ABSTRACT
The natural result of destruction and confiscation was a scarcity of everything, especially food. From 1916 through 1918 Urfa was plagued with famine. Many of the local poor and refugees died of starvation. In the evenings at every doorstep could be seen people looking almost like skeletons, whimpering weakly, in Turkish. The Turkish government did nothing to relieve the famine. It hired "undertakers," dividing them into groups of four. These groups gathered up the Armenian corpses into manure carts and dumped them into ditches outside the city. Some died of famine and disease. Some were conscripted into the army in March of 1918 to meet military needs. After the armistice, the survivors returned to their original homes, not knowing that the war was yet to continue in Turkey, and that they would be banished from their Fatherland of twenty-five hundred years. During the years of famine, the deplorable conditions became worse as various diseases began to spread.
