Armenians in Turkey

The Kingdom of Armenia at its greatest extent under Artaxiad dynasty, 69 BC.

Kingdom of Armenia under the Arshakuni dynasty, 150 AD.

The presence of Armenians in Anatolia has been documented since the sixth century BCE, about 1,500 years before the arrival of Turkmens under the Seljuk dynasty.[9][10] The eastern part of Turkey was part of the kingdom of Armenia for centuries. Under reign of Tigranes the Great, for a long time headed the kingdom of Armenia, his domains stretched from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, from Mesopotamia up to the Pontic Alps. The vast empire, formed of a varied mixture of diverse tribes, with their own dialects and cultures, could hardly be turned overnight into a cohesive and durable political structure. Inner disunity aided the designs of the Romans, who launched a series of onslaughts on the Armenian dynasty, beginning with the invasion by Lucullus in 69–68 B.C, and culminating in the campaigns of Pompey in Armenia, Iberia and Colchis in 66-65 B.C. The downfall of Tigranes the Great was precipitated by the flight of his son, Tigranes the Younger, to the court of the Parthian king Phraates III, who supplied him with an army with which to invade Armenia, and join forces with the victorious Romans.[11] The Kingdom of Armenia adopted Christianity as its national religion in the fourth century CE, establishing the Armenian Apostolic Church.[12] Following the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, two Islamic empires—the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian Safavid Empire—contested Western Armenia, which was permanently separated from Eastern Armenia (held by the Safavids) by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab.[13]

Ethnic groups of Six Vilayets in 1912 according to Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople.

From the mid-nineteenth century, Armenians faced large-scale land usurpation as a consequence of the sedentarization of Kurdish tribes and the arrival of Muslim refugees and immigrants (mainly Circassians) following the Russo-Circassian War.[14][15][16] In 1876, when Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to power, the state began to confiscate Armenian-owned land in the eastern provinces and give it to Muslim immigrants as part of a systematic policy to reduce the Armenian population of these areas. This policy lasted until World War I.[17][18] These conditions led to a substantial decline in the population of the Armenian highlands; 300,000 Armenians left the empire, and others moved to towns.[19][20] Some Armenians joined revolutionary political parties, of which the most influential was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), founded in 1890. These parties primarily sought reform within the empire and found only limited support from Ottoman Armenians.[21]

Armenian revolutionary political parties in Ottoman parliament
Armenian Revolutionary Federation			Social Democrat Hunchakian Party		Armenakan Party
Year	Total seats	+/–	Total seats	+/–	Total seats	+/–
1908	4 / 275	4	1 / 275	1	1 / 275	1
1912	10 / 288	6	0 / 288	0	0 / 288	0
1914	4 / 275	6	0 / 275		0 / 275
1919	0 / 160	4	0 / 160		0 / 160

Armenians in Istanbul celebrate the coming to power of the CUP government.

Abdul Hamid's despotism prompted the formation of an opposition movement, the Young Turks, which sought to overthrow him and restore the 1876 Constitution of the Ottoman Empire, which he had suspended in 1877.[22] Although skeptical of a growing, exclusionary Turkish nationalism in the Young Turk movement, the ARF decided to ally with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in December 1907.[23][24] In 1908, the CUP came to power in the Young Turk Revolution, which began with a string of CUP assassinations of leading officials in Macedonia.[25][26] In early 1909 an unsuccessful countercoup was launched by conservatives and some liberals who opposed the CUP's increasingly repressive governance.[27] When news of the countercoup reached Adana, armed Muslims attacked the Armenian quarter and Armenians returned fire. Ottoman soldiers did not protect Armenians and instead armed the rioters.[28] Between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in Adana and nearby towns.[29] Unlike the 1890s massacres, the events were not organized by the central government but instigated by local officials, intellectuals, and Islamic clerics, including CUP supporters in Adana.[30]

The Armenian quarter of Adana after the 1909 massacres.

On the eve of World War I in 1914, around two million Armenians lived in Anatolia out of a total population of 15–17.5 million.[31] According to the Armenian Patriarchate's estimates for 1913–1914, there were 2,925 Armenian towns and villages in the Ottoman Empire, of which 2,084 were in the Armenian highlands in the vilayets of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzerum, Harput, and Van.[32] Armenians were a minority in most places where they lived, alongside Turkish and Kurdish Muslim and Greek Orthodox Christian neighbors.[31][32] According to the Patriarchate's figure, 215,131 Armenians lived in urban areas, especially Constantinople, Smyrna, and Eastern Thrace.[32] Although most Ottoman Armenians were peasant farmers, they were overrepresented in commerce. As middleman minorities, despite the wealth of some Armenians, their overall political power was low, making them especially vulnerable.[33] During World War I, the CUP—whose central goal was to preserve the Ottoman Empire—came to identify Armenian civilians as an existential threat.[34][35] CUP leaders held Armenians—including women and children—collectively guilty for "betraying" the empire, a belief that was crucial to deciding on genocide in early 1915. Minister of War Enver Pasha took war of Sarikamish after losing, Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians who he claimed had actively sided with the Russians, a theory that became a consensus among CUP leaders.[36][37] Reports of local incidents such as weapons caches, severed telegraph lines, and occasional killings confirmed preexisting beliefs about Armenian treachery and fueled paranoia among CUP leaders that a coordinated Armenian conspiracy was plotting against the empire.[38][39] In February 1915, the CUP leaders decided to disarm Armenians serving in the army and transfer them to labor battalions.[40] Discounting contrary reports that most Armenians were loyal, the CUP leaders decided that the Armenians had to be eliminated to save the empire.[38]

Russian soldiers in the former Armenian village of Sheykhalan near Mush, 1915 in the Armenian genocide.

The ethnic cleansing of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire is widely considered a genocide, there are different estimates for the number of Armenians who died from the genocide range from 800,000 to 1,500,000.[41]

In the Republic of Turkey, Christian Armenians are mostly lived in Istanbul. Through Armenians in Istanbul faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey. In addition, in many regions of Turkey, converted Crypto and Islamized Armenians live.

• Dündar, Fuat (2000). Türkiye nüfus sayımlarında azınlıklar (in Turkish). Doz Yayınları. ISBN 9789758086771.
• Karpat, Kemal (1985). Ottoman population 1830–1914. The University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299091606.
• Simonian, Hovann H., ed. (2007). The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-79829-1.
  • Hachikian, Hagop (2007). "Notes on the Historical Geography and Present Territorial Distribution of the Hemshinli". The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey.
  • Simonian, Hovann H. (2007a). "Hemshin from Islamicization to the End of the Nineteenth Century". The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey.
• Vaux, Bert (2001). "Hemshinli: The Forgotten Black Sea Armenians". Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
• Melkonyan, Ruben (2008). "The Problem of Islamized Armenians in Turkey" (PDF). Yerevan: Noravank Foundation: 98. Finally, it would be interesting to quote several versions concerning the numbers of apostate Armenians. Different Turkish sources indicate those numbers as 80.000 to 600.000. Karen Khanlarian shows the figure of around 2 million, of which 700–750 thousands are Crypto Armenians, and those who are Islamized - 1.300.000 [8, p. 104]. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Dubin, Marc S. & Lucas, Enver (1989). Trekking in Turkey. South Yarra, Vic.: Lonely Planet. p. 126. ISBN 978-0-864420374.
• Ersoy, Erkan Gürsel (2007). Ethnic identity, beliefs and yayla festivals in Çamlıhemşin. in The Hemshin. p. 320.
• Balakian, Peter (2009). "Armenians in the Ottoman Empire". In Forsythe, David P. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Human Rights. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. p. 98. ISBN 978-0-19-533402-9. Diplomats and journalists at the time estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died in 1915 alone (Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians in Ottaman Empire). In the summer of 1916 another 200,000 were massacred in the Syrian desert around Deir el-Zor. In addition, tens of thousands of women were abducted into harems or Muslim families, and as many children were taken into families and forced to convert to Islam. After the war, further massacres took place, in Marash in 1920 and Smyrna in 1922. In the end, from one-half to two-thirds of the more than 2 million Armenians living in their historic homeland in the Ottoman Empire were annihilated. In his autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man, Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who invented the concept of genocide as an international crime, put the figure at 1.2 million. The International Association of Genocide Scholars conservatively assesses that more than 1 million Armenians were killed, probably 1.2 to 1.3 million. Some historians put the figure at about 1.5 million.
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• Akçam, Taner (2012). The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15333-9.
• Üngör, Uğur Ümit (2015). "The Armenian Genocide in the Context of 20th-Century Paramilitarism". In Demirdjian, Alexis (ed.). The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
• Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2018). Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-8963-1.
• Suny, Ronald Grigor (2015). They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6558-1.
• Kévorkian, Raymond (2011). The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. I.B. Tauris. ISBN 978-0-85771-930-0.
• Lang, David M. (1983). "Iran, Armenia and Georgia". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanid Periods. Cambridge University Press. p. 516. ISBN 0-521-20092-X.
• Ahmed, Ali (2006). "Turkey". Encyclopedia of the Developing World. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-388-0.
• Astourian, Stephan (2011). "The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power". A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539374-3.
• Göçek, Fatma Müge (2015). Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-933420-9.
• Payaslian, Simon (2007). The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-7467-9.