Hangings in Beyazıt Square during the Allied
occupation of Istanbul, 1918-1923.
In 1919-1920,
during the occupation of Istanbul by the Great Powers,
many Ottoman officials
and Turkish journalists were imprisoned on
various charges, but the focus for
retribution was against those who
had been involved in the forced deportation
of Armenians from
Anatolia during World War I.
One of those so accused was Nusret
Bey, who was charged in connection
with deportation-related
actions he took while a district chief in Bayburt, in
northeast
Anatolia in 1915-1916.
As
prosecutions proceeded in Istanbul in
this regard, Nusret Bey,
who was by that time the ‘mutasarrıf’ (Ottoman provincial
subdivision governor) of Urfa in southeast Turkey - appointed
there in June
1917 at the request of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk),
then the 2nd Group
Commander of the ‘Yıldırım’ Army - was
summoned to Istanbul to face the charges
in June 1919.
After the
“Mütareke” (cease-fire of 30 October 1918 between the
Ottoman state and the
Great Powers that ended World War I for
Turkey), when the English and French
occupied Urfa, Nusret Bey
had been involved in local nationalist resistance and
anti-
occupation activities there, as well.
Amidst the
ever-changing political winds in Istanbul at that time,
Nusret Bey was tried
and exonerated but arrested again on 6
November 1919 and another court-martial
for Nusret Bey began
in March 1920, based on the Bayburt events, but it was
delayed
because telegraphic communications with Bayburt were severed
and
testimony could not be obtained.
However,
Damad Mehmed Ferit Paşa, with the backing of the
Great Powers, became Prime Minister for the fourth time in
April and quickly appointed Nemrud Mustafa Paşa to conduct
court-martials
related to the Armenian deportations in secret
and without lawyers for the
defendants. Witnesses were called,
some
of them children, and on 27 July 1920 Nusret Bey was
sentenced to death. The sentence was approved by the Sultan
on 4
August and the execution by hanging was carried out the
next day in Beyazıt
Square.
In the
Istanbul “tevkifhane” (jail) with Nusret Bey at the time
were Ebubekir Hâzim
(Tepeyran) and Falih Rıfkı (Atay), both
of whom were being court-martialed on
charges unrelated to the
deportations. Hâzim Bey wrote a book about his court-martial
and mentioned Nusret Bey many times. Falih Rıfkı Bey wrote an
article in Yeni Mecmua in
February 1923, recalling the night
Nusret Bey was taken away from the jail to
be hanged. The
longer version of this story can be found on Academia.
Herewith, the English translation of Falih Rıfkı Bey's article:
(Photo of Nusret Bey in Urfa in 1918 with his children.)
A Hanging- Memories of Cruelty
One day, I was
returning to the jail from the Martial Law Court with
Hâzim Bey and three
bayonet-wielding soldiers were at our backs.
It
was the time in the evening during Ramazan when the day’s fast is
broken and the stretch from Beyazıt Square to Sultan Ahmet was filled
with the
Moslem populace. We wanted to ride in a
vehicle but the
Negro officer laughed and said “just be glad I’m not taking you
in
handcuffs.”
When we came to
the middle of Beyazıt Square two young Greek girls
were pinning a rosette on
the chest of every passer-by. The girls
had blue
and white boxes hanging from their necks and a picture of ((Greek
Prime
Minister)) Venizelos, printed on blue and white paper, on their
chests.
And yet everyone in the Square
was a Turk. Every once in a while a
Greek or Armenian with a hat on would pass by and toss Turkish money
into the
blue and white box. Later, these two
Greek girls, together with
a few Christian boys, formed a happy and lively
group in the middle of
this Ramazan evening.
One of the
bayonet-wielding guards poked my arm and said “Move along,
friend. It’s getting
late.” That evening the two girls, with
their box full of
Turkish money, headed off laughingly to Beyoğlu and we two
citizens told
our friends in the cold rooms of the jail, surrounded by Turkish
rifles,
about this sad encounter.
The next day, an
old friend came to visit me. There is
one room in the
jail which looks out across the sea to the Prince’s Islands. The sun was
setting as a ferry passed Sarayburnu. The ferry was packed to the point
of leaning to one side. The Turkish flag could be
seen intermittently
through the smoke from the stack. There were at least two thousand
Greeks and Armenians on board, heading for their happy homes on
Kınalı, Burgaz, Heybeli
and Büyükada islands.
White-haired Galip
Paşa was sitting in the other corner of the room
where I was sitting. The old general was talking with a woman who
had come to see him. From the window
overlooking the courtyard
we saw Turkish guards with bayonetted rifles passing
back and forth.
The person I was talking
with was a sharp-minded soldier known
from the greatest days of the
independence of the Turkish state.
I said to him:
“There are at least two thousand Greek and Armenians
on that ferry passing by.
They all want an Istanbul without any Turks.
My home is on one of the islands, but here I am in jail.” This
deep-seated enmity for Turks among the
Greeks and Armenians seared
my soul. I wanted to shout “Freedom!” but even if I
was free what
could I do? In those days
we were retreating from Bursa and ((Greek
General Leonidis)) Paraskevopoulos
was haughtily ready to declare
that we were beaten, as he proclaimed “we march
onward!”.
I wanted the
freedom to rip apart the two girls in Beyazıd Square, to
pummel the Greeks and
smash Greek pride. My visitor left late
at
night and as he passed through the stone corridor behind the iron bars,
I
was left in our damp dormitory.
They had rousted a
Turkish ‘mutasarrıf’ ((Ottoman provincial subdivision
governor)) Nusret and put
him in the death-row cell. So that the
Armenians will be pleased by us, he was
going to be hanged the next
morning. I
was looking at his empty bed. Just last
night we were playing
at fortune-telling with Nusret. He had a gas burner at his bedside to cook
food on and just one set of clothes, with pants that were patched in a few
places.
Hasan Rıza Paşa
said: “They’ve taken Nusret!” İbrahim
Fevzi turned
white, because since the day we met him we came to the conclusion
that
he wasn’t as good-hearted a Turk as Nusret was. The Martial Court
thought Nusret was rich
but, in reality, he had no money to bribe his way
out. We knew that his wife
and newborn child were going hungry. He
slept in his clothes. I looked at him and as he sat up on his bed I wondered
“who
knows when the last time was he changed the shirt on his back and
who knows
when he’ll drink some hot tea.”
He came back from
court two days ago and said to us: “The low-lifes are
sure to keep me locked up
for a year. How nice, so we’ll be saved?
And
how? What am I going to do about my wife and children? If I have to
spend another month here they’ll
die from hunger. They heard from a
12-year-old ‘witness’. I said ‘ask him
how old he is?!’ They did and he
said
‘I’m twelve.’ So I said ‘the crime you
are ascribing to me happened
four years ago when he was eight-years-old! How
can you listen to an
eight-year-old?!’ But after him they listened to a
ten-year-old!”
Nusret wasn’t
willing to stay in jail for even a year.
But last evening he
and the other ‘tehcir’ ((involved in the
deportations)) prisoners were
suddenly taken to the Central Command. An officer told us that the
English wanted
these prisoners sent to Malta. When he
was the only
one who came back, we thought he’d been saved. We gathered around
him and asked him why they
had been summoned. In response, he said
“the others went to Malta. They brought only me back here.”
We were all quite
pleased to hear this, thinking that Nusret had been
spared. However, his expression was like that of a
dead man, pale and
lifeless. After the
crowd dwindled, he pulled us aside and said: “friends,
tomorrow or the next day
I will be hanged.” We all objected, of
course,
but, continuing, Nusret said: “No, listen. They took us all to the Central
Command. An English captain who spoke Turkish called
out our names
one by one. There was a
truck waiting at the door. Then, they
gave the
news that Nemrud Kürd Mustafa had arrived and the captain went into
a
small room with him. I was able to hear
their conversation with my
own ears.
Kürd Mustafa said to the captain: ‘take all of them but in the
name of
the Martial Court I ask that you leave Nusret here, because his
judgement has
been confirmed and we will hang him tomorrow or the
next day!’ The officer thought for a moment and said:
“Fine, I’m leaving
him with you!’. The
rest of my friends went to Malta but they will hang
me.”
I looked at
Nusret’s face and his eyes had the look of a dead man, his
skin the tone of a corpse. His hand was as cold as a corpse’s, too. A bit
earlier, while I was inside talking,
they took him to the death row cell,
which had no bed nor window and was quite
narrow. The guard threw
him bread
through a hole in the door. Anyone who
entered this cell
would only come out to die and talk with only the executioner.
İbrahim Fevzi gave me the playing cards Nusret had left.
Since he
was poor, he would read our fortunes with our worn out
cards. He
entrusted his wallet to
another fellow and the only other thing he had to
leave was his black-covered
watch. Heartsick, we returned to our
beds.
İbrahim Fevzi was breathing
heavily from the anxiety, as the candles at
our bedsides gradually dimmed. One of the generals among us set up a
fresh
candle on top of a pack of cigarettes.
Nusret’s empty bed
resembled a “musalla taşı” ((place where a coffin
is set for a funeral)). Feeling ourselves to be within a tomb, the
hours
of the night passed in terror.
Was it poor Nusret
who had done the plundering? Was it he who cut
down women? As the guard passed by we all held our breath
and kept
quiet. The time was now
three-thirty. With burning hearts, we
turned
our ears toward the street and,
suddenly, we heard the ill-omened sound
of an automobile, followed by a flurry
of footsteps. Then, there was a
silence and different sort of darkness
descended. We all froze in our
beds,
spoke not a word and listened for activity in the corridor. In the
dim candle light, we discerned a tall
man with his head bowed, with
an officer in front of him and two
bayonet-wielding guards at his back.
It
was as if he was being dragged away.
Nusret was, first and foremost,
a husband and father who loved his wife
and children, more than he
was a state official. There was no one in the world more innocent
than him.
Soon afterwards,
the the muffled sounds of the automobile could be
heard as it left the prison
gate. The sobs and cries emerged from
beneath our blankets as soon as the automobile pulled away, with we
prisoners releasing
the built-up tension as best we could by means of
muffled grumbling. İbrahim Fevzi got up and washed at the toilet
faucet and declared that he would recite the morning prayers. The
dawn was just breaking so by then Nusret
would have been hanged
and died. İbrahim Fevzi went out into the corridor and began to recite
the prayers, but he quickly lost his voice and became upset, returning
to his bed and under his
blanket.
The next day, the
Turkish newspapers wrote about the Greek Army’s
victories and published
Nusret’s “ferman” ((death warrant signed by the
Sultan)). Nusret’s wife, who had come to see her
husband was sobbing
uncontrollably in the courtyard and lamenting: “they hanged
him but
why did they dishonor him?!”
She said this because in the “ferman”
the charges were based on “acting
with enmity” and “theft of money”.
One of the
prisoners handed over Nusret’s wallet and watch to the
unfortunate woman. In the wallet there was a 25-kuruş bill and a
100,
along with two stamps. Nusret was
hanged in the only clothes he had.
There
was no bundle of his remaining at the jail.
Falih Rıfkı
NOTE: Falih Rıfkı was an aide to Cemal Paşa on the Palestine Front
in World War I. After the army, he began to write as a jounalist in
opposition to the Istanbul government and the Great Powers occupation,
and in support of the nationalist movement, leading to his court-martial.
After the liberation of Izmir in 1922, Falih Rıfkı Bey went to Izmir and
became close friends with Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk).
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