The Red Rugs of Tarsus: A Lady`s Experiences in Turkey at the Time of the Armenian Persecutions 1909-1914, Gibbons Helen Davenport

This is an unusual and riveting account by a young American mother who was living in Ottoman Turkey in both Constantinople and Tarsus in Armenia during the opening years of the twentieth century. This was period of turmoil-a time of several cholera outbreaks, the war between Turkey and Italy, the Balkan War and the unrest that eventually led up to the conflagration that was the First World War. Helen Gibbons found herself enmeshed in many of these historic events, but the most significant and terrifying ordeal came with the massacres of the Armenian people by the Turks which turned into nothing less than genocide. The twentieth century has seen many examples of ethic cleansing, each appalling episode seeming by its horror to eclipse the last. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the suffering of the Armenian people one hundred years ago has been relegated to the dusty corners of the public consciousness for all but those who had a direct connection with it. It is always right that these crimes against humanity should be returned to the spotlight of the present. In this book the account is made particularly poignant by the eyewitness recollection of one who lived through those days of terror and personal danger.
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