Chapter 5 - The Weşin Incident: the Spark that Burnt a Village … and the Arsonist

Summary

In the winter of 1848, an architect named Agop, an appraiser (muhammin) named Hacı Mehmed Agha and an official named Ali Agha were sent by the Palu district council to Weşin village. Along with another official sent by the Harput provincial council, they were tasked with determining the damage caused by the violent encounter between Abdullah Beg and village inhabitants in the late summer. It was a tedious job. They had to examine the destruction caused by an apparently mysterious fire that had burnt down houses, granaries, trees, orchards and vineyards. The crew came up with a detailed list of who had lost what, together with the monetary value of each item, with the total loss amounting to 58,180 guruş. Around this time, Abdullah Beg was writing to the imperial centre from his prison room in the Harput council to complain about the conditions in which he was being held and to request a transfer to the imperial capital. How did Abdullah Beg, the descendant of the Palu nobility and holder of several positions in the provincial bureaucracy, end up in a cell? It was all connected to what happened in Weşin on that hot summer day of Eid el Fitr in 1848.

Located eighteen miles south-east of Palu’s centre, Weşin was one of the exclusively Muslim settlements of the emirate. The population was (and is) Zaza-speaking and of Sunni orientation. The 1841 population register designated it as a nahiye (sub-district) consisting of twenty-seven villages. Notwithstanding this designation, however, both locals and the Ottoman bureaucracy called it a village. Either way, it was a sizeable settlement of around 140 households mostly living in adobe houses scattered in and around hills studded with tall poplar trees. Weşin’s inhabitants subsisted primarily on animal husbandry and produced substantial amounts of dairy – as seen from the sizeable amount of clarified butter they were expected to pay as taxes to Abdullah Beg. The poplar trees were another source of economic value; the wood’s soft texture and straight shape made it suitable for construction and furniture.