The house of the Armenian priest of Adeljivas, on Lake Van, is officially recognized as having perpetual immunity from all forms of taxation. The family legend has it that their ancestor was the personal servant of Ali, the nephew of the Prophet, in some warlike expedition that he made. The scene of the campaign is said to have been Egypt.
Ali was hit in some skirmish by an arrow, which pierced his heel and broke in the wound. The steel could not be found and extracted, and signs of mortification set in, so that the doctors gave up hope. Still the Khalif, though he thought himself dying, insisted on rising from his couch to say his prayers as a good Mussulman should; while his faithful Christian servant stood behind him the while. One of the attitudes of Moslem prayer involves bowing forward from a kneeling posture till the forehead touches the ground. (It is this attitude that makes such a headgear as the fez or turban obligatory for a Moslem. The hat is not removed in prayer, and yet the forehead must touch the ground.) Naturally, a wound on the heel was drawn open by this act, and the Armenian saw the arrowhead in the flesh. He, prompt man, dropped on his knees, got a good hold of it with his teeth, and pulled! The steel came out, but Ali fainted with the pain, and the servant fled, fearing he had killed his master. The latter recovered, however, and ordered search to be made for his benefactor; and when he had found him, told him to name his own reward. Perpetual immunity for all males of his house from all taxes was what the practically minded Armenian chose; and Ali granted him this boon at once, giving him a piece of his own robe in testimony. Each successive Khalif has recognized the act of his great predecessor, and in many cases has given a firman declaring the same; and these documents are now stored in the house of the present holder of the privilege. They naturally form a most interesting collection; ranging, as they do, from the great purple and gold parchments, works of art of great value to connoisseurs, which were granted by Sulieman the[{243}] Magnificent and Murad the “Father of Clubs,” down to the flimsy half-sheet of notepaper which bears the seal of Abdul Hamid II.
With them is kept what purports to be the original fragment of the robe of Ali; which is a valuable possession in itself, for water in which it has been dipped is a specific for most diseases for all faiths. The piece of stuff has some unusual qualities certainly, if it is genuine; for it is said to have lasted undecayed through some thirteen centuries of soaking and drying again. As for the cures it works, they are genuine enough, provided that the patient has sufficient faith!
Gradually, however, the comfortable state of things referred to, from which both Ottomans and Armenians profited, changed and took a bad turn. The Ottoman Government grew worse itself absolutely; and much worse relatively to the progress made by other nations in Europe. Turks saw one Christian nation after another (Greek, Bulgar, and Serb) slip from their control, and grew more and more suspicious of those that remained; while these became more and more aware and resentful of their sufferings. The old oppression and corruption grew worse; while the old laziness and good nature that had tempered things helped less. The latter qualities, however, are not quite extinct even yet, as a case from the writer’s own knowledge may illustrate.
An unfortunate Assyrian qasha was arrested on some charge or other; and after he had endured some months of close confinement in a very foul prison, was tried and fully acquitted—and then sent back to prison again indefinitely, because he could not pay to the jailer the fees he had incurred during his avowedly illegal confinement! One must admit that the same thing used to happen in England during the eighteenth century; but perhaps the English official would not have been as kindly as was the Ottoman Vali, who replied to the intercession of the writer by saying, “Well it is a hard case. Look here, Effendim, you can have him out any Sunday for service, if you will promise to send him back on the Monday![{244}]”
That official’s successor, by the way, had the idea of doing things more in order; and signalized his departure from the old slack ways by inviting any folk who had the misfortune to be under sentence of death in his province, to come in and be executed without more delay. When the order had gone out, he set about inquiring how many he might expect to surrender themselves; and found that the number of gentlemen who were under sentence of outlawry in his jurisdiction, and liable to death or imprisonment for life on arrest, amounted to between seven and eight hundred, and included every Kurdish Agha of any note in the vilayet![120] The decree caused much inconvenience; for naturally there was some delicacy felt about coming to pay your respects to the new governor under the circumstances.
While the Government got worse, the national self-consciousness of the Armenians developed; particularly in the light of the fact that they saw how other subject nations, who made sufficient noise, were given their independence by Europe. They began demanding reform, and a measure of autonomy; requests which it was natural they should make, in light of the fact that they could not help being aware that they were far cleverer and more adaptable than the Turks, and that nevertheless they were treated as an inferior race by them. On the other hand, the Turkish feeling was “This country is ours and we mean to rule it. Equality of treatment such as these Armenians demand is a sheer impossibility; for the reason that the races are not equal. While we have the power, we can keep them under; but to put them on an equality means that in a very few years we shall be under them.” Reform is anathema to the Turk, for he knows (even if he cannot put the matter into words) that reform means subjection of the Turk to the rayāt.
Armenians, and many of the friends of the Armenians, seem unable to understand this side of the question. They cried out in horror at the steps (certainly sufficiently grim[{245}] ones) which the Turk took to preserve his threatened rule: and not without full cause; for the steps referred to were the Armenian massacres. Still, the fact is that if you, being in the same field with a bull, choose to wave a red handkerchief, it really is no use to explain that any animal of ordinary intelligence ought to have known that you only wanted to blow your own nose; and that anyhow the creature’s prejudice against red is very unreasonable! The Turk thinks he has a right to rule; but the only methods he knows are those which did not shock the conscience of anybody in the seventeenth century, but do shock the European conscience now; and hence his verdict was, “The way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians.”
This was how matters stood between the parties in the period 1904-1910 when the writer was resident in Van. At that time the reforming or revolutionary party among the Armenians was known by the generic name of the “Fedais;”[121] and was divided internally into two parties, the “Armeni” who were more or less moderate in their views and methods, and the “Tashnak”[122] society, which advocated open violence.
The line which the Tashnak brotherhood followed was simply this:—to provoke open massacre by deeds that they knew must infuriate the Turk; in the hope that if only the massacre was horrible enough, European intervention would follow. There are perhaps two things that may be said in excuse for this appalling line of action. First, that the Tashnakists did expose themselves pretty freely to those perils which they were deliberately drawing down on their unfortunate fellow countrymen; and second, that they had seen success follow the adoption of very similar methods in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The headquarters[{246}] of their organization were in the Caucasus, that sink of all that is disorderly in the Russian Empire; but they had their local leaders in Turkey, and Van was one of their most important centres. Their object was the creation of an independent or autonomous Armenia; and they worked on parallel, but by no means on friendly, lines with the “Young Turk” Party.