Battle of Sardarapat
Decisive Armenian defensive victory over the Ottoman Army of the Caucasus, 21–29 May 1918. Together with the parallel battles at Bash-Aparan and Karakilisa, the Sardarapat engagement halted the Ottoman advance on Yerevan and created the conditions for the declaration of Armenian independence on 28 May 1918.
Account
Background
The Armenian armed forces of May 1918 were the wreckage of the imperial Russian Caucasus Army. Following the Russian Revolution, that army's Armenian volunteer corps under General Andranik and the Armenian Riflemen had retained organisation and equipment as Russian regular units demobilised; by spring 1918 they constituted the only effective force standing between the advancing Ottoman 3rd Army and Yerevan.
Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), Soviet Russia ceded Kars, Ardahan and Batum to the Ottomans. Vehib Pasha's 3rd Army moved into the territory and continued east through April and May, taking Alexandropol on 15 May and pushing toward the Ararat plain. The Transcaucasian Federation, struggling to maintain itself, dissolved on 26 May. The Ottoman ultimatum of 25 May had demanded the surrender of the railway and access to Tiflis through Armenia.
If the Ottoman force reached Yerevan and the Ararat plain, the residual Armenian population of Russian Eastern Armenia, already enlarged by hundreds of thousands of survivors of the 1915 deportations from Western Armenia, would be physically eliminated as a community editorial. The stakes, in the language of the contemporary Armenian command, were "to be or not to be."
The event
The Ottoman 3rd Army split into three columns to take Yerevan from the north (through Karakilisa), the northwest (through the Aparan Pass) and the west (through Sardarapat on the Aras plain).
Sardarapat (21–28 May 1918)
The principal engagement was fought at the railway junction of Sardarapat, 65 kilometres west of Yerevan, by a force of about 9,000 Armenian regulars and irregulars under General Movses Silikyan and Daniel Bek-Pirumyan. The Ottoman attacking force, roughly 10,000 men of the 9th Caucasian Division under Yakub Şevki Pasha, launched a frontal assault on 21 May and was halted. The Armenian counter-attack on 22 May broke the Ottoman line. By 28 May Şevki had withdrawn to Alexandropol.
Bash-Aparan (23–29 May 1918)
The northern column, under Şevki himself, attempted to cross the Aparan Pass. It was held by an Armenian force of about 4,000 under Drastamat Kanayan ("Dro") in fighting that lasted from 23 through 29 May and ended in Ottoman withdrawal.
Karakilisa (24–28 May 1918)
The northernmost engagement was fought at Karakilisa (modern Vanadzor) by a smaller Armenian force under Tovmas Nazarbekian and Garegin Nzhdeh against the Ottoman 11th Caucasian Division. Three days of close-quarters fighting and an Armenian counter-attack on 28 May halted the Ottoman advance.
The three engagements were nearly simultaneous; the Ottoman command had outrun its supply lines, and the 3rd Army's veterans were exhausted by four years of fighting. Armenian commanders exploited interior lines of communication, dense fortified positions and a population with everything to lose editorial.
Aftermath
On 28 May 1918, with Ottoman forces in retreat across all three sectors, the Armenian National Council in Tiflis declared the Republic of Armenia. The Republic was forced one week later, by the Treaty of Batum (4 June), into a humiliating territorial settlement, confined to roughly 10,000 km² around Yerevan and Lake Sevan, but it was a state. Without the May battles, there would have been no Armenia for the Ottomans to negotiate with.
By the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, the Ottoman occupation of the Caucasus had collapsed entirely, and the Republic expanded into Kars and Alexandropol over the following months.
Memory and politics
Sardarapat is the founding battle of modern Armenian statehood. The Sardarapat memorial complex on the battlefield (1968) is the principal pre-Genocide-memorial commemorative site in Armenia and figures with Tsitsernakaberd as one of the two state ceremonies of Armenian Republic Day (28 May).
The historiographical reading of the battles is uncomplicated by international competition editorial: the engagements are documented from both Ottoman and Armenian primary sources, the casualty figures are agreed within reasonable margins, and the strategic outcome, the preservation of an Armenian core in the eastern Caucasus, is uncontested. Sardarapat is the rare case in this atlas where the historical record speaks largely with one voice.