Defence of Van begins

On 20 April 1915 in Van, capital of the eastern Anatolian vilayet on Lake Van, the first shots were fired in fighting between Ottoman troops and the city’s Armenian inhabitants. The British chronology of the war on which this site is based calls these events the Armenian revolt. That is how the Ottoman authorities presented them, later making them one of the main justifications for the deportation of the Armenians. Most historians, however, describe them as the armed self-defence of a population that had every reason to expect a massacre. From that day, for nearly four weeks, the Armenians defended themselves in their quarters against the troops of Governor Cevdet Bey.

The governor and the Armenian leaders

Van was one of the main centres of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire. By various estimates the Armenians made up from half to a majority of the city’s inhabitants, and strong political organisations were active among them, above all the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, known from its Armenian name as the Dashnaktsutyun. Its local leaders, Aram Manukian, Ishkhan (Nikoghayos Mikaelian) and the deputy to the Ottoman parliament Arshak Vramian, had tried until the spring of 1915 to give the authorities no pretext for repression.

In February 1915, according to some sources only in March, Cevdet Bey, brother-in-law of the Minister of War Enver Pasha, became governor of the vilayet of Van. He replaced Hasan Tahsin, who enjoyed the Armenians’ trust, and arrived in the city at the end of March with army units and irregular Kurdish and Circassian cavalry. Even earlier, gendarmerie and irregular units operating on the Persian border had been raiding Armenian and Assyrian villages. In April Cevdet demanded that the Armenians provide some 4,000 men, ostensibly for the army. The Armenian leaders, knowing what had befallen the disarmed Armenian soldiers in the labour battalions, refused, offering a smaller contingent and to buy the rest out of service.

A few days before the fighting

In mid-April a dispute broke out in the district of Shatakh, south of the lake, where the authorities had arrested an Armenian teacher. Cevdet asked Ishkhan to go there to calm the dispute. On 16 or 17 April, according to different accounts, Ishkhan and his companions were murdered on the way, in a Kurdish village, on the governor’s orders. The next morning Cevdet summoned Vramian and had him arrested. The deputy was taken out of the city under guard and later murdered. Aram Manukian, who did not answer the summons, survived. In those same days irregular units began raiding Armenian villages around Van. On 19 April, according to Armenian and missionary accounts, some 2,500 Armenian men were murdered in Erciş on the northern shore of the lake.

The Armenians of the city concluded that the same fate awaited them. In the Armenian garden quarter, Aygestan, which stretched east of the walled old city lying at the foot of the rock with the citadel, trenches were dug, barricades put up and weapons distributed. A joint defence command was formed, on which, alongside Aram Manukian, sat among others Armenak Yekarian of the Armenakan party. A separate centre of resistance was set up in the Armenian part of the old city.

20 April

On the morning of 20 April, according to eyewitness accounts, Ottoman soldiers stopped an Armenian woman on her way into the city. When Armenians tried to come to her aid, the soldiers shot two of them. The Armenians returned fire, and the Ottoman troops opened artillery fire on Aygestan and went over to the attack. The defenders, armed mainly with a few hundred rifles and pistols, held their positions. Thus began the siege of Van.

The events were witnessed by American missionaries, above all the physician Clarence Ussher, whose mission lay on the edge of the Armenian quarter. Their accounts, as well as reports by Ottoman officials and German diplomats, are today the main sources for the history of those weeks. At the same time Ottoman units massacred the inhabitants of many villages around Van. The numbers of victims are uncertain, but witnesses spoke of tens of thousands killed.

The events in Van were the strongest Armenian resistance to the policy whose first stage, at the beginning of April, had been the deportations from Zeytun. The Ottoman authorities quickly proclaimed them proof of an Armenian uprising in the rear of the Caucasus front and of a conspiracy with the Russians. Almost all outside witnesses, including some Ottoman officials, believed however that the Armenians were defending themselves against announced annihilation. Cevdet’s predecessor, Hasan Tahsin, wrote that there had been no rebellion in Van and could not have been, and that the authorities themselves had created a situation with no way out.