Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"During those black days of August 1915, when the Armenians of Asia Minor—the toddlers, the elderly, the virgins, the brides, and the grandmothers—were being massacred under the guise of 'deportation' or 'exile,' and when the fate of those exiled to Chankiri and Ayash had already been settled, the eighteen to twenty of us who remained in Chankiri were awaiting ours. The Ottoman Parliament members Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Serengulian had been arrested in Constantinople during this time, and after being held in prison briefly, they had been put on a train to Diyarbekir on the pretext of being tried before the court-martial there."
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 to Chankiri and Ayash. Most of the others were already dead. The two Parliament members Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Serengulian found supporters who offered to help them escape, but they believed the court-martial would exonerate them. In Aleppo, the two came briefly under the protection of governor Jelal, who petitioned Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Pasha to keep them in the city. Talaat, one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide, instead replaced the governor. Under the guard of mounted police, the two Armenian members of the Ottoman Parliament were seized by or delivered to bandits who tortured and killed them.
Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 by Grigoris Balakian, page 103, copyright © Introduction and Translation 2009 by Peter Balakian, publisher: Vintage Books, publication date: 2009-00-00
1915-08-27, 1915, August, Talaat, Talaat Pasha, Aleppo, Palestine, Syria
