Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities

Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities

Bliss, Rev. E.M.
Fresno, California: Meshag Publishing, 1982, (reprinted), 574 pages.

"With slight exceptions, the method was to kill within a limited period the largest number possible of Armenian men, especially those of capacity, intelligence, and wealth, and to ruin their families by looting their property."

Description:
A detailed account by an American missionary born in Turkey in the 1894-1896 massacre of more than 200,000 Armenians, at the order of Sultan Abdul Hamid. This massacre was the prelude to the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The author's region-by-region, city-by-city description of the killings was paralleled 20 years later in more devastating terms by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee in the British government's collection of documents from 1915-1916 -- The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. One portion of the book also deals with the formal creation of the Armenian Question, beginning with the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Bliss concludes that a major factor for the atrocities against the Armenians was the Turkish desire to crush the only Christian group which appeared to have any chance of asserting itself against the Muslim overlords of Anatolia. Bliss also concludes that the government of Constantinople was responsible for the massacres.

Sample Chapters:

• Rise and Decline of Ottoman Power
• Conditions of the Christians
• The Armenian Question
• General Situation in 1894
• The Sassun Massacre
• Politics and Massacre at Constantinople
• Massacres at Trebizond and Erzrum
• Massacres in Harput District
• Character of the Massacres
• Religious Persecution