Sayfo; City of Kharput

Kharput: Crucible of the Sayfo Genocide

The city of Kharput (Kharpert in Armenian, and also known as Harput or Mamuret-ul-Aziz) is geographically located on a hilltop overlooking a rich and fertile plain that was densely populated with hundreds of villages. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the population of the province was estimated at around 300,000, with Armenians, Kurds, and Turks roughly equal in number. Administrative records indicate that the Ottoman Empire had established its reign over the region by approximately 1500, though local Kurdish tribes and beys often functioned as the actual rulers in rural areas. During the 1830s and 1840s, the province served as a vital command outpost for the Ottoman imperial army during its military expeditions intended to dismantle the semi-autonomous Kurdish emirates, highlighting its position at the edge of Kurdish power domains. By the mid-nineteenth century, the city had developed a governmental suburb known as Mezre, which became a center for administrative elites and merchants. Prior to this period, labor networks were robust, with Bitlis and Diyarbakir serving as primary destinations for seasonal laborers from the region. The welfare of the local population suffered as centralization efforts increased.

The Bedir Khan massacres of 1842 to 1846 primarily targeted the Nestorian population in Hakkari, but the resulting disruption affected the broader eastern Anatolian region. While the massacres were focused further east, the subsequent dismantlement of the Kurdish emirates in 1847 by the Ottoman government created a power vacuum that was filled by competing Kurdish tribes and religious sheikhs. This period of transition led to increased insecurity for Christian farming communities as Kurdish tribal rivalries intensified, causing the Christian population of Kharput to face deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Despite these challenges, Kharput remained an ancient center of Western Syriac culture and spirituality, and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Register of 1870 documented that the district contained 24 Syriac villages with households paying dues. During the 1860s, a new formulation of Armenian identity was introduced to the region through the efforts of the Istanbul-based United Society Association. In the 1870s and 1880s, the local population experienced high levels of feverish unrest and anxiety regarding their security and the lack of reforms. By 1894, on the cusp of significant violence, the American Protestant mission in the city had established Euphrates College alongside dozens of schools and churches serving thousands of students and members.

The Hamidian massacres of 1895 to 1897 served as the precursors to the later genocide, devastating the city and its surrounding province through collective violence. The attack on the city center was not initially anticipated by residents, but it began on November 10 and 11, 1895, when Kurdish tribesmen from the Dersim region, alongside Hamidiye cavalry units, surrounded and invaded the city. During the events, the violence was perceived by Armenians and missionaries, such as Susan Wheeler, who described a "sorrow too great for tears," as an invasion by outsider Kurdish tribesmen rather than an Armenian conspiracy. However, reports written after the fact, including those by Ottoman officials, shifted the narrative to a "provocation thesis" that blamed the Armenians and erased 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 the Kurdish invaders. Turkish officials, soldiers, and regular army units assisted the Kurdish tribes, using guns and cannon fire against the Armenian quarter. The violence was characterized by large-scale plunder, the burning of homes, and the destruction of mission buildings. In the province of Kharput, contemporary accounts suggested that approximately 29,544 to 40,000 Armenians died directly or during the events, with an additional 10,000 dying from burns, hunger, and exposure in the aftermath. Furthermore, records indicate there were 5,530 reported rapes and 1,532 forced marriages to Muslims during this period. Not a single Christian church or school was left standing in the 80 villages surrounding the city, and all but one priest in the vicinity were reportedly killed.

During the period of the Sayfo and Syriac Genocide from 1915 to 1924, the Christian population was systematically targeted for destruction. The destruction of the Syriac Orthodox population (Suryoye) in Kharput, referred to locally as the "kafle time" (meaning destruction en masse), was an integral part of the genocide directed against the Ottoman Armenians, indicating that Syriac Christians were similarly massacred for their religion and ethnicity. At the beginning of 1915, the Syriac Orthodox community in the town numbered between 5,000 and 6,000 individuals. In late 1914 and early 1915, the Young Turk government ordered the disarming of Christian soldiers, who were transferred to labor battalions where many were subsequently murdered. In early May 1915, Turkish authorities began open persecutions in Kharput, initiating searches of all Christian homes under the pretext of finding weapons. This was followed by arbitrary, systematic arrests of the intellectual, social, and religious elite of each community, including teachers, priests, and influential figures. 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 before the arrests quickly escalated into executions. Among the first victims executed in early May 1915 was Ashur Yusef, a professor at the American Euphrates College in Kharput and editor of the local journal Murshid.

Following these elite arrests, the marketplace was surrounded by soldiers, and all Christians without distinction were taken away. Gendarmes and regular soldiers rounded up the men, seized their belongings, and killed them. On the night of June 23, 1915, a general deportation of the remaining Christian population commenced under the orders of Governor Sabit Bey, sending away three-quarters of the city's Christians. Witnesses reported that 800 boys and men were roped together, marched to Khanköy, and shot by soldiers. The remaining convoys of deportees, consisting primarily of women and children, were forced into marches where they encountered Circassians, Kurds, and Arabs who robbed them, while women and girls were subjected to widespread sexual abuse. Perpetrators of these atrocities included the Ottoman army, local gendarmes, and the Special Organization. One testimony from an Armenian survivor describes an Ottoman  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 same survivor noted that their own family lost four brothers and one sister, and their father, who had initially 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 and surrounding areas whose male relatives had been bifurcated and massacred. Mor Dionysius ‘Abd an-Nur Aslan, who was the Metropolitan of Harput before the genocide, survived unscathed in Homs after being transferred there in 1914, though many members of his previous diocese were killed or disappeared. Following the war, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphram I Barsoum, in his assessment presented to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, reported 3,500 Syriac Orthodox losses across 24 villages in Kharput, alongside the murder of two priests and the destruction of 5 churches.

By 1917, the few survivors of the genocide were dirty, starved, and frequently abused, with thousands of women and children having been abducted into Muslim households. In 1918, the remaining Christians were destitute and traumatized, as their lands and stores had been seized by local authorities and Muslim settlers. Following the First World War, many survivors were scattered in refugee camps across the Caucasus, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. By the 1920s, the multi-denominational Christian populations were almost entirely displaced from their historic settlements, marking the end of the traditional community structure in the region.