Before the War, any Armenians who lived in ports and towns near the Black Sea coast had been exposed to western European ideals of justice and democracy, but during the War they faced charges by Turks of potentially aiding the Russians or Allies. In early 1915 Armenians serving in the Turkish army were disarmed and assigned to road construction before being killed. (Payaslian, “The Fate of the Armenians in Trebizond,” 2009, p. 278, and Hovannisian, Armenian Pontus, 2009, p. 356). The extremist Young Turk government ordered the Armenians to be evacuated immediately in July 1915, and either drowned at sea, shot, or marched hundreds of kilometers to their death. Post-war Ottoman trials of individual Turkish culprits were soon ended as the region came under the control of the new Nationalist Turkish assembly in Ankara.
As in the region around Smyrna, Gilbert Bagnani would have needed permission to travel inland from Trebizond, since the region south of Trebizond included six forbidden provinces and three military zones. (Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey, 2009, p. 160) After a disastrous winter campaign against the Russians in 1915, the Turkish War Minister Enver Pasha had blamed the Armenians, using them as scapegoats for his own incompetence, and launched the massacres driving the Armenians from eastern Turkey. So when the Russians occupied eastern Anatolia in 1916, including Erzerum and Trebizond, the Armenians actively supported them but, after the Russian Revolution and withdrawal from eastern Turkey in 1917, it was open season on any remaining Armenians throughout Anatolia.
After the Greek occupation of western Anatolia in May 1919, the Pontic Greeks in and around Trebizond were also at risk. Nationalist Turks had lost no time in ‘deporting’ the remaining Greeks far away from the coast. Whatever Christian population remained had just been forced by the Treaty of Lausanne to abandon the region where they had lived for thousands of years, including the lofty and isolated cliff-side monastery of Soumela.
In June 1924 Gilbert Bagnani crossed through these troubled regions beginning at the coastal mountain range and onto the upland plateau of central Anatolia into western Armenia. The plateau was well watered but endured long cold winters. The region was depopulated of men, of course, the Turks serving in the Nationalist army and the Armenians having been marched off to oblivion in arguably the first holocaust of the genocidal twentieth century. It was now literally a no-man’s land of destroyed villages and deserted farms.
The largest city, Erzerum, had once prospered from trade on the silk route from Persia to the Black Sea and was fought over for centuries, but only recently had been depopulated of its Armenians and adult males. The latest blow to the area was a destructive earthquake, just three weeks earlier on 13 May, centered on the town of Horasan a few miles east of Erzerum, with much loss of life. It may have been the destruction caused by this earthquake that led the Italian consul, Amedeo Guglielmo, to suggest to Gilbert that they should visit the area to see what potential opportunities there might be for Italy, e.g., possible aid for the survivors, but in such a place at such a time few inhabitants would have been able to speak anything but Turkish, and Gilbert would have to have relied upon translators, especially after he left Trebizond for the interior of Anatolia.
For a few months after the War, Armenians had hoped that America would come to their rescue and support an independent Armenian nation. President Wilson appointed a committee which recommended including both Erzerum and Trebizond within Armenia’s borders, but by the time the report was received at the end of 1920, the proposed nation of Armenia was a non-starter as no western country was prepared to implement the proposals militarily against the Turkish forces in the field. In addition, the American Senate rejected Wilson’s plan to support even the League of Nations, preferring instead isolationism from the eastern hemisphere, but there was nothing isolationist about America’s Open Door Policy on oil: if there had been any prospect of oil fields in Armenia, the isolationist Senate might have eagerly accepted the proposed American mandate over Armenia. But Turkish Armenia had no oil, and now no Armenians. (Hovannisian, Armenian Pontus, 2009: 363-70)