The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
History
The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
Armenian question; Armenians; World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Refugees
It would not be right to close this report of medical work in Urmia
without a word about the native physicians. One of them received a
martyr’s crown early in January in the village of Khanishan. Four
died in the epidemics. One had been a worker for many years in the
plain of Gawar, two days’ journey to the west of Urmia. One of them
was a companion in the attempt to find Karini Agha at the very
beginning of the troubles here that resulted in the rescue of the
people of Geogtapa. One was the assistant in the hospital. He had
been in the hospital since his graduation in 1908, and was a most
faithful and efficient man. During the awful first days of fear,
murder and rapine, it was his hands that dressed and re-dressed most
of the wounded, with the help of medical students. He thought little
of himself and wore himself out until he could not eat, keeping on
at his work for three days after he began to be ill. His life was
given in the noblest self-sacrifice, and many people will remember
him with deep affection. The fourth was one of the refugees in our
yard who, though he was not very active, frequently prescribed for a
number of patients. His wife, who is a graduate in medicine in
America, in spite of the death of her husband and two children, kept
bravely on with her work, trying to relieve some of the suffering.
She had charge of the maternity cases and examined many of the
outraged women and girls after they finally reached us.
The most diabolically cold-blooded of all the massacres was the one
committed above the village of Ismael Agha’s Kala, when some sixty
Syrians of Gawar were butchered by the Kurds at the instigation of
the Turks. These Christians had been used by the Turks to pack
telegraph wire from over the border, and while they were in the city
of Urmia they were kept in close confinement, without food or drink.
On their return, as they reached the valleys between the Urmia and
Baradost plains, they were all stabbed to death, as it was supposed,
but here again, as in two former massacres, a few wounded, bloody
victims succeeded in making their way to our hospital.
_The testimony of the survivors of the massacre at Ismael Agha’s
Kala is confirmed by the following extract from a letter, dated 8th
November, 1915, from the Rev. E.T. Allen of Urmia_:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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