Introduction

Summary

“The desert journey continues very boringly,” wrote a reporter for the Istanbul newspaper Akşam in the summer of 1928. The train was headed eastward from the outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo (see Figure 1 for a map of the route). “To pass for hours in the middle of a brown expanse amid suffocating heat in a train car that is always shaking is,” the reporter complained, “unpleasant.” It would get worse. Suddenly, a droning insect flew into the train car. And then another. They were locusts. Someone closed the windows. But the insects continued to collide into the side of the train “incessantly.” In their percussive onslaught, the reporter might have heard the rhythm of the region’s recent history. After all, it was these creatures that had helped make a landscape that witnessed nomadic sedentarization campaigns, the Armenian genocide, and interwar refugee resettlement. The train hurtled onward.