The fall of Kars, 1920

On 30 October 1920 the Armenian city of Kars fell. The fall of Kars is one of the saddest pages in Armenian history. Thanks to its geographical position and the weapons it held, Kars could have resisted for months and seriously hindered the enemy’s plans.

One of the immediate causes of the fall was hopelessness: the soldiers knew they were fighting a joint Bolshevik-Turkish force. Oliver Baldwin, a Briton serving in the Armenian army, wrote in his memoirs that only two cannons fired from the fortress of Kars at the Kemalist army, once each. In the words of Simon Vratsyan, the last prime minister of the Republic of Armenia, the utterly exhausted people wanted to believe the Bolsheviks’ promises, and, seeing that both the Russians and the Turks were fighting against them, had lost hope.

The photograph shows a snow-covered town with a fortress on a hill, a stone bridge and horse-drawn carriages in the foreground.