Photograph of a village on Lake Van, an area of Turkey populated largely by ethnic Armenians. The area was one of the first targeted on a large scale when Turkey turned on its Armenian citizens. Photo from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
Fishing village on Lake VanIn this district about 55,000 Armenians were massacred
"From the deep silence of the night until morning, every few hours Armenians were brought to the prison. And so behind these high walls, the jostling and commotion increased as the crowd of prisoners became denser. It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures — assemblymen, representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, bankers, and others in the capital city — had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells. Some even appeared in their nightclothes and slippers. The more those familiar faces kept appearing, the more the chatter abated and our anxiety grew."
Excerpt from the memoir of Grigoris Balakian, a priest of the Armenian Church, and one of the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople imprisoned on the night of April 24, 1915, and moved by buses to a waiting ferry to cross the Sea of Marmora to be moved to Ayash and Chankiri. A postwar study identified 761 men and women who were rounded up in Constantinople on April 24. Most died or were killed.
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 by Grigoris Balakian, page 57, copyright © Introduction and Translation 2009 by Peter Balakian, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2009-00-00
1915-04-24, April, 1915, Armenia, Armenian genocide, Constantinople
