Rebel land : unraveling the riddle of history in a Turkish town / Christopher de Bellaigue.

Originally published: 2009.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-270).

Dramatis personae -- Map of Turkey and her neighbors -- Prologue : The mirror -- Map of the district of Varto -- An infinity of shapes -- Map of the town of Varto -- Rebel land -- The massacre of Newala Ask -- Great man -- The death of Mehmet Serif Firat -- Gumgum! -- Scab -- The siege of Varto -- Deep state -- The captain's victory -- Epilogue : The silver belt.

"In 2001, Christopher de Bellaigue, then the Economist's correspondent in Istanbul, wrote a piece about the history of Turkey for The New York Review of Books. In it, he briefly discussed the killing and deportation of half a million Armenians in 1915. These massacres, he suggested, were best understood as part of the struggles that attended the end of the Ottoman empire. After the story was published, the magazine was besieged with letters. This wasn't war, the correspondents said; it was genocide. And the death toll was not half a million but three times that many. De Bellaigue was mortified. How had he gotten it so wrong? He went back to Turkey, but found that the national archives had sealed all documents pertaining to those times. Undeterred and armed with a stack of contraband histories, he set out to the conflicted southeastern Turkish city of Varto to discover what had really happened."--Jacket.