ABSTRACT
In the session held between July 22 and August 2, 1878 of the National Assembly of the Armenian Patriarchate, Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian assessed the Congress of Berlin from the point of view of the "Armenian nation." The Ottoman government, which at the beginning resisted the statistical approach and the idea of non-Muslim participation in the state apparatus according to the principle of equality, gradually became an enthusiastic proponent of this idea, and an advocate of non-Muslim participation in the state. The most important source of inspiration for the request of Nerses and the Armenians was the sub-provincial government of Mount Lebanon. The area requested by Armenians extended deep into Anatolia, which in the intellectual, sentimental, and political perceptions existing during both the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid and of the Committee of Union and Progress, and especially following the loss of land in Roumelia, had increasingly taken on the dimensions of a "motherland.".
