The Horrors of Adana offers one of the first close examinations of these events, analyzing sociopolitical and economic transformations that culminated in a cataclysm of violence. Drawing on primary sources in a dozen languages, he develops an interdisciplinary approach to understand the rumors and emotions, public spheres and humanitarian interventions that together informed this complex event.
Peter Balakian discusses the book of poems Bloody News from My Friend by Siamanto (1878-1915). Dr. Diran Balakian, Peter Balakian’s grandfather, at the time of the 1909 Adana massacres was working as a physician tending to the wounded and was also an eyewitness to the atrocities.
The Adana Massacres of April 1909 took the lives of more than 20,000 Armenians in the province of Adana and elsewhere in Armenian-inhabited areas of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to the appalling loss of life and property, the massacres were a bitter blow to the Armenians who had expressed such optimism at the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Many see in these massacres an indication of what was to come in the genocide of 1915.