Mutesarriflik (sancak) Izmit / Nikomedia, Nikomidia, Nicomedia

Copy of the encrypted telegram from the Minister of the Interior Mehmet Talat to the Governor of the Province of Aleppo dated December 14, 1915:

“The main target group to be targeted for extermination is the religious clergy. It would be a great mistake to grant them (the clergy) permission to travel to and settle in dangerous areas such as Syria and Jerusalem. The best place to settle for these people, whose character tends to conspire maliciously against the government, is the place where they are exterminated.
The Minister of Interior Talat”

The Ottoman official Naim, who worked in the North Syrian transit camp Maskanah (Tr: Meskene) in 1916/17, mentions in his memoirs Archbishop Hovagimian:
“When I worked in Meskene, the former prelate of Nikomedia (Izmit) was there. He had retired to a small tent and meditated on his fate. He would tell those who would come to him that this misfortune comes from God, and he would advise everyone not to commit sins. It is not obvious how this man, who could do no harm to anyone in this world, could have come to the attention of the deportation deputy of the regional office. Eyüp Bey sent the news that the prelate of Nikomedia [Izmit] was there; why did I hold on to him? ‘Send him on; let him die on the road!’ I couldn’t say no, or that I couldn’t do something like that. But we didn’t keep him.”

(Quoted after: Akçam, Taner: Tötungsbefehle: Talat Paschas Telegramme und der Völkermord an den Armeniern. (Weilerswist): Velbrück Science, 2019, p. 217)

From the recollections of Sarkis Mesrobian of Keramet

“(…) It was in Roosjuk [Ruse, Bulgaria], also, that I had the enormous privilege of visiting with our great Archbishop Stepanos Hark Hovagimian. He had been the prelate of Izmit, in the province of Bursa. I visited the bishop nearly every day. He became like a father to me. I could be open with him, expressing my longings and dreams for a better life.

I knew of his heroism from the times of the massacres and deportations. In Mekece, he had taken off all of his medals and placed them on the floor of the cattle car. When the Turkish officials saw the medals, many of them given to him by the Turkish sultan, he was granted an exemption from deportation, but he refused. He said that he would not abandon his flock. When they were led out of the cattle cars, he led the deportation caravan toward Bozanti [Pozantı]. Then, he gave up his cart to those who were sick and traveled on foot to Aleppo.

From Aleppo, he was taken to Jerusalem. In 1918, when the First World War ended, he wrote a letter to Izmit, informing his parishioners that he would be returning. When he came back, hundreds of people were waiting for him, Armenians who had survived the massacres and deportations, Greeks, Turks, Jews, men, women, and children. They unhitched the horses from his carriage and pulled it to the headquarters of the Armenian Church. He was much loved.

Here are some examples of his good works. When he went to a Turkish village, and he saw the villagers did not have enough water or even a mosque, he would write the government in Constantinople and let the authorities know about the destitute conditions. When inspectors came, he would indicate where water could be brought down from the mountain and even showed them where to build the mosque.”

Source:  Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut: Deli Sarkis: The Scars He Carried; A Daughter Confronts the Armenian Genocide and Tells Her Father’s Story.  Minneapolis: Two Harbors Press, 2014, p. 95 f.

Biographical information: T(er) Stepanos S(urb) Archbishop Hovakimian (in Western Armenian: Hovagimian) was born in the village of Keramet on June 12, 1846, and died in exile in Sofia (Bulgaria) on March 10, 1934. He studied first at Armash Monastery, then at the Shahnazarian School in Chas-Gyur. From 1880 he served as Prelate of the Armenian Apostolic Diocese of Bithynia for 50 years; in 1886 he was ordained Archbishop. He granted refuge to Armenians who had fled from Lazistan (Pontos area). In 1895 he protested against the murder of Armenians in his diocese.

He miraculously survived the deportation in 1915. He went first to Jerusalem, then to Bethlehem and, towards the end of the First World War, to Port Said (Egypt). Archbishop Hovakimian returned to Nikomedia (Izmit) the first week of August 1919, but the Kemalist nationalist movement made his stay there impossible. He emigrated first to Thrace and then permanently to Bulgaria, where he served first as a vicar and then as a prelate for the rest of his life. In 1903 he published a list of Armenian manuscripts from Bithynia in the ecclesiastical-philological journal Sion of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Stepanos Hovakimian ordained 14 archimandrites (vardapetner) and 121 priests.

Source: Journal Sion, May 1934, pp. 157-159 

A tradition of state sponsored discrimination and economic boycott had been established against the Christian and in particular the Greek Orthodox part of the Ottoman population as early as 1908, which reached its climax in 1913 as a retaliation for the Balkan Wars and the heavy losses that they involved. At the same time, discriminative economic policies were an attempt to Islamize Ottoman finance, commerce and entrepreneurship which previously had been dominated by Non-Muslims, in particular Greeks and Armenians.^[10] The C.U.P.’s campaign of economic repressions and boycotts was accompanied by increasing lawlessness and impunity of the Muslim population when it torched, robbed or plundered their Christian neighbors. The increasing Islamization of the region added to the already existing insecurity and inferiority of Ottoman Greeks and Armenians, for the Muslim newcomers from the North-Caucasus and the Balkans felt not only superior to the indigenous ‘infidels’, but acted unimpeded by the Ottoman administration and with impunity. The policy of settling Muslim immigrants, or muhacirler in so far predominant Christian areas became a frequently used tool of the demographic policies of the ruling Turkish nationalists, and the ethnic diversity that resulted from such policies added to already strained relations of Muslim Turks, Albanians and Circassians towards their Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Christian Laz (Lazepe) compatriots after the Great War.

Starting with Eastern Thrace in 1913 and 1914, the Greek Orthodox, or rumlar^[11] population of the Ottoman Empire was exposed to forced deportations, which continued during the First World War. Overall estimates for this period vary by a factor of three between 240,000^[12] and 773,915^[13]. For the area under consideration the reported figures from the Bursa (Prousa) district are 14,634 Greek Orthodox deportees, and for the district (kaza) of Izmit 4,176 deportees.^[14] At the same time the district of Izmit was receiving Greek deportees from the Eastern Thracian diocese Miriofido (Turkish: Mürefte), where since the Balkan Wars “the systematic persecution of the Greek element in that district had utterly quashed the vitality of the people. (…) The Christian population of these communities as well as that of Neohori was compulsorily dispersed in 1915. The inhabitants, transported by sea to Ismid, scattered among the villages and dioceses of Nicaea and Nicomedia.”^[15]

The above quoted report of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of 1919 describes the thrice repeated deportations of Greeks from the Thracian village Lazarköy (Diocese of Dercos) as typical:

“LAZARKEUY. — The Christians were forced to emigrate to Nicomedia during the Balkan War, and were strictly prohibited from taking anything away with them, although soon after the war was over they returned to their homes, and resumed their peaceable work in the fields. They were again expelled in February, 1915, and their properties plundered. Notwithstanding this they returned again, only to be expelled for the third time.”^[16]

“Since the sixteenth century, Izmit, the city and mutasarriflik (…), had been major Armenian centers. The absence of major Muslim religious sites meant that more fundamentalist believers tended to spend their time elsewhere, making Izmit a relatively welcoming place for Christians. And Armenians there took advantage of proximity to Constantinople and the ports of the Marmara to develop a thriving silk industry.

But no region was immune to the crackdown. At the beginning of the war, the authorities carried out systematic searches and discovered guns and bomb caches in Armenian homes in towns and villages around Izmit, including Bahçecik (Bardizag, Partizak – Պարտիզակ), Arslanbey, Döngel, and Yuvacık. The German consul-general in Constantinople later claimed that most of the bombs were antiques, made, ironically, by Armenians collaborating with the Young Turks against Abdülhamid’s regime years before. Around the same time, a number of Izmit inhabitants were arrested on suspicion of contacting a French spy ring. Then, in April 1915, many local leaders were arrested. Abuse and torture seem to have been minimal, and most were released. In May police began patrolling Izmit’s Armenian quarters, looking for deserters. In one incident, shots were fired and a deserter wounded. Emboldened by what they had found, police then undertook more searches and arrests. On July 20 official notices went up around town, instructing the Armenians to prepare to leave.  People packed suitcases and sold belongings, but the deportation was delayed, perhaps at foreign insistence. Morgenthau had, after all, secured from Enver a promise that these deportations ‘would be done with moderation and decency’. But Talât was insistent. On August 9 he cabled Izmit’s mutesarrif to ask why the deportation was being delayed. At this point, Morgenthau wrote, the government’s ‘decision was definitely rendered’. Supposedly the authorities ‘had found 100 bombs at Adabazar [Adapazarı] and were afraid that the Russians might come . . .  and the Armenians in that region might assist them!’ Morgenthau was incredulous, given the distance to the Russian front. A few days after Talât’s cable, thousands of families and soldiers were deported from Izmit and surrounding towns and villages. Armenian properties were looted. A range of officials took part, from the mayors of Bahçecik and Derbend to the local prison warden and the CUP secretaries for Adapazarı and Izmit mutesarriflik. The Armenians either were dispatched southeastward or scattered among larger neighboring Turkish villages, in line with the 5 percent rule. While the women, children, elderly, and infirm traveled by train, some men sent out on foot. (…)

The deportees were led to believe that Konya would be their destination, where they would be re united with the men sent on foot. But, for many, the stay in Konya proved as temporary as it was hazardous. For months, while the rails were devoted to military usage, deportees  were stuck in the city.

Those who could afford to rented rooms; others camped in the open or in makeshift tents near the station. Eventually many of the deportees were put on trains to Pozantı, from which they continued to the desert on foot, still without their husbands and fathers. At one point that summer, a group of Izmit Armenian Protestants and state employees whose expertise was thought indispensable received special permission to return with their families. They made their way home, only to have their permits torn up by the vali. They were sent back to Konya. Some Izmit-area Armenians, mainly from Bahçecik, were massacred as they left town. This seems to be what an Austrian diplomat hand in mind when he reported to his foreign office, ‘A specialist for the slaughter of Armenians whom I personally know, ex-vali of Adana Emin Buad, . . .  was sent to Ismid on a secret mission to organize a small, condensed version of his work in Adana.’ The diplomat was referring to the killing of thousands in that city in 1909, amid an attempted coup against the new CUP- led government.

Those who survived the journey to the desert reached their destination more than seven months after setting out. At the end of the war, a British officer, Lieutenant C. E. S. Palmer, estimated that, in total, about 120,000 Armenians had been deported from Izmit mutesarriflik. About 30,000 were accounted for, living in other regions of the empire; only 4,000 remained in the mutesarriflik. Talât’s 1917 numbers were considerably lower, but the ratio was similar. According to his black book, there were just over 56,000 Armenians in the mutesarriflik before the deportation, of whom slightly more than 13,000 were alive afterward, mostly living elsewhere.”

Source: Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror: The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1923. Harvard University Press, 2019, p.  217-219

Armenian Deportees from the Izmit (Nikomedia) Sancak: A Telegraph of 19 August 1915 of the German Embassy at Constantinople, Pera, 19 August 1915

“The situation for the deportees is very deplorable, in particular the poorer class is suffering terribly. Many mothers throw their children in the rivers to avoid having to see them tormented any longer. Other mothers sell their little ones to be able to buy a piece of bread and to save them from certain death. Children up to the age of 6 years are sold for 5 piasters, that is less than one mark, and the 15- 20 year old girls for 20 piasters. At night in particular, all kinds of disgraceful acts of violence are carried out on the wives and girls.

Eskishehir [Eskişehir], Kütahia [Kütahya], Afion Karahissar [Afyon Karahisar] and Konia [Konya] are central places where they are collected in masses outside the towns on an enclosed field, for example near Eskishehir, when 10 – 12000 children, women and old people were turned out into the open and exposed to the unpredictable whims of the people and the weather. A reliable eye witness told how he had seen hundreds of bodies lying on the field in Eskishehir a few days after a thunder-storm, in particular children’s corpses which the Christian railway officials had not allowed to take shelter under the station roof.

Also, the railway officials did not always behave considerately. The people piled up in the fields without any means are whipped three times a day in order that they move on because they cannot travel by train. Nobody knows what happens to the Armenians who are deported on to Konia. God bless those who relieve the suffering of these poor people.”

Source: Political Archives of the German Foreign Office (PA/AA), as published on armenocide.net: http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs-en/1915-08-19-DE-012?OpenDocument

“Systematic ethnic cleansing of Greek villages appears to have begun in March 1920 near the Greek- Turkish front lines in Izmit sancak. The frequency and intensity of persecution increased in June– July, according to an Allied commission that investigated two months later. The perpetrators were brigands often assisted ‘by the Turkish villagers’. All the while the Turks complained of Greek atrocities. In March the Turkish Foreign Ministry alleged beatings, rape and torture by Greek soldiers. But the commission found that atrocities ‘on the part of the Turks have been more considerable and ferocious than those on the part of the Greeks.’ The commission’s report detailed more than a dozen Greek villages cleansed around Adapazarı and several south of Izmit.

As Nationalist strength grew, so did ‘Nationalist persecutions and excesses.’ At Ortaköy, there were repeated bouts of murder and depredation. Twenty were killed and dozens exiled on April 12.”

Source: Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror: The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1923. Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 400

In June 1920, 22 Greek men were massacred at Yukarıyapıcı (Ano Neochori).^[17]

Court-Martial Trials 1919-1920

“From November 1919 to February 1920, several of those responsible for the deportations and the pillage of Armenian property in the sancak of Izmit were brought before the court-martial in Istanbul. The first of those indicted, Hamid Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Adabazar, went on trial on 6 November 1919 for having acquired the Armenians’ assets at ‘indecent prices’. The former kaymakam Necati Sezayi Bey was the witness for the prosecution. On Tuesday, 17 February 1920, the court-martial, with Esat as its presiding judge, acquitted Hamid.

The trial of the authors of violence and ‘abuses’ in the kazas of Izmit and Karamursal that ran from 15/28 January to 29 February/16 March 1920 culminated in the condemnation of Hoca Rifat, the CUP’s delegate in Izmit, who was then being held on the island of Malta and was convicted in absentia; Ibrahim Bey (sentenced to 15 years in prison), arrested on 4 March 1919 in Istanbul; and a number of less important criminals: Imam Salaheddin; Ali; the navigator Ismail Bey; Ali Şuhuri Bey, müdir [mayor] of the nahiye Bahçecik (two years in prison); Faik Çavuş (three years and 200 days in prison), Ahmed Çavuş and Hasan Efendi (four months in prison and 20 strokes of the rod for each). (…) The only noteworthy information to come out at these ‘trials’ had to do with Ali Şuhuri Bey (…), who according to several witnesses, bore the responsibility for the systematic pillage of Armenian property by people who had been charged with organizing the deportations.”

Source: Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, p. 555f.

“That summer [1920] British and the Nationalist troops clashed for the first time. The precipitating event came in April, when the Şeyhülislam issued a fatwa declaring Kemal and his associates rebels against the caliph. The Constantinople government, supported by the British troop presence, then moved against the Nationalists in the Izmit Peninsula. The Nationalists responded with a proclamation, couched in religious language, attacking the British, Greeks, French, and Italians: ‘They wish to convert the mosques of Fatih and Aya [Hagia] Sofia into churches, and to drive the Moslems from Constantinople . . .  and to give Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Sivas and Harput to the Armenians. . . .  May God preserve the people of Mahomet.’ The Nationalist press portrayed the British as ‘determined enemies of Islam . . .  trying to subjugate the Islamic world.’ On June 15, words gave way to action, as Nationalist troops attacked British outposts on the Izmit Peninsula. The British responded with fire from sea and air, causing heavy Turkish losses and eventual retreat. To the south, though, Nationalists took rebellious Turkish villages. In some cases, the villagers fled to neighboring Christian villages and towns for shelter. The Armenian Patriarchate reported that in one village, Pazarköy, the Nationalists had forced Turkish women and girls ‘to dance all naked, then they violated and murdered them.’

British intelligence noted ‘a decided change’ in Nationalist policy toward the Christian population, against the backdrop of the Greek army’s major summer offensive. According to an American witness, when the Greek army marched into Bursa on July 8, the troops and Bursa Greeks displayed ‘perfectly wonderful self- control’ toward the town’s Turkish inhabitants, ‘especially when you think what they have to remember of wrongs done them and their families.’ Nonetheless Ankara resolved to destroy ‘non-Muslim villages as a reprisal for the destruction of Muslim villages in the occupied areas.’

One outcome of the growing Nationalist anger appears to have been a series of massacres by Turkish regulars and irregulars in the Izmit Peninsula. At Fulacık, in June, the Turks ‘hanged 400 of the inhabitants.’ Soon after, some 600 were killed in Geyve and its vicinity. In what is likely an exaggeration, a native of Geyve-Etchme (Eçme) related that on July 11, 7,300 Armenians and Greeks in Geyve-Ortaköy were pushed into a church and burned alive. He added that, the day before, the Turkish authorities, using deceit, had transferred to Etchme the inhabitants of neighboring villages, tied the men together, then massacred them at the Kara-Tchai (Karaçay) pass. Women were also murdered. Villagers who fled to the mountains were hunted down and killed. The villagers of Pamucak, after offering resistance, were piled into the church and massacred. Muslims carried off the women and girls. Although some of the allegations may have been exaggerated, there are perfectly credible reports of atrocities. Clearly, thousands of villagers were forced to flee to Izmit. And the depredations described at Geyve are in keeping with what is knownfrom other sites, qualitatively, if not quantitatively.”

Source: Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror: The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1923. London, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 401f.

An incomplete list of the targeted towns and villages according to Greek reports (in alphabetical order):

An Inter-Allied commission concluded that 35 villages in the region were affected due to the activity of Turkish nationalist bands.

Ak Hisar

Bolu

Büyük Saraçlı

Düzce

Elpizli: September 1922, massacre von the Greek population^[18]

Eçme (Kaza Uşak)

Fulacık (Gr: Φουλατζίκ, Fulatsik), kaza Karamursal (Karamürsel): 400 inhabitants hanged in June 1920; looted, burned and population partially massacred. According to Kostas Faltaits who recorded the testimony of one of the survivors, the looting and massacre began on the 23rd of June 1920. Turkish regulars and irregulars were under the command of Kemal, the political administrator of Karamursal. 300 men and boys 14 and older were locked inside the church of St. George before it was doused with petrol and set alight.^[19]

Funtuklia (Gr: Φουντούκλια; also Foundouklia; Turkish: Fındıklı) – four Greek villages in the kaza of Adapazarı. “Of our 500 homesteads (…) none remains standing, and of the 2,500 Christian souls less than half survive here now”^[20]; population partially massacred, looting, rape. According to journalist Kostas Faltaits who interviewed a survivor of the massacre, the events started on the 20th of June 1920. Kemalists surrounded the four Greek villages of Foundouklia. The men were shut up in a church and ordered to come out in fives and were shot. Of the population of 3,400, 400 men and 30 women were massacred.  Girls were raped in front of their mothers. Kemalist soldiers were under the command of Haci (Hadji) Bey.^[21]

Geyve (Greek: Kaviya; Kabaia, Kyvala) town and vicinity, 1 July 1920, 600 killed; in October 1920, about 30 Christians, mostly Greeks were massacred by Nationalists (Kemalists).^[22]

Hudi: A town with Turkish population and “up to 5,000 Greeks”, all of whom had been massacred.^[23]

Karesı (Karası; Karasu): a community of 14 Greek villages (among them Kestane Pınarı, Parali, İncirli, Çoban Yatak, Kirazlı, Kas Başı) with a population of 14,000

Karatepe (Gr: Καρα Τεπέ): “(…) a wealthy and progressive town with 200 homes, all of which were Greek, its spotlessly clean environment and its renowed cherry orchards”; massacred by Turkish peasants from nearby villages Ak Pinar, Tepecik, Serindere, Kazandere, Aksir, Klikondu, and Sapaca.^[24]

Looted, partially burned, town’s church bombed, population massacred. According to journalist Kostas Faltaits who interviewed a survivor of the massacre at Karatepe, the town was first looted on the 15th of May 1920. But on the 25th of March 1921, Kemalists returned and continued the looting and also massacred the population.

Kontses (Gr: Κόνζες): “A miracle of beauty, gentility, and happiness; two-hundred and twenty Greek well-to-do and kind families lived in Kontses and in summer it served as a holiday home to the wealthy residents of Nicomedia and Ada Pazar (Adapazarı today), of Bahtsezik (Bahçecik today), of Kiouplion (Küplü today), of Eski-Sehir (Eskişehir today), and even of the capital, Constantinople (…). The fruit grown in Kontses were among the most famous sold in the markets of Constantinople, and its waters were among the coldest and most digestable that could be drunk. A sea-side paradise with its tall and well-built homes, with its ancient Byzantine mosaic church Saint Gregory, Kontses was the joy of the Greeks and the envy of the Turks in the surrounding villages”.^[25]

Looted and its inhabitants massacred. According to journalist Kostas Faltaits who interviewed a survivor, the looting and massacre started on the 18th of February 1921. Brigand leader Cemal of Iznik directed the looting and massacre, along with Sekip (the Tax Collector of Karamursal) and other civil servants, officers, lieutenants and corporals. A contingent of the Hellenic Army arrived at Kontses on the 20th of February 1921 and saw the land covered with corpses, men’s and women’s clothes, hands, feet, noses, ears and fingers.

Küplü (Gr: Κιουπλιά- Kouplia): Partial massacre, racketeering, looting, partial deportation to interior.

Levkes (also Lefkes; today Osmaneli), in the kaza of Adapazarı – a Greek village with a population of about 5,000, of whom only “forty to fifty survived”.^[26]

Nikaia (Gr: Nicaea/Νικαία; Iznik): On the 27th of August 1920, a large band of Kemalists (Nationalists) led by a certain Cemal, surrounded the Greek quarter of Iznik, seized the entire population numbering about 600, and massacred them. No survivors had been found.

Ortaköy, kaza Geyve: A town with 10,000 Greeks, “many factories and many schools, and with the advanced culture of its inhabitants”^[27]. The persecutions began in March 1920 when regular and irregular Kemalist forces arrived under the command of the kaymakam of Geyve, Hamid Bey. Civilians were beheaded and massacred with knives and hatchets.

Survivor Christos Hatzigeorgiou provided a detailed account of the crimes committed in this book “Ortaköy, Bithynia: The Massacres and the Uprooting” (Athens, 1965). On page 91 he wrote: “I remained hidden as I saw them taking all the women to the side of the lake and made them sit together. I then saw them taking 2 women at a time and proceeded to slaughter them like lambs. At one stage I saw my mother for the last time holding my sister while 2 Turks were beating them as they were taken away. It was at this stage that I totally lost my senses and began trembling like a fish. After slaughtering them, they threw them into the lake. One girl who was 16 years of age, a very nice girl by the name of Kyriaki Mela, they cut her head from her body and she walked around making a growling noise for minutes before she fell inside the lake with the others.”

K. Faltaits mentions 3,000-3,500 victims in Ortaköy^[28]. According to other sources, 7,300 Armenians and Greeks burned alive on 11 July 1920^[29].

Pamucak: After offering resistance, the villagers were piled into the church and massacred. Muslims carried off the women and girls.⁽³⁰⁾

Papuççular (burned)