✝️🇦🇲 This painting by Ivan Aivazovsky shows Muslim Turks throwing
#Christian #Armenians alive into the Sea of Marmara during the Hamidian massacres.
Between 1894 and 1896, Ottoman forces and mobs slaughtered over 200,000 Armenians simply because they were Christian.
They burned villages and killed people. They cut down the men, spared no children, and tortured people in their own homes.
The French vice-consul in Diyarbakır, Gustave Meyrier, recounted to Ambassador Paul Cambon stories of Armenian women and children being assaulted and killed, and described the attackers as cowardly as they were cruel. They refused to attack where people defended themselves and instead concentrated on defenseless districts.
The worst atrocity took place in Urfa, where Ottoman troops burned the Armenian cathedral in which 3,000 Armenians had taken refuge, shooting at anyone who tried to escape.
Estimates of the death toll range between 200,000 and over 300,000 Armenians, with hundreds of thousands more widowed, orphaned, or displaced. Many of the survivors lost their property, homes, and livelihoods.
Thousands of Armenian Christians were forcibly converted to Islam.
The associated plunder of homes and businesses economically ruined countless families, and the destitute numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Ivan Aivazovsky, baptized Hovhannes Aivazian, was born to Armenian parents and was deeply affected by the Hamidian massacres that took place in the Armenian-inhabited areas of the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896. He painted a number of works on the subject, such as The Armenian Massacres at Trebizond (1895).
He threw the medals given to him by the Ottoman Sultan into the sea and told the Turkish consul in Feodosia: "Tell your bloodthirsty master that I've thrown away all the medals given to me. Here are their ribbons. Send them to him, and if he wants, he can throw my paintings into the seas I painted"