ARMENIAN - Erevangala500

and Karatheodori and Mehmed Ali of the Ottoman
Empire. The only purpose o f the Congress was to
remove those conditions from the dictate o f San
Ste-fano which were too oppressive for the
Ottomans. And that is just what was done. The
strong Armenian delegation, under the leadership of
Prelate Khrimian - a former Armenian patriarch -
had travelled to Berlin in vain. It was already common
knowledge that the Armenians did not constitute
a majority anywhere in Anatolia. It was only in
Van itself that they even made up a third of the population.
No one wanted to grant autonomy to such a
minority. On what grounds could such an action be
justified?
On the 8th of July, 1878, the Congress replaced
Article 16 of San Stefano with "Article 61", which
for the most part corresponded to the original.
Article 62 also dealt with religious freedom, but
nowhere was there any talk of autonomy. The
Armenian millet was simply not large enough for
that. The nineteenth century had become a century
o f the triumph of the nation states - but also of the
democratic majority. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and
Romania all became independent, but in every case
the nation constituted a solid majority.
In the case o f the Armenians, the situation was totally
different. It may have been true that an Armenian
king had once ruled over an Armenian kingdom in
the vast territories that the Armenians were claiming,
but that had been almost two thousand years
earlier under totally different circumstances. The
nineteenth century called for majorities, and it was
the Moslems who had the majorities - throughout
Anatolia.
There were certain Armenian circles that simply
could not come to terms with these facts. Groups of
revolutionaries, intellectuals, and clergymen, egged
on primarily by the Russians but also to some extent
by the missionaries, turned to ever more daring and
adventurous means in order to attract attention and
eventually gain power over the majority.
Meguerditch (or KHIRMIAN (1821 - 1907) with nickname
"Hayrig" (little father) patriarche o f Constantinople (Istanbul)
(1899 - 1873) then catholicos (1893 - 1907) responsible for the
foundation of the extremist group YERG IR, "the way, how the
Haik called their correspondent home."
Khirmian, a ruthless Armenian nationalist - his religion was not
Christianity but Nationality traveled 1878 to Berlin in order to
present the Armenian demands at the congress. At Edime he
met the tarist invadors which was considered by the Ottomans
as high treason.
He worked close together with the Armenian officers serving in
the Russian army (mainly with Loris Melikian, general
Lazarian and general Ter-Goukassian in Eastern Anatolia. The
whole enterprise was a typical rehearsal for the Russo -
Armenian attack against Ottoman East-Anatolia 1915. He was
one of the creators of the "Mouvement Revolutionnaire HAY"
which ended disastrous.
The Selimie of Edime, a masterpiece by Mimar Sinan. Representatives
of the Armenian patriarch (Khrimian) of Istanbul met
in Edime in 1878 with the victorious Russians. The Ottomans
saw this as shameless treachery.