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Later, away from his friends, a 50-year-old man named Behcet Basibuyuk said that he was of Armenian descent and that his grandmother had survived the massacres and was taken in by a local Muslim family. Mr. Basibuyuk said he was proud of his heritage, even though he is often subject to slurs and insults.“One should not measure a person by his origins or religion, but by what kind of person he is,” he said. “But they don’t do that here.”

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On a recent afternoon near the old monastery here, a Muslim woman spoke of “the awful things the Armenians did to the Muslims here,” and said she grew up hearing of stories about Armenians killing pregnant Muslim women in boiling vats of jam.

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The facts were also largely known as the events were unfolding. A New York Times headline from Aug. 18, 1915, blared, “Armenians Are Sent to Perish in Desert.” A headline from December read, “Million Armenians Killed or in Exile.”

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Mr. de Waal described the genocide as “collective punishment on a mass scale.”

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Even now, Turkish textbooks describe the Armenians as traitors, call the Armenian genocide a lie and say that the Ottoman Turks took “necessary measures” to counter Armenian separatism.

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Under its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, society here underwent a process of Turkification: a feat of social engineering based on an erasure of the past and the denial of a multiethnic history.

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Mr. Erdogan has turned combative, embracing the traditional narrative,“The Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a worldwide campaign on genocide claims ahead of the centennial anniversary of 1915,” Mr. Erdogan said recently. “If we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find far more suffering than what the Armenians went through.”

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Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in offering condolences to the Armenians, went further than any Turkish leader ever had in acknowledging the painful history.

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Ankara is not participating in any of the memorials, nor does it appear ready to meet Armenian demands for an apology.

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The Turkish government acknowledges that atrocities were committed, but says they happened in wartime, when plenty of other people were dying. Officials stoutly deny there was ever any plan to systematically wipe out the Armenian population

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The genocide was the greatest atrocity of the Great War. It also remains that conflict’s most bitterly contested legacy, having been met by the Turkish authorities with 100 years of silence and denial.

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“Armenians have passed one whole century, screaming to the world that this happened,” said Gaffur Turkay, whose grandfather, as a young boy, survived the genocide and was taken in by a Muslim family. Mr. Turkay, in recent years, after discovering his heritage, began identifying as an Armenian and converted to Christianity. “We want to be part of this country with our original identities, just as we were a century ago,” he said.

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Worried that the Christian Armenian population was planning to align with Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials embarked on what historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres like the one here, others in forced marches to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death.

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A hundred years ago, amid the upheaval of World War I, this village and countless others across eastern Anatolia became killing fields as the desperate leadership of the Ottoman Empire, having lost the Balkans and facing the prospect of losing its Arab territories as well, saw a threat closer to home.

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“They threw them in that hole, all the men,” said Vahit Sahin, 78, sitting at a cafe in the center of the village, reciting the stories that have passed through generations.