Hacking history II: Erzurum Archaeological Museum

by Ara Sarafian

Published: Monday December 01, 2008

The entrance to the Erzurum Archeological Museum, where Armenians make a cameo appearance to massacre Turks and disappear once again. Ara Sarafian / © 2008 Gomidas Institute. Used with permission.

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Hacking history I: Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara

Hacking History III: The Archaeological Museum of Van

Hacking History IV: The Museum of Kars

Erzurum, Turkey - Following my trip to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, I was curious to see how Armenians would be represented at Erzurum Archeological Museum, in eastern Turkey. I expected to see at least something, as Erzurum was the location of the ancient city of Garin (Karin) in historic Armenia.

I flew into Erzurum early in the morning and went straight to the museum. In stark contrast with the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, this provincial museum was a modest one-floor establishment. The staff at the museum seemed surprised to see a visitor as soon as they opened. They were very polite and got on with their job.

The museum has several sections, starting from the Paleolithic. The other sections are built around artifacts found at a number of excavations in the region, as well as some "emergency digs," which were forced by the building of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline across Erzurum province recently. The museum also boasts a donation of Urartian artifacts from Igdir. The excavations forming the core of the museum have yielded Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and some Ottoman artifacts that are displayed in the museum, but nothing Armenian is on display. There is also no mention of Armenians in the historical explanations printed on large panels around the various exhibits, except for a special display related to Armenians. This display occupies almost a third of the museum.

Ungrateful Armenians relocated

The special display starts by stating, "Anatolia was under the sovereignty of Umayyads from the end of the 7th century, who were followed by the Abbasids till the end of the 10th century." Then, we are told, "Byzantium dominated the whole of Anatolia starting from the end of the 10th century." The suggestion is that this region was called Anatolia at that time and not Armenia. The Byzantines, we are told, mistreated Armenians until the Seljuk Turks conquered this region. "Seljuk Turks showed tolerance to Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities." This is the first mention of Armenians in the museum.

The museum's narrative continues by stating that Armenians prospered in the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century, when they began rising against the state. It says that Armenians formed revolutionary committees, provoked the 1895 and 1908 incidents [massacres], and finally organized an Armenian uprising against the Ottoman government during World War I. Because of these revolts, we are told, Ottoman authorities deported Armenians and settled them in safer places in the empire.

(According to creditable sources, most Erzurum-Armenians were killed on their way to exile in June 1915. Some caravans were killed in Erzinjan, while others were wasted away on forced marches southward. The American consul in Harput gives harrowing descriptions of the Erzurum exiles as they passed by Harput, before at least some of them were killed near Lake Goljuk. He identified such victims because their identity papers could be found among their corpses.)

Then the main point of this special section is made: During World War I Armenians committed atrocities against Turks in eastern Turkey. There are discussions of massacres at such locations as at Chavushoglu Samanligi village in Ercis (near Lake Van) or Subatan village near Kars. These sites were excavated in the 1980s and 90s. We are told that in Chavushoglu Samanligi, the victims could be identified as Turks because of forensic examinations, written data, or artifacts found with the bodies. "It is possible to identify [the] race [of victims] by measurement, index, and morphological observation of the skulls.... We calculate that the cephalic index which is the most prominent criteria in race studies. We took the measurements of the eight skulls. The indexes varied between 76 and 89. The results showed that four are mesocaphalic and the others are brachycephalic... all skeletons belonged to [the] Alpine group to which Anatolian Turks belong."

April 24, 1918

In the case of Subatan village, we are told that a massacre took place there on April 24 1918, when Armenians were evacuating the area. This assertion is made on the basis of contemporary written records, plus an examination of the mass graves at the village. Subatan was a mixed village of Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. According to the museum, 570 people were killed there. Interestingly, the Subatan village massacre in 1918 is considered to be "one of the excavations of the mass-graves which aim shedding light onto the events happened in Eastern Anatolia between 1915 and 1918." The inference is that the 1918 massacre of Turks in this village somehow explains what happened to Ottoman Armenians in 1915. 

(Kars was not part of the Ottoman Empire when World War I broke out. After the Russian revolution Armenians controlled the city. In April 1918 Turkish armies advanced against Armenians in Kars and there was intercommunal violence in the surrounding villages. It is possible that there was a massacre at the village of Subatan around April 24, 1918, though there has not been an independent assessment of either evidence or circumstances.)

The museum also claims, more problematically, a massacre at Zeve (in Van province). We are told that this massacre took place in 1915 (no month is given), when 2,500-3,000 Turks-Muslims were brought to Zeve from eight other surrounding villages. These people were tortured and shot. "The most important findings of the excavations were daggers, cartridges, pieces of silk clothes, necklaces with beads displaying Sultan Reshad's monogram, amulets covered with wax, copper coins and glass buttons." Information about this claimed incident comes from an oral source (Ibrahim Sargin), but there is little further evidence offered about the claimed massacre, such as a more precise date of the incident and how the number and ethnicity of the victims was established. It is also not clear who the informant was, where the oral testimony might be found today, or who excavated the mass grave. If such a massacre took place after Russian occupation of this region (Spring 1915), we could investigate what Russian military units (with various Armenian, Muslim, and other soldiers) operated in this region.