Like all the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, Trabzon Armenians received an official order of deportation in June 1915. However, the Vali [governor] of Trabzon, Djemal Azmi, made an “exemption” for Armenian women in the later stages of pregnancy and for children “when the parents so desired.” Approximately three thousand children (girls up to 15 years old and boys up to 10) and several dozen women remained in the city. Those Armenians were placed in special institutions, subjected to neglect, starvation, murder, and institutionalized rape. Sexual violence was a tool to foster submission and terror, humiliation, self-hate, and stigmatization. After four years, all male children disappeared, and the girls who mainly survived did so in Turkish households, to which they were given as gifts or sold to serve as servants or sex slaves. In 1919, the Turkish Courts-Martial brought the perpetrators of the Trabzon Armenian Genocide to trial in Constantinople. The charges against them included organizing and implementing the massive annihilation of the Trabzon Armenians, the plunder of their property, the rape and murder of Armenian women and children, and the drowning of around 50 pregnant women in the Black Sea. There were twenty sessions of the Trabzon trial, held between 26 March and 20 May 1919, during which witnesses and victims testified. This lecture will discuss the anatomy of the Trabzon Armenian genocide and how sexual violence was one of the main components of it.

Anna Aleksanyan earned her Ph.D. from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the gendered aspects of the Armenian Genocide, particularly the experiences of female victims from 1914 to 1918. Before her doctoral studies, she spent seven years as a senior research fellow and head of the Source Studies Department at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. Aleksanyan holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Yerevan State University. From July 2023 to January 2026, she served as a postdoctoral fellow with the Armenian Genocide Research Program at the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA.