Erzurum §

Reform question and eastern front city

Erzurum, Karin in Armenian memory, was a major Ottoman eastern city and military centre. It stood near the Russian-Ottoman frontier and was central to nineteenth-century reform diplomacy. The Armenian reform clauses in the Treaty of San Stefano and Treaty of Berlin were concerned with provinces such as Erzurum, where Armenian security depended on reforms the Ottoman state promised but did not enforce.

During the First World War, Erzurum became part of the eastern front and the genocide zone. Armenian residents were deported or killed, and the city's Armenian institutional life was effectively ended. The later Wilson arbitral award under the Treaty of Sevres included Erzurum in the territory assigned to a projected Armenia, but the award never came into force.

Erzurum is therefore a place where three unrealised projects meet: Ottoman reform, Armenian survival within the empire, and Wilsonian Armenia. Its absence from modern Armenia is part of why Yerevan's statehood carries the memory of a larger lost geography. editorial