Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary, Volume 1 — Chapter 14: The Salmast Workers

When I came from the Caucasus to Salmast a second time, I found little changed there. The party's affairs were going on in the old way, and had even taken on a stronger momentum.

Sasun having fallen, Andranik had come out with his soldiers toward Salmast by the road of the monastery; and behind him Koms too had come out of Van. In their place new comrades had crossed into the Land — Aram,^t1 Harutiun, Shahbaz and the others.

Andranik and Koms had gone on abroad, but their soldiers had stayed in Salmast and had made a new atmosphere there.

As I said above, the Kurds and the Persians no longer used acts of violence^t2 against the Armenian villages of Salmast, from the day the "Jan Fedayis"^t3 had made their nest among the Armenians. The Armenian villages were, on the whole, free from plunder and destruction. The Kurds now did their looting and pillaging only out of the Tatar villages. In this way the Tatars' villages had been brought to a more wretched state than the Armenians'. The soldiers of Sasun and Mush, filling that

small district, had become the protectors not only of the Armenians but of the local Tatars as well. The Tatars of Salmast kept a few fedayis in their villages, because the presence of these men was enough to make the Kurds count that village a fedayi village and stop plundering its people, or even give back what they had already taken from them.

Many small incidents and skirmishes had taken place between the robbers and these newcomer soldiers, thanks to which, by all accounts, a friendship and a mutual sympathy had grown up between the local Tatars and the Armenians. For the same reason the fear of the fedayis had grown among the Kurds. This new state of things had one further use as well: it lifted from the party, and from the small Armenian population of Salmast, a part of the burden of keeping soldiers.

A few words, too, about the field-workers of Salmast — the men with whom, after staying only a month or two, I said goodbye and parted, thinking I would not see them again.

The party's representative at Salmast was Samson, "Samson Khan," as the Persians called him. The Armenians called him "Baron Samson."^t4 As I said above, from the year 1898 that comrade single-handed took the place of all the field-workers of Salmast who, after the Khanasor Expedition, were forced to leave Persia. By the time he came to Salmast, the thorny road leading toward the Land had been cleared a good deal. In 7-8 years of its work the party had gained no little experience in binding the local people to itself, in being useful to the Land, in transporting arms, in keeping up communication, in sending bands, in cultivating relations with the government, and in work of other kinds. Samson made use of what had been gained, and was able to set the work carried on in Salmast and its neighborhood on firm foundations. He was able, with little

sacrifice and few casualties, to reach great results.

Samson had no great schooling, but by diligence and by teaching himself he had acquired a certain competence, so that he could give direction even to educated men and lead the work of the revolution. He was a craftsman, a gunsmith, who had worked earlier with Toros and Karo at Tabriz; but having a gift for observation, he had been able to acquire experience, and it was thanks to that that he had become an authority for the men around him. Perhaps because his trade had shaped him so, he had tenacity and a strong will, and he could restrain and bring to heel armed forces that it was no light matter to govern or to hold under one's own authority. And in order to forestall disorders and to make the party's rules and traditions respected, he did not shrink from severe measures — from a beating all the way to shooting a man. In this way that short man had created around himself sympathy toward him, awe and fear. What helped in this too was the man's plain nature, his warmth and his tact, into which cunning was sometimes mixed.

He took no advantage of the position that the party, the men around him, or the government had given him. In his private life he had remained the same common workman, in his character and in his bearing toward others. He let his standing as a leader, as a khan, be felt only in the hours of work, and then very harshly; in his personal life he was a simple, gentle-tempered man, and it was by that that he bound every class of people to himself.

Salmast has given local forces as well, on whom our field-workers leaned. Among them were Martiros and Zakare,^t5 who were a support to the Armenakan party, and who worked and were martyred for it. These men were not only local field-workers of Salmast but fedayis too, and they had played a large part in the "Joj Fight"^t6 of Van.

Those men, who were Avetisian's own making, died at his side as well, near the Monastery of the Apostle Bartholomew.

There are many field-workers who win fame,^t7 whose names are always remembered, but who in reality would have come to nothing if they had not had beside them men of the kind who are the true marrow and pith of the work. In the district of Salmast, if the leadership of the work belonged to Nikol, to Samson and to the others (and it was they who were seen and who gave the orders), still, beside them, there was in the village of Ghalasar a modest peasant, Sarkis by name, of whom one may say that he was the soul of the whole work of Salmast. If that original and self-sacrificing man had not been there, it would perhaps have been impossible, among the selfish and small-town people of Salmast, to create the unity and the spirit of sacrifice pointed to above, or to secure the safe and honest keeping of the arms and the party's goods. He was a man born a dervish, whose motto was to guard the party's property at any price, forgetting even his own person. This man was the keeper and the carrier of goods worth millions, and yet he himself was always hungry and always poor. That plain peasant gathered up in himself the self-sacrifice and the idealism of the people, and lived only in brooding on the liberation and the independence of Armenia. He had seen many of his dearest comrades off on the road to the Land, where few arrived alive and from which fewer still came back. In him self-sacrifice had reached the point of self-forgetting and had become a kind of second nature. He was a noted marksman with the rifle, and he always wanted to go into a fight. He had taken part in the Khanasor Expedition. It is hard to describe these public workers of ours, who are the men really running the work, but who are ashamed to show it, and who count it a sin even to be conscious of it.

It was with such men that I was a guest for some 10 days. There they told me, among other things, of Sergei's (Aram's) crossing into the Land.

Our greatest amusement in that house was playing

with Kasar,^t8 who was as faithful to that house as Sarkis was to the Party.

From there they called me to Tabriz (I do not remember on what business or why), where I stayed about a month, as secretary of the Central Committee. That office work, however, did not satisfy me; I wanted to cross into the Land as soon as I possibly could.

From Tabriz I went to Khoy. Kosti was no longer there; he had gone across to the Caucasus. There was a strange man of some kind there, in a broad hat, with a European's face and a European's clothes. He talked very fast, as though he had something in his mouth, and he spoke with the kind of sounds European pastors make. This man was one of our comrades from America, who had come to replace Kosti. He was called Malkhas, his real name Artashes Hovsepian, and he was the exact opposite of Kosti. Kosti was short and thick, Malkhas thin and long. The first went about in slovenly, torn clothes, while the gentleman who had come from America wore a European traveling outfit. Kosti was gentle-tempered and always smiling and thoughtful; the newcomer was always in a rage, as though he were about to fly at you, and he swore, calling you "dog, son of a dog." Kosti was patient, but he nursed grudges too; Malkhas was like gunpowder — pchtatsogh,^t9 and then full of regret. Kosti led by his services, this one by his orders.

At Khoy Malkhas had made himself a standing that put one in mind of a khan's.^t10 It could not be said, though, that in that country of khans he was doing wrong. That bearing of his was perhaps the right one, and may have been more useful than the bearing of the placid and meek Kosti, who used to clean the dung out of the stable.

— Dzo,^t11 brother, well… I, the representative of the Dashnaktsutiun, am to go and put on a hamshari's^t12 clothes, take up the basket and carry out the dung, and after that go and negotiate with the Sheikh of Shamdinan and federate^t13 with him. No — I do not understand that sort of thing.

Dzo, brother, dog, son of a dog, work does not get done that way…

Malkhas had just come from Shamdinan. He had gone, so he told me, to negotiate both with the Assyrians and with the Sheikh of Shamdinan (the son of Ibadulah).^t14 I think I have already said that as far back as '96 there was a thought of establishing ties with the Kurds and the Assyrians, but those attempts had remained no more than attempts. Malkhas manages to meet with those sheikhs and begs, but the result is not great. Why should they strike their own full jug against our empty one? Sheikh Sadiq was all but a sovereign in Shamdinan, and had no need to rebel in company with the Armenians. Even so, he was well disposed toward the Armenians and in sympathy with the idea of independence. In 1895–96 he had not allowed his Kurds to take part in the massacres, saying that "after the Armenians they will massacre us." Even that much friendship was a great thing for the Armenians. This was the line Malkhas was working along, and he did not forget to tell me about his negotiations and about the reception fit for a king that had been given him.

— Dog, son of a dog, every one of you comes and goes straight into the Land, and we are to rot here among these hamsharis like donkeys, he would say to me.

*

With "Doctor" Rouben^t15 I take the road again toward the Monastery of Thaddeus. The road is already familiar to me; I have been over it once before with this same Rouben.

Rouben has made me put on good clothes. He had set a European hat on my head and spectacles on my nose, which made my eyes ache. As we are entering the village of Korel,^t16 at once, calling out "hakəm-hati,"^t17 they all come up and tell the doctor their ailments. Many of them are shamming, and it is simply to get medicine that they pretend to be ill. The "hakəm" gives them powders of some sort that he has made up himself (in general he handed out a great deal of quinine to the genuinely sick, saying that "it is a harmless medicine").

They bring us a woman whose belly is swollen and who is half dead. Rouben had presented me as a great physician, a "hakim-bashi," and as a European. He has told me not to utter one word of Armenian, or Kurdish, or Turkish either, and to put on a very grave manner when serious cases are brought to us. I mumble words in German or in other languages. They bring the sick woman to us and lay her down in front of me. From my schoolbook I recite a line I had learned by heart — «Այն լամ քոմ ցու այնէմ բախսէ» (A lamb draws near to a brook).^t18 Rouben translates my words, saying that the doctor orders the swollen place on the patient to be opened. I go on with my German words in the same way, and Rouben goes on with his "translation," saying that "the hakim-bashi orders you to take the patient away and lay her down in comfort, that he has prescribed medicine for her, but that he cannot operate, because he has no instruments with him…" Out of that village we take guards along with us, by way of payment for the doctoring done, so as to bring safely to their destination the goods and the arms we were carrying to the monastery.

We reach the monastery. It is the same monastery and the same men. Nothing has changed. The villagers stand about idly in the shade of the atar^t19 stacks. The same tedious^t20 solitude, the same bleary-eyed old woman of a housekeeper with her tanabur.

I am to wait there until the snow draws back a little toward the mountains and the couriers can get through. To kill the days we want to put up a building. We repair the walls of the mill, and then we set about finishing the school building, whose construction had been begun. A new wall had to be raised to complete the second room. And the somewhat crooked and lopsided wall built there is the work of my hands and Rouben's.(\*)

———

(\*) Doctor Rouben's dream was the question of when "this dog-and-son-of-a-dog nation was to be set free, so that we too might go and

So as to be able to cross into the Land as a peasant in disguise, I began going about bare again, so that my chest should darken in the sun. I began again to walk barefoot, so that my feet should harden for the charukhs, and so that I too, like a poor man, might be able to walk unshod over the mountains and the ravines.

In those days Artashes Melkonian came to the Monastery from the Caucasus. I was to cross into Vaspurakan together with him.

———

live like a dog"… When the Constitution^t21 is proclaimed, he crosses into Vaspurakan and settles at Akants,^t22 meaning to live a life of his own. But at the beginning of the war he is arrested among the first, as a dangerous man, together with Ter-Zarvadar^t23 (Ter-Mkrtich, and formerly Zarvadar Hagop); and those two, who had worked together at Khoy and Maku and had dreamed together of living a quiet life, are killed together as well.

END OF VOLUME ONE