The Christian Massacre Turkey Doesn’t Want You Remembering
In April 1909, mobs tore through the Armenian quarters of Adana, a city in southern Anatolia, killing, raping, and burning in what became one of the most brutal mass killings in Ottoman history. The violence killed at least 20,000 Armenians and other Christians, with some contemporary estimates reaching 30,000 dead.
The killings started on April 14, when armed mobs joined by local officials and soldiers began attacking Armenian neighborhoods, looting shops and setting homes on fire. The timing was deliberate. It coincided with a counter-coup in Constantinople against the Young Turk government, creating cover for the slaughter while central authority was distracted and unstable.
Troops sent to restore order instead joined in.
A second wave of killing followed later that month, even more devastating than the first. Troops sent to restore order instead joined in. Much of the Armenian quarter of Adana was burned to the ground, and the violence spread outward across the whole province of Cilicia, reaching towns and villages throughout the region. Assyrian and Greek communities were also targeted.
Churches, schools, hospitals, and entire neighborhoods were destroyed. The physical scale of the destruction was staggering. More than a thousand homes were burned in Adana alone, along with churches, colleges, and institutions belonging to Catholic, Gregorian, Syriac, Protestant, and Chaldean Christian communities.
Almost none of the perpetrators faced serious punishment. Six years later, in 1915, the systematic extermination of the Armenians began on a far larger scale. Greek and Assyrian Christians across Anatolia suffered deportations and massacres in the years that followed. Many historians now regard Adana as the first warning of what was coming, a dress rehearsal for the destruction of all of Asia Minor's ancient Christian communities.
Today, April 14 marks 117 years since the first day of those killings.
