This is the fifteenth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump’s direct superior, the white nationalist Elon Musk, tried to buy a judicial election in Wisconsin by passing out supersized $1 million checks, in the hope that the Wisconsin Supreme Court might look more favorably upon Musk’s petition to allow Tesla to own dealerships in the state or maybe embrace apartheid.)
The strategic Turkish city of Erzurum, where the Anatolian plains give way to high mountains. Once a largely Armenian city, Erzurum has been the site of numerous battles between the Russian and Ottoman empires, and of numerous programs carried out against the Armenian population, which vanished in 1915. Photo: Matthew Stevenson
When I got off the train in Erzurum, I forgot my bicycle helmet, which I had left under the berth in my compartment. For a moment, I froze, watching the express leave the station and knowing that my helmet was on it. Nor, thinking quickly, did I believe I could find a replacement helmet in a remote city such as Erzurum. Then I had the idea to ask the station manager to call the train and ask the conductor to give the helmet to my student friends, who I knew were hanging out in the dining car. They could, in turn, leave my helmet at my hotel in Kars. I found the station manager, explained the problem, and in ten minutes I had a text from Giuseppe (one of my new friends) that he had the helmet in hand and would leave it at my hotel in Kars. I didn’t love riding around Erzurum without a helmet, but in two days I would have it back.
I had thought that my Grand Catalkaya Hotel might be something left over from Ottoman days, but it was modern and tucked away on a side street that was up a hill from the train station. I didn’t find it on my first turn through the old town, but only because the traffic was heavy, with shoppers out and about the downtown.
My large modern room had a desk (something that I like) and a panoramic view of the snow-capped mountains that surround the city. From my window, I could also see the ancient fortress that sits on a hill at the center of Erzurum, and all around it the towers set up to watch for either Persian or Russian encroachments in the last millennium.
Because there were still two hours of daylight, I decided to set out on the bicycle and get an overview of the places that the next day I wanted to see in detail: the castle (which dates back a thousand years, to Byzantine times), the site of the 1919 Erzurum Conference (important in the drive for independence), the Atatürk House Museum (to add to my life list), and the Aziziye bastion several miles from downtown that saw heavy fighting in 1877.
I didn’t think I would find many traces of the Armenian community, much of which vanished in pogroms in 1894–95, but thought I would try. I brought along all of my lights and reflective gear, figuring I might run out of daylight, but I knew I would enjoy the ride after sitting all day on the train.
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Downtown Erzurum, situated on several hilltops, sits in the broad valley of a mountainous landscape. Once I got my sense of direction, I found the castle, where the only activity seemed to be the taking of wedding pictures in front of the high walls and watch towers.
A guard told me that the castle would open the next day at 8 a.m. That was the same news that I got at the site of the 1919 Erzurum Congress and at Ataturk’s House, but at least now I could easily find them on my bicycle, and all were near my hotel. That left only the Aziziye redoubt in the hills around Erzurum, and to get there I decided to fold up my bicycle and hire a taxi.
The driver seemed thrilled to get such a distant fare late in the day on a Friday (when everyone else was heading to the mosque). He drove at chicken-scattering speeds through the suburbs and out of the city on one of the main roads. He explained that there might be a gate to the bastion closing at 18:00, and he didn’t want me to miss it.
In fact, the fortress gate was closed, but a few Turkish lira to the security guard opened it, and we sped up a winding road to the redoubt, which commanded a sweeping view of both the city below and the approach roads to the east (from which attacking forces would have to come).
The driver would have liked to take me to other places, but I decided to pay him off and to explore the bastion on foot, and then bike down the hill and ride back to Erzurum in the twilight. I had seen that the wide road below had a service lane on its side, and on that I would be safe, even without my helmet.
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I felt elated to have come on the overnight train from Ankara and now to be standing on one of the hills that had been so decisive in the 1877 Russo-Turkish war (important background to the issues that have divided Russia, Turkey, and Europe for the last 150 years, including the current war in Ukraine).
With so many of my books, I struggle to visualize the landscape described, and being someone who remembers by seeing something, I always want to match a passage in my reading to a specific place in the world.
Here I was standing on an Erzurum hilltop, and what came into focus were many passages from J.A.R Marriott’s diplomatic history, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study In European Diplomacy, concerning the endless struggles in the Caucasus and eastern Turkey between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
For example, here is how Marriott introduces the chain of events that led to the 1877 war:
Little or nothing was done to ameliorate the lot of the subject populations [i.e., Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire], and in the third quarter of the nineteenth century those populations began to take matters into their own hands. Crete, the ‘Great Greek Island’, had been in a state of perpetual revolt ever since it had been replaced, in 1840, under the direct government of the Sultan. In 1875 the unrest spread to the peninsula. It was first manifested among the mountaineers of the Herzegovina; thence it spread to their kinsmen in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The insurrection among the Southern Slavs in the west found an echo among the Bulgars in the east. The Sultan then let loose his Bashi-Bazouks among the Bulgarian peasantry [the so-called Bulgarian Horrors, to use the phrase of British Prime Minister William Gladstone], and all Europe was made to ring with the tale of the atrocities which ensued. The Powers could not stand aside and let the Turk work his will upon his Christian subjects, but mutual jealousy prevented joint action, and in 1877 Russia was compelled to act alone.
In 1877, while besieging the Turkish army at Plevna, the Russians won a series of decisive engagements at Shipka Pass, high up in the Balkan Mountains, often by using bayonets on craggy escarpments at the summit. The Russian forces there blocked any Turkish relief efforts for their army surrounded at Plevna.
The last battle of the war took place in January 1878, when the Ottomans were in retreat on numerous fronts, even though, technically, Erzurum in November 1877 was a win for the Turkish army, as it forced the Russians back east to their siege lines around Kars (a good place to go if you ever want to brood about the endless wars between Russia and Turkey, if not the West).
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At the Aziziye redoubt, I scrambled among the boulders, took pictures of the fortification walls, and inspected a memorial to Nene Hatun, a hero in the struggles against the Russians.
According to her legend, when the Russians occupied the Aziziye bastion, she was so infuriated at the wounding of her brother and at the presence of the Russians on the edge of Erzurum that she led a group of peasant women (carrying axes and cudgels) against the Russian lines, driving them off the hilltop.
Whether it happened like that or not, it makes for good folklore, especially in a city that has seen numerous Russian invasions, and Nene Hatun statues are everywhere in Erzurum. Best of all, she lived almost to age 100, and well into the 1950s she was celebrated as the “mother” to the 3rd Army and as a symbol of the people’s opposition to the Russians.
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In less than a half hour, I rode from the redoubt back into the city. I had a brisk wind at my back, and the road descended into Erzurum, which was deserted on a Friday night, and all the stores were shut.
By then it was dark, but I made a few detours to see if I could find traces of the Armenian neighborhoods that vanished in the holocaust. Some 40,000 Armenians were living in Erzurum in 1915, when Turkish soldiers descended on their neighborhoods, killing some, deporting the rest; it was a holocaust of exhaustion, as the Armenians were forced to march into the wilderness until most collapsed. A few made it to Syria or elsewhere.
When the Russians arrived in Erzurum in 1916, they reported finding only 200 Armenians left in the city. When I biked through the former Armenian areas, all I saw were modern Turkish apartment blocks with their shades drawn for Friday prayers.
Tragically, the killings in 1915 were foreshadowed by an earlier pogrom that took place in Erzurum and elsewhere in 1895-97, which killed thousands of Armenians. In The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, Peter Balakian writes:
When Harbord [a U.S. military officer who headed what was called the Harbord Commission in Armenia] submitted his final report to the secretary of state in October 1919, he summarized the recent history of the Armenians, which he called “a story of massacre and of broken and violated guarantees”: the promises for reform for the Armenians made by the sultan and the Ottoman government from the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877 had never been kept; in 1880, 1895, and 1914, the Turks ignored or abrogated European demands for reform on behalf of the Armenians; and “there have been organized official massacres of the Armenians ordered every few years since Abdul Hamid ascended the throne.”
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That evening, back at my hotel and picking around in Marriott’s diplomatic history, I discovered a confluence of decisions in western Europe that may have contributed to the massacre of the Armenians (not something that gets much circulation).
The 1853–56 Crimean War (Britain, France, Turkey, and some smaller allies against Russia) was Europe’s last attempt to prop up the crumbling Ottoman Empire (what was often called “the sick man of Europe”).
After that, European public opinion shifted, and ironically it came around to the Russian perspective that the West had a moral obligation to defend the rights of Christian minorities suffering under the heavy-handedness of the sultan.
In Britain public opinion crystallized against the Ottomans with Liberal Party leader William Gladstone’s pamphlet denouncing the “Bulgarian Horrors”, the slaughter of Bulgarian Christians in Ottoman-controlled lands.
From 1876, there were “risings” against Ottoman occupations across the Balkans, and in 1877 Russia invaded the Principalities (Romania and Bulgaria) to drive the Turks out of Europe and seize Constantinople for the Christian world.
It was during that war that the Russians attacked Erzurum from the east and briefly held the Aziziye bastion (until Nene Hatum showed up with her axe).
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The two treaties that ended the 1877–78 conflict imposed Carthaginian conditions on the Ottoman Empire, especially as regards its treatment of Christian minorities (of whom the Armenians were one).
The Treaty of San Stefano (a seaside village, now Yeşilköy, on the outskirts of Constantinople) awarded nearly all of Macedonia (previously Ottoman) to Bulgaria (a Russian client state).
When the Allies ripped up the Treaty of San Stefano and took away Russia’s (and Bulgaria’s) gains in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, it still imposed on the Ottomans the fear that the empire was living on the sufferance of the West, which retained the right to intervene at any time in domestic Ottoman affairs.
Marriott writes: “From 1878 onwards the Sultan lived, therefore, under the perpetual apprehension of intervention while his Armenian subjects could repose in the comfortable assurance that they were under the special protection of their fellow Christians throughout the world.”
By the 1890s, when the Armenians in Erzurum first came under attack, the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire were being singled out to receive the sultan’s rage over what he felt was the West’s connivance in dismantling the empire.
Marriott writes: “Three reasons must be held mainly responsible for the peculiar ferocity with which the Armenians were assailed by Abdul Hamid: the unrest among hitherto docile subjects caused by the nationalist movements in Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria; the intervention of the European Powers; and, not least, the palpable jealousies and dissensions among those Powers.”
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As bad as the pogroms against the Armenians were in the 1890s—including in the Erzurum neighborhoods through which I had just biked—they did not add up to the holocaust that unfolded in 1915, when Turkey embarked on its genocide on the same day in April that the Allies landed troops on the Gallipoli peninsula.
In 1915, being at war with the Entente Powers (Britain, France, and Russia), the Ottoman Empire no longer felt constrained to defend Christian minority rights imposed in the Treaty of Berlin. It could deal with Armenians as it saw fit, which was to organize deportations from Armenian communities all over the empire (but largely in the eastern provinces around Erzurum). Marriott writes:
In February, 1914, the Porte agreed to admit to the Ottoman Parliament seventy Armenian deputies, who should be nominated by the Armenian Patriarch, and to carry out various administrative and judicial reforms in the Anatolian vilayets inhabited largely by Armenians. But the outbreak of the European War afforded the Ottoman Government a chance of solving a secular problem by other and more congenial methods. Massacres of Armenian Christians have been frequent in the past; but the Turks have been obliged to stay their hands by the intervention of the Powers. That interference was no longer to be feared. An unprecedented opportunity presented itself to the Turks. Of that opportunity they are believed to have made full use. A policy of extermination was deliberately adopted, and has been consistently pursued. It is at least simpler than autonomy.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians from towns like Erzurum were marched away at gunpoint into the bleakness of the Anatolian plains (I had seen many water-less fields on my train ride east) and pointed in the direction of the Syrian border or simply a road that would lead them to extinction.
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For their side, the Turks vehemently deny that either a genocide took place or that more than a million Armenians died in a holocaust. They argue that the Armenians took up arms against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, to fight on the side of invading Russians and Allies, and that any Armenians deaths after 1915 were casualties of war. If they were killed on their roads “to safety,” it was at the hands of local brigands or marauding Kurds.
If you want the Turkish side of the story, ask any Turkish citizen you might know, or have a look Guenter Lewy’s The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, which lays out the academic argument for this particular brand of holocaust denialism.
In it Lewy writes: “While the Armenians were victims, not all of them were innocent victims; and the disaster that overtook them therefore was not entirely unprovoked. Most importantly, while the Ottoman government bears responsibility for the deportations that got badly out of hand, the blame for the massacres that took place must be put primarily on those who did the actual killing.”
But if at sunset you ride your bicycle around Erzurum’s northern neighborhoods, which were the center of what was the unofficial capital of Armenia, you will see no traces of their earlier civilization, any more than if you bike around Poznan you will find more than a few fragments of the Jewish communities that lived in what was called the Jerusalem of Poland.
