The current city of Malatya was founded in 1838 , with the old site of Mitilene now designated as Old Malatya . The city saw rapid expansion in the 19th century , and by the end of the century it had around 5000 households , 50 mosques , six madrasas , nine inns and five Turkish baths . Ottoman sources also recorded ten churches . In 1889 and 1890 , Malatya was struck by two large fires that destroyed thousands of shops . The city was then hit by the 1893 Malatya earthquake , which killed 1300 , destroying 1200 houses and four mosques . A cholera outbreak that subsequently took place in 1893 killed 896 people . The destroyed buildings were rebuilt in 1894 . Malatya was the scene of anti-Armenian violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . During the Hamidian Massacres of 1895 – 1896 , 7,500 Armenian civilians were massacred and Armenian villages in the rural countryside of Malatya were destroyed . In the aftermath , a Red Cross team sent to Malatya and led by Julian B. Hubbell concluded that 1,500 Armenian houses had been pillaged and 375 burned to the ground . According to the 1913 '' Catholic Encyclopedia '' , Malatya city was inhabited by 30,000 people with a clear ethnic Turkish majority , and an Armenian population of 3,000 , of whom 800 were Catholics . Of the five churches in the city , three belonged to the Armenians . In the spring of 1915 , the vast majority of the Armenians of the town were rounded up by Ottoman authorities and deported on death marches as part of the Armenian Genocide . According to reports of the governor of the Malatya district , of the 6,935 registered Armenians in Malatya , 197 were left in the town as artisans . In the early Republican era , Malatya became the centre of Malatya Province and enjoyed a substantial growth in terms of population as well as covered area . This development was further accelerated by the construction of the Adana-Fevzipaşa-Malatya railroad in 1931 , and a few years later in 1937 , by the construction of the Sivas-Malatya railroad
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Malatya