later prove vital to his disguise
and ultimate escape. With wit and ingenuity, Balakian took on various identities: a
German worker on the railway, a German Jew, a German engineer, a railway
administrator, a German soldier, and a Greek vineyard worker.
As he managed to stay alive through an extraordinary chain of circumstances,
Balakian became an observer of what one might call the inner life of the Armenian