Christian Armenians

Turkey summoned Germany's ambassador to its foreign ministry on Monday, Berlin said, amid a mounting row between the two NATO powers.

Der Spiegel magazine said Ankara wanted to raise a German parliamentary motion last year that declared the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide - a description that Turkey has long fiercely rejected.

On this date in 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals – Christians, for the most part – were forcibly deported from the Turkish capital of Constantinople. The number soon escalated into the thousands, and most were eventually murdered.

Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Istanbul deputy Garo Paylan applied on Jan. 16 to the Constitutional Court, demanding that the top court annul his temporary suspension from parliament after using the word "genocide" in reference to the World War I-era mass killings of Ottoman Armenians.

A Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) lawmaker was temporarily suspended from the Turkish parliament on Jan. 13 for using the word "genocide" in reference to the World War I mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, during heated discussions on changes to the constitution.

Armenia marks on Friday the centenary of the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians with commemorative ceremonies across the country.

Flowers were laid and a minute of silence was observed at the Armenian Genocide Memorial near Yerevan, the BBC reports.