CHAPTER XIV.
THE REIGN OF TERROR—HARPOOT AND ZEITOUN.
The Harpoot massacre was another butchery carried out under orders. Sixty Christians fled to a church in the vain hope that its walls would furnish them a shelter against those who were crying for the blood of Armenians. They were permitted for a time to believe themselves secure, but suddenly the church was surrounded by a great number of Kurds. The doors were then blown in, and the Christians thought that they would be massacred within the sacred structure. They were not. Their captors took them one at a time outside the church, and there, heedless of the cries for mercy from women and children, killed them, either by shooting or stabbing them. The first victim was the Protestant pastor of the church, who, as he was dragged out, bade the others, if they had to die, to die as Christians. He met his death like a martyr. Some of the refugees, in a very agony of terror, offered to abjure their faith and accept Islamism, thinking thus to save their lives. The offers availed them nothing, for their insatiable enemies, after accepting them, dragged the converts out and killed them one by one. The Armenian Church was turned into a mosque, and the Protestant Church into a stable.
An eyewitness who saw the Christian quarter in flames and the houses of the American mission burning, said that he came on to Malatia (the ancient Melitene), and found not a house in the Christian quarter standing. In a khan there were about twenty wounded men, the sole survivors of a caravan of two hundred who had been traveling to Harpoot from Northern Syria and whose members had nearly all been slain by the Kurdish bands. There were one hundred and fifty bodies lying in the road. At Marash, the same witness, days after the massacre, counted eighty-seven dead Armenians in one spot, and there were hundreds of bodies strewn around in the near neighborhood. In the villages on the plains near Harpoot, each containing from fifty to one thousand houses, the evidences of slaughter were sickeningly abundant. The Kurdish butchers had slain fully half the population. The door of a house would be burst open, a volley fired upon the shuddering inmates, while those who rushed out were caught and killed in the fields. Then the houses were plundered, fired and left blazing. This was the fate of thousands of Christian homes.
Several thousand Armenian Christians fell in the city of Harpoot under Kurdish and Turkish swords. In the Province of Harpoot were hundreds of small towns and villages, few of which escaped the terrible fate of slaughter and desolation that befell over two thousand other towns and villages throughout the country.
Harpoot is one of the principal stations of the Eastern Turkey Mission, and is the seat of Euphrates College, a group of buildings, eight of which were badly wrecked during the riots. This institution had about five hundred and sixty-four pupils in all its departments, and was exerting a powerful influence for good throughout Eastern Turkey.
It was estimated that the loss would not be less than $88,000. At Marash, the destruction of mission buildings was more complete. The Central Turkey Girls’ College and the Theological Seminary were both wrecked. There were in the former institution (which was organized in 1884), about thirty-five students. Both buildings were located a little distance outside of Marash.
In February, 1896, the United States Minister, Mr. Terrell, demanded an indemnity of $100,000 for the burning and pillaging of the American missions at Marash and Harpoot. He also asked for the immediate granting of firmans for the rebuilding of them.
Rev. Grigos Hachadoovian, the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Harpoot, when the Turkish soldiers commenced shooting all over the city, took his wife and children and went to church, where about sixty of his congregation joined him. Naturally good and earnest Christians as they were, they lifted their voices up to heaven for help. While in prayer the Turks rushed in and demanded of the minister to become a Mohammedan then and there, with his congregation. He refused promptly. The Turks removed the pulpit, made a butchering platform, cut off the head of the minister and actually cut him to pieces before his congregation. Mind you on the platform from which he had preached Christ for twenty years. This horrible spectacle had no effect upon the devout Christian Armenians, as they all refused to denounce Christ and pray to Mohammed, and all were killed in the church to the last man, woman and child. What do you think of that picture, Christian people of America? That is the Mohammedanism some people would like to have introduced into our county.