On November 20, The Daily Mail prepared a report on the historic Baron Hotel belonging to an Armenian of Aleppo. There is dust in every room of the hotel. Agos has presented some parts of the story about the hotel connected to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and other memories of the hotel, reports tert.am.

The century-old hotel doesn’t receive any clients besides people who have been left homeless as a result of the war and need a place to stay for a couple of days. There was a time when the hotel hosted famous people such as kings, leaders and presidents.

Besides famous people, Baron Hotel has also hosted hundreds of survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Then owners of this top hotel in Aleppo, Brothers Armenak and Onik Mazmumyan, would use the hotel to provide shelter to survivors of the Armenian Genocide and to remove people from the territories of the Ottoman Empire.

Along with other famous Armenians of the city, they had also turned the hotel into an underground hideout where they would seek ways to save the Armenians.

In July 1915, Armenak Mazlumyan, who was a member of the Aleppo Regional Committee of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, tried to help the Armenians who had reached Deir ez-Zor. To coordinate efforts, he played a huge role within the committee for refugees in Aleppo.

At the hotel, he met state officials, bribed them and removed Armenians from the territory of the Ottoman Empire. They say he paid 10 gold coins for every Armenian.

However, when Mustafa Abdulhalik was appointed in Aleppo to make the caravan of Armenians walking toward Deir ez-Zor move faster, by permission of Taleat Pasha, the Mazlumyans were also exiled and left for Lebanon.

Antonyan and Zohrab

In that period, writer Aram Antonyan was one of the important guests at the hotel. Later, he gathered evidence of the Armenian Genocide at the hotel.

Among other important guests at the hotel were Grigor Zohrab and Vazgen Serengyulyan.

In order not to become a burden for the Mazlumyans, they stayed at another hotel, but they often visited Baron Hotel and spent some time there.

Armenak Mazlumyan and many others would convince them to escape, but they thought nothing would happen to them and returned to Diyarbekir.

Antonyan says Mazlumyan had even offered a large amount of gold to Zohrab and Serengyulyan before they left for Diyarbekir, but even that didn’t help.

“It’s all in the past. Frankly, this hotel will no longer be what it used to be,” these are the words of Armen Mazlumyan, the last member of the Mazlumyans, who owned the Baron Hotel opened in Aleppo in 1911…