518,000 mass graves of Turks murdered by Armenians have not been found until today. This claim, currently circulating on TikTok, X (Twitter) and Facebook, is a dramatic and misleading exaggeration of an old statistical figure. There is no reliable archaeological and documented evidence of the discovery of hundreds of thousands of such mass graves "in our time".
The number 518,000 comes from Turkish historiography, Turkish historians claimed, based on Ottoman documents, that between 1914 and 1922, approximately 518,000 Muslims (mainly Turks) were murdered by Armenian gangs (hancaks and tasnaks) in Eastern Anatolia, sometimes in collaboration with the Russian army.
This number appears repeatedly on official/semi-official Turkish websites (AVIM, TCA, etc.) and in posts by Turks on the Internet.
What really happened? There were also acts of Armenian revenge against the civilian Muslim population, especially in response to the genocide committed by the Turks in 1914–1916 and again in 1920.
In any case, this is not an inflated figure like 518,000 Turks. Most independent historians consider the number of Muslim victims to be much lower than the Turkish claim, and see them as part of a brutal war imposed by the Turks, and not as a "systematic genocide" like that committed against the Armenians.
It should be remembered that the Armenians were a minority (about 10-15% in some areas) under the boots of Turkish colonialism, without a state and without a regular army. They could not have carried out a systematic massacre of half a million people even if wanted.
The Ottomans carried out a transfer, a systematic and planned deportation of Armenians (documents, trains, death convoys, camps), with the clear intention of destroying the Armenian community in Anatolia and kill as many as they could. This is what most scholars in the world define as genocide.