Adana

“ They continue to hang Armenians at Adana. It is a point worth remembering that Zeitoun and Dört Yöl are the two Armenian towns which held their own during the Adana massacres of 1909.
—th May.
A new batch of Zeitounlis has just arrived. I saw them marching along the road, an interminable file under the Turkish whips. It is really the most miserable and pitiable thing in the world. Weak and scarcely clothed, they rather drag themselves along than walk. Old women fall down, and struggle to their feet again when the zaptieh approaches with lifted stick. Others are driven along like donkeys. ”

“ Week-ends would indeed be dull were it not for visits exchanged up and down the railway by missionaries in Mersina, Tarsus and Adana. A new person at any of the three stations is very soon invited to make week-end visits. Early in the autumn, Miss X arrived at Adana. When she made her first visit to Tarsus, Herbert and I invited her to have coffee in our study one Saturday evening. ”

“ But during all these busy and tremendous months of war Germany has not only been denuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same altruistic spirit she has been vastly increasing the productiveness of her new and most important colony. There is a great irrigation work going on in Konia, and another at Adana financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marre gives us a capital account of this, for Adana was already linked up with the Bagdad railway in October, 1916, which was to be the great artery connecting Germany with the East. ”

“ The Ottoman troops continued their retreat across the plain of Adana, but they had scarcely reached that city before they were dislodged by the enemy, who were on the point of capturing the field-marshal. The whole district of Adana declared for Ibrahim, who had at length reached the new line of frontiers which Mehemet Ali wished to make the boundaries of his empire. There was now nothing to prevent the march of the Egyptians upon Constantinople itself, for the demoralised soldiers of Hussein Pasha deserved not the name of an army. ”

“ In the week during which I remained there we had no further intelligence save the vague rumour of an outbreak at Adana; even the assurance that Muḥammad V was sultan in his brother’s place we accepted from Turkish official sources, neither had we any means of ascertaining whether he had been recognized by the Powers of Europe. Turkish official sources are apt to be tainted, and few regions can be further removed than Eastern Turkey from the pure fountain of the truth ”

“ There are, moreover, at Adana some Maronite and Syrian merchants and some Europeans employed in various capacities. The total population amounts to about 45,000 inhabitants during the two or three months when the decortication and the cleaning of cotton attract a great many workers. During the rest of the year the population does not exceed 30,000 inhabitants, viz.: 14,000 Mussulmans, 12,575 Armenians, 3,425 Greeks, and a few others. There are in the town 18 mosques, 37 medresses, and 8 tekkes, 2 Armenian churches, 1 Latin church, 1 Greek church, and 1 Protestant church ”

“ This brutal programme has already been applied to the city of Zeitoun and its thirty-two villages, to Albustan, Göksoun, Yarpouz, Gurin, Diyarbekir, Adana, Tarsus, Mersina, Dört Yöl, Hadjin, etc. And the same policy is being extended to all the one-and-a-half million Armenians in different parts of Turkey. ”

“ As the Armenian men of Adana were drafted into the Army or Labour Battalions, and the Armenian shops were robbed at pleasure without payment, great numbers of families did not know where to look for food, and even the wealthier business men were beginning to see destitution looming ahead. ”

“ Adana has often been the theatre of frightful convulsions and rebellions. The supreme power of the Sublime Porte has been on more than one occasion set at defiance, and though the results have been terrible, and the honour of the Sultan been vindicated in blood, time has worn off the impression, and rising generations have continued to grow up in insolence and insubordination, till the natives are so void of civility to the stranger, that, as a recent author truthfully observes, “it was difficult for any European to traverse the bazars, especially that part allotted to shoe-makers, p. ”

“ The country back of Adana, known as the Cilician Plain, is very favourable to cotton culture, and a considerable quantity of that staple is already produced there. Under the encouragement of the new government the industry will doubtless develop rapidly, but so long as Abdul Hamid was in control of affairs it was scarcely worth while for anybody to develop profitable enterprises, because they would invariably tempt the cormorants who surrounded the sultan to spoliation. ”

“ Thousands have been murdered—25,000 in this province they say; but the number is probably greater, for every Christian village is wiped out. In Adana about 5,000 have perished. After Turks and Armenians had made peace, the Turks came in the night with hose and kerosene and set fire to what remained of the Armenian quarter. Next day the French and Armenian Schools were fired. Nearly every one of the Armenian Schools perished, anybody trying to escape being shot down by the soldiers. ”

“ The reactionaries had certainly played a part in fomenting the outbreak, but other elements—which the Minister did not specify—had contributed thereto." On the 13th of July it was reported that "an Imperial Iradeh has been issued ordering the arrest of the ex-Governors of Adana and Djebel Bereket, the commander of the Adana garrison, and a number of notables of Cilicia, among whom is the editor of the Itidal, the notorious Baghdadi." Two days later it was said that "the ex-Governors of Adana and Djebel Bereket have been sent to Adana under a strong escort. ”

“ There are many pleasant orange groves and citron walks in the village; and the water and shade, and verdure, form a picture of ease, and health, and comfort, that but ill accords with the really pestilential atmosphere of the neighbourhood. Small and unimportant as Mersine is in itself, it is of considerable importance to the commerce of Asia Minor, as being the nearest seaport to Tersous and Adana, whose merchants ship annually large quantities of linseed, wool, sessame, and cotton, the produce of the vast plains and valleys on either side of the Taurus range of mountains. ”

“ Outside Adana every Christian village—Greek, Syrian, or Armenian—has been burned and every soul in them killed. Unfortunately, it was just before harvest, and thousands of peasants from the mountains and other districts were there to start work. From 100 to 200 men and women were murdered on every farm. Turkish farms were not burned or looted, but the Armenian servants were killed. ”

“ Lately, the whole town was placed in quarantine for five days, because a Turkish Bey, who lives near Baïas, entered the gates without being noticed, and was found in the bazaars. The Quarantine building was once a palace of the Pashas of Adana, but is now in a half-ruined condition. The rooms are large and airy, and there is a spacious open divan which affords ample shade and a cool breeze throughout the whole day. ”

“ Here, under the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. ”

“ Armenians were also killed in the Vilayet of Adana, some months after the proclamation of the Constitution, but this slaughter did not extend beyond the two Vilayets of Adana and Aleppo, where the influence of Abdul-Hamîd was paramount till the year 1909. ”

“ This city of Adana, Adena, or Adan, is nearer to the island of Cyprus than is Satalia, although not actually on the sea-shore, a situation not attributed to his Adalia by Schiltberger. It belonged to the sultans of Egypt, which was not the case with Satalia, a city that from the year 1207 had been subject to the sultans of Iconium, to the Seljouk principality of Tekke, and to the kingdom of Cyprus, and was already incorporated in the Ottoman Empire (Weil, i, 505; Heyd, xviii, 714) . ”

“ Sweet lemon-trees, and other kinds of orange-plants, are also very abundant. As to our Lord the Patriarch, he went to collect his revenues at Tarsus and the smaller towns of Trimor and Jafer Pasha, and the towns of the Kabarisa in that direction. Then he returned to Adana: and we departed thence in the night of the twenty-ninth of Ab, in the company of an Aga of Turkomans from Damascus. Before noon we came to Khan Bairam Pasha, and alighted on a bank of the river Jakut. In the evening we arose, and marched the whole night through woods and over stony ground. ”

“ Beyond this is the city of Adana, round the eastern side of which runs a river named Sarus, [95] which rises in the mountains of Armenia. The Sarus is a navigable river, and is nowhere fordable on foot. Here in ancient times there had been constructed a large and admirable bridge, in the following manner. In the river were built many piers, formed of large stones of great thickness, extending across the whole width of the river, and rising high above its surface. Above the two central ones rise two lofty arches. ”

“ Armenian refugees, fleeing from the massacre at Adana, which occurred right under the nose of the English, French, Germans, Austrians and Italians, see these warships as the train draws into Mersina station. Turkish soldiers, of the same regiments [Pg 167] who massacred them three days ago, bar the way. Back they must go to death.
Herbert and I meet the trains. We look for the chance to smuggle friends through. We got H—— B—— through yesterday. The Swiss stationmaster, Monsieur B——, remonstrated hotly with Herbert about allowing me to come to the station. ”

“ The massacres were committed in [Pg 286] the following places: Adana, Alexandretta, Marash, Mersina, Hadjin, Kessab, Zeitoon, Kirikon, and all the villages. The number of the killed was estimated from 25,000 to 50,000. And those who suffered from diseases and starvation exceeded 150,000.
The following is an extract from a letter written by Mrs. Doughty Wylie, wife of the British Consul at Adana. It was published in the London Daily Mail:
“We are having a perfectly hideous time here. ”

“ Thousands of additional Armenians from the North have arrived here and been transported to the Aleppo region. Six thousand have been deported from the city of Adana, without the exception supposedly given to Catholics and Protestants. The congestion of people at the various stations en route caused terrible suffering and hardships to the refugees. The authorities no longer appear disposed to grant exceptions in favour of teachers and pupils of American schools, and, despite intervention, St. Paul’s College at Tarsus has been suffering in this respect. ”

“ The Turks, who are seldom at home during the day, suffer very little inconvenience from the fact above alluded to. They, for the most part, have their little shops on either side of the prodigiously long street that constitutes Adana; and as these are covered in with thatch-work, and are moreover carefully watered by public water-carriers several times a day, the Dukkans afford a desirable retreat from the mid-day heat. If their wives and families suffer inconvenience from the sultry closeness of the weather, they are at liberty to lock their doors and resort to any among the number p. ”

“ The few who have reached Mersina are like the messengers that came to Job. Adana is still hell. The soldiers set fire to the French Mission buildings, and are going each night after other foreign property. The American Girls' Boarding School was evacuated. The teachers and some girls who were saved arrived yesterday, and are with us. One of our American teachers has typhoid, and reached us on a stretcher.
Herbert brought me here from Tarsus to get away from the contagion that might come from the crowding of refugees in our compound. It is now worse here than it was in Tarsus. ”

“ Shehabeddin, 371; Ibn Batutah, 258-9, 265; Bustron, Chronique de Chypre, 296; Mas-Latrie, Trésor, col. 1802; Matteo Villani, in Muratori, xiv, col. 662; Urban V, Epp. secr., i. 161; Rasmussen, 45; Schiltberger, 19. (I cannot agree with Bruun that Adana is meant, for there is no reason to believe that the Osmanlis crossed the Taurus into Cilicia for more than one hundred years after the events Schiltberger was describing. See above, p. 296, n. 3.)
[790] See note for Mikhalitch.
[791] Weil, iv. 504-624; Heyd, passim under Tarsus, Lajazzo, Adana, and Alexandretta; Mas-Latrie, Bibl. ”

“ Herbert was very anxious to meet the missionaries of whom we have been hearing so much. They are to reach Adana overland on horse from Marash, Hadjin, Aintab and other stations. It is the jubilee year—the fiftieth annual meeting. The [Pg 101] native Protestant pastors of this whole field are to hold a reunion at the same time. An important question is coming before the Mission—what to do with the orphanages that were established after the massacres of 1894-96. The orphans are practically all grown up now. ”