In his diary entry for 18 April 1656, a twenty-year-old Armenian named Eremia recorded a murder committed by a fellow Armenian. He lamented that ‘because of these Eastern Armenians who have filled up this place, there has been much destruction and tumult in this city [Istanbul] …’ These ‘Eastern Armenians’ about whom Eremia complained were refugees from Eastern Anatolia. Ironically, he too was a descendant of refugees from the East who had settled in Istanbul earlier in the seventeenth century. The seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire was one of mass migrations from Eastern Anatolia westwards, migrations that profoundly impacted Armenian history, as well as the demographic landscape of the empire at large.

While much research has addressed the destruction of Armenian culture and society in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, much less attention has focused on the origins and development of the Armenian community in the early modern period. Yet it was during this era that a thriving Ottoman-Armenian social and cultural scene emerged in Istanbul and its environs in the aftermath of mass migrations that had their high point at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I call this seventeenth-century mass migrations of Armenians from Eastern Anatolia westward the ‘Great Armenian Flight’.

This book tells the story of how instability at the turn of the seventeenth century in Eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus – territories sometimes called ‘Greater Armenia’ – as well as Cilicia – a region on the Mediterranean Sea that includes the city of Adana – caused mass migrations of Ottoman subjects from historic centres of Armenian population and culture towards more secure Ottoman territories, namely, Western Anatolia, Istanbul, Thrace and beyond. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Armenians fled from Greater Armenia westwards, thereby causing a refugee crisis in multiple Ottoman urban centres, such as Istanbul, Izmit (ancient Nikomedia) and Rodosto (modern-day Tekirdağ). In time, however, these refugees adapted to life in the western parts of the Ottoman Empire. They became part of both the rural landscape in Western Anatolia and the urban landscape in the above-mentioned cities. In some urban centres – like Rodosto and Izmit – the first major settlement of Armenians was a direct result of the Great Armenian Flight. In others, like Istanbul, an existing local Armenian community was greatly augmented.