On a hot summer day in 2013, one of the descendants of the Palu begs took me to a mansion built by one of his ancestors, presumably in the 1950s. The house stood in the middle of hundreds of acres of fertile agricultural land and orchards. In the front yard was an unkempt fountain with a weak flow of water. A line of pine trees encircled the backyard. The meticulously constructed irrigation canals below the pine trees were clogged with debris. As I looked at the beautiful details of the house, the descendant told me about the uncle who had built it – a learned man with a passion for bringing modern agricultural techniques and machinery to his estate. All the details inside and outside of the mansion showed that the ancestors of this man had once been wealthy. No more. The unkempt courtyard and desolate fields as far as the eye could see did not reflect the glorious past of this noble family.

Palu, once the stronghold of the begs, a place of ethnic and religious diversity, witnessed a series of dramatic events from 1896 (the year at which this book ends) on, events that changed it into an ethno-religiously homogenised, culturally conservative and economically deprived place. These transformations reflected the tumultuous processes leading up to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. After the 1895 Massacres, the Armenian population of Palu in the countryside was reduced to servile agricultural labourer status. However, the 1908 Revolution opened up a new chapter in the ongoing story of Armenian dispossession. Throughout the empire, Armenians demanded that the new regime address the issue of the lands they had lost during the Hamidian era. Like Armenians elsewhere, the Palu Armenians appealed to local and central administrators for the return of their land. Their inquiries were mostly ensnared in local bureaucracy and bore little or no fruit. This brief moment of hope disappeared with the tense political climate unleashed with the Balkan Wars and the First World War, and then the 1915 genocide of the Armenian population removed Armenians from Palu altogether.