Russians shell Trebizond

On the morning of 17 November 1914 the main body of the Russian Black Sea Fleet appeared off Trebizond, today’s Trabzon, on the northern coast of Anatolia, and shelled the port. It was the Russian fleet’s first major expedition against the Turkish coast since the attack by Ottoman warships on Russian ports at the end of October.

The fleet had left Sevastopol on 15 November under the flag of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Andrei Eberhardt. It consisted of five old battleships, Evstafi, Ioann Zlatoust, Panteleimon, Tri Sviatitelia and Rostislav, as well as three cruisers and a dozen or so destroyers. They were accompanied by two minelayers. The choice of target was no accident. No railway led to Erzurum and the Ottoman Third Army fighting in the Caucasus, and much of its supply was brought by ship along the coast to Trebizond and from there by road inland. At the same time Russian troops were ending their unsuccessful offensive towards Erzurum.

According to Turkish sources the bombardment began at about 8 a.m. and lasted roughly an hour and a half. Some sources state that the firing was done mainly by Rostislav, covered by the other battleships. Shells hit port installations, cranes and military barges, as well as buildings in the town. According to Turkish records three government buildings and a dozen or so private ones were seriously damaged. The number of dead varies in the sources, from a few to several dozen.

In the night of 17–18 November the minelayers Konstantin and Ksenia, covered by the fleet, laid a minefield off Trebizond. According to Russian studies, some 400 mines were laid in all during the expedition, also off other ports of the Anatolian coast, among them Samsun. In this way the Russians wanted to hamper Turkish coastal shipping, on which the supply of the Caucasus front depended.

News of the bombardment quickly reached Constantinople. The commander of the Ottoman fleet, the German admiral Wilhelm Souchon, decided to intercept the Russians on their way back to Sevastopol. Still on 17 November he took out of the Bosporus the battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim, formerly Goeben, and the cruiser Midilli, formerly Breslau. Trebizond was shelled from the sea many more times in the following months. The Russians took it only in April 1916.