Introduction Vahé Tachjian
Daily Life in the Abyss,
05/2017
Book Chapter
Beginning in May–June 1915, when the plan for the Armenian genocide was put into practice under the Ottoman authorities’ supervision, the region of Bilad al-Sham saw an influx of tens of thousands of ...Armenian deportees. There is no precise information as to how many people there were in this mass of deportees, and I do not intend to enter into the debate about numbers here. What is certain is that those who arrived in this area represented a sizable proportion of the Armenian population of Cilicia and the towns and villages to the east of it. The new arrivals
What were the deportees’ day-to-day means of survival? How were they to confront the unprecedented crisis? How would they meet their family’s everyday needs? Their daily concerns clearly reflect the ...reality of the catastrophe and the steady intensification of these extreme conditions. The diary—in this case, Bogharian’s and Der Nerses’s jottings—brings us closer to the realities on the ground, making possible an authentic reconstruction of the environment in which survivors waged their lifeand- death struggle. This chapter will present that battle to find something to eat and meet other immediate needs.
In the extreme conditions of the Armenian
In the extreme conditions that prevailed in Bilad al-Sham, one of the most shocking dimensions of the “Hobbesian social contract” was, without a doubt, the deportees’ collective Islamization. More ...than any other, this event shows how abnormal the deportees’ environment had become. The endangered, impoverished, and in many respects now unrecognizable Armenians were summoned to make a concession fraught with consequences. There are essentially no individual studies of this subject, and Islamization is rarely mentioned in Armenian eyewitness accounts, whose authors, generally speaking, only briefly allude to collective conversions. Nonetheless, a handful of exceptional authors have deemed this theme deserving
Primo Levi describes his life in the Nazi camps as “cut off from the world and outside time.”¹ Conditions in Hama and Salamiyya or, more generally, Bilad al-Sham were no different. Some of those who ...settled here were human wrecks who had escaped the horror of massacres; the rest were to learn about the massacres perpetrated on the banks of the Euphrates and the Khabur, not far from their own native towns and villages. The deportees in Bilad al-Sham would not themselves face such mass killings, but they were constantly anguished over the eventuality of being transferred elsewhere or even
Afterword Vahé Tachjian
Daily Life in the Abyss,
05/2017
Book Chapter
Cease-fire and liberation of the deportees. A new chapter was opening in the history of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. This afterword recounts an episode that will help us understand the ...significance of that moment. There were very many like it in the period immediately following the genocide. It has to do with a debate raging in the Armenian press in Istanbul, Izmir, Aleppo, Adana, and elsewhere that had been touched off by a speech of Artin Efendi Boshgezenian, a former member of the Committee for Union and Progress (i.e., the Ittihad Party) and an Ottoman parliamentary representative from
