Abstract
This title searches for the origins of aghet in the larger framework of modernization embodied primarily in the rise of nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the environment of a brutal global conflict and the agency of the main figures in the leading positions of a unionist dictatorship also played a crucial role in the short-term horizon of the decision-making process that led to the genocide.
The book also places the extermination of Ottoman Armenians in the context of the Assyrian and Greek genocides. In the Anatolian and Caucasian region, World War I was followed by a series of lesser conflicts and cases of ethnic cleansing committed by various parties.
After the establishment of the Turkish Republic and the USSR, the extermination of the Armenians became an almost completely forgotten chapter of world history. Even the Armenians themselves only refocused on this theme after 1965.
Their efforts to receive world-wide recognition of the 1915 genocide ranged from academic research, political activism to terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. The Turkish state responded with an organized campaign of denial.
The text also deals with various aspects of Armenian and Turkish memory and the possibilities for further dialogue. The Czech press extensively covered the Hamidian Massacres against the Armenians in 1894-1896, but due to the alliance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the Ottoman Empire there was almost no coverage of the Armenian genocide in 1915.
Brief retrospective articles about the extermination of the Armenians were published in the post-war Czechoslovak press, but it did not make up for the general picture of the events during the war in the public space. Subsequently, the Armenian question was put aside in contrast with the massively positive image of the new Turkish Republic.
The Armenian genocide became an issue in Czech politics in the post-1989 period, which resulted in its recognition by the Czech Parliament in 2017. The second part of the book begins with a detailed examination of a microcosm of American, Danish and German missionaries and an American diplomat during the aghet in the provincial twin-towns of Harpoot and Mezreh.
This small community left a substantial corpus of diaries, reports and memoirs giving a vivid testimony of the paralysation of the local Armenian community during the home searches and arrests in spring 1915 and the subsequent massacres, death marches and the forced assimilation of children and young women. The text also analyses the relationship between the foreign community and the local authorities, their security and humanitarian efforts.
The book closes with a story of a Czech traveller Karel Hansa, who worked for several months in 1922 with an American relief organization in Syria, and with limited success tried to organize humanitarian aid for the Armenian orphans in Syria and Lebanon after returning home to Czechoslovakia.