Defence of Van

The defence of Van was the largest armed Armenian resistance to the policy of the Ottoman authorities in the spring of 1915. For nearly four weeks, from 20 April to mid-May, the inhabitants of the Armenian quarters of the city on Lake Van held out against the troops of the governor, Cevdet Bey. They had about a thousand fighters and a few hundred rifles, against well over ten thousand soldiers, gendarmes and irregulars with artillery. The siege ended when the Ottoman troops withdrew before the Russian offensive. Tens of thousands of Armenians survived, among them refugees from the surrounding villages, whose inhabitants had largely been massacred.

Name and dates

The British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based speaks of an Armenian revolt at Van and an Armenian defence of the city. The term “revolt” repeats the Ottoman version of events. The authorities in Constantinople presented the fighting at Van as an uprising in the rear of the Caucasus front, prepared in collusion with the Russians, and made it one of the main justifications for the deportation of the Armenians. Most historians, and almost all contemporary witnesses from outside the Ottoman authorities, describe it as the self-defence of a population that expected a massacre. The literature uses the names defence of Van, self-defence of Van or siege of Van. The Polish Wikipedia has no separate article on these events.

On this page we adopt the dates 20 April – 17 May 1915. On 20 April the first fighting took place in the city. During the night of 16–17 May Cevdet Bey withdrew the last units from Van, and on 17 May the Armenians took control of the quarters abandoned by the Turks. Some works end the siege on 16 May, others link its end to the entry into the city of the Armenian volunteers marching in the vanguard of the Russian troops, which according to various accounts took place on 18 or 19 May.

Background

The vilayet of Van lay in eastern Anatolia, on the border with Persia and not far from the Russian border. Many Armenians lived there, and in Van itself they made up, according to various estimates, from half to the majority of the population. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which before the war had cooperated with the Committee of Union and Progress ruling in Constantinople, had a strong position here. After the outbreak of war with Russia the borderland became a front-line zone. Armenian volunteers, some of them fugitives from Turkey, fought on the Russian side, and the Ottoman authorities increasingly treated all Armenians as potential traitors. After the defeat at Sarikamish Armenian soldiers were disarmed and transferred to labour battalions, and at the beginning of April the deportations from Zeytun in Cilicia began.

At the beginning of 1915 Cevdet Bey, brother-in-law of the minister of war Enver Pasha, became governor of the vilayet. He replaced the moderate Hasan Tahsin and at the end of March arrived in Van with army units and irregulars. He demanded that the Armenians provide about 4,000 men for the army, which the Armenian leaders, fearing that the conscripts would be massacred, refused. In mid-April, exploiting a dispute in the mountain district of Shatakh, he lured one of the Dashnaktsutyun leaders, Ishkhan, into a trap, and Ishkhan was murdered together with his companions; Cevdet also had the deputy Arshak Vramian arrested. The third leader, Aram Manukian, survived because he did not answer the summons. In the same days irregular units began to massacre the inhabitants of Armenian villages in the area, and on 19 April, according to witnesses, about 2,500 Armenian men were killed at Erciş on the northern shore of the lake.

Forces

The Armenian self-defence had, according to the most frequently cited figures, about a thousand fighters, and according to some sources up to one and a half thousand. There were far fewer weapons than men: about 500 rifles and a few hundred pistols, and so little ammunition that it had to be conserved. The defence was directed by a joint command in which Armenak Yekarian of the Armenakan party sat alongside Aram Manukian. Against them stood gendarmerie units, some regular infantry, Kurdish and Circassian irregulars and volunteers from the local Muslims, according to various estimates from about 10,000 to well over ten thousand men, supported by artillery. Among the Ottoman officers was the Venezuelan mercenary Rafael de Nogales, who left memoirs of these weeks.

Course of events

20 April. In the morning, according to witnesses, Ottoman soldiers stopped an Armenian woman walking into the city, and when Armenians tried to come to her aid, they shot two of them. The Armenians returned fire, and the Ottoman troops shelled the Armenian garden quarter, Aygestan, and went on the attack. The defenders held their positions. The fighting took place in two separate sectors: in Aygestan, where most of the Armenians lived, and in the Armenian part of the walled old city at the foot of the rock with the citadel.

Late April and early May. The Turks shelled the Armenian quarters every day with guns, including old mortars, and the infantry stormed house after house and barricade after barricade. The defenders dug passages between houses, built new barricades in place of destroyed ones and made ammunition and gunpowder in improvised workshops. Women sewed clothing and cared for the wounded. Refugees from massacred or threatened villages streamed into the city. At the beginning of May, according to missionaries, there were about 15,000 of them, and several thousand took refuge in the compound of the American mission, headed by the doctor Clarence Ussher. Cevdet tried to force the Americans to admit Ottoman soldiers into the mission compound, but they refused. Food and medicine were short, and disease spread in the crowded quarters. Even so, the Ottoman troops could not break the defence.

Mid-May. At the beginning of May the Russians, who at the turn of April and May had beaten off the Turks at Dilman in Persian Azerbaijan, set off towards Van. Armenian volunteer detachments marched in the vanguard, followed by Cossack units. When news of their approach reached the city, the Turks began to evacuate the Muslim inhabitants, among other ways by boat across the lake, while the artillery shelled Aygestan to cover the withdrawal. During the night of 16–17 May Cevdet Bey left Van with the rest of his troops and withdrew south-east, towards Başkale. On 17 May the Armenians took control of the parts of the city abandoned by the Turks. According to missionaries, the first Armenian volunteers reached Van on 18 May, and Russian units entered in the following days.

Casualties

The defenders’ losses in the fighting for the city itself were relatively small, but the number of victims of the massacres in the surrounding villages was enormous. The Russian consul reported in mid-May some 6,000 murdered, and according to an account passed on by Ussher to the American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, after the Turks had been driven out the bodies of about 55,000 people killed in the vilayet were burned. These figures are uncertain and hard to verify. Ottoman losses are not known.

Significance

Van was the only large city in which the Armenians managed to survive a siege in the spring of 1915. The commander of the Russian Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, approved an Armenian administration of the city, and Aram Manukian became governor of the vilayet. The reprieve, however, proved short. When at the end of July the Turks went on the offensive north of the lake, the Russians withdrew from the Van area. With them, according to various estimates, from over one hundred thousand to over two hundred thousand Armenians from the whole region fled to Russian Transcaucasia, and many of them died on the way of exhaustion and disease or were killed by attackers. The Ottoman troops reoccupied the ruined city for a few weeks, and in the autumn the Russians returned to it.

The events at Van also had consequences far from the lake. The Ottoman authorities presented them as proof of an Armenian conspiracy with Russia and used them to justify the arrests of Armenian leaders in Constantinople at the end of April and the mass deportations from the whole of Anatolia. Outside witnesses saw it differently. Ambassador Morgenthau wrote that the Armenians were fighting for their lives and the honour of their women, and the Austrian military attaché Joseph Pomiankowski called the defence of Van an act of despair. Today Armenians remember it as one of the few cases of successful resistance during the Armenian genocide.