Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of IslamWilliams, Augustus Warner
History
Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam
Williams, Augustus Warner
Armenian question
In the district between Gemerek and Cæsarea twenty-seven Armenian
villages were pillaged and burned. The thirteen villages this side
of Gemerek, and five or six hours distant, such as Burhan, Dendil,
Tekmen, etc., were also pillaged and ruined. Burhan was ravaged five
times and Tekmen seven times. The raiders carried plunder from Dendil
for three days continuously; they carried away even the old mats and
wooden spoons from the houses. No clothing, no bedding, no utensils,
and no food was left to the survivors in those villages. The people
lived on herbs gathered from the hillsides, and cooked in the petroleum
tins which the raiders had brought along full of petroleum to fire
the houses with. In the district of Tounnouz the Armenian villages,
especially Hantavos, Kazmakara and Patsin were pillaged and destroyed,
the male inhabitants were butchered, and the young women were carried
off. Some of the villages were so utterly destroyed that now there
is no sign that such places existed.
At Gemerek the Turks joined the Armenians and drove away the raiders,
who however carried away one thousand sheep and cattle and about one
hundred horse loads of wheat and flour from the neighboring mills.
The reader can understand the ferocity of the attack upon the
Christians in this city from the fact that the wife of a captain
in the Turkish army watched the horrors from her window. She was so
affected by what she saw that she has since that event become insane.
Another terrible massacre occurred in Palu, a district not far from
Harpoot. An Armenian lady of Palu, writing to her son in New York,
thus told the story:
"You are my comfort in God. My only joy is that you are safe; but
we are in great distress. My hands are trembling; I cannot write
from hunger. The Turks have burned forty-one villages, destroying
everything. They take the beautiful women to their homes and use
them badly. They kill the old men, and the old women and children
are entirely naked. Their bed is now the snow. They go begging at
Turkish doors for a piece of bread, and instead of bread they get
mulberry and husks. After six days of plundering and burning those
villages, our enemies returned to the city. Ten thousand Kurds with the
Mohammedans of the city, attacked the houses and killed one thousand
seven hundred and thirty-two grown-up men and many children and women
who would not accept Mohammedism.
"They took all the articles which were useful and broke everything
they had no use for. They tore up every place in the hope of finding
something valuable."
A letter received from an Armenian resident on the seacoast of
Cilicia, said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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