The Bloodlands Between Russia and Turkey

This is the seventeeth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week, Trump and his cohort of white supremacists did their best to bankrupt the United States—by attacking the chairman of the Federal Reserve—no doubt so that the likes of Trump and Musk can scoop up the country’s forfeited assets at distressed prices.)

My original plan for the day was to ride the 16:25 Dogu Express from Erzurum to Kars, and arrive there at 20:27, in time for a late dinner. But what interested me the most that afternoon was exploring the battlefields that lie between Erzurum and Kars, where the fate of one million Armenians might well have been determined.

Ideally, I should have hired a car and driven around the parched, hilly landscape that has seen many battles between the Turks and the Russians (some hilltops have small monuments and plaques). But neither the desk clerks at my hotel nor anything online pointed me toward an available car and driver.

Nor did I see any options for renting a car in Erzurum and returning it in Kars. I could have used a combination of taxis and my bicycle to see some of the battlefields, but I was leery of that, as it was on a road outside Erzurum that the American cyclist Frank Lenz had vanished in 1895 in his bid to become the first man to cycle around the world.

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The dramatic story of his last ride is told in David V. Herlihy’s The Lost Cyclist, which was published in 2010 and given to me for a birthday by my brother-in-law Tom Meyer.

Lenz ran afoul of Kurds in a village outside Erzurum, and apparently the next day they ambushed him on the road and buried his body, which was never found.

In reading the book, I pondered his bad luck to be on the road across eastern Turkey when there were pogroms against the Armenians in the same area at the same time. (To Kurdish villagers, I am sure an American cyclist and Armenians looked about the same.)

So in the end, I bought a ticket to Kars on an intercity bus, and decided that I would see what I could of the intervening battlefields from my bus window.

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Before leaving my hotel, I figured out that the Otogar (bus station) for Erzurum was about six miles north of the city, on the busy road to the airport. I gave myself an hour to find it on my bicycle and followed the directions on my phone, which took me on a small lane through fields outside the city.

At one point I was held up (figuratively, not by Kurds) by a herd of cattle that was grazing on the road. Eventually a shepherd with a stick and a dog came to my rescue, and shooed the cows off the pavement. I carried on and found the Otogar on the side of main highway.

In general, the Turkish bus system shines. Most of the buses are new and well maintained, and porters on board pass out hot tea, free bottles of water and snacks. Above all, Turkish buses seem to go everywhere in the country at all times.

In the course of a day, I am sure there are at least ten buses going between Erzurum and Kars. Perhaps the only challenge of Turkish buses is that they can come and go anonymously from the terminals, and sometimes even their brief stops in the stations can be a bit of a state secret.

In this instance, I had remount my bicycle and ride at top speed across the terminal parking lot, when the bus parking bay changed at the last minute. Then with the driver scouring at me, I had to pack the bike in its bag and load it under the bus.

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I settled into my seat, ready to take in the landscape on the road to Kars, but five minutes outside Erzurum we stopped again, this time at a rest stop so that everyone on board could smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and eat something, while the porter washed down the bus. It explained why the three hour drive to Kars takes four hours on the bus.

To redeem itself for the lost 45 minutes at the rest stop, the bus went right past the arches of the Çobandede Bridge in Köprüköy, which has been standing for almost a millennium (on the caravan route from Tabriz to Erzurum and beyond), and earlier bridges spanning the same stretch of the Aras River.

The approach to Erzurum from Köprüköy might well be mentioned in Xenophon’s Anabasis (his march with the ten thousand to and from the wilds of Cyrus’s Persia), as he writes:

Passing on from thence in four stages of twenty parasangs, they reached a large and prosperous well-populated city, which went by the name of Gymnias, from which the governor of the country sent them a guide to lead them through a district hostile to his own. This guide told them that within five days he would lead them to a place from which they would see the sea, “and,” he added, “if I fail of my word, you are free to take my life.” Accordingly he put himself at their head; but he no sooner set foot in the country hostile to himself than he fell to encouraging them to burn and harry the land; indeed his exhortations were so earnest, it was plain that it was for this he had come, and not out of the good-will he bore the Hellenes.

Many scholars have suggested that Gymnias was Erzurum, or at least close to it, and Xenophon’s harrowing account of his escape from Persia in 399 B.C. was another reason that I was glad I had not rented a car.

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Elsewhere in Köprüköy there was a military memorial to battles that took place around the strategic bridge and town in 1914–18, although from my bus seat I didn’t really know where to look and, besides, was focused on the stone bridge, off to my right.

The night before, I had searched around on Google maps for a link but came up with nothing, which isn’t surprising, as Köprüköy is only marginally bigger than a village. It does have an army base, a train station (for the Dogu Express), and a long military history, as anyone attacking Erzurum from the east (usually the Russians or the Persians) had to cross over the famous bridge (perhaps with a descendant of Xenophon’s guide).

In 1877, on their way to the Aziziye redoubt in Erzurum, the Russians had come this way and fought their way across the bridge. In his account of The Armenian Campaign (published in 1878), Charles Williams (a British war correspondent in 1877) writes:

On my way in I was glad to find that further preparations are being made for another stand, if necessary, at Keuprikeui, near the only big bridge in these parts, which is therefore regarded as a miracle of science and art, and has two names all to itself, for it spans the Praxes under the designation Choban Keupri, or the Shepherd’s bridge. The new works are close to, but slightly in advance of, those erected fifty years ago in the vain attempt to stop the advance of Prince Paskiewitch. There are several battalions here, and the works are well concealed and well placed, while there is one battery of field artillery.

A more significant battle was fought here in January 1916, as the Russians advanced, yet again, toward Erzurum with about 75,000 men (the Ottomans had 65,000).

The Russian general, Nikolai Yudenich, managed to outflank the Ottoman lines strung across the river, bridge, and village, and he inflicted some 20,000 casualties, which sent the Ottomans reeling into the fortified city of Erzurum.

On the internet I managed to download a picture of a melee that shows Russians with swords (even in 1916) breaking through the Ottoman lines. That it was a Turkish defeat may explain why more isn’t made of the 1916 battle.

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From the bus it was harder to distinguish the outlines of the battle of Sarikamis, which is a 90 minute drive to the east from Köprüköy and about 35 miles southwest of Kars.

The new highway linking Erzurum to Kars winds through the hills to the east of Sarikamis, and even on an intercity bus it is easy to see why this was such a strategic pass in the endless wars between the Russians and the Ottomans.

In the defense of Erzurum, it’s a logical chokepoint to keep invaders on the far side of the rolling hills. To anyone defending Kars, what makes the most sense is to begin a defense at the center of this plateau and pass.

There is a war memorial and cemetery in the center of Sarikamis, a small town, but I didn’t see them from my seat, as they were distant from where we stopped. But I did get a good look at the landscape in which the Ottomans suffered one of the worst defeats in a war of endless defeats.

For reasons not entirely clear, except in a mindset that defines war as a series of annihilations, Enver Pasha, then the minister of defense who took temporary command of the 3rd Army, ordered his men to charge up the hillside at Sarikamis in successive waves directly into Russian guns.

It wasn’t a Light Brigade charge in one day, but took place over the course of ten days at year’s end in 1914–15, costing the Ottoman side some 60,000 casualties; this from an army of 90,000.

What made it worse was that in late December 1914, Sarikamis was a bitterly cold snowfield, where many soldiers, on both sides, froze to death in the raw elements.

The Ottomans hoped to drive the Russians back across their border and into Kars, while the Russians sought to bleed the Turkish lines in the snow, thus re-opening a path to Erzurum, from which they had retreated in November 1914 back to Sarikamis.

Perhaps of more significance is the conclusion that the Ottoman defeat is what (along with the Allied landings at Gallipoli) set off the Armenian deportations in April 1915.

One account I read of the battle states: “Thoroughly outmanoeuvred by his Russian rivals, Enver blamed the defeat on Armenians, using some Armenian desertions as a pretext, even though Armenian soldiers and officers in the Ottoman army generally fought loyally and bravely. The Turkish debacle at Sarikamis triggered the Armenian Genocide, which was begun by the Ottoman state on 24 April.”

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