Toponym
The original name of the administrative unit seems to have been Gavurdağı (“Mountain of the Infidels”). It was renamed Cebel-ı Bereket (Bereket Mountain; ‘Mountain of Blessing’) by government order before 1890 to denote the fertility of the land.[1]
The seat of government and the sancak of same name was called Cebel-ı Bereket in Ottoman time (today: Osmaniye).
Administration
The Ottoman sancak Cebel-ı Bereket comprised the six kazas of Payas (Ancient Gr.: Παίας- Paías, Western Armenian: Բայաս – Bayas), Hasa (also Hassa), Yarpuz, Islahiye, Bulanik and Osmaniye with the seat of the sancak since 1890. Before, the current village of Yarpuz was the seat of government in this sancak.
Population
According to Turkish historian Yusuf Halacoğlu there lived a total of 48,173 Muslims and 7,285 Christians in the entire sancak of Cebel-ı Bereket in the early 20th century.[2] This figure for the number of Armenians alone is more than a factor of five below the census of the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate in Constantinople.
Armenian Population
According to the pre-war census of the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate, there lived 39,928 Armenians in 29 localities of the Ottoman sancak of Cebel-ı Bereket, maintaining 13 churches, two monasteries and 18 schools with an enrolment of 1,200 pupils.[3]
Half of the Armenian population lived in the coastal areas of Payas, Ayas, and Hasa, and the other 20,000 in the Amanos region. “These Armenians were above all concentrated in the northern part of the sancak, in the northern part of the kaza of Yarpuz, around Hasanbeyli, and in the Bahçe district located in its northern extremity. There were a great many fewer of them in the eastern district of Islahiye and the western kaza of Osmaniye. Many were working (…) on construction of the series of tunnels being dug through the mountainous Amanus region (…).”[4]
Destruction
After the March 1915 ‘incidents’ in Dörtyol, the deportation of about 20,000 Armenians from the coastal regions of Payas, Yumurtalık and Has(s)a began already at the end of April 1915. This was followed by the deportation of the remaining 20,000 Armenians from the mountainous regions of the sancak. Hasanbeyli seems to have been the first locality affected by the deportations in the sancak.[5]
Cilicia and especially the sancak Cebelibereket were important transit regions for Armenian deportees from Western Armenia and Central Anatolia in 1915. Deportees who reached Cilicia despite all hardships thought they would be saved if they managed to escape to the construction sections of the Baghdad Railway there. Since the construction of the tunnels in the Amanos and Tauros Mountains was considered important for the war effort, the Ottoman authorities initially tolerated, at the request of the head of the Imperial German military mission, Otto Liman von Sanders, that the Holzmann company employed both Muslim deserters and fugitive Armenian deportees – including women and children from the age of 12 – as workers.[6] For the Armenians, this was life-extending despite all the crass exploitation, and for the German employers it was highly profitable, since a male adult received only one pound of bread per day, while working up to 12 hours. But in early June 1916, Interior Minister Talat ordered the extermination of even these survivors. Despite the protests of the construction management, all but 200 of the 11,500 Armenians[7] working in the Amanos section were deported and 2,600 of the deportees were massacred already in Cilicia. As compensation, the Turkish government sent 1,600 nearly starved British and Indian prisoners of war, the last survivors of a contingent of originally 13,000, who were subjected to the “white massacre” just like the Armenian deportees: Starvation and forced marches in sweltering heat through the desert. The survivors of these Ottoman war crimes described to the last Armenians in the Amanos how they came across mass graves and skeletons of the deportees near Der ez-Zor.[8]
“On 7 and 8 July 1915, all those employed on the tunnel construction sites from Hasanbeyli, Intilli, and Bahçe were deported with their families and their houses were immediately turned over to Muslim muhacirs. (…)
After the Mudros Armistice, none of the criminals who had been active in Cilicia or Syria was brought to trial.”[9]