On the night of April 24, 1915, Ottoman police rounded up some 250 Armenian writers, editors, clergy, and political leaders in Constantinople, most of whom were later killed. The arrests opened a campaign of mass deportation and killing that would claim an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Armenian lives over the following years, an event now widely recognized as genocide.
The roundup targeted the intelligentsia first—poets, composers, doctors, lawyers, members of parliament—men the Ottoman government judged capable of organizing resistance or documenting what was to come. Many were shipped to holding centers in Ayaş and Çankırı and executed within weeks. Among the dead was Komitas, a priest and composer who survived the initial killing but was driven to mental collapse by what he witnessed, spending his final years in a Paris asylum unable to speak of it.
The arrests were the opening act of a much larger campaign carried out under cover of the First World War, in which Ottoman authorities forcibly deported Armenian populations from Anatolia on death marches into the Syrian desert, accompanied by massacres, starvation, and disease. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American envoy in Constantinople, cabled Washington describing a 'campaign of race extermination.'
April 24 is now commemorated worldwide as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Turkey to this day disputes the characterization of these events as genocide, a diplomatic sore point that has shaped its relations with Armenia, France, and the United States for over a century.