On The Brink Of Catastrophe: Haunting Color Photos Capture Armenians In Ottoman Turkey
This image of a group of ethnic Armenian children in today's Istanbul, Turkey, was taken by French photographer Stephane Passet in September 1912.
A portrait of two ethnic Armenian women in the village of Artvin, in today's eastern Turkey, was taken by famed Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky in April the same year.
By remarkable coincidence, Passet and Prokudin-Gorsky happened to document Armenians in and just outside the Ottoman Empire at around the same time, shortly before what is widely referred to as the Armenian genocide.
An image of the mostly ethnic Armenian town of Artvin, as photographed by Prokudin-Gorsky in April 1912.
Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944) was on a years-long mission backed by the Russian tsar to photograph the Russian Empire using a complex early color photography technique.
A photo of Armenian women and girls in today's Istanbul in 1912, photographed by Passet.
Passet (1875-1941) was in the Ottoman Empire on behalf of the Archives of the Planet project to document the world using the French autochrome color photography technique.
The town of Artvin, near the Black Sea coast, was overwhelmingly ethnically Armenian when this photo was taken in 1912 but changed hands repeatedly through the early 1900s between Ottoman Turkey and tsarist Russia.
Ethnic Armenian prisoners of war guarded by Serbian soldiers in Belgrade's Kalemagdan Fortress in 1913. The Armenians had probably been fighting for the Ottoman Army during the first Balkan War in which Ottoman Turkey lost most of its European territory to an alliance of the Christian kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro.
Two years after this Archives of the Planet image was taken, the systemic destruction of the Armenian people and their heritage convulsed Ottoman Turkey. From 1915-17 some 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what many countries, including the United States, call the Armenian genocide. Turkey objects to the use of the word "genocide" and says hundreds of thousands of Muslims also died in the region amid the chaos of World War I.
An ethnic Armenian woman at a refugee camp in Port Said, Egypt, in 1918.
The scale of the atrocities against Ottoman Turkey's Armenian population led to the event being called "the apex of horrors conceivable" before the Holocaust of World War II.
A group of Armenian orphans in Ankara, Turkey, in 1922 photographed with an Armenian Catholic priest.
Some small populations of Armenians remained after the World War I-era killings, but further violence followed.
A photo of the "Armenian quarter" of today's Izmir (then known as Smyrna), which lay in ruins when an Archives of the Planet photographer visited the western Turkish city in 1922.
Armenian and Greek areas of Izmir were destroyed by fire shortly after it was captured in September 1922 by Turkish forces in a closing chapter of the Greco-Turkish War.
The ruined Armenian quarter of Izmir in 1922.
Amid the razing of Izmir, at least thousands of Armenian and Greek residents of the city were killed. Turkish sources claim Armenians and Greeks started the fire to tarnish the reputation of the Turkish military.
Today just a few tens of thousands of Christian Armenians remain in Turkey.