Beginning of the Armenian Genocide

Date: April 24, 1915 • Location: Beyoğlu, Turkey

This milestone marked the outbreak and beginning of this historic period, which spanned 1915.

The Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire began with the arrest and deportation of hundreds of prominent Armenians in Constantinople.

The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches from the Turkish-dominated Anatolia to the Syrian desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Alongside the concurrent Assyrian and Greek genocides, the Armenian genocide enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey.