ABSTRACT
Most of the territory interlocutors for the Armenian cause in Europe chose to call ‘Armenia’ fell within the six eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, Sivas, Erzurum, Ma’muret el Aziz, Bitlis, Van and Diyarbakir. Many Armenians lived outside these boundaries, in the territories of the medieval Cilician kingdom, or over the border in Russia. Substantial numbers were also to be found in Istanbul and Izmir. The idealised European view of the Armenians as the ‘Europeans of the east’ might have been true of the aristocratic amira class of Istanbul (although no more true than it was of many Muslim Ottomans) but in the east there was little difference between them and their Muslim neighbours. They were equally ‘oriental’ from a European perspective and poverty was common to Christians as well as Muslims. Some areas of these vilayets were extremely beautiful. Some were not. ‘Northern Armenia’, wrote Sir Charles Eliot, ‘is one of the gloomiest and dreariest countries in the world … in summer and winter alike it is hard, repulsive and terrible’. 1
