WATERTOWN — Dr. Ümit Kurt will give a presentation called “A Farewell to Arms: Broken Hopes and Total Departure from the Homeland” concerning The Heroic Battle of Aintab, at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 12. Sponsored by the Tekeyan Cultural Association and the Armenian Museum of America, it will take place in the Adele and Haig Der Manuelian galleries on the third floor of the Armenian Museum.
The Turkish-French war of 1920-1921 took place between the Turkish-Kemalist Nationalist forces and French troops in Aintab, modern day Gaziantep. The war started on April 1, 1920 and ended with the city’s surrender to the French military forces on February 9, 1921.
Following the diplomatic negotiations between France and the Kemalist government as well as the Kemalist victory against the Greek army in the Western Anatolia, a mutual agreement (Ankara Agreement) signed between the Grand National Assembly in Ankara and the French government on October 20, 1921 led to the halt of all activities on the Turkish-French fronts. The agreement was a result of the French retreat from Aintab, as well as the resettlement of Aintab Armenians to the French mandates of Aleppo and Beirut starting March 1921.
There are ample amounts of archival materials, memoirs, diaries and various other sources written in Turkish and Ottoman Turkish on the Turkish-French War. Furthermore, individuals who themselves witnessed or participated in this war wrote down the history of the city within this particular period. Absent from these sources, memoirs and diaries are the narratives of Armenians, who are almost always depicted as ‘the opposite side’, ‘the enemy’ and ‘the traitor’. In Armenian historiography, this war has been described as Aintab Herosamarde [The Heroic Struggle of Aintab].
In this lecture, Kurt will explore how this war was narrated based on an original source written in Armenian by Kevork Baboian, titled The Heroic Battle of Aintab. Kurt will present his English translation of this important book with the detailed history of the Armenian struggle for survival in Aintab between 1918-1922. It is a unique and significant work because it is based on detailed eyewitness accounts of real people who were in the city at that time.
Kurt argues that the famous battle of Aintab against the French—which resulted in the gifting of the honorific prefix Gazi (veteran) to the city, renaming it as Gaziantep on February 8, 1921—seems to have been as much the organized struggle of a group of genocide profiteers seeking to hold onto their loot as it was a fight against an occupying force. This resistance sought to make it impossible for the returning Armenians to stay in their native towns, terrorizing them in the hope of causing them to flee.
