Zabel Yessayan’s account of the 1909 massacres of Armenians in Adana
March 26, 2016
The latest podcast is with Judith Saryan, who edited a new English edition of Zabel Yessayan’s account of a trip to Adana in the aftermath of pogroms targeting Armenians there in 1909.
Download the podcast or listen below:
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Read my Hurriyet Daily News review of “In the Ruins: The 1909 Massacres of Armenians in Adana” (AIWA).
Here’s an interview from last year with translator Jennifer Manoukian, discussing Yessayan’s remarkable life and work.
Here’s another piece I wrote last year for Al Monitor from a crumbling station on the Armenian side of the closed Turkey-Armenia border. The immediate political dynamics have changed since then but it may still be an interesting read. View photos I took of the station here.
Finally, let me flag up my newly opened Patreon account – Through it you can support the Turkey Book Talk podcast by making a monetary donation, large or small, on a per episode basis. Check it out. Many thanks to my first supporter Sera Aleksandra Marshall.
Turkey Book Talk 
March 26, 2016 at 11:51 am
Proud of the Turks who defended their country from terror.
March 26, 2016 at 12:13 pm
Can I offer the following paragraphs from m y book “The Genocide of Truth” ? ISBN 978-975-6516-24-9
p.102 “It was announced in mid-December that four Armenians, Kirkor, Nazaret, Bedros and Mihran, with bishop Sahak, who had been condemned by the court-martial to hard labor for life and perpetual banishment, had been pardoned by the Sultan, and that further sentences to death of the culprits of the incidents should be commuted to hard labor for life. Yet many of the Armenians of Adana were not the innocent passive sufferers that they had sometimes been portrayed. They were insufferably and tactlessly loquacious, and their bishop Mousheg was ‘a firebrand’, who was seeking to force the foreign Powers to intervene, with the ultimate end of declaring himself ‘king of Cilicia’, as confirmed by secret British documents.” #43* (Joseph Grabill, Proestant Diplomacy & the Near East p. 63)
p.252: “According to American missionary Krillman, as quoted by the Armenian newspaper Gochnak, a number of hotheaded and emotional Armenians went around in Adana and Mersin, singing old Armenian songs. They were supported by the ‘young and inexperienced Armenian Bishop Mousheg’, who perambulated round the villages in the Adana plain, urging the Armenians to eat less, to sell their belongings and to buy weapons. Bishop Mousheg having thus prepared the ground, left for Egypt, and as soon as he departed, the Adana incidents began.” #73* Salahi Sonyel, The Great War and the Great Tragedy of Anatolia, T.T.K., pg. 62