The Great Crime: A Podcast History of the Armenian Genocide

In the turbulent wake of the Russian Revolution, the Ottomans push eastward into the ancestral lands of the Assyrians. What happened around the city of Urmia in 1918 forms a central part of what they call Seyfo - The Sword.

“Leave all your belongings: your furniture, your beddings, your artefacts. Close your shops and businesses with everything inside…Make list of everything you own, including livestock, and give it to the specified official…You have ten days to comply with this ultimatum.”

The process of assimilation was a like a machine. Armenian bodies were fed into the machine, and out the other side fall new people, scrubbed clean of their old identity, forced to take on a new skin, a new tongue, a new life that was not their own.

Der Zor is the nadir of Armenian existence. A black void into which people vanished. More than the word ‘deportation’, more than the figure of Talât Paşa, Der Zor is the single name that can sum up the Armenian Genocide.

Throughout 1915, scenes of apocalypse and degradation were inescapable. The Ottoman Empire became an open-air morgue. To those who witnessed the cruelty, it felt as if “the world were coming to an end.”

“Those of us still alive envied those who had already paid their inevitable dues of bloody torture and death. We survivors became living martyrs, every day dying a few deaths and returning to life again.”

To annihilate a people, the Committee of Union and Progress used every power at their disposal, from the Special Organisation slaughter squads to the Ministry of Education. This is how it worked.

April 24, 1915. The regime moves to decapitate the Armenian nation. And as the Empire faces an existential crisis at Gallipoli, Talât begins to create the architecture of genocide.

April 1915. The picturesque region of Van is stained with blood. Aram Manukian leads the desperate Armenian population in a struggle for survival.

The first disasters befall the Armenians. The army is purged. Innocent civilians are deported. And the Allies launch a naval strike on the Dardanelles, threatening the imperial capital.