The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century, by Bedross Der Matossian, (Stanford University Press: March 2022), 360 pages.

In August 1909, the Ottoman government in Istanbul replaced Zihni Paşa, the sitting Vali, or governor, of Adana with Ahmed Cemal Bey. Cemal Bey’s task was to deal with the fallout of massacres that had been committed primarily against the Armenian population several months earlier in April. He managed to calm some of these tensions and the chaotic attempt at justice that followed; however, Cemal Bey’s limited success was a blip on the radar screen, both his own and the Ottoman Empire’s. “It is regrettable that this is the same Cemal who just six years later would become one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide,” writes University of Nebraska, Lincoln historian Bedross Der Matossian in his new book.

The book walks the reader through the details of a few weeks in April 1909, when an estimated 20,000 Christians and two thousand Muslims were killed in sectarian and ethnic violence that was a harbinger of the larger Armenian Genocide to come six years later. Der Matossian draws on an impressive array of sources in Armenian, Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Ladino, Russian, and both Ottoman and modern Turkish to paint an all-encompassing picture of the events from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. 

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the massacres. As the Ottoman Empire lost its Balkan territories to nationalist movements, mostly among Christian populations, there was a fear that the Armenians would attempt the same—namely to revive the Kingdom of Cilicia, an Armenian kingdom of the Middle Ages that sat on the territory that included the city of Adana. Even more pressing, the new Ottoman constitution installed by the Committee on Union and Progress (CUP, also known as the Young Turks) caused a religious backlash. “Ideas of constitutionalism, equality, liberty, and fraternity that were heralded in the public sphere—especially by Armenians—were viewed unfavorably by the majority of the Muslim population and considered an abrogation of the Sharia,” Der Matossian claims.

In October 1908, an Armenian doctor wrote, “Already the Turkish people of Adana-Tarsus-Mersin have armed themselves. The government is careless and acts slowly… Religious fanaticism is rising here, and we are afraid that in the future there will be a collision.” In other words, many Armenians sensed that something sinister was coming, and they were right.

Violence broke out on the streets in two waves. Mobs attacked the Armenian quarters of the city, while some Armenians fought back. 

“The physical destruction in the city of Adana was unimaginable,” Der Matossian says, “more than one thousand houses were burned, and others were looted. All the public buildings belonging to Christians were burned. The Catholic missionaries lost their church, residence, college, and the Jesuit school. The Sisters of Saint Joseph lost their chapel, boarding school, day school, and dispensary. The Armenian Catholicos lost its bishop’s residence, presbytery, and the boys’ and girls’ schools. The Chaldeans lost their church and presbytery. The Gregorian Armenians lost one church and two colleges. The Syriacs and Protestants lost their church. Numerous houses of Muslims were burned.”

One cannot help but notice the continued parallels to the situation of minorities in the Middle East today when reading The Horrors of Adana. In the conclusion to the book, Der Matossian writes, “the failure to punish the true perpetrators of the massacres emboldened the inner clique of the CUP to commit a larger crime against the Armenians during World War I: the Armenian Genocide.” It’s a fitting description for many of those involved in what remains of ISIS, either under cover in Europe or Turkey or who simply went back to their lives in Syria and Iraq, do today—live next to their victims in impunity. A Yezidi woman held captive by ISIS told the BBC in 2018 that she saw her captor in Germany, and that he knew the details of her life there. After little response from the German police, she returned to northern Iraq, paradoxically recognizing that as a safer option than the country where her captor walked free.

ISIS became infamous for its brutality, but they were not alone in committing heinous crimes against religious minorities in Iraq and Syria. Turkish-backed Syrian jihadists have virtually ended the existence of Yazidis in Afrin and Christians in towns like Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. Almost daily they shell the Assyrian Christian villages of the Khabur River. Like Adana in 1909, officials are often afraid that harsh punishments will simply stir up popular anger, so the cycle continues. 

It is much debated whether the Armenian Genocide was a centrally planned event or an unfortunate incidence of mob violence that couldn’t be reined in. But incidents like what happened in Adana show that the two narratives are intertwined: the planners of the genocide relied on a supportive element of society who was willing to assist in carrying out the genocide. The events in Adana in 1909 are a microcosm of what would come later: mob violence, government complicity, and an unwillingness to bring those responsible to justice after the fact.

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In 2015, I spent a year working in Gaziantep, Turkey. There were no functioning Catholic churches in Gaziantep, formerly called Aintab, so every few months I would make the two-hour bus trip to Adana to attend a Roman Catholic mass offered in Turkish to at most two dozen congregants, about half of whom were foreigners like me (mostly African workers). There was also an Iraqi family of a mother and four daughters who were waiting for asylum somewhere far away. This tiny community was all that remained of what was once an impressive Christian contingent in the city until the Armenian Genocide brought an end to the community’s existence. There were also at least two Armenian churches still standing in Gaziantep, but one is now a cultural center and the other, predictably, a mosque. There is an inscription on the wall of the mosque, whose architecture betrays its origins as an Armenian church, indicating the building was constructed in 1892, just before the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1880s devastated the Christian community of that city.

I wish I had had Der Matossian’s book with me when I was attending mass in Adana. It would have given me a better perspective on St. Paul’s Church, where we worshiped. Wikipedia says it was originally an Armenian Church built before the genocide and turned over to the Catholic Church after the Armenians left. A map in The Horrors of Adana doesn’t mention the church but has a “School of the Sisters” on the site. If the building does indeed predate the genocide, at one time it would have been one of many churches dotting the crowded alleys of central Adana. Now it stands almost alone, a small monument to a mostly forgotten history.

Turkey’s government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and other events that led to the destruction of its Christian population, not just Armenian but also Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, and Assyrian. It’s easy for a visitor to walk the ruins of the New Testament in Turkey—as I did in Perge in 2019—and forget that until relatively recently there were still Christians worshiping in places like Tarsus and Ephesus. Books like The Horrors of Adana help rectify this, and can hopefully one day bring about the official acknowledgment of a tragic history.