Turks occupy Van

In the first days of August 1915 Ottoman troops entered Van. The city was almost empty: Russian units and tens of thousands of Armenians had fled from it a few days earlier. The British chronology of the war gives the date 5 August. Turkish works based on Ottoman military documents write that Ottoman troops took control of Van on 4 August, just after the last Russians had marched out. The governor of the vilayet, Cevdet Bey, who had had to flee the city in May, reported by telegraph his entry into Van on 10 August.

A ruined city

Cevdet found Van devastated. In his telegram he wrote that from the outside the city looked normal, but inside it had suffered a terrible catastrophe, and the Muslim quarters had been completely burned. Part of the destruction dated from the fighting in April and May, when Ottoman artillery shelled the Armenian garden quarter, and part from the period of Russian-Armenian administration, when the houses of fleeing Muslims were burned. There were almost no Armenians in the city. Only a few old and sick people remained, who could not or would not leave. Little is known of their fate.

The massacre at Bergri

On the same day, 5 August, one of the most tragic episodes of the Armenian exodus took place. Columns of refugees from Van and its surroundings reached Bergri (today Muradiye), north-east of Lake Van, where the road ran through a narrow gorge above a river. From the rocks above the road Kurds and Ottoman units opened fire on them. Clarence Ussher, an American missionary doctor travelling in the column, wrote that hundreds of people threw themselves from the cliff into the river, and that some parents killed their own children so that they would not fall into the attackers’ hands. Accounts collected in 1916 in the British volume of documents on the fate of the Armenians describe it in similar terms. Armenian volunteers briefly silenced the riflemen, and then the passage was cut off. According to Ussher, more than a year later the remains of about seven thousand people were found in that valley. This figure cannot be verified.

General Trukhin, who had left Van on 3 August following the refugees, turned back after a few hours’ march, apparently warned of the danger on the road, and withdrew across the Persian border to Dilman.

Yudenich’s counter-stroke

Ottoman rule in Van did not last long. On the evening of 4 August, as the troops of Abdülkerim Pasha, pursuing the Russians after their victory at Malazgirt, were entering the Eleşkirt valley, the commander of the Russian Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, gave the order for a counter-stroke. From 5 to 8 August General Baratov’s group struck the flank and rear of the Turks near Karakilise. Abdülkerim had to fall back, and the Russians recovered the ground they had lost, including Malazgirt. Soon afterwards, still in August or at the beginning of September depending on the source, Trukhin with Cossacks and Armenian druzhinas reoccupied Van. Surviving refugees slowly began to return to the city, but in Van, which before the war had had several tens of thousands of inhabitants, only about 6,000 people were living again in December 1915, according to reports by relief organisations.

The fate of Van shows how closely the war in the Caucasus was intertwined with the Armenian genocide. For the people of the province, every movement of the front meant flight or death.