Excavation at the mass burial site in Tepeköy, located eight kilometers from Erzurum, started yesterday and is being conducted by academics from Atatürk University (AÜ) and regional officials.While speaking with journalists at the site, Erol Kürkçüoğlu, director of AÜ’s Turkish-Armenian Relations Research Center, said, “This will be a scientific dig where we will put forth evidence on the massacre Armenians committed against Muslims in this area.”
He said: “We are now in Tepeköy, located eight kilometers northwest of Erzurum. In Tepeköy, the civilian residents of two villages were massacred by Armenian gangs in February and March 1918. The first three months of 1918 in particular saw large-scale massacres in Erzurum and its surroundings. Tepeköy was one of the foremost regions among these areas.”
He noted that staff from the AÜ Turkish-Armenian Relations Research Center, officials from the Erzurum Directorate of Museums and AÜ’s department of archeology were conducting the excavation.
“There are two places where two significant massacres took place here. One is the place where women and children of the village were massacred. The other place is an area where 60 people were massacred. This was a completely defenseless village at the time, as the men of the village capable of fighting had gone to World War I fronts when the Tashnak Armenian gang attacked. They gathered the villagers in an old square in the village and interrogated them, but that was a mere formality. Later, they massacred the women on the pasture lands owned by Durak Bingöl. Most of those who were killed were women, about 90 of them. They were buried in the village cemetery in 1958 by the people of the village. The men of the village were killed in this field covered with hay owned by İbrahim Sefa. We now stand in front of the most important place that will serve as one of the best answers to the Armenians’ so-called claims of genocide. This is a village where two out of the 185 mass graves in Anatolia are located.”
He said documentation of the massacre had been found in various submissions by locals and the memoirs of a Russian lieutenant colonel whose brigade remained in the region after the Russians pulled out.
