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Batak 1876: A massacre and

its significance
James J. Reid
Published online: 03 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: James J. Reid (2000) Batak 1876: A massacre and its
significance, Journal of Genocide Research, 2:3, 375-409, DOI: 10.1080/713677621
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Journal of Genocide Research (2000), 2(3), 375–409
Batak 1876: a massacre and its

signi cance
JAMES J. REID
Con icts in Ottoman society in the nineteenth century

What can the 1876 massacre at Batak reveal about genocidal processes from a
social and psychologica l aspect? The Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate
during the course of the nineteenth century, rst with the Serbian and Greek
revolutions at the beginning of the century, and last in the destructive turmoil
centered upon Ottoman Macedonia. Con ict de ned Ottoman society at almost
all levels. Commonly, at the community level, the vendetta de ned relations
between the members of mutually opposed families. A member of one lineage
killed another. The dead man’s family vowed vengeance, and if they killed one
of their antagonists in retaliation, the custom of the blood feud usually prevailed.
Customary practices permitted limited retaliatory killing, and worked to limit
both the killing and the growth of the con ict to a higher level of intensity.
Expansion of the vendetta, and the destruction of restraints exerted by customary
practices led to vigilante war. The vigilante con ict went one step beyond the
vendetta and often involved at least the inclination of one or both groups to
massacre one another. At the very least, killing became less controllable, and
custom ceased to prevent violence. The revolt at Batak, and the subsequent
massacre of 8,000 Bulgarian villagers in this place by Ottoman irregular cavalry,
belongs to this level of local small war. The irregulars acted as vigilantes, and
their role as surrogate for the Ottoman government did not alter the vigilante
nature of the enterprise.1 The ultimate stage of con ict began with a rebellion or
a full- edged (nationalist ) revolution. In this case, the state fought a full- edged
civil war with its rebellious subject population . The comparative example of the
Rozhiki Kurdish revolt of 1655 belonged in this category. The Rozhiki rebellion
did not achieve the status of a nationalist revolution, but the leader of the
insurrection, the Kurdish chieftain Abdal Khan Rozhiki, controlled a private
army, and levied special troops from among his subjects to ght a full-scale war
with an Ottoman army. One could place many other nineteenth century wars
within the former Ottoman Empire in this category. Examples could includ e the
war of the Greek Revolution, the Serbian insurrection, the war in Montenegro
from 1876 to 1877, and the Cretan insurrection of 1866–1869 to name only a
few examples. Vigilantism as a military and social type served as a signi cant
psychologica l undercurrent in both the vigilante wars and the full-scale revol-
ISSN 1462-352 8 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/00/030375-3 5 Ó 2000 Research Network in Genocide Studies
JAMES J. REID
utionary wars of the nineteenth century. The destroyer mentality of the vigilante
became the basis of genocidal inclination s in the state, among surrogates of the
state, and even among certain subject population s forced to wage war against
their oppressive masters. Genocidal processes that surfaced in 1915 Ottoman
Armenia grew from roots deep in the experiences of social collapse inside the
Ottoman Empire.
An environment of oppression imposed by destroyer vigilante s might create a
pessimistic climate of mourning, melancholy sorrow, and deep af iction in the
suppressed population , but the presence of such powerful psychologica l forces as
destroyer impulses and grief reactions did not and do not constitute genocide.
These factors served as the psychologica l continuum that promoted destruction
(destroyer mentality) or preserved the subject’s mentality of oppression (grief,
depression, pessimism). A destroyer personality might have had sadistic quali-

ties, as this article will show, but at times might avoid the worst elements of this
personality disorder. Likewise, an oppressed victim could develop a greater
understanding of the human condition, or might just as readily surrender to
pessimism and engage in a manipulative or self-seeking lifestyle for the sake of
survival. Analyses that seek to arrive at a more human understandin g of both
sadistic destroyer and oppressed survivor will ultimately establish a more diverse
and useful understanding of the psychologica l aftereffects of con icts. Polarized
accounts intent upon proving the evil of one or another group often perpetuate
the problem that they claim to describe or analyze. The following article will
study the 1876 massacre at Batak, Bulgaria as the primary example of a
pre-genocidal event in the Ottoman Empire, in which the psychologica l forces
that contributed to genocide emerged as a de nitive factor. The liquidation of
Batak was not a genocide, but many of those who destroyed Batak acted in the
grip of an intense sadistic personality disorder. A destroyer commander of the
past in Eurasia may have annihilated part of a population, and enslaved another
part, usually the women and children with a few men. What made Batak and
other massacres of its era unique was the fact that the perpetrators intended to
annihilate everyone, and did so in a particularly sadistic manner. That portion of
the population that would have been saved in the distant past, fell to the
aggressor’s blade in this new era of vigilante con ict. Pre-genocidal destruction
and annihilatio n often elicited extremely powerful sadistic impulses in the
killers. Genocidal destruction in a totalitaria n state contrasted strongly with this
orientation in that mass destruction did not require the services of brutal sadists
to do the killing.2 The following article will explain this seeming paradox.
Destroyer mentality: the vigilante’s psychology

Ottoman race theory and demonization of subjects
Race beliefs existed in Ottoman society, even though Ottoman state practice
displaced ethnically Turkish elites in the highest realms of power with slave
of cers of mixed, non-Turkish origin. Medieval and premodern ideas of race did
376
THE BATAK MASSACRE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE
not depend upon a modern scienti c understanding of the human species to

formulate ideas of genus and sub-species. The word “genocide,” for example,
rests upon a modern concept of ethnicity in which the genus, or racial type, has
become the basis upon which the perpetrator determines the community that his
destroyer forces must annihilate. Darwin’s theory of evolution recognized the
in uence of the species (phylus) upon the individual , but did not argue for the
dominance of a superior species through a metaphysics of race. He saw that all
species had combinations of adaptive and less adaptive traits, the combination of
which worked in one environment and failed in another. In modern racism,
metaphysicians of race have converted changeable scienti c ideas of phylogeny
into absolute values of race. Commentators who have looked into the past with
this set of criteria as their understanding of racism have often arrived at the
notion that racism did not exist before the nineteenth century. In the case of the
Middle East, in particular, scholars and others have argued that racism was
unknown until the in uence of the West became paramount. Such conclusions
avoid the notion that more indigenous forms of race beliefs could have emerged
in their own right from an earlier period.
Medieval aristocracies of many regions held the ideal of race dear as a means
of giving moral authority to their own lineages. The aristocratic lineage became
the race par excellence in both East and West. However, a more general idea of
race also existed . Medieval race beliefs did not have access to scienti c
materialism as a means of designing an idea of a superior or inferior race.
Rather, metaphysics determined an idea that de ned interrelationship s between
carnal forms and spiritual archetypes. The spirit world contained a full array of
spirits, or celestial archetypes, that acted as the spiritual source for carnal beings.
Each human being, and many non-human beings, possessed a soul or spirit in the
values of medieval belief systems. Heaven—the good force—maintained a
well-organized and orderly array of spirit archetypes—angels—who served as
the protective spirit for some carnal entity on earth. All of human society, each
(rightly guided) community, every family, and all human beings of all ages
possessed a link with some higher celestial being in the angelic hierarchy
centered upon the Highest Deity. Already in this elaborate medieval phylogeny
of spirits and dependent carnal forms one can nd a racial idea. Each society
possessed its own genius, lodged in the heavenly hierarchy. This genius
bestowed upon its earthly counterpart special characteristics and group tempera-
ments that made it unique. That the heavens should have existed in an elaborate,
predetermined hierarchy ascending from the spheres bordering upon the carnal
zone to the four archangels near God indicates that believers saw some groups
and their members as possessing superior status and others inferior. Even
heavenly groups existed within a hierarchy that bestowed higher approval upon
groups closer to God.
The underworld also contained its spiritual archetypes—fallen angels and
beings of evil nature—that Satan created as a force intended to assault God. The
celestial hierarchy and its eld of good power existed as a defense against
Satanic forces. In the course of this eternal struggle, the celestial hierarchy
377
JAMES J. REID
created the carnal world in order to deceive Satan by allowing him to have the
impression that he had made gains in the struggle against God. God’s angels
permitted Satan to have the illusion that he dominated earth and the beings living
upon the earth. Human history in its medieval form traced the stages of human
struggle as the effort to build and protect the Good Government and its
dependent society from total disruption by apparently overwhelming satanic
forces. Premodern Islamic, Persian, Turkish, and Ottoman ideas of society not
only maintained the notion that the Good Society existed on the pattern of the
predeterminant celestial hierarchy, but that Satanic forces sought to tempt the
good away from their duties, that good persons could fall victim to spiritual
possession by Satanic spirits, and that entire segments of society possessed links
to a Satanic, not a Heavenly, archetype. Groups as well as persons existed in
dual forms, with a spirit linked to a Heavenly or a satanic counterpart, and a

carnal form. The Good Ruler possessed the trait of justice [‘adl] in Perso-Islamic
and Ottoman thought, while individual s belonging to the rightly guided society
ruled by the God-empowered sultan contained many persons endowed with
justice, as well as innumerable combinations of virtues. If the notion of justice
[‘adl] represented the character of the Good Society, where social relations
remained in a measured balance or equilibrium [i’tidal], then any community
where Satanic forces prevailed emanated the character of tyranny [zulm]. These
medieval or premodern values molded the idea of race. A ruler could govern
through tyrannous means, but he derived his power from an evil prototype , or
Satan had subverted his good soul, and had taken possession of his carnal being.
Ottoman and Perso-Islamic political theorists and historians identi ed the lower
social groups of Ottoman society as dominated by satanic tyranny. The under-
world and its carnal emanations had no true order or hierarchical harmony,
existing in a world of tortuous chaos and misery. Satanic government could only
result in tyrannous evil, and for some, even the mere day-to-day existence of
individuals in the lower social orders exuded either chaos, or the ultimate evil
of tyranny.
Such premodern ideas, of course, existed in many forms, and with a wide
diversity of variants in the Ottoman Empire, as well as elsewhere. No two
communities in the Ottoman Empire retained exactly the same value orienta-
tions, but almost all accepted some variant of these beliefs. At their heart, they
followed a racial, or phylogenetic , understanding of human existence. The
Persian poet Hati (sixteenth century) considered that it was impossible for any
creature to change its spiritual state just as it was impossible to change one’s
carnal being from one form into another. One of his poems followed the
peregrinations of a crow’s egg. A person should not think that by placing a
crow’s egg in the nest of the peacock within the Garden of Paradise [tavust-i
bagh-i bihisht] that it could become a Peacock. The peacock symbolized good
being, while the crow emanated from “darkness” [zulmat]. In this case,
“darkness” [zulmat] possessed the traits of the cognate tyranny [zulm] for the
poet. No effort to change the crow’s egg could bring forth a peacock, or alter
the spiritual essence of zulm, that it contained in its being. One could feed it a
378
seed from the g tree in the Celestial garden, water it with uid from the
Fountain of Salsabil, or bring the angel Gabriel [Jibra’il] to breathe into the egg.
None of these measures would make the crow’s egg endowed with zulmat into
a peacock imbued with the virtues of Paradise. While a sixteenth century Persian
poet wrote the original, a nineteenth century Ottoman poet and literary scholar,
Ziya Pasha, included the verses in a collection of his most treasured poems.3
The Persian poet Sa’di (thirteenth century) wrote of a vezir who adopted the
boy child of a band of Arab brigands [taifa-yi duzdan-I ‘Arab], found abandoned
in a brigand camp. The vezir did everything to educate the boy in the ways of
civilized society, training him in every way as the son of a high court of cial.
In the end, however, when the brigand s returned, the boy killed the vezir who
had cared for him, and rejoined his blood relatives. The moral of the story for
Sa’di was that one could not forge a good sword from bad iron. Thus, the vezir
mistakenly thought he could take the evil character inherent in the brigand and
convert it to a good being through education.4 Such moralizing stories contained
as their source the idea of celestial phylogeny described above. A human born
into a certain community at a given level of society could never alter his internal
character, even if his station increased through upward social mobility. Ottoman
commentators upon Ottoman decline from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries believed that the Ottoman state had declined because persons of base
social status had received social promotion to of ces at a status higher than their
birth could permit. They managed their of ces with tyranny [zulm], and deserved
eradication. 5
Ottoman writers of the nineteenth century referred to these social beliefs in
their descriptions of the Empire’s social problems, though these premodern
beliefs often came in the midst of other, unrelated values. Where such references
appeared in the nineteenth century, the author will discuss them in a later
section. The existence of such beliefs in a broad cross-section of Ottoman
Islamic society could have sanctioned sadistic behavior toward non-Muslims,
particularly those viewed as agents of Russia, or some other “Christian” imperial
power. According to premodern Ottoman race beliefs, non-Muslim s always had
the potential of projecting Satan’s evil values, dwelled perpetually in a state of
moral degeneration in this view, and if they rebelled against Ottoman rule they
behaved with tyranny. These race beliefs survived into the nineteenth century
both in the extracting of older texts as in the case of Ziya Pasha named above,
and in the application of viable new expressions of the older forms. Thus, the
historian and Ottoman of cial Mahmud Jelaleddin Pasha who had lived in the
era of the 1876 Bulgarian Revolution, described the Bulgarian rebels in precisely
the terms of the old Ottoman value system. He described the ghting over
Pazarjik in 1876, when the “insurrection” [isyan] retreated from that town to a
new defensive center at Filibe. He stated that the rebels [isyanjilar] had held
Pazarjik in their “tyrannous claws” [zulum penchelerine] until Ottoman forces
caused them to withdraw.6 As if to reemphasize the predominance of archaic
values, Mahmud Jelaleddin Pasha ascribed the Bulgarian massacres to “violent
brigand chiefs” [elebashilarini n shiddet], indicating the typology suggested in
379
JAMES J. REID
the story of Sa’di noted above. Brigand chiefs would always retain violent
[shiddet] character traits. They committed violence beyond the control of the
(good) state.7 No one, it was implied , could alter these chiefs whose violence
could end only when someone destroyed them. The “tyranny” of the Bulgarian
rebels had its parallel in the “violent behavior” of the brigand murderers.
Ottoman explanations of the Bulgarian massacres did not go beyond the old
Ottoman racial typology, and suggested that the old value system had much to
do with the cultivation of a proto-genoc idal mentality in this era.8
Destroyer personality and sadistic personality disorder

The author wishes to avoid the “Orientalist” perspective of the nineteenth
century and earlier, namely that the brutal degeneracy of the Ottoman Turks
resulted in violent (or sadistic) behavior that evolved from a degenerate Turkish
racial identity. Such ideas rested upon premodern values, representing a Western
parallel to the above discussion about racialism in premodern Ottoman ideas of
society. The author does intend to say that any human being can possess sadistic
inclination s that might ultimately grow into a sadistic personality disorder
through alterations of personality, or as the consequence of traumatic war
experiences. A person with sadistic inclination s might foster this orientation if he
(or more rarely she) feels frustrated in attaining their expectations, even when he
has not suffered through a violent trauma. The destroyer mentality can exist
when there is no war. The current study, however, will focus upon the
circumstances of political, social, and military disintegratio n in the Ottoman
Empire, during which vigilante behavior increased and small wars plagued much
of the Ottoman Empire. While sadistic behavior appeared in many forms
between 1821 and 1878, one must question not why so many incidents occurred,
but rather why more terrible and all-encompassin g destruction was avoided. An
event similar to the Armenian genocide could have occurred a generation earlier.
This section will de ne the concept of sadistic personality disorder in its relation
to the stressors of war and social collapse. Then, a pre-nineteenth century
example of sadistic behavior in battle and on campaign will demonstrate various
trends in Ottoman military culture.
Sadism as a psychologica l attitud e belongs to the broader orientation of
aggression. Psychologists consider sadism to be a personality disorder, with
gradations of intensity. Some analysts use the term sadism or sadistic personality
disorder to describe a highly aggressive state, while others have attempted to
neutralize the concept by portraying different levels of aggression. The deper-
sonalization of modern warfare, and a parallel growth in a restrictive political
correctness has attempted to reduce the aggressive personality into a less
intimidatin g entity. One can search in vain through the Diagnostic and Statistic
Manual of Mental Disorders, revised edition IV, for Sadistic Personality Dis-
order, even though previous editions have carried such a category.9
Various scholars have worked upon the issue of human aggression. Konrad
Lorenz formulated a theory that aggression in humans belonged to the realm of
380
Table 1. The three stages of malignant aggression identi ed by

Fromm
A. Destroyer-nihilist Aggression due to nihilistic alienation

and lack of feeling from a frozen or
“rigid” personality12
B. Ecstatic type Aggression with powerful emotions to
relieve depression—berserkers
C. Necrophiliac Most intense form—sadistic aggression,
obsession with death, and with causing
death; dismemberment of the living and
the dead13
instinct. His theory tended to remove individua l responsibilit y for aggression. All
humans had an instinct for aggressive behavior that could become agitated and
increase. Lorenz saw violent aggression as a part of nature that occurred in a
predetermined instinctual pattern. Erich Fromm disputed Lorenz, and argued for
the in uence of character upon the actions of humans, especially with regard to
the development of aggressive behavior. He did not accept the instinct theory
because it seemed to absolve aggressors from some of their worst acts. Fromm
devised a full scale of aggression based upon intent of the perpetrator and the
intensity of the violence. The lowest gradation of aggression found expression in
the instinctiv e acts of animals. Such violence occurred in nature. Humans have
lost the aggression instinct, replacing it with characterological motivations. He
designed other types of aggression existing in humans that did not involve a
vicious malignancy of attitude. In other words, aggressors did not intend to
destroy, and found no emotional satisfaction in their aggression or its conse-
quences. These types he enumerated as pseudo-aggression , accidental (an acci-
dental action resulting in injury, death, or destruction), “playful” (archaic games
of ghting skill such as fencing), self-assertive (actively seeking a goal without
fear or hesitation), defensive (phylogeneticall y programmed ght or ight
reaction linked to instinct) , and instrumental aggression [malignant intention to
destroy (hunting, war), but in a biologicall y adaptive manner].10 The various
stages of aggression build in this model toward a more destructive orientation.
Instrumental aggression exists among soldiers in wartime in instances where the
soldier may have to kill his enemy, but has no underlying desire for killing, and
no obsession with causing death. Every army including the Ottoman army
contained a percentage of soldiers whose aggressive behavior belonged in this
“biologically adaptive” range.
The experience of war, during which traumatic events can create post-trau-
matic stress disorder, intensi es the inclination in some soldiers to commit acts
of malignant destruction.11 Fromm identi ed three stages of malignant ag-
gression in this level (see Table 1).
Malignant aggressors appear in all wars, but each army and each war has
possessed different levels of aggression and the destroyer mentality. Malignant
aggressors had become “affectively frozen”14 according to Fromm. That is to
381
JAMES J. REID
say, these individuals had ceased to have an interest in anything, felt no emotions
such as grief, sorrow, or joy, and suffered from a nihilisti c feeling of inner
nothingness . They could make no emotional bonds with other human beings.15
Fromm thought that malignant aggression had its roots in human character.
The two most basic forms of malignant aggressiveness necessary to under-
stand the violent acts of Ottoman irregular soldiers in the nineteenth century are
the destroyer-nihilis t and the necrophilia c types. The destroyer-nihilis t wor-
shipped the use of force. This lower degree of malignant aggression has “the
function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying him in the worship of
one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction;
his devotee has, as it were, given his life over to him.”16 Fromm gave the
example of an ex-soldier and assassin named Kern, whose war experience in
World War I made him feel as though he had already entered the land of the
dead. Feeling as though he had died, Kern devoted his entire physical existence
to killing and destruction. Feeling emotionally dead, Kern evolved a “death
wish” in his emotional orientation that enabled him to perform the most daring
and dangerous acts.17
One degree higher in aggressive tendencies was the necrophiliac , or sadistic
aggressor. Sadism pure and simple intended to in ict “physical pain up to the
extreme of death, [and] has as its object a powerless being, whether man or
animal.” Fromm considered mental cruelty as a form of sadism as well. Thus,
the instance after the defeat of the Rozhiki revolt when the Ottoman commander
engaged in a mock debate with one of his of cers over the fate of a Kurdish
captive (whether to allow him to live or die) belonged to this category of mental
cruelty. Fromm’s basic de nition of sadism saw this mental state as “the passion
to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal,
a child, a man, or a woman. To force someone to endure pain or humiliation
without being able to defend himself is one of the manifestations of absolute
control, but it is by no means the only one.”18 The sadist differs from the
nihilist-destroye r in a very fundamental aspect. The nihilist wishes primarily to
do away with life, while the sadist nds emotional ful llment from choking and
controlling life.19 Ambiguity and uncertainty make the sadist feel uneasy, and
from such situations, the sadist reacts violently. Fromm called the most potent
form of sadism “necrophilia,” by which he meant a passionate love of the dead
and death, sometimes resulting in a sexual lust, but most of the time appearing
in a nonsexual,20 gruesome desire to handle and be near corpses, and especially
to dismember them.21 In his experience as a psychoanalyst , Dr. Fromm stated
that in many “necrophilous people I have observed that they had many dreams
in which they saw parts of dismembered bodies oating or lying around
sometimes in blood, often in dirty water together with feces. The desire to
dismember bodies, if it appears frequently in phantasia and dreams, is one of the
most reliable factors for the diagnosis of the necrophilous character; no other act
is as clear as the expression of the desire to tear apart living structures.”22
Ottoman commanders rewarded the dismemberment of dead enemy soldiers (in
the form of decapitation) in every campaign, and frequent notices of these acts
382
appeared in Ottoman and Persian sources.23 Ottoman military practice institu-

tionalized sadistic behavior in other ways as well.24 One example is painful and
slow death by impalement frequently used to punish rebels.
One must also consider the study of Henry V. Dicks, who examined the
psychologica l orientations of SS troops and other German soldiers some of
whom acted in mass killings and concentration camp exterminations . He discov-
ered that a range of attitudes existed among a sampling of 138 German prisoners
of war. On his scale of aggressiveness among these soldiers, he found six main
orientations: “(a) overt gross cruelty with some evidence of its being enjoyed by
the subject; (b) harsh, domineering behavior and (c) indifference and impervi-
ousness to the show of sadism by others or to the suffering of victims. The social
variants implied a greater degree of conscious or unconscious control over
aggressive behavior, yielding (d) ‘normal’ (not really ‘sadistic’) capacity for
self-assertion and anger coupled with human warmth and lacking viciousness ;
(e) an over-compensator y suppression of aggressiveness , resulting in a gentle,
submissive , apologetic attitude, and (f) a strong reaction formation against
cruelty shown by such things as blood phobias, paci sm, moral aversion from
all forms of aggression.”25 Dicks identi ed types (a) overt cruelty and (c)
imperviousnes s to sadism by others as linked with the abnormality or personality
disorder identi ed as “aggressive psychopathy. ” Type (c), he added, coincided
with G. M. Gilbert’s “schizoid ” personality.26 Dicks observed that before he had
studied the eight SS men in his sampling, he assumed they would conform to the
three “anti-social” variables [types (a)–(c)]. “This, however, turned out to be true
only of their behaviour at the height of their SS careers and service with ‘death
squads’.”27
Dicks had also provided another scale that coordinated political attitudes with
aggressive behavior that he named the High F Syndrome. He took a sampling of
1,000 German prisoners interrogated by British of cials. Interrogators detected
the highest F (for Fascist) orientation in 11% of the men. The second highest
category—believers with reservations—accounted for 25%. The middle group
consisting of the “unpolitical ” individuals numbered 40%. Men who were
divided or held passive anti-Nazi attitudes accounted for 15% of the grouping.
Finally, according to Dicks, the active anti-Nazis or “democrats” consisted of
9%.28 The aggression and political scales did not necessarily correlate with one
another. One high on the F scale might also conceivably have a severe blood
phobia, and would hence actively seek to avoid personal acts of sadistic
butchery. Dicks found that the psychologica l determinants among the high
F-scale individuals included unconscious paranoid types or individual s caught in
depressive states.29
While the work of Dicks applied speci cally to aggressive behavior among
German soldiers in the era of World War II, the variables he suggested for the
psychology of violence prove highly useful in the present study. Both the
massacres described in this study—the killing of Rozhiki prisoners in 1655 and
the Batak massacre of 1876—describe only the actions of the most brutal
Ottoman soldiers. Men who killed defenseless prisoners with enjoyment, decap-
383
JAMES J. REID
itated wounded and dead (sadistic dismemberment), or raped defenseless women

(or others) to the accompaniment of torture or extreme psychologica l cruelty
received the most notice. This awareness of the extreme brutality appeared in
both the Muslim author Evliya Chelebi (for the Rozhiki revolt of 1655) and in
the authors describing the massacre at Batak. However, two factors seem most
apparent. First, that most sadistic individual s [types (a)–(c) in Dicks’ scale of
aggressiveness ] did not always retain the same high level of sadistic behavior,
but eventually “burned out.” The more directly involved in butchery and sadistic
acts, the sooner these men would decrease or lose their sadistic drive. Second,
some percentage of individual s at the scene of the massacre found themselves
unable to engage in sadistic acts. That is to say, at least in their attitudes,
the soldiers present at massacres probably belonged to a wide scale of
differing orientations as described by Dicks. One should note, for example,

that many Ottoman soldiers preferred to plunder rather than engage in
sadistic behavior. If sadism dominated the command structure and motivation
of an irregular unit—and such an attitud e may not have always been the
case—a suitable escape hatch for non-sadists would have included looting
without killing. Evliya Chelebi noted that some soldiers—especially irregulars—
gloried in killing disarmed captives, while many others, including Melek Ahmed
Pasha, felt remorse at the execution of Rozhiki prisoners and similarly felt
emotional relief when the executions came to an end. Consequently , one could
nd similar variables among German and Ottoman soldiers with differing
individual statistics based upon military culture (beheading the enemy was
both sanctioned and practiced traditionally from the time of David and Goliath
to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in Middle Eastern armies), variations over
time, and the in uence of either Christian or Islamic ethic upon individual
soldiers.
The massacre at Batak did not constitute an isolated event. Such terrible
occurrences happened frequently in the Ottoman Empire. Christians, Jews,
Muslims, 30 and other groups fell victim to such attacks, often sponsored by the
Ottoman government or undertaken unilaterally by the government’s surrogates.
On numerous occasions, one subject group or another made some such attacks
in efforts to destroy one or another neighbor. The sparse historical record leaves
the impression that massacres and atrocities were isolated events, especially if
one reads Ottoman histories. The revolt of the Rozhiki Kurds in 1065/1655
presents an exception to the rule in the historical record. Unwillingness to come
to terms with the rebellious acts of subjects indicates that the Ottoman elite
could not engage in realistic analysis of the political, social, cultural, or military
trends and developments in most periods. Consequently , the absence of a record
pertaining to revolts should not surprise the observer. When one nds a record
of a revolt recorded in some depth, its study would contribute to a broader
picture of developments inside the Ottoman Empire. The author wishes to urge
upon the reader the fact that the historical record of state–subject relations in eras
of civic rupture remains fragmentary, and completely uncertain, except for a few
events such as the Rozhiki revolt, the Greek Revolution, certain other Balkan
384
revolts, and especially the massacre at Batak. Consequently, the Rozhiki revolt
would present a useful precedent and parallel for understandin g the massacre at
Batak. While many elements separate these two revolts from one another,
showing them to be different than one another at various levels, one factor binds
them together. In both instances, one can see variants of a destroyer mentality
at work.
Studies that limit themselves solely to the examination of one victim group or
another fail to arrive at a sophisticated understanding of the destroyer mentality
that caused murder and mayhem. In such studies, the perpetrator has become
demonized . Victims and their sympathizers have suffered from demonization in
the minds of the perpetrators, and suffering from such demonization have
reciprocated by painting their torturers with the same brush of demonization.
One can never question the evil of the destroyer orientation, but quite often this
attitude has grown inside an ordinary person, who, in the normal circumstances
of family and friends, may even appear normal and loving. To portray the
destroyer as a devil alone not only projects something equally violent upon the
perpetrator (and by extension, perhaps, upon innocent ones who did not commit
atrocities), but also results in a failure to grasp the true and underlying realities
of the destroyer’s personality. This contracoup projection also avoids any
understanding of the conditions that might provoke the worst elements of the
perpetrator’s sadistic inclination that could unleash itself upon one victim group
or another. Reducing the perpetrator to his evil aspect alone cannot help explain
why sadistic inclination s have emerged.
Research into the Rozhiki Kurdish revolt of 1065 AH/1655 CE presents
important insights into Ottoman military customs and operations in regard to
psychologica l perceptions of the enemy, and measures taken to destroy enemy
resistance. A scale of destructive attitudes among soldiers emerges from such a
study. Table 2 illustrates this complex of issues relative to the idea of causing
destruction and death.
All of these attitudes represented aspects of the destroyer mentality in relation
to killing and destruction of the enemy. The suppression of the Rozhiki revolt
ranks in the middle range of orientation II: the Destroyer mentality imposed
selective killing upon the defeated and defenseless enemy. The massacre at
Batak belonged to level I as indicated in Table 2 because the conquerors of the
village attempted to kill every man, woman, and child in the place. While the
two events differed in the extent of the conquerors’ killing, they both represented
cases in which a de nitive destroyer mentality emerged.
Ottoman and modern Turkish writers pay very little attention to revolts in
Kurdistan in general during the seventeenth century. This unwillingness to
describe the Kurdish revolts continued throughout the nineteenth century into the
twentieth. 32 The chief Ottoman source for the Rozhiki war presents a most
illuminatin g insight into the inner workings of Ottoman soldiers on campaign.
The renowned Ottoman traveler Evliya Chelebi visited his kinsman Melek
Ahmed Pasha at Van, and accompanied the Ottoman general and governor of
Van district on the campaign directed against the center of the revolt at Bidlis
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JAMES J. REID
Table 2. A scale of destructive attitudes among soldiers
Attitude Action
Intense hatred of the enemy or strong Dismemberment of the dead and

malevolent feelings toward the victim wounded
Rejection of the enemy as human or
civilized
I. Destroyer mentality Annihilation of the enemy
Genocidal destruction
II. Destroyer mentality Kill and commit atrocities
a. Destructive annihilation of one
subgroup
b. Selective killing of numerous members

in a given community
c. Occasional muders accompanying
widespread looting and destruction (or
the Vendetta)
III. Destroyer mentality Intend to destroy, but restrict to looting
No Annihilation, looting and destruction
of property
Showing respect to bodies of the enemy
dead
Intense atred of the enemy Grudging willingness to accept enemy as
human 31
in the year 1065 AH/1655 CE. His eyewitness account provides a unique and
valuable source for a military offensive in Kurdistan.33
The Rozhiki revolt originated from multiple causes. First and foremost, Abdal
Khan the chieftain of the Rozhiki clan was the hereditary ruler of Bidlis who
maintained his own private army by arrangement with the Ottoman state. He
became isolated in his dealings with the Ottoman governor, Melek Ahmed Pasha
(who resided in Van), and in his association with other Kurdish chieftains of his
own status. As usually happened in Kurdistan, various individuals and factions
manipulated Abdal Khan into an untenable position. His foes had placed him in
a bad light and forced him to revolt.34 Secondly, Abdal Khan’s family had
traditionall y accepted Shi’a Islam, or a mystical Islam amenable to Shi’ism, and
often favored an alliance with the rulers of Iran, claiming leadership in the Shi’a
Islamic world. In addition to this anti-Sunni Islamic and anti-Ottoman religious
stance, the Khans of Bidlis became the patrons and protectors of many heterodox
and non-Islamic movements existing in Kurdistan. Evliya Chelebi’s account
noted the presence of many Yezidi Kurdish sectarians in Abdal Khan’s army.35
Once malicious discord between Abdal Khan and the Ottoman governor
Melek Ahmed Pasha drove the Khan into insurrection, Melek Ahmed Pasha led
his army, including Ottoman troops, irregular soldiers, and Kurdish private
386
armies to Bidlis. Abdal Khan had built great stone redoubts from huge boulders
around the circumference of Bidlis and its old city walls.36 He had levied a large
army of Kurdish infantry, many of whom carried muskets and manned these
outer defensive works. After some days of establishin g a position around Bidlis,
during which preliminary skirmishes erupted, the Ottoman general, Melek
Ahmed, formed his army into a nal assault force. These soldiers stormed the
outer defensive perimeter, and in hand-to-hand engagements, defeated many
pockets of resistance. With victory in sight, most of the Ottoman troops and their
Kurdish auxiliaries in the rst wave ceased ghting and rushed into Bidlis to loot
the city, and perhaps to rape, or even kill defenseless survivors. Melek Ahmed
Pasha had kept a large reserve force, perhaps with the looting impulse of his
soldiers in mind. When rebel soldiers who survived the rst assault regrouped,
the initial victory seemed in danger of reversal. The second wave, including
Evliya himself, attacked and defeated all remaining rebels.
Some features of this con ict have interest for the issues of the destroyer
mentality, annihilativ e tendencies in conquering soldiers, and the reactions of the
oppressed and victims. The general Melek Ahmed Pasha may have had ne-
crophiliac tendencies, but restrained them and ultimately showed mercy to some
survivors. The dream of the pasha described by Evliya suggests that the Ottoman
commander functioned mentally in the mindset of the most extreme sadism—
Fromm’s necrophilia.37 The night before the main assault on Bidlis, Melek
Ahmed had a dream [ru’ya]. He recited this dream for his kinsman Evliya, and
asked the erstwhile traveler to interpret its meaning for him. Dream interpret-
ation had become a “science” in Middle Eastern cultures. Certain images had
certain meanings. Thus, a dreamer who saw abundant feces of any type in his
dream would become immensely wealthy according to the Middle Eastern
canons of dream interpretation . According to Erich Fromm, however, the sight
of feces in a dream determined that the dreamer possessed the most extreme
traits of sadism, or necrophilia .38 Such disparitie s between the Middle Eastern
canon and the psychiatric canon of dream interpretation must give warning that
the analyst should proceed with caution in most cases. The mere fact that the
Middle Eastern canon would suggest certain possibilitie s for certain dreams
might have encouraged people to dream in given patterns. The dream of Melek
Ahmed Pasha, however, possessed a de nite meaning for both Middle Eastern
and psychiatric approaches. The Ottoman general dreamed that a squadron [alay]
of black ants [kara karinjalar] assaulted his foot. One huge ant in particular
marched up his shin. At this affront, Melek Ahmed Pasha felt offended. A weak
and thin ant charged aggressively through a mob of 1,000 other attacking ants,
climbed upon the pasha’s foot, and bit him. This bite gave him much pain.
Subsequent to this act, Melek Ahmed rolled up his pant leg, and brushed off all
the ants that had crawled upon his foot, killing this group. Survivors remained,
and he gave sixteen ants to Evliya to restore to their nest. He gave more ants to
his of cer Demirji-oghlu to place back in their nest as well. In anger, the pasha
took his vengeance by crushing 50 or 60 of the defenseless ants with his shoe.
This vindictive killing of defeated and defenseless ants showed the inner
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JAMES J. REID
workings of Melek Ahmed’s mind.39 Instead of showing mercy to all of the

defeated ants, he killed a majority of the survivors. The most basic image of the
dream—the ants—became a symbol for Rozhiki Kurdish soldiers in Evliya’s
interpretation of that dream. The Ottoman commander’s dream, and Evliya’s
interpretation had bestialized humans, that is, had converted them into beasts, in
this case, insigni cant insects that the general could crush easily underfoot. The
comparison of humans with insects has equal validity in both Western and
Eastern cultures. Melek Ahmed Pasha, who despised his own irregular soldiers,
compared them with vermin [hasharatlar]. Rozhiki Kurdish rebels possessed the
image of ants in this hierarchy of dehumanized subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
The demotion of humans into insects—dehumanization—marks an orientation
inclined toward a destroyer mentality.
The use to which Evliya put this dream proved even more revealing. At the
end of the battle for Bidlis, 1,400 Rozhiki rebels continued to resist from the
town’s old citadel. The Ottoman second in command, Yusuf Kethuda, freed 700
of these men when they raised the banner of surrender. Another 700 continued
to resist after the raising of the ag. Melek Ahmed Pasha and his of cers kept
these men for execution because they had technically violated the terms of
amnesty [eman] extended to surrendered (in del) soldiers in the Ottoman version
of the Islamic law of war. Ottoman soldiers treated these victims with extreme
brutality with the concurrence of the pasha. Melek Ahmed lacked any com-
passion for these men, spoke sternly to them, and even debated in the presence
of the victim whether he should have the man killed , or spare him.40 Ottoman
executioners not only killed 70 men by sword, but cut them into pieces, placing
their dismembered [kelle pache] corpses before the pasha for his approval, which
he gave. It was customary in the Ottoman army for the pasha to give a reward
to his men for bringing him the heads of dead enemies. As he frequently did,
Evliya introduced a bit of fantasy into the scenes he described . He stated that an
executioner could not kill one man, who bore a charm [vefk] that protected him
from injury or death. Aside from this example, it is not likely that he would
invent the massacre of 700 prisoners, much less to show that his kinsman Melek
Ahmed had ordered such mass killings. The entire process identi ed a sadistic
mentality in Melek Ahmed and his soldiers. They delighted in keeping their
victims waiting for the moment of death, and in playing cat and mouse with
them. 41
Evliya Chelebi, who had heard the pasha’s recital of his dream about the ants
that morning, began to intercede at this point. He brought the dream to the
pasha’s recollection, and indicated to him that the clear interpretation of these
events was before him at this moment. Just as he had killed only a percentage
of the surviving ants in his dream, said Evliya, the portent showed to him that
he would kill only a percentage of the Kurdish prisoners. Once Qara ‘Ali went
free, 630 of the recalcitrant 700 remained alive. Evliya interceded again, and
reminded his kinsman that in the dream the pasha had given Evliya 16 ants to
save. Melek Ahmed hesitated at rst, but relented. Evliya, through some
alchemical process of reinterpretation , converted the 16 into 60. These spared
388
ones taken aside, the general ordered the executions to begin again. The
executions proved even more brutal than before. Evliya heard the shouts [feryad]
and the mournful wailings [vavela] of those coming under the blade with much
anxiety and regret. These killings assumed the proportions of the Judgment Day
[ruz-i mahsherden] and the eld where God resurrected the dead [meydan-i
neshirden] to the eyewitness Evliya. Evliya called the irregular soldiers carrying
out the death sentence butchers [kassab] and vermin [hasharatlar]. Ultimately,
Melek Ahmed himself could no longer bear the killing, and his more human
instincts prevailed according to Evliya, who stated that the pasha saved the
remaining 400 prisoners slated for execution.42
This series of events shows that Melek Ahmed possessed a necrophilia c
tendency both in the dream, and in his brutal treatment of prisoners he intended
to kill. In terms of a scale for the destroyer mentality, he potentially existed at

the highest level in moments of inspiration in that direction, but could not retain
such an intense level of destructive vindictiveness . He relented from his
killer-torturer stance, and spared lives, but not before putting these men through
the torture of anticipating death for a lengthy period. Even though Evliya
participated in the pasha’s sadistic fantasy, he did so with great regret. Evliya,
according to his own account, wished to save lives. It is clear, then, that the
narrator and eyewitness of the battle and the killings did not relish either war or
killing, and that he did not possess an abnormal sadistic mentality. This narrative
of the Rozhiki war demonstrates that sadism existed in both the commander and
his soldiers, that not all Ottoman soldiers possessed the most intense form of
necrophilia, and that Ottoman culture did not function on an endemic character
trait of sadism. If Melek Ahmed Pasha and some of his soldiers behaved as
sadists, not all soldiers possessed a sadistic attitude, and certainly Evliya and
some of the lesser Ottoman commanders hoped to act with mercy and com-
passion. Evliya saw the killings as a terrifying experience for himself personally,
since he equated the screams and wailings of the dying men with Judgment Day.
Sadistic behavior existed in this instance as the product of institutiona l attitudes
and practices, as a result of the level of hatred, and as in some or even most
cases as a response associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in the perpetra-
tor. Sadistic attitudes can exist both in individuals with signi cant war stress
disorder (the case of Hitler), or in individuals with no signi cant war experience
of any kind (the case of Himmler).
One other incident of the Rozhiki campaign of 1655 gives signi cant insight
into the processes of the destroyer mentality, and the struggles of the victim to
resist. As Melek Ahmed Pasha’s army established its camp before Bidlis prior
to the siege, Abdal Khan made an attempt to assassinate the Ottoman comman-
der. He formed a suicide squad of about 20 Rozhiki soldiers who would in ltrate
the Ottoman army camp [ordu], locate the tent of Melek Ahmed Pasha, and
attempt to attack the general with their swords. This act of desperation showed
that the Kurdish rebels had become feverishly desperate, and that Ottoman
troops committed atrocities against civilians as they marched through Rozhiki
territory before they encountered rebel forces. The assassinatio n attempt began
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JAMES J. REID
with a huge Kurdish soldier riding to Melek Ahmed’s tent, before which Evliya
sat relaxing in the evening calm. This soldier asked a man near Evliya in
Kurdish “Hani basha ye te?” [“Where is your pasha?”]. No one imagined that
an enemy soldier could ride unscathed into the middle of the Ottoman army
camp, so that everyone became confused . To emphasize his aggressive intention,
the soldier cut a tent-rope nearby with his sword. Evliya intervened by directing
the Kurd to the tent of Yusuf Kethuda, the second-in-command . The horseman
then rode to Yusuf Kethuda’s pavilion, attacked him, but failing to kill Yusuf,
fought a ferocious battle with his guards. Twenty of his companions rode into
the melee, fought with equal ferocity, and died each one surrounded by stabbing
and slashing Ottoman soldiers.43
The assassins had taken a vow to surrender their lives in return for Abdal
Khan’s oath to give these men a handsome reward before their mission began.
The khan would pay these soldiers’ children an annuity in perpetuity, thereby
ensuring the daring attackers that their families would have a good life. Of these
men, Evliya stated that they had become heedless of their heads [serden gechdi].
This phrase suggested more than thoughtlessness , but represented an abandon-
ment of the soldier’s attachment to life. The men of the suicid e mission were
willing to risk the release of their souls into an eternity of torment (after
decapitation) in order to make their children’s lives better.44 Even more telling
for the desperation of the rebels’ actions was the curse that the gigantic Kurdish
soldier shouted after he asked for the pasha’s location. He shouted in Kurdish:
“Ey keranji niy may gay pasha-ye te!” [“Hey donkeys! He fucked our women
that pasha of yours!”].45 This angry curse may have had much truth in it. The
arrangements by the khan did not include the soldiers’ wives. Could these
women have died during or after violent rape assaults? Or, just as valid, could
these women have fallen into shame after Ottoman soldiers raped them (without
killing them)? In any event, the assassin’s curse demonstrated a consciousnes s
that such events occurred, and he or someone he knew had fallen victim to such
an attack on his family honor. The desperation of their attempt de nitely
expresses an unwillingness to live. These men who undertook such a daring
attempt to assassinate the enemy general, had already surrendered life. They had
ceased to expect that their lives would continue, and they anticipated with
certainty that they would soon die. This death wish must have emerged in them
not as the result of fanaticism, but as a consequence of some traumatic
experience such as the death of a wife, including a rape that brought shame to
the man and his family. He could expiate for his inability to defend his wife, and
his family honor, by sacri cing his own life in an effort to destroy the enemy.
This self-destructiv e inclination took the form of reckless daring in a circum-
stance that ensured certain death. That only 21 men felt willing to expend their
lives in this manner shows that a few only could foster such an intense death
wish. Many others, however, developed a depressive melancholy (melal in
Evliya’s text),46 while many deserted and a few even became treacherous
informants [dil] to the enemy. Evliya thus identi ed with some sophisticatio n a
wide range of reactions among the oppressed and among potential victims.
390
One deed of destruction that indicates a sadistic mentality in some Ottoman

soldiers was the act of decapitation. After the capture of Rozhiki positions , many
enemy soldiers had fallen in defending their redoubts. Evliya described the
terrible scene after the ghting had ended and documented in the process the
dismemberment of dead and wounded enemy soldiers.
Several thousand others lay wounded and grovelling in the dust of abasement, sighing and
moaning, crying “Ah” or “Yallah” or “Muhammad Resul Allah.” But the merciless soldiers
[’asker-i bi-eman], their eyes a ame, paid no head to these mournaful sounds. They let
their victim’s head roll like a polo ball [kelleleri top-i chevgen gibi ghaltan olan] and either
took the head, or else, so as not to be burdened, cut off the nose and ears and stuffed these
into their scabbard before going after another head. And so these were warriors who
presented the Pasha with twenty ears and ten noses, or fteen or twenty noses and forty
ears.47
This passage clearly indicates that Ottoman, Hakkari and other Kurdish auxil-
iaries, and irregular troops decapitated both dead and wounded men. No
distinction between living and dead victims appears in this passage. The
viciousness of the deed became more pronounced with the realization that living
men, already suffering from wounds, became subjected to horrible dismember-
ment before they died. That such battle eld events and atrocities occurred in
many other circumstances as a common method of operation is ascertained by
numerous other references in texts about the Ottoman army and its campaigns.48
The bene t in studying comparable events removed in place and time from
one another is that one can understand that a general pattern of behavior existed
in Ottoman military practice. Soldiers followed many of the same campaign and
battle eld practices in 1655 and 1876. If the military culture of the Ottoman
army and its auxiliaries differed in many respects between these two eras, many
cultural attitudes and traditions did not disappear. The standing Ottoman army of
1655 differed totally from the European-style Ottoman army of 1876. Yet, both
eras saw the use of irregular cavalry and infantry as a supplement to the standing
army. Likewise, certain brutal practices such as decapitation or mutilation of the
dead marked both periods. Ottoman soldiers in both times did not show mercy
or compassion to the enemy dead or wounded. Aggressive behavior toward
enemy soldiers and civilians of all types had existed prior to the nineteenth
century. The massacre at Batak showed, however, that violent destruction could
be carried to an extremely vehement level beyond any prior destructiveness , as
terrible as that pattern may have been.
Massacre at Batak, 187649

The massacre at Batak occurred during the course of the Bulgarian insurrection.
This article will not examine the historical dimensions of that revolution because
the avowed intention of this article is the study of genocidal processes. In brief,
this revolution developed as a link in various revolts that swept the Balkan
peoples during the mid-1870s (Montenegro, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, and other
391
JAMES J. REID
places revolted). These revolts happened as a response to independence drives

among various Slavic peoples under Ottoman rule, the desire for an autonomous
church (in the case of Bulgaria), and to some extent as a reaction to the
Pan-Slavist ideology of imperial Russia.50
Ottoman troops suppressed the Bulgarian insurrection with much violence. A
British of cer who accompanied the Ottoman army in its campaign of 1877
reported that numerous massacres had occurred, especially in the Tunja valley.
“The enormity of the crimes committed in this and other districts made it
dif cult to credit them. But the proofs were undeniable ; and I believe, so far
from the reports being generally exaggerated , that a large proportion of them
have never been brought to light at all.”51 Fife-Cookson spoke generally about
the period 1876–1877. The atrocities of war appeared to the reading public in
their starkest and most terrible image at Batak. Zahari Stoyanov wrote a history
of the revolt at Batak, in which he described the means by which an Ottoman
irregular force subjected the village, and massacred almost all its inhabitants.
The commander of the forces that massacred the population of Batak in May,
1876 was a chieftain of irregular cavalry named Ahmed Aqa. He belonged to the
Circassian military colonies that the Ottoman state had established throughout
the empire, including areas of Bulgaria. Januarius MacGahan, an Irish-American
newspaperman on assignment for the London Daily News, had traveled to Batak
along with the Baring–Schuyler commission to ascertain the validity of the
massacres. He considered the perpetrators of the Batak massacre, and other such
mass murders in Bulgarian villages elsewhere, to have been at least a mixture of
Circassians and “Turkish” villagers mobilized by Ahmed Aqa and other chief-
tains to attack their Christian neighbors.52 Ahmed Aqa held the rank of yuzbashi,
or “commander of a band” (yuz literally means “100”), a title taken by the
chieftain of irregular rural police called zaptiyes.53 He thus held an of cial rank
in the Ottoman rural constabulary.54 All published narratives of the Batak
massacre, where 8,000 died according to MacGahan, placed Ahmed Aqa in
command of the perpetrating forces. Forced by the hue and cry raised by
MacGahan’s publication s of his trip to Batak with the Baring–Schuyler Com-
mission, Ottoman authorities and writers had to admit that the massacres had
occurred. They placed the entire blame for these actions upon Ahmed Aqa,
calling him a brigand leader [ele-bashi]. To emphasize the innocence of the
Ottoman government in this affair, of cials claimed that the general Shevket
Pasha had received orders to take a column of regular troops and punish the
“brigand ” for his terrible depredations.55 MacGahan stated in no uncertain terms,
however, that Ahmed Aqa had received a promotion to the rank of pasha for his
terrible actions at Batak.56
On April 21, 1876 Ahmed Aqa rode into Tatar Bazarjik, Bulgaria ac-
companied by several irregular policemen, or zaptiyes. He and his men rode to
the governor’s residence, or konak, bringing news that would set the governor’s
palace and the town astir. Muslim and Bulgarian shop-owners learned of the
news, and closed their shops. The streets cleared, and alarm gripped the
population . Rumors had spread that Ottoman soldiers would massacre Bulgarian
392
villagers over a broad area in this spring season. Bulgarian Christians, living in
alarm, concocted plans to defend themselves. The men of Batak village, fearing
the worst for themselves and their families, decided to revolt under the in uence
of rumors about the massacres, and other rumors that spoke of a general revolt
of Bulgarian villages.57 The Batakis met on April 22, 1876 in the village
schoolhouse , discussed the rumors of impending massacres, and agreed to take
action before disaster would befall them. The news of their decision spread
immediately throughout the village, the people became excited, ran about, and
someone began ringing the bells in the village church. Young men walked
around the village alley ways carrying weapons.
These events of late April, 1876 emerged amid the ambiguity and alarm fed
by rumors. Muslims on the one hand suspected Bulgarians of collusion with the
traditional enemy of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia. Bulgarians on the

other hand suspected that Muslims would attempt to annihilate them. The
possibilitie s of violent altercation grew every day. According to various author-
ities, rumors develop as the news of an event or a future development spreads
from the witness or the source to successive levels of repetition. Allport and
Postman identi ed three psychologica l steps in the transmission of testimony and
rumor: perception, remembrance, and report. Persons who pass any “news”
around repeat these stages in a possibly endless chain composed of many links.
“As the complex process unfold s itself, progressing from initial perception to
nal report, many fascinating transformations occur as the original sensory
impressions, past memories, and emotions inextricably fuse. Selective forgetting
and subjective distortion inevitably change the values of nearly all events in the
outer world.”58 They noted further that signi cant previous experiences
in uenced the persons who transmitted the rumor in progressive steps outward
from the primary source. Allport and Postman state further that habit, emotion,
and cultural convention helped to alter the original eyewitness or source account
into a new transformation. The perception of an event or an original discussion
becomes reduced to nothing, while the third stage—reporting the news—in-
creases. In this last stage, distortions of remembrance, and the intrusion of the
tellers’ habits, cultural conventions , or emotional inclinations increase as forces
altering the original account.59 Of the rumor types listed by Kapferer, the rumors
that provoked Bulgarian village insurrections in 1876 resulted from events, the
meaning of which was ambiguous.60 Rumor became a decisive fuse mechanism
for the destructive maelstrom that swept over Bulgaria in Spring, 1876. The
pernicious policy of press and publication censorship imposed by the Ottoman
state created conditions of rumor that provoked the revolutionary explosion of
1876. Censorship and the attempt to suppress ideas merely created the aura of
mystery and uncertainty.61 Rumor based upon the fantasies of persons and
communities ourished in these ambiguous situations , and caused an even more
potent revolutionary outbreak than if the public had received information from
a sound source.
The people of Batak and surrounding mountain villages, living in areas remote
from the centers of Ottoman power in their province, lived at the end of any
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JAMES J. REID
chain of transmission . Even factual narratives became distorted beyond recogni-

tion by the time any “news” arrived at these highland villages. These mountain
peasants had long cultivated a sense of independence , and it seems likely that the
double rumors of planned massacres and Bulgarian insurrections would have
created a spontaneous impulse either to rebel or to ee into hiding, depending
upon the relative strength of one or another rumor. One might also suspect the
idea that Russia would protect fellow Slavic peoples, combined with a belief that
other Bulgarians had taken the path of revolution, had empowered the Batakis
to declare a revolt.
The insurrectionarie s agreed that Batak would become the center of the revolt
for several surrounding villages, including Rakitovo, Kamenitza, and Peshtera.
Leaders of the Batak revolt included Peter Goranov, Stefan Trenda lov, Vranko
Dimitrov, and others according to Stoyanov’s account. A small force of 200

Ottoman troops took position near Batak on April 24, and a Bulgarian named
Peter from Rakitovo brought a message to the Batakis requesting a meeting
between the Ottoman commander and the rebel chiefs at Toumbata. The rebel
leaders agreed to discuss terms, and sent Vranko Dimitrov, Ivan Bozhin, and
Peter Trenda lov as their emissaries. In their meeting with the Ottoman envoys,
these three stated their village had revolted and presented demands. They desired
an independent life, and refused to accept the status of reaya, or “subject people”
that they considered demeaning and degrading to themselves. They further
expressed a desire to live in peace with their neighbors, including any “Turks”
who remained peaceful. The Bataki rebels also demanded that the “Turks” of
Rakitovo, Kostandovo, Derkovo, and Banya release the Christian Bulgarians in
their villages from servitud e within 24 hours. In addition, they demanded that
their former masters provid e them with wagons to carry these peoples’ belong-
ings to Batak. If the Turkish villagers, whose representatives also attended this
meeting, failed to take the steps demanded by the envoys from Batak, then the
Batakis would burn their villages and drive them away. Such demands came
from an unrealistic idea among the Batakis about how independent they could
become, and also to what extent they could defeat their neighbors. This revolt
possessed a powerful delusional kernel at its heart that enabled the villagers to
believe they could build an independent and unassailable utopia that neither the
local “Turks” nor the Ottoman army could reduce or destroy. The Turkish
villagers agreed to these demands, thus feeding the delusion even more. The
Bulgarian villagers from the villages of Rakitovo, Derkovo, Banya, and Kostan-
dovo did not accept the Batakis as their saviors, and sent messengers to Batak
to tell the rebels that they did not intend to join the rebellion or abrogate their
relationships with the Turks in their villages. Stoyanov suspected that their
Turkish masters had coerced these villagers into making a refusal. The envoys
of Batak did not use force in an attempt to sway the other villages to their
course, and continued to insist that they wished to remain on friendly terms with
their Turkish neighbors. Exhilaration swept the village of Batak, and the idea of
independence made the villagers sing, dance, and rejoice in a celebration on
April 30.62
394
On the evening of April 30, according to Stoyanov, “countless bashi-bazouks

with their ag and under the command of the terrible Ahmed Baroutanliya,
appeared to the southwest of the village, at a place called Petrovo Burdo.”63 A
preliminary negotiation between Ahmed Aqa and the Batakis failed. Peter
Dimitrov led 100 armed Batakis to the promontory called Vlashka Mogila,
one-half hour outsid e Batak in the direction of Petrovo Burdo. At the sight of
Dimitrov’s band, the bashi bozuks gave wild war cries in an attempt to frighten
the villagers. Bulgarian sympathizers with these forces went to the rebels, and
encouraged them to turn over their weapons and return to their village.
According to Stoyanov, some young men left this band and returned to their
homes. The large Bataki band at the hill called Sveti Georgy also abandoned
their position on that height and returned home. The bashi bozuks saw the
disbandment of this force. Meanwhile, Peter Goranov left control of his armed
group to Sera m Milev and attempted to rally the other detachments of Batakis
who had abandoned their positions . Many of the Batakis had become disheart-
ened, but their more resolute comrades attempted to stem the tide of desertion.
One group of rebels established itself in the Middle Graveyard of the village
with the intention of ghting the bashi bozuks. One rebel killed the bashi bozuk
standard bearer with a shot from his gun. This force of irregulars then moved
against the opposite side of the village, where another shot felled the new
standard bearer. Anger took hold of the bashi bozuks, who red a volley at the
villagers.
These bashi bozuk troopers carried multiple-sho t French and Belgian ri es
(supplied to them by the Ottoman government) that were far superior to any
weapons carried by the Batakis.64 Despite their dominance in repower and
numbers, the Ottoman irregulars fought with the defenders for four hours. More
irregulars reinforced the bashi bozuks of Ahmed Aqa, swelling the numbers of
the attackers. In Stoyanov’s narrative, the bashi bozuks counted seven dead and
some wounded men, while the men of Batak had counted only a few wounded
men among their number. A renewed bashi bozuk assault created despair among
the Batakis, and many began to lose hope. On May 1, Bulgarian collaborators
assisted the bashi bozuks to gain secret entry into Batak, promising them that the
villagers would surrender their weapons. Some of the ghters did give their
weapons over to the irregulars. The bashi bozuks, axes in hand, beheaded each
man who handed his weapon to an irregular soldier. Women, children, and some
men made their way to the upper end of Batak, and told of these occurrences to
the residents there. Seeing no hope for surrender, the survivors vowed to ght
the invaders to the last man. With this avowal, an exceedingly desperate battle
exploded around the entire perimeter of the beleaguered village. Volleys of
bullets red by both sides in the battle constantly lled the air. Bashi bozuk
casualties amounted to 46 men, while the Batakis lost two killed and three
wounded. Late in the night of May 1, Ahmed Aqa ordered his men to retreat to
their camp, where he held a council of war. This meeting produced the resolve
to exterminate the villagers. Some members of the council meeting had become
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JAMES J. REID
so dispirited that they argued the irregulars should leave and return to their
homes.
On May 2, Ahmed Aqa devised a ruse for seizing Batak. He ordered his men
to withhold their re in the morning, and sent a Wallachian envoy to discuss
terms for Batak’s surrender. This “ambassador” persuaded many that Ahmed
Aqa held compassionate intentions . He stated that if the villagers gave their
weapons to the bashi bozuks, Ahmed would spare their lives.65 After this peace
offering, the irregulars would disband and return to their villages. Georgi
Sera mov and Angel Kovlakov among the Batakis argued for acceptance of
Ahmed’s offer. All ghting had ceased during this peace parley. Angel
Kovlakov went with the Wallachian to Ahmed Aqa, who presented kind and
optimistic assurances to the Bataki. Kovlakov returned to Batak, and explained
Ahmed’s terms and assurances in some detail to his compatriots in the village.
He felt convinced that Ahmed Aqa meant to cease operations. One faction of the
Batakis became seduced by Ahmed’s “kind” offer. These men agreed to hand
over their weapons. Tranda l Toshev, Peter Trenda lov, and Peter Banchev led
the largest faction that refused surrender of any type. They said that too many
of the enemy had died to expect any mercy. Debate swayed too and fro until
those favoring surrender of the weapons became the majority. The Batakis
loaded the village weapons on three carts, and the village leaders including
Angel Kavlakov, Tranda l Toshev, Peter Trenda lov, Vranko Dimitrov, and
Peter Kavedjiev took these carts to Ahmed Aqa. Ahmed Aqa accused the Batakis
of hiding their best weapons in the village, and sent 30 men to search the village.
The Batak delegation now realized that the whole village had fallen into grave
danger. The search party returned to Ahmed Aqa with nothing. Angel Kavlakov
attempted to reason with the irregular chieftain, but to no avail. Ahmed’s men
surrounded them, and removed the once-hopeful village leaders with the inten-
tion of burning them alive. Angel Kavlakov had secretly collaborated with
Ahmed Aqa during the ghting, but instead of receiving a reward, Ahmed’s men
shot him.66 When news of their leaders’ deaths reached the villagers in Batak,
they fell into a state of panic, and ed to church or schoolhouse , there to await
the end that all had now come to expect. The bashi bozuks rode violently into
the village. Most did not stop to loot. They broke into the schoolhous e with little
dif culty, and began to kill one after another at the door. They moved slowly
into the crowd that had sought asylum in the school, butchering the helpless
villagers as they proceeded. Troopers took the priest and teacher from cupboard s
on the wall, and cut them to pieces in a slow and agonizing death. These
rage- lled troopers had slaughtered about 50, when they abandoned the school
in order to burn it, with about 200 surviving villagers inside.67 These villagers
had taken refuge in the basement, and as the building burned, they screamed.
The irregulars had not detected this group previously, and learned of them only
as they screamed in the midst of this immolation. According to Stoyanov, the
bashi bozuks held only one regret for these villagers’ terrible death, namely that
they would lose the loot that these people carried with them.68
Bashi bozuk assailants attempted to scale the wall surrounding the church, but
396
at rst some Bulgarian resistors knocked a number of the attackers down, took
their ri es and yataghans, and killed them. With these weapons in hand, they
continued their desperate and hopeless resistance. Finding their way over the
wall obstructed , the bashi bozuks began to bore holes into the churchyard wall.
As soldiers aimed their ri es at the desperate villagers inside, some women ran
at the guns, and attempted to seize them from the hands of their owners. Most
of these women died in their attempt to take a ri e. Soon, the irregulars had
many ri es aimed at the Bulgarians within the courtyard of the church, and they
killed men, women, and children indiscriminately with their ri e re. Stoyanov
wrote that the wailing of the victims lled the churchyard with the sounds of
grief and death. Some begged for mercy, others begged for a quick death from
the bashi bozuk attackers. When a few women ran to the gate begging for mercy,
they opened it in their effort to implore for mercy from the gun-wielding
attackers. The bashi bozuks rushed into the yard yataghans in hand, cutting
down everyone in sight regardless of age or sex. Surviving eyewitnesses told
Stoyanov that they had heard the victims scream as the yataghans cut into them.
They also heard bashi bozuk of cers shout orders to the men. The nauseating
sound of steel cleaving esh and bone lled their ears. Yataghans, they said,
made a different sound when their blades struck the bones of older people. These
troops slashed away at their victims all during the night. The assailants formed
into shifts, so that soldiers fatigued by their slicing actions could obtain rest.
Victims covered the ground . The soldiers continued killing. Victims crowded
into the church seeking the last place of asylum. After a night of constant killing,
the butchers had just arrived at the church doors. Bashi bozuks searched for
plunder among the dead and wounded while their comrades continued to kill at
the doors of the church. The looters stripped the better clothes off the corpses
of the dead, and searched for valuables.69 At dawn on May 3, the bashi bozuks
stopped killing for a period. They stood and surveyed the rows of dead sprawled
in the churchyard . According to Stoyanov’s eyewitness accounts, these men
made grossly insulting remarks about the dead, telling obscene jokes to one
another about the positions in which some of the dead had fallen. They looked
at some of the young women whom they had slaughtered , commenting that they
had regrettably killed them before they had the opportunit y to rape them.70 These
men ignored the pleas of the mortally wounded, and permitted them to languish
in pain and misery.
Many survivors cowered in the church anticipating the butchery to begin
anew. They had closed and barred the doors, denying entry to their would-be
killers. The bashi bozuks attempted to break the doors down. Failing in their
attempt to do so, some gunmen climbed to the windows, and began shooting.
Each bullet killed several at once. Cries for mercy brought the response that if
they opened the doors and surrendered , the bashi bozuks would spare their lives.
Batakis opened the doors, but the irregular soldiers merely trooped into the
church and began swinging their yataghans again. The killers tortured their
victims to force them to reveal where they had secreted their treasures. When
they heard what they wanted, the soldiers killed their miserable victims. Men
397
JAMES J. REID
ri ed through their victims’ clothes in a search for valuables. Many Batakis
escaped death by lying among the corpses and feigning death.71
On May 5, ‘Ali Beg ordered Ahmed Aqa to make a list of the dead men, and
another list of the widows who had survived .72 Many remained alive in the
church on May 5, and the troopers escorted this group into the courtyard . They
separated the men from the women. He ordered his men to slaughter the male
survivors. About 300 Batakis died in this way. Finally, on May 6, this horde of
destroyer-murderers had abandoned their kill, leaving it to scavengers who
pilfered the few remaining tidbits that the soldiers had not seized. Stoyanov
nished his record of the massacre with a deserted village scene where skeletons
bleached in the sun, and dogs or birds of prey picked esh off the bones of the
dead.73
Januarius MacGahan and Eugene Schuyler (an American diplomat assigned to

the Ottoman Empire) left a published account of the horrible sights they saw on
their visit to Batak village in early August, 1876.74 MacGahan understood the
Batak massacre as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign conducted against 60 or
70 Bulgarian villages. He stated that authorities admitted that 15,000 people had
died in massacres. He listed some of the various atrocities reported by Ottoman
irregulars in this campaign. “When, in addition to this, you have the horrid
details of the vilest outrages committed upon women; the hacking to pieces of
helpless children and spitting them upon bayonets;75 and when you have these
details repeated you by the hundred , not by Bulgarians, but by different consuls
at Philippopoli s [Filibe] and the German of cials on the railway, as well as
Greeks, Armenians, priests, missionaries, and even Turks themselves,76 you
begin to feel that any further investigatio n is super uous.”77 Among the atroc-
ities they had heard recounted , the French consul general told them “of
Bashi-Bazouks relating to circles of admiring listeners how they cut off the
heads of little children, and how the dismembered trunks would leap and roll
about like those of chickens.”78 MacGahan and the commission did not stop their
investigation , and their visit to Batak uncovered the most awe-inspiring and
gruesome evidence for Ottoman massacres in any era. Though massacres did
occur, no one sent commissions to investigate and report upon them.
In their journey toward Batak, MacGahan and Schuyler encountered survivors,
most of whom were women of all ages from 18 to 80. Almost all the married
women had become widows as a consequence of the massacre. “They told their
stories with sobs and tears, beating their heads and wringing their hands in
despair. And they were starving and houseless. We could not relieve their
misery. We could only listen to their stories with saddened faces.”79 As the
commission left Pestera for Batak, mobs of survivors besieged them. “One
woman caught my horse, and held it until she could show me where a bullet had
traversed her arm, completely disabling her from work, and this was only the
least of her woes. Husband killed , and little children depending on that broken
arm for bread; all of this told in a language so much like Russian that I could
understand a great deal of it [without a translator].”80 These women suffered
from post-traumatic stress disorder. The sheer intensity of their terror and
398
anxiety gave valid indications that they continued to feel the horror of the
massacre months after they had seen their fellow villagers cut down. The young
mother who had seized the bridle of MacGahan’s horse, experienced “recurrent
and intrusive distressing recollections” of the murders in Batak as symbolized by
her shattered arm.81
Their entry into Batak made all the narratives of massacres pale by compari-
son to what they witnessed . As the MacGahan–Schuyler party rode into Batak
on August 2, 1876, its members saw dogs foraging among skeletons and
scattered bones on the outskirts of the village. MacGahan saw nothing peculiar
until his horse stumbled upon a human skull that lurked partly hidden among the
grass. The same dogs wandering about the site had eaten the esh of the
massacre victims, and they had thoroughly cleaned the bones of the dead in
many cases. MacGahan and his party moved further toward the village. “As we
ascended, bones, skeletons, and skulls became more frequent, but here they had
not been picked clean, for there were fragments of half-dry, half-putrid esh still
clinging to them.”82 This movement toward Batak did not bring any surprises.
The members of the commission and MacGahan had expected to see such sights.
As they crossed a small plateau and rode into a hollow, a shock greeted them,
and “all suddenly drew rein with an exclamation of horror, for right before us,
almost beneath our horses’ feet, was a sight that made us shudder. It was a heap
of skulls, intermingled with bones from all parts of the human body, skeletons,
nearly entire, rotting, clothing, human hair, and putrid esh lying there in one
foul heap.” 83 MacGahan recalled that a sickening odor lled the air in this place.
Rotting esh continued to emit its aroma as late as August, three months after
the massacre. MacGahan states that in “the midst of this heap I could distinguis h
one slight skeleton form still enclosed in a chemise, the skull wrapped about
with a coloured handkerchief, and the bony ankles encased in the embroidered
footless stockings worn by the Bulgarian girls.”84 This gruesome yet poignant
vision provided evidence that the irregular soldiers had mercilessly killed young
girls who had not participated in the resistance. MacGahan’s prose expresses his
deep emotion upon seeing these initial sights. The sight of a massacre, even an
old one, would unsettle even the hardest soldier, because, in this case, the
victims included women, children, and the elderly.
Every house in the village had fallen into ruin. MacGahan and his colleagues
entered the village itself, where they saw another heap of skulls and skeletons.
All of these victims had been women and children. They saw women’s apparel
tossed about everywhere. “From my saddle I counted about a hundred skulls, not
including those that were hidden beneath the others in the ghastly heap, nor
those that were scattered far and wide through the elds. The skulls were nearly
all separated from the rest of the bones, the skeletons were nearly all headless.
These women had all been beheaded.”85 This forensic evidence proves that
Ottoman irregular soldiers decapitated their victims, that is, engaged in dismem-
berment of the dead and even the living. The power of the destroyer mentality
had reached such an intense height of emotion, that one could say the perpetra-
tors belonged without doubt to the class designated as necrophilia by Fromm. At
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JAMES J. REID
the very least, these soldiers had dismembered their defenseless victims, some of
whom must have remained alive while they did so. The forensic evidence, as
important as it is for its uniqueness, does not give all the details relating to the
deaths suffered by these women. Evidence for rape follows, but did the soldiers
torture, strangle, mutilate, or in other ways cause these women to suffer intensely
before they killed them? This will remain the most dif cult question to answer.
MacGahan provided physical evidence for rape. Riding deeper into Batak, he
saw a heap of ashes where the irregulars had burned bodies.
A little further on we came to an object that lled us with pity and horror. It was the
skeleton of a young girl not more than fteen, lying by the roadside, and partly covered
with the debris of a fallen wall. It was still clothed in a chemise; the ankles were enclosed
in footless stockings; but the little feet, from which the shoes had been taken, were naked,
and owing to the fact that the esh had dried instead of decomposing, were nearly perfect.
There was a large gash in the skull, to which a mass of rich brown hair nearly a yard long
still clung, trailing in the dust. It is to be remarked that all the skeletons of women found
here were dressed in a chemise only, and this poor child had evidently been stripped to her
chemise, partly in the search for money and jewels, partly out of mere brutality, then
outraged, and afterwards killed. We have talked with many women who had passed through
all parts of the ordeal but the last, and the procedure seems to have been as follows. They
would seize a woman, strip her carefully to her chemise, laying aside articles of clothing
that were valuable, with any ornaments and jewels she might have about her. Then as many
of them as cared would violate her, and the last man would kill her or not as the humour
took him.86
The combination of eyewitness accounts describing the stripping and rape

proved that the soldiers had treated the women in the manner of sadists. Women
raped repeatedly by these killers had suffered brutalization in icted by a mind
that found pleasure in causing suffering. The sadistic wish to derive pleasure
from suffering accompanied a destroyer impulse when the soldiers killed the
women they had raped, and decapitated them. By leaving the headless body
unburied as a monument to their deeds of rape, torture, and destruction, these
killers had left their victims as an exhibition of their kill. None of them had
undertaken an effort to bury the dead. They intended only to show the utmost
disrespect to the bodies of the slain, placing them in the highest category of
destroyer—the necrophiliac. Fromm’s argument against Lorenz’s theory of
aggression as an instinctua l behavior in humans receives con rmation. The
irregulars had not killed these women as prey in the hunt. They had captured
them, controlled them by threat of force, and when they rst raped them, had
stripped them carefully. The bitterest irony of their violent act is that they began
by carefully removing the clothes of the women and the girls. Such an action
demonstrates that they did not torture and kill them simply from instinctual
behavior, but as part of a “rational” plan of torture. Sadistic actions moved
according to a program reasoned by the perpetrator, and lodged within the
rapist-killer’s character. The brutalizer did not function according to mere
instinct, an unreasoned behavior that formed part of an animal’s natural life
400
cycle. Rape with the intention to destroy and demean certainly did not belong to
a natural cycle or an instinctive impulse.
MacGahan outlined other terrible deeds that also could enter the ledger as
forensic evidence. He saw the small skulls of little children slashed by numerous
saber cuts. “The number of children killed in these massacres is something
enormous.” 87 Eyewitness accounts told of children whom the soldiers had
impaled upon bayonets.88 The forensic evidence available to MacGahan did not
show such treatment of the women in the massacre at Batak. The women who
survived the ordeal of torture and rape obviously had not suffered such
impalement, and if they had witnessed such an act, felt too ashamed or
traumatized to describe such an action. Wherever impalement of a woman by a
bayonet had occurred, the soldiers seem to have reserved such a terrible act for
a pregnant woman. Impalement through the vagina aimed at killing the woman,
as well as her unborn child by use of the pointed blade. The soldier intended to
cause excruciating pain for the woman, but he achieved the ultimate in the stage
in the destroyer complex by attempting to destroy the posterity and lineage of
the woman’s family in this single act of impalement. The destroyer syndrome in
this case served as the basis of a genocidal orientation. The fact that no examples
of vaginal impalement occurred in the forensic or the eyewitness record of the
Batak massacre need not prevent the reader from arriving at the proper
conclusion. Such an event or events probably did happen, but eyewitnesses did
describe the impalement of infants and children, acts that amounted to the same
genocidal inclination couched within a sadistic perception of destruction and
death. The massacre at Batak represented , nally, the wish of the perpetrators to
commit a genocidal destruction. They lacked the means and the technology to
destroy all Bulgarians, but they could eradicate an entire set of Bulgarian
communities through the most brutal and destructive means possible . The
forensic record, supplemented by eyewitness narratives, presents an unequivocal
testimony for the genocidal nature of the Batak massacre in an era before
genocide was possible. Batak happened as a warning of things to come,
however, and suggested that when the means for total destruction became
available, that a genocidal event would take place insid e the Ottoman Empire.
Finally, MacGahan described the layout of the massacre according to the
remains of the victims. The schoolhous e held the ashes and bones of the dead
just as Stoyanov had described this action. The irregulars had burned the place,
and those hiding there died in the ames. MacGahan wrote “And now we begin
to approach the church and the schoolhouse . The ground is covered here with
skeletons, to which are clinging articles of clothing and bits of putrid esh; the
air is heavy with a faint sickening odour, that grows stronger as we advance.”89
He estimated that 3,000 people lost their lives in this massacre. MacGahan also
gave statistics for families. He noted that one to ve persons survived in families
that counted ten or more souls. In one instance, only the grandmother lived from
a family of 19. In another case, only eight persons from a family of 39 lived to
speak of these events.90 Annihilation did more than decimate the families of
Batak and outlying villages. Eradication had been almost total.91
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JAMES J. REID
The personal legacy of Batak for MacGahan “was a fearful sight—a sight to
haunt one through life.”92 If one who did not suffer the torments of the
destructive attack could feel such a harrowing psychologica l legacy, the
in uence of the massacre site upon the survivors proved even more traumatic.
MacGahan stated that women of Batak who had not died in the attack
accompanied the commission to their former village. One mother took MacGa-
han into her former home, now lying in ruins. She pointed out the remains of
her daughter to the correspondent, and “shrieked with agony, and beat her head
madly against the wall.”93 To speak of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the
inclination of the survivor to feel as though the event recurred would underesti-
mate the grief portrayed by MacGahan. The relationship between perpetrator and
victim, between sadistic victimizer and sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder
belongs to the heart of the genocide problem. The far deadlier “Final Solution”
in the Nazi death camps employed brutality, but the conversion of the death-
dealing process depersonalized the massacre program for many perpetrators. The
average perpetrator at the Batak massacre became deeply involved in brutaliza-
tion and killing. These men must have found rape, torture, and killing a very
serious process that evoked powerful emotions from them as they raped and
murdered. They killed , tortured , and raped until fatigue prevented them from
these activities.94 Nazi death camps mechanized the process of killing that
enabled the killers to alienate themselves from the emotional involvement, even
to the point that they could deny involvement and make claims that they only
obeyed orders. In the less conscious 1870s, the perpetrators turned their deeds
into epics in which they converted sadistic butchery into heroic and sanitized
epic.
Comparative study of the Rozhiki revolt in 1655 and the Bulgarian massacres,
along with numerous other evidence for other events in the Ottoman Empire
reveals startling insight into human nature. Twentieth century genocides in most
instances did not rely upon individual killers to commit massacre. Even in
incidents such as the 1944 “Massacre at Malmedy,” the machine gun made the
individual’s role a simpler matter. The change in the technology of death
permitted the perpetrators and the society to have little conscience or awareness
about the total destruction of a people, or the mass killings of numerous others.
The nineteenth century lacked a technology of destruction for the most part. The
increased killing ef ciency of ri es and revolvers enabled one man to kill many
more people. The introductio n of the machine gun, particularly in World War I,
enabled a geometric increase in the killing rate of each machine gunner. Yet, at
Batak in 1876, once the battle for the village had ended, the killers took their
victims’ lives primarily with the blade. Part of the reason behind this method of
murder was the nature of the irregular soldiers themselves, whose weapons’
culture made them idealize archaic weapons, upon which they placed greater
value than a new and more deadly Colt revolver or Winchester repeating ri e.
Using archaic killing techniques had limitations . The irregular soldier could
exert only so much personal power in physical acts of destroying other human
beings. Efforts to eradicate an entire population could go only to a limited result
402
when archaic destruction techniques came into use. The limitations of con-
science and physical boundaries of action restrained the executioners of Rozhiki
rebels in 1655. With far fewer restrictions of conscience in place, the perpetra-
tors of the Batak and other Bulgarian massacres continued to face physical limits
to their endurance in killing and rape. Despite these differences, the destroyer
syndrome continued to serve as a unifying psychologica l current. The sadistic
destroyer existed in both centuries, releasing their energies in different ways.
The most important issue by far is the understandin g of the victim and the
survivor. The nineteenth century gave little formal acknowledgement of the
victim or the survivor. Only in such instances as MacGahan’s interviews with
the surviving women of the Batak massacre did a writer begin to express the
existential condition of survivors, or, in fact, to voice his own remorse at such
sad events. 95 The world had only begun to show a consciousnes s about the plight
of civilians caught in war since the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian
con ict. The Balkan revolutions and the Russo-Turkish War gave even more
impetus to the public’s understandin g of war’s effect upon civilians, but the texts
of the period show that existential awareness of human suffering in war
remained only at a primitive stage of development.
Notes and References

1. James J. Reid, “Social and psychological factors in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire ca. 1780–1918,”
Journal of Modern Hellenism, Vol 10, 1993, pp 117–156 for a discussion of the vendetta and vigilantism.
The Ottoman army ruled by establishing military colonies with forces organized mainly as irregular
cavalry. These colonies functioned as governmen t surrogates in lieu of constituted authorities of
bureaucrac y or army. The Ottoman state intended these colonies to take part in the vendetta and vigilante
con icts of their regions in a “divide and conquer ” scheme. By this means, the Ottoman state ruled through
active destabilization of its subject populations. At the same time, they participated in the increasingly
genocidal assaults of their surrogates, whom they provided with weapons, for example. On the issue of
Ottoman military colonies, see James J. Reid, “Irregular military bands and colonies in the Balkans,
1789–1878,” Etudes Balkaniques, Cahiers Belon, Vol 3, 1996, pp 131–165.
2. As noted below, sadists did participate in the Final Solution, but mass killing in concentration camps, as
at Auschwitz, occurred through the medium of technology (gas chambers), and much less through
individual s personally killing helpless victims. By this means, even non-sadists could operate the
machinery of mass destruction. Few died in the sadistic experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele or the killing
rampages of sadistic guards, while millions died unseen in gas chambers.
3. The Persian original and an English translation appear in E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Vol IV, pp 228–229. The Ottoman copy is in Ziya Pasha,
Harabat [Ruins] (Istanbul: Matbaa-I Amire, 1875), Vol III, p 436, published one year before the massacre
at Batak.
4. Sa’di, Gulistan [Rose-Garden] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1363), pp 40–42. See also Sham’i, A Turkish
Commentary on the Gulistan [of Sa’di], British Museum, BM Harleian, 5485, 1000 AH/1595 CE.
5. These Ottoman writers are summarized and cited in James J. Reid, “Rozhiki Revolt of 1065/1655,”
Journal of Kurdish Studies, Vol III, forthcoming. This argument appears as early as the of cial,
philosopher , and historian Mustafa ‘Ali, Mustafa ‘Ali’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, Andreas Tietze, ed.,
Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ph.-Hist. Klasse, Denkschriften, 137 (Wien: Verlag der
Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979), pp 163–164 [Ottoman text], pp 66–67 [English
translation].
6. Mahmud Celaleddin Pasha, Mir’at-I Hakikat, Ismet Miroglu, ed. (Istanbul: Berekat Yayinevi, 1983)
[reprint of 1908 edn], p 86 [MH].
7. MH, p 169.
8. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see James J. Reid, “Philosophy of state–subject relations, Ottoman
concepts of tyranny, and the demonization of subjects: Conservative Ottomanism as a source of genocidal
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JAMES J. REID
behavior, 1821–1918,” in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocid e
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp 60–91. The slave-owning society of the American South before
the Civil War of 1861 often relied upon a metaphysics of race to argue for the racial inferiority of Africans
and African-Americans , and in so doing, relied upon premodern beliefs that had existed at least from the
early Middle Ages.
9. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn
[DSM-IV] (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994) has decentralized the characteristics
of sadism among different categories, namely Conduct Disorder (pp 85–91 “has been physically cruel to
people”—p 90), and Antisocial Personality Disorder (pp 644–650, also called psychopathy) .
10. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp
185–248 [AHD].
11. James J. Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire, Prelude to Collapse, 1853–1878 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2000), Chapter 7, has studied the issue comparatively for the Crimean War, the American Civil
War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Russo-Turkish War showing that post-traumatic stress disorder
(also known as war stress neurosis, combat fatigue, etc.) enhanced sadistic traits in some soldiers and
caused repugnanc e for further aggression in others (counter-phobi c type, and phobic, or “malingerer-
deserter” type).
12. AHD, p 248.
13. AHD, pp 270–335.
14. AHD, p 248.
15. One nds such traits in “conduct” disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and antisocial personality
disorder. See DSM-IV, pp 87 (“Individual s with Conduct Disorder may have little empathy and little
concern for the feelings, wishes, and well-being of others”), p 428 [C. (4) “markedly diminished interest
in signi cant activities,” (5) “feeling of detachment or estrangement from others,” and (6) “restricted range
of affect”], and p 650 [A. (7) “lack of remorse”].
16. AHD, p 276.
17. AHD, pp 276–279. On the issue of the death wish in soldiers who have experienced much danger in war,
see Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumsah Sherman (New York: Random House,
1995), p 114. It does not follow, however, that soldiers who had a death wish automatically exhibited the
symptoms of malignant aggression.
18. AHD, p 289.
19. AHD, p 291.
20. Lt. Col. Brackenbury , The Times’ war corresponden t with the Russian army in 1877, saw Russian
casualties “all headless, some cut from limb to limb, some treated in a manner which is universally
regarded as the deepest insult that can be paid to the body of a man, alive or dead.” Edmund Ollier,
Cassell’s Illustrated History of the Russo-Turkish War (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., [1878]), Vol
I, pp 351–352. This “deepest insult” was homosexua l rape, probably of a corpse—a sure indication of
sexual necrophilia in this case. This represents the only possible eyewitness reference to sexual intercourse
with a dead enemy that the author has found to date. In the massacre at Batak, the irregulars regretted the
lost opportunity when they saw dead young women lying on the ground .
21. AHD, p 325. See E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981), p 148 who witnessed as a Marine infantryman in World War II atrocities committed upon
the corpses of dead marines. He saw their heads severed with their genitals stuffed into their mouths, and
their severed hands all arranged neatly upon their chests. Such an example indicates that the phenomenon
was general, and not speci c to the Ottoman irregular cavalry. Dismemberment (in the form of scalping)
and mutilation (slashing the dead with Bowie knives) occurred in the American Civil War. The partisan
guerrilla—comparabl e to the Ottoman irregular—named “Bloody Bill” Anderson and members of his band
scalped dead and even living Union soldiers. See Albert Castel and Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Bill
Anderson: The Short Savage Life of a Civil War Guerrilla (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998),
p 47 (Archie Clements scalped a dead soldier, then mutilated the corpse); p 51 (Anderson dismembered
a man, tortured live victims, and mutilated their bodies), p 29 (Anderson made potential victims crawl in
the dust to beg for their lives before he killed them); and p 43 (threatened a Union general that he would
“abuse” captive Union ladies). The admixture of sadistic attitudes, torture, and dismembermen t appears
evident in this case.
22. AHD, p 329. Instances of complete or extensive dismembermen t of dead Russians appear in the sources
for the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. See Archibald Forbes, J. A. MacGahan, et al., The War Correspon-
dence of the “Daily News,” 1877 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1878), Vol I, pp 173–174 (eyewitness
account by a war correspondent , Circassians surrounded 15–20 Russian soldiers, killed them cut off their
noses and ears, and hacked “the bodies into as many pieces as they possibly could”). Lt.-Gen. Valentine
Baker Pasha, War in Bulgaria: A Narrative of Personal Experiences (London: Sampson, Low, Marston,
404
Searle, and Rivington, 1879), Vol I, p 45 (general reference to mutilation of the dead), p 131 (Baker saw
bashi bozuks stripping dead Russian soldiers after the battle of Voditzka on September 13, 1877, after
which they “had slashed the dead bodies with their swords”). C. B. Norman, Armenia and the Campaign
of 1877 (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin [ca. 1878]), p 407 stated that on November 9, 1877, the
women of Erzurum “commenced a system of mutilations [of dead Russian soldiers] which it does not do
to dwell on.” Among the mutilations was the cutting off of genitals.
23. In addition to the examples cited for Batak below, other nineteenth century examples of decapitation
appear in plentitude in the sources. Crimean War: Captain J. A. Butler, Journal of Captain J. A. Butler
at the Siege of Silistria, 1854, National Army Museum (London), 7402/129, f 14 [“numbers of the
townspeople went out 1 cut off the heads of the slain (Russian soldiers) to bring them in as trophies for
which they hoped to get a reward”]; Le Vicomte de Noe, Les Bachi Bozouks et les Chasseurs d’Afrique:
La cavalerie [ir]reguliere en campagne (Paris: Michel Levy, 1861), p 68 [BB] (bashi bozuks decapitated
dead Cossacks at Periklea village); Humphry Sandwith, A Narrative of the Siege of Kars, and of Six
Months’ Resistance by the Turkish Garrison, under General Williams, to the Russian Army (London: John
Murray, 1856), p 129 (stated that the Ottoman general Mehmed Pasha offered a bounty to his irregular
cavalry for any heads of Christians they brought back from raids into Russian Armenia and Georgia);
Alexandre Dumas, Alexandre Dumas’ Adventures in the Caucasus, A. E. Murch, ed. and trans. (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), p 49 witnessed a single combat between a Cossack and a Chechen in 1858
in which the Chechen victor decapitated the defeated Cossack. Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878: M. E.
Durham, Some Tribal Origins, Laws, and Customs of the Balkans (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,
1928), pp 172–179 (direct testimony of Montenegrin war veterans in 1906 to Durham); Edmund Ollier,
Cassell’s Illustrated History of the Russo-Turkish War (London: Cassell & Company, Limited, [ca. 1878]),
Vol I, pp 350–351 (severed head of a Bulgarian peasant at Karabunar witnessed by Ollier, who was taken
there by an Ottoman guide to view the trophy); Archibald Forbes, J. A. MacGahan, et al., The War
Correspondenc e of the “Daily News,” 1877 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1878), Vol I, p 259 (General
Gourko reported to the war corresponden t that he saw decapitated Russian casualties after ghting in the
Shipka Pass on July 19, 1877), pp 351–352 (the corresponden t saw headless Russian corpses at Shipka on
July 18).
24. James J. Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire, Prelude to Collapse, 1853–1878 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2000), Chapter 7, has a full listing of examples.
25. Henry V. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, A Socio-Psychologica l Study of Some SS Killers (London:
Chatto-Heineman n for Sussex University Press, 1972), p 232 [LMM].
26. LMM, pp 232–233.
27. LMM, pp 233–234.
28. LMM, p 64.
29. LMM, pp 64–65.
30. An idea of the large number of Muslim victims killed and massacred by Ottoman armies is described in
James J. Reid, “Necrophilia and Alienation, or Death and Exile, A Review Essay,” Journal of the Society
for Armenian Studies, Vol 9, 1996, 1997 [1999], pp 105–123; and idem, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire,
Prelude to Collapse, 1853–1878 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, forthcoming).
31. An example of a soldier who spoke the words of a malignant destroyer, but felt hampered in his ability
to carry out a campaign of death and destruction was Lt. Charles H. Brewster of the Union army in the
American Civil War. Union forces captured nine Confederate guerrillas. He wrote, “I think they aught [sic]
to give them a short shrift, and a stout cord [i.e., hang them], but I presume they will be more careful not
to harm them than they are our own men, and they will be allowed to take the oath of allegince [sic], and
be let loose to murder more of our own men.” Charles Harvey Brewster, When This Cruel War Is Over,
The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster, David W. Blight, ed. (Amherst, MA: The University
of Massachusett s Press, 1992), p 132. He also argued for an ethnic cleansing program in his letter home:
“I go for driving every mothers son and daughter of them [Confederate civilians] out of the country and
settling it with Yankees” (p 133). Had institutional restrictions not existed, this destroyer orientation could
easily have increased in intensity, as shown by experiences later in the same war in General Sherman’s
Georgia and South Carolina campaigns. See also the discussion of Thomas Rohkramer, “Daily life at the
front and the concept of total war,” On The Road to Total War, The American Civil War and the German
Wars of Uni cation, 1861–1871, Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp 497–518 examines the point at which German soldiers broke discipline and committed
atrocities during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
32. A standard modern Turkish history by Ismail Hakki Uzuncharshili , Osmanli Tarihi, Vol III, II. Selim’in
Tahta Chikisindan 1699 Karlofcha Andlashmasina Kadar (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1983),
pp 248–249 discusses the general Melek Ahmed Pasha’s vezirate, and pp 277–289 examine the events of
1065/1655 without making one reference to Melek Ahmed Pasha’s campaign to quell the Rozhiki revolt
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JAMES J. REID
of that year. The same comment extends to Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern
Turkey, Vol I, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp 206–207 mentions only Jelali revolts.
33. Evliya Chelebi, Evliya Chelebi in Bitlis: The Relevant Section of the Seyahatnam e, Robert Dankoff, ed.
and trans. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990) [ECB].
34. The primary seventeent h century Kurdish epic portrays exactly the manner of factional politics that may
have driven Abdal Khan into revolt. The elite personage Bekir personi ed the dangerou s and destructive
nature of Ottoman and Kurdish elite politics in the era of this revolt. Ehmede Xani, Mem u Zin, Alan
Ward, ed. and trans. (Amsterdam: International Society Kurdistan, 1969), pp 30–42. Bekir used fal u
nazan [“tricks and sorcery”], and spread gevztie [“malicious gossip”] to isolate the hero Mem and make
him susceptible to attack. Frederick Millingen, Wild Life Among the Koords (London: Hurst and Blackett,
1877), pp 344–350 gave an eyewitness account (Millingen served as an Ottoman of cer) of this
phenomeno n in 1860–1862. Other Kurdish chiefs, enemies of the Milan Kurdish confederation under
Omer Aqa, conspired with the Ottoman governor of Van to stage a false revolt into which they would draw
Omer Aqa. At the point of battle with the Ottoman army, the other Kurdish chiefs would desert, leaving
Omer Aqa stranded . The Milan Kurds fell to defeat, and many died, both during and after the battle. Going
into exile, the Milan lived a life of poverty in western Iran. For the Rozhiki revolt, Evliya identi ed any
number of Kurdish traitors and informants [dil] who would inform on Abdal Khan and his forces. ECB,
ff 264b–265a, pp 206–208 (Pinyanishi Kurdish scouts serving the Ottoman general captured a very
talkative informant [dilli dil]) and ff 263a–263b, pp 192–196 (for another example of an informant).
35. For a survey of religion in Kurdistan, see Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handboo k
(Washington, DC: Crane Russak, Taylor & Francis Publishers, 1992), pp 131–166, and especially pp
153–158 on Yezidism.
36. Evliya Chelebi occasionall y included unbelievable events in his account as in ECB, f 233a, p 138. For a
fuller discussion of this issue, see James J. Reid, “Rozhiki Revolt, 1065/1655,” Journal of Kurdish Studies,
Vol III, forthcoming. Such cases of whimsy do not detract from the validity of his evidence.
37. One must acknowledge the fact that the pasha’s dream ful lled a literary role in Evliya Chelebi’s narrative.
Nonetheless, dream visions comprised a signi cant aspect of Ottoman culture and psychologica l life.
Melek Ahmed could have had such a dream, and clearly placed great store in dreams as signs of spiritual
processes that directed humanity through life. Books studying the interpretations of portents were
published as late as the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. See Ioannes Makrygiannes , Oramata
kai Thamata [Dreams and Miracles] (Athens: Morphotiko Idryma Ethnike Trapezes, 1989) for a modern
Greek example based partly upon the Ottoman tradition.
38. AHD, p 329: “In many other necrophilou s people I have observed that they had many dreams in which
they saw parts of dismembered bodies oating or lying around, sometimes in blood, often in dirty water
together with feces.”
39. ECB, ff 267a–b, p 226.
40. ECB, f 271b, pp 256–258 shows the primary example of this life or death debate in the case of Qara ‘Ali
Aqa, commande r of the Bidlis citadel for Abdal Khan. Melek Ahmed engaged in a lengthy conversation
with Qara ‘Ali, pondering whether he should let him live or die. After some time, during which he kept
the man’s life hanging in the balance, he relented and freed Qara ‘Ali.
41. In the massacre at Batak, the irregular soldiers held scores, perhaps hundreds, of the Batak women captive
for three days, abusing them and ultimately killing them, as discussed more fully below.
42. ECB, f 272a, pp 260–262.
43. ECB, ff 265a–265b, pp 210–212.
44. ECB, ff 265a–265b, pp 210–212. Manfred Ullman, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh
Press, 1978), pp 61–63, 72–85 stated that medieval and early modern belief understood the brain, and
hence the head, as the seat of the human soul. Evliya’s statement indicates that these men knew as a
certainty that when captured and killed, the Ottoman soldiers would sever their heads from their bodies.
45. ECB, f 265a, pp 210–211.
46. ECB, ff 265b–266a, p 214.
47. ECB, pp 241–243. Dankoff’s translation is cited here to give independen t con rmation that the text
genuinely makes these statements, and Turkish phrases in the Ottoman text show the original passage for
important concepts.
48. See the following examples: Abu Bakr-I Tihrani, Kitab-I Diyarbakriyya: Ak-Koyunlular Tarihi, Necati
Lugal and Faruk Sumer, eds (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1962), Vol I, pp 81–82; Konstantin Mihailovic,
Memoirs of a Janissary, Benjamin Stolz, trans. (Ann Arbor, MI: Slavic Publications, The University of
Michigan, 1975), pp 45, 47; Fethullah ‘Arif Chelebi, called ‘Ari , Suleymanname, Vol V, Shahname- i Al-i
Osman, Topkapi Palace Museum, Hazine 1517, Istanbul, Ramazan 965/June–July 1558, f 170b (Mehmed
Bey defeated and killed the rebel governor of Egypt, and beheaded him: “ki da’im-i sar-i khasm dar pa-yi
406
shah/chinin bi u uftada bar khak-i rah”) [“That the head of the adversary at the foot of the shah
(emperor)/did he drop in this manner on the road”]; Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, Sharaf-Nama, V. Veliaminoff-
Zernoff, ed. (Petersburg: Eggers et Cie., 1860), Vol I, p 98; E. Schutz, ed. and trans., An Armeno-Kipcha k
Chronicle of the Polish–Turkish Wars in 1620–1621, Bibliotheca Orientalis Hungarica XI (Budapest :
Akademiai Kiado, 1968), pp 56–59.
49. The Ottoman army—both regular and irregular forces—engaged in massacres at various times during the
nineteenth century. In 1851, ‘Omer Pasha gave no mercy to Bosnian Muslim rebels during the revolt of
that year. His army defeated Bosnian rebel forces, and destroyed [kirdik] them in large numbers. The
implication was that Ottoman troops had massacred either the combatant s or even (large?) segments of the
Bosnian civilian populace. See Ahmed Jevdet Pasha, Tezakir, 1–12, Cavid Baysun, ed. (Ankara: Turk
Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1960), p 15. One could also nd massacres in various other areas, notably the
Cretan insurrection of 1866–1869. See James J. Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire, Prelude to Collapse,
1853–1878 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, forthcoming), Chapter 4.
50. For studies of the 1876 Bulgarian revolution, see Dimitir Chagzhuzenchev-Bechu , Zhitie na Edin Bulgarin
(So a: Sivmestno Izdanie, 1992); Ivan Undzhiev and Sveta Undzhieva, Christo Botev: Zhivot i Delo
(So a: Izdatelstvo Nauka i Izkustvo, 1975) (biography of an important leader in the Bulgarian revolution-
ary movement) ; A. A. Ulunyan, Deyateli Bolgarskovo Natsionalino-Osvoboditel’novo Dvizheniya, XVIII–

XIX vv. (Moscow: Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk, 1996), 2 Vols (biographica l dictionary of individuals
involved in the Bulgarian nationalist movement); Dimitir Kocev, Kum Istoriyata na Revolyutsionnot o
Dvizhenie v Bulgariya prez 1867–1871 (So a: Izdanie na Bulgarskata Akademiya na Naukite, 1958)
[Bulgarian revolutionary movement, 1867–1871]; Panayot Chitov, Kak Stanach Chaidutin, Nikolai
Chaitov, ed. (So a: Izdatel’stvo Otechestvo, 1982) [Bulgarian guerrilla and revolutionary theorist whose
book disputed the claim that the revolutionary band (cheta) operated as a brigand (haidut) band]; Dimitir
Panchovski, Poslednite Dni na Vasil Levski (So a: Po zgam, 1990) (a study of Vasil Levski’s revolution-
ary activities); Ivan Undzhiev and Nikola Kondarev, eds, Bacil Levski, Nay-Chubavi Stranitsi ot Pismata
My (So a: Narodna Kultura, 1948) (Letters of Vasil Levski); Marcia MacDermott, The Apostle of
Freedom: A Portrait of Vasil Levsky Against a Background of Nineteenth Century Bulgaria (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1967) (biography of Vasil Levsky, a Bulgarian revolutionary leader and
partisan guerrilla of the 1870s); Thomas A. Meininger, The Formation of a Nationalist Bulgarian
Intelligentsia, 1835–1878 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987); Constantin N. Velichi, La
Roumanie et le mouvement revolutionnaire bulgare de liberation nationale (1850–1878) (Bucharest:
Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1979); Leften S. Stavrianos, The Balkans Since 1453
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), pp 364–380; Nikolai Todorov, Bulgaria’s Liberation from
Ottoman Oppression (So a: So a Press, 1987) (a very brief summary in English); Christ Anastasoff, The
Bulgarians (Hicksville: Exposition Press, 1977), pp 98–102 (a very brief summary in English).
51. Lt.-Col. (John) Fife-Cookson, With the Armies of the Balkans and at Gallipoli in 1877–1878 (London:
Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1880), p 54.
52. J. A. MacGahan and Eugene Schuyler, The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria (London: Bradbury, Agnew, and
Co., 1876), pp 31–32 [TAB].
53. Zaptiye referred speci cally to rural police organized into bands of irregular soldiers. The generic word
for “irregular cavalry soldier” in Ottoman Turkish was bashi bozuk. Such irregulars included zaptiye bands
and special levies of irregular cavalry and infantry raised in wartime or during revolts. For references in
Ottoman Turkish, see Zarif Mustafa Pasha, “Zarif Pasha’nin Hatirati, 1816–1862” [“Memoirs of Z. M. P.],
Enver Ziya Karal, ed., Belleten, Vol 4, 1940, pp 475–479, 481–493 in particular dealing with his military
career. See also Ahmed Midhat, Uss-u Inkilap (Istanbul: np, 1295/1878), Vol II, pp 288–289 who
contrasted the regular army [nizam] with irregulars [bashi bozuk]; Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, Anadolu’da Rus
Muharebesi, 1877–1878 (Istanbul: Petek Yayinlari, 1985), Vol I, pp 46, 57 (Ahmed Muhtar, commanding
general in Anatolia in the Russian War, sent a military telegraph in which he mentioned bashi bozuk
troops, and a distinction was made between militia and irregular cavalry).
54. TAB, p 13.
55. Mahmud Celal al-Din Pasha, Mir’at-i Hakikat (Istanbul: Matba’a-i Osmaniye, 1326/1908) [MH].
56. TAB, p 13; Schuyler’s account in the same volume, p 93, stated that Ahmed Aqa did not receive a
promotion to pasha, but to yuzbashi . Whichever version is correct, both con rm the fact that Ahmed
received a promotion by an Ottoman of cial.
57. Zahari Stoyanov, Extracts from Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings (So a: So a Press, 1976), pp 123–141
[ENBU].
58. Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1947), p 55.
59. See also Jean-Noel Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New Brunswick: Transaction
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JAMES J. REID
Publishers, 1990), pp 26–29. Kapferer identi ed the transforming agent as based upon the fantasy of the
person reporting.
60. Kapferer, Rumors, p 37.
61. Such ambiguity alone could have triggered massacres and the accompanying atrocities. As Fromm
observed , sadists react with violence in ambiguous situations. The powerful ambiguity that prompted
rumors could also have provoked extreme violence in the deeds of the irregular soldiers. AHD, p 289.
62. ENBU, pp 126–127.
63. ENBU, p 127. This vigilante action and the massacre it included compare most evidently with Nazi
Einsatzgruppen that came into use as ethnic cleansing units operating in the wake of the Wehrmacht
campaigning in Poland and Russia. These Einsatzgruppen committed mass murders of Polish, Jewish,
and Russian civilians in rear echelon areas as part of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy. See Henry V. Dicks,
Licensed Mass Murder: A Socio-psychologica l Study of Some SS Killers (London: Chatto-Heinemann
for Sussex University Press, 1972), pp 52–54 [LMM]. Differences also existed between Einsatzgruppen
and bashi bozuks. The Nazi SS murder squads functioned on the ideological premises of a totalitarian
state, while bashi bozuks operated at best as state-sponsored vigilantes. The irregulars had only just
begun to act according to greater ideological imperatives in 1876. Their chief motives included
those ascribed to vigilantes mentioned above, loot, and in the case of Batak a new and murderous
inclination to annihilate a community considered to have operated as a fth column. Concepts similar to
Lebensraum may have existed in rudimentary form, but such ideas appeared very remote in the bashi
bozuks’ actions.
64. These ri es carried extremely long sword bayonets. In the hands of irregular soldiers, such bayonets had
the primary use of committing atrocities such as impalements of civilian victims.
65. TAB, p 25 reports differently that the villagers wanted to surrender their weapons, but Ahmed refused
permission for such a surrender . After considerabl e negotiation, the Batakis surrendered their weapons, at
which point the massacre began.
66. Stoyanov’s account admitted that traitors and collaborators operated amongst the revolutionaries. Such
admissions demonstrate that the account he gave had validity. One might expect that he exaggerated the
number of casualties in icted by the Batakis upon the irregulars. Otherwise, he used eyewitness accounts
that MacGahan, Schuyler, and Baring supported with independen t evidence.
67. TAB, p 13 also gives the gure of 200 victims burned in the schoolhouse .
68. Dale L. Walker, Januarius MacGahan: The Life and Campaigns of an American War Corresponden t
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), p 167 [JM] states that by May, the village of Perustitsa had also
suffered from several days of ghting with bashi bozuk attackers. On this day, the village leaders shot all
their wives and children to prevent them from dying under torture by the irregulars. These men then shot
themselves.
69. ENBU, pp 131–138.
70. This statement suggests that these irregulars who made the comment did not engage in sexual necrophilia.
Most or almost all of the killers raped the women before they killed them.
71. ENBU, pp 138–139.
72. Colonel Alexander John Fraser, Papers of Colonel Alexander John Fraser relating to His Career in the
Orange River Sovereignty , 1853–5, the Crimean War, during which he was seconded to the Turkish Forces
in Erzeroom, etc., British Museum, Add. 44912, 44913A, B, C contains an Ottoman document listing the
victims of the Damascus massacres of the early 1860s by family, that is, head of household . Such
documentatio n suggests that the Ottoman government became involved in these massacres, and felt the
need to document the devastation.
73. ENBU, pp 140–141.
74. Dale Walker’s biography of Januarius MacGahan gives an excellent account of the Irish-American
newspaperman ’s life and activities. JM, pp 163–184 states that MacGahan had worked for William
Bennett’s New York Herald, but when Bennett refused to bankroll the expenses of a Bulgarian trip,
MacGahan went to the London Daily News, which sent him to the region.
75. See photograph . A French bayonet manufactured in 1874 measures 22 and 3/4 inches. Such bayonets must
have accompanied the French ri es that the Ottoman state issued to these irregular soldiers. The primary
use of the bayonet for these soldiers was the commission of atrocities since they rarely had need to use
them in battle. A similar incident took place in the nal days of the Dobruja expedition during the Crimean
War. Le Vicomte de Noe, Les Bachi Bozouks et les Chasseurs d’Afrique: La cavalerie [ir]reguliere en
campagne (Paris: Michel Levy, 1861), p 106. The Vicomte de Noe served under General Yusuf, who
commanded a division of Ottoman irregulars given to the French army by ‘Omer Pasha in early 1854. In
the disastrous retreat from the Dobruja, de Noe received complaints on all sides from Bulgarian villagers.
In one instance, he reported, the parents of an infant reported that bashi bozuks had hacked their live baby
to pieces in front of their eyes in order to force them to reveal treasures in hiding. The child died a slow,
408
excruciating death in order to force a revelation from the parents, who evidently had nothing to give. As
noted above, dismembermen t of the dead by itself quali es as sadistic behavior according to the de nition
of sadism given by Eric Fromm. Dismembermen t of the living for the purposes of torture, and for the
intent of causing grief to related eyewitnesses must qualify as the highest form of sadistic behavior. The
torturer-killer derives some emotional satisfaction in the killing through torture.
76. Frederick Burnaby wrote of an interview he had with a Circassian irregular in western Anatolia. This man
spoke Russian, and Burnaby could therefore communicat e with him. Burnaby asked if the man had
participated in the massacres. The trooper admitted that he had, and that the reports of killings were not
exaggerated . Indeed , the man admitted to Burnaby that women as well as men had died as a consequenc e
of the bashi bozuk assaults on their villages. Frederick Burnaby, On Horseback Through Asia Minor
(London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1877), Vol I, pp 82–83.
77. TAB, p 11.
78. TAB, p 12.
79. TAB, p 18.
80. TAB, p 19.
81. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric
Association, 1994), p 428.

82. TAB, p 22.
83. TAB, p 22.
84. TAB, p 22.
85. TAB, p 23.
86. TAB, p 26. MacGahan returned to his discussion of rape. He noted that the pile of skeletons they had rst
seen outside the village as they entered belonged to the women and girls held by the irregulars during the
days that they massacred the victims in the churchyard . The shift of soldiers that rested from killing raped
these women who suffered this fate repeatedly. Finally, when the irregulars departed , they killed the
women and decapitated them, leaving their bodies in a pile at the entrance to the village. TAB, p 32.
87. TAB, p 26.
88. TAB, pp 26–27. In World War I, T. E. Lawrence had witnessed the aftermath of a massacre by Ottoman
troops in an Arab village. As he rode into the Arab village, he saw a dead woman who had been pregnant ,
spread-eagled upon a wall, impaled through the vagina by a long Ottoman bayonet . T. E. Lawrence, The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), p 652.
89. TAB, pp 27–28.
90. TAB, pp 29–32.
91. Eyewitness accounts of the massacre sites, especially that at Batak, caused a furor in Europe, and
prevented the Ottoman Empire’s former allies in the Crimean War (1853–1856) from entering the new
Russo-Turkish War of 1877. See Richard Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876
(Hamden, CT: Harvester Press, Archon Books, 1975) who discusses the massacre at Batak in particular
as an issue in British politics; R. W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1972), pp 51–101 gives more information on the Schuyler–Baring
Mission, MacGahan’s publications, and the Bulgarian question itself than did Shannon.
92. TAB, p 29.
93. TAB, p 27.
94. LMM, p 53. Dicks observed that some German generals protested the use of Einsatzgruppen in Poland.
He wrote that “Some protesting army generals lost their jobs, even though they pleaded chie y in the name
of preventing the demoralization and brutalizing of young German soldiers who were outraged by these
mass murders.” Such cynical assessments of the affect that mass murder had upon soldiers who committed
them—fatigue as a limitation or the demoralization of soldiers—demonstrates clearly that the repetition of
the physical act of killing, etc. could impose physical and psychological limits upon the killers. By
reducing such acts of killing to physical and/or psychologica l debilitation of the killers, the armies and
states supporting such mass murders demonstrated the loss of conscience . Even if individual soldiers
became outraged , the state and its armies worked actively to deprive such men of their consciences . By
removing the individual killer from the process of annihilation, the Nazi state could implement the mass
murder of millions without worries about the killers’ physical or psychological limitations in executing
mass killings. Machinery and gas removed much of the human factor in committing mass murder. The
totalitarian state found that the most ef cient way to conduct mass killings was the removal of large units
of killers from the scene of the crime.
95. Lt.-Col. Fife-Cookson, With the Armies of the Balkans in 1877–1878 (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin &
Co., 1880), pp 119–120. Fife-Cookson wrote of a Bulgarian Muslim woman—a refugee—whose
experiences had provoked dementia.
409

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Batak 1876: a massacre and its

Con icts in Ottoman society in the nineteenth century

depression, pessimism). A destroyer personality might have had sadistic quali-

Destroyer mentality: the vigilante’s psychology

not depend upon a modern scienti c understanding of the human species to

dual forms, with a spirit linked to a Heavenly or a satanic counterpart, and a

Destroyer personality and sadistic personality disorder

Table 1. The three stages of malignant aggression identi ed by

A. Destroyer-nihilist Aggression due to nihilistic alienation

appeared in Ottoman and Persian sources.23 Ottoman military practice institu-

itated wounded and dead (sadistic dismemberment), or raped defenseless women

differing orientations as described by Dicks. One should note, for example,

Table 2. A scale of destructive attitudes among soldiers

Intense hatred of the enemy or strong Dismemberment of the dead and

b. Selective killing of numerous members

workings of Melek Ahmed’s mind.39 Instead of showing mercy to all of the

to kill. In terms of a scale for the destroyer mentality, he potentially existed at

One deed of destruction that indicates a sadistic mentality in some Ottoman

Massacre at Batak, 187649

places revolted). These revolts happened as a response to independence drives

traditional enemy of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia. Bulgarians on the

chain of transmission . Even factual narratives became distorted beyond recogni-

Dimitrov, and others according to Stoyanov’s account. A small force of 200

On the evening of April 30, according to Stoyanov, “countless bashi-bazouks

Januarius MacGahan and Eugene Schuyler (an American diplomat assigned to

The combination of eyewitness accounts describing the stripping and rape

Notes and References

ary movement) ; A. A. Ulunyan, Deyateli Bolgarskovo Natsionalino-Osvoboditel’novo Dvizheniya, XVIII–

Association, 1994), p 428.

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Con icts in Ottoman society in the nineteenth century

not depend upon a modern scienti c understanding of the human species to

Table 1. The three stages of malignant aggression identi ed by