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So why after those relentless bombardments, and in absence of “the Russian bayonet” appraised in the Empire’s poetry as a panacea and pledge against Asiatic blood bathes, why (excuse the monotony in use of the same question word) not to enter the city and kick up (no! we won’t say “carnage” we are too globalized citizens of the new order for that) kick up fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get read of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?

Well, they would were they could, they certainly would if not for the nagging impediment named “phedais”.

Despite the Arabic-Muslim origin of the word that means “self-sacrificer”, some researchers derive it from Neo-Greek roots of the period when Hellas was no more and Greece was not yet around, and in their stead there was the Osman Empire (otherwise denominated the Ottoman or just Sublime Porte). To make things clearer, phedai is simply a guerrilla-fighter or Bandera-man who kisses his family good-bye, grabs his wooden fork or AK, and leaves his home sweet home going to defend his village.

What did Armenians need phedais for?

It’s certainly a good question, yet after skirring thru Wikipedia or Brita

Over-meticulous German pastor Joha

The following 2 massacres:

a) 25 000 in Diyarbakir Vilayet (yet, since there were massacred Assyrians as well, let’s divide the number evenly which leaves 12 500 for each of the groups, in brotherly way);

b) variously estimated from 15 000 to 30 000 in Adana Vilayet (only Armenians this time) which makes average of 22 500.

Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.

(I don’t call for boycotting your summer vacation in Turkey, the hotel Manager over there might very well be a great-grand kid of an Islamized Armenian).

Each outbreak of the mentioned atrocities was vigilantly responded to with a commonly shared outcry from the indignant Europe and unsparing headlines in the leading newspapers.

In the 20-th century the word “massacre” fell out of vogue getting replaced with the word “genocide”.

The Armenian genocide in 1915-1923 sums up to 1.5 millions of human lives. And ultimately we come to:

2 500 000 – 1 500 000 – 235 000 = 765 000

Two third of the entire people exterminated or (to put it optimistically) one third survived.

Figures are a fucking effective means of consolation – the skimming shoot of eyes over the long row of zeroes and that’s that, you’re good to live on further. The trick is just not to let the details crack your mental mail of arms by pictures of a mujik sliced with sabers, a baby hoisted on the bayonet, a woman beastly raped and killed and dumped into the same mountain of decomposing bodies.

No. It is not a feverish verbal diarrhea of a wacky blogger, the illustration is taken from the pencil sketches by an eyewitness (they did not travel with cameras yet). Poor Frenchman! Poor Frenchman! What repulsive nightmares he was haunted by in his following life!

Turkey flatly rejects this arithmetic (ask the hotel Manager), yet the obstinate figures are there to show the remainder of one third of survivors (plus those who took Shahada).

Where are they, that third?

Fled to Russia, fled to France, fled to America.

In Russia they would become citizens in the pending USSR, in the West they’d flesh out the Diaspora.

As noted by a European eyewitness of the massacre in 1894, the attackers were distinguished by exceptional cowardice, so if ru

And what were they, those 2.5 millions of Armenians who could not last in their land (albeit provided with phedais of their own)?

I’m go

Okay, fine, the mujiks also had their own elite: merchants, political figures, shoemakers, writers and composers, however, those were far away, in the capital city of Istanbul. So, on the whole, just mujiks as is.

From 1915 to 1923, while the elite were being hanged out on the lampposts in the capital city, the arrangement about mujiks was way simpler – collected in crowds, they were driven to Syria (also a part of the then Ottoman Empire), driven into the desert under the pretext as if some camps were awaiting to accommodate them there. So one million human beings died on that trek because they were driven without any food, shepherded by riflemen.

The guardsmen did not bypass gutting dead womenfolk in case she swallowed her gold earrings while alive. Some were lucky to find. (Armin Theophil Wegner; 1886—1978, another German witness of atrocities.)

Still, what did Turkey need all that trouble for?

Easy as pie – it’s an Empire and any state of that status has no choice but to grow. It exists only while it grows, like those polyps in the Coral Reef.

But behold and see – the neighboring insistent grower, Russian, end 1800’s grabbed ample swathes off the Ottoman Empire. Who else might possibly be guilty of such an affront if not those Armenians? They also worship the Cross.

At the dawn of the next, 20th century, Turkey looses almost all of its possessions in Europe. Who’s guilty again?

For consolidation of any Empire, having an enemy is the must, be it an external or i

The Stepanakert phedais were noticeable by their young age, from 16 to about 32. Night after night they kept shooting at the positions of the other side to the conflict entrenched in Krkjan, the commanding hill in Stepanakert outskirts. There sounded bazooka bums too in that neighborhood co

When someone got blown up by a mortar fire in his fox-hole, they buried him a day later in the city cemetery – everything was conveniently at hand, in the same blockade…

For me personally, the phedais are – Mishik, who after the first (unsuccessful) storming of the Malubalu Village returned home frozen thru and thru and slept for about 24 hours;

Gavo, my one-time coworker at BCM-8, after a night in Krkjan passed the AK to his shiftman and was coming back home, and winked at me proudly in the sidewalk of Lenin Street;

Samvel, whose wedding pants were shot thru in the second (successful) storming of Malubalu yet he never looted a thing there, not a kopeck worth;

Edo (the Draftsman) sporting an obsolete army officer harness belt.

In the then Stepanakert parlance the appellation “draftsman” was used to designate a person whose eyes in his head watched the world speeding round thru the prism of ca