Audio tour Armenia itinerary

During the First World War, the genocide of the Armenian people took place in the territories of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks government, an offshoot of the “Union and Progress” party, decided to magnify the Anatolian area and to deport and exterminate Armenian ethnic groups who had lived in the territory since the 7th century BC, who were integrated but not considered as the others.

The goal of Ottomans was the elimination of the Armenian community as a historical, cultural and especially political subject. The robbery of possessions and lands of Armenians was another major event that served as an economic base for the future Kemalist republic.

The First World War offered the government of the Young Turks the opportunity to solve the “Armenian question” once and for all, which had already exploded when the Berlin treaty had been signed in 1878 at the end of the Russian-Turkish war. On the night of 24th April 1915, the Armenian elite of Constantinople was arrested, deported and eliminated. Armenian soldiers were then disarmed, massacred and forced to forced labour on the Berlin-Baghdad railway line. In the following spring, systematic deportation started of the Armenian population to Der es Zor desert.

Few arrived there alive. The majority was exterminated during actual death marches. Almost all Armenians disappeared from the land that had been inhabited for over two thousand years. Their assets were confiscated.

One and a half million people lost their lives, two-thirds of Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.

Find out more on the Armenian genocide.