Armenian
News Network / Groong
Some Details of the Death
of Dr. Armenag Harutune Haigazian, Intellectual and Educator in Mezreh,
Kharpert in 1921
Armenian News Network / Groong
September 25, 2014
Special to Groong by Abraham D. Krikorian
and Eugene L. Taylor
Long Island, NY
Some Background
We have long felt that visual materials,
as accurately attested and attributed as possible, should be made accessible to
scholars and those wishing to make documentary films. We knew that it would be no trivial task to undertake
the work of attesting and attributing photographs, but the difficulty has far exceeded
our initial expectations. It inevitably
takes a great deal of time and more than a little luck. And, one has always to be on the look-out for
connections. The famous French
bacteriologist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) said something to the effect many years
ago that good things come only to the prepared mind. Sounds good but preparing the mind is not
easy either.
Arbitrarily but also trying to be
realistic, upon our retirement we decided to concentrate in earnest on events
up to 1923. Again, by design and for
obvious reasons, we focused on the earlier years rather than the later
ones. And for personal reasons, we have further
concentrated our efforts on the events in the Kharpert region.
A recurrent theme signifying the onset
of the Armenian Genocide is the beheading, figuratively and literally in some
cases, of the Armenians in the broadest sense, by first targeting intellectuals
and intelligentsia, the community leaders at every level. This effectively eliminated any potential for
significant resistance.
On 27 June 2011 we communicated on
Groong “Finding a Photograph for a
Caption: Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee's Comments on some Euphrates (Yeprad) College
Professors and their Fate during the Armenian Genocide” http://www.groong.com/orig/ak-20110627.html
Around the same time we published an essay
entitled “Achieving ever-greater precision in attestation and attribution of
genocide photographs” in a volume The
Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, studies in the state-sponsored campaign of
extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor (1912-1922) edited by Tessa
Hofmann, Matthias Bjørnlund, Vasileos Meichanetsidis (Aristide Caratzas, New
York and Athens, 2011, pgs. 389-434.) We
drew special attention on pg. 408 to a description by Dr. Mark H. Ward, who
served in Harpoot, of a little Greek orphan boy during the deportations of the
Pontic Greeks. That word picture about
this little tot losing his grandmother during the exile far exceeds any
photograph that we could have encountered or found. The word picture was recounted in the course
of a fund-raising plea made by Dr. Ward in Boston upon his return to America
after he and his colleagues were kicked out of Turkey without any explanation. Ward knew what he was talking about since he
was Director of the Medical Unit, actually head of the ‘American Hospital’ in Mezreh. The heart-wrenching description of a little
Greek boy on the road to exile, losing his grandmother etc., is of course
totally typical of what happened to Armenians but considerably earlier than
what was happening to these Greeks that Dr. Ward was talking about.
Mark Ward was one of those unusual people
who we would nowadays call activists and seekers of justice. We need not emphasize that World War I was
over, or that the insurgency of the Kemalists, which Turks refer to as their
glorious war of independence, was causing all kinds of major problems for
relief workers, above and beyond all those brought on by the genocides and
ethnic cleansings carried out under cover of the War by the Young Turk
leadership. Mark Ward did not hesitate
to call a spade a spade, and for this he engendered the wrath of the Turkish
hierarchy [Endnote 1]
A special cable to the New York Times
from Paris led to a May 6, 1922 article captioned “Killing by Turks has Been
Renewed. American Says They Plan to
Exterminate the Christians in Asia Minor. — Expel Near East Workers
— They have deported Major Yowell and Associates from Harpoot —
Thousands of Greeks Killed”… [2]. The “associates”
alluded to were Mark Ward, M.D. and Ruth A. Parmelee, M.D. [3]
Major Forrest D. Yowell, head of the
Harpoot Near East Relief Unit, gave a considerably more detailed account of the
situation in Harpoot and from that it is quite clear that the Turks were not at
all pleased with Americans trying to help save the latest exiles and ‘refugees’
(see the May-June issue of The New
Armenia (NY) 1922 vol. 14, no. 3, pgs. 39-41) [4].
What follows is an account extracted
from a typed version of an extended entry in the diary of Dr. Ward from Hoover
Institution Archives. We thank the
Archives for giving us access to the papers of Ernest W. Riggs, from which file
this was retrieved. We do not mind
saying that it was a challenging job typing it. [5]
Death of Dr. Armenag Harutune
Haigazian
Haigazian University (previously
Haigazian College) was founded in 1955 in Beirut and was named after the
distinguished educator.[6] On Wikipedia
one sees mention made of Dr. Haigazian’s death according to the New York
Times.
Indeed, in the New York Times on May
26, 1922 pg. 18 there is a notice that reads “Prof. Haigazian dies of typhus at
Harpoot — President of American College at Konia was being deported into
the Interior. By Special cable to the
New York Times. Constantinople, May 25 1922.
Professor A.H. Haigazian, President of the American College at Konia,
Asia Minor, and the most prominent Armenian educator in the Near East, died
last week at the American Hospital in Harpoot with typhus. The disease was contracted while Professor
Haigazian was being deported with a group of influential Armenians and Greeks
into the interior of the country. He was
a graduate of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary and received
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Yale.
News of Haigazian’s death was brought to Constantinople today by Edith
Wood, a Philadelphia Red Cross nurse attached to the Near East Relief Hospital
at Harpoot. Miss Wood is convalescing
from typhus and plans to return to the United States shortly.” [7]
Filling in Some Blanks
The New York Times has long
considered itself “a newspaper of record”, and that is arguably the case. Just what a “newspaper of record” is we
readily admit we do not really know — perhaps it is their illusion that they print “All the news that is fit to print.” But like all newspapers, their reporting is
dependent on timely access to accurate information. Even if it is accurate, significant details
may be lacking because they simply were not available. It is worth repeating here that many
historians regard newspaper articles as a “first draft of history.” Perhaps. Perhaps not.
It is not unknown that politics can enter the equation as well. (Little has changed over the years.)
Dr. Haigazian died on July 7, 1921 at
the American Hospital in Mezreh, Mamuret-ul-Aziz [Kharpert]. This is reliable information because it
derives from the diary entry of Dr. Ward, who was in charge of the Hospital,
and an attending physician.
We won’t bother going into detail on
Dr. Ward’s record-keeping of the populations of Greeks and mostly left-over
Armenian remnants being moved for the most part southwards from the Pontus
area, but most assuredly from other areas as well, as was the case with Dr.
Haigazian from Konia (the ancient Iconium).
We refer cynically to these events as ‘mopping-up operations.’ How Dr. Haigazian was able to survive the genocidal
atrocities as long as he did is a moot point.
He probably had connections and we also do not hesitate to venture to
say that a fair amount of money probably exchanged hands as well. Altruism in those days took on many faces. Perhaps someone out there knows the
story.
The following are quotes from Dr.
Ward’s diary:
“June 20
[1921]”
“Ten persons
arrived today by yailis [a yaili is the name in Turkish for a spring wagon]
from Konia, and were admitted to the American Hospital in order that we might
delouse them. Refugees with typhus or
danger of typhus are treated gingerly by the Turks, as they may spread the
disease further among the Turkish population.
This is a small group of high-quality people. In the group is a Greek priest, a wealthy
Greek engineer, a wealthy merchant and his wife, and the well-known Professor
Haigazian, president of the American College at Konia. Prof. Haigazian is a graduate of Columbia
University and Union Theological Seminary, and has also received a Ph.D. from
Yale. He speaks English perfectly. He appears weak and ill: we are doing all we
can for him.
LATER: On the 23rd the government ordered us to send Prof.
Haigazian to the quarantine camp. This
was very bad for him, as the men there are very lousy, and he could hardly
escape being infected.
On the 25th I saw him at the camp and he seemed very ill, but we were unable to get permission for him to
enter the hospital (emphasis ours).
On the 28th most of his party were sent away, but Prof. Haigazian, by paying fifteen
pounds gold, was permitted to remain.
The following day we got him to our hospital. By that time the rash of typhus had
appeared. We made a hard fight to save
him but he died on 7th of July. We were
permitted to bury him.”
There you have it from the senior physician in Harpoot/Mezreh who kept
detailed notes.
There are many questions that remain of course but the essentials are
here. His grave is certainly one of the
many now lost.
Some of the facts in the New York Times are wrong, and one can trace them
in part to Dr. Ward, and via him to nurse Miss Wood. First of all, Armenag Haigazian was not a
graduate of Columbia University or of Union Theological Seminary. Clearly some confusion crept into the picture
– either on Dr. Ward’s part or even Dr. Haigazian’s since he was ill with
fever etc.
If we read Armenag Haigazian’s autobiography written in his own handwriting
(see below) at the end of his Ph.D. thesis we see first of all that he was a
Hadjintsi. :-
“I
was born in 1871 at Hadjin, Asia Minor; graduated from Hadjin High School in
1885; graduated from Central Turkey College at Aintab, in 1889; a tutor in
mathematics during my junior and senior years in the same institution.
“Graduated from Marash Theological
Seminary in 1892;
“An
instructor of Mathematics and Physical Geography in St. Paul’s Institute, at
Tarsus, for two years – ’92 – ‘94
“One
year’s study (‘94 – ‘95) in the University of Chicago, in Semitics and
Comparative Religion; one year (’95 – ‘96) in Hartford Theological
Seminary, pursuing post-graduate studies, and in recognition of my high
standing the degree of S.T.B. (Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus = B.D.) was
conferred on me. Two years (’96 –
‘98) in the Graduate School of Yale University, pursuing Semitic Languages and
Biblical Literature.”
The degree
of Doctor of Philosophy was conferred on Armenag Harutune Haigazian in New
Haven in June 1898. His thesis was
entitled “The Text of Zephaniah.” One
can ‘Google’ to one’s heart’s content learning today’s relevance of this Old
Testament prophet. We admit never having heard of this prophet.
Dr.
Haigazian seems not to have published much but he wrote a very scholarly review
of Fred. C. Conybeare’s The Key of
Truth. A manual of the Paulician Church
of Armenia. Text edited and
transliterated with Illustrative Documents and Introduction. (1898)
Clarendon Press: Oxford for The American
Journal of Theology vol. 3, no. 2, pgs. 380-384. He was a member of the American Oriental
Society.
Some
Photographs
Below we present some rare photographs
to help achieve a mise en scène, or
put into the scene as it were, in this case a very sad scene, to some extent at
least, the place of the death and the appearance of some of the caregivers and individuals
Dr. Haigazian necessarily encountered. Whether
he was in any condition to acknowledge any of these people, or was simply too
sick to do so we shall never know. They
are, however, part of his final days.
The American Hospital: The “American Hospital” was
dedicated on 9 October 1910 as the “Annie Tracy Riggs
Hospital”. The hospital was named for
the late Annie Tracy Riggs, the first wife of Rev. Henry H. Riggs. The post card image is fairly
well-known. What is much less well-known
is the layout of the facility.
The first image shown is
a scan of the front of a card that belonged to Mary C. Masterson, wife of the
penultimate American Consul to Harput William Wesley Masterson. In June 1914 Mrs. Masterson was in
confinement and stayed for a while in the Hospital before her child was born, and
for a while after Dr. Ruth Azniv Parmelee delivered on 23 June the Masterson’s first
and only child Mary.[8] The backside of
the card gives a key of the rooms and layout that conform to the hand-drawn markings
in ink on the front. Dr. Henry H.
Atkinson died of typhus on Christmas Day 1915, and our guess is that when he
was Director of the Medical Unit in Mezre/Harput Dr. Ward used the same office
that Dr. Atkinson used. (Note that Mrs.
Masterson made the error, still common today, of misspelling Dr. Parmelee’s
surname. )
The front and back of the
Annie Tracy Riggs Hospital card are followed by a view in 1919 of the Hospital
yard and adjacent house in which Mrs. Tacy Atkinson, widowed since the end of 1915,
resided with her children. One can see
in the distance Harpoot city up on ‘the mountain’. Two views of the Hospital follow. The first shows the outside wall to the
Hospital compound. The other one shows
the layout inside the walls.
Both derive from
photographs by Frances C. MacDaniels and Dr. Laurence H. MacDaniels, many of
which are now at Oberlin College Archives. [9]
Husband and wife MacDaniels served in Harpoot with the American
Committee for Relief in the Near East, ACRNE.
The front entrance of the
hospital can be seen on the left. At the
right is the Atkinson house. It is informative
to learn from a clipping that “A good graded road is now completed from the
Hospital to the main Mezreh-Harpoot road which it joins at the point where the
road branches to the Consulate. Within
the Hospital walls it goes around a heart-shaped plot with the point of
entrance to the grounds and a foot-path through the center. The portion outside the walls is a straight,
graded turn-pike with two inches of sand on top and a water gutter on each
side, 800 feet long and 40 feet wide.
Its cost was something less than one cent a square yard. Your sincerely, Harpoot” (from an
unidentified printed source among the Masterson materials given to us by Miss Mary
Masterson.)
Drs. Ward and Parmelee
We feel it will also be
both useful and interesting to provide photographs that show what Drs. Ward and
Parmelee looked like in 1919 when they served in Harpoot for Near East Relief. It would have been nice to have something a
bit later but no matter. We shall do
with what we have.
The first is a crop from
a considerably larger photograph of the relief worker staff at Harpoot Station,
taken in October, 1919. This is close
enough we feel to the time of Dr. Haigazian’s death. Dr. Ward is on the upper right; to his right,
incidentally is Mary W. Riggs, well-known for her many years service at
Harpoot, and sister to Henry H. Riggs and Ernest W. Riggs. On the lower left we see Dr. Ruth A.
Parmelee. On the lower right is Mark
Ward’s wife, Mrs. Anna Rathburn Ward. We
thank Mrs. Ellen M. Speers for permission to use this photograph from her
parents’ collection.
Another photograph, taken
inside, and cropped to allow only Drs. Ward and Parmelee to be seen, shows Dr. Ward
on the left in uniform and Dr. Parmelee, seated on the right, at Mezreh in
1919/1920. Again, this comes from the
MacDaniels’ collection.
Final Commentary
We hope that this brief accounting
has provided some lesser known details of Dr. Haigazian’s death, and the
environment, in a rather general way at least, and the context in which that
tragedy occurred. He was only about 50
years old. Photographs of a few of those
who provided care in an attempt to save him after every effort had been made by
the Turkish authorities to make sure that he did not, in fact, have the care he
required. They even had the audacity,
perhaps we should not use the word audacity since it was common practice to
extort, squeeze every last drop of money out of the Armenians whenever they
could, even when they feigned sympathy as in the instance of allowing him to
stay on while the others in his group were sent on. He bought ‘permission’ to stay even though
‘they’ must have known it was too late.
‘They’ certainly couldn’t care less.
We won’t bother about the ‘theys’ that were in charge.
Perhaps Dr. Haigazian’s death might have
been avoided had the authorities allowed him to be taken into the Hospital as
soon as he showed up on the scene. Given
the details of the situation, we feel totally justified in labeling their
behavior as a deliberate act of murder.
One can only wonder what kind of a
spin the official ‘Turkish Point of View’ would put on this “tragedy.”
Endnotes
[1] See Mark Ward on “What Turkish
Deportations Mean” in Current History
(NY Times) vol. 16, pgs. 950-951 (1922) at http://books.google.com/books?id=RLYqAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA950&lpg=PA950&dq=What+Turkish+Deportations++really+means+by+Mark+Ward+in+Current+History+1922&source=bl&ots=YDlhvVCjT4&sig=-dYuw_gq_v8IpO0py5sHeM0UKnI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=50sPVKaWO8P7sATk9YLwBg&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=What%20Turkish%20Deportations%20%20really%20means%20by%20Mark%20Ward%20in%20Current%20History%201922&f=false
And although not available so far as
we know in digital form yet, for a longer and more detailed 18 page presentation
entitled The Deportations in Asia Minor
1921-1922 by Mark H. Ward, M.D. published in London jointly by the
Armeno-Hellenic League, and the British Armenia Committee see http://biblio-archive.unog.ch/detail.aspx?ID=123770
[2] For the rest of the chilling
article that includes many direct quotes which especially relate to the
situation of the Armenians in Harpoot put into your browser
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9901E1DF1439EF3ABC4E53DFB3668389639EDE)
[3] We have written a bit on Dr.
Parmelee before, but not much on Dr. Ward specifically.
See Groong Filling in the Picture: Postscript to a
Description of the Well-Known 1915 Photograph of Armenian Men of Kharpert Being
Led Away under Armed Guard, June 13, 2011 at http://www.groong.com/orig/ak-20110613.html
[4] For The New Armenia go to http://books.google.com/books?id=KnPnAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=The+New+Armenia+vol.+1922&source=bl&ots=jBabfxUjj_&sig=AGpl6E4MUYLcBWrBgEsF5iXx0LA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dpQNVJzTKqbjsATZ1IC4Aw&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=The%20New%20Armenia%20vol.%201922&f=false)
[5] The quotes
in question are also published in considerably fuller presentation in the now
very rare booklet given in Endnote 1 entitled “The Deportations in Asia Minor…”
on pgs. 6-15. We did not know that the Extracts from the Diary of Dr. Mark H. Ward,
Mezereh, Vilayet of Mamuret-ul-Aziz, Anatolia (showing total number of
deportees observed May 26, 1921 – February 23, 1922) existed in
printed form when we first came across the typed pages at Hoover Archives. We could have saved the difficult task of
typing it but doing so allowed, in our opinion, for added accuracy. We have yet another copy of the typewritten
pages from a different private source.
It seems that more than a few copies are ‘out there.’ But we prefer to cite the Hoover Archives
since they can make the pages available to anyone whereas the others are far
more difficult to locate. New York
Public Library does have a printed copy of the London booklet.
[6] As an
aside, it is a bit of fate that one of us (ADK) while still a graduate student
at Cornell University, around 1960 at the latest, was approached by Dr. M.G.
Sevag, a biochemist on the faculty of University of Pennsylvania to see if he
would be interested in being considered for taking on a teaching position at
Haigazian College. ADK declined stating
that he had just started graduate school and felt that he was in no position to
take on such a responsibility. Earning a
Ph.D. was the first priority. God only
knows what might have transpired had he agreed to be considered.
[7] Edith L.
Wood, of Quaker lineage, was a 1910 graduate of Philadelphia’s Protestant
Episcopal Hospital School of Nursing and was employed since her graduation as
head surgical nurse in that hospital.
She saw service in Germany in 1915 before entering service with the Near
East Relief, first at Marsovan, then at Harpoot and Malatia from 1920 to 1922.
[8] See “Mary C. Masterson, Daughter of Harput Consul William
W. Masterson, Dead at Age 92” on Groong, June 11,
2007 by Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor at http://www.groong.com/orig/ak-20070611.html
[9] Near East Relief Photo Album, 1919-1910 at http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/NearEast.html. We worked for longer than we care to admit
working up those photos preserved at the Oberlin College Archives.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge our debt to the late Miss Mary Masterson of
Carrollton, Kentucky for having given us materials from her mother’s
collections. We are grateful to Mrs.
Ellen MacDaniels Speers for her continuous support and help in all our efforts
involving the work and service of her parents in Turkey and especially at
Harpoot. We thank the Columbia
University Archives for reporting that there is no record of Armenag Haigazian
having attended or graduated from either Columbia or Union Theological
Seminary. We again thank Hoover Institution Archives for giving us access to
the Ward material, and to the New York Public Library for making available a
pdf of the Dr. Ward pamphlet.