A Wreath on the Gamavor’s (Legionnaire’s) Tomb

Vahe H. Apelian

 

Gamavor is an Armenian word meaning volunteer. It is used only as a noun. For the one or two generations preceding ours Gamavor referred to the approximately 5,000 Armenian men who volunteerarily joined the French Army to fight the Turks during the First World War. The French called the formation La Legion Armenienne. In English the descriptive word we have chosen is legionnaire. I am not sure if the word legionnaire inherently describes volunteering to a legion for a lofty cause, as was the case with the Armenian Gamavors. 

The Armenian volunteers were motivated by a French and Armenian Diaspora pact promising that in return for Armenian military support to the Allies against the Ottoman and German alliance, the French and their allies would help the Western Armenians lay the foundation for home rule in Cilicia, part of historic Armenia. Most, if not all, of the volunteers were expatriate Cilicians. Approximately 1,200 came from the United States, including some 70 Kessabtsis. Among the latter was Nshan, the paternal uncle of my maternal uncle, the historian Dr. Antranig Chalabian, who dedicated his book “Revolutionary Figures” to his uncle Nshan and noted the following:  “Towards the end of 1916, when my father was subjected to deportation, his brother left America and returned to the homeland to enlist with the volunteers to fight against the Turks. After training with the Armenian Legion in Cyprus for two years, my uncle and his cousin Panos went to Palestine along with thousands of volunteers, fought in the Battle of Arara, went to Cilicia and after the turnabout of the French Government, returned to America and died in Fresno in 1973.”

The Battle of Arara was the major military engagement of the Gamavors. It took place on Sept. 18, 1918, near Megiddo (the Biblical Armageddon) in northern Palestine. The valor of the Armenian combatants in securing victory against the German-Turkish forces merited special commendation of the Allied High Command. Twenty-three Armenian combatants were killed in action. What followed the battle was another sad chapter in Armenian history.

The French forces, having secured victory, headed north and eventually captured Cilicia. Their presence encouraged the genocide survivors to return to their ancestral villages. But instead of honoring their pact with the Armenians, the French reneged on their promise and withdrew their forces, without giving notice to the Armenians and without having negotiated with Turkish forces about the state of the Armenians they were leaving behind. I recall being told, during family conversations, that the French even padded the hooves of their horses to muffle the sound of their unannounced midnight evacuation. “Chivalrous France” became a sarcastic expression in Armenian conversation and literature.

Abandoned and left to the whims of the Turkish onslaught, without the protection that they had rightfully expected from their French allies and unable to protect themselves, the Armenians once again fled their Cilician homeland to disperse around the world. Only two Armenian villages remain from the once thriving Armenian enclave on that prime northeastern Mediterranean region, along the Mediterranean coast,—the vilage Wakf in historical Mussa Dagh in Turkey and Kessab in Syria.

After the genocide the surviving Kessabtis who managed to return to Kessab tenaciously held on to their enclave and established a de facto home rule, under the leadership of the Kessabtsi Gamavors who had left the legion and moved to Kessab with their arms. The home rule lasted from 1918 to 1921 during which the Armenians established administrative and judicial bodies to enforce law and order. The former legionnaires also formed an armed force and protected the population from the prevailing lawlessness in the region and gave refuge to some members of other minorities such as ethnic Greeks and the Alevis. The French disbanded the Kessab self-rule, as they cemented their colonial control over Syria and Lebanon.

The British and the French, as the supreme powers in that part of the world, had secretely already drawn the map of the region to suit their interests. The straight-lined borders of present-day Middle Eastern states were the works of their foreign ministers, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France. They carved, among themselves, what had remained of the Ottoman Empire, without regard to the mosaic of the area's ethnic, religious or social fabric.

The drawn map put Kessab within Turkey. The prospect of ending up in Turkey terrified the Kessabtsis in spite of the fact that they had been under Turkish rule for centuries, had adopted Turkish words in their vocabulary, traded almost exclusively with Turkish-occupied Antioch and had almost no dealing with their immediate Arab neighbors in the south. The uncertainty over the fate of Kessab heightened in the latter part of the decade (1937 to 1939) as Turkey began imposing its presence in Kessab and made Turkish language teaching mandatory. Many members of the first post-Genocide generation born in Kessab had reached conscription age by then. These young men, including my father, were urged by their families to flee to Lebanon lest they be be drafted into the Turkish Army.

The Kessabtsis also appealed to the occupying forces to have Kessab removed from the emerging Turkey. It is generally accepted that Cardinal Krikor Bedros XV Aghajanian (Գրիգոր Պետրոս ԺԵ. Աղաճանեան, French: Grégoire-Pierre XV Agagianian, Italian: Gregorio Pietro XV Agagianian) played a decisive role in having the colonial rulers redraw the map to secure the last remnant of Armenian Cilicia. This episode may be the only instance where the two great powers redrew the map in that corner of the Middle East to save the Armenian enclave Kessab from the Turkish occupation. Kessab was incorporated into Syria but at a price. Most of the arable lands of Kessab were given to Turkey.

The first Syrian government official visit to Kessab took place on March 20, 1944. Shukri Kuwaitli, the first elected President of Syria visited Kessab as a token of Syrian Government’s appreciation of the Armenians for having their native enclave included in Syria. 

The late George Azad Apelian, in an article, noted that during his pre-teens in the mid-'50s, the  Kessabtsi Gamavors came to Keurkune--one of Kessab's twelve villages--for their traditional September reunion celebrating their participation in the battle of Arara.. Their arrival created much excitement among the villagers, particularly among the youngsters, seeing the men in their military fatigues and carrying ammunition and rifles. The Gamavors celebrated their victory at the Battle of Arara seated next to the village spring, feasting over white sheets spread on the nearby meadow. They sang a song about the Gamavors. George had memorized the old song that ended with:

From Arara to Cilicia

Are reminders of the Volunteers

On the tomb of the Volunteer

There is no wreath, however.