And here I made a startling discovery. According to the French, Christians in Cilicia (215,000) outnumbered Muslims (185,000), and of the latter only a small minority were Turkish: in 1920, the French administration tallied 28,000 Greeks, 5000 Chaldaean and Assyrian Christians, 100,000 Ansarian Arabs, 30,000 Kurds, 15,000 Circassians, only 20,000 Turks, and finally 120,000 Armenians. These last were mainly shepherds and husbandmen living in small, prosperous settlements in the Taurus – the remnants of the old medieval kingdom – and maintained close contacts with Tarsus and Adana, where Armenians were an important commercial presence. Even allowing for gross imperialistic statistical manipulation – and the numbers given for the constituent ethnic groups fell around 80,000 short of the given total population of 400,000 – I was presented with a picture of ethnic and religious diversity completely at odds with my sense of a region I thought I knew reasonably well.
The first wave of French and British forces reached Iskenderun in November 1918, shortly after the signing of the Armistice. In February 1919, British troops arrived to reinforce the French and Armenian battalions. They made a magnificent impression. They organized tennis matches, played polo, put the finishing touches on the Taurus rail tunnels, and repaired the Mersin–Tarsus railway: every day, one French onlooker marvelled, six thousand Hindus, shepherded by sergeants carrying whips, went singing to work. In June, the permanent occupying force of French troops began to arrive. A Colonel Thibault received the following words of welcome from a schoolgirl:
We salute you and acclaim France, whom we have summoned with our most fervent wishes. France, the object of our dreams; France, whose benevolent deeds in the world we have learned to bless; France, hitherto known only in the pale and cold reflections of history and the teachings of our schoolmasters, whom we at last see with our own eyes. She has set foot in our Cilician land, and our heart trembles with joy.… Flag of France, whose victory brings with it justice, peace, prosperity and liberty, flutter forever over this Cilician land.
I was again saddened by the reckless zeal of the schoolmasters who had placed this speech in the hands of a schoolgirl. But I wasn’t surprised. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), the ideologue invoked in Oncle Georges’ speech and obviously revered by the Capuchin brothers in Mersin, was an arch-conservative monarchist, and his followers would not have hesitated to fit out their students – the usual Levantine mix of Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians – in the stiff, perilously enchanting garments of French nationalism. It must have been a curiously improvised job of ideological costuming, because surely not even the most francophile Cilician Christian could have dreamt of living under the French flag alongside their Kurdish, Circassians, Ansarian Arab and, yes, Turkish neighbours. But it appeared that this was precisely what the Armenian Cilicians were encouraged by the French to believe: that Cilicia, in some form or other, would be a country they could call their own. In 1919, eight thousand repatriated Armenians landed at Mersin and Iskenderun. Most of the Armenians resettled in Adana and the Cilician highlands; two or three thousand went to Mersin. Orphanages had to be build for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Armenian children.
This information made me think of Joseph Dakak’s spell as an interpreter for the (presumably British or French) Red Cross. In his capacity as a Red Cross worker, which he assumed at some point after the termination of his employment on the railway construction in February 1919, he would inevitably have been involved in local relief efforts, which in Cilicia would have meant extensive contacts with displaced and homeless Armenians.
For a while, the red, white and blue of France flew serenely over Cilicia. On 14 July 1919, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the populace decked out the streets of Mersin and Adana in French tricolours, Union Jacks, and Armenian and Greek flags; the showing of Turkish colours remained unlawful. For the rest of the year, Mersin was treated to a steady and glorious inflow of French military dignitaries who would parade before the massed and craning townsfolk in superb cavalcades of carriages, motorcars and chevaliers. The young Joseph Dakak certainly witnessed these scenes and could only have been deeply excited. It was not hard to imagine how scintillating these near-magical creatures, sprung from the myths he’d consumed at school, must have appeared to an alienated Syrian with no experience of a government that took an active and apparently benevolent interest in his welfare. After the British finally pulled out in October 1919, the French in Mersin (using Algerian and Senegalese labourers) paved streets, opened a hospital and public library, founded a literary society, and built a new port consisting of a customs house with a magazine, a concrete landing platform, and a wharf.
Militarily, however, things were not going well. Even as Oncle Georges welcomed General Gouraud in December 1919, French outposts in the Taurus mountains were under attack. Oncle Georges’ comparison of General Gouraud with Bayard struck me, on further reflection, as more desperate than triumphant, because the salient point about Bayard was that he’d held at bay a besieging army of 35,000 with only a thousand men. And sure enough, by June 1920 Mersin and Tarsus and Adana were under siege and intermittent attack. Mersin was trapped – or, looking at it from the Turkish perspective, on the point of liberation.
While the fighting went on in Cilicia, the remnants of the Ottoman government were submitting to the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, by which Turkey was dismembered and portioned out to the Allies with extraordinarily transparent rapacity: Istanbul was put under the jurisdiction of an international commission, Greece was given Thrace and the Izmir region, Italy the Antalya region, and France was authorized to occupy Cilicia and large tracts of south-east Anatolia; the cost of maintaining these foreign troops was, naturally, to be borne by Turkey, which in addition had to pay very high war reparations. The capitulations were restored and Turkish taxes, customs, loans and currency were put under the supervision of the Allied Financial Commission. The Treaty also provided – fantastically, it quickly became clear – for the establishment of an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan, whose projected territories respectively extended into vast parts of the north-east and south-east of modern Turkey.
In the year that followed, Atatürk’s armies defeated the Greeks, the Italians, and, in north-east Anatolia, the Armenians. The French government lost interest in its Turkish adventure. Even though French troops had managed to regain control of the Cilician plain, in October 1921 the French agreed to evacuate the occupied lands in return for an assurance that there would be no reprisals against Christians. The Christians, especially the Armenians, were not reassured. A panicked mass exodus began. By the end of November 1921, only 60,000 Christians were reportedly left in Cilicia, 20,000 of whom were sleeping in the port of Mersin, waiting for a ship out. On 4 January 1922, when the Cassard sailed from Mersin, the Cilician occupation, which had lasted for three years, was finally over; indeed, according to one French observer, ‘The siren of the Cassard sounded the end of the glorious era that began with Charlemagne, in which the French flag swaddled in its folds whosoever raised his prayers to Jesus.’
Among the departed were my great-aunt Radié, who married a Frenchman stationed in Mersin, Lieutenant René Salendre. The couple left Mersin in 1920, going to Iskenderun and then to Aleppo, where Oncle René served until around 1930 as France’s consul. Georges Dakak left for France when he was around sixteen or seventeen, in 1921 or 1922.
While thousands of Christians were fleeing from Mersin in terror at prospect of what the victorious Turks would do, Joseph Dakak stayed behind. It was an enormous gamble. The Dakak family had strong collaborationist links to the occupiers – Joseph had worked for the (ostensibly neutral) Red Cross, his brother had given a welcoming speech to General Gouraud, his mother had taken English and French officers into her home as paying guests, and his sister had married a French officer – and Joseph had no property or family ties to Mersin. No doubt he stayed in the knowledge that his professional and social standing in Mersin was relatively certain; but there was also the co
mplex matter of identity. My grandmother once told my mother that Joseph was ‘too Oriental’ to leave. He felt comfortable in Mersin. Thanks, perhaps, to counter-perspectives gained from his work alongside the Ottoman and German armies, he was not seduced by French promises of a homeland; and he reckoned he knew the Turks well enough to feel sure that they would not regard him, at least not to any hazardous degree, as a political threat. A Levantine of the Christian Syrian-displaced-to-Turkey variety, he did not belong to an ethnic group with nationalistic ambitions. He was not to be confused with an Armenian.
Although certain retaliatory measures were taken – Christian schools were closed, Christian shops were boycotted, and imports at Mersin were taxed very heavily – the fears of massacre turned out to be unfounded. Nevertheless, the exodus of Christians continued, and their numbers in Cilicia soon dwindled to next to nothing. The Greeks, for their part, were deported in accordance with the Turkish–Greek population exchange provided for by the Treaty of Lausanne 1923, by which, furthermore, the sovereignty of the Turkish Republic was recognized and all prospects of an independent Armenia or Kurdistan were extinguished.
I rang up my mother and discussed with her what I’d learned: that Cilicia used to be heavily Armenian and that the French occupation had ended with a massive regional depopulation of Christians. Joseph, in Mersin, and the young Georgette for that matter, must have witnessed unforgettable scenes as thousands of refugees poured in and out of the port. How come these events had not been perpetuated in the local folklore? Had she never been told about them?
‘No,’ my mother said.
‘Did your father ever talk about the French occupation at all?’ I asked.
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘What about the Armenians?’
‘Never. He never spoke about them. No one did.’
She paused as she reflected on her community’s insulation from the fate of local Armenians. ‘We didn’t really mix with Armenians,’ she finally observed. ‘They were completely separate from us. They spoke Turkish, whereas we spoke French and Arabic. I think that in those days they were regarded as a lower class; I remember that when a Nader married an Armenian man it was regarded as something of a mismatch. Also,’ she continued, ‘they mainly lived in Adana. Even at the time I was growing up, the 1940s, Adana seemed very far away, almost another world. In my father’s time it must have seemed even further away, because there were no real roads.’ Then my mother mentioned something else. Now that she thought about it, she recalled that her father’s family had migrated to Mersin from Iskenderun because of attacks on Armenians. The Dakaks fled to Cyprus first, and then sailed on to Mersin. Tante Radié, my mother said, used to relate that it was in Cyprus she first ate an ortolan – a finch so small and soft-boned that it could be popped into the mouth and eaten whole.
Thinking how typical it was of the Turkish side of the family to reduce a profoundly political episode to a gastronomic event, I decided to check this startling news with Pierre, who, like Brendan, was perceived to be the child who’d been closest to his father. My uncle lived in Paris for most of the year, only returning to Mersin for a few months at a time to do business, and I phoned him at the Montmartre apartment of his girlfriend, Katya, which had been Picasso’s first Parisian studio. When I put the Cyprus story to him, Oncle Pierre muttered in assent. Then he said, ‘You must be very careful about writing about such things. You shall show me what you’ve written, so that I can censor it. I’m being serious. And by the way, we are not Christians. We are Christian Turks.’
When I subsequently spoke to a few other Mersin Christians of Pierre’s generation – women, mostly – about the Armenians in Cilicia, the general response was one of mystification and, in one or two cases, non-admission. More than once the phrase ‘on ne les fréquentait pas’ was used: We didn’t frequent them.
As with so much of Mersin’s history, I had to resort to overseas documentary sources to fill in the huge voids in the city’s oral account of its own regional past. In the case of the Adana massacres, the extraordinary testimony of an eye-witness was preserved in a Foreign Office file at the Public Records Office in London.
On the evening of Wednesday 14 April 1909, His Majesty’s Vice-Consul at Mersin, Major C.H.M. Doughty Wylie, travelled from Mersin to Adana on the train. The consul had received a note that morning from the British dragoman at Adana, Mr Trypani, that there was a very dangerous feeling in the town, and he decided to investigate. About two stations distant from Adana, Doughty Wylie noticed a body by the track. A little further on, he saw people running in panic towards the train. More bodies began to appear near the railway track as the train approached Adana.
At Adana, the consul went quickly to Mr Trypani’s house, witnessing en route the killing of two or three men in the street. Major Doughty Wylie put on his military uniform and, accompanied by an escort of four men, went by foot to the government offices. His route took him through the Armenian quarter and Armenian bazaar, and then the Turkish bazaar and the Muslim residential quarter. He found the town ‘in undescribable tumult, with heavy fighting going on in the approaches to the Armenian quarter, and murder and fires everywhere.’ A ‘howling mob’ was looting the shops, there was firing in all directions, and men were being killed in front of his eyes. At the government headquarters, the consul was met with scenes of panic and disorder and fear; the Vali, in whose very office two men had just been killed, did not dare send out troops to quell the violence.
The following morning, Doughty Wylie assembled a corps of some fifty Turkish troops. In an attempt to clear the streets, he led the men through the town with bugles blowing, but the house-to-house fighting and mayhem continued. The main bazaar was now on fire, and when Doughty Wylie was temporarily parted from his troops they became involved in an attack on an Armenian house in which all of its inhabitants were killed. The consul himself was shot in the arm by an Armenian. The violence continued until the evening of the following day, Friday 16 April, when hojas and Armenian priests finally kissed each other and made peace. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear from the inflow of Armenian refugees that terrible things were taking place in the surrounding country. In Antakya (or Antioch, where, tradition has it, the followers of Jesus Christ were first called ‘Christians’), more than 100 Armenians had been killed. In Tarsus, around 200 armed men – Kurds, mostly – jumped out of the train from Adana and engaged in systematic pillaging and, according to one American missionary, the burning of 800 houses and killing of 500 Christians. Some Christians fled to the Tarsus American College (where seventy years later my cousins received their schooling). The Armenian inhabitants of over 200 villages in the Cilician plain, mostly peasants and farmers and seasonal migrants down from the mountains, were attacked. For example, every Armenian house in Inçirlik, the village that nowadays hosts a base of the United States Air Force, was burned to the ground.
Doughty Wylie eventually reckoned that 2000 corpses, of which around 600 were Muslim dead, were buried in Adana; an inestimable number of bodies had been thrown into the river. Wylie put the fatalities outside Adana at between 15,000 and 20,000, almost all Armenian. The French consul arrived at the figure of 30,000 dead. The Ottoman government reckoned casualties at 5400, including 418 Syrians and 62 Syrian Catholics.
Many Armenians avoided harm by fleeing to Mersin, where some caught boats to Cyprus. That Mersin saw no violence was, according to Doughty Wylie, largely due to the governor-general of Mersin – ‘the first Ottoman official there to refuse bribes and to refuse to be entirely ruled by the Greek clique’. Mersin was also the base of a flotilla of French and British warships that arrived soon after news of massacres spread abroad. The surgeon aboard the HMS Swiftsure, which sailed into Mersin on 21 April, went ashore to treat patients in makeshift hospitals. ‘The brutality and savagery of the massacre are impossible to describe,’ he later reported, noting, in descending order of frequency, wounds caused by Martini rifle bullets; swords and hatchets; clubs and sharp sticks; Mau
ser and revolver bullets; and bayonets.
The international naval presence had a limited deterrent effect. On the night of 25 April, there were further killings in Adana, and the Armenian quarter was burned to rubble. The statistic emerged that of the 4823 properties destroyed, 4437 belonged to Armenians.
Doughty Wylie was at a loss to explain the two massacres and by what devilry, as he put it, the Turkish peasant, ‘a kindly, honest and hospitable man, can suddenly be changed into a cruel killer of unarmed men and even in some cases of women and children’. On further reflection, he identified a variety of factors. The constitution recently proclaimed by the Young Turk government, under which Christians enjoyed equality with Muslims, was deeply offensive to the Muslim Turks. This resentment was inflamed by the ‘swaggering’ behaviour of the Christians, who, ‘with all the assertiveness of the newly emancipated, made equality to seem superiority’. This unseemly behaviour included the flaunting of weapons bought under a freshly acquired right to bear arms, and loud talk of what Doughty Wylie called ‘Home Rule’ – the establishment, with assistance of foreign powers, of an Armenian principality in Cilicia. The British consul, who regarded such talk as patently fantastical and ineffectual, commented that the ‘incurably loquacious’ Armenians ‘never seem to have thought of the possible consequences of wild words. Natives of the country, they should have known its dangers, but with the word liberty they forgot them all.’
It was against this backdrop of communal hostility that, on Thursday 8 April, an Armenian shot dead two Turks. The funeral of the men, whose bodies were carried through the town, provoked strong feelings among the ‘savage, ignorant, and fanatical’ Turks, who misconstrued the incident as a seditious attack. The atmosphere in Adana worsened, and it was at this time that Armenians who could afford to do so began to flee by train to Mersin. On Wednesday 14 April, the uneasiness was so great that shops closed and groups of armed Muslims began to gather on the streets, saying the Armenians were going to revolt; some Armenians, in their turn, regrouped and assumed defensive positions. Then, shots were fired – who fired first was never established – and the killing began. Major Doughty Wylie concluded that the real fault lay with the local Ottoman authorities, whose response to the events was culpably feeble. He found that the Muslim violence, although inexcusable, had in the main been committed by persons gripped by a real fear for their Empire, their religion and their lives. The consul (who was to be killed by Turks in 1915, leading a charge on the Gallipoli peninsula) observed, ‘Nothing is so cruel as fear.’
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