Graves decorated with flowers

art4341

Dec 9

Besides, many of the survivors are women, who have made fruitless efforts to keep the bodies of loved ones covered with a little earth. We had ample proof that wherever bones could be identified, they were tenderly cared for. We saw many well- kept graves decorated with flowers.

We saw others that had been uncovered by the rain or the dogs, leaving parts of the skeleton exposed, that were still decorated with flowers. We even saw skulls lying on the ground, within a doorway or a garden wall, with a bouquet of flowers lying upon them, as though some one was caring for them, and was yet loth to bury them away out of sight. I saw one half buried, with the face upward, and its hollow eyes gazing reproachfully up at the sunny sky, with a bouquet carefully placed in its mouth ; but most of these skeletons and bones have nobody to look after them.

Of the eight or nine thousand people who made up the population of the place, there are only twelve or fifteen hundred left, and they have neither tools to dig graves with nor strength to use spades if they had them. But why have the Turkish authorities not buried them out of sight ? The Turkish authorities will tell you they have buried them, and that there were very few to bury Istanbul Private Tours.

Of all the cruel, brutal, ferocious things the Turks ever did, the massacre of Batak is among the worst! Of all the mad, foolish things they ever did, leaving these bodies to lie here rotting for three months unburied is probably the maddest and most foolish ! But this village was in an isolated, out-of-the- way place, difficult of access, and they never thought Europeans would go poking their noses here, so they cynically said, " These Christians are not even worth burial, let the dogs eat them."

We talked to many of the people, but we had not the heart to listen to many of their stories in detail, and we restricted ourselves to simply asking them the numberlost in each family. No other method would probably give a better idea of the fearful character of the massacre, and the way in which whole families were swept out of existence.