ABDULBARI BARLAS

BDULBARI BARLAS
Father�s Name: Mehmet Emin
Mother�s Name: Ayse
Place of Birth: Van-Saglamtas
Date of Birth: 1919

As I have heard from my father, the Russians invaded our country, but there were no phones, no radio so the villagers could not understand where abouts the enemy come from. My father had a cousin named Abdulkadir and my father had told to him �I am so sick and my son (my brother) is a soldier on the Iranian front, he fights against the Russians. Go and get information�. So Abdulkadir goes. There is a meadow behind those hills, when he climbs up the hill, he sees that the people of Ercis are running away. Abdulkadir comes to my father and says �All the people of Talat Aga are running away�. Then my father decides to leave the village. They immediately begin preparations.

The season is spring, they leave the village with ox carts, but the animals are not ready for such a journey and they quickly get tired. They go as far as the hill standing on the southeast border of the village. But most of the villagers give up. The imam of the village asks my father �where are the Russians, where are the Armenians? Who are you running away from?� My father answers �this is not a clan war! This is the Russian war. We do not have cannons, rifles. We have to run away.� In the morning my father�s family and the Sheikh family set up again. However, people of the other thirty-eight houses stay.

The day after my father leaves the village; the villagers see that the Russians guided by the Armenians are coming. All the villagers begin to run through the stream, but the horsemen circle them and they immediately kill most of them. Later they gather the others in to a house on the hill. Two armed Armenians watch the door, and two Armenians kill all people with bayonets. Only a woman and a little girl are alive by remaining in silent among the dead bodies. As she told my father later that her name was Azime and the girls was Rusen.

As Ms. Azime told, she waited until the night in silence. She straightened out she called out if there was anybody who was alive. Only that little girl answered her. So she takes that girl and goes to Siirt passing through the mountains, which is a long and painful story.. Everyone knows the place of those martyrs. But, I don�t know under which ruin they are in. But, there are many other places as such. As I told you before, the Armenians passed through the hill by killing everybody they saw on the way.

My father�s family and the Sheikh family went to Diyarbakir, Farikin. When they arrived, they harvested the crops. Later on the government sent them to Konya because of epidemy where they stayed for three years. Later, they returned to our village.

* Cousin of Abdulbari Barlas, Abdulhamit Barlas showed the place where the Turkish villagers were killed by the Armenian bandits. He said that the villagers who migrated found countless human bones here. As those bones could not be collected under the circumstances of that time, they all disappeared. In this village, the Armenians killed 150-200 people.