Sayfo; City of Kharput

Kharput: Crucible of the Sayfo Genocide

During Sayfo, the Syriac Genocide, significant events occurred in the city and province of Kharput (also known as Harput or Mamuret-Ul-Aziz), a region that was an ancient center of Western Syriac culture and spirituality. Harput, a city located on a hilltop with surrounding fertile plains and villages, had a population estimated at around 300,000 in the second half of the 19th century, with Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in roughly equal in population in the city and hundred of villages around it.

The 1895 Massacres were the precursors to the Sayfo massacres. In November 1895, massacres took place in Kharput, witnessed by missionaries such as Susan Wheeler, who described the "sorrow too great for tears". Contemporary accounts suggested that approximately 40,000 Armenians died in the province during these events. Initially, the massacres in the city center were not anticipated by residents. During the events, they were perceived as an invasion by outsider Kurdish tribesmen, rather than an Armenian conspiracy. This initial perception was shared by Armenians and missionaries. However, reports written after the fact, including those by Ottoman officials, shifted the narrative to a "provocation thesis," blaming Armenians and erasing the Kurdish invasion from the historical account. Urban notables and government officials, who may have "overlooked, supported, instigated, or even organized the massacres," later minimized the role of Kurdish invaders. These earlier massacres involved Hamidiye cavalry units.

During the events of Sayfo in 1915, the destruction of the Syriac Orthodox population (Suryoye) in Kharput was an integral part of the genocide directed against the Ottoman Armenians. In early May 1915, the Turkish authorities began persecutions in Kharput. They initiated searches of all Christian homes under the pretext of finding weapons. This was followed by arbitrary arrests of young men and influential Christian figures, including teachers and priests, specifically targeting the elite of each community. At the same time, the district governor, Sabit Bey, ordered all schools closed under the pretense of a typhoid epidemic. The arrested Christian notables and professors were held in prison for two weeks. These arrests quickly escalated into executions. Among the first victims arrested and executed in early May 1915 was Ashur Yusef, a professor at the American Euphrates College in Kharput and editor of a local newspaper.

After that, the marketplace was surrounded by soldiers, and "all Christians without distinction" were taken away. An Armenian survivor from Kharput recounted how soldiers rounded up all men and killed them in 1914-1915. Subsequently, gendarmes took women and children, seized their belongings, and forced them into a march. The convoys of deportees from Kharput encountered Circassians, Kurds, and Arabs who robbed them, and women and girls were subjected to sexual abuse. One testimony describes a German soldier throwing a child into a river and shooting the child's mother. Some mothers reportedly abandoned their babies as they could no longer care for them. The survivor also stated that their own family lost four brothers and one sister, and their father, who had escaped military service, was eventually caught and killed in the village. In September 1915, the German consul in Aleppo reported the arrival of approximately 300 Syriac Catholic women and children from Kharput, among other areas. These were survivors whose male relatives had been massacred.

Mor Dionysius ‘Abd an-Nur Aslan, who was Metropolitan of Harput before the genocide, survived unscathed in Homs after being transferred there in 1914. Many members of his previous diocese in Harput were killed or disappeared.

The Syriac Orthodox church Patriarch Ignatius Aphram I Barsoum, in his assessment to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 after the war, reported 3,500 in Syriac Orthodox losses in 24 villages in addition to two priests and the destruction of  5 churches in Kharput. The events in Kharput, referred to as the "kafle time" in the local area, meant "destruction en masse," and indicate that not only Armenians but also Syriac Christians were massacred for their religion and ethnicity.