page_title: Adana
section_title: French rule
hierarchical_section_title: Adana / History / French rule
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance to Adana from Tasköprü in 1920
context_page_description: Adana is a Cilician city in southern Turkey. The city is situated on the Seyhan river, 35 km inland from north-east corner of the Mediterranean. It is the administrative seat of the Adana Province and has a population of 1.77 million.
  Adana lies in the heart of Cilicia, a distinct geo-cultural region, at a time, was one of the most important regions of the classical world by being crossroads for religions and civilizations. Home to six million people, Cilicia is one of the largest population concentrations in the Near East, as well an agriculturally productive area, owing to its large fertile plain of Çukurova. Adding the large population centers surrounding Cilicia, almost 10 million people reside within 2-hours drive from the Adana city center.
  One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements of the world and with a name unchanged for at least 4-millennia, Adana were a market town at the Cilicia plain and one of the gateways from Europe to the Middle East. The city turned into a powerhouse of Cilicia with the Turkic takeover in 1359.
context_section_description: Armistice of Mudros that was signed on 30 November 1918 to end the World War I, ceded the control of Cilicia to France. French Government sent four battalions of the Armenian Legion in December to take over Adana and oversee the repatriation of more than 170,000 Armenians to Cilicia. Returning Armenians negotiated with France to establish an autonomous State of Cilicia and Mihran Damadian, the chief negotiator for Armenians, signed the provisional Constitution of Cilicia in 1919. Pre-war life had resumed with re-opening of the churches, the schools, the cultural centers and the businesses.
  The French forces were spread too thinly in Cilicia and the villages that were repatriated came under withering attacks by Turkish Kuva-yi Milliye. Costs and difficulties associated with the repatriation process, growing Arab nationalism in Syria mandate, forced French High Commissioners to meet with Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, several times in late 1919 and early 1920 which resulted in halting the deployment of extra forces to Cilicia. A truce arranged on May 28 between the French and the Kemalists, led to the retreat of the French forces south of the Mersin-Osmaniye railroad. The subsequent evacuation of thousands of Armenians from Sis and its environs and their migration to Adana, raised the number of Armenians in the city to more than 100,000 and crammed the city with refugee camps. On 10 July 1920, to ease the overpopulated south of the railroad, a Franco-Armenian operation forced the local Turkish population to escape north. Roughly 40,000 Turks from Adana and around fled to the countryside and to the mountains north, an event known as Kaç Kaç incident, which lasted 4 days and claimed hundreds of lives. Mihran Damadian declared the autonomy of Cilicia on 5 August 1920, by coming to a consensus with the Christian communities of the city. French government, however, did not recognize the autonomy, and in September, the Armenian Legion was disbanded for committing vengeful acts on Turks.
  With the changing political environment and interests, French further reversed their policy and abandoned all pretensions to Cilicia, which they had originally hoped to attach to their mandate over Syria. Cilicia Peace Treaty was signed on 9 March 1921 between France and Turkish Grand National Assembly. The treaty did not achieve the intended goals and was replaced with the Treaty of Ankara that was signed on 20 October 1921. Based on the terms of the agreement, France recognized the end of Cilicia War and to the withdrawal under the condition of Christian communities' rights to be protected. Armenians who were not satisfied with the guarantees that the treaty offer and who had no trust in Turkish nationalist rule after the catastrophes of 1909 and 1915, had rushed to the Mersin port and Dörtyol, and had evacuated their two-millennia homeland by December 1921.
   French troops together with the remaining Armenian volunteers withdrew from the city on 5 January 1922. Later in 1922, up to 10,000 Adana Greeks moved to Greece before the policy of Greco-Turkish population exchange got in effect. Adana Armenians settled in Lebanon, where they founded Nor Adana (en:New Adana) neighborhood within the mostly Armenian Bourj Hammoud town, just north-east of Beirut. From the 1920s, around 60 percent of the Cilician Armenians moved to Argentina. An informal census of 1941 revealed that, 70 percent of all the Armenian Argentines in Buenos Aires had Adana origins.
caption: Kalekapısı; entrance to the city from Taşköprü (1920)
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