Sancak Siirt / ܣܥܪܬ Siʿret / Sa’irt / Սղերդ – Sġerd / Sgherd

Ecumenical Genocide Memorial_Commemorative Plate_Siirt
Ecumenical Genocide Memorial, Berlin: Commemorative Plate for Siirt

Covering a territory of 11,300 square kilometers, Siirt was a district in Western Armenia, in the province of Bitlis, situated in the valleys of the Tigris and the Redvan tributaries. The relief  is mountainous, the average height is 1100 m. The sancak was rich in fertile lands, had lush pastures, plenty of drinking and irrigation water, and mineral springs. In some places they even harvested three times.

The province had a diversified economy. The main occupation of the population was agriculture and cattle breeding. In addition, the population was engaged in viticulture, fruit growing, cultivation of melons, watermelons, figs and other fruits and vegetables, which were in great demand in the neighboring provinces.

The Ottoman sancak Siirt had also reserves of oil, copper and other minerals. which were extracted in primitive ways.

Administrative Division

In the 16-18th centuries Siirt (Sa’irt, Sgherd) was a district of the Diyarbekir vilayet.

The sancak comprised 679 settlements in the seven kazas of Siirt, Ridvan (Arm.: Redvan), Şirvan (Şarnag), Eruh (Arm.: Erun; Bohtan), Kurtalan (also Kürdalan; Ğarzan; Arm.: Kharzan / Harzan), Pervari (Arm.: Barvar), and Kozluk (Hazzo/Hazo/Hezu).[1] The administrative center was the town of Sgherd.

Bohtan Su_Kentrites_Siirt
“View into the valley of Bohtan-su (Kentrites), south of Söört (Siirt)” (Lehmann-Haupt, Carl Friedrich: Armenien Einst und Jetzt, Vol. 1: Vom Kaukasus zum Tigris und nah Tigranokerta (1910), p. 332; source: Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia, Berlin)

Toponym

In 722-705 B.C., the forms of Ziqirtu in Assyria, then Old Persian Asagrta, and Armenian Sġert (Sgherd) are recorded. The Armenian toponym Sgherd is believed to originate from the old name Kherhet. According to others, it derives from the Persian word se-ard, which means ‘destroyed 3 times, rebuilt’.

Christian Population

According to the data of 1882, about 100 villages of the sancak Siirt were inhabited by Armenians, and further 20 had a mixed population. The massacres of 1895 lowered the percentage of Armenians and Christians in the population, not only as a result of direct killings, but also as a result of the conversion of the unprotected Christian population to Islam and forced Islamization. “[The British vice-consul Charles] Hampson reported that in the last months of 1895, 19,000 villagers converted in the sanjak of Siirt alone.”[2]

During the 1890s, the sancak had about 60,000 inhabitants, of which 30,000 were Armenians, and the rest were Turks, Kurds and Syriacs. According to another data, the population was 100,000.

According the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, around 1914 the Armenian population of the sancak Siirt was 21,564, which maintained 45 churches, three monasteries and 22 schools.[3] The French Dominican missionary, scholar, writer and poet Jacques Rhétoré mentioned that before the 1915 genocide there were originally 15,000 Chaldeans among the estimated 60,000 Christians living in the Sa’irt sancak as well as 25,000 Armenians and 20,000 Syriac Orthodox.[4]

The situation of the Armenians of Siirt under Ottoman rule deteriorated significantly from the second half of the 19th century. National and religious persecutions and the unbearable economic situation have driven Armenians into exile ever since. In 1877 alone, about 5,000 Armenians migrated from Siirt to Constantinople and other places. Emigration increased rapidly later.

Thousands of Christians, remaining in Siirt had a desperate fate in 1915. In that year, the Russian troops and the Armenian volunteers liberated Siirt, but soon left again, leaving the Christian population  undefended. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the massacres in 1915 almost completely destroyed them. Only a few thousand Christians managed to escape the slaughter and migrate to other places.

Armenians were skilled winemakers, potters and metalworkers. The Armenian artisans, especially of items made of copper and other metals, and of the fabric called porridge had a good reputation outside the district.

Destruction in the Sancak of Siirt

Halil Kut (1882-1857), genocide perpetrator in Van and Bitlis provinces

“(…) the event signaling the start of the massacres in the vilayet of Bitlis took place in Siirt. (…) On their way to Bitlis, Halil and Cevdet carried out mass liquidations in the Siirt area. The 35 villages in the easternmost kazas of the vilayet – Pervari, Bohtan/Eruh and Şarnag, with a total population of around 6,000 Armenians – were literally annihilated when the forces commanded by Halil and Cevded passed through them; the inhabitants were slaughtered on the spot. In Siirt, the local authorities

Cevdet Tahir Belbez
Cevdet Tahir Belbez (d. 1955), governor of the Van province in 1914/5

anticipated the arrival of Cevdet and his

Addai-Sher
Chaldean Catholic Arch-Bishop and martyr saint Addai Sher (born: 1867, murdered 21 June 1915 in a cave near the village of Tanze; in office since 1902)

butchers. Four days previously, on 9 June, the Armenian primate of the diocese, Yeghishe, the Chaldean Catholic bishop, Addai Şer (Sher), the orthodox Syriac Abuna, Ibrahim, and then of the leading men of Siirt were arrested and shot the next day, half an-hour from the town. On 11 June, 670 men from Siirt, out of a total Armenian population of 4,032, were summoned in the barracks, ostensibly to transport military supplies to Bitlis. They were, however, arrested and shot the next day, at half-hour’s distance from the town in the Vedi Ezreh gorge. When Cevdet arrived on 13 June he finished the job: over the next few days, he rounded up the remaining older men, whose throats were cut on the town’s central place.

The women and children were assembled a few weeks later at the exit from the town and offered to the Kurdish population. Of those the Kurds did not fancy, some were massacred on the spot with axes and knives; around 400 people were deported toward Mardin and Mosul. No one in the group that was set marching in the direction of Mardin survived; its last surviving members had their throats cut a short distance from town. Fifty deportees in the other caravan reached Mosul alive.

Nobody knows what became of the several hundred villagers from the eight villages in the vicinity of Siirt, or of the 2,853 Armenians from the villages and towns of the kaza of  Şirvan/Shirvan. It is known, however, that the 5,000 Syriacs in the sancak of Siirt, both Catholic and Orthodox, received the same treatment as the Armenians. As for the 8,343 villagers from the 76 towns and villages of the kaza of Harzan [Kurtalan], they fled to the mountains of the neighboring district of Sasun, where they suffered the same fate as the local population.”

Excerpted from: Raymond Kévorkian: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, p. 339f.

“The Chaldeans in Söird [Siirt] (Vilayet Bitlis) and Djeziret ibn Omar (Vilayet Diyarbekir) and all of the Christians in Djebel et Tor north of Mardin have been exterminated.”

(Report of 27 September 1915 by German Consul Walter Rössler, Aleppo, to the Ambassador on Extraordinary Mission in Constantinople (Hohenlohe-Langenburg); http://www.armenocide.net/armenocide/armgende.nsf/$$AllDocs/1915-09-27-DE-014

“In and around Siirt, in Bitlis vilayet, local Muslims and Cevdet’s troops murdered 5,000 Assyrians and razed their villages. Cevdet came to be known as ‘the horseshoer of Bashkale’: he had invented, or resurrected, a torture involving hammering horseshoes into Christians’ feet.”

Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror: The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 377

1. Krikorian, Mesrop K.: Armenians in the Service of the Ottoman Empire: 1860-1908. London: Routledge, 2018, p. 27
2. Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror: The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 119
3. Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 339, 277
4. Gaunt, David: Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006, p. 251