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The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանութիւն, Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı) — also known as the Armenian Holocaust, Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն) or the Armenian Massacres — refers to the forcible deportation and massacring of hundreds of thousands to over a million Armenians during the First World War, in the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenian Genocide is widely acknowledged to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Turkish authorities arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Turkish military was utilized to uproot Armenians from their homes and force them to march for hundreds of miles, deprived of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender; and rape and other sexual abuse were commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, does not accept the word "genocide" as an accurate descriptor of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty-one countries have formally recognized it as genocide, and most Western scholars and historians accept this view. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.
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