March 2, 1915

Armenian genocide

Ottoman Interior Ministry orders Dörtyol's Armenians deported, on a disputed date

The order survives as a ciphered telegram carrying the Rumi date 17 Şubat 1330; whether that lands on 2 March 1915 is what the chronologies disagree about.

A ciphered order to Adana, dated 17 Şubat 1330

A ciphered Ottoman Interior Ministry and Public Security Directorate telegram, dated 17 Şubat 1330 in the Ottoman Rumi calendar and converted by the consulted scholarship and the Turkish Historical Society's chronology to 2 March 1915, ordered that the Armenians of Dörtyol be sent to a previously designated place, so that no opportunity for revolt would remain.

The order, archival reference BOA DH.ŞFR 50/141, went to the authorities in Adana and was issued under Interior Minister Talat Pasha.

It followed Fourth Army commander Cemal Pasha's proposal to deport Armenian families from the Dörtyol and İskenderun area, amid Ottoman allegations of revolutionary activity and collaboration with enemy forces.

An order, not a departure

The surviving record documents a central instruction for removal. It does not establish that a deportation convoy left Dörtyol that day, and the consulted record gives no same-day count.

The day itself is disputed, and not only because of the calendar conversion. The Armenian National Institute's detailed chronology has no entry for 2 March at all: it moves from the disarmament of Armenians at Marash on 1 March to a Committee of Union and Progress dispatch on 3 March. The 2 March date should not be treated as independently confirmed.

The label "earliest recorded deportations" is too definite: the scholarly introduction in The Great Crime discusses removals from Dörtyol and İskenderun during February 1915, which may predate this surviving central order.

Where it sits in the sequence

This was a limited regional directive, not the empire-wide mass-deportation programme implemented later, and it should be distinguished from the April arrests and the May legislation.

The 24 April arrests of Armenian intellectual and political leaders in Constantinople are commemorated as the genocide's beginning, but the March paper trail predates them, and the Temporary Law of Deportation of 27 May supplied later general authority rather than initiating the policy.

Ronald Grigor Suny's synthesis describes a contingent process that radicalised during the wartime crisis, rather than a fixed early-war blueprint.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1915-03-02.

What the sources leave uncertain

The archival document is dated 17 Şubat 1330 in the Ottoman Rumi calendar, converted in the consulted scholarship and Turkish Historical Society chronology to March 2, 1915.
The label 'earliest recorded deportations' is too definite. March 2 is securely the date of a ciphered order, but it is not demonstrably the departure date of deportees.
The scholarly historical introduction in The Great Crime discusses removals from Dörtyol and İskenderun during February 1915, which may predate this surviving central order.
This was a limited regional directive, not yet the empire-wide mass-deportation program later implemented. Its place in the genocide's escalating decision process requires careful distinction from the April arrests and May legislation.