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The years following Tatous's conversion were among the darkest in Armenian history. In 1894-1896, the Hamidian massacres swept through Armenian communities across the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, seeking to suppress Armenian political activism and reassert Ottoman authority, unleashed irregular Kurdish cavalry and local mobs against Armenian villages and neighborhoods. Estimates suggest that between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were killed, with countless more displaced, their homes and businesses destroyed. The Sivas region, where Zara was located, was particularly hard hit. Armenian converts to Protestantism and other minority faiths were especially vulnerable, seen as doubly suspect—traitors to both the Ottoman state and the Armenian nation. The small community of Latter-day Saints in Zara faced extraordinary danger during these years. The records explicitly state that Tatous immigrated due to religious persecution from the Turkish Government. This terse notation conceals what must have been years of increasing fear and hardship. As a convert to a Western religion, Tatous was marked as a potential threat by Ottoman authorities. His large family made flight difficult but also made staying increasingly untenable. Every day brought the possibility of violence, of losing everything he had built. In 1902, when Tatous was thirty-nine years old, his mother Goola Baboog Modoian died. The loss of a parent is always profound, but for Tatous, it may have severed one of the strongest ties binding him to his homeland. With his mother gone, the pull of the past weakened, and the call of Zion—the gathering place of the Saints in distant Utah—grew stronger.