The killings began in the Sasun district in the summer of 1894, when troops and Kurdish irregulars suppressed resistance to double taxation, and spread after Armenian political demonstrations in Constantinople in September 1895 were broken up with violence. Through the autumn of 1895 massacres moved south and east from Trebizond across the Armenian provinces; the worst single episode was at Urfa, where the Armenian National Institute records approximately 3,000 people burned in the cathedral. A further round followed the seizure of the Ottoman Bank by Armenian revolutionaries in August 1896, in which five to six thousand people were killed in Constantinople over three days. Estimates of the total dead range from about 80,000 to 300,000; the Armenian National Institute gives 100,000 to 300,000 and the EBSCO summary reports that Abdulhamid II is said to have killed more than 100,000. Plunder was systematic, forced conversions were widespread, and the events are widely treated in Armenian and Western scholarship as a precursor to the deportations and killings of 1915.
Ottoman troops, Hamidiye irregulars and urban mobs killed Armenians across the eastern Anatolian provinces and in Constantinople during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II
The figure is politically contested. Ottoman official statistics of the 1890s recorded about 1.0-1.1 million Armenians, the Armenian Patriarchate claimed roughly 2.6 million, and European consular and later scholarly estimates generally fall between 1.5 and 2 million. The mid-range figure is used here with that spread flagged.
The upper end, 300,000, is the maximum in the range given by the Armenian National Institute and derives from missionary, consular and Armenian Patriarchate compilations made at the time. The lower end reflects the more conservative contemporary European estimates and later scholarly revisions. EBSCO notes that only rough estimates exist even for individual towns - 920 killed at Trebizond on 2 October 1895, nearly 6,000 in Constantinople after the Ottoman Bank raid - and that the Ottoman state produced no reliable count. There is no independent census against which to check any of the figures.
The Armenian National Institute and EBSCO document the massacre of civilians, the burning of the cathedral at Urfa with its congregation inside, forced conversions to Islam and the systematic plunder and destruction of Armenian homes and businesses, drawing on missionary, consular and Patriarchate reporting.
Turkey, Armenia, Bulgaria