Category: David Gaunt

Deep inside the forbidding black basalt city walls, the vast and age-old bazaar of Diyarbekir was burning. It burned for three days and nights, from around midnight on 19 August until 21 August 1914. The chief of police, Mehmed Memduh, a brutal thug, hindered the merchants from putting out the fire or even to save their merchandise. The new vali, Mehmed Reshid Bey, installed only the week before, refused to intervene and was generally assumed to have masterminded the arson. …