The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

1915 It is a dark year for the Armenian people. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands to the west of the Caspian Sea the Islamic Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Based on actual historical events, this stirring, poignant novel unfolds the story of Gabriel Bagradian -- an Armenian-born officer in the Ottoman army -- and the five thousand Armenian villagers that he leads to the top of Musa Dagh. There, in the Caucasus, on "the mountain of Moses," for forty days these brave Armenians will heroically suffer the siege of Turkish forces hell-bent on their annihilation. Written in the early 1930s and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh remains the only significant treatment, fiction or nonfiction, in any literature, of the first in the twentieth century's long series of holy wars and lamentable inhumanities.