Russians capture Köprüköy

Late in the afternoon of 17 January 1916, units of General Vorobyov’s Russian 4th Caucasian Rifle Division came down from the mountains and took Köprüköy, a village with an old stone bridge over the Aras, on the main road from Kars to Erzurum. In the evening they were joined by the vanguard of the 39th Infantry Division, which had been storming the Turkish trenches in the valley for a week. The date of 17 January is given both by the British chronology of the war and by the history of the Caucasian wars by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff. In Russia, where the Julian calendar was still in force, it was 4 January.

The British chronology says that Köprüköy was taken “again”. The Russians had been here before, in November 1914, when the troops of General Georgy Bergmann reached Köprüköy. A few days later, however, a counter-attack by the Ottoman Third Army pushed them back almost to the border, and in December 1914 Köprüköy housed the headquarters from which Enver Pasha led the army to Sarikamish. For more than a year the Turks fortified the area. In the Pasin valley, along which the road to Erzurum ran, they built three lines of trenches with wire entanglements, and on the hills on both sides of the Aras they placed batteries that could enfilade the whole valley.

Breakthrough in the mountains

That is why the commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, did not strike at Köprüköy head-on. After feint attacks on the northern sector and bloody assaults in the valley, which drew the Turkish reserves there, Vorobyov’s hitherto concealed division moved off on 14 January. It broke through the front at the Çakırbaba ridge, which the Turks considered impassable in winter. Columns of Don Cossack infantry and Turkestan regiments advanced along the crest in a blizzard, clearing a path through snow up to one and a half metres deep. On 15 January they took the fortified summit of Kozıçan, and on 16 January they were in the Turks’ rear and had split their army in two.

The acting commander of the Third Army, Abdul Kerim Pasha, realised that he was threatened with encirclement and on the night of 16–17 January ordered a general retreat to Erzurum. The Turks withdrew quickly and in good order. The Russian regiments in the valley, exhausted by days of assaults, noticed this only in the morning. Vorobyov, advancing slowly along mountain paths in deep snow, did not manage to cut off their retreat. When his soldiers entered Köprüköy on the evening of 17 January, the enemy’s main forces were already far away. Yudenich angrily telegraphed the commander of the I Caucasian Corps, General Pyotr Kalitin, that he had let the enemy escape, and ordered the cavalry to push on at least to Hasankale.

The road to Erzurum

The next day Siberian Cossacks reached Hasankale (today Pasinler), and on 19 January they routed the Turkish rearguard there. Their horse battery fired the first shots at the forts of Erzurum. According to Allen and Muratoff, the Third Army lost in this battle nearly 15,000 killed, wounded and frozen to death, about 5,000 prisoners and a similar number of deserters. Of some 65,000 soldiers, about 40,000 took refuge behind the forts of Erzurum. The Russians lost about 10,000 killed and wounded and 2,000 severely frostbitten.

The victory at Köprüköy opened the way for the Russians to the fortress itself. In Tiflis there was advice to rest content with the ground gained, but Yudenich began to press for permission to storm Erzurum.