September Days, Baku §

Background

By August 1918 the precarious British–Centro-Caspian holding of Baku was untenable. The Ottoman Army of Islam, a force raised by Enver Pasha in late 1917 from Ottoman regular units, Azerbaijani volunteers, North Caucasian mountaineers and Daghestani auxiliaries, under the command of his half-brother Nuri Pasha, had advanced from Ganja through the summer. Ottoman forces had taken Yelizavetpol (Ganja) in late June and pushed east along the rail line. British units under Dunsterville withdrew to Persia on 14 September; the Centro-Caspian government dissolved overnight; the Armenian National Council attempted to negotiate terms.

The terms were not honoured. The Ottoman command formally entered the city on 15 September 1918 and tolerated three days of mass violence by the city's Azerbaijani population, by the irregulars who had marched in with the army, and by some elements of the Ottoman regular force itself.

The event

The killings ran from the afternoon of 15 September through the morning of 17 September. The Baku Armenian quarter, in the Black City and the inner districts that had been spared in March, was systematically attacked. Survivors fled by sea to Krasnovodsk and to Iran; many never returned.

Casualty estimates have run as widely as for the March Days but in the opposite direction. Contemporaneous Armenian estimates ran to 30,000; sober later academic accounts (de Waal, Swietochowski) typically settle at 10,000–20,000 contested. The lower bound is roughly consistent with the city's pre-war Armenian population minus those who escaped by sea. The Ottoman command acknowledged "irregularities" in subsequent communications; modern Turkish historiography has tended to distinguish between the regular Ottoman conduct and the actions of the Azerbaijani auxiliaries, an analytical distinction that the contemporary record does not strongly support contested.

Aftermath

The September Days closed the cycle of intercommunal violence in Baku that had opened with the 1905 massacres and continued through the March Days. The Armenian National Council leadership, including Stepan Shahumyan himself, fled or was killed in the days afterward; Shahumyan and the other "26 Baku Commissars" were extracted overland and shot near the Caspian on 20 September, in circumstances that have remained contested.

The Armenian population of Baku recovered slowly through the 1920s and grew through the Soviet period to its 1979 peak of 215,000. That community in turn was destroyed in the Sumgait–Baku 1990 sequence seventy years later, the structural rhyme that gives the September Days their current symbolic charge in Armenian memory editorial.

Memory and politics

The September Days are commemorated less institutionally in Armenia than the Genocide itself or Sumgait, and have been less visible in international diplomacy. They are central to the Swietochowski–de Waal reading of the conflict as a multigenerational cycle of intercommunal violence that no single starting point will fully explain.

In contemporary Azerbaijani memory the events are typically not denied but contextualised, read as retaliation rather than as a freestanding atrocity, and frequently attributed primarily to Ottoman regulars rather than Azerbaijani actors. That distinction has political utility in the modern Azerbaijani–Turkish alliance but is historiographically thin editorial.