The Red Rugs of Tarsus

Around 1915, 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed, with many more deported, by the Ottoman Empire. This slaughter has become known as the ‘Armenian Genocide’. Earlier, in 1909, Helen Davenport Gibbons, a lecturer, found herself in Tarsus at the invitation of the President of the St Paul’s Institute. It was from here, in a series of letters which comprise this volume, that she made known to many the facts of the massacres she witnessed in Tarsus and Adana. It was these which led ultimately to the genocide of 1915. First published in 1917, this first-hand account, highlights one of the major atrocities of our modern age.