Aram I (R), head of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia speaks with Pope Francis during an Armenian-Rite Mass marking 100 years since the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, on April 12, 2015 at St Peter's basilica in Vatican. AFP
Reuters/Ankara
Turkey called its ambassador to the Vatican back to Ankara for consultation, the foreign ministry said on Sunday, after Pope Francis publicly described the 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide.
Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.
The ministry said in a statement that the pope's comments were "null and void" to the Turkish people.
