The history of the Armenian people is inextricably linked not only with the Armenian Highlands, but also with the Mesopotamian Lowlands beginning at its foot, as well as with the eastern regions of Turkey, once known as Western Armenia. Herodotus wrote about this country, but even before it there were really exciting events.
Western Armenia: such a long story
The path of national and state formation of the Armenian people is so long and difficult that it is quite difficult to determine the exact place of its origin, and there is still no consensus among scientists about this.
One thing is clear - if one mentally draws a line from the city of Samsun on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey to another Turkish city of Mersin, which is located on the Mediterranean coast, then such a line on the one hand and the border of the modern Armenian Republic on the other will become the borders of the region known in historiography as the Western Armenia.
From the Iron Age to Tigranakert
Western Armenia has been populated by people since the time when mankind did not yet know the pottery wheel. Archaeological excavations begun in the twentieth century show that in the immediate vicinity of the Armenian Highlands highly organized human communities lived in the 10th century. BC e.
Among Armenian historians, there has always been a tendency to build the genealogy of the Armenian people to the state of Urartu, whose center was on the eastern shore of Lake Van. An extensive monograph by the great St. Petersburg researcher B. B. Piotrovsky is devoted to this question .
After a short time, the once friendly Hittites replaced the Van Kingdom, then the Greeks and Romans, who were replaced by the Byzantines.
However, there was a period of greatness and complete national independence, thanks to which Armenia took an important place on the world map. This was made possible thanks to one of the greatest sovereigns in the history of the country. Western Armenia began to include part of the lands of eastern Anatolia in his reign . The fame of the Armenian people was brought by Tigran the Great, who conquered vast lands outside the usual habitat. He also built the city of Tigranakert, whose black basalt walls have survived to this day.
The Great Section and the Borders of Armenia
Being in the very center of Western Asia, Armenia could not help but become an arena of struggle between the greatest states of antiquity. In lV n. e. a war broke out between the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran, as a result of which the western part of historical Armenia was transferred to Byzantium, and the eastern one became part of Persia.
For a long time, until the Turkic conquest, the Armenians occupied an important place in the administrative elite of Byzantium, and about thirty of the fifty sovereigns were Armenians.
The borders of Armenia in this period were brought into line with the administrative requirements of the empire, and the country was divided into many small areas, fem.
Armenian Genocide in Western Armenia
European politicians have raised the issue of the situation of the Armenian minority in the Ottoman Empire since the 13th century. This was due to the desire of the last sultans to direct the aggression of the masses towards the Armenians, instead of taking seriously the modernization of the state system.
The first massacres of Armenians began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and covered the entire territory of Western Armenia, on which the Armenians at that time constituted the majority or had a significant representation. Most researchers are convinced that such massacres would not have been possible without the connivance of the government of the Golden Port.
Feeling impunity and lack of resistance from Europeans, the Ottoman government continued its persecution of Armenians and the mass persecution of other minorities such as Assyrians and Kurds. Two decades later, these persecutions will result in mass executions of Armenians under the control of civil servants. In many countries these events will be called genocide, with which modern Turkey categorically disagrees.
Woodrow Wilson and Dreams of Revival of Independence
After the loss of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, an active division of the state, which was breaking up into parts, began. With the support of the British forces, many Arab countries, as well as the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, gained independence, and some parts of the Turkish state were occupied by the French and British.
At one of the peace conferences, US President Woodrow Wilson proposed the creation of an independent state of the Armenian people, which should have been given land from the Syrian border to the Black Sea along with the city of Trabzon on its coast. Had this happened, and Armenia on the world map would have looked different than now. In this case, the country would have access to the sea, which is now deprived.
However, all these plans crashed about the power of the Turkish Republic that was emerging at that moment, and Western Armenia never gained independence.