From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The old capital of Cilicia is, of truth, a city of a wonderful historic past. But among all her proud memories those which have made her best known throughout the ages and which will endure the longest are not those of her abounding wealth and luxury, her superb monuments and palaces and temples, long in ruins; not those that clustered around her poets and philosophers and made her a favored sanctuary of the Muses; not those of her schools and gymnasia and her one-time eminence as the rival of Athens and Alexandria as the home of learning and culture; not those of Persian satraps and Roman proconsuls who here lived as the famed representatives of imperial authority; not those awakened by the presence within her gates of an Asurbanipal, an Alexander, or a Cicero; not those associated with the love-enmeshed Mark Anthony and the fateful “Siren of the Nile,” who both perished the ignoble victims of a debasing passion and a foiled ambition. No; that which has rendered her immortal is that she was the birthplace of a poor tent maker who was disowned by his own family because he became the bond servant of the Crucified, to whom he bore witness from Jerusalem to Rome; of one who, while preaching the good tidings of the Gospel, toiled night and day lest he should “be chargeable to any one”; one who, while preaching the Kingdom of God, was accused by the Thessalonian Jews of “turning the world upside down”;[211] one who, during his long and fruitful apostolate and his almost superhuman labors in the service of his Master, gloried in persecution and was the frequent victim of stripes and chains and imprisonment; one who was the fearless teacher and the strong supporter of the infant Church, and whose matchless Epistles have, during nineteen centuries, been the guide of doctors and professors; one who wrote his own epitaph when he declared “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” and who, in the capital of the Cæsars, won an Apostle’s exceeding great reward—a martyr’s crown; one whom his contemporaries knew as Saul, otherwise Paul,[212] of Tarsus.

While in Cilicia I made a special effort to ascertain the truth regarding the Armenian massacre that so stirred Europe and America to horror in 1909. I had long been convinced that most of the reports circulated respecting Turkish atrocities in Cilicia, like the reports disseminated throughout the world regarding other similar atrocities so frequently ascribed to the Turks, were ex parte accounts of what had actually occurred and that most, if not all, of them were greatly exaggerated. And recalling the activities since 1885 of Armenian revolutionists, many of them inspired by Russian Nihilist propaganda, the conviction grew that in probably the majority of massacres in Asia Minor, as well as in that of Constantinople in 1896, “the Armenian revolutionaries, by their riotous action, had put themselves and their innocent countrymen outside the law.” As the result of my investigations I am now satisfied that my previous views were not without foundation.

The massacre in Cilicia—organized, it was averred, by the Moslem Jews of Salonica—surpassed in frightfulness any that had taken place during Abdul-Hamid’s long and troubled reign. When, therefore, one understands the origin of the Cilician massacre, one may safely conjecture the cause of most, if not all, of the others in Turkey which have so shocked the world during the last four decades.

But, in a matter of such import as the one under consideration, I prefer to give the views of those who visited Cilicia when the terrors of the great massacre in Adana were still fresh in the memory of everyone, or who by long residence in Armenia are well acquainted with its people and are thoroughly familiar with the measures to which Armenians resort in order to achieve their independence of the Ottoman Empire.

Many influences [writes an English traveler who had exceptional opportunities for studying the question and who is well disposed towards the Armenians] went to the making of the (Cilician) massacre, some more or less, obscure, as the part taken in planning it by the Turkish Jews of Salonika and others belonging to the deeper causes of faith and race which ever underlie these horrible affairs. But some were local and exhibited the inconceivable unwisdom which Armenians so often display in their larger dealings with Moslems.

Cilicia [known during the Crusades as Lesser Armenia] is a district closely connected with Armenian history and independence; and here, in the sudden period of liberty which followed the downfall of Abdul-Hamid, Armenians gave unrestrained vent to their aspirations. Their clubs and meeting-places were loud with boastings of what was soon to follow. Post cards were printed showing a map of the future Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and circulated through the Ottoman post. Armenian nationalists marched in procession in the streets bearing flags purporting to be the flag of Lesser Armenia come to life again. The name of the future king was bandied about, no aloof nebulous personage, but, it is said, a well-known Armenian land owner of the Cilician plain, held in peculiar disfavor by the Moslems. Giving a fuller meaning to these matters was the steady assertion that an Armenian army gathering in the mountains by Hajin and Zeitun—an army of rumor like the legendary Royalist Army of Jales which terrorized revolutionary France—would presently march upon Adana and set up an Armenian kingdom again.

Sober Armenians of Cilicia tell you now that these proceedings were folly, the work of revolutionary societies and hot-heads and that the mass of the Armenian population held aloof. But there can be no doubt that the movement was approved and supported by many, and intended to involve the whole race; that it had in fact, got beyond the control both of those who desired to go more slowly and those who disapproved of it altogether.[213]

What is here said of the hot-brained revolutionaries of Lesser Armenia can with even greater truth be affirmed of their seditious compatriots of Greater Armenia. For those who know them best do not hesitate to declare that their lurid accounts of frequent and inevitably recurrent atrocities in certain parts of Asia Minor are to be interpreted in the same way as those which were first published regarding the horrors of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909, and of Constantinople in 1896.[214] We get only one-sided reports respecting them, which reports, if not glaringly exaggerated, are in nearly all instances in severest condemnation of the “bloodthirsty” Turk.

No one probably has a more accurate knowledge of Turkey and her people or has made a more thoughtful study of the Armenian Question than has the noted traveler and Orientalist, David G. Hogarth, sometime fellow in the University of Oxford. With an experience of several years in Armenia, he frankly declares, writing of the Armenian Question:

So far as I understand this vexed matter, the source of the graver trouble is the presence in the heart of Armenia of the defiant Kurdish race which raids the villages where the flocks are fattest and the women most fair, now cutting an Armenian’s throat, now leaguing with him in a war on a hostile tribe and resisting in common the troops sent up to restore the Sultan’s peace. Whatever the Kurd does is done for the sake neither of Crescent nor Cross, for he bears neither one emblem nor the other in his heart, but just because he is Ishmael, his hand is against every man who has aught to lose.