Kharpoot

Harpoot (Turkish: Harput) or Kharpert (Armenian: Խարբերդ, romanized: Kharberd) is an ancient town located in the Elazığ Province of Turkey. It now forms a small district of the city of Elazığ. In the late Ottoman period, it fell under the Mamuret-ul-Aziz Vilayet (also known as the Harput Vilayet). Artifacts from around 2000 BC have been found in the area. The town is famous for its Harput Castle, and incorporates a museum, old mosques, a church, and the Buzluk (Ice) Cave. Harput is about 1,100 kilometres (700 mi) from Istanbul.

Harput was a largely Armenian populated region in medieval times and had a significant Armenian population until the Armenian genocide. By the 20th century, Harput had been absorbed into Mezre (renamed Elazığ in 1937), a town on the plain below Harput that significantly grew in size in the 19th century.

Name

Kharberd was first interpreted as consisting of the Armenian words kʻar ("rock") and berd ("castle, fortress"), as if meaning "a fortress surrounded by rock faces." Others have connected the name with a Hurrian word, har/khar, meaning "path" or "road." Nicholas Adontz proposed a connection with Kharta, a city mentioned in Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions, putatively having developed into Khartberd and later Kharberd. Another proposed etymology connects it with the name of a Hittite and Hurrian goddess. Kharbed is sometimes identified with Hoṛeberd, a fortress in the Antzitene canton of the province of Sophene of the Kingdom of Armenia; according to this view, Kharberd is a corrupted form of the name Hoṛeberd (with the proposed development Hoṛeberd-Khoreberd-Kharberd).

Arabic sources referred to Kharberd as Khartbirt or as Hisn Ziyad, from the Syriac Hesna d-Ziyad, meaning "the fortress of Ziyad." The medieval geographer Al-Dimashqi wrote that Khartbirt was the name of the city, while Hisn Ziyad referred to the ancient citadel.

Geography

Harput is located on a hilltop above a rich, fertile plain historically dotted with villages, about 14 km away from the left bank of the Murat River․ To its southeast is Lake Hazar (previously known as Gölcük in Turkish and Tsovkʻ in Armenian), the source of the Tigris River.

History

Historian Hakob Manandian believed Harput to be the site of Ura, the main fortress of the Bronze Age Hayasa-Azzi confederation. Harput was a fortress town of the Iron Age Kingdom of Urartu. In the classical period, Harput was a part of the Kingdom of Sophene and later the Armenian province of Sophene. Some scholars consider it to be the site of Carcathiocerta, the initial capital of the Kingdom of Sophene.

Harput was developed as a military base during the second Byzantine occupation of the region, after 938. An imposing fortress was built on a wide rock outcropping overlooking the valley from the south. A town grew around the fortress, with a primarily Armenian and Syriac population that came from nearby villages as well as the city of Arsamosata further east. By the late 11th century, Harput had eclipsed Arsamosata to become the main settlement in the region. Around 1085, a Turkish warlord named Çubuk conquered Harput and was confirmed as its ruler by the Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah I. The Great Mosque of Harput was built opposite the citadel by either Çubuk or his son (attested as the ruler here in 1107). William of Tyre wrote that Joscelin I, Count of Edessa (Jocelyn) of Courtenay, and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem were prisoners of Belek Ghazi in Kharput's castle and that they were rescued by their Armenian allies. William of Tyre calls the place Quart Piert or Pierre.

The first Artukid ruler of Harput was Balak, who was related to the Artukid rulers of Mardin and Hisn Kayfa but not directly part of either ruling family. Balak died young in 1124 and the Artukids of Hisn Kayfa took over. Later, Imad ad-Din Abu Bakr, an Artukid prince who had previously attempted to usurp the throne of Hisn Kayfa, gained control of Harput. Harput remained an independent Artukid principality until 1234, when it was conquered by the Seljuks. It was during the Artukid period that the former population of Arsamosata became fully absorbed by Harput. In the early 1200s, one of the Artukid princes may have entirely rebuilt the citadel. In the subsequent period of Seljuk rule, not much was built in Harput.

From the mid-14th century until 1433, Harput became part of the Beylik of Dulkadir. It was one of the main cities in the beylik, and the citadel was again rebuilt during this period. The Aq Qoyunlu ruled Harput from 1433 to 1478; the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan's wife, a Greek Christian from Trebizond, lived here with her Greek entourage. Ottoman rule began in Harput in 1515. The Siege of Harput occurred the next year. Under the Ottomans, Harput remained a prosperous industrial center, with thriving silk-weaving and carpet-making industries and many medreses.

In 1834, however, the governors of the Sanjak of Harput moved their residence to the town of Mezre, on the plain to the northeast, and some of Harput's population moved with them. In 1838 a barracks was built in Mezre as a local base against Muhammad Ali of Egypt. In 1879, Mezre was built up into a large city named Mamuret el-Aziz, which became modern Elazığ.

Various estimates exist for the population and ethnic makeup of Harput in the 19th century: 3000 Armenian and Turkish households at the beginning of the 19th century, 25,000 inhabitants (of which 15,400 were Armenian) in 1830–1850 and around 20,000 in 1892. Another estimate places the town's population at the beginning of the 20th century at 12,200 (6,080 Armenians and 6,120 non-Armenians). Raymond Kévorkian gives the combined Armenian population of Harput and 56 other nearby localities (the Harput kaza) on the eve of World War I as 39,788 and the Armenian population of the entire Harput Vilayet as 124,289.